#372 - Mariana van Zeller

[0] The Joe Rogan experience.

[1] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[2] So, with me today are Darren Foster and Mariana von Zeller, and I first found out about Mariana from the show on Vanguard, the OxyContin Express, which I remember watching it in my house and thinking, this is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.

[3] I couldn't believe that all the things you were telling me about the whole system of pain management centers and how it's set up in Florida was true.

[4] And the statistics on how many people are addicted to OxyContin and how many prescriptions are being given out for OxyContin in Florida is just absolutely bananas.

[5] And I watched it and I said, this is so far beyond out of control that it's amazing.

[6] that I'm just hearing about it now from a documentary on current TV, which is like, you know, not the most widely viewed channel.

[7] I mean, I felt like this should be on every channel, on the front page of every newspaper, there's a hijacking going on down there.

[8] They've hijacked the legal system somehow or another and absolutely willfully put these things into position in order to extract money and do it at the expense of all these people being addicted.

[9] I mean, how did you find out about this and how did you go about doing that piece?

[10] It's interesting you say that.

[11] I mean, it was exactly the same for us, the same surprise that we got when we started looking into this story.

[12] We found a little news clipping on one newspaper about some deaths in Florida because of prescription drugs and some, there were more pain clinics around than McDonald's.

[13] And we thought, wow, this is really interesting.

[14] We should investigate this.

[15] And we started looking into it.

[16] And then we found out that there were seven people every day dying from prescription pill abuse.

[17] that all over the U .S., there are more people dying from a prescription pill overdose than heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy combined, that just last year it surpassed car accidents to become the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States.

[18] So this was a story that we could just turn our heads away from.

[19] My God, when I watched it, I went to work and I told all these people about it.

[20] I was like, you got to see this.

[21] This is crazy.

[22] And they didn't believe me. Like when I was saying, I go, do you know, in Florida, you can go to a doctor and get a prescription, and then they don't have a database.

[23] You can go to another doctor across the street and get a new prescription and just ping pong your way back and forth down the highway, and they're everywhere.

[24] Absolutely.

[25] You know what the most insane thing was that we spoke to local journalists who had sort of covered this story a little bit.

[26] And they told us, look, you'll go by pain clinics here and you'll see lines of people and out -of -state cars parked outside and literally lines of people, I mean, very long lines around.

[27] the corner of people waiting to get into these pain clinics to get these prescription drugs.

[28] And we thought, okay, this is the kind of thing that you hear about.

[29] We'll never be able to film or witness ourselves.

[30] And then it was easy.

[31] I mean, as soon as we left the airport, went straight to this one street that we knew had a lot of pain clinics.

[32] And there it was.

[33] The parking lots full of out -of -state plates.

[34] I mean, people driving all the way from Kentucky, Ohio, as far off as Massachusetts down to Florida to buy their pills, and they pack their cars with people.

[35] And then they bring them back and sell them for five, ten times the price that they buy them in Florida.

[36] So it's a racket.

[37] It's so hard to believe.

[38] When I watched your show, it was so hard to wrap my head around the fact that there was one area that was so completely out of control.

[39] Because where I grew up on the East Coast or here in California, I've never seen anything like that.

[40] And I never had any inkling that this was something that had to be dealt with somewhere.

[41] So watching that was a, wow, you really freaked me out.

[42] It was interesting.

[43] So when we tried to film.

[44] one of the lines we knew there was this one pain clinic that had that a lot of people liked going to because it was super easy to get drugs basically you just go in and out and get whatever you wanted and we started filming outside and we set our tripod and we were across the street on the other side of this sort of it wasn't a freeway it was sort of a big street and as soon as we started filming these guys come out and they start chasing us and they asked us what we were doing and we said we know we were just filming out here.

[45] Big guys.

[46] Big guys.

[47] I mean big big guys and they started chasing us and we ran out of gas because every time we tried to stop and get gas on our car, we were running low, they would get out the car and it was just me, Darren and our other producer, Sarissa.

[48] And I was freaked out the night before I'd been watching The Sopranos and I really felt like I was a part of the Sopranos.

[49] I felt, oh my God.

[50] We've been, we traveled all around the world into war zones and we're going to be killed right here in Florida in Fort Lauderdale, Florida because we were filming a pain clinic.

[51] But those guys are actually later indicted they were busted by the DA and they were later indicted but in the indictment they found that they had made like 40 million dollars in two years off these pain clinics and they're they're in jail for like 17 years now because I think one of them was even convicted of like hiring someone to kill to take out somebody else yeah a gun for hire yeah I mean these were dangerous people these were not people that you want to yeah so not not good people always getting in behind the these rackets so when you ran out of gas what happened so we ran out of gas and I'd I'd I'd had just interviewed some law enforcement there.

[52] And he was calling 911.

[53] I was calling the contact that we had for law enforcement there and saying, please help us.

[54] We don't know what to do.

[55] And in the meantime, the 911, I mean, that we were about five minutes later.

[56] We were on 9 .95, and so, like, Highway Patrol just saw that we were pulled over anyway, and they came and then...

[57] But we stopped, and then the other guy stopped behind us, and they didn't come out of the car because I think they realized that we were calling 911, but they just stayed there, and it was just to intimidate us.

[58] So they stayed there, and then they made the story up to the police that we had been stalking them, that they had an ex -girlfriend that was stalking them, so they thought that we were stalked the ex -girlfriend or something like that.

[59] She wants it, bro.

[60] She's filming because she wants me. I mean, you do have stalker tendencies, coming for my husband.

[61] Wow.

[62] So the non -database thing, that has to be a criminal thing.

[63] I mean, there's no way that could, in this day and age, there's no way that could be by accident, right?

[64] Yeah, you know, they did pass a drug control plan there now that is in place.

[65] What does that mean?

[66] It means that now doctors, they have a database in place, basically, that they are supposed to check to see if a customer is coming or a client is coming to get more drugs.

[67] Right.

[68] So that you can't go what's called doctor shopping from pain clinic to pain clinic or pharmacy to pharmacy to get all these meds.

[69] However, it's not mandatory.

[70] but, I mean, it's far better right now in Florida than it was back when we went.

[71] And what's happening is it not mandatory.

[72] There's a lot, I mean, it all has to do with, like, these privacy laws, you know, like they don't want your medical records to be accessible to, you know, the government, basically.

[73] And so, you know, people that are very, I guess, worried about our privacy, which, you know, maybe we think about differently now with the whole NSA scandal.

[74] But, I mean, like, you know, people are definitely, that's the resistance to doing the performance.

[75] prescription monitoring programs in a lot of places.

[76] But most states have them these days.

[77] Florida was one of the biggest states that didn't have one for a long time.

[78] But now with obviously so many people dying of this and this sort of bad reputation the state was getting, they decided to do some things.

[79] Crack down a little bit, but it's still happening.

[80] And two years after we did at OxyContin Express, we actually were filming a story about heroin abuse in Massachusetts and how because of the OxyContin epidemic, a lot of kids then went on to do heroin for whatever reason because oxy was getting more expensive or it was harder to get their hands on oxy so then they started shooting up heroin because the effects are sort of the same on the on the body except you know it's a street drug so in many ways it's um extremely dangerous as well um and so we actually went to a guy's house who was selling um heroin and he said dude i'm selling heroin but what i really like to sell is pills and we go down me and my friends all go down to florida and get a bunch of and we make much more money.

[81] Our profit margin is much higher by selling pills and it is selling heroin.

[82] So we much prefer to that.

[83] Wow.

[84] Yeah.

[85] That's hilarious.

[86] I know.

[87] It's pretty.

[88] 2013, it's really shocking to me that that hasn't been addressed and that you're not seeing people talk about that in the mainstream media.

[89] Like the president never fields questions on the prescription pill problem in this country and why is this happening?

[90] And have you investigated?

[91] What factors are involved here?

[92] Are there dirty doctors?

[93] Are they in cahoots of the pharmacy companies?

[94] Like, how is it possible that there's, they did a thing on Montana recently in the Montana, the Billings Daily Gazette or something like that, one of the Billings Daily newspapers, where they said that out of one million people in Montana, 240 ,000 new prescriptions had been written.

[95] Whoa.

[96] Yeah.

[97] I mean, it's great.

[98] One of the things that definitely drew us to that story and to follow -up stories that we've done subsequently is the fact that, you know, we spend billions of dollars every year fighting a war on drugs trying to prevent drugs coming into this country.

[99] But meanwhile, you know, the drugs that are being made in this country that are causing the biggest, you know, problems in terms of life loss and stuff like that.

[100] The war on drugs is like playing cowboys and Indians and pretending you're doing genocide.

[101] I mean, it's the worst job ever of controlling business.

[102] drugs that anybody's ever done ever when you stop and think about how much resources to results it's so damn stupid it's like all you're doing is arrest in pot dealers why don't just call it the war on people probably won't shoot you and you can make arrests you can make them count you know there how many people are they arresting that are involved in these pill clinics how many people they're investing that are involved in the pharmaceutical companies so obviously bribing local lawmakers to make these laws I mean that's that is one of the creepiest laws I've ever heard in my life.

[103] But it's not surprised then it's coming from Florida.

[104] Like, if you wanted to have a crazy place where you would think that that would go, you go, yeah.

[105] Yeah.

[106] I always say that Florida is like the South's Mexico.

[107] You know, like, we always look at Mexico, like, oh, those, God, Mexico, like, you think about all the crime that goes on there and all the craziness and the shenanigans.

[108] We always look at, like, Florida is like, the South is that part of this country, and the Florida is like that to the South.

[109] Like, they're like, Jesus Christ, Florida yeah whenever we're stuck for a story we're always like what's going on in Florida there wasn't for Florida Nancy Grace would have nothing to talk about it's a crazy crazy place now when you guys aired this and you you put this with was there any resistance that people give you a hard time about this no actually it's been incredible in the past I mean this aired three years ago already and I still get weekly I get emails or Facebook messages or people reaching out because they've been somewhat they've watched this and And somehow they've been affected by drugs, by prescription drugs, you know, their son has died, their husband is addicted, and they reach out because this documentary has made an impact on them and they want to let us know, which is fantastic.

[110] You know, as a journalist, that's the best kind of gift you can get.

[111] Yeah, that's beautiful.

[112] No, you guys did an amazing job.

[113] Like I said, you completely enlightened me on the subject.

[114] I had literally no idea before I saw your show that this was even an issue.

[115] I had thought about, you know, people need pills, like they get hurt.

[116] And then I remember reading the Rush Limbo thing.

[117] And I would be like, that crazy bastard, like, what the fuck is he doing?

[118] He's taking like 99 a day or something nutty like that, wasn't he?

[119] Do you know the number?

[120] I don't know the number.

[121] No. But I know some people, you know, that we've interviewed and have, you know, gotten quite tolerant to the pills.

[122] And they could take a huge number, like a surprisingly huge number.

[123] And he was going with his housekeeper.

[124] He was having his housekeeper go around and, you know, collect them for him and then apparently that's how he got popped the whole thing was just i was like well this just this crazy fat guy of course he's got a skeleton or two in his closet the guy's an asshole you know like he's so judgmental and evil and the way he goes after you know these the liberals and the democrats i was like of course that guy's fucking crazy of course he's on pills and then when you hear that he did so much that he lost his hearing like somebody had to describe it to me in medical terms he did so much oxy cotton that he blew out his hearing.

[125] Wow.

[126] I mean, I don't know if you remember, but Todd, the main guy in our, in our documentary, the OxyContin Express.

[127] He was this kid.

[128] He was 28 at the time, but he started doing Oxy's 10 years before.

[129] He lost his brother to OxyContin.

[130] He lost his wife to pills.

[131] And you could see, I mean, and recently he died last year as well from drug overdose.

[132] And, you know, you could tell just by talking to him that he, his mind was just not there.

[133] And his mom was constantly telling us.

[134] He couldn't remember things.

[135] He was totally frightened, and it was all because of pills, the amount of pills he was doing.

[136] And he was taking an insane amount.

[137] I remember him telling us, what was it?

[138] Like, do you remember the grams?

[139] 10 to 15, 80 milligrams of that, which is I remember we consulted a doctor afterwards and told him how much this guy was taking, and he couldn't believe it.

[140] He said that, you know, obviously if any of us decided to take that amount today, we would die in a second because we just don't have that tolerance.

[141] Yeah, I have one of my, well, I had one of my best friends died from it um that and actual heroin and a bunch of other things he was doing but it was just i've seen people caught in the grips of physical addiction and it's a terrifying terrifying thing i've never experienced it myself um the only thing that i've that i've ever taken that's really addictive is coffee and um i guess alcohol to certain people but although it's never been to me um but i've always been terrified of the actual addictive properties is something becoming a part of your system not an impulsive addiction like gambling which I'm scared of that stuff too um because I'm a very impulsive person but the the the terrifying notion of seeing it get into your bones which is what these pills do and it's it's so just evil like it's almost like vampires in a pill form it just slowly sucks your life away and forces you to take it you know I'm from Europe from Portugal and in Europe it's only prescribed to critically ill cancer patients.

[142] So it's, it was so surprising to me to see how easily they're prescribed here.

[143] And yeah, it's because, well, it's because of money.

[144] I mean, it has to be.

[145] I got my nose fixed.

[146] I had a deviated septum.

[147] And my doctor gave me a prescription after it was over of two different types of painkillers.

[148] And I told them, I go, it doesn't even hurt.

[149] Because it really didn't hurt.

[150] Like, everybody had told me it was like incredibly painful and oh my God, you're barely going to be able to deal with it.

[151] I got out of there.

[152] I was like, this is it.

[153] I was like, I feel like I have a tough nose.

[154] Like, it doesn't hurt at all.

[155] And it was, because my nose had been packed with these things, but he was like, you need pain pills.

[156] And I'm like, listen, man, I just got done telling you that I'm not even in pain.

[157] What did he give you?

[158] He gave me Vicodins and I think it was Perkinsed.

[159] I didn't take it, though, but I just threw the prescriptions away.

[160] I'm scared of that shit.

[161] I have a buddy who had a problem with drugs, and then he had back surgery.

[162] And then after you had back surgery, they put him on the pills to give him.

[163] They're like, look, you need prescription medication.

[164] They didn't even take any consideration the fact that he used to be a junkie.

[165] And so immediately has a problem again.

[166] You know, it's all shady and weird now.

[167] Yeah.

[168] I mean, unfortunately, that's the way it starts with so many people is that the injury.

[169] And that's why you see, like, in a lot of places where the problem is, is that it's around places that have, like, a lot of workplace injuries, like, Evalesia, where people work the minds and stuff like that.

[170] Yeah.

[171] Can you get, like, closer to.

[172] Yeah, sorry.

[173] Sorry, man. Yeah.

[174] So, I mean, that's a lot of times where you see these clusters of people who have become addicted.

[175] Yeah, and so unfortunately, it's like that is where, you know, you're finding these lower income people or middle class people who work factory jobs, have to move things, manual labor type jobs, and it just seems like they have no hope.

[176] Like, once they get caught up in that, it's so hard to get out from under the grip of that monster, and they don't have, they can't afford to take a month off and go to Malibu to some clinic where they're going to feed them green tea and rub their feet, you know, like people they get they're doomed like you can get stuck and the amount of willpower required to pull yourself out of that mud is insane it is i mean we spoke to so many um people who were getting better and they really i mean they really they had this conviction that they were this was it they were talking to us as as drug addicts and they were never going to take pills again and i would say that 99 % of those went back to drugs did you know this is a statistic that somebody put on my mezzas board, a dude named Evil Homer, thanks Evil Homer, that last year five pharmaceutical companies were agreed to pay $5 .5 billion to resolve the U .S. Department of Justice allegations of fraudulent marketing practices, including the promotion of medications for uses that they were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

[177] Insane.

[178] I mean, if you go back and look at the numbers that they've been paying like Pfizer in 2009 was fine, $2 .3 billion.

[179] And there's so many of them.

[180] Glaxo Smith -Kline, $3 billion.

[181] And it's not that pharmaceutical drugs haven't done great things.

[182] There's amazing applications for pharmaceutical drugs that have changed people's lives for the better.

[183] It's just so unfortunate that it's the bottom line over morality, over humanity.

[184] The bottom line being ones and zeros, collect as many as you can, above humanity.

[185] And it's not necessary.

[186] It's like there's plenty of valid applications for drugs.

[187] But if you want to control the entire world and you want to be like the king of the planet and have all the gold, like the best way to do it is to be like, fuck people.

[188] Just treat them as little vampire sucklings and take as much blood as you can while keeping them alive for as long as you can until they eventually run out of money or blood and then move on to the next one.

[189] We spoke to a doctor.

[190] He was a rehab doctor and he told us something really interesting.

[191] I think it was at the end of the 90s that the medical community got together and they, decided that the best thing to do to treat pain was to really go at it aggressively and have the lowest possible tolerance to pain.

[192] So if there was any chance that the patient would feel any sort of pain, just treat it aggressively by giving them a lot of drugs.

[193] And he says there was a total shift in the end of the 90s, wasn't it, Darren, the end of the 90s, I believe it was.

[194] And that's when pain pills started being dispensed, dispensed much more liberally.

[195] And I think at the time they didn't really realize what this, you know, the addictive side of this and what this could do.

[196] How is that possible, though?

[197] How is it possible that they could have not known?

