Julian Dorey Podcast - #354 - Chinese Cartels have Invented a NEW $4.99 Weapon to POISON Americans | Steve Robinson

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) RIDGE: Take advantage of Ridge’s Biggest Sale of the Year and GET UP TO 47% Off by going to https://www.Ridge.com/JULIAN #Ridgepod 2) TRUE CLASSIC: Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at https://trueclassic.com/JULIAN ! #trueclassicpod PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Steven Robinson is the Editor-in-Chief of the Maine Wire. Robinson has previously worked as an Executive Producer for the Howie Carr Show and Barstool Sports’ Kirk Minihane Show. Over the past few years, he has tirelessly worked to expose the Chinese Cartels' grip over Maine. STEVEN'S LINKS: X: https://x.com/BigSteve207 X: https://x.com/TheMaineWire SUBSTACK: https://robinsonreport.substack.com The Maine Wire: https://www.themainewire.com High Crimes Documentary: https://tuckercarlson.com/high-crimes FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Intro 01:26 – Breaking News, Nashville Trip, W33d Loopholes, Chinese Cartels, Human Tr@fficking 11:26 – Cover-Ups, "Indentured Slavery" Lucas Sirois, Johnny Wu, Chinese Border Crossings 24:34 – Fort Fairfield Case, Jennifer Fay Case, Steve Background, “Organ Harvester Turned Grower” 39:33 – 300+ Properties in Maine, Chinese Restaurant Ties, Triads, CCP Influence on Nationals 51:33 – CEFC, Fake Principals, Cannabis Licenses Approved Anyway, Maine Law Can’t Keep Up 01:05:36 – $1-5M/Month Grow Houses, Laundering W33d, Exporting to China, Vape Smuggling 01:16:27 – CCP Tactics, Investigative Hurdles, Profiling Pushback, Obvious Red Flags 01:27:01 – CCP Consulate Links, WeChat Shield, Property Purchase Patterns, Quantic Bank, CDFI 01:35:33 – Weak Prosecutions, Fake IDs via NY DMV, Chemical Waste, Olivia Nuzzi RFK Jr Memoir 01:49:28 – 1llegal Toxins in Somerset, Tyson’s THC-p, H3mp Loopholes, THC-p Dangers 02:01:27 – Educating New Users, Regulatory Mess, Legal Operators Struggling 02:11:27 – $10B Market Surprise, OK Cannabis Boom, $150B Black Market, Global Overflow 02:26:40 – Cartel Escalation, Vi0lence Warning, Let the Work Speak 02:38:52 – 7OH, Kratom, Gas Station Her0ine Street Users vs. Novices, Narc@n & 7OH Vapes 02:53:27 – Reverse 0pium War, State-Backed Crime, Chemical Warfare via 7OH 03:06:57 – CBD Chains Pushing 7OH, 7 Hope Alliance, Invisible Industry 03:10:04 – Steve's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 354 - Steven Robinson Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've got this, like, ancestral memory of smoking tobacco and marrow and therefore it's safe. Those rules don't apply anymore. This guy who's hawking chemicals in China lays out the whole playbook for how they're going to dodge sanctions. People who don't give a look about their end consumer, they just know they're going to make money on it. You have a company called CBD American Shaman run by Top 70H producer. I wonder what's going on with this stuff. There was a guy in Richmond, got some tablets of 70H, died in the parking lot. Oh my God.

There was a guy out in Ohio wasn't intending to use a hard narcotic. up overdosing. It's in open. Yeah. And there was actually a guy smoking THCP for the first time, went into psychosis, attempted to get sued. This is the hemp loophole for one. This is China exploiting America for two.

And the brave new world of these synthetic drop. But I don't think that it's been understood the national scale of it, the international scale of it. And I don't think that someone has talked about it on such a high level. Please explain this. Yeah. So. Hey, guys.

If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star they're both a huge huge help thank you all right so we got a little breaking news as we come on air what's cooking yeah well i guess uh grundy county sheriff's office uh heath gunter the sheriff's county where's that uh my tennessee geography is not great it's altamont tennessee is the address on this press release that my podcaster just sent me, but, I mean, sorry, my producer just sent me, but says the sheriff apparently heard me talking with Sean Ryan on his podcast about how easy it was for me to buy THC Delta 9 in Tennessee and went around and did THC checks on all the smoke shops and head shops. During this investigation, five of the 13 stores were found

to be out of compliance with state regulations. Oh, wow. Random products were purchased and submitted for testing. The testing revealed that some products labeled as containing 0.3% THC or less did not accurately reflect their content, which of course is the hemp loophole. That's what you have to test at less than 0.3% THC Delta 9 in order to be considered hemp. And there are very obviously importing marijuana from other states. When I was in Nashville, like on my way to Sean Studio, I stopped at the first head shop I found on Google Maps and walked in and they've just got. jars of pot up on the wall. And they're not even trying to hide it. It's like Michigan gold and Georgia Green. They're saying this weed has come from out of state. And if it's THC Delta 9 with content

higher than, you know, mine, 0.3%. It's illegal. It's cannabis. Yeah. And everyone's just pretending anyways. No one actually thinks that it's hemp. No one's selling it, growing it, or smoking it, thinks it's hemp. Everyone knows it's cannabis, but they all just pretend because either making money or getting high. It's easier to pretend. Yeah. Yeah. It's much easier to. to pretend. We're going to get into all the nitty-gritty today. You and I have been talking for a couple hours since you got here off camera. Like some of the shit you're uncovering is insane. But the main theme is exactly what you were telling me out there. It's perfect. Like something like this comes in. You legalize it. And then it's just, there's no setup for it. Like you have it

completely out of control. There's loopholes that everyone can get around. And because law enforcement is now not, you know, putting at the top of their priority because, oh, the people have spoken, it's legal, that means that pretty much anything that has to do under that category, be it hump, be it marijuana, anything bad that then happens as an offshoot of that is not even looked at. I mean, it's the unintended consequences of bad policymaking. You know, you can try to predict what you think is going to happen when you legalize a drug and try to create a regulatory framework for this massive industry, but you're going to be wrong. There's going to be things you don't know about. And the other thing I've discovered is that there's going to be things that people

on the inside of that industry know about money-making opportunities that aren't discussed with the regulators. And so when the door is open, they come waltzing through and they're ready to sell, you know, hemp oil converted into THC Delta 9, which just started, I think earlier this week, Target launched a pilot program in Minneapolis. They're going to be selling hemp drinks. but it's THC Delta 9, it's the same exact molecule that comes from, you know, the pot we smoked in high school and college. Like, it's in the age restricted? 18, I think.

Whatever the, whatever their local, their state rules are. Maybe it's 21. But it's 5% THC. It's the same exact thing that you're going to get at a cannabis dispensary. But because it's derived from hemp, it's treated regularly differently from a regulatory perspective than if it were to come from cannabis to Tiva or cannabis. indica so i mean it's it's a it's a fascinating case study in how the market responds to changes in the law and you also have this weird situation where there's a there's a group of people who benefit

from the status quo the way things are right now with some states legal some states illegal and then this weird hemp loophole there's some groups including the chinese organized crime who are benefiting from this patchwork of illegality because you can can make an awful lot of money on flexible principles. If you're willing to take grow marijuana illegally and bring it from Maine to New York or New Jersey, you can make some money. Maybe four, five times the price.

But there's a lot more than just the Chinese cartels doing that, for sure. But I think that the Chinese are just a little bit better at it. And they also have free labor. Free labor. Free labor really helps with your margins, yeah. Can you explain the free label? Labor. Slaver, indentured slaves.

That's nice. Generally, their people aren't, you know, compensated at an hourly wage for their work. Chained to the walls? Well, I mean, that's an interesting thing is the human trafficking is kind of a spectrum. Like you have on the one hand, the chattel slavery, you're chained to the wall. And then on the other hand, you're free, whatever, you can leave whenever you want. And a lot of the worker exploitation we see is kind of in the middle. You know, there's a case on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

where some Chinese nationals were promised jobs cutting flowers, arranging flowers, and they came over the border, were driven to the reservation, and had their phones and passports taken, whatever they had on them, taken away from them. And they were effectively held prisoner on the Navajo Reservation. Somehow they managed to get away, and this is actually the subject of a lawsuit right now. There's a human rights attorney representing the Chinese nationals who were effectively enslaved at this cannabis farm on Native American Reservation Land. yeah there it is he's got it chinese dreams on native american land until cannabis boom and bust bbc

okay please continue yeah uh but i guess what we see in maine is maybe more toward the middle of the spectrum where you know you're you're not chained to the wall you're not on you know on an indian reservation maybe you've got a phone or access to internet but you're at this house in rural main in a town of 500 people you're an hour and a half away from the nearest shopping location, you don't have a car, you don't speak the language, and your food deliveries are coming from the same people who are picking up the marijuana that you're supposed to be growing. And your passport's locked in a safe with your snakehead down in Massachusetts.

And he's not going to give it back to you until you've worked off your debt because he's the one who arranged for you to be smuggled over the Mexican border and flown to Boston and driven up to a marijuana house in Maine. And who knows whether you ever actually work off that debt. But that's the situation that we find with a lot of the people who have been arrested at these sites, a lot of people that I've encountered and tried to interview with these sites, where I initially thought that they were all somehow benefiting from the conspiracy or were profiting from what they were doing. For the most part, now I understand that they're really victims of Chinese organized crime and that they might have wanted to be in America. or they might have initially made some kind of made some free choices to the extent that they can to bring them to the situation they've there are victims of human trafficking they've been smuggled here under false pretenses they've been lied to they've been manipulated and they've been brought to main to grow cannabis for a criminal network that is you know the guys that were arrested in massachusetts are driving around in porches with hidden compartments that have a quarter of a million dollars in it they've got Rolex bracelets and Cartier bracelets and there's even A slave labor.

Yeah. Yeah. And they, like, they're very aware of what they're doing. Oh, yeah. And how they're exploiting America's culture and America's sentimentality and our, I guess, almost like our liberal culture and, like, not wanting to be racist and wanting to approve of everybody. They have a way of using that to camouflage and not get caught and protect themselves. But I was just thinking of the funny example from Massachusetts in the, I don't know,

We can look this up. But in the indictment that came down, when they busted these guys, there was one who was actually wearing a shirt that had a picture of someone ironing money. It was his money laundering t-shirt. Come on. This was like the lead money laundering on the grave. The lead money launderer of the Chinese organized crime outfit arrested in Massachusetts. It was Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, handed down this indictment in July.

I think I have the picture at the Robinson Report, if you go there. Did your reporting facilitate this, that kind of thing? In the indictment, one of the first items listed in there is that these guys were sending my report around on WeChat. So I think that, I mean, that who knows what the investigators were reading when they started out looking into these guys, but the law enforcement, the mass GOP have credited my reporting with it, and it was listed in the indictment. And I think we were the first ones really to start digging deeply into it as a coordinated regional transnational issue rather than just like, oh, hey, these guys got busted growing marijuana and they all happen to be Chinese and don't speak English. Well, I guess that's an isolated random incident. Don't read too much into that. I don't worry about it.

But there's not a lot of investigative reporting happening these days. You know, it's really sad that things like this can be pressured. to stay below the surface when we exist in a world where information is so ubiquitous. Everyone's got one of those right there. They can all talk about this. But like you were saying, people are like afraid to ask a question because they're like,

oh, what if I'm racist or something? Because it happens to be a bunch of Chinese people living there. But like this is also, you know, we're talking about Maine, where you're from and where you're covering this. And obviously it's a big deal. This is level, different levels of this are happening in basically all 50 states at this point.

Yeah, right? Because China, I mean, we've had other guys in here reporting on this china effectively has a fucking manual system where they send chinese nationals on this whole circuitous route to get through the southern border and then go into america you never see them again and they end up either in indentured servitude or doing the indentured servitude upon other people yeah you know what i mean and they get in these rackets the marijuana is the best case example you know there's more yeah i mean there's more nefarious things that military age males could be doing rather than guarding marijuana

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That link is in my description below. This is by far the biggest discount Ridge has given all year long. So once again, use that link in my description to head on over to ridge.com and get up to 47% off your order with their biggest sale of the year. After you purchase, Ridge is going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. And who knows what role the cash that they generate from the marijuana is playing in other malign activities. I mean, with that kind of cash, you could facilitate a lot of wrongdoing. But, you know, I think that the, we've seen in Maine really the, I guess the end result of the migration patterns over the Mexican border.