[198] I don't buy that.

[199] Like, everyone's known that from the time I was a kid, I knew that people had problems with quayludes.

[200] You would hear about that all the time.

[201] I didn't even know what a quaylude was.

[202] You know, but I remember people always on ludes.

[203] The guy's got a problem with ludes.

[204] So, of course, they knew.

[205] They're full of shit.

[206] They must have bowed down to pressure from the pharmaceutical companies.

[207] There must have been someone who cut a deal and said, listen, if you guys just prescribe a little more, do you know how much money we can all make and we'll give you a little bit of this, a little bit of that?

[208] People say, well, that doesn't happen.

[209] Well, here's one thing that definitely does happen.

[210] My wife, her mom is a nurse.

[211] And her mom was working at this clinic and she would tell us about the drug reps and all the things that drug reps would do for the company.

[212] They take the whole company out to dinner to a really nice restaurant.

[213] Like, you know, nurses are on very reasonable salaries.

[214] They can't afford like a really expensive restaurant or really a fine restaurant.

[215] They would take everybody out, buy them all the drinks, order anything on the menu, lobster and steak and this and that.

[216] And they did it on a regular basis.

[217] They gave them trips and all sorts of other things.

[218] And they made everybody like really eager to prescribe these drugs.

[219] Keep the drug reps around.

[220] Keep the vacations coming in, you know, keep the lobster dinners coming.

[221] It's amazing.

[222] It's amazing.

[223] And it's amazing that it takes someone like you guys to expose.

[224] this like where's CNN where are these so -called investigative journalists that are supposed to be looking out for us you know where are the people that uncovered Watergate where where the people that are really looking out for America like what the fuck happened yeah what happened to journalism in this country well I mean like for us I mean you know great local reporting is what drew us to the story so there are great reports but some reason yeah some local guys yes yeah people on the scene yeah people on the scene and like that's you know what we got the lead to this story and so yeah why it doesn't get Better national attention is definitely a question that we should all be asking.

[225] Well, it's like, you know, when you hear that the CIA gives gigantic news corporations like Fox and CNBC, gives them talking points and that they follow these talking points.

[226] And then you hear that these stories are going on and no one's reporting it.

[227] Meanwhile, they'll pay attention to, you know, Kim Kardashian's baby will be like the lead on CNN.

[228] Kim Kardashian And they make it seem like that As well Florida is the fucking apocalypse There's spots of Florida That like If it was just a zombie factory And then people went in and turned Came out of zombies You'd be like Well we have to stop this They're becoming zombies But they are fucking becoming zombies They're becoming functional zombies Who can sort of walk around And live amongst you As long as they keep getting Their zombie medicine Yeah We had that great sheriff in our docs say that, you know, talk about these doctors and how they were, what was it that he said, there were drug dealers with degrees.

[229] Yeah, they really are.

[230] It's such a great way of bidding it.

[231] And they are.

[232] I mean, they know what they're doing.

[233] You, the other thing you exposed when you show these pain management centers is that some of them are actually connected to pharmacies.

[234] Yeah.

[235] For folks, first of all, folks, if you haven't seen the documentary, you must.

[236] Where can they watch it?

[237] Is it an online?

[238] It's online.

[239] Where they get it is.

[240] You can actually go to muck.

[241] dot TV, which is muck .tv.

[242] MUCK.

[243] MucK .com.

[244] It's our production company.

[245] And we have all our work there and the Oxycontin Express is featured there as well.

[246] Beautiful.

[247] It's a must say.

[248] It's so enlightening.

[249] But the pain management centers, you go there and you say, hey man, my back hurts.

[250] And they go, well, you definitely need some OxyContin and just go three feet down the hall and open up that next door.

[251] And that's the prescription place.

[252] And you go in there and the pharmacy hooks you up.

[253] And it's like one stop shopping for drugs and it's legal.

[254] Cash only.

[255] Cash only, yeah.

[256] Cash only.

[257] No insurance.

[258] Not accepted.

[259] Cash only.

[260] And so that's what happened to us.

[261] We went undercover.

[262] We got an undercover camera and went into one of these.

[263] And it was I think the first pain clinic we went into and I just asked the receptionist.

[264] So I have a back pain.

[265] What can I get?

[266] And she said, oh, well, they'll be able to prescribe you oxy cotton and she listed the long list of drugs.

[267] And you just need to go get an MRI.

[268] And basically what this is, is that an MRI can show anything and you can point to something and say that that's what's hurting you and the doctors just need to see something that they can then say, I looked at the MRI and it looked like she had that it was legitimate back pain and that's all they need.

[269] And so we went out the door to get this MRI and we stopped and started talking to these guys that had come down from West Virginia and Kentucky and they were telling us, you know.

[270] We traveled down there here because it's just so easy to get these drugs and we just say we have a back pain but of course we don't have anything.

[271] We just want to take a lot of these drugs back home with us.

[272] When people listening to this and saying, well, how easy?

[273] Ready for this?

[274] Doctors in Florida prescribe 10 times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined.

[275] Yeah, red flags all around.

[276] But if you smoke pot in Florida, they'll put you in a cage, son.

[277] They will lock you up in a box, throw away the key.

[278] What are you a damn hippie?

[279] trying to ruin your life you've got problems go to the pain management clinic get a nice american cocktail of opiates the have you guys ever seen the documentary the wild and wonderful whites of west virginia yes beautiful and sad at the same time and hilarious but look if you can't do anything about it and you just accept that going in you have to you can't look at it and growing up because then you'll get all sad.

[280] But if you can treat it as a comedy and pretend they're not real and treat it as like if you're watching a Cohen Brothers movie, a big part of that documentary is pills.

[281] Yeah.

[282] Huge part of what those people are and that culture of wild hillbilly, white trash, crazy people is about, is about pill addiction.

[283] Yeah.

[284] We spoke to some people in jail, some women in jail that were in jail because of pill trafficking from Florida.

[285] And they call themselves pill bill billies.

[286] That's what they say they are, pill billis.

[287] What a great name.

[288] Well, that's where the hillbilly, heroin comes from, is Appalachia, yeah.

[289] It's really confusing and to have it all exposed in one piece like yours and just all of a sudden be like, what?

[290] Like, that's out there?

[291] It was a real paradigm shifting moment for me and it was the thing that really got me paying attention to pills in general.

[292] And then I started reading all these other bizarre stories.

[293] Like, I don't know if you ever heard.

[294] heard about the man who was awarded the equivalent of like 600 ,000 American dollars because he was on a Parkinson's drug called Requip.

[295] This was by Galaxosmith Quine.

[296] They had this Parkinson's drug and it turned him into a gambling and gay sex addict who was a straight man and he took this pill and it was Parkinson's drug.

[297] So apparently it has some psychoactive properties.

[298] That's something to the way the mind works and all he wanted to do was have gay sex and gamble.

[299] Yeah.

[300] It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

[301] Brilliant.

[302] I've never heard that.

[303] But I mean...

[304] So he got $600 ,000 because of this?

[305] So it's not like just an accusation.

[306] It's an accusation backed up by at least some science.

[307] I mean, I don't know what they use to show that there's some sort of a chemical correlation between his activities and this drug.

[308] But they pulled the drug off the market.

[309] The drug doesn't exist anymore.

[310] So he got his $600 ,000.

[311] and stopped doing, you know, gay sex and gambling.

[312] He got off the Parkinson's medication and they became a straight man again without a gambling problem.

[313] But with $600 ,000 in his pocket.

[314] And a lot of bad memories.

[315] A lot of horrible, horrible gay sex gambling memories.

[316] You thought off to con was bad.

[317] Yeah, it is weird.

[318] But it's just, how did, I mean, there's so many drugs, like those late night things.

[319] You know those commercials you see for those shady legal guys, 2 o 'clock at the morning.

[320] Like, did you take Fen in the 80s?

[321] You know, call this number and we'll get you the money that you deserve.

[322] You get millions of dollars, yeah.

[323] It's just shocking how easy it is for these things to get prescribed or for these things to get approved.

[324] Like, how much testing is involved?

[325] Do you guys ever find out as far as, like, how much testing is involved and making something legal?

[326] So the interesting thing is that when all these pain pills started being produced, such as oxy cotton, they were really easy to manipulate so that you can use them.

[327] They have this time release so that when you take a pill, they will have an effect on your body but over time.

[328] And that was really easy to manipulate so that you would take it and it would immediately have all the effect at once, which is what an addict ultimately wants.

[329] So then they were heavily criticized for that.

[330] So then they came up with a pill that wasn't so easy to manipulate.

[331] But then, you know, that was easy.

[332] They found a way around that, too.

[333] Addicts found a way around that too.

[334] And you just go online and you search how to manipulate the new oxies.

[335] And you put them, there were ways I remember addicts telling us that you just put them in a microwave and do all this certain kind of things that I'm not going to say here because I'm not trying to get people to do it, but that there are ways to manipulate everything.

[336] So even when they try to play it safe, you know, there's always a way around it for an addict.

[337] Why are they smoking them?

[338] yeah it's just i mean it's the the quickest way to get it into your body to ingest it you get it all at once you know it just same as snorting it crushing it snorting it you just get it all at once like marionette was saying it was initially made as a time release formula so that it would sort of dull out over eight hours or 12 hours something like that but if you crush it and you snorted you get all the active ingredient once all the oxcodone at once and um thank you very much better at explaining that i was having hard time It's the reason why people like free -based cocaine, right?

[339] Or small crack and stuff like that.

[340] It's really kind of a brave new world type thing, isn't it?

[341] It really is sort of a horrific version of the future thing, these numbers.

[342] Like, especially the Florida number of 10 times the number of prescriptions for oxycodone and the entire country combined.

[343] I thought before I read it, like I saw, I bet Florida is certainly number one, but probably only about like 50 % or something like that.

[344] That was my silly little idea, 10 times.

[345] I think there's also a number that there are 100 doctors that most prescribe oxycotton in America.

[346] 99 of them are in Florida or something like that, which is awesome.

[347] Ooh, powerful Florida.

[348] What's that?

[349] Yeah, back then.

[350] It's changed somewhat now.

[351] You know, I'm torn on these things because part of me is I'm a huge fan of personal freedom.

[352] I'm a huge fan of civil liberties, and I think if you want to be an idiot and ruin your life, you should be able to be an idiot and ruin your life.

[353] And there's a lot of things that would ruin some people's life that I enjoy, like whiskey.

[354] I like whiskey.

[355] I like having a couple shots.

[356] But I'm not a drug addict and I'm not an alcoholic, so I can have a couple shots of whiskey and stop.

[357] And that's it.

[358] I don't need them every day, and I can do it once a year if I really want it to.

[359] But I'm also really keenly aware that I don't know what I'm talking about.

[360] because I've never done an opiate.

[361] Did you guys ever consider?

[362] Trying it?

[363] Yes.

[364] We like to immerse ourselves in stories, but not that far.

[365] I mean, we went to Brazil, for example.

[366] We did a story about the Cambo Frog.

[367] We did, it's a drug that does all this sort of things to your bloodstream, and it's supposed to be really good for you.

[368] But it's crazy.

[369] It's the skin of a frog that gets dried, and then you punctured a little hole in your body and you put the skin there, the skin of the frog, the secretion of the frog, and then it gives you sort of a burst of energy you feel your blood coming up and down all over your brain.

[370] It seems like your brain is about to explode and it has a lot of pharmaceutical promise.

[371] This particular frog's the frog The cumbo frog.

[372] How do you spell that?

[373] K -A -M -B -O.

[374] K -A -M -B -O.

[375] It's a beautiful frog.

[376] It is actually a beautiful.

[377] It's a giant, really green frog.

[378] And yeah, it secrete.

[379] It's this chemical, and it's, you know, like, drugs are, like, sort of slimy.

[380] Like, that slime they take and they dry it out, and then they, yeah, they do, like, a crude injection of, like, burning you.

[381] So it's the native tribes down there.

[382] They use it as sort of like a cleansing ritual.

[383] But it doesn't, it's not hallucinogenic or anything like that.

[384] It just, but what attracts, like, medicine to it is that it breaks the blood brain barrier.

[385] So it's like, I don't know what that exactly means, but it's.

[386] very attractive to science, but they haven't figured out how they're going to use it yet.

[387] They think it's going to be good for heart disease, treat heart disease.

[388] Wow.

[389] And so that was, we definitely immersed ourselves in that one.

[390] But it's not addictive.

[391] I don't think.

[392] It's another sign of how crazy human beings are.

[393] This one spot in the world, like Brazil, the rainforest, where there's so much promise as far as like new healing, new plants that can do all sorts of great things.

[394] And what are they doing?

[395] Just chopping it down.

[396] Just hacking it down at a wrecking.

[397] pace.

[398] It's insane.

[399] We've done several stories about that and it's just insane.

[400] It's so sad every time we go back.

[401] There's so many different wonder cures have been found in the rainforests.

[402] Like they're always looking for the rainforest to come up with new, new medications for all sorts of things.

[403] And, you know, there's the good side of the pharmaceutical companies.

[404] The fact the pharmaceutical companies are creating things that are helping keep your grandpa around for longer and, you know, keep people healthy.

[405] It's such a double -edged sword.

[406] And like I said, for me, I'm so torn.

[407] because I would, I don't think that I would want to be in a neighborhood where they're selling heroin, but I don't think that anybody should be able to tell anybody else they can't buy heroin.

[408] But then you get into that area of the addictive properties of it.

[409] And that's where it gets sketchy.

[410] That's where it gets like, well, if you're going to do anything as a community to try to stop something like that, boy, there's, there's not a lot of ways you can convince people to not do things.

[411] It's very difficult.

[412] And it gets real weird when you're trying to convince someone to not do something that has a really good chance of ruining your life.

[413] Yeah, absolutely.

[414] Yeah, I know you talk a lot about drugs.

[415] And I don't know if you've looked into the Portuguese experience.

[416] I'm from Portugal.

[417] And Portugal is basically one of the biggest experiments in drug policy in the world.

[418] And it's been going on for 10 years.

[419] And it's actually quite a success rate.

[420] And what they did is they did decriminalize drugs.

[421] They didn't legalize them.

[422] They decriminalize them.

[423] Meaning that if you're caught with, I think it's one gram of heroin.

[424] or cocaine, 100 gram of heroin, 2 grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of marijuana.

[425] If it's that or less, you don't go to jail, as you do in other countries.

[426] And what they do is they send you to a drug rehab commission and to a group of doctors that know what they're talking about that want to find out if this is the first time you're trying drugs and why are you doing them?

[427] And they try to address the problem as a disease and not as a crime.

[428] And it's had actually great success rate and, you know, much less people are going to rehab.

[429] centers, much less people are dying.

[430] So it's definitely being looked at as a way to go in terms of drug policy.

[431] Well, that's a beautiful idea also in terms of human nature, because it's human nature to not want to be controlled.

[432] There's many, many examples.

[433] And if you have children, you know, that if, you know, one of the best ways you get a kid to want to do something is tell them they can't do it.

[434] It's a natural human tendency to try to resist.

[435] And when you tell them, they can do whatever they want, and you'll be there to help them.

[436] Like, you're honestly better off.

[437] We would like to think that the established laws that we have in this country are set up to protect people, but they're clearly not.

[438] When you're dealing with these numbers, especially outside of Florida, like I told you about Billings, Montana newspaper, talking about 240 ,000 different prescriptions for that stuff in Montana alone.

[439] It's obviously not the case.

[440] It's not that anybody is trying to look out for anybody.

[441] It's just simply a matter of a crazy system where it's become this, there's this weird sort of method that you can do to skirt logical thinking and extract money from, from humans.

[442] And you can do it in this really immoral, horrible way by getting them addicted to these things.

[443] And the fact that doctors are in on it.

[444] That's what the, that's the weirdest aspect of it.

[445] that these people who supposedly had dedicated their lives to helping people.

[446] And that's what their whole career was supposed to be, improving the health of people, keeping people alive.

[447] And then somewhere along the line in the whole storm of student loans and getting sued for malpractice and all this different shit, they somewhere along the line, a bunch of them just crack.

[448] And they just go, let's just make some money.

[449] Yeah, we spoke to some addicts in Florida whose doctor, the doctor that prescribed them the drugs, and this was a kid, actually, a boy, a man, a 25 -year -old kid, was a gynecologist.

[450] So he was going to a gynecologist to get his meds.

[451] Whoa.

[452] Well, if anybody would know.

[453] Wow, that's so crazy.

[454] This story is also close to me because besides my friend who died, I had another family member that had nothing wrong with him.

[455] He was completely normal.

[456] normal, great guy, and then got injured in a work accident and became the biggest fuck up I've ever met in my life.

[457] And it's hard for me to even imagine that this is the same guy I knew from high school.

[458] He was, at one point in time, he was a hard worker, he was a great kid, he was always friendly, and then he just became a complete loser, a compulsive liar, anything you could do to get bills.

[459] And so I've seen the firsthand effects of someone who didn't have an issue.

[460] like he didn't have any physical issues he also didn't have any family history of people being addicted to anything so it was just a monster got into a system yeah I understand what you say that a person should be able to get whatever they want if they're adults and they can make up their own minds but they should also be able to know what they're getting and that's many times a problem we again the injury is a big problem is a big reason why people get into prescription drugs is because they're prescribed this by their doctor and you know there aren't enough warnings as to how addictive this stuff can be.

[461] And then, you know, we spoke to one kid who was also a star athlete in college and he was featured in the second documentary we did about this issue.

[462] And he was in the hospital for five days and he left the hospital he was already addicted to bills and never left.

[463] And now he's doing heroin.

[464] Wow.

[465] It's so crazy.

[466] So this is, you know, you know a story, I know a story, so just imagine how many stories there are out there, just people that get injured and get addicted.

[467] And how do we stop this?

[468] Is there a way?

[469] Is it too far into the cultural system?

[470] I mean, is it a part of us now?

[471] I don't think so.

[472] I think a lot, not more needs to be done.

[473] And there are fantastic people out there.

[474] A lot of moms, actually mothers who've lost kids who are leading the way and trying to raise awareness and pass legislation.

[475] I definitely think more needs to be done.

[476] More doctors need to prescribe less and know what they're prescribing.

[477] And, you know, people need to know more about what they're being prescribed in the addictive.

[478] addictiveness of it.

[479] Wow.

[480] It's, to me, it's one of the most disturbing aspects of our culture.

[481] It's one of the most disturbing, it's like second only to war.

[482] The idea that there's this massive corporations that are profiting off of these people becoming zombies.

[483] It's, uh, it's really, really crazy.

[484] So I want to thank you very much for doing that document because you guys really, you knocked it out of the park and you changed the way I look at it.

[485] So this new show you're doing, it's called, uh, Inside Secret America.

[486] It's on Nat Geo.

[487] And does it aired yet?

[488] Does it start?

[489] It starts Wednesday night.

[490] This Wednesday at 10 p .m. is the first episode.

[491] Oh, awesome.

[492] And what is the show?

[493] What's, what are you guys doing?

[494] The first one is drugs.

[495] Oh, hilarious.

[496] We just can't get away from them.

[497] It's actually synthetic drugs.

[498] So we look into sort of bath salts and spice and K2 and all that stuff.

[499] And the show is basically Darren, who's my producing partner and my husband and myself, we go around America exploring and infiltrating these subcultures, some of the U .S.'s most controversial subcultures, and everything from sex trafficking to unregulated and illegal guns to the first episode, which is about synthetic drugs.

[500] Wow.

[501] Did you guys follow the John McAfee case?

[502] Yeah.

[503] I mean, a little bit.

[504] I saw the vice guys were down there.

[505] Did you follow the drug aspect of it?

[506] So I've heard about it, but I'm not like to.

[507] up to speed on what was going on.

[508] But I heard he was, like, making his own, like, stuff, right?

[509] I have no idea.

[510] Well, in the entrance of all fairness, he says that it was all a troll, and then he was just joking about the drug part.

[511] But the reality is he had a laboratory set up in his backyard in Belize, like a real legit laboratory.

[512] And inside that laboratory, I don't know what he was actually doing, but he made a post under a pseudonym on this drug forum describing his free basalts and his, he did some work with, I don't know what, I don't know what the technical aspects of his, his transformation of the basalts and something else, but he had claimed that it made you this incredibly hypersexual person and he was trying to market it as like a, he was trying to come up with a drug that would turn women into like nymphomanii.

[513] essentially the female Viagra yes sort of but Viagra doesn't make you eras like on steroids yeah but you know what I mean like Viagra is an aid to a man achieving an erection but it doesn't necessarily make you like a horny person whereas this was a mental thing like it would change you make you very very very aroused and you know he described it on the web on his post as like you know clawing your genitals and like freaking out masturbating all day and I mean he He had these really detailed depictions of the chemical transformation of these drugs and clearly had this massive laboratory, well, not massive, but like really high -end, high -tech laboratory, set up in his crazy fucking jungle house and this guy was cooking basaltz back there.

[514] I mean, the doctors we spoke to definitely said that like hypersexuality is one of the sort of symptoms, not symptoms?

[515] Side effects.

[516] Yeah, side effects.

[517] Benefits.

[518] Benefits.

[519] I don't know.

[520] However you want to describe it of bad salts.

[521] Yeah, and depending how you slice it.

[522] I wonder who he was targeting for these drugs.

[523] I know they're for women, but would men buy these drugs to give to their wives and girlfriends?

[524] Well, what he was doing it was give.

[525] He had like a bunch of young girls from this, you know, is Belize a third world country?

[526] I guess, sort of, whatever it is.

[527] Developing.

[528] Developing.

[529] So he had these, you know, young jungle girls, like 20 years old or however they were.

[530] Like, I think his girlfriend was 20.

[531] And he was like, you know, had all these pictures of these different girls.

[532] And he was getting hooked up on bas salts.

[533] Crazy dude We had him on the podcast When he was actually on the run No way Yeah yeah yeah After he was being charged with murder He fled the country And he was calling us I think he was calling us from Mexico On a One of those little Kmart cell phones That you buy Or Burner's yeah Yeah yeah And so he was He called into the podcast I spoke to us for like an hour It was fascinating We asked him about the drugs And he was in his thing You can't believe Everything that you read I am a notorious prankster You know, I think that was his It's just funning I know that's how I prank When I prank, I set up a lab And I fucking do it hardcore, man I make you really believe that I'm cooking Bath salts Meanwhile, I'm just back there with some like glitter And too glue And I mean, he made like this really like high resolution photographs of his work and detailed The whole process So if he was a troll Like man, he's a really well thought out troll He's a character and a half but the bath salts aspects were one of the parts of the whole story where they just sort of painted him like this maniac.

[534] Yeah.

[535] Some of the names of these bath salts are just insane.

[536] We were able to actually acquire some just at smoke shops here in Southern California that were, one was called Scooby -Doo.

[537] The other one was called Sexy Zombie.

[538] And we went into a smoke shop and bought this stuff.

[539] And then we were actually, so our first episode, we actually filmed some, we feature some, a Marine who's a dictated.

[540] to, or who was at the time, addicted to bath salts.

[541] We should explain to people that these are not actually bath salts.

[542] No, no. There's a few people that live happy lives that stay off the internet.

[543] The term basalts is a term given to these synthetic drugs that escape regulation because they're not clinically, they're not technically legal or illegal.

[544] Illegal.

[545] Yeah, they're not defined.

[546] Yeah, undefined.

[547] Well, they're defined compounds that haven't been.

[548] And they sell them as bas salts and says not for human consumption.

[549] right right exactly so they're chemical they're made in labs but they have the same sort of effects on your body as cocaine or meth but it's made in lab so there's nothing natural about it it is entirely made with chemicals most of which come from china and india and you can order them and then you have a garage and there are these kids this is how it started off with these kids putting all these chemicals together you have it all on the internet step by step on how to make it pretty easy and you make these batches of both what they call bath salts and they initially call them bath salt so that they could sell them with a not for human consumption, wink, wink, although they're super expensive compared to regular bathsalt.

[550] And they made this spice and K2.

[551] And these were drugs that were sold over -the -counter smoke shops.

[552] I mean, we were able to buy them at shell stations, gas stations, and they're sold all over the country.

[553] And it's really hard to go after these drugs because as soon as the government comes out and prohibits one compound, they immediately, you know, China and India have already all these other chemicals ready to ship so they just need to change a little compounds and it's a new drug and it's legal all of a sudden so that's why it's so hard to get it's it's amazing that that sort of popped up out of nowhere it's like all of a sudden someone figured out oh we could do this yeah yeah well I think they were like they were sitting around in like chemistry labs at universities like you know they were doing legitimate research on them and then this sort of you know monkey got out of the cage and next thing you know it's uh you know running rampant 20 days later style exactly So it was actually really interesting.

[554] It was a professor at a university in, do you remember what the name of the university was?

[555] I don't remember.

[556] I can't remember.

[557] But it was a professor in the 70s.

[558] He was doing this research.

[559] He wanted to know what kind of effects drugs have on a person's brain.

[560] So he was doing all this research and came out with all these compounds.

[561] And all this came out.

[562] And suddenly it was, you know, the instructions and the manual on how to create these crazy drugs that are now everywhere around us.

[563] and legal.

[564] Quasile legal, yeah.

[565] Quasai, quasi legal, yeah.

[566] Now, but, you know, John McAfee, McAfee, McAfee, I never know how to say that.

[567] It always pops up on your computer and you're like, Macafee?

[568] He's the one that created that, right?

[569] No, he didn't create bath salts.

[570] No, Macafee, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[571] Antiviral software, yeah, sorry.

[572] So he's a legitimately smart guy.

[573] Well, he was at one point in time.

[574] Yeah, it might be a little crazy.

[575] But, like, most of these bath salts and synthetic marijuana are being put together by like some yahoo's in their garage so that's where the problem comes in is that you know you don't know what you're getting and you don't know if they're mixing it correctly they do these things they get these things called hotspots like where one portion of the batch will have like 30 times the amount of the product compared to another part that might just have just been missed you know so so you never know what you're getting and obviously you know when you have like a 19 20 year old kid who's you know just looking to make some money mixing it together he's not probably doing his the best science to uh yeah yeah and you're you're also there There's a bunch of different effects of these things, right?

[576] It's not uniform.

[577] Yeah, we spoke about the over sexualization, aggressiveness.

[578] People believe that they have superhuman force.

[579] There's all these videos that you can search it on YouTube, too, of people going out and believing they're Superman and throwing themselves off cliffs.

[580] We spoke to a doctor who had treated a patient who was a lawyer.

[581] He was studying for the bar exam and took some of this stuff and decided that his hands, his own hands were trying to attack him.

[582] He thought paranoia.

[583] He thought his hands were trying to attack him.

[584] So he put both his hands on a stovetop and burnt his old arms.

[585] And he couldn't feel the pain.

[586] So it was just because the neighbor smelt the burning of his arms that they came.

[587] So he was cooking his own arms.

[588] He was cooking his own arms.

[589] Ouch.

[590] So some of these drugs are related to other drugs where they like take it and they change a molecule or twist something around.

[591] But they're not, it's not uniform.

[592] So it's not like they're all derivatives of this.

[593] They vary, like wildly.

[594] So you buy a batch of sexy zombie today, and you snort it or smoke it, and it does something to you really like.

[595] It's a really great high.

[596] It wasn't too bad.

[597] Next day, there's not much of a hangover.

[598] So the next day you decide you want to go to the smoke shop and buy some more of this stuff, but that batch can be have the same name, possibly come from the same place, but it's entirely different.

[599] You never know every single batch is different.

[600] So suddenly you might be taken to the hospital or you might be out trying to attack somebody.

[601] And there's also that story in Florida, that guy that ate that guy's face.

[602] Yeah, that's what put bath salts on the map that story.

[603] Yeah.

[604] Well, what's interesting is they said, well, it's been refuted because he didn't test positive for bas salts.

[605] But then I read, there is no test for bas salts.

[606] Like, he didn't test positive for bas salts because it doesn't exist.

[607] First of all, they don't know what to look for because it could be any and number one of these different substances.

[608] And second of all, they're not looking.

[609] Exactly.

[610] And that's why they're so popular that we heard, that they're so popular in places where there's drug testing is mandatory, such as military or rehab communities or even bullfighting.

[611] We were in Arizona and interviewed people from the bullfighting community, and this is really popular there because it's so hard to test these drugs.

[612] So they can just take them and know that nobody's going to ever find out.

[613] So they take these bass sauce and then hop on a bull.

[614] Yeah.

[615] Holy shit.

[616] Yeah, we spoke to a kid to do that.

[617] You want to talk about a reckless person.

[618] The guy who takes bath salts and gets in a bull.

[619] Wow.

[620] So it's very possible, apparently, that that guy who ate that guy's face was on bath salts.

[621] It is possible.

[622] And that sounds right, right, doesn't it?

[623] It's, I guess, yeah, it's consistent with behavior.

[624] Scientific waves there.

[625] I mean, we can't have no idea if the guy was on bath salts on it.

[626] Definitely, you know, I think the cops were like, this is the craziest thing we've ever seen.

[627] and it's just consistent with behavior that we've seen of other people that have been on bath salts.

[628] That's why they jumped to the conclusion that maybe it was bath salts.

[629] And even after the autopsy or whatever they did, you know, they said they ruled out that, well, I don't know if they ruled it out, but they said it probably wasn't bath salts or something, but who knows?

[630] How long before the pharmaceutical companies realized how much money is in bas salts and just say, listen, what we need to do is to set up some labs in, like, Mexico or Peru or whatever, churn out our own bas salts, launch them over the border with catapults, Have people pick them up, sipping trucks.

[631] Yeah.

[632] Well, there's an article that came out today, actually, about how the DA had just busted and is really concerned about synthetic drugs because it is becoming quite a big problem here in the United States and how they were finding out that actually it is, they said that it was, they are finding some connections of how it's funding terrorism in the Middle East.

[633] It's funny how everything ends up funding terrorism in the Middle East.

[634] It just means we need to spend more money on tanks.

[635] That's the tank companies.

[636] You know, but there are some really sad stories that we, We, you know, we interview the father of a kid who took bath salts for the first time because a friend gave it to him.

[637] And the kid went totally wild, came into his parents' house and slit his throat in front of his parents and died five days later.

[638] So, yeah, it's definitely something, too.

[639] Well, when you have children, that's when drugs really start worrying you.

[640] Like, drugs never worried me when I was single because I was like, you know, I'm not doing anything stupid.

[641] I'm not worried about it.

[642] I would hear stories about people dying and, you know, it would make me. sad, but it didn't hit home.

[643] When you started having children, and you think about all the dumb things that you did growing up, and somehow another dodged all those bullets and got to be an adult, and you think about these little ones growing up in this new world, where it's not so easy.

[644] Because when I was a kid, there was no such thing as Oxycontin.

[645] There was no such thing as pain management centers.

[646] There's not such thing as 240 ,000 people in a year getting a prescription for Oxy's in Montana.

[647] There was none of those things.

[648] So those hurdles, even though it was still there's lots of scary stuff that that wasn't there but i got really fortunate that i saw my friends when i was a kid my friend's cousin was a coke dealer and i go i got to watch him rot away i mean i got to watch his life like fall apart over the course of like a year like a guy lost all this way he became creepy he was hiding all the time just became like a vampire like he got bitten by a vampire and became this like sick person was really he was a dealer yes he was a dealer and an addict himself he was doing it himself and in watching that watching him go from like a regular guy to becoming this guy.

[649] It was a huge, you know, lesson to be learned.

[650] And I was in Vegas this weekend and I was talking to this guy who's the driver.

[651] And I said, you know, how do you like living in Vegas?

[652] Is it a problem?

[653] He goes, well, it goes, you know, the thing is, it's the drugs, man, you got to avoid the drugs.

[654] If you can avoid the drugs, it's a good place to live.

[655] Like, it's like most people just avoid the strip.

[656] But fortunately for me, my sister was hooked on drugs and the other person was hooked on drugs.

[657] He's telling me all the people they knew that are hooked on drugs you know that had sort of he learned from them to not do it it's like it's almost like how we need to learn we need to learn by watching other people fuck up the hard way yeah you're not gonna believe the government if the government comes out and tells you to avoid it you're like whatever what do you fuck do crooks now you know it's what can be done to like besides you know you talking or you doing a show like that did you guys ever is there anybody that you talked to that had like some really concrete plans or how this could be halted?

[658] Now there's some great organizations out there, support group organizations.

[659] You know, again, a lot of them are being led by women, by mothers, which I think is phenomenal.

[660] And they're really trying to raise awareness and pass legislation to make these bills harder to get and to stop these, you know, crazy doctors from overprescribing.

[661] But it's, you know, there is a way.

[662] And I do love the, whenever I speak to some of these mothers, it's really refreshing to see these, these just women who are so strong and wanting to fight for this.

[663] Yeah, well, that is a nice thing, but it just sucks that they have to fight for that.

[664] Jamie, there's something going on where it's buffering every few minutes.

[665] People are complaining a lot.

[666] It's the U -Stream side.

[667] Yeah.

[668] Sorry, we've got 100 megabytes a second upload, ladies and gentlemen now, so it's all U -stream, those dirty bitches, tell me to get it figured out.

[669] Complain to U -Stream.

[670] We can't help you.

[671] The show, you're going to, basically, you're going after a lot of different things.

[672] It's not just drugs.

[673] When you do this kind of investigative journalism and you're like ruffle feathers and sort of make noise, do you guys experience any blowback from that?

[674] Occasionally, but, you know, like this series, as we did in the Osh County piece that we started with, you know, we did a lot of on the cover filming.

[675] And, you know, our sort of approach to that is that we're not looking to get it.

[676] any individual in trouble.

[677] We're not trying to do any gotcha kind of journalism and bust any individual.

[678] We're just trying to shed light on an issue.

[679] So I think, you know, if we were targeting a specific individual, you know, there might be a little bit of blowback, whether rightly or wrong way, whether we were doing it that way.

[680] But I think, you know, the fact that we're just trying to shed light on an issue, and the only way that we can do that is with undercover cameras, you sort of, you know, mute the blowback a little bit because it's just enlightening for most people to see what goes on when people don't know the camera's rolling you know yeah that's that's probably a very good point yeah i didn't think of that that's um uh that's probably what's saving you guys well you know mike wallis from 60 minutes 60 minutes pioneered the undercover camera then they started doing away with it and mike wallis said you know uh the idea was to to draw light but we started drawing heat and so once you know it just becomes a bit of uh you know drawing heat and not shedding enough light then you know it's not it's time to sort of stop doing it so Yeah, so I think that will be our time to stop as well.