You're just talking about the guy who, you know, the manuals they put online or they hand out showing them how to how to get into Maine. And we've seen a couple of examples. I mean, the district of Massachusetts indictment said specifically they were indicted for human trafficking. They were people who were smuggled from mainland China into Mexico across the Mexican border. they bought them plane tickets into Logan International Airport and then drove them to marijuana houses in Massachusetts and in Maine. And so there it is. Like that's the supply chain. Like do we think that this is the only incidence of that happening? No. This is this is the model. This is what they're doing. And in that instance, they did steal their passports and put them in a safe. And, you know, they were indentured servants. But we've also seen there was a case, 555 Belfast Road, Freedom, Maine is the house. beautiful house a little trout pond out back freedom main freedom main yeah what a name yeah uh well there were some slaves there in for yeah yeah uh so this was a uh a house where there was a a marijuana growing operation that was rated in i think early 2024 and um a few months later some

people had come back there and we're living there and one morning there's an emergency call it goes out because of carbon monoxide poisoning or propane poisoning And there are five Chinese nationals who are hospitalized, asphyxiated, or asphyxating. Two of them died. And the two survivors would later tell investigators that they were illegal aliens. They came in illegally from Mexico. They spoke fluent Mandarin and fluent Spanish, no English. And after that, they wouldn't really talk.

Both of them had New York driver's licenses. And this was under Biden. So they were released. Released. Released. And no one ever came to claim. the bodies of the two Chinese men who died. This is the one you were telling me off air, too,

and it's interesting because you said they were in their 30s. Yeah. So this would have been the era, they would have been from the era of like the one child policy in China. So effectively, this could probably be someone's only kid ended their line. Yeah. And they die in a flop house in Freedom, Maine. And no one comes to claim their bodies,

and no one in the media cared. I'm the only one who's written about it. I went and got the police records about it. I have no idea. I've asked myself this question a lot. Part of me thinks it's because we're like a startup digital media outlet and we're, you know, right of center. We're the conservative outlet in the state of Maine. So if we start reporting on something like, is it too edgy or is it like the conservative news ghetto?

You know, there's a phenomenon sometimes where if Fox starts talking about something or you know bright bart breaks a story well the cnns and the washington posts they're not going to talk about it it becomes the conservative news go right uh i think that that might be a little bit of what started out but now they're in this position where they're so far behind on the story we've seen some some attempts that the mainstream press in i guess main the the establishment media in maine has tried to make covering the world of chinese organized crime and it's just kind of funny for me to read because i'm like oh okay so you don't know anything. So I don't blame them now at this point for not picking up on some of the stuff. But

you think about like if a, you know, I mean, if a, you know, a refugee from the Congo died in some accident in Portland, there would be like rallies and candlelight vigils and everybody would be coming out to say, what did a travesty this is? We need to pay attention to this. But for some reason that kind of, I guess, like left-wing non-profit world of sympathy generating and, you know, making political hay out of sympathy, it just doesn't exist for the Chinese, not in Maine, at least, that I've seen. No one really cares that they're dying, that they're being abused. I mean, we had this, as I'm reporting on indentured slavery at Chinese cannabis houses. Indentured slave, and you're using those words, too.

I mean, if I've smuggled you into the country and I've taken your power. passport, and I've got it locked up in a safe. That's the definition. You can't get away. Yep. Like, it's indentured servitude. That is absolutely what it is. But as we're reporting on this, the legislature is debating an agricultural minimum wage

for farm workers. And this is the same legislature that is adamantly ignoring the Chinese organized crime problem, doesn't want to support any legislation that might strengthen the law enforcement's ability to deal with the problem, doesn't want to do. do any kind of changes to the cannabis program so that this is harder for them to do, harder for them to profit from, totally ignoring actual slavery happening, and they want to like get the agricultural minimum wage up a little bit. It's weird. There's a weird cognitive dissonance happening with people, you know, pretending like this isn't a problem. It's also, the dark side

of the immigration debate is that if you just looked at it at the highest level, on the one hand, you have the people who are hardliners, we got to stop this problem or whatever. Just leave them as that broadly for a second. And then on the other side, you have people going, no, we don't have a problem. We're a nation of immigrants, all this stuff, which we are. But the reality is the argument, like the people who may be hardcore like, let's fix the border who aren't like racist and stuff like that, which there are plenty of people who are not racist that are thinking that kind of thing. they get called racist by this group over here because it's like oh you don't want immigrants in there but the people who are claiming in that case to you know love all the immigrants coming in

when there are then these massively dark dystopian black market realities that happen that literally kill some of those immigrants or other things that are on an equal playing field with that well that we just don't want to see and there's like that's the cognitive dissonance you're talking about at the highest level they're racist They're making race-based judgments. They're taking two examples of the same behavior and saying, we're not going to, we're going to ignore this behavior because of these people's race, nationality, ethnicity, and we're going to focus on this behavior. A great example of it, there's a guy named Lucas Soroy's in Maine who, at the same time, Chinese organized crimes taking off in Maine, he was trying to build a legit marijuana business, and he had gone to the Office of Cannabis policy and was trying to get registered. And it was a confusing time because the legislation had just rolled out.

And people who were trying, who knew how to grow marijuana were trying to figure out how to do it legally, how to run big businesses. He had some money and some capital and was trying to create a space where multiple people could come in with marijuana licenses and grow in the same space. And an ex-employee who was, you know, angry at him for being fired. Yeah, there he is. He, the ex-employee goes to OCP and says, oh, this Lucas guy's. doing all kinds of bad stuff and instantly they're on the phone with DEA and they get a federal investigation and they're after this guy they tap his phones they listen to his conversations with his dad and his dad grows Christmas trees but they they code word no well I mean they didn't even that's

how they took it they didn't even say it was a code word for marijuana they clipped it into in the indictment so that they were to say that they were talking about growing pot plants I mean they they railroaded this guy so hard. And at the exact same time that this was happening, while they're tapping his phone lines, you have a company called Green Future LLC that was a host of Chinese guys primarily from the New York area, but also from the Massachusetts area, who'd come up with a ton of money and started buying up property in the Lewis and Auburn area. And eventually they would go beyond that. And they were doing whatever they wanted to. They would cut, they got, some of them got licenses, but for the most part, they just did whatever they wanted to. And the state police were

called to their locations multiple times for hostage situations, missing persons, uh, firearms offenses. And the state police would show up and they can't speak to any of the people there because they all speak only Mandarin. And they're like, well, whatever, this is just a civil dispute. They wipe their hands and leave. And we actually got a police incident report responding to one of the houses, one of the, it's like an airport hangar run by Green Future LLC. And the police after leaving say, we suspect it's controlled by Chinese gangs from New York, just as a throwaway line. And they're never investigated again. No one's arrested. No one digs deeper into that. But so you have a case where we got one set of laws, the Office of Cannabis

Policy, our adult use marijuana program, our medical program. Green Futures LLC comes in from New York with guys who don't speak English and they just do whatever they want, break every rule, try to make as much money as possible, generate a little bit of law enforcement attention. No one cares. We're not going to investigate these guys. No one calls the DEA. No one calls the FBI. No one calls immigration. Pay no attention to these people. But Lucas Soroy's, you know, an ex-employee says that he was breaking the rules. So let's wiretap his phones. And he's still in, has a pending case that he's still fighting. That's insane. Yeah, the U.S. attorney still has charges against him. Even after all this. Yeah.

I've told him you should go to the main human rights commission and sue for discriminatory treatment. It's like, how can they ignore this massive, like, 200 and, I mean, the initial memo said 270 properties were probably closer to 500 or 1,000. In Maine. In Maine. This is not that big a place. Well, it's big geographic-wise. Yeah, but like population. Just 1.4 million.

Right. Yeah. And they got maybe 500 properties with probably hundreds of people. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. But that's happening. And it is just one, it's one unified conspiracy. It's not a phenomenon where people have just figured out they can make money coming up to Maine and getting into the marijuana business. They have unified supply chains and logistics and, you know, an operationist structure is all the way back to China. I mean, they're bringing people here from Southeast China and, you know, smuggling them. At least they were smuggling them in through Mexico. And there's also plenty of evidence that they're using the open Canadian border as well. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you know specifically where?

Yes. There was an arrest. I think this was Fort Fairfield. There was a case where there were illegal aliens from China who were arrested after just walking across the border and jumping in a car with a getaway driver. We actually, we have a story up there somewhere. It's like Chinese nationals arrested near Maine Canada border. Yeah, there it is. Fort Fairfield.

Where is that in my Canada map? So like if you're, yeah, so if you're looking at like Maine, it's like right here. So you're looking at northeast. Okay, so right near. Yeah. Got it. North, the northeast Maine, Canada border is wide open. Yeah.

I know of areas where you know to walk across. And we've seen a lot of cases and heard about a lot of cases of illegal aliens just walking across the border and they get in a vehicle with a getaway driver. And we've heard about the few where they get caught because they have a broken tail light and some 20-year-old cop from Fort Field, Maine, pulls them over, and then just sees like, what are these Jordanians doing? And Fort Fairfield, Maine, it's 1 a.m?

What's that stack of cash back there? That's weird. And then those guys get caught or got caught. But how many aren't? Yeah. You know? And there was actually this, I don't know if it was this specific case,

the one we just referenced in Fort Fairfield, but there was another one I heard about where there's a similar incidence of Chinese guys just walking across the border from Canada and they later get pulled over and the driver had his phone still on the dash with his Google Maps route in it and it was still saved from New York

or Massachusetts I think it was Boston but you could see how he'd driven up from Massachusetts and gone to ding ding ding ding ding all these different locations in Maine and then up to the border totally like he knew what he was doing almost we should probably save that or at least someone told him where to go Have you ever seen my friend Kat Schultz's reporting at all? Name sounds familiar.

You've probably seen her around. So she's young, but she's like on the ground in Mexico has been like reporting on the cartels. But she's originally from Canada. Okay. So then she started, you know, naturally she's going to track stories back to where she's from as well, cares a lot about that. She was talking and she wasn't the only one, but she's talking about how easy the cartel lines were going in just with like the fentanyl stuff and the things that we've done. talked about before into Canada and setting up literal plants there and she got laughed out of the place like a year ago talking about that and then six months later it's like oh yep we found some

and you know that's another thing she's like obviously we talk about the Mexico border all the time righteously so but you got a whole thousands of fucking miles border with Canada up there and if you don't think different groups like this in your case you're referring toward more towards to triads and stuff like that, but any, any surreptitious group that wants to do something bad on either side of those borders, isn't using that? You're fucking crazy. Anybody who doesn't want to check in at the border? Yep. I mean, we have normalized relationships with Canada. They, anyone, for now. Yeah, for now, right? Governor, Governor Chudeau. They, anyone who wants to cross for legitimate reasons, just, you go through a port of entry.

I cross into Canada all the time. And it's, I mean, it's as simple as paying a toll. It's like crossing from New York to New Jersey. It's easy. You take a passport? Yeah, you just stopped there. The guy looks at your passport and he's like, thank you. Sorry. But anyone who is walking across the border or trying to skirt your points of entry, they're doing so for a reason.

And it's not a good one. There's no innocent reasons for just walking across the border to get into a getaway car. That's right. Innocent reasons for crossing between ports of entry. There's not. And you're right that the main Canada border hasn't gotten enough attention. gotten enough attention. I think that's changing. I think that with the crackdown on the southern border, like customers, there's still demand for drugs, guns, and human trafficking

victims in America, unfortunately. That's just going to be rerouted through the Canadian border. Yeah. It's like, you know, trying to squeeze a balloon. The pressure is going to go somewhere. And so as the Mexican border is harder for it to come through, it's going to come through the Canadian border, through marine ports of entry. The other thing people don't think about with Maine is our coastline with all the inlets is longer than Californias. And on the eastern... Wait, really? Yeah.

If you count all the, you know, the sounds and bays and the little inies and outies, yeah, it's longer than Californias. And Border Patrol has their area of enforcement is from the border 100 miles in. It's basically the entire populated state of Maine. You go from the Canadian border 100 miles in, but also from the Marine border 100 miles in. That's their enforcement territory. And you've got just a handful of agents in Maine

that are supposed to enforce that entire thing. A handful? Just a handful. We have the Holton border sector, which is up on like the right, you know, I guess the right corner of Maine, if you're looking at a map. And there's a station there and they have the sector.

But then there are agents stationed in different places throughout the state of Maine where if there's anything that falls within the domain of CBP that they can get to in an hour. drive, that's their territory. And they're like wolves, man. They don't have overlapping territory. You know, it's very sparse. But, you know, I've actually gone out in Border Patrol boats just doing ride-alongs with some of these guys. And it's thinly covered. And I haven't personally you know, seen or encountered this out in Washington County, Maine. But I've heard a lot of stories

about smuggling with boats and, you know, the like urchin divers, uh, haul. out there oxygen tanks so that they can stuff heroin in it and in the early days it was like they'd bring it up from New Jersey actually they'd bring it up they'd sound about right yeah they'd take an urchin boat from down East Maine and it's like I don't know it's some crazy length of a trip's like five out 15 hours boat ride down and put the heroin in those tanks and upright the tanks and no one ever searches the tanks no one ever looks twice of course you're an archand diver, why wouldn't he have a bunch of oxygen tanks on his boat? And that was how heroin

was getting into Down East Main for a long time. Huge, huge quantities of heroin. But obviously the fentanyl came in, you know, it was like prescription opioids, then the heroin and then the fentanyl. And now we're coming away from the fentanyl a little bit. The guys at True Classic started with a simple mission. They wanted to bring premium, comfortable clothing to the masses because looking and feeling great shouldn't come with a designer price tag. And clearly, people agree. With over 25 million shirts sold to 5 million customers and more than 200,000 5-star reviews,

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Ben, you're finding some other dark shit that we're going to talk about. Yes. Yeah, yeah, more dark shit. Anyways, that was just to say, the Marine smuggling is also a big issue, especially on the human trafficking. especially on the human trafficking side yeah well the human trafficking let's let's let's put a pin in that because there's there's a lot there and like I said there's there's like 10 different things we can go to right there but just from the start so that people understand you if they haven't seen you like on Sean show and some of the other shows you've done like how did you even get into

reporting on this stuff I mean you were working at barstool sports yeah like three years ago what would what happened to get you to report on international Chinese drug smuggling rings it's a good question uh where did where did things go wrong uh well i was i was the producer on the kirk minnehan show for barcel sports and did uh it was his producer for his comedy show but kirk um i think this was new the end of 2021 decided that he wanted to do a cold case podcast and asked me if i wanted to be the producer for that as well and i was like yeah of course um and so we started looking into the disappearance of a 15 year old girl named jennifer who went missing in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1989. And I kind of got a taste of investigative journalism by following Kirk around and kind of seeing how you would make a eight-episode cold case podcast. And this particular case ended up being more than just, you know, we're going to pull up the Wikipedia page and we're going to read about, you know, this, you know, dusty old case. Because that wasn't Kirk style. He wanted to go, like, do actual news. Like, his model of success for that podcast was, we're going to find the body, we're going to find the murderer, and we're going to get them locked up.

Like, we're not just, like, doing a podcast and entertain people. Like, we're out here trying to solve a crime. And so that led to us, you know, we got a lead on this creepy guy who was doing coke with Jennifer the night she went missing was probably the last one to see her alive. Probably killed her. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but probably. Allegedly. Allegedly, probably killed her. Allegedly, we don't know.

Definitely. Was charred. Multiple murders. But so we ended up chasing this guy around South Carolina in the middle of COVID restrictions. It was crazy to go from Massachusetts where everyone's like, mass stuff. I don't know. Oh, that's not worth me. And we were down and like outside of Clemson.

You're like spit and chew out. Oh, yeah. Oh, teeth. You know, there's some people are smoking so much meth down there. That's what. Kirk always asked, he was like, if one of these guys got COVID, how would they know? You know, which was a legitimate question. question. But so like running around doing that, believe it or not was a fun experience. It was

rewarding to do a long form podcast because I'd been used to talk radio or daily podcast episodes where it's like it's more topical. It's not like we're going to put a lot of time into this one hour of content and we're going to release these episodes. So I really enjoyed that. And so I was kind of burnt out after that. End up getting a camper van driving around my wife just for a year, just travel in the country, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and settled on starting a media outlet in the state of Maine. Maine's like a purple, a blue purple state, and it's going to media that's pretty much just dominated by progressives, kind of liberals who don't even know that they're liberals, really.

They don't know that they're like in this, that they're reporting on things and writing about things in a way that just like doesn't appeal to half of the state and doesn't align with what the half of the state is interested in in terms of values you know it's so it's kind of bifurcated in that more commentary rather than journalism so to speak uh yeah i mean that's journalism yes yeah or they think it's just like they're writing about something they're you know it's a conversation amongst people on the left as opposed to of the entire state or something that's true investigative journalism they're more they think their job is to, like, republish statements from the government or, you know, referee a fight between Republicans and Democrats as opposed to finding out what's actually going

on or finding things that the government doesn't want you to know about. So we wanted to shake things up a little bit. And yes, I mean, I'm conservative. I wasn't going to, like, pretend to be neutral down the middle. So we are the conservative outlet in the state of Maine. But we really started as digital media startup. And we used some of the things that I learned. at Barstool, some of the, you know, new media platforms, new media techniques to create an outlet that embraced video, storytelling, multimedia, a kind of brash, not trying to be like stuffy and have, you know, an issue that went out in the morning. And when the first story about the Chinese organized crime in Maine broke, I was like, oh man, we got to dig into this. Yeah.

Like, this is sensational. Like, there's an organized crime ring of 270 locations. in Maine like we got to find out if this is true or not and we got to go find these places and we got to talk to these people and we got to figure out who owns these properties and we got to dig into this like you weren't a little bit afraid uh no not at first no not at first definitely went through like a period of of immense fear um but uh then kind of came out the other end of that um but at first i was like ah geez i don't know are they are there powerful people leaking this story just to get us angry at China so that people will support a defense budget or you know is are people playing games here what's the what's the truth here um so that's what we set out to figure out

is if there's any substance to this claim from a you know anonymous anonymously leaked CBP memo that there's 270 Chinese marijuana grows in Maine controlled by Chinese organized crime and they're using the profit from that to subsidize fentanyl trafficking and human trafficking and um you all kinds of other activities. Let it go. The other outlets, all of the other outlets made that decision. I guess they saw it and they were like, huh, that's interesting. Nothing to see here folks.

You know what the problem is, Steve? They're looking at it thinking, all right, well, eventually, if we're going to do a big story, we wanted to go to Hollywood. And they look at Hollywood and they go, oh, wait, we got to be able to sell it to China. I guess we can't cover the China story. I don't even think they're thinking that far. I know. They're not, but it's kind of funny to think about that.

true you're you're uh you're giving them it's tied everywhere a little bit too too much credit i don't think these guys have ever thought about ever producing a movie or uh you know some more interesting product but i'll show you a funny funny text message so this this um uh this is with a individual who was described to me as a former organ harvester for the ccp he um told people in maine that that was his line of work back in China was harvesting people's organs. And it's not here now? No, no, no, no. He's in the marijuana business.

Is he an illegal immigrant, too? Well, he's in one of those gray areas where he may have a green card, but I think he's an illegal immigrant, but he's been here for a long time. But he was part of this Green Futures LLC that I was talking to you about earlier, these guys who came in here. Was that off camera or on? I can't remember. It was on camera.

It was on. Okay. right yeah so we've been talked for hours here this is uh this is the same um so his this is a buddy of johnny woos at green future god see the guy on the yeah so i i got his phone number and i called him and he didn't speak very good english and told me to text him and i was trying to flip him so i was like man netflix would love it if i could get somebody from the inside of the of the chinese organized crime to flip and become part of my documentary so i was texting him like like can i read this movie deal dollar sign dollar sign dollar sign i thought the dollar yeah go ahead i thought the

dollar sign was like the international language of uh peace and prosperity this is my this is my genius pitch to the former organ harvester of the ccp for the people out there there's a lot of blue and not a lot of gray on this text chain if you know what i mean says hi jason thanks for talking with me just now i'm making a document not new message i'm making a documentary movie about marijuana growing in Maine. I want to see how long. Okay, so you're firing these off in three minutes. Okay. Eddie and Matt told me that you used to have business in Maine, but you don't have businesses in Maine anymore. I was hoping to interview you about your experience in Maine. I can conceal your identity. I can keep you anonymous. I can make sure no one ever knows we talked. If you helped me

with the movie, then there might be some money to be made. If you have good information to share, then we could partner to make the movie and make dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign. And then you send him a text two hours later. There is money to be made in telling your story. Maybe big money. Ask Eddie. Just naked. Naked. I'll give him this. He didn't bite. No, he didn't. I will give him that. He's a principled organ harvester. I guess he is. For sure. He's got that Omerta. Yeah. But so he was an organ harvester in China. That's what he said. You know, he said that. I don't know why you would say that if it wasn't true. It's pretty dark. Yeah. Yeah. it is yeah but he also he wasn't trying to scare people you know like i might i can i can

conceive of it if you're trying to scare somebody into complying with you or not wrong in you yeah right um but uh no this guy was like trying to befriend locals because he needed them to help with his electricity and that's how he befriended him oh i was your resident organ harvester in china yeah he actually the guy who told me this story um said that he was like oh well how does that work and jason and went, which is true. I don't know if you've looked into the organ harvesting in China, but they do organs on demand. Like he just does this openly.

Yeah. Oh, you kill and then you take. Very, very, yeah, very casual. I guess his specialty was kidneys. Oh my God. My friend Remy Adeleke did an amazing short film that really needs to be developed into a full film called The Unexpected, I want to say.

this was three four years ago remi was a navy seal for a lot of years and since then has done a lot of work in different trafficking stuff around the world in addition to being an actor in hollywood he's a lot he's a very talented writer as well but he he wrote and directed this this film where it shows in reversed order an organ harvesting so it starts in some hospital in mexico with a rich american couple having a doctor come out and say your son's going to live and they're like oh thank fucking god and And then it works its way. I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Dude, it works its way all the way to where the source was from the organ all the way back. Some Falun Gong practitioner. Dude, it wasn't, in this case, what he chose to portray was a victim of during like the ISIS period, the Yazidis. So it was coming from that, but it works the same exact way. Any marginalized communities, especially if they don't drink alcohol, you know.

Oh, right, because their organs are good. Exactly. That's why they like the Falun Gong practitioners. But there's hospitals. I think the, um, uh, epic media actually did this, uh, or epic, epic news, um, called hospitals in China, um, looking to arrange organ transplants and asking specifically for organs from people who haven't drank alcohol. They're like, oh, yeah, we got those. Yep. Come on over. Like, what do you want to do it? Yep. Oh, no, don't worry about the timing. We'll have one for you. Oh, my God. So you. Don't worry about blood type. How, how? We'll match it. Who put you in touch with Jason again, that guy from the text? So this guy was actually a licensed, attempted to be a licensed marijuana grower. Okay. So he had some footprints, some contact information that I was able to find. American guy?