[681] But I do get nervous every time.

[682] I just re -watched for the 10th time the first episode of this series that is airing on Wednesday night at 10 p .m. And it made me really nervous just to watch some of the stuff because we did go undercover and filmed a lot of things, filmed a lot of people selling drugs and film people taking drugs.

[683] And a lot of it was filmed undercover and it makes me nervous for sure.

[684] But it was an issue that we thought was, you know, an important issue, not enough people know about it.

[685] What other subjects do you guys cover?

[686] We have, the second one is about guns, and we go into, we go to Arizona.

[687] We spent a lot of time in Arizona, and we basically became the, we transformed ourselves into the bad guys, into criminals trying to get guns, just to see how easy it would be for a criminal to get their hands on guns in Arizona.

[688] And in the space of about two, three days, we were able to get three handguns, one of which is the most powerful handgun, Smith & West and 500 Magnum.

[689] I now am an expert on guns.

[690] I knew nothing about guns before this.

[691] And we were able to get an AK -47 and a 50 caliber, which is the most powerful guns in the world.

[692] Out of the AK -47, we got out of a Taco Bell parking lot.

[693] We went online, backpage .com.

[694] We looked for AK -47, and within 45 minutes we had bought an AK -47 out of this guy's.

[695] Oh, my God.

[696] And then he wanted to sell us two more AR -15s that he had in his car as well.

[697] Oh, my God.

[698] We were on a budget, so we can...

[699] So this person, when you air the show, do you block their face out?

[700] You block their faces out, yes, because who knows why they're doing this?

[701] In that case, they actually look like drug addict.

[702] So it was really important for us to not, again, not going after anyone personally.

[703] Yeah, right.

[704] Well, that's beautiful of you.

[705] And congratulations on handling it that way, because that's, I think, the right way to do it.

[706] And it's also, obviously, this person is a part of a much greater issue.

[707] and to turn it on to make it about one person, it's like it's a tendency to do in this country, like to victimize or to criminalize this one person or whatever, you know, focus on this one person when it's really what's going on is the issue, right?

[708] Right.

[709] The issue of being able to buy guns that easy.

[710] Do you know what's so interesting, though, is that right after we bought that AK -47, it was, I think it was a first assault rifle that we bought in Arizona, and we'd been nervous, whether, you know, we'd invested money to go there, are we going to be able to, to buy these guns.

[711] And so to sort of celebrate our purchase, we went into the bar right next to Taco Bell.

[712] And we ordered three beers, myself, Darren, and the other producer, Alex, and because Alex didn't have his ID with him, they didn't sell him a beer.

[713] Meanwhile, we just bought an AK -47 outside.

[714] And no one asked for our ID or even our names.

[715] That's funny.

[716] It keeps cutting out, Jamie.

[717] Maybe we should switch it over to a lower stream or something like that.

[718] Try that.

[719] Try that.

[720] See if that helps.

[721] We'll fix it for you, folks.

[722] folks.

[723] The gun issue is a really a creepy one in this country.

[724] And it's also, in my opinion, connected to the pharmaceutical issue.

[725] And the reason being is that there's just massive connection between the things that people are afraid of when it comes to guns, which is school shootings and the like, a massive connection between those and the use of SSRIs and antidepressants.

[726] and there's something like I think the latest statistic was it was more than 90 % of all school shooters either are on antidepressants when they do it or are recovering from antidepressants when they do it and that's one of those things that makes you wonder like which came first, the chicken or the egg.

[727] Right.

[728] You know?

[729] No, definitely I mean like I think when you talk about those mass shootings and actually we shot this in the last day of shooting was the Aurora shooting Lest Dave were filming Oh wow The guns piece was the the Aurora shooting That's incredible Yeah and then You know so it's been in the can for a while This piece And then you know when Newtown happened You know there was some question of whether we should air the show The the guns episode early But we decided you know There was enough debate going on at that point To just to hold it off Yeah But he used the guy The Aurora The Newtown Sandy Hook shooting, he used a bushmaster which we also saw for sale at gun shows.

[730] What is that?

[731] A lot of them.

[732] I thought the Sandy Hook guy used pistols.

[733] I think the Sandy Hook guy used a Bushmaster.

[734] I was looking at today.

[735] Look it up.

[736] I'm pretty sure the new findings or the Sandy Hook shooting was that he actually didn't use an assault weapon.

[737] Pistols.

[738] Hold on.

[739] let me see what we should know NBC admitted no assault rival used in a new town shooting um do do do do do do do do um four handguns apparently the only handguns were taken into the school yeah I think um yeah he had it had been said that he had oh he had an AR -15 assault rifle that he had taken into to the school and it was in the car that he drove there but they've been told by several officials that he had left it in the car and then he came in and just shot everyone with pistols I remember when the reports came out hearing about the Bushmaster that he had to Bushmaster and I remember clearly having seen it in the gun shows and we almost bought one I mean we're really just being this is just sort of a technicality here but what kind of gun he used he obviously shot a bunch of people That's what's important Is someone can get this tool And really that's what it is It's an inanimate tool And a person can get it And go do these things And these things happen very rarely And when they happen There's this massive reaction And the reaction is almost always To try to take guns away And that's what gets like The real nutters crazy They're like, you ain't gonna take my guns You know, I'm a cold Cold dead fingers from a gun and it's almost like it's one of the strangest debates in our culture because it's not a gun that's killing all these people it's a person who's doing something that is horrific and impossible stop it's it's a person that's doing something so if if if they didn't have a gun who knows what they would do would they try to do it with a car where they just plow over a bunch of people in the road would they would they would they would They make a bomb.

[740] The idea is that this tool makes it easier for them to do it.

[741] But the reality is the gun's not doing shit on its own.

[742] And the real issue in my mind has always been a person able to do something like that.

[743] Like, how does that happen?

[744] And why is that sort of brushed away?

[745] Yeah.

[746] Everyone just wants to talk about gun control.

[747] And then it gets up this debate and humans are so wacky that when there's a debate, there's two sides screaming at each other and nothing gets done.

[748] You know, you have the Ted Nugent side that stockpiling ammo because they think Obama's going to, you know, turn the whole country into communist Russia.

[749] And then, you know, you've got the other side that want the, you know, that say, fuck hunters, you should just kill hunters, no one should have a gun, you know, get your meat from a supermarket, this is bullshit.

[750] We need to, we need to evolve.

[751] You know, there's that argument as well.

[752] In my opinion, it's a mental health issue.

[753] And just the fact that guns exist, look, guns are crazy.

[754] The idea that you could just point at something and make it disappear, but there's so many guns, there's so many gun owners, and it's so rare.

[755] If you look at it statistically that something like this happens, if you look at how many human beings we have in this country is like 300 million and how many shootings like this happen where someone indiscriminately just starts whacking people around them, it's kind of strange that it's so rare because there's so many fucking nuts.

[756] So many fucking crazy people in this country, it's almost, we're like blessed that these.

[757] things don't happen on a regular basis.

[758] Well, in many ways, I think the gun debate is an easier debate to have.

[759] It's the same with addiction, right?

[760] I mean, like, addiction is a very complicated issue.

[761] Mental health is a very complicated issue.

[762] And, you know, it's not as easy as to talk about, do you want guns or do you want guns?

[763] And I think, you know, what our...

[764] Can you not have guns?

[765] Yeah.

[766] And I think what we, you know, we're trying to show in RPS is that, like, the same laws that make it easy for anybody to access guns also makes it easy for people who you don't want having guns to have guns.

[767] And so if you're comfortable with that, and there are many states and there are many people that are comfortable with that, that's great.

[768] And if, you know, if you're not, if you, if you fear the damage that a gun can do in the wrong person's hand, then, you know, that's also a worthy thing to debate, I think.

[769] Yeah, but it's a much easier debate.

[770] I agree with you.

[771] It's much more black and white.

[772] It's about having the right to bear arm, to have arms, and what should be the limits on that and then pills, which actually, you know, it's a much more of a gray area debate yeah it certainly is um and even if there is gun laws i guess you could punish people harder for selling you and a k -47 in a parking lot but the fact that you could just do it yeah that's uh the anybody wants to stop background checks from owning guns is an asshole okay you just it's really that simple yeah i mean i think it's there is The vast majority of people just have agree on most things.

[773] And then it's, you know, the sort of extremes of both sides that sort of hijacked the debate.

[774] And, you know, background checks, you know, we go through background checks anytime we want to buy a car or, you know, like, you know.

[775] And they ask for our ID if you want to get beers, make sure you're over 21.

[776] So why not ask for your ID or get a background check if you want to buy a dangerous weapon?

[777] I saw the best Twitter post on this.

[778] Somebody wrote, this is the way to solve the gun problems.

[779] Take everybody who has a gun and kill them.

[780] And I was like, Jesus Christ.

[781] See, that is...

[782] Talk about missing the point.

[783] That doesn't help the debate.

[784] But it was just one of those things that, like, this extreme reaction that people have to the gun issue.

[785] When the reality is, and, you know, and I'm not in the Ted Nugid camp, but the reality is when you look at the actual numbers of people with guns and the small amount of times that these things happen, it's really not a gun issue.

[786] issue.

[787] It's a mental health issue.

[788] Oh, but there's the sort of pedestrian violence that happens every day.

[789] Sure.

[790] You know, there's rare, you know, mass shootings and stuff like that.

[791] But every day, you know, either accidentally or on purpose, people are getting shot with guns and killed.

[792] Yeah, it's true.

[793] And, you know, the thing is, is that the part that I loved about doing the piece and was when we started out is we went to this shooting range and we went to this shooting range and we took part in this festival.

[794] It was the Independence Day rifle match, yeah.

[795] and you know there were guys that are very obviously very pro -gun and like would disagree with anybody who says that there should be any limits on gun ownership or anything like that but at the same time you know a lot of the guys that were speaking to were very serious about the safety that went into to you know what owning a gun there's a responsibility there that if you own something just like if you own drive a car there's a responsibility to know how to drive a car and how you know to educate yourself and so you know the nRA they often they offer these pistol classes and They teach you how to, you know, unload, load, and how to do everything safely.

[796] And, you know, I think it's not mandatory for gun owners, but I think anybody that wants to own a gun should certainly take a class and how to handle a weapon because, you know, they're super dangerous.

[797] Yeah, I don't think there's any debate in that whatsoever.

[798] And I think another issue that needs to be taken into consideration is how many people's lives are saved with guns from bad guys.

[799] I mean, how many times have police in justifiable cases shot people?

[800] I mean, when you look at the number of people that are shot in this country, sometimes it's people that are protecting their home from a burglar, or sometimes it's a woman trying to prevent a rape.

[801] I mean, all these things are true as well.

[802] So it isn't a black and white issue, and that's what gets people really weird.

[803] And, you know, by the way, if you really, if you're really adamant about gun control and you've really adamant about stopping gun violence, pay attention to the fact that we're involved in wars, two crazy ones, and they're in places that don't make any sense, and people are dying over.

[804] over there just yeah a lot of innocent people and you know how about drones you know there's a lot of other shit going on it's not just happening right here it's a violence issue it's a detachment from humanity issue it's a it's a very strange one it's a one that seems to be lingering in a in our transition from this you know primal alpha male monkey thing that we used to be to whatever we're becoming as we become more and more educated and more more aware of the consequences of our actions and more and more hopefully enlightened where we're we're still we still have this thing we can just press a button and people explode you know and anybody can get one in the parking lot after you know being online in 45 minutes you know we're so strange i mean people are so goddamn strange and you really look at it that way if you were an objective observer you know from another planet that's sent here to report back on earth boy what a fucking story you would have You'd have to sit them down, and you'd have to go, okay.

[805] Where can I start?

[806] Yeah, you go, this is not what we had hoped for.

[807] Let me just say that first.

[808] They're fucking crazy.

[809] First of all, they're all on pills.

[810] They got a lot of guns.

[811] They got guns.

[812] They're on pills.

[813] No one knows what the fuck they're doing.

[814] It's all bananas.

[815] Journalists are driving into trees on 90 miles an hour and not leaving skid marks.

[816] When you guys saw that, did you get scared?

[817] Like thinking about the business that you're in.

[818] talking about Michael Hastings, who was a journalist for the Rolling Stone magazine, and he was involved in exactly what you're not involved in.

[819] He was involved in singling out individuals and going after them, and he did it to a very powerful general and wrote some piece in Rolling Stone that got the guy fired and repeatedly told people that people had told him they were going to kill him.

[820] And then one day, his car going 100 miles an hour in Hollywood, slammed direct directly into a pole or a tree and killed them, it burst into flames, no skid marks at all.

[821] You know, you think, well, that's crazy.

[822] Then this guy who was involved in security for President Clinton and Bush said that you can hack into a car now.

[823] Richard Clark.

[824] Yeah.

[825] And that today it's possible to hack into a modern car and control the steering, control the acceleration, control the brakes and then it's very possible you could remote control a car and make someone accelerate and slam into a tree and make the car explode wow yeah so when i'm sure you're aware of that story well no yeah i mean i've heard just um and some of the conspiracies that's around this i don't really know the details but um i'll say that he was a great reporter and uh definitely um big loss Yeah, a big loss for the industry, for sure.

[826] That's a good way to play it safe.

[827] No, no, I really don't.

[828] I applaud you on your effort.

[829] So basically tell us what you think he was killed.

[830] Oh, I don't know.

[831] I have no idea.

[832] I think it would be foolish of me with my zero understanding of the mechanics of modern automobiles, zero understanding of the computer equipment that runs them.

[833] I have zero technical knowledge.

[834] I'm just, Richard Clark, is there what was?

[835] Yeah, yeah.

[836] It was several others as well who have studied the, the mechanisms behind the possibilities of remote controlling various things, hacking into them, you know, I don't know.

[837] It's true.

[838] I have no idea, but it's scary.

[839] That sounds like such a scary scenario.

[840] It's very scary, yeah.

[841] I mean, it's trying to have a movie.

[842] Yeah.

[843] The guy just drives it.

[844] He's about to release this crazy story, tells everyone that the FBI is looking into him and interviewing all his friends and then bar right into a tree.

[845] Boom.

[846] And the car explodes and he dies.

[847] And now the story is just kind of slow.

[848] disappear.

[849] You know, Kim Kardashian will get pregnant from some other dude in like a couple of months.

[850] Kanye West would be on the outs and everybody would forget about Michael Hastings.

[851] Yeah.

[852] You know, a few people will try to talk about it on the line.

[853] And other folks will go, oh God, are you still talking about Michael Hastings?

[854] Let it go.

[855] Please.

[856] No, we should talk about the great work that he definitely did.

[857] I mean, yes.

[858] Yeah.

[859] But, you know, I think also a thing to take into consideration is that we live in an age of extreme transparency.

[860] And anybody who does something that evil, it seems like it's almost impossible to completely cover things up.

[861] And if it's not impossible now, I feel like it will be in a few years.

[862] I feel like any sort of record of something of that magnitude, it's going to be a way that that's going to come to light in some sort of a WikiLeaks type scenario.

[863] You're an optimist.

[864] Me?

[865] I like that.

[866] It all comes out.

[867] I'm an optimist.

[868] I'm what I would call a technological optimist.

[869] You know, there's that famous Orson Welles quote that history is a race between education and catastrophe.

[870] And I think if you look at the trends, education seems to like kind of always be winning.

[871] And I think part of that is that ultimately what's good for the entire race triumphs over what's good for the few.

[872] and I think even what's good for the few in terms of bad for the entire race is bad for the few because I think there's a thing called karma and I think that's real and I think that the effect that you have on your environment is a very tangible thing the way people react to you is a very physical, real, measurable thing and that comes from being a piece of shit if you're a piece of shit and you do horrible things it's very difficult to feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy love and happiness and have friends and I think that that ultimately technology most likely will be the tool that balances all that out.

[873] Because I think that with technology comes as transparency, with this transparency, you get to see the actions of these few in a different light than we got to see, like whether it was in the 60s or the 70s or when Eisenhower warned of the, when he left office and he was warning about the military industrial complex.

[874] that was just a film that was on television for one brief moment in a time where there was no VCRs.

[875] So it's like, how much impact is that even going to have that?

[876] Whereas now, many, many years later, over a half a century later, that film is being played over and over again on the Internet as an example of how this is probably an issue that's been around secretly behind the curtain for a long time.

[877] But now, every day, there's some new thing.

[878] Every day, there's some new piece of information.

[879] Every day there's some new story, you know, whether it's Edward Snowden or whether it's, you know, someone else releasing something else or some people getting arrested for something that you can't believe is real.

[880] That's, it's almost impossible to cover that stuff up these days.

[881] Yeah, no. It's crazy.

[882] Yeah, I like that worldview, though.

[883] I like that idea that.

[884] Yeah, people say I'm ridiculous.

[885] You could easily say I'm ridiculous.

[886] First of all, I'm not qualified to give any prognostication whatsoever.

[887] I can't give a prognosis.

[888] I mean, this is just a gut.

[889] reaction.

[890] But I think that if you look at the way life used to be a thousand years ago and the way life is today, you know, try living during the Inquisition.

[891] Try living in the Middle Ages.