No. What do you mean? Who attempted to be legal? Or was it another Chinese guy? This guy is a Chinese guy. No. Right, that guy's Chinese. He actually got a license to grow marijuana legally in the middle.

medical program. It didn't, it only lasted a couple of months because you just wasn't following any of the rules. And you can later see in other disciplinary reports from the Office of Cannabis policy where everybody in the orbit of Green Futures LLC and all of these people, the principals and their assistants, everybody, they're just totally flouting the rules, growing as many plants as they want, doing whatever they want. So you can see kind of the history and development of Chinese organized crime in Maine as they initially come in they try to get uh permits or try to do things with a veneer of legality and then eventually they just go full scale screw the program like let's just grow out in the woods of Maine no one's going to care we're not going to get caught and so they found this

little corner where they could proliferate because they were right no one cared a corner like that area of the state like a market niche you know they could they could if they were buying up these houses in rural Maine and not ever attempting to get a permit, then they're never going to find a cannabis office inspector. Like the cannabis, the director of the office of cannabis policy actually told me when I was at the beginning of this adventure reporting on Chinese organized crime, I asked him, I was like, so what are you doing about these guys? Like, what is this? And he said, if they're, if they're purely illegal, we don't have any jurisdiction over them. And then if you would ask law enforcement about it, they would say, well, anything marijuana related, that's

the Office of Cannabis Policy. So when I say they found a coroner, they found this kind of gap in jurisdictions and in, I guess, American perception where it was just this blind spot. Like, you're out in a house. No one sees you. You're at the end of a long dirt road. You're not really interacting with people that much, except for at a few key points. So they found a blind spot to be in that was incredibly profitable for them. And they just kept dumping the money that they were making back into real estate and that's how they were able from from 2020 when it really all started to now to amass i mean provably more than 300 properties i would i would estimate um more than 500 because not all of the properties that they have are chicken barns with 5,000 marijuana plants

and some slaves yeah some of them are like logistics hubs you know there's some places they own in the more populated southern part of the state that are more cash houses and you also i mean you can include the Chinese restaurants in that that property list for sure oh they're using them as like trap houses for the cash yeah they're all tied they're all they're all they're all connected yeah they're all they're all connected and i think that most of the restaurants were in main and set up prior to the development of the cannabis activities but whether it was just a nation of origin similarity linguistic similarities you know friend of of a friend type thing they they got connected to the restaurants and there's there's one i mean

there's one we've reported on that uh was the um burglarized the owners who their home was burglarized and they lost 70 000 cash and this is actually an interesting story because you please please explain yeah so you the um they get robbed they call the police a week later it's kind of weird you wouldn't call the police right i would have called him right away yeah if i'm in legitimate business. Yeah. So the police show up. This is in Brewer, Maine. Police show up and the, there's one guy there younger who speaks English and there's several older people there who don't speak English. And while the police are interviewing the guy who speaks English, they can tell he's being cagey. You know, he says he's lost $70,000 and he wants it back. Maybe it's because they're trying

to file an insurance claim or something. They just want the police report. But they're kind of getting hints that he knows more than he does and won't tell him because he's maybe scared of the people who did this to him. They don't know. But while they're interviewing this guy, the other people are just talking the whole time in Mandarin or Cantonese. They're just, you know, whole other conversations happening over here while they're interviewing this guy in English. And they didn't think that the, you know, the pale faces understood what they were saying, but the white cops had body camps that were recording audio. So a detective at the police department sent the audio off to have it translated.

And while this guy was giving the official report of who robbed him, there was a whole other story going on in Mandarin. And they're talking about all these other Asian business owners who'd been robbed in the area and how there's this like string of unreported robberies targeting the homes of people who own Chinese food restaurants. That's weird. Yeah, I'll say. You start to look a little bit deeper at it.

And Nespin, which is like a law enforcement intelligence sharing network that New England law enforcement has, there's a lot of reports about burglaries targeting Asian business owners that are super sophisticated in that they have like cellular hotspots connected to surveillance cameras that are camouflaged with like camo duct tape and sat on the tree line looking at your house so that they know when you're home and when you're, you're not home so that they can go in when you're not home oh my god just you know look around for wherever the cash is stashed um but so the costs get to thinking and they're like oh hold my second there's been like more than 10 robberies in main targeting asian business owners and you guys are the first ones who've called the cops hmm something's not right here so it's either you know someone has figured out how to rip off the triad for a thousand thousands of thousands of hundreds of thousands of

dollars and just never have any retribution or make any waves or that you have like inter-family strife, you know, triad on triad violence or even scarier, the Hispanic cartel, Central American cartels knocking off triad weed soft targets, you know. That actually makes sense. If it's just, if it's 70-year-old guys. It would be funny if it's like fucking Vinnie and Carmine, like just pulling up to all these places like, got him again. be way less

or the wet bandit yeah but you get the now the cartels are involved it's like well what do they know about the business then well I've also thought about if law enforcement you know I mean law enforcement they're seeing more than they're able to

talk about and then that they're able to go out and prosecute like if you go to band of cops together who are like you know this pays shit like you know they haven't increased our our salaries in a long time why don't we just go get some of this illegal drug money like training day stuff you know oh a lot of possibilities there it's just like it's definitely

it's definitely triads robin triads yeah so that that was going to be my next question though because a lot of people now understand that there is this expectation within the CCP that a chinese national is called upon to spy or do espionage if called upon there's a to do it on their national security law right no matter where they are so like like we're saying it's a literal law that relationship then with the literal organized crime organizations is the same then no so like the government doesn't view the chinese government doesn't view the triads as scumbags they they view them as a useful tool yeah fair to say yeah i think that's a fair and accurate and look i'm not uh you know a Chinese politics expert, but I do know what we've seen in Maine. And the development of it

are Chinese drug cartels situation in Maine. You can kind of track how it increased in complexity as well as size. And the nature of the people who were populating some of these sites changed over time. In the beginning, it really seemed like you had just a couple of wildcatters who came up and we're trying, kind of bumbling around, trying to figure out what are the rules, what are the limits, what's the, how are we going to have to operate to operate profitably in this business, in this region? And they figured it out. It took them like a year, year and a half, but they figured it out. Another example is, um, Mervyn Yon. You familiar with that name at all? He was, um, he worked for C EFC Energy, the firm that paid the Biden family $1.5 million. I'm thinking of Michael Yon,

not Mervyn Yon. So this is Mervyn Yon. Totally different guy. Totally different guy. All right, please Mervyn Yon, he worked for CEFC energy, which is just a Chinese cutout. It's, you know, it's a, I don't know if it's a real company or not, but it's the way I knew, recognize the name was that he had been interviewed by the House Oversight Committee for his role in paying the, the Biden family $1.5 million. So it was like, oh, okay, this is part of Hunter Biden's bag, you know, printing money from foreign sources. But Mervyn Yon, of all people, paid a woman in Staceyville, Maine, $100,000.

to be the signatory on an adult use marijuana grow. You should look up, look up Staceyville, Maine, so you can just see how remote this place. S-T-A-C-E-Y? You got it. Okay. Yeah, Staceyville, Maine. And just zoom out so you can see how remote this place.

This is in the middle of nowhere. This is a town of like, again, 500 people. This is where you write a horror movie. But there was an old industrial site there that was like right on the train tracks. So this is super, super remote, super remote. I mean, this is like... Oh, and there's like a lake back there. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, this is... Yeah. So, Mervyn Yon, while he's, you know, in between paying Hunter Biden and James Biden for, Lord knows what, good advice on energy, I guess. Maybe Hunter's got some great advice. The best advice. The best advice on energy. That's our next president you're talking about.

President Hunter Biden. Oh, man. Well, I don't hate him. You know, he's the most relatable person in the Biden family. I want to love something the way he loves crack. That's all I'm going to say. It was inspired. It was, you see the one with the Oppenheimer music behind it with like imagery and everything.

I was ready to go do crack. I was in. You could see, you could see a little like addicts glint in his eye though. He was like, he's like, geez, if I keep talking about this, I'm going to have to. The light is like, take that sodium bicarbonate and then. Oh, my God. Oh, that was so funny. The only thing he loves more than crack is his dead brother's sister, her former wife, rather.

Oh, yeah, all right. That just got dark. Bosh the joke, but. That got biblical. Sorry, you were saying Staceyville now. Yeah, so Mervyn Yon, in between doing this high-level bribery on behalf of a Chinese energy cutout, pays a woman in Staceyville, Maine, $100,000 to come and sign on the dotted line as the principal for Sherman Grove, which was a marijuana company that was going to operate up in Staceyville.

At the time, you needed a, there was a residency requirement. This got struck down in a court case, but there was a residency requirement to operate a marijuana business in Maine. And Mervyn was going to pay this woman to be his main resident, paid $100,000. Random lady. Yep. It was like, talked with multiple people, and there were some people were like, no, no, no. And then he found the one who would take $100,000.

And she was like, oh, yeah. sound me up goes down gets fingerprinted takes $100,000 and apparently later he at some point it became clear that he wasn't going to move ahead with the project because he this is again an example of them coming in and trying to figure out what the rules are so mervin comes in and he goes tier four adult use that's the biggest grow you can get it's like 20,000 plants you can increase over time so there were some of them who just came in and had the money and just said give me the biggest license and the biggest space you have i'm gonna you know make a ton of money doing this but then what he learned was approval's kind of hard at for tier four uh stacyville's a little

remote as you can see and eventually he backs away from this and god bless this woman in stacyville she she got him to make good on it she was like you're paying me she's like i did my part good for her yeah stand up for yourself again this is a a communist spy with principles he he made good on that that. I appreciate that. So they those were the early stages like 2020 to 2022 kind of where they were trying to figure out exactly how they were going to be able to grow cannabis in Maine. And they embraced the getting permits and like this pantomime of compliance, pretending like they were following the rules. And then eventually they learned now. The most profitable way to do this is just completely off the radar. Nobody's going to bother us. And that's what I kind of came

into was that stage of their development. Now they're swinging back to getting medicinal licenses. So you see the same people who, the same people in the same properties that are involved with search warrants, busts that are very obviously in this criminal network are now getting medicinal licenses. And it's no problem. They're just applying and they're like, oh, you're under investigation, you can have one. Well, it's hard to say if they're under investigation, you know, the law isn't written specific to a property. So a new person comes in with a property, like, yes, they're both, you know, Chinese individuals from the same area of New York. And yes, this property did get rated. And yes, the same person still owns it and is also Chinese and from

New York. But you don't know that they're related. It'd be racist. It'd be racist to say that they know each other just because they're all Chinese and from New York. So the Office of Cannabis Policy approves all these licenses. And this, by the way, isn't. speculation or just like the, you know, conservative Steve Robinson saying this, the John Hoodack from the Office of Cannabis Policy has admitted in legislative testimony that they are giving licenses to people they suspect have affiliations with organized crime. This says their hands are tied. What do you mean their hands are tied?

Their hands are tied? How are your hands tied? He's in a fucking triads. Don't give him a license. That's what he says. Hands are tied. It doesn't have a discretion. Who's tying them?

It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. He never he never explains the media doesn't ask him to explain further. He doesn't seem real interested in talking to me. This is like the Truman show, bro. Yeah, it's very, very bizarre. The longer I've looked at the problem of why these guys are allowed to continue to operate, I think I've said before I told Sean, like I try to stay away from this idea that all the politicians are crooked and everybody's been bribed. Oh, they are. I tend to believe things. are more emergent and there's a lot more incompetence but the the idea that they're still operating given the amount of publicity that we put on like I really thought initially I would do like three or four stories on this topic be gone and be gone here I am two years two years later so like hey why are we allowing this you know this is I mean just like the environmental uh destruction that comes from these guys the human trafficking tax evasion just the deterioration of our culture It's like, why are we allowing this to happen in Maine?

It doesn't, sadly, and I really do mean this, sadly, it doesn't surprise me at all that you've now been reporting on this for years and not even the slightest dent of the people that can actually do something about has happened. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me now either that I know what I know. But it's also having gone through this and reported on it and had this conversation about, like, well, why is this? That's what people always ask you. Yes.

Well, why? If everybody knows it's illegal. you're literally out in front of these places jumping up and down, you know, with a red clown nose on and taking videos to get people's attention on this stuff. Why is it still being allowed to happen? And it's getting harder and harder to not go down the, well, if it's being allowed to happen, then the people who are allowing it to happen are benefiting from it. Yeah. It's getting harder to avoid that conclusion. And so I think that there are a lot of people, both on the sale end at these hemp shops and head shops where the triad weed is being sold,

who are benefiting from it, but also people in, you know, more traditional main business or main politics, you know, French guys and Irish guys and English guys who are renting property to the Chinese organized crime. Or maybe they're real estate agents. There it is. You know, they like the high sales volume that's all cash. It's like the scene in the town when they get through the whole

fucking chase, they're all done, everything blew up and they're moving the cars to the other getaway car and there's the one cop sitting there and he's looking at him and then he just goes, you know, if you're tied in and, you know, in that case, that cop just didn't want to be in a shootout

and potentially get hurt, just wanted to go about a shift. That might be what these people are doing. It might just be like, well, I only own some of my real estate, fuck it, whatever, it's going to have it anyway. Might as well control it. Also, you know, if you're like a cop in rural Maine,

you know, you might have in the 90s or early 2000s some experience busting marijuana grows, but never dealing with transnational organized crime. Right. Like, you're not equipped to, I mean, you know, how many, how many law enforcement in Maine do you think speak Mandarin or Cantonese? I mean, zero. Yeah, zero. Zero. They might have like the phone line for a translation service, but maybe. But they're not equipped to deal with sophisticated organized crime of this variety. But we, in our, in the movie that we made, we actually, We found a guy in Albion, Maine who...

Is this the one with Tucker you did? Yes, the documentary that you can... People can watch it at Tucker Carlson.com, shameless plug. But in the documentary, we interviewed a guy who was just like a classic Mainer. You know, he shows up to talk to us and he's wearing like a camo-Trump hat and a, you know, like a tank top and driving his truck. We're in front of a Chinese marijuana grow that hadn't been raided, but... the individual that he knew to be associated with this grow had been arrested like a hundred miles over across the state at a different marijuana grow and so it was it was dormant for whatever

reason as we interviewed him in front of it and he told us this story of how when he saw this guy sent up shop in his town he said not in my small town damn it which is a fantastic drop a nice quote from the from the movie and he pretended to be the code enforcement officer so he just like went over to this guy and was like, this is out of code, this is out of code. You got to get that up to code or we're going to have to shut you down. And the guy's, it's like, well, he's Chinese. He's from New York. He doesn't know. He's like, yeah, okay, gets the guy's phone number. And then just a few days later, the guy's phone rings. It's a number from New York. It's a woman on the other end of the line with an obviously a Chinese accent. Uh, and do it. Uh, yeah, yeah. Let's let's, let's, let's

out of it. Oh, hello. I don't know. I'm not trying to get you canceled. That's all right. I I'm uncanceable at this point. They, uh, uh, so the woman offers, uh, to come to a financial arrangement.

And the guy says, yeah, but you're going to have to meet me in person. And they're like, no, hang up. Uh, so I'm thinking,

well, I wonder, is that the only time a code enforcement, code enforcement officer in Maine has been offered a couple thousand dollars. You're talking about a job where these people probably make, maybe $35,000 a year? Yeah. You know, so what's a $10,000 bribe like?

If you're, so the, um, there's a police task force in Washington state that has works specifically on these illegal indoor residential marijuana grows. And they've estimated that one house, just like a 2,500 square foot house customized with, you know, every single room is growing marijuana can generate anywhere from, uh, one million to $5 million in revenue a month. So if that's what you're looking to do with a house, if you can turn it into a one to five million dollar a month revenue source, what can you afford? What's your bribery budget? Large.

Yeah. All right. That was another question I had just to make sure this is all clock into me because you're mentioning that now a lot of these same houses with the same people are applying for the legal side of it. When they build it off books illegally and they have all the money coming in, who are? Who are all their end customers? Strictly black market? Are they sawing it into the green market, you know, like, pun intended there? Yeah.

What does that part look like the cash flow? Yeah. So initially they would use some of the licensed growers as conduits to funnel the illegally grown marijuana into the legal markets. Oh, like money laundering, marijuana laundering. Just like money laundering. Wow. But this was based on a quirk of Maine's marijuana program.

So we have an adult. use recreational program which is um has uh track and trace and mandated testing and some more rules uh the the medicinal marijuana program is more i guess libertarian there's less government oversight and so you would have them come into the medicinal side with just a few people who manage to hang on to their licenses and if you've got the license uh and a charismatic salesperson who's part of your criminal network, they can go around all the illegal places and grab trash bags full of weed and then go to the medical dispensaries in the state and say, hey, I can wholesale you some pot and it's all through my license. This is all legit. And so the dispensary owner has

plausible deniability that they're selling an illegal product. They don't have to test it for pesticides, fungicides, anything like that. And the price is right because this guy doesn't want you asking too many questions about where this weed came comes from because it all looks different. It's all different kinds of baggies and, you know, he's an out-of-stater. They don't want you asking questions. So it's going to be about 50% off the market rate. And people took them up on that deal. You know, it's COVID. Economic uncertainty. You're trying to put food on the table. Very competitive growing industry. When you can do it at scale, you can take advantage of that. Yeah. So people, there were medicinal store operators throughout the state who took advantage

of it paid cash that cash gets plowed back into real estate deals for more uh you know houses that later become marijuana grows but later and they're buying the houses in cash yes that's actually a key part of how the money laundering happens is through the the real estate and through real estate attorneys um real estate attorneys can you explain that part yeah so just meaning they're complicit just to finish that the the earlier threat first though now the final sale point is mostly out of state. The last time the attorney general's office testified about this, they estimated like two thirds out of state, one third in state, which, you know, accorded with what I had come to believe based on reporting. But they're bringing it out of state,

trafficking it all over eastern United States, primarily to prohibition states so that they can sell it at head shops, tobacco shops, convenience stores. And they're using the hemp loophole for intoxicating hemp products to do that. So their market, they're growing in Maine, their activities in Maine, their lot of their money laundering is in Massachusetts, but their sale point is throughout the eastern United States, including New York for a while,

before you guys really figured out how to turn. Oh, sorry. That's all the same to me. Got you. Hey, hey, relax, Boston. I don't like that. You were doing well until that. well they were they liked in new york because you guys had were sorry those guys those guys over

there were illegal that's better um but uh you know when it was legalized in new york it didn't quite uh you guys didn't they did not have a rollout that was smooth for legalizing the sale of the product and to the the gray market where it's legal but you can't really enforce the rules and you can't really figure out how to sell it it's the perfect place to come in and be a a drug dealer. You're not going to get arrested and you get all the cheap pot from Maine. So yeah, you fill up your U-Haul or your sprinter van and you drive it from Maine down to New York and you're selling hotcakes. Good business decision. Yeah. But the money laundering is, I mean, there's a bunch of different money laundering techniques, but the one that I think is pertinent here

is called seasoning the money. You have money seasoners. The practice is called seasoning the money. Right. Your money seasoner is an attorney with flexible morals. Saul Goodman. Yes. That's exactly. I mean, you're, anyone who's seen like weeds or Breaking Bad or the Sopranos knows what money laundering is. But that's exactly it. But the practice of it. The reason why seasoning the money works is because, okay, I've got, I've got a briefcase with a quarter million dollars in it. And it's all marijuana money. It's dirty money. I want to reinvest. this into real estate. If I bring my briefcase full of cash to the owners of that property and try

to trade it with them, they're going to bring it to their bank immediately and say, oh, I got this from Julian. He was trying to buy a house. And the bank's going to file a suspicious transaction report that includes you. And the IRS is going to come to you looking for, you know, did you pay taxes on that? Where did that money come from? We're curious. So the goal of all money laundering is to avoid paying taxes and avoid law enforcement finding out what you're doing. So, but if you bring that briefcase full of cash to your real estate agent, you're going to have the same problem. Eventually, that money is going to touch some law-abiding financial rail, some payment system, some bank, some part of the financial system where a suspicious transaction report is going to be filed and

Treasury is going to figure out about it and it's not going to end well for you. So to avoid that, you bring that briefcase full of cash to your lawyer and you ask your lawyer to place it in his trust account. So all lawyers have trust accounts where money that they're holding for clients as part of their retainers or for any reason money funds held in escrow for any reason whatsoever is all in this trust account the trust accounts generate interest and in most states the interest off of that fund is used I know the state puts it towards some pro-social cause whatever but the trust account can also work like a checking account you can have a bank check drawn on the trust account so after I've deposited my court my briefcase with a quarter million

dollars in it. I go to my lawyer and I say, can you make out a bank check that draws on your trust account to redrealtor.com and, you know, make it out for, you know, 230 and you can keep 20,000. And you take that bank check and bring it to your realtor. And your realtor's like, excellent. I know this one's going to cash. And no one has to file a suspicious transaction report. Why not? Because it's, uh, the relationship between the client and the attorney is protected by attorney-client privilege. But even on the other end, you don't have to look at that as suspicious if you're outside that relationship? Nope. It's a bank check from a lawyer. It's clean. And that money becomes real estate and you make a, I mean, you generate additional

revenue from operating it as an illegal marijuana grow. And when the jig is up, you just sell the real estate. And then you got clean cash because you could just tell the bank, well, this proceeds of a real estate sale this is the really really shitty thing steve it's like i love having freedom right i love our system our system give me it a thousand times out of a hundred over like a china or something like that or communism of course what sucks sometimes though is that totalitarian places like that because we are talking about that in this case that that that is yeah that these other people on the ground and that's who they're reporting to in all likelihood like they can use our system against us yeah to move it to turn it in on itself and like we've a million

times on the show i was talking with you about this even before we started the podcast like the the high level example would have been like the ticot thing you know because they're communists and control speech one benefit of that is that their eight-year-olds don't have ticot after 8 p.m and before they have nature videos and fucking math videos their eight-year-olds aren't trying to cut their dicks off because they saw some videos right that's right ours are sitting there and 12 am in bed watching titty videos and stuff. Yeah, I think I'm a pangender unicorn. Exactly. And it's like what you're talking about here, obviously entirely different context, but it's the same kind of thing. Yeah, it's the same thing. That would never fly in China, fucking real estate.

Some attorney right now to check for a real estate deal, they'd be like, throw that motherfucker in with the Uyghurs. I've actually, I just recently learned about somebody who was part of the illegal Chinese marijuana growing world who, you know, convey. to some english-speaking associates that he smuggled hash back into china it was uh he'd get a thousand dollars for a one gram vape cart but he also would face the death penalty if he got caught death penalty right so they were at this it was again it was at that green futures llc spot they were making hash and putting it into makeup containers so that it looked like um yeah and that's how they were smuggling it back into china i hope i didn't get somebody

killed just now, but they were... Darwinism. Right. But $1,000 a gram? $1,000. That same product is probably like two or $3 a gram in Maine's markets at least. So, I mean, there is... But like the death penalty.

Yeah, no, no. I'm afraid when I put creatine through TSA. Right. I think it's fucking blow. You're going into China. You get killed over a gram of hash. Right. Or, I mean, Russia. You know, the... Right. What was it? Brian Greiner locked up for a vape cart. I mean, so you're, yeah, the, the rules are different and they have a little bit more efficiency enforcing them in communist systems. But I think that the, to kind of, I guess the tension or the dilemma here is when you're talking about how, you know, what does what do Americans do? What does our system of our society, our government do to repel this? I guess the question is how do you, how do you fight communist China without becoming communist China? That's right. And it extends, it extends to the TikTok thing too, because it's like, well, We don't want the government having total control over X, Facebook, YouTube. We saw that under President Biden and to a lesser extent, Obama. Like, we saw what happens when the government's trying to censor stuff, kicking the President of the United States off X.

Like, we saw what that, how that works. We don't want that. And it's a difficult question to answer. You know, how do you, how do you expel, you know, a nation-state-backed organized crime outfit that is sad? exploits your laws, exploits your culture. Without breaking your culture and laws? Yeah, because you can't, you don't want to racially profile. That's what pugnant.

Everybody agrees on that. But at the same time, they're all Chinese guys. You know, they're all Chinese. They're all from New York. It's a hard, hard thing to resolve for law enforcement. Yeah, let me toss this through you, though. Like, there's racial profiling, and then there is just cause. And this gets really foggy.

Yeah, if you get a racist cop, then it looks bad, right? But if you see a network of known criminals don't care what race they are, and they are dealing with people of their same race, which is how every organized crime element does to some extent, at the very least. And you see an illegal activity happening on the other end. As long as it didn't just start with some cop trailing some dude and saying, oh, you know what, he was swerving within his own lane to pull him over. And it was a Chinese guy or something. So as long as it doesn't start with something stupid like that, which is clearly like some sort of profiling, how is it profiling? You know what's funny is they actually have an easier time going after these people if it can start with a traffic stop. If it can start with a traffic stop and they find them with 40 pounds of marijuana, they have a much easier time than if they have to apply for a search warrant.