[892] That's what's so funny.

[893] You always hear people, oh, we're living in the most violent time of our history and it's not actually.

[894] It's the least violent time in history and we actually have it pretty good.

[895] But I'm a strong believer in karma as well.

[896] I think we're dealing with a time where we're really confused.

[897] There's obviously some bad spots everywhere.

[898] They're always have been it's very difficult to be a human being and it's very difficult to develop a human being to raise a person so to have a baby become an adult the process is insane there's so many pitfalls and nobody gives you a guidebook nobody knows what the fuck we're doing and we're getting information from seven million or seven billion rather people a day essentially we're getting not all the information but anything crazy anything fucked up you know man born with 10 penises there he is you know like that'll get through yeah that gets through everything crazy gets through and it's almost like we weren't we weren't designed for that we're designed for what's happening in the tribe who are those guys with swords coming over the hill hey we got to get the fuck out of here you know that's what we're sort of designed for we're dealing with the same genetics essentially that people had 10 ,000 years ago and there was no communication back then there was nothing and now it's on your phone I was at a restaurant the other day with a buddy of mine and I'm like I'm a fucking junkie I can't put this goddamn phone down I have to keep checking the stupid phone I'm so such a asshole.

[899] Like, I can't stop.

[900] What's going on on Twitter?

[901] You know, like, it's so bad.

[902] But it's this, what's happening is I keep getting information and I'll go and I'll see something and ooh and maybe I'll see nothing and I'll look more and I'll see nothing and I'll look more and then ooh, a new post by someone I follow or something crazy is happening.

[903] Especially when it's a married couple and we're in the same sort of business and we're always, we're journalists or we're always looking for information but I find that where it's almost like a ping pong ball for us.

[904] I'm looking at the phone and he's really mad at me because we're having dinner and I'm looking at the phone and then I put it down and then he's looking at the phone trying to keep the romance alive and she's checking her phone I was at a restaurant the other day and I watched four people and none of them talked and they all stayed on their phone the entire time they're sitting there eating together yeah but then you look at them you're like oh at least people and then five minutes later you're the one checking your phone and they're looking at you saying the same thing so it's like yeah we are junkies Yeah, we really are.

[905] I interviewed Ray Kurzweil for my, I have a new show that's coming out on sci -fi.

[906] Yeah, congrats.

[907] Thank you.

[908] And one of the episodes, we're talking about the convergence, the human to machine convergence, and then the idea that one day we will be some sort of a combination of people and technology.

[909] And he was essentially making the argument that it's already happened.

[910] And that it's just we, we're slowly accepting it, but that technology is in pacemakers and in hearing aids and we are so attached to our phones that it could be argued that if you have a certain number of people that constantly carry phones with them the argument could be that you're already a part of that it's like it's what you just haven't figured out a way to put it in your body so the way before they had hearing aids those dudes used to carry those horns they're what lean forward you remember those like you would see them in the old like three stooges movies and shit there's like a giant buffalo horn what it would get close to you well not google glass and then you don't even have to hold anything yeah absolutely Have you played with that yet?

[911] No, I haven't.

[912] Have you?

[913] Yes.

[914] Yeah, I got a chance.

[915] I have a friend who works at Google, and she let me, that's one of those things.

[916] Yeah, the year thing, that used to look like.

[917] That would help you.

[918] I'm born.

[919] She let me play with it.

[920] It's very, very interesting.

[921] And it feels to me like a step.

[922] Like, ooh, I'm holding on to a Model T right here.

[923] Yeah.

[924] Like, this is what's one day going to be a Tesla.

[925] You know, one day it's going to be a contact lens, and we're all going to have one.

[926] or it'll be some sort of an implant.

[927] So describe it to me. Well, it's sort of crude because, sorry, Google, but right now it has to be tethered to a phone.

[928] And this is a, I played with a, it's not ready for prime time yet.

[929] Like a prototype.

[930] Yes, it's a prototype.

[931] And a Google phone at that.

[932] And you can do things to it.

[933] Like you can ask for, one of the things I thought was cool is like you could Google, like Ray Kurzweil, you know.

[934] Ray Kurzweil and all of a sudden it shows you like a page like right out of Google on Ray Kurzweil and you can you like see like Google Ray Kurzweil video and shows you all these video options and then you could play them off of YouTube but is it like projected somewhere or are you looking at the glass yes yes there it is that's me with one of those things on you can see it over there too this this TV in front of you actually no worries um yeah um you see it sort of floating in space but nobody can see it like if I have have it on and I'm talking to you, you can't see what I'm seeing.

[935] I see it, but you can't see it.

[936] And it's one of those things where if you look over here, you don't see it, but you look here, you see it, is really trippy.

[937] It's strange.

[938] But the strangest aspect is that I felt like I was holding onto something that was going to be something way greater someday.

[939] And this is just the first steps of this weird sort of a transformation into the symbionion.

[940] It's so wild.

[941] Yeah, it is wild.

[942] Yeah, that's right.

[943] It's freaky.

[944] Not sure if I'm looking forward to it, and I have to I feel like I am because I feel like I enjoy so many aspects of technology already.

[945] I think people are afraid, for the most, we're afraid of a loss of privacy.

[946] But if we could get people to stop being assholes, if everybody was like really cool, would you care if everybody looked at your pictures and got into your email?

[947] Or no, we know that everybody's looking, that people are looking at everything.

[948] But our issue is not with people looking at our stuff.

[949] Our issues are with assholes looking at our stuff.

[950] using our information against us.

[951] That's what we're really concerned with.

[952] And I wonder if you could extrapolate the sort of this thing that we're going through with technology, where there's this massive curve and it's spinning and spinning faster and faster until this exponential growth.

[953] If it was possible to somehow or another encourage that in human behavior as well as with technology, if technology could be used by in aiding in this sort of like connection with people, and aiding in emphasizing empathy and emphasizing camaraderie and friendship and love, if that could be like seen as like a more worthwhile ethic, a more worthwhile, like, a state of consciousness and behavior.

[954] It sounds like very hippie.

[955] No, you are, you're really optimistic.

[956] Well, I think it's possible.

[957] Yeah.

[958] I really do.

[959] Yeah, I love that.

[960] There's repercussions that people experience now when they do something terrible to someone on, like on the internet where there's a flood of people will go after them now that no one ever had before.

[961] You know, like, did you ever see there was a video where Anonymous released this video of this girl who was throwing puppies into a river?

[962] Oh, my God.

[963] And then they went after, exposed her and chased her.

[964] And it was really horrific stuff.

[965] But this, this, this, they, people swarmed on this evil behavior.

[966] They saw that someone was doing something terrible and they went after it.

[967] And this one example is also the example of what happened in Ohio with the rapes where they were trying to cover it up and that was also exposed by hackers and then the massive amount of negative attention that was given on those people.

[968] And it's like in time, would that not slowly sort of like cure people of this sort of behavior?

[969] Or if not cure people, make it far less likely to happen.

[970] Yeah, because the golden rule becomes a, you know, because people know what the fuck's going on.

[971] And they're not going to tolerate it.

[972] If everyone knows that something like that happened, someone did a horrible thing, wouldn't that lessen the occurrences of these things?

[973] If there were repercussions, the masses had access.

[974] The problem is, of course, that we don't think of that loss of privacy in that way.

[975] We think of a loss of privacy in Big Brother.

[976] We think of like the NSAs listening to all your phone calls and copying all your emails and, you know, and it sounds very Orwellian and dangerous and scary, you know, and that this is an erosion of privacy.

[977] But it's also, it seems inevitable.

[978] It seems inevitable.

[979] And if it's not inevitable in the sense that the government gets it, I think they're just going to get, they might get a hold of it first.

[980] But it seems like everybody's going to get it.

[981] Right.

[982] It's like, it's just that's where it's going.

[983] It's all moving to this area of no boundaries.

[984] It's very weird, but if you look at how life has changed since the Internet, you know, when did we get it, like 90 -ish, 94 -ish, when it really took hold.

[985] I got on AOL.

[986] I think it was in 94.

[987] I was on.

[988] You were really a adopter.

[989] Yeah, well, I owe it to my friend Robbie.

[990] My friend Robbie was a computer major.

[991] Robbie Prince, what's up, dude?

[992] He was a computer major in college, and then became a stand -up comedian and was telling me, like, oh, it's a great way to write your jokes.

[993] I didn't have a type at all.

[994] But I remember getting online the first day on AOL and they have like all these categories you can look into and I was fascinated.

[995] I was like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life.

[996] If you have a question and it was so rudimentary and crude with a 14 -4 bod modem.

[997] But extrapolate that from 1994.

[998] Take, take 1994 and go and look at how we are now in 2013.

[999] I would have never guessed.

[1000] First of all, I'd never guess that I'd be sitting in some room talking to some people who made a documentary that us.

[1001] And the only way we communicated until today was strictly through this electronic medium.

[1002] No publicists, no nothing, no one hooking this up, and no formal process.

[1003] And then now no producers, no network, no nothing, no filtration, no censorship, instantaneously broadcast.

[1004] and my Ustream page has right now 14 million views so it reaches a lot of people it's not like it's not like a couple weirdos or checking it out and then it goes on iTunes and at least a half a million will download each individual episode from either that or Stitcher or just the raw MP3 like this is a crazy shift in the way things were done just 20 years from now and then you think about Facebook you think about Twitter you can take a picture of something You put it online and then this guy retweets it and that guy retweets it.

[1005] And if it's something, especially if it's something big or a story big, it could get retweeted by millions.

[1006] And then before you know it, it becomes a news story.

[1007] And then before you know it, it becomes something that the whole country knows about.

[1008] And it's almost instantaneous.

[1009] I look at that and I say, how is it possible that that's not going to continue to go in that same direction?

[1010] And I really do think it's going to be beneficial.

[1011] I think there's going to be pitfalls for sure as we sort of figure out our way and how to navigate this new world that we live in.

[1012] you know pardon the phrase but i ultimately think that it's going to be beneficial i am sold i think it's going to do i dare you i'm too i was not surprised to stop technology here no i am too it's just that it's going to make our romantic dinners even harder yeah because you're going are you looking at me or you're looking at your google contact lens right right exactly you son of a bitch look into my are you looking at this i'm not sure well we'll have to The thing is about these things, they seem to want to operate on voice recognition.

[1013] It seems to be, that's what the trend is with these things.

[1014] That would be very difficult to hide.

[1015] You know, you can't say, oh, listen, honey, I totally, Google, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[1016] I totally agree with you.

[1017] Google new shoes.

[1018] Yeah, it would be, I don't know.

[1019] I mean, it would be nice if we all took our Google contact lenses off as we entered in.

[1020] Exactly.

[1021] Mandatory.

[1022] Yeah, I guess it's just an inevitability of the world we live in.

[1023] And we just have to accept the fact that times they are changing.

[1024] Yeah.

[1025] For the better.

[1026] Hopefully.

[1027] Maybe I'm wrong.

[1028] I'm fucking wrong all the time.

[1029] Don't listen to me. What other substances do you guys cover?

[1030] The third episode is sex trafficking, actually.

[1031] Oh, snap.

[1032] That was a really interesting one.

[1033] Yeah.

[1034] So you think about sex trafficking and you think of foreign women being brought into the United States.

[1035] Well, it's ten times more likely that an American is being trafficked than it is a foreigner here in the United States.

[1036] in another country or here in...

[1037] An American here in the United States.

[1038] Yes, an American here in the U .S. So we basically went undercover.

[1039] I went undercover as a prostitute trying to get a job at a massage parlor in Houston.

[1040] And, I mean, within five minutes, I was approached by this guy who tried to get me to be a prostitute for him.

[1041] He wanted to be my pimp.

[1042] And meanwhile, Darren was filming all of this from across the street in the car.

[1043] Oh, my God.

[1044] How are you not freaking out?

[1045] You must have been freaking out.

[1046] He was.

[1047] I was freaking out a little bit.

[1048] He was.

[1049] And because, you know, technology has evolved so much, but yet we didn't have all the technology we needed with us at the time.

[1050] We just had our iPhone.

[1051] I had my iPhone on mute, but on speakerphone so he could hear what was happening.

[1052] And then I had the little glasses, secret filming glasses.

[1053] But the only way he could hear me was through my speakerphone iPhone.

[1054] And the whole time I was holding the iPhone while talking to this guy.

[1055] So it looked really strange because I was trying to get Darren to hear what was happening.

[1056] And the guy is saying, you know, you're, where are you from you look like you're from Sweden don't you you you can get a lot of clients I can make you thousands of dollars every night and you you you look so clean which is a compliment that I'd never gotten before you you look really clean yes kind of gross made me wonder what other kind of no scams no pus you're a clean clean girl and meanwhile and he kept on insisting for me to go into the car with him and Darren across the street couldn't see where I was at and thought that I had gotten into the car with him and was sort of cursing me and saying, is she crazy?

[1057] What is she doing?

[1058] And then I hadn't gotten into the car.

[1059] And he kept on saying, why don't you come into the car with me?

[1060] And I just gave excuses that I didn't feel very comfortable yet.

[1061] But I was really looking forward to working with him because I wanted to know more information about how these whole prostitution rings work here in the United States.

[1062] And it's really, really sad.

[1063] You know, it's these many times teenage girls who, you know, are at a shopping mall and their approach by this guy who says you're beautiful.

[1064] You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.

[1065] I'll give you everything you need in the world.

[1066] Come with me, travel with me. You know, sometimes these girls are, for whatever reason, they don't have good relationship with their parents or they come from a bad background and they accept and they go travel around America with these guys and very soon after they become, you know, they're sex slaves and they're sold out for, you know, $200 a night.

[1067] It's very, very sad.

[1068] And they somehow or they keep them from escaping?

[1069] Keep them from escaping, yes.

[1070] First, by just persuasion.

[1071] Persuasion.

[1072] Coercion.

[1073] And, and, I mean, beating them by violence.

[1074] And some girls are even branded with, like, tattoos of their pimps and stuff like that.

[1075] Yeah, we interviewed one girl that had a dragon tattoo with the name.

[1076] It was a panther, I think.

[1077] A panther, sorry, a panther tattoo with the name of her pimp in the back.

[1078] And all the girls that were in her ring all had the same tattoo.

[1079] Oh, God.

[1080] And, you know, sometimes they're scared to go back home.

[1081] Some of the girls get hooked on drugs.

[1082] The pimps get them hooked on drugs.

[1083] And a few of the girls that we interviewed said they went to the police and told the police, but the police didn't believe them.

[1084] And they just arrested them for being prostitutes.

[1085] So they spent a night in jail, and they kept on saying they had a pimp, and the police had nothing about it.

[1086] And as soon as they were released, the pimp was outside of the jail waiting for them to come out.

[1087] Put them right back to work.

[1088] To work, yeah.

[1089] I mean, they're worth a lot of money, you know.

[1090] Jesus.

[1091] Yeah, it's like they're shepherds, you know.

[1092] It is.

[1093] It was.

[1094] Farmers.

[1095] Yeah.

[1096] It's insane.

[1097] It is.

[1098] It really is sad.

[1099] And it was really interesting.

[1100] One of the operations, these sort of undercover operations we did was in Charlotte, which is a big place for sex trafficking.

[1101] Because there are all these interstates.

[1102] This is North Carolina.

[1103] All these interstates that meet there.

[1104] So we went out with this religious group because religious groups are out there doing a lot of outreach for sex trafficking.

[1105] And we went out with this religious group that goes out every night or many weeks, many, nights a week to look for women to try to recruit them, take them out of these rings, out of prostitution, essentially.

[1106] And it was me and this other woman who works in this organization.

[1107] And we went out with, again, with a secret camera, Darren, again, filming from the car.

[1108] And we saw a girl who seemed to be sort of lost.

[1109] She had just gotten out of the car.

[1110] Her jeans were ripped.

[1111] And we called her and started asking, are you okay?

[1112] And she said, no, I'm not okay.

[1113] a guy just, you know, just beat me and I'm not feeling well.

[1114] And as we're talking to this girl, suddenly it's as if we had disrupted some sort of crazy sex trafficking ecosystem and all these pimps come out of the woodworks, out of the bushes, literally in the middle of Charlotte, in the main prostitution street, and come out and start circling us.

[1115] And they don't know we're watching because Darren's in the car watching them and start seeing these two pimps sort of circling us to find out why we were talking to their girl.

[1116] And that's when they came out and started calling us and then we left.

[1117] But it's really interesting and it's happening all around the United States.

[1118] God.

[1119] Wow.

[1120] It's so disturbing.

[1121] Now, does that happen in countries where there's prostitution or is legalized prostitution?

[1122] That's a very good question.

[1123] I don't know.

[1124] I don't know.

[1125] I would think that would be.

[1126] I don't, I don't, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, just from, out of the top of my head, I wouldn't think, you know, obviously one of the big things, the reason why these rings exist, it's because it's illegal to be a prostitutes.

[1127] So the prostitutes feel safer.

[1128] If they want to sell themselves, they feel safer, having somebody who looks after them and who essentially at the end of the day takes away all their money.

[1129] So this is what we heard again and again.

[1130] It's sort of the same issue that exists in the drug world where if you make things illegal, then you sort of create this atmosphere where only the outlaw is profit.