Because if they have to apply for a search warrant, they have to go to a DA or some left wing attorney and justify that search warrant. search warrant request and if they include in their search warrant request yeah we've seen you know six military age Asian males coming and going from this property and you know one Asian male lives here uh if they have Asian male in their search warrant application it's going to get spiked for profiling because they know that's racist what are you doing why does it matter to that they're so stupid I'm losing brain cells here and you explain that it's true I've heard it like directly from costs. If they put, if they put, you know, a description of the, the offenders, essentially, the suspects in the search warrant application, they'll get this, like, hostile reaction from the district attorneys or the attorney general's office, whoever it is, ADAs, they'll, yeah, they don't like that at all. So it's a difficult thing for them to resolve. You've got to kind of find these, like, weird, like, coded ways, you know, like to get at what, you're talking about like you've got to find like oh yeah like their electricity consumption and

there and the number of heat pumps hang off the side and i can smell marijuana and we did some trash poles from out front of their place and and you know we found all these like empty bags of promics and i know from my experience and training that promix is something used by marijuana growers and we checked with the office of cannabis policy and they don't have a license to grow cannabis and we checked with the office the department of agriculture and they don't have a license to grow hemp and so on and so forth in order to justify what you're doing whereas if you just if you just if you get them at a traffic stop and they've got some other crime that's your foot in the door yeah see i i've seen unfortunately this is what's stressing me on my head i've seen both ends of this

in this studio in different ways different stories in different contexts many different times i've seen it to where the government goes and gets warrants that forget racial profiling or anything like that they're just fucking insane yeah they get allowed that should never have been allowed and then get admitted that they shouldn't have been allowed and are still then allowed in court And then I've seen it the other way where it's like, you know, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, fucks like a duck and they're like, no, I think it's a goose. And it's like just because you reported the truth on something. And it makes me lose a little bit of hope because I'm like, I know shit's never going to be perfect. But like the way a properly functioning justice system work, the most captain obvious opinion is that it doesn't have it.

It's faceless. it is simply fact base right try to follow the facts where they are and then where the facts can't be proven in court someone's found not guilty like it shouldn't be harder than this but we're not even we're not even getting some like this to court because they don't like the way it's written on a fucking warrant page well we've put some we've put some facts in a box and said that these aren't okay facts yeah to talk about like you can't talk about country of origin in a in a search warrant application you know yeah yeah and it's honest it's like common sense into a apologize if we do. Right. It's like common sense goes out the window. There's going to be a way

that you can balance that, you know, justice is blind principle you're talking about with still incorporating common sense because like no, none of the neighbors to these properties were surprised. That was a big part of my reporting was visiting, you know, nearly 200 of these properties. And I would try to knock on the door and get an interview. They would not come to the door. If they did, there was a language barrier and we couldn't really communicate. But I would I would always talk with the neighbors and try to get interviews with them. And I would just say like, hey, it's back in 22, 23? Yeah, so this is the tail end of 2022 and throughout 2023.

Okay. And I would just, no, sorry, this is this is 2023 and throughout 2024. Got it. Sorry, yeah, no time flies. But I would just say, hey, I'm an investigative reporter. I'd like to talk with you about your neighbors and I would just, they'd kind of get this look in their eyes like, oh man. And then like a smile would creep across their face like, yeah. Yeah, and be like, I'm guessing, you know, every 40 days, a sprinter van comes, out of state plates, probably some Asian guys over there, smells like skunk once in a while, and they would just be like, yeah.

And then they would tell me their story about what they've observed, the different things they've done to try to bring it to law enforcement's attention, whether it's their local police, code enforcement, state police, MDEA, all of them. All of them had been trying to blow the whistle on this and been rebuffed. And then they had the sense of disillusionment because they're like, it's crazy. Why hasn't anyone do anything about this? Steve, when they called, did they say, did they all tell you that like right up front they were using terms like weed and marijuana and stuff? I think so, yeah. Yeah. So that might have been why it's getting indoor because they're like, well, it's legal now.

Yeah, maybe. And a lot of them, a lot of the ones who didn't call right away were just thinking, hey, it's pot, whatever, you know. Right. You know, it means like, I guess has a little bit of a libertarian, you know, keep your nose out of other people's business type mentality. Um, and, you know, well, that's New Hampshire, but I appreciate it. I thought, I thought you were making a new, uh, New Jersey, New York. No, I want, I won't take credit for that. I wasn't bad.

I wasn't that far ahead of it, but they, you know, so they, they took advantage of that. So they knew, like, nobody's going to bug us. Nobody's going to come around poking in our business. And as much as the people of rural Maine or rural America generally get stereotyped as these country bumpkin racists who just like don't like anybody who's not who doesn't look just like them i encountered time and again the exact opposite right these people went out of their way to give every possible excuse and break for their neighbors until they were very obviously engaged in antisocial behavior like dumping chemicals on their property poisoning groundwater

pesticides fungicides that kind of thing knocking out the electrical transformers multiple time in the middle of winter because they're using so much power that the transformer kicks out and the whole block in Maine the block is like you know several miles the houses are pretty far apart but then knock out the transformer and a bunch of other people lose power or there's you know other interesting things happen houses catching on fire so people came to understand that the the people who were moving into these houses were engaged in something that wasn't totally above board and so it was reported to law enforcement a lot but I mean these people knew what was happening it wasn't

It wasn't really hiding. And once you went looking for it, it became just glaringly obvious to the point we're driving around. I was driving around with one of my reporters. We'd just gone to get video of a marijuana grow in, I think this was Cornville, Maine, the West Cornville Road, or no, sorry, West Ridge Road, Cornville, Maine, the marijuana grow. It was right on the same road that the sheriff lives on. And they finally got around to busting it. And as we're driving back from getting video on it, we just driving along when we,

might we look at you. Should you smell that? We're like, yeah. We start like driving around, trying to figure it out and pull up the, you know, the app to see who owns the properties around us. And sure enough, there's a property that was purchased by someone with a Chinese surname. So there, I guess I'm, you know, profiling someone with a Chinese surname. But then we just like hook back around and go and check out the property. And yeah, it's got all the heat pumps hanging off.

the side, the upgraded power, smells like weed, security cameras all over the place, and later it would be, there was a search warrant executed there. So it became so glaringly obvious that we were sniffing, literally sniffing them out in Maine. So it's all the more troubling when it's that obvious and you still have people in the Attorney General's office saying, no, you know, you can't comment on this very obvious thing that's happening. You have to pretend like this isn't a factor you have to pretend that it's not Chinese organized crime we even had this sheriff Morton's not gonna like this but one of the first media hits that I did about Chinese organized crime in May was Laura

Ingram on Fox News Laura calls up she wants to do something about this she's big anti-weed and I didn't know this at the time found out mid segment that they had asked Sheriff Morton from Pinobscot County to come on and he's been pretty aggressive on the Chinese marijuana grows did some of the early search warrants some of the early arrests formed a task force that went after this big chicken barn that had one of the individuals had direct ties to the New York consulate the CCP consulate in New York we can talk about we can talk about those direct connections that we've proven and reported out but I find out

mid segment that Laura emailed Sheriff Morton asking him to come on or her producer did and said I want to talk about these Chinese marijuana gross and his comment back to her was like I'd prefer that you not mentioned that they're Chinese or something of the song I'm not quoting him directly but like he specifically asked like don't don't talk about the fact that they're all Chinese and she put that statement up on the TV and I'm supposed to like react to it in real time and I'm like well I think it's kind of important that you mentioned that because they're all backed by a nation state they all share a common

language they're all using we chat they're using in America yes yeah yeah no we chat is critical to this we chat is critical to can you explain the infrastructure that if you don't mind yeah a little tangent yeah I'll take some Of course. And we'll come back into Wii chat. I'll get you right into, I'll get you some water. But the we chat thing, and for people that aren't familiar with WeChat and what it is, can you just explain what it is?

Yeah, of course. So, WeChat, we chat is like Twitter or any kind of messaging app. I guess maybe it's what Elon Musk is thinking about when he buys X and wants it to be the everything app. So WeChat is your direct messaging. it's your shopping, it's a payment processing app. And it's Chinese language only controlled by the Chinese government. They can use it in America because we have freedom. In order to use the app, though, you have to, it's, they have like a social gatekeeping around it.

So you have to be approved by other approved WeChat users in order to use the app. it has some like proximity location yeah yeah yeah like you have to be invited but there's also like people have to vouch for you in order for you to be allowed into it and you can also create trusted networks within we chat so that if you're on the east coast

running a marijuana grow you can see a list of numbers or we chat users and communicate with them on we chat never seeing them in person but they own a grow supply store in California, and they're going to ship you pesticides and fungicides and fumigants that they imported illegally from China. And you never have to know their name. You don't have to, you know, look them up in a phone book. You just know, I'm dating myself. You don't have to look them up online. You know, you don't have to find their website. But you know through this network that you can send a we chat message with your address to this number, pay them, transfer it through

we chat and they're going to send you the pesticides, fungicides, or whatever grow supplies you need for your marijuana grow. So this creates a payments and logistics infrastructure for the Chinese networks to use that is virtually impermeable to American law enforcement because there's the linguistics barrier, but there's also the technological barrier of, you know, getting inside, you know, end-to-end encryption on a Chinese app. You really can only catch it on one of the endpoints if you have like a cooperation of one of the end users, unless there's some, you know, NSA fuckery that I don't even know about and they've cracked WeChat, I don't know.

I hope so. But this app allows for very sophisticated coordination, not just on the mechanics of growing the marijuana once you're at the house, but also facilitating the purchases. So we looked at one, looking at these property records, were just spotting patterns engaged in basic pattern recognition. One of the patterns was... Not some racist.

One of the banks was Quantic Bank, which is a bank headquartered in New York. And based on the patterns that you see in the property records, they didn't really do a lot of lending in Maine. There was a couple here and there. They had a couple of mortgages on file. And then all of a sudden, 2020 hits and they're just mortgage business takes off. It's kind of weird. And it just so happens that Maine's right. registries allow you to search by mortgage company in addition to the person who's buying the

property and the person who's selling the company. So when you type in Quantic Bank for any county in Maine, just spits out all the names. You can't help but recognize, well, geez, kind of seems like Quantic Banks only lending to Chinese people. That's weird. You click through and you look at all the mortgages. And like 80% of these people are from New York. The rest are from Massachusetts, maybe like one from California.

That's weird. All these Chinese Chinese people from out of state just all of a sudden decided to use this one bank. And as we looked closer at the mortgage documents, we saw just two loan officers were doing almost all of the Quantic Banks business in Maine. And one was a Taiwanese national and the other was a Chinese national, born, raised, educated in China and now working at a bank in New York. It makes sense. They speak the language. They would be the people to handle mortgage business for other people who speak Chinese. But we interviewed both of them actually. And one of them told us that they specifically advertised on we chat like they targeted like maybe they didn't know

i'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and said that they didn't know that they were let's call it advertising not like you know getting yourself into the directory of the the chinese cartels but they were putting themselves out on we chat as the people who could facilitate property acquisition for chinese nationals and on this network controlled by the ccp and they were actually using a program called the community development finance institution, which Trump just rift, by the way. Everyone's been fired from this department, the CDFI. It's a Treasury Department program that specifically gives, helps facilitate rather, lending to foreign nationals. There's a special program. Oh, is just the H1B1 thing? No, that's totally separate. That's the housing, that's federal housing

assistance. That's another one that's been scheme. All right, let's say what this one. Yeah, this one is, hold on. The CDFI was created intentionally to help marginalized communities. The idea is if you're a new American, as the euphemism is, if you're a new American, you might work in the restaurant business or for whatever reason you might have non-traditional income. So you're not going to be able to go to the traditional route of getting a mortgage where you can provide a bank's statement and pay stubs and show your ability to pay. So we're going to create this financial product, which is more risky, but the CDFI federal government is going to come in and backstop

it and provide certain guarantees. It's going to make it so that these institutions can feel more comfortable lending to foreign nationals with no legal status in the U.S. who can't prove their income and are having the closing costs of the mortgage covered by a third party. so if you're you know in the organized crime world think about that you're somebody who's just arrived here no legal status in the u.s doesn't have any provable income and someone else is paying their closing costs it's a pretty good product if you're in the organized crime business and you're looking to buy some property and so they they use the cfi program which quantic bank advertised on we chat and bought 75 80 houses these are just the ones that they were buying with mortgages not the ones that they were buying with

cash. So you saw maybe like a third, two-thirds mix of how they're buying it. But that's the centrality that WeChat plays to how these networks operate across the, you know, internationally, but specifically within the U.S. It's a very helpful command and control infrastructure. Wait, wait a minute, though. Maybe I'm thinking about this way too simply and missing the boat right now, but I feel like I'm not. So WeChat's allowed here because we free speech, meaning other platforms from other places. Just like Twitter's allowed. Just like it's allowed, even though we're not allowed there in China, because they don't have that, right? We don't set our laws based on what China does. Correct. It's perfectly legal then on a public platform where people

are communicating and advertising this stuff for the FBI to surveil that, right? Not private messages, but the actual public messages and things like that. I mean, it seems like they're literally advertising what they're doing step by step on a public platform, not behind DMs. Yeah. So why aren't we like? Maybe we are. I don't know.

I mean, this was just if you look, if you saw the advertisement, you would think, well, that's just a Chinese language advertisement on WeChat. You wouldn't instantly connect it to two, three years down the road. You're going to have 100 houses in rural Maine that have been bought using this mortgage program and this bank. But now we are now growing marijuana. Yeah. So there have been, I think, two cases.

in Maine charged the charges of bank fraud and I think one of them might have been a a Quantic Bank loan but don't hold me to that but there was these people basically lied to get mortgages they said you know we want this mortgage this is going to be our primary residence it was like the Letitia James thing or the Troy Jackson a politician in Maine did this as well you say it's going to be your primary residence so that you can get a lower interest rate there's all kinds of benefits to it but they instead of making it their second home or a rental home turned it into an illegal small business so they've effectively committed mortgage fraud so only a tiny tiny

minority of them have actually been charged on it um yeah there you go new york men strike plea deals over bank fraud conspiracy tied to chinese cannabis cartels in maine by steve robinson try oh great great picture yeah we've really embraced the dragon motif the liberals the liberals the liberals call us racists for having the dragon yeah they said the dragon's kind of hard i think the dragon's bad i like the dragon i would want like if i wanted to get t-shirts if i were doing a legal activity i would want to be represented by the dragon i'd be like they all have the tattoos like they actually get the tattoos they love it it's i feel like it's culturally appropriate framing dragon yeah yeah this is flaming dragon so i mean i you want me to read some of this

Steve? Yeah, sure. Okay. Two New York men have agreed to plead guilty on a federal case, alleging they lied to banks to buy three main homes that were later used as illegal marijuana growth sites. According to plea agreements filed this week in U.S. District Court and Bangor that no one but Steve Robinson read, the plea bargain is extremely generous to Yongtong Liang, 36, and Yong Ling Dong. I'm sorry.

I'm just fucking this up. Yang Liang Gang, 34, and was struck by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maine, which does not have a U.S. attorney nominated by President Donald Trump. Pleat papers say Yang Tong Liang will admit to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and one count of maintaining a marijuana-involved premises, according to a report from the media arm of Pulse Marketing Company in Bangor. that's a much more lenient penalty than Liang could have incurred given he was originally facing 15 felony charges. So there's something being brought. There's something. I mean,

there's a theory of prosecution there that gets to the people who are actually benefiting from this. I mean, the other instances you have like the indentured servant who happens to be there, gets caught, and maybe there's a $500 fine. If they get felony charges, if those stick, they could be deported. But for the most part, they just make bail. disappear you know they're gone into the wind and they can go down to new york and never see a little bit of paperwork they come back with a different driver's license and a different name um that's another thing they get a different name yeah i mean they i mean if an illegal alien can their driver's license in new york a month after they've crossed the border

why can't they just come back here and get a different driver's license oh no shit that does make sense like new york is new yorks uh i don't know whether is it uh bureau of motor vehicles department of motor vehicles whatever they have registry of motor vehicles um it's aiding and abetting organized crime because they're just printing fake IDs for illegal aliens. But you're supposed to have... That's why the Trump administration is suing them. That's what I'm saying. This makes no sense to me that this became a thing because I've only ever looked at it.

You know, I go to the DMV, the minimum amount I have to, right? Yeah. Of course, like anybody. They tell me, I've got to present my six points of ID, whatever it is, birth certificate, Social Security card, you know, you name it. Yeah. But you have to do that. And if I don't do that, I don't get a full.

fucking driver's license. So how do these people walk in there when they don't have any of this stuff and get a driver's license? Well, you have to be a member of a marginalized community. That helps. You know, and I mean, they're doing this in all, all states. You know, and if you're a asylum seeker, and this gets into some of the complexities of immigration law, but if you're an asylum seeker, then you do have this gray zone of legal status while your weight, not legal status, but you're on parole, essentially. So if you've asked for asylum, you're on parole until a immigration court judge can say your asylum claim is yay or nay. Most of the time it's nay, but you still don't get deported and you can get a work authorization number and that work

authorization number can be a stand-in for a social security number. So the pattern that we've seen is you have, you know, your standard Chinese marijuana house employee comes over the Mexican border. It gets smuggled up to New York and stays at a house in Brooklyn or Staten Island flushing for a little while and it's just long enough to get a piece of mail or something where they can get a New York license once they get that New York license and they come up to Maine they are assumed to be a US citizen because we're a sanctuary state you're not going to get questioned over your citizenship citizenship status if you get pulled over in some in some towns it's it's even against local ordinances or local law to ask them about their immigration status. If you go to the welfare office or something, they can't ask you if you're a U.S. citizen or a lawful resident because that would be offensive.

You would be engaged in profiling if you did that. So they're assumed to be a U.S. citizen. But the New York IDs creates a whole other set of problems when it comes to effectively, having law enforcement effectively root out what's going on and enforce the laws against these guys. I know where this would never happen, Dief. Mrs. Dief would never let this through.

She would never, ever, ever let this happen. I was literally just thinking that when he's just like, yeah, people will come into the DMV and do some like, dude, they come up to my mom's window. Not a fucking shot in hell. Donna is letting that fly. She'd be, she'd be like, I know what you're doing. Good for her. I know what you're doing. Honestly, that might be part of the solution is people just using their, yeah, people do more Donnas and more.

Yeah, she's a, she's a savage. More Donnas and more of this random guy who pretends to be a code enforcement officer, you know, but the, but, uh, you know, the, the, the left or liberals would look at that and be like, what, you want, you want more people just taking the law into their own hands and being racists. No, I don't want that. But also like, you need a little bit of, uh, you know, defensiveness of your culture and your society. Like, you're, you're talking about a totally anti-social group of people who have no interest whatsoever in integrating and becoming part of the economy. They're here to undermine. They're here to undermine. to exploit they're destroying the environment like these these marijuana grow houses become wastelands can you explain yeah the the whole environment thing obviously they're dumping a lot of horrible poisonous shit like a lot of stuff robert f kennedy probably hates but what else probably stuff stuff that uh robert f kennedy doesn't even know about um doesn't even know about it you can actually look up um uh somerset county chinese toxins um because i know everything that happens on this one. Okay. I've seen it all. That's a pretty good one. The glutasate has been

killing since I was 17. I forget who it was, but somebody was like, well, somebody please get RFK Jr. a glass of water. Do you imagine if that wasn't what? He's just had a frog in his throat. You know, he's like jacked, right? But he's intimidating. He sits there and he like squeezes himself even more when he's talking when you watch him and I'm like I feel like that's not good for the vocal cords like something else like it like the veins are like pop and he's like it's true and then they dumped it in the hudson and i'm fucking telling you tell you yeah he's just like all by the way did you see that new yorker reporter uh is uh gonna write a book about uh sending pictures of her butthole to uh rfk junior you need to hear about this at all that the new york

explain uh second tab we're on a tangent here uh that's all i forget i forget what her name is Yeah, Olivia Nuzzi. There we go. Oh, wait, the Olivia Nuzzi story. I know about that. So she was sexting with RFK Jr. She's writing a book about it now. Oh, no, she's writing a book? She's going to book deal about What's sending butthole picks to RFK Jr. What a garbage book.

Oh, I would love to know what happened there because Olivia Nuzi, that is, she's an interesting one, man. Well, she blew up her marriage over this. She blew up the marriage. Didn't she blow up a marriage to get into that marriage? It was a, well, I think so. Allegedly? She was, allegedly. She was engaged to like the Politico senior editor or something.

And then that got blown up from this. No pun intended. But she wrote the story. Olivia, this is where it gets really interesting. She was like the first damn in like, quote unquote, mainstream media to write a story about Biden. Okay. She wrote a story. I want to say this was.

I want to say this was spring, 2024, maybe early summer towards when that disastrous debate happened during the election cycle. But she wrote the story about not only recounting what people were saying behind the scenes about his clearly cognitive decline, but also her own experiences with him in a journalistic capacity where she was like, what the fuck? Like he's not there. and she caught so yeah july 2024 is right after the yeah we'll mike benson and get it but it was right after the debate she dropped it and clearly had been working on it for months and then it was very interesting that then you know she had obviously been in phone something something but then that all but there was nothing physical supposedly there was nothing physical about their relationship except for that hike they went on that's what her story was about the raw masculine energy that was

surging off RFK Jr. And Matt, he just takes her up in the San Monica Mountains and his bones are just good for him. Just fucking. There's one. There's one thing for him. I was just going to say there's one pharmaceutical product that RFK is fine with. Don't tell Pfizer.

That'd actually be a great. That'd be a great Pfizer ad. RFK. No, he actually got it. RFK Jr., wiping sweat off his head with Olivia Nuzzi in the background. He got at a gas station, actually. Okay, right. Yeah, but this, I'm not going to read this story, but this was, shout out to Mike Benz.

He showed us this tool where you can go get anything that's fine the paywall legally. But she wrote up this whole thing, man. I just thought it was so interesting that, yes, clearly, like, she probably was doing something with RFK, allegedly, but. It was a texting, intellectual. They went after her. They went after her, and now she's writing a book. about it when it blew up her whole life i mean i know she had some of her monetization blown up overnight but like she made money like she's still gonna be all right she's a young blonde reporter

she'll be fine yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know how any if any parts of that are true like the young part but uh i don't know what her situation is but it's an interesting to yeah she's like 32 33 something like that yeah i don't know why i thought she was yeah no she's she's less than half his age yeah yeah he's uh that's uh that's a that's a Hey, it's not helping with those black book rumors, but the heart wants, man. You know, and they're the two intellectuals, you know, they're sapio, sapiosexuals, right? They're just attracted to each other's keen, you know, view of the world. And I should, I should disclose, by the way, that Olivia blew up a guy who would later come to work for me. Um, you got to be careful with

your language. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Did a hat job, an unfair, given, uh, unfair journalistic portrayal maybe like took advantage of to get a story not not in a sexual way um just uh you know a little too comfortable maybe having uh you know some adult beverages and then writing about things that maybe he shouldn't have said or he didn't think we're going to end up in a story that might have got him in trouble um but um uh did this all start with illegal Chinese toxins in Somerset County. But actually, Beef,

while we're on it, maybe we should get Olivia in here. She's going to be doing a book tour. Actually, yeah. I'll do the whole podcast in RFK's voice. She'll feel right at home. I support that.

I think we, I'll send, I'll send an email. I don't know, I don't think I can make three hours doing it. That'd be tough. That'd be tough. It's good.

You got to get me on a day where I haven't lost my voice. Do you have a Trump? My Trump isn't that good. It's harder. My Trump's not, my Trump was actually decent like six, seven years ago

and I stopped doing it. And now it's like, I don't love doing it. That's so good anymore. Yeah, no, I feel like that's probably better than what I got. There's certain ones that just like Mike Tyson, Robert F. Kennedy, I just never had to try. I just got him, you know. Well, it's actually, we can talk about this later, but Tyson, at one point in time, so Tyson has his own weed companies. I don't know how involved he is, he is in those or if he's just, it's like a branding deal.

So they can sell it as like Tyson Jays or something. I got my own weed company because I got to make the money in my post career. You know what I'm saying? Yes. So he was tweeting about something or he retweeted a story of mine. And I responded to him and was just like, Mike, come up to Maine. Let's come, come. I'll take you to a Chinese weed grow.

And he retweeted me and was like, yeah, let's make this happen. And I ended up texting with his people about it and never came together. Oh, my God. We got to make that happen. Well, make them wear a GoPro. Well, I started looking at some of his products, and I don't think if I had to, if I did it, that encounter as a journalist with integrity, rather than some guy who wants to be in a video with Mike Tyson, I would have to ask him about the synthetic THCP and his products. And, you know, you'd have to ask about the, not necessarily like good main ground natural cannabis like you'd get from a nice legal, ethical main business. I feel like Mike would fix that.