[1131] And I know that in Amsterdam, where drugs are pretty much legal or at least tolerated as far as marijuana and many drugs, they have like a very low rate of addiction and very low rate of AIDS.

[1132] They have legalized prostitution.

[1133] I would wonder how much of this type of thing of sex slavery is.

[1134] is mitigated by that those places in Nevada right where it's legal and I think that's the argument that a lot of the brothel owners make is that we can make it safe we can make it you know the girls are tested the girls are there under their own volition and you know they get to keep their money as opposed to have the money taken away so we visited some of these brothels and I was actually really impressed for a different show but you know they get tested for AIDS on a weekly base for all sorts of sexual transmitted disease on a weekly basis and you know the girls feel safe at least they're in the brothel and they're not out in the streets yeah I would about look then it's another one of those things it's like a personal freedom issue almost like should a woman if she's crazy and she loves sucks should she be allowed to be a prostitute I wouldn't want my daughter or my friend's daughter or he my friend I wouldn't want anybody that I know doing that I wouldn't want anyone that I know being a prostitute but I also wouldn't want my daughter or my friend I wouldn't want anybody that I know being a prostitute but I also wouldn't want my daughter or my friend I want anybody I know being a hired killer.

[1135] I wouldn't want anybody I know working on an oil field when it blows up.

[1136] There's a lot of things I wouldn't want my friends to do, but do I think that they should be allowed to be a prostitute?

[1137] Why is it that sex is something that everybody wants, but you can't sell it?

[1138] Why is that?

[1139] I mean, who says?

[1140] Yeah, who says?

[1141] Yeah, we've met, I mean, we've met women on all sides of this issue and, you know, women that are high paid call girls and stuff like that who very much see it as an empowerment issue but you know the vast majority I think of girls out there are being exploited against their will and I think that that's the issue and it is because obviously because it's illegal well yeah it again it goes down to that same issue of human nature we're such a strange animal and when you tell us that something is wrong that we can't do it then it becomes this weird itch that people want to scratch you know and I wonder how many people actually I wonder that study how many people actually go to prostitutes because it's illegal, as opposed to illegal prostitutes.

[1142] In countries where it's tolerated, I wonder if they have less people.

[1143] Side -by -side study between...

[1144] Double -blind placebo prostitute study.

[1145] Exactly.

[1146] Can we do it?

[1147] No. Can we get funding for that?

[1148] Well, it's so, you know, it's so, it seems like a pattern, you know, that exists.

[1149] Things are illegal.

[1150] People want to do them.

[1151] Bad people, sell them to the people that want to do them.

[1152] Then you have crime.

[1153] So basically that's where our show is, essentially.

[1154] And then we go do a show about them all.

[1155] Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[1156] Is there anything you guys did during this new show that really shocked you?

[1157] Is there anything that, like, it really stands out or something that you never expected?

[1158] I mean, I thought it was, the pimp moment was a shocking one.

[1159] I've never seen a pimp, like, sort of uses game to try to pick someone up before.

[1160] I've heard about it, you know, secondhand stories, but I actually see...

[1161] Especially your wife.

[1162] Especially since it was my wife, but that was really interesting how they sort of talk about and they try to sell it.

[1163] I was really nervous going in not only because I was filming undercover and that is always nerve -wrecking, but also because I was trying to apply for a job just to show sort of what this is like, what this sex trafficking underworld is like.

[1164] Not that I was going to work as a prostitute, but just to be able to get into these massage parlors and see how easy it is to get a job.

[1165] And I was nervous that they were going to turn me down and say, I'm sorry, you're too old or to this or to that.

[1166] That's funny.

[1167] As a woman, that's the first thing.

[1168] So when this guy approaches me and starts saying that I look very clean.

[1169] Did you always go, hey, all right.

[1170] I can pass.

[1171] Yeah, I came back to the car.

[1172] The first thing I told Darren is like, I still got it.

[1173] That's hilarious.

[1174] What other subjects were covered?

[1175] I mean, how many episodes do you guys do?

[1176] It's six episodes.

[1177] Six episodes.

[1178] We covered animal rights activism.

[1179] Oh, did you cover the animal liberal, organization animal no we we we didn't really uh delve into that too much but we were looking into um the the guys that go undercover into like factory farms and film like the abuse of animals on factory farms and then they you know turn it into campaigns to uh try to get people to stop eating meat or to sort of improve conditions for um for factory farm animals and stuff like that so um there's yeah that you know the sort of whole um very successful campaign by animal rights groups in the last decade or so that have, you know, used the on -the -cover camera.

[1180] And so we figured since we're doing a show about on -the -cover filming, you know, like, let's see if we can, you know, hook up with these guys and see what their world is like.

[1181] So we hooked up with this one guy who's been doing it for like 10 years, and he remains anonymous.

[1182] It goes by, you know, a fake name in the show.

[1183] But his whole life has just been penetrating these farms and capturing, you know, pictures of abuse on film and stuff like that.

[1184] And this is the guy who's obviously he's vegan.

[1185] He's completely against the eating consumption of animal meat.

[1186] And he still, every day, he goes to work when he goes undercover and he has to kill these animals just to be able to record what happens inside these factory farms.

[1187] And then there's a legislation that is being passed right now in several states to try to stop to prohibit what these guys are doing by filming undercover.

[1188] Yeah, I've seen that.

[1189] And how is that flying?

[1190] How are they allowing people to do that?

[1191] Because everyone is outraged.

[1192] When they see those videos, even a meteor, they watch those videos.

[1193] videos of people like, I saw one of this abuse that was going on with these cows where this guy was like hitting a cow with a crowbar.

[1194] They're so horrific.

[1195] And again, another thing that's being exposed by technology.

[1196] I believe that video could have very well come from the guy that we feature.

[1197] He's sort of the main, one of the biggest undercover animal rights activists.

[1198] So did you alter his voice and blur out his face?

[1199] We didn't alter his voice, but we definitely, you know, he was in disguise actually.

[1200] But he has, he's had, I don't know how many any name changes throughout his life and this he's been doing it for 10 years and he's sort of if you ever want to do any undercover filming this is the guy you need to talk to and he actually gave me some training because a lot all of this show is about undercover filming he gave me some training into filming undercover he sent me out into a parking lot and told me that first I had to go to that woman over there she's a perfect stranger and you have to ask her you have to get information from her I want to know where she lived before she lived here and I had to go and do that and I pass that really easily.

[1201] But then the second test that he made me do was I had to go out there and make a woman sort of run away from me because she was scared.

[1202] And I'm not very good at that.

[1203] I'm good at getting information from people, but I can't it's not in my nature to be mean or to be scary, intimidating.

[1204] And so I went to a sparking lot and I just started acting wild, crazy and not really scary, just crazy.

[1205] Like, where is water?

[1206] Where can I find some water?

[1207] People were just staring at me with this crazy woman.

[1208] probably thinking I was on bath salts or something.

[1209] Why were they trying to get you to do all these different things?

[1210] So this is part of the training is that you have to be able to make people feel either very comfortable with you, so they give you information that you need that you want to get for your undercover filming, or very uncomfortable with you so that you feel the need to either leave so you can film or intimidating to a point, intimidated to a point that you will release any information you give without actually resort into violence, obviously.

[1211] So it was really an interesting little practice.

[1212] that we had with him.

[1213] Wow.

[1214] And how long has this guy been doing this?

[1215] Ten years.

[1216] Yeah.

[1217] He trains other people.

[1218] He's the main trainer of undercover filming for animal rights activists in the United States.

[1219] It's an incredible guy.

[1220] It seems to me that that's another one of those things where it's sort of a diffusion of responsibility thing.

[1221] And there's so many people that want meat, so many people that want, you know, food.

[1222] And if you could figure out how to stuff them into smaller packages, he can extract more ones and zeros.

[1223] Yeah.

[1224] Right.

[1225] And I mean, that's just that, you know, these guys that do the undercover, you know, filming, they obviously have an agenda, which is they want people to become vegan, but they're very sympathetic to the workers who, you know, sort of toil on their conditions that can be, at times, be pretty stressful.

[1226] And that's what sort of causes them to lash out many times.

[1227] And then, you know, the sort of agriculture industry obviously just sees us as a, you know, a pretty big threat, you know, these guys coming in and filming on the cover and their farms.

[1228] And, you know, their argument is that, you know, they're capturing, capturing these, an anomalies, you know, this doesn't happen every day, and they're using it to sort of amplify, you know, their issue.

[1229] What is his take on this, though?

[1230] His take is not that it's not, it's not anomaly at all.

[1231] He says it's not.

[1232] He says that in every single farm he's ever entered, he's ever filmed undercover, he has witnessed animal abuse.

[1233] Wow.

[1234] That was his take.

[1235] Does he go to these organic, free range places?

[1236] Does he ever try those?

[1237] I think that, you know, the biggest sort of target for them of the bigger factory farms.

[1238] factory farms yeah boy would it freak people out though if you go to grass -fed free -range farm and watch them abusing cows too and you'd be like oh shit because that's what everybody wants to pretend like i don't have any murder on my hands why my meat is grass -fed and they smile right before they cut their throats we actually went to a slaughterhouse and actually that was probably yeah you asked before would have been one of the most surprising thing we did is we went to a slaughterhouse but it was at a you know a humane ranch it was certified humane ranch and it was you know like we sold the whole process we saw them tagging a baby calf like a baby calf that was just born with born within like the last 24 hours and mariana got to like tag the calf's year and then you know we saw the other another of the process where you know what is it 18 months later some like that they're slaughtered and they let us on to the floor of the slaughterhouse and they said you know we have an open door policy because you know we want to be sort of as transparent as possible you know about how this food is you know raised and how it's slaughtered and you know if you know i've been eating meet all my life and I've never once seen a cow slaughtered and I thought it was a really eye -opening experience, you know, to be able to sort of consume thousands of thousands of meals and, you know, not know exactly where you're, you know, so disconnected from where our food comes from just as, you know.

[1239] How do they kill the cow?

[1240] So they use a, what they call a knocker and they basically, it's a like no country for old men.

[1241] Yes, exactly.

[1242] Exactly.

[1243] And it sort of stuns the cow it doesn't kill them right away but it definitely sort of paralyzes them for a moment and puts them into a deep unconscious state um and then they hang up that upside down and they slit the throat and they cut the you know the odd reason and they never wake up from that thing to the head no no they bleed them to death so it's almost instant yeah yeah yeah and it seems fairly humane yeah you know like it's not how it happens at every farm though you know again this is a humane farm what's the least humane way they do it kosher is really bad I have no idea pretty sure kosher they just cut their neck I think kosher there's a process that has to be followed and one of the parts of the process involves cutting the neck yeah I think they yeah I don't think you're allowed to use that stun thing it's kosher you know there are some things that are called standard farming procedures I think it is right standard standard farming procedures and they're legal common common farming practices, perfectly illegal, but, you know, so violent to see.

[1244] And we watched tons of videos of this that were filmed undercover, but the deba -deaking of chickens.

[1245] So they don't poke each other because they get so close to each other?

[1246] The cutting of the tails of the pigs, all that is just hard to see.

[1247] The taking away of the baby pigs from their mothers, you know, and you can see them caged in these little tiny compartments.

[1248] All that is, you know, again, common farming practices, but very hard to see.

[1249] And obviously, there's a lot of interest there for us to be disconnected to our food and not see what happens.

[1250] And I'm not a vegetarian at all.

[1251] I still eat meat, but it was definitely a very interesting piece to be a part of and to find out more about how it all works.

[1252] I'm not a vegetarian either, but I certainly am not a fan of human cruelty.

[1253] And I think that's the real issue.

[1254] It's not whether, because these animals do not live forever, and the reality is that they're, there's quite a few realities when it comes to being a vegan.

[1255] One of them is, if you do decide that no one's going to eat meat anymore, and we make a law in the whole world has to let all their animals go, they're going to keep fucking and they're going to keep making baby animals, and then you've got a real problem.

[1256] Because what are you going to do then?

[1257] Are you going to castorate the males?

[1258] Are you going to sterilize them in some way?

[1259] Are you going to reintroduce predators into the environment?

[1260] You're going to have to do something to keep the population down.

[1261] I don't know how you plan on doing that, but how are you going to do that and not put into jeopardy human beings?

[1262] There's a reason why we rose to the top of the food chain.

[1263] And one of the reasons why is because we can control our environment from predators.

[1264] We can box up a city, make it nice and tall, and keep out the mountain lines.

[1265] And we know how to do that.

[1266] There's never been a mountain line in New York City.

[1267] LA has been.

[1268] Santa Monica recently.

[1269] Oh, my God.

[1270] Yeah.

[1271] See that one?

[1272] Every time I run in Griffith Park, man, I'm afraid I'm going to get people.

[1273] pound stuff.

[1274] Yeah, I saw one very recently in Santa Barbara.

[1275] Wow.

[1276] I was driving through Montecito.

[1277] You know where Montecito is?

[1278] Yeah.

[1279] A really beautiful neighborhood and this fucking thing ran across the road.

[1280] And my wife initially said coyote.

[1281] She goes, look, it's a coyote.

[1282] And I thought it was a coyote.

[1283] You know, we saw it in our headlights.

[1284] And then I saw the tail and it's tail.

[1285] And I noticed that its body was like kind of bouncy, whereas coyotes are really stiff and, you know, they have that sort of stiff, twitchy leg movement sort of a thing.

[1286] Oh, shit, it's a mountain and I'm like, in Santa Barbara.

[1287] Oh, man. This is crazy.

[1288] It's like, this is a really urban place.

[1289] There's got some guy at National Geographic right now doing a story on like urban wildlife.

[1290] And he recently released a picture of, I think it was a bobcat.

[1291] I don't think it was a mountain line, but it was a bobcat.

[1292] And it's like caught by one of those trigger cams.

[1293] And it's like at night and the whole background of downtown L .A. It was basically taken by the observatory where, you know, there are millions of animals.

[1294] Little children running around.

[1295] But the grip of the observatory is.

[1296] hardly L .A. It's pretty rural.

[1297] Yeah.

[1298] It's a small area that's rural, but they have coyotes biting people there.

[1299] Yeah.

[1300] Like some homeless person went to sleep there and woke up because they got bit by a coyote.

[1301] Oh, man. Like the coyote came around and tested them just to see if they could eat you.

[1302] Is that good?

[1303] Well, the guy might have been really fucked up, you know.

[1304] Who knows how drunk or high or messed up he was.

[1305] I mean, there are coyotes in our backyard constantly.

[1306] Oh, yeah.

[1307] It's L .A. It's a cat eating assholes they are.

[1308] Yeah.

[1309] steal your cat like very few people in LA let their cats out right well because I mean you see all the missing signs in the neighborhoods right it's like you know what you know what happens yeah I live in a really rural place and there's there was a mountain line siding in my neighborhood about a year ago and coyotes there every day see hawks and we saw a crow in our yard and all these other crows were squawking and we're trying to figure out what's going on and the crow was uh there's something wrong with it obviously it was like kind of hobbling and hopping around in this branch but it couldn't fly away so we went inside and then we came out and and like, I don't know, a couple hours later and there was just feathers and guts everywhere.

[1310] All it had to do was people had to get away for a little bit and then some predator came swooping in.

[1311] It was probably a raptor.

[1312] Like, you know, some sort of a...

[1313] Yeah, hawks.

[1314] Hawks are everywhere around where I live.

[1315] They're big, too, man. Big creepy murderers.

[1316] Just flying murderers from the sky and swooped in and jacked this crow.

[1317] I mean, they don't eat buries.

[1318] Original drones.

[1319] Yeah.

[1320] Hawks don't, you know, steal tomatoes.

[1321] They're jack -moving things Anything's sick I'll take care of this I got it They're like the cleanup crew For the wounded animals So, you know, animals Eat other animals That's another problem Is that okay?

[1322] Is it much more humane For a deer to get eaten Slowly by a pack of wolves There is to get shot by a hunter I don't like the idea of veganism But I don't like the idea of animal cruelty either Yeah, I think that's where most people people land, right?

[1323] I mean, so, but they're, you know, like the animal rights groups, they, you know, they, they, I think have done an effective job of sort of getting people like us who eat meat and, uh, thinking about it.

[1324] Yeah, thinking about it.

[1325] Yeah.

[1326] Because, you know, it is hard to watch people beating a cow or something like that.

[1327] And it should never exist.

[1328] And it's, again, it goes back to like the same thing.

[1329] It's, it's a human issue.

[1330] It's about humanity.

[1331] It's about what, what is causing a person to do something like that.

[1332] Well, it's a mental illness.

[1333] It's a sickness.

[1334] Hitting a cow with a crowbar.

[1335] What is happening?

[1336] How is that possible?

[1337] I couldn't do it.

[1338] You couldn't do it.

[1339] Why is it happening?

[1340] Yeah.

[1341] So when we interview the woman who runs this humane farm, one of the questions I had was, why do you treat them?

[1342] Because they really put a lot of effort into treating these cows well while they're alive.

[1343] Why do you put such emphasis in treating well the cows if you know they're going to die?

[1344] If you, you know, the farm's going to kill them anyway.

[1345] And she said exactly because we're going to kill them and use them for meat.

[1346] They're going to be our food.

[1347] Exactly because of that.

[1348] We, it is, it is mandatory for us to treat them well.

[1349] And I really like that philosophy.

[1350] I think that's a beautiful philosophy.

[1351] I watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain's old show, No Reservations.

[1352] And one of the things that was about this place in New York that is, they are not just a restaurant, they're a restaurant and they have their own butcher shop and they also have their own farm.

[1353] So they grow all of their food.

[1354] I guess it was Maine.

[1355] They, yes, okay, I'm confusing two different things.

[1356] one of them was a butcher shop that's also a farm and they grow their own food and they kill their own animals and then sell the meat so you know you're getting it humanely and the other one was a farm in Maine where they locally source everything from their own farm all their food all the vegetables all the animals and they were showing all the different pigs they raise and they're petting the pigs and you know talking about the different parts that are going to be delicious and it's kind of weird because you're like well that's your pet you're pet.

[1357] that thing and you're going to kill it but is it is it better that way yeah is it better that way to be nice to them until you decide to be really mean yeah yeah I mean yeah it's probably one of those things that as we develop synthetic meat oh man yeah we're probably going to move away well they're really close to doing that then some guy in like London or England has done it right he's figured out how to do it he made the first hamburger or something like that I don't know I don't know where they have but I do know that they're they're capable of doing things now where they can reproduce cells and they can reproduce certain types of tissue like Kurzweil was telling me about this woman who had something wrong with her esophagus so they built an esophagus out of biodegradable material used stem cells and used the biodegradable material as a scaffolding stem cells built a brand new esophagus and they operate on her installed the new one and now she's fine, you know, and that's like they're making parts for humans.

[1358] So it just seems to make sense that they're going to make meat.

[1359] Yeah.

[1360] I don't know how I feel about that.

[1361] Yeah, maybe vegans will eat like a fake steak.

[1362] Yeah, maybe they're down with that.

[1363] That would be like the best thing for that.

[1364] Yeah, I realize how delicious and karma -free, a nice karma -free cheeseburger.

[1365] That would be awesome.

[1366] Yeah.

[1367] I mean, I think that's inevitable.

[1368] Fish.

[1369] That's great.

[1370] It's coming.

[1371] I mean, they're going to, well, you're talking about doing it with humans.

[1372] They're talking about developing parts that are completely artificial, completely artificial cells that interact with your cells with no immune response.

[1373] They're talking about these things being an inevitability of the future.

[1374] It's not science fiction.

[1375] In fact, it's all based on proven research.

[1376] And there's proof of concepts already available.

[1377] And it just makes sense they're going to have a fake chicken, a fake headless chicken.

[1378] Running around.

[1379] Just waiting for you to eat it.

[1380] Breasts and legs.

[1381] Doesn't know what's going on.

[1382] Literally has no brain.

[1383] It's not that they're stupid.

[1384] They have zero brain.

[1385] Because every chicken's stupid.

[1386] But this would be like, there's nothing going on.

[1387] You don't have to worry at all.

[1388] Just pick it up and kill it.

[1389] You're not even killing it.

[1390] It's not even a lot.

[1391] Featherless.

[1392] It's like all the annoying things that are doing when you.

[1393] Yeah.

[1394] We've actually had to kill a chicken.

[1395] But in Colombia, that was, it's not a pretty process, taking the feathers off a chicken.

[1396] And it seems to be that the real thing about killing an animal and eating an animal is the fact that this is not just that it's alive because vegetables are alive as well.

[1397] It's the fact that it's alive and it can move and feel pain.

[1398] And feel pain, yeah.

[1399] But if you can take away the whole feel pain part and it can't think and just headless chickens, like you got a, you know, you have some new sort of a way to make the heartbeat without a brain.

[1400] Just really fucking stupid, headless chickens.

[1401] Vegan still wouldn't go for it because they don't eat eggs.

[1402] And I have chickens, and the chickens lay an egg every day, and you can eat the eggs and no one gets hurt.

[1403] But vegans are still not down with that.

[1404] No, they're not.

[1405] But that's how far removed we are from the farm is that I only found out that chickens lay an egg -a -day, like two years ago.

[1406] Yeah, it's true.

[1407] I had no idea.

[1408] Oh, I only found out a year ago that an egg doesn't become a chicken.

[1409] I thought that an egg became a chicken And you eat them before it happens But no, it's a hen Lays an egg Whether the roosters is involved or not But if the roosters in the house Then the chicken can get pregnant And then the egg can become a chick But if there's no rooster Wow, I didn't know that See?

[1410] Most people don't know that Isn't that?

[1411] It's amazing how removed we are From the whole process of food So there's no life there No life at all, zero Zero, zero threat of life impossible to make life.

[1412] And in fact, if you don't eat the egg, then the chickens will probably eat their own eggs and go crazy.

[1413] You know, they'll become fucking cannibals or something.

[1414] I don't know.

[1415] They do eat their own eggs if you don't leave them in too long.

[1416] Yeah, for veg, though the problem is not that they're eating the egg because there would be life in the egg.

[1417] It's because you're eating an egg that comes from a chicken that is probably being abused in order to produce these eggs.

[1418] That's, I think, the thinking behind it.

[1419] But you could have it the way I have it where my chickens live on a full, they have a full acre lawn.

[1420] And they go inside the chicken coop at night, which is huge.

[1421] And we set it up, like, we wanted to make it as nice as possible.

[1422] Super humane, really big place.

[1423] Like, the chicken coop itself is bigger than the studio, where I have 14 chickens, and they just go in whenever they want at night, and we shut the door and lock it down.

[1424] So you get 14 eggs a day?

[1425] Yeah.

[1426] What do you do with them?

[1427] I eat them.

[1428] They're all.

[1429] I don't eat them all.

[1430] I'm a whole family.

[1431] But I give them to friends if they want them, too.

[1432] Yeah, they just started laying the eggs recently.

[1433] but yeah we had people over this weekend we gave them some fresh eggs it tastes delicious too because we give the chickens like vegetables like we buy vegetables like say i make kale shakes pretty much every morning and it's cucumbers and kale and celery and fruit and stuff like that so a lot of times you have like leftover stuff leftover kale and left over and we feed them that and then we feed them chicken feed and they wander around the lawn and they basically eat anything they find they try to eat your house they're stupid as shit they peck at your house they're like hmm maybe this house is edible they just check it everything for food but they've become like our pets you know they're not they're not chickens that we're eating we're just getting eggs out of them but it's amazing how much you get out of them they give you food and that food is based entirely on food that you give them so it's this process it's like a natural healthy cycle and nobody gets hurt they're happy when they see you you know there's no cruelty involved and so for me it's like i just started doing this really recently we started growing our own vegetables and raising our own chickens and not as like like a doomeday prepper sort of a thing.

[1434] But just as like, let's see what this is like, you know.

[1435] My wife super got into it.

[1436] So it's been really fun.

[1437] It's been kind of cool.

[1438] What vegetables do you grow?

[1439] All sorts.

[1440] We grow hot peppers.

[1441] We grow cucumbers.

[1442] We go tomatoes.

[1443] We grow squash.

[1444] We grow a lot of different things that you can eat.

[1445] Cale?

[1446] We haven't started doing that yet, but that's the next step.

[1447] Cale, we're trying to move our little garden to a new spot.

[1448] And we have this new area.

[1449] We're going to set up gives a lot of sunlight.

[1450] And the idea is to just, the best idea, I think, would be completely self -sustaining.

[1451] We're going to go solar power to, but one of the things we found out is like, solar doesn't help you if the power goes out.

[1452] You still need a generator.

[1453] And I was like, that's stupid.

[1454] That's so dumb.

[1455] Like, how is that possible?

[1456] Like, the guy explained to me at the solar place, I go, so if the power goes out, we're still up.

[1457] He goes, no, actually you have to have a generator.

[1458] And I go, what?

[1459] What are you talking about?

[1460] What does that mean?

[1461] It doesn't make any sense.

[1462] Like, somehow or another, there's got to be a way.

[1463] to have a completely stand -alone system.

[1464] But it's not that easy.

[1465] I think you have to have some sort.

[1466] Because your house is still connected to the grid?

[1467] Is that the reason?

[1468] Could be.

[1469] I mean, maybe if you completely removed from the grid.

[1470] So you just want to be completely removed from a grid?

[1471] Oh, yeah.

[1472] I would think that would be the smartest thing that anybody could do.

[1473] So maybe you are a doomsday prepper.

[1474] No, it's not that I'm a doomsday prepper.

[1475] It's that, like, I think to be self -sustainable would be ultimately what I want to do, these are my beginning steps.

[1476] Ultimately, what I want to do is get a bunch of friends in, involved and buy a piece of land, build houses, and have a farm on it.

[1477] Not a cult, just get, like, a few couples.

[1478] Sounds a little culty.

[1479] A little culty.

[1480] Everything I do is a little culty.

[1481] But I do it.

[1482] It's a fine dance.

[1483] But my idea is to have a large plot of land, you know, like several hundred acres, with a few families.

[1484] And everyone sort of have this big space that's their own.

[1485] And we share in like a community farm and that everyone gets their food from there.

[1486] way see one of weird things about neighborhoods is that you don't pick them you sort of just you pick where your neighborhood is of course if you can if you have that freedom but you don't really pick your neighbors yeah they're there when you we like this house we like you know Manhattan beach let's move in and then you're moving in a bunch around a bunch of people that you don't even know whereas the whole idea of community and culture and tribes used to be that we lived near all of our loved ones we had them all together we don't do that anymore it's kind of rare yeah it's funny I was we We were playing the lottery game the other day, as you often do.

[1487] If you won the lottery, what would you do?

[1488] And that was definitely, it was on the top of my list.

[1489] I would buy a big house that I could build lots of houses around and I could move all the people I love around me, my friends and family.

[1490] Yeah.

[1491] Well, I've actually, we've actually sat down, our family sat down with a couple other families that we really like.

[1492] And we actually started talking about doing that.

[1493] And we've decided to have some meetings, have some dinners where we, uh, we, uh, we've decided to make some meetings, have some dinners where we, uh, meet and discuss the idea and look at like various locations whether or not it be feasible with you know all the people that are they all have sort of alternative entertainment type jobs like comedians and writers and stuff like that and so we're all just saying like what an awesome community that would be into to live in a place where you're in a town where there's a you know like a good town like a healthy place where it's a city that's close by but set up an establishment where you could grow your own food so you don't have to worry like is this organic are these grass raised Is this farm, you know, is farm healthy and clean?

[1494] It's your own farm.

[1495] And it wouldn't be hard to do.

[1496] And if you think about how much money you spend on food every year, it seems to me that if you have quite a few people hiring some really competent, nice people to run a farm for you, well, people would appreciate a good job where they work for nice people and everybody's ethical about the whole situation and how everything's done and fair.

[1497] And you set up a nice little community farm.

[1498] I don't think that that's impossible.

[1499] That doesn't seem like a big dream.

[1500] It seems like something that's entirely doable.

[1501] And a new reality show.

[1502] Yeah.

[1503] That's where it all goes awry.

[1504] So you don't need to get the lottery to win the lottery, I guess.

[1505] It doesn't, well, it seems like you're going to need some money for sure.

[1506] You need some money to set up almost anything.

[1507] But the real problem would be you'd have to planning and, you know, you'd have to get permits to build houses.

[1508] Or you'd have to buy a bunch of houses together, which is even more ridiculous.

[1509] How are you going to pull that off?

[1510] That would be hard.

[1511] But I just think that ultimately that seems like it would be the ideal situation to get all of your food that way.

[1512] Not all of it.

[1513] I mean, you still go to the supermarket by mayonnaise and some shit.

[1514] You don't want to sit around making yourself.

[1515] But how beautiful would it be to not worry?

[1516] Like, okay, the power goes out.

[1517] Well, guess what?

[1518] We have power.

[1519] Okay, the supermarkets are empty.

[1520] We have a farm.

[1521] We get all of our food from this area.

[1522] then you just have to worry about the other people.

[1523] Yeah.

[1524] The shit hits the fan.

[1525] Yeah, exactly.

[1526] That's where the problems would start.

[1527] Trying to steal your crops.

[1528] Well, took this to a doomsday place again.

[1529] That's what I do.

[1530] Yes, you did.

[1531] Try to stay positive.

[1532] That's why we need our guns.

[1533] Six episodes.

[1534] So any other interesting topics?

[1535] We did one about homeless youth, where we actually spent a lot of time with young people who are homeless here in Los Angeles, and we spent a couple of nights sleeping under the bridge.

[1536] Whoa.

[1537] Oh, my God.

[1538] You did?

[1539] Yeah.

[1540] we did both of you together yeah i mean you live in l .A you know it's like you know driving downtown or hollywood and you see all these homeless you know kids and sometimes adults and did you guys go to skid row so we went to skid row it starts off in skid row and um you know we walk explain that place for people who don't know so skid row is the largest homeless community in the nation that's i mean uh thousands and thousands of homeless people yeah it is i mean it's uh sleeping on the streets and tents and they've tried various times to clean it up but it's you know there's a lot of issues there it's like where are you going to where are you going to house them there's a lot of housing and there is a lot of shelters down there but not enough to sort of meet the demand of how many homeless people are actually down there and so if you go down there day or night you'll see you know hundreds if not thousands of people walking in the streets you know with their carts and And it's just another side of the city that, you know, it's actually right next to the architecture downtown.

[1541] And so it's, you know, it's sort of you've run across it here and there if you're living in L .A., but it's definitely an eye -open experience the walk down there because there's a whole ecosystem down there that sort of caters to, not caterers, probably not the right water, but, you know, like that is just supports.

[1542] the homeless down there from, you know, clinics and shelters and stuff like that to obviously drug dealers and gangs that sort of run the territory down there.

[1543] Because as the activists who we follow down there told us, you know, it's not just the homeless community.

[1544] It's probably the largest concentration of addicts in the country as well.

[1545] Because most people, obviously, if you're living on the streets, you're either dealing with the mental health issue or some sort of addiction or both.

[1546] So, yeah, that was crazy.

[1547] It was fairly eye -opening, I'm sure, to see the population, right?

[1548] It was, and it was, the idea is that if you're sort of above 35 and you're homeless, you're on Skid Row.

[1549] If you're under 35 and you're homeless, you're in Hollywood.

[1550] And that's even more sort of surprising because you think of Hollywood, you think of the Walk of Fame, right?

[1551] You think of all the stars and celebrities.

[1552] And then, you know, for us who live here in LA and we drive by Hollywood every day and you see all those homeless kids every day and you know that they're sleeping out on the streets.

[1553] And this, again, because of mental health issues or addiction or just because they come from broke up, broke down families and have nowhere to sleep, which was some of the case of the people that we filmed.

[1554] And so we decided it was, you know, sort of important if we were really going to dive deeper and deep into this issue to spend a night with them with two of the people that we were filming.

[1555] I would have faked it.

[1556] I would have did it just like that dude, not.

[1557] Survivor Man who's real, Les Trowd.

[1558] Who's that other guy?

[1559] The fake guy.

[1560] The English dude, handsome bastard.

[1561] Bear Gris?

[1562] Barre grills.

[1563] Does he fake it?

[1564] Oh, yeah.

[1565] He sleeps in hotels.

[1566] Does he really?

[1567] No, he does not.

[1568] Really?

[1569] Oh, yes, he does.

[1570] He got busted.

[1571] No way.

[1572] Yes, he did, yes.

[1573] What I like is that when he...

[1574] I can't really do you.

[1575] Well, go ahead.

[1576] I like that it's, you all, you always say, and now I'm here in the middle of nowhere.

[1577] You can't see, and you know that there's like a big camera quick, like a camera guy and everything filming me. Well, that's one of the beautiful things about Les Stroud.

[1578] there's nothing but him he brings cameras in a backpack he does everything himself he sets up the cameras he even has videos of him setting up the cameras so you can see him when he walks off like he'll walk a hundred yards in the distance and film it he has to go back and get the camera and then take it and put it 100 years forward I'm 100 yards forward and have him walking towards it like he sets everything up himself it's very time consuming what's the name of that show Survivor Man is the real one the other one man whatever the fuck it is it's horse wild loves it.

[1579] It's total horse shit.

[1580] And the reason why that show was created was because Les Stroud wouldn't play ball with producers and set up fake shots.

[1581] They wanted to like, oh, Les Stumbled upon this dead animal.

[1582] This is how you fix this dead animal so you could eat it.

[1583] This is how you cure the meat or cut it up.

[1584] Bear Grills does all that stuff.

[1585] So he's like, you know, he would do it.

[1586] He would fudge shit.

[1587] And Les Stroud said the only way to do this is to do it real.

[1588] So he like will starve.

[1589] He'll be out there for five days with no food, you know, and really freaking.

[1590] out and not knowing whether or not he's going to get out of there and trying to figure out how to alert the crew and how to start a fire when it's raining out.

[1591] All that stuff is real.

[1592] When you watch that show, he deals 100 % real, which is so fascinating.

[1593] When the people found out about the other show, the Barrow Grill show, they were like, get the fuck out.

[1594] The guy sleeps in tents.

[1595] No, come on, man. He's out there for real.

[1596] Hotels?

[1597] Really?

[1598] He really is in four seasons.

[1599] Oh, man. Like, he's pretending.

[1600] He's covered in mud.

[1601] To keep the flies off your face.

[1602] You got a smother your face in mud.

[1603] No, no mud, dude.

[1604] He's getting a mud mask.

[1605] He's getting his feet massaged.

[1606] Pretending he's out there.

[1607] I knew there was some fakeness to it, but that much, I had no idea.

[1608] It's fake as fuck.

[1609] It's totally fake.

[1610] He's, you know, like, his one, he found, like, a dead sheep, and he, like, turned the, like, made clothing out of it.

[1611] So when he drinks his own piss, that's not true either?

[1612] That's probably fake, too.

[1613] I mean, I don't know.

[1614] I would assume he's not drinking his own piss.

[1615] I mean, if you're going to fake everything else, why wouldn't you fake drinking your own piss?

[1616] I hate to admit this, but I draw the line.

[1617] I'm drinking my own.

[1618] I've drinking my own piss before.

[1619] Why?

[1620] Well, because someone told me that there's a thing called urine therapy and I think I said that.

[1621] Why?

[1622] Like, this is a person who has covered investigative journalism for her whole life.

[1623] She's seen horrific things.

[1624] She's been to the oxycontin center of the world.

[1625] I tell her, drank my own pee.

[1626] Why?

[1627] Just immediately, like, what is wrong with you?

[1628] Can I leave now?

[1629] Several athletes have thought that it's a good thing to do.

[1630] That somehow or another, you get vitamins that pass through your body and then you recycle them into your urine and that your urine is sterile and it's not nothing to worry about and there's actually antibodies in your it's very controversial but i had uh done it to see if there's anything too like when i was sick i took uh i drank my own pee a couple times and i don't know whether it helped me or room temperature body temperature right out of the hatch really right into a cup and down the old pipe it's more it's i don't recommend it first of all and i don't do it all the time i only done it a few times once on the radio just because i wanted to because i'm not squeamish right i hosted fear factor for six years right i know what's bad and what's not and drinking your own urine even if it's terrible it's no big deal compared to some of the shit that i've seen face i've seen face to face people eat horrific things and not just once i've seen it hundreds of times so it's like for me drinking my own pee oh god animal dicks urine 24 ounces of donkey come i saw people drank donkey semen that was what got to the show can actually.

[1631] They had to drink donkey semen and then TMZ got a hold of the video.

[1632] It got online before the show aired and then NBC pulled the episode first and then canceled the whole show.

[1633] That was the second run season of Fear Factor.

[1634] The video is online.

[1635] How far can we take it?

[1636] Yeah, exactly.

[1637] That's about as far as far as you take.

[1638] Well, that's the thing is that that was approved by the network.

[1639] That's the most fascinating aspect of it.

[1640] And when I say by the network, I should not say by the network.

[1641] say some executive that decided for the network that's what i should say whether or not represents the corporation of nbc as a whole i think that would be misjudging it because they pulled it when they found out about it but someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to make people drink come you know they say like oh it seems reasonable as long as it's not going to kill it the four contestant drank it oh yes not just one three people drank it yeah there was three it was twins and three groups of twins the video is actually available online you can still get it because in other countries they didn't censor it.

[1642] In other countries, Fear Factor eras all over, the thing it aired like more than a dozen countries worldwide.

[1643] And they, um, in other countries, that's customary though.

[1644] That's actually one of the ways that we got it past.

[1645] Oh, really?

[1646] I was just kidding.

[1647] Yeah.

[1648] New Zealand.

[1649] Um, one of the things about Fear Factor is if we, especially during the first season, if anyone, if we aired people eating things, it had to be something that people ate in other countries.

[1650] So like, insects are very common.

[1651] People in poor countries eat insects all the time.

[1652] In fact, insects are probably eaten more than livestock in a lot of countries.

[1653] So that was an easy one.

[1654] We could prove that.

[1655] And then in New Zealand, they started selling shots of horse semen at bars.

[1656] Like, as a novelty, and people would, you know, mosey up to the bar and buy a shot of horse semen.

[1657] And apparently they said it gave him energy and all sorts of crazy things were attributed to it.

[1658] Most likely placebo effect, I don't know.

[1659] But they...

[1660] You better have a good story afterwards.

[1661] You've got to justify it somehow.

[1662] Somehow or another.

[1663] You've got to say, listen, I know it seems crazy, but I feel awesome.

[1664] I drank that horse.

[1665] You was probably so freaked out that you drank horse com.

[1666] You don't know what's going on in your body.

[1667] Your fingers are tingling.

[1668] You can't feel your feet.

[1669] You don't know what the fuck you just did.

[1670] So because of that, NBC said, well, the people are serving it.

[1671] And we brought them a news story.

[1672] Not we.

[1673] It was not my idea.

[1674] I should stress that.

[1675] And so that allowed them to sign off on people drinking.

[1676] 24 ounces of donkey cum 24 ounces yeah it was ridiculous not only that how about the contestants at least had a shot at winning some money but we had PAs drink it and they only did it because it was part of their job just the fence of them they got like a hundred bucks no no no to see if it could be done whenever we did a stunt on Fear Factor there was several times where we'd look at a stunt whether it was a physical task or whether it was someone eating something we had to figure out out what's the correct amount and whether or not physically a task could be completed.

[1677] So the physical aspect was handled by stuntman, first of all, who would look at it and say, well, you shouldn't do it that way because I don't think a guy could do that.

[1678] And if he does do that, he's probably going to hurt himself in this way or that way.

[1679] And then with the eating thing, this is really the only way to find out.

[1680] You got to like, how many bugs can a person eat?

[1681] Hmm, let's see.

[1682] Okay, we'll try to get a PA to eat 10.

[1683] And then the PA would have like 10 minutes to eat 10 bugs.

[1684] and they'd be like three bugs in just hurling and you're like okay this is too much let's cut it down to five you know we'd have to make it some sort of a reasonable amount so you'd have to have more than one PA because you want to have a control group so you have a few PAs and I hope you pay them really I would give them extra money I would give them extra money all the time especially the horrific ones I don't remember how many dollars I gave those several hundred dollars I gave one of the extra but that's nothing several hundred dollars the fuck man you just drank come you know what's really I'm just making a note here that next number a PA complains to us.

[1685] I think we should tell them about Fear Factor.

[1686] Yeah, being a PA sucks for a lot of, a lot of places.

[1687] I mean, sometimes it's cool, you know, but for the most part, not good.

[1688] We were offered, actually.

[1689] We didn't eat.

[1690] We were offered monkey brain in the Amazon, right that time, remember?

[1691] It wasn't the brain.

[1692] What was that awful thing?

[1693] It wasn't the brain.

[1694] It was just monkey.

[1695] No, it was a monkey head.

[1696] He cut off the monkey.

[1697] Well, the head was there.

[1698] I don't know.

[1699] And then what was it that you ate that I hated that had all those hairs?

[1700] It was.

[1701] The armadillo of the Amazon, the tattoo?

[1702] The tattoo?

[1703] And it's an armadillo?

[1704] Yeah, it's like an Amazonian armadillo.

[1705] How do you spell tattoo?

[1706] T -A -T -U?

[1707] No, I think it's a T -A -T -A -T -U, maybe.

[1708] It's Portuguese.

[1709] I should know this, but I know.

[1710] Yeah, you should.

[1711] What's up?

[1712] Wait, wait, I'm from Portugal.

[1713] We don't have tattoos in my country.

[1714] Oh, but is the Brazilian Portuguese, the same?

[1715] It's the same language.

[1716] It's the same language.

[1717] Different accent.

[1718] Like you don't, there's nothing, no confusion.

[1719] There's some words here and they are different, but not like English and American.

[1720] I went to tattoo this all.

[1721] Here it is.

[1722] Here it is.

[1723] This is what Darren ate.

[1724] Yeah, there it is.

[1725] Whoa.

[1726] It's an ugly looking thing, right?

[1727] How do you spell that?

[1728] It tastes like it looks.

[1729] TATU.

[1730] Wow.

[1731] Armadilled.

[1732] What a creepy looking thing.

[1733] It was awful.

[1734] It tasted, I mean, worse than it looks like.

[1735] There's also a Russian music duo of these sex pot Russians called tattoo.

[1736] T -A -T -U.

[1737] And there's all these pictures of them, like, naked, making out, touching each other's boobs.

[1738] Yeah, I didn't mean to.

[1739] But the thing is that when I remember when we ate the meat, the hair is still there.

[1740] So they sort of burn, they don't take the hair.

[1741] So it's slightly burned from the barbecuing of the meat.

[1742] That's it.

[1743] And you can still taste it.

[1744] And it tastes awful.

[1745] It really does.

[1746] But they love it.

[1747] It's a delicacy there.

[1748] They did.

[1749] They did.

[1750] What does it taste like?

[1751] It just tastes terrible.

[1752] It tastes like, oh, what's that?

[1753] Oh, man. What's this stuff?

[1754] Thripe.

[1755] Tripe?

[1756] Tripe?

[1757] Oh, I like Tripe.

[1758] Really?

[1759] Yeah.

[1760] I like Minuto.

[1761] Oh, menudo is, yeah.

[1762] I like Manudo.

[1763] I like tribe and menudo and organs and all that stuff.

[1764] It's a little gamier.

[1765] There's a place in Boulder, Colorado, called Papusas.

[1766] And, man, we used to go there all the time.

[1767] If you're in Boulder, it's a, I guess it's not Mexican.

[1768] It's Spanish food.

[1769] Maybe it is Mexican.

[1770] Papusas, though, they have the most sensational menudo.

[1771] It's amazing.

[1772] It's all, like, hearts and organs and liver.

[1773] and tripe.

[1774] Sounds terrible.

[1775] I like that stuff.

[1776] It's fantastic.

[1777] Super legit.

[1778] Yeah.

[1779] Like that with this one place, it's like so good.

[1780] It's spicy and like, oh.

[1781] They say it's a hangover cure.

[1782] I think it's just so good you forget the fact that you hung over.

[1783] But I've had it in other places and it's nasty.

[1784] Like I had a place in L .A., and it tastes like shit.

[1785] It's all about doing it right.

[1786] This definitely tastes like shit.

[1787] It wasn't.

[1788] It wasn't good.

[1789] I've had Minuto and then maybe it's not a fair comparison.

[1790] Well, if you live in the middle of the Amazon, you got it.

[1791] We're going to eat what's there, right?

[1792] Do they eat those copy baras, those crazy big rat things?

[1793] Do they eat those things?

[1794] It must.

[1795] I mean, it must.

[1796] We saw a couple.

[1797] We didn't seem to be eating, but we saw the copy baras everywhere.

[1798] I think anything is open.

[1799] It's open season for whatever's there if you're actually need to survive there.

[1800] Yeah, they eat crazy shit.

[1801] Do they eat jaguars?

[1802] Well, probably not.

[1803] They're actually really hard to see.

[1804] And I think most people that come in contact with them is too late.

[1805] It's too late.

[1806] Yeah.

[1807] They're like really stealth predators.

[1808] You know, I was almost attacked by a jaguar.

[1809] Really?

[1810] So we went to do the story on the Cambo Frog looking for the pharmaceutical promise of the Amazon.

[1811] And we went in with two herpetologists.

[1812] These are guys who study poisonous amphibians and snakes.

[1813] And they go out every month, they go out for a week at a time.

[1814] And they go deep, deep, deep into the Amazon.

[1815] I mean, they take a canoe deep inside where there's nothing around.

[1816] And they said that we, after much haggling, they decided that they were going to take these two gringos along with them, me and Darren.

[1817] And we are camped out in the middle of nowhere.

[1818] There's nothing.

[1819] We put out our, we bought a couple of hammocks.

[1820] We hung them as soon as we got there.

[1821] And then at night they go out with these lights, with these headlamps to look for the most dangerous and most venomous snakes and frogs there are in the world in the middle of the Amazon.

[1822] on.

[1823] It was a crazy, crazy experience, but for some reason, because we were filming it it, and we were on this high of filming this documentary and how cool it would be if we found the most dangerous thing in the world.

[1824] For us, it was, we didn't feel scared, and we thought it was great.

[1825] We were filming all this crazy stuff.

[1826] We got back to the hammocks at night, and I'm sleeping on the edge because they decided they wanted to give me a little of privacy.

[1827] So it was a sort of like little wooden camp thing, but no walls, no roof, nothing, just these hammocks and I was on the last hammock right on the edge and in the middle of the night I woke up nobody told me that in the Amazon it gets really cold at night so we had nothing to protect us and we had these mosquito nets in the middle of the night I heard I woke up because I was freezing and then I heard and we'd been talking about all these stories they've been telling us all these stories on the the Onsa they call it the most dangerous animal in the Amazon and suddenly I start hearing it breathing right next to my head and it was breathing and it was breathing really hard and I could smell it.

[1828] I could smell it was a big creature, big hairy, scary creature breathing right next to me. And I had one of those, you know when you have those dreams and you try to scream and nothing comes out?

[1829] That happened to me. I panicked and I was trying to call out for Darren or for the other guys and nothing came out.

[1830] I was literally frozen, panicked.

[1831] And Darren woke up with my breathing because I was breathing really heavily and really scared.

[1832] And he asked me, are you okay?

[1833] And I was able to get out just.

[1834] just, no. And Darren comes up to me and I told him I was about to be attacked by an Olsa, by a jaguar.

[1835] And we went around the camp with the lights just so I could see that there was nothing there.

[1836] Morning after, wake up, I look at my bag and it was full of hair, full of hair.

[1837] And I said, I told you, I knew it, I knew it.

[1838] And I told the scientists that were with us, you know, I know it was a jaguar.

[1839] It was right next to me. And then we looked around and there was a freaking stray dog that had come from like an Indian reservation close by, and it had been the stray dog.

[1840] So it would have been a much coolest story if it was a jaguar.

[1841] It's a long way to go.

[1842] It was the scare of my life.

[1843] Oh, you freak me out.

[1844] You freaked me out for no reason.

[1845] I had the image, the smell of death, the hot breath, right through the mosquito netting.

[1846] But it was just a dream.

[1847] I am terrified of big cats more than anything on the planet.

[1848] They're so...

[1849] I have cats at home, like little.

[1850] cats and i just watch the way they move they jump on we feed them on they're all they always eat on the counter which is a equivalent of me jumping on the roof of this building i mean it's not happening but to them it's like boing they just they just hop up on the counter to eat it's it's so crazy to think that there's one of those that's 200 pounds and it's black as night and it's one during the jungle it's yeah it's uh that's what i was thinking about when i was breathing heavily and what is what kind of poisonous stuff that you guys follow line when you're out there?

[1851] I have a bushmaster also.

[1852] The snake, not the gun.

[1853] A lot of things, but, you know, ultimately we were afraid of all these things.

[1854] And actually, Darren has a fascination for a snake, so he wasn't as scared as I was.

[1855] But what got us was several months after we came back.

[1856] I had this little thing growing on my finger that I thought it was just a bug.

[1857] And then I decided I had to get it checked out because it was growing and growing and suddenly pus was coming out of it.

[1858] So I thought it was maybe skin cancer.

[1859] And I went to dermatologist.

[1860] And it turns out I got a full.

[1861] flesh -eating parasite capelach moniasis that I caught in Brazil.

[1862] Oh.

[1863] It only exists in a few parts of the world, so they didn't have the treatment here.

[1864] So, but CDC, the Center for Disease Control, had to make a special treatment for me that had a nurse come to my house.

[1865] And it was pretty scary.

[1866] That's why I say, fuck, going in the area.

[1867] I hear stories like that.

[1868] It's the either that or what is that show, the enemy inside you or something like that?

[1869] There's a show that I was always about people going to these places and catching parasites.

[1870] Oh, yeah.

[1871] They don't even realize they have them until they...

[1872] Crawls across their eyeball.

[1873] Yeah, they start having weird behavior because there's like a baseball -sized cluster of worms growing inside their head.

[1874] I watch that, too.

[1875] Nature, you scary.

[1876] Nature is very scary.

[1877] So this Wednesday is the show, and it's on Nat Geo, and it's called Inside Secret America.

[1878] 10 p .m. this Wednesday, set your DVRs.

[1879] Watch it.

[1880] I am going to.

[1881] I'm running home.

[1882] I'm going to send my DVR.

[1883] This has been an awesome conversation.

[1884] really, really appreciate you guys coming down.

[1885] And again, I really appreciate that OxyGontin Express that really opened my eyes to you guys and also to the subject at a whole.

[1886] And I think it was just brilliantly done.

[1887] So I really can't wait to see this.

[1888] So National Geographic, or it's Nat Geo now, is that what they're calling themselves, they're being slick.

[1889] Wednesday, 10 p .m. Inside Secret America.

[1890] Thank you guys very much.

[1891] Thank you.

[1892] Thank you so much, Joe.

[1893] Thank you also to Onit .com.

[1894] Go to OnN -N -I -T.

[1895] and use the code name Rogan to save 10 % off any and all supplements.

[1896] Thank you also to Squarespace.

[1897] Go to Squarespace .com for slash Joe and use the code Joe 7 to save yourself some cash song.

[1898] And thanks also to audible .com.

[1899] Go to audible .com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audiobook and 30 free days of audible service.

[1900] We will be back tomorrow.

[1901] with the great Joey Cocoa Diaz, aka Mad Flavor.

[1902] My little buddy Red Band will be joining us again as well.

[1903] He's off doing his own podcast tonight at the Comedy Store with the great Tony Hinchcliff.

[1904] They're doing one there on a regular basis.

[1905] You can check that out at Desquad