I think he would. That's why I'm saying. I don't think he's like involved. I don't think he's like, Call Shanghai Minstar. We're going to get some THCP shipped over here and sprinkle the THCP powder on your, on your joy. I don't think he's doing that. I think he's just sold his licensing stuff to some company that's selling, you know, hemp, intoxicating hemp products under his label. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, you should, you should almost experiment, especially like with some of the guys you know now, like use those back channels and see if he would, you know, like off the record. Yeah. See if he would, like, say, hey, if you have these two or three over here and you didn't know about this and I told you about it, would you look at it. And then maybe he would. And then it turns into a whole new story too. Because he's like, we're cleaning up the whole company right here. We got my man, Steve. It would be really funny. Mike Tyson cleans up. Mike Tyson versus the Chinese mafia. The fight of his life. Get the scorecard. Mike Tyson versus a big dragon. I got this tattoo. This is a triad. I went up to the Chinese and I said, she, she, we're done with business. We ain't. doing business i'm done with that oh man that would have been hey stranger stranger things have happened man yeah and i and i and i you know i like i like i like tyson i don't think he's

doing anything sketchy with his company it's just like if if we if in that um you know world where mike tyson shows up to go get the triad we tour of maine which a lot i've given to a lot of people uh if he were to do that i'd have to be like mike you know we had some of your products tested you got this THCP shit that's like associated with higher incidences of psychosis and tachycardia yeah can you explain this all the way if we're going to go there just yeah for sure we understand the science of what this means and how it gets how regular products that are legalized get this and stuff for sure so I guess we we kind of started talking about the the pesticides that we're going to come back to that so yeah so but they're they're related so the these little baggies

that you can see up there those are identical to baggies being found at Chinese marijuana grows in California. And these are pesticides. Pesticides, fungicides. They dump them into a barrel and they burn them and the smoke coats everything, including the marijuana and just kills everything. No bugs, no mold can grow. So you don't get product loss, but you just get pesticides shit all over the place. It's toxic. It ends up in the environment, ends up in the end user. It's bad news. So these are illegal to manufacturer use in the United States. So they're importing them illegally from China. They do like a, they've got all kinds of gimmicks to get around our. tariffs in our customs as opposed to Border Patrol, but our customs protection infrastructure,

they know how to get through like de minimis shipping so they structure all the packages so that they're small enough so that they don't get a close scrutiny or they mislabel them as some innocuous industrial ingredient so that they don't get, you know, it doesn't say like Chinese poison on the side of it. But they're another product that they're importing into the United States is called THCP. And you can actually look up at Shanghai Minstar, THCP. So this is a company, it's got several locations, one in Shanghai. And THCP naturally occurs in cannabis in a very, very small quantity.

So you've got, so yeah, here's the story you wrote about it, but you've got all these different products that are, I mean, different chemicals or molecules in the cannabis flower called cannabinoids. yeah and they all do have some kind of like effect on your body whether it's small or large but they're all in various quantities tc delta nine's the big one that's your psychoactive drug if you're just taking like a maranol tablet or a gummy or something the THC delta nine that's going to be the primary ingredient that's the one we've developed our our bands around that's we so we our bands are focused on this molecule is going to be illegal this molecule if it comes from these two plants is going to be illegal but all the other molecules around it like Delta 8 or Delta 10, which you'll see sold throughout the south.

It's probably, you know, gas stations around here that sell Delta 8, Delta 10. Yeah, that's what the defuses. The three chi. I mean, they were an advertiser on barstool. And it's, it's just like a, you know, it's a marijuana or cannabis analog. But THCP is one of these. And this company is one of the largest producers of THCP. And they're in China.

And we got a hold of an email correspondence where this guy who's hawkin chemicals, in China is just like lays out the whole playbook for how they're going to dodge sanctions. Like we're going to, you know, if we have an 800 pound shipment, we'll break it down into this many boxes so that, you know, we don't get tariffs and we don't get inspections. And if you can't have products showing up to your store with Chinese labeling on them, we'll ship them to our friends in Colorado and they'll ship them from you so they'll be repackaged and it'll look discreet. And, you know, we'll label it as this, you know, like random long chemical that I can't remember

or pronounce. and no one's even going to know that it's cannabis related. But the THCP, technically legal, it's naturally occurring in the plants, but in such small amounts that your even heavy cannabis users really aren't getting huge amounts of THC Delta 9, I mean, THCP in their system, very small amounts. But it does have a little bit of a drug effect. So if you're like a high schooler and you just randomly buy this joint at a gas station because they're not carding and you can legally sell these like smokeable products,

from a gas station. And it's got THCP in it. You're going to have higher risk of psychosis, higher risk of tachycardia, which is your heart rate going out of control. And there was actually a study published in PubMed this year that found an incidence of a guy smoking THCP for the first time and went into psychosis and attempted to commit suicide. And this was like not somebody who was, I mean, he might have been genetically prone to having that reaction, but not someone who was suicidal in the normal course of events. And I'm not a, like, a reefer madness guy at all. Yeah, you said, you smoked a lot in college.

Yeah, I would say, you take this like, you know, one chemical that people haven't been smoking in large quantities for thousands of years, like the cannabis plant. And then you extract it, sorry. Yes, no, you're good. Extract it in a lab in China into, you know, 99% purity and then sprinkle it on a joint. And then you're, you know, consuming as much of that as you need to, in order to feel some kind of a high from it. I mean, yeah, I can foresee some negative effects of that. And it hasn't been it hasn't been tested from a scientific or medical standpoint, but also we don't have the human

experience over thousands of years like we do with just regular old Mexican ditch weed. Like we've got a lot of experience that shows that that's not going to kill you. Not so much with the synthetics and the hemp intoxicants. Yes. You're speaking my language here because I've always been of the belief that especially with weed should be legalized because you know just like people can make the wrong decisions with alcohol and have it ruin their life you know you you could technically do that with weed if you take it way too far but you look at it on just on just base weed base weed highlight on base like you don't yeah you don't you don't you don't see that you don't see the damage of that at nearly the level that you do say alcohol so it never

made sense to me however when you then legalize it and now you introduce this whole new world where it's not supposed to be checked and make sure that the product's pure. It's actually the opposite where now we have it coming from all over the place with all kinds of new shit in it that like if you just went and picked a weed plan in fucking Columbia or something, this has a lot more things in it that do cause these problems. And some of the terms you just brought up, I know there are people out there who can relate to this. I've known people, I'll just say, around me who either some of those people or some of their family members have run into these psychosis problems and things. things like that because they think they're smoking regular weed yeah something like that and they're not and then this isn't even talking about the fact that now you even have to worry about like it this makes me terrified as someone who's not a father yet but like your kids you know smoking a joint

and someone sprinkled fucking fentanyl in it yeah or something it's it's very scary man yeah and what am i that's a picture of a THCP joint that I bought at a gas station in Lewiston Lewiston, Lewiston, Maine okay so not a dispensary not regulated this was I was actually in that area because I was going to investigate we got a public records request showing us where all the shooting incidents were in Lewiston and so we went I wanted to go check out the areas where all the shootings were and so I went to this convenience store that was on the block and just happens that they're selling all these you know synthetic hemp products and some 70H products yeah we haven't talked about that yet I start looking into this THCP thing but again this is you know it's available

and a poor you know one of the poorest most dangerous parts of lewiston no regulatory oversight the person who's selling this to me doesn't you know they don't they don't kind of card they don't care it's no trouble if they they get caught um but if you look on the back of this it's got a little bar a little QR code that you can scan so you can go to the lab and you can get the certificate of analysis that's going to show you that it's it's all garbage it's all it's all faked it's all and the company supposedly that does the analysis on this won't return my phone call And they're like big time hemp lobbyists. And if you look at the certificate of analysis that's associated with this THCP joint,

you follow it all the way to the end to try to find the address of the company that produced this joint, it's going to pop up in a field out in Colorado. So actually there's no one there. So we have no idea where this product came from, but it's got THCP in it, and it's sitting on a shelf in Lewiston, Maine, and the THCP very likely was manufactured in China by Shanghai Minstar or a company like that. So there's, this is the hemp loophole for one. This is China exploiting America for two.

And this is the brave new world of these synthetic drugs where you, we've got this like ancestral memory of smoking tobacco and marijuana and therefore it's safe. Or you go to the grocery store and you buy something and therefore it's safe. Those rules don't apply anymore, especially not with gas station drugs, gas station heroin, gas station weed. Like you have people who don't give up. talk about their end consumer they just know they're going to make money on it or maybe it's the chinese communist party and they want to undermine the american public and and undermine public health

by flooding the market with these cheap dangerous drugs uh so you know buyer beware is the is the name of the game like you talk about people smoking something the vapes make it even harder like oh yeah nicotine vapes um the the cannabis vapes it's it's much harder to know what exactly you're dealing with and it's beyond the means of the average person to test a product every time they buy it, if they're going to just be a, you know, a recreational cannabis user. There has to be a level of trust between, just like you trust that somebody's not poisoning your coffee or your beard, I mean, your beer. You have to trust that somebody's not poisoning your weed. And increasingly that trust is harder to place.

How do you, if right now someone's listening, and I'll be even specific about this, They're the parent of a 13, 14-year-old specifically. Yeah. Coming into high school soon. Yeah. You don't want to be the helicopter parent that locks your kid in room or, you know, it doesn't let them be a kid and experience some things. How do you have the conversation with them, though, about making the right choices,

which also involves being very careful. what they consume, if, not that you're condoning it, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe my opinion will change when I'm actually having this conversation, but I think that you just have to be honest with them because the truth is fully sufficient. You don't have to be like, you know, if you smoke pot, you're going to turn into a lazy bum and you're going to end up arrested and it's the gateway drug and you're going to be, you know, sucking dick for crack down on Fifth Street. You don't have to do that.

You can just tell them, like, hey, you know, I tried, I tried it when I was a kid. It was a little bit different when I was a kid. It wasn't as strong. And we knew, you know, that like Reggie out back, you know, down the street was like growing it in his backyard or something. Like, so we generally knew the chain of custody for this product we were smoking. You won't. You'll go to a dispensary and, you know, there might be some certificates of analysis or some safeguards or you'll buy it wherever.

but here's what you are consuming and here's what could happen if you have a genetic predisposition for addiction or psychosis or schizophrenia here's what could happen if you become a chronic user here's the the money you're going to end up spending here's the cost or the toll of addiction on your life and here are the unintended health consequences if you end up with a vaping that's been laced with 70H right laced with fentanyl um or laced with fentanyl um or this THCP product. I mean, we've seen photos that people have posted online of their trip to the emergency room after eating a gummy, typically THCP, where their heart rates like a 230, you know, like the, what is it, not the tachyometer, that would be revolutions per minute, but the EKG

is just screaming off the charts because their heart's going a mile a minute. That's not a comfortable place to be. And then who knows what the long-term consequences are of consuming like organophosphate pesticides and fungicides could be talking about fertility issues hormone issues you know I'll tell you know if you're if your child is male tell them like you know it's a chance your dick's not gonna work it's true you know they could really was yeah I mean the reproductive harm endricon disruptors there's a there's a chemical called pachlobutrazole that is very common we've actually tested flower or trim from these sites in Maine and

and found it has pesticides and fungicides on it, but there's also a plant growth inhibitor called peculubutrizole. It's very popular amongst the Chinese growers. And it makes your plants less stemmy and focuses more of their growing energy on weed. So you faster turnaround on your product from seed to harvest, but it's also an enderkin disruptor.

And all of this stuff is so new that we haven't done studies on like, well, what happens if somebody's eating every night they have a gummy that's got a little bit of Pacalo butylutriol in it? Because when you make, when you make the concentrates or the oils

that are concentrated to like 99% THC, you're also concentrating all of the oil-soluble pesticides and fungicides. So those little, you know, the vape you buy on Snapchat or the gummies that you buy from a friend, they could have concentrated levels of these

pesticides and fungicides. They could have other drugs mix into them. They could just be pure synthetics that, you know, kind of mimic cannabis, but not really. So I think education for our kids Would be the most important Just be honest on them You're just be like you're putting like

You know garbage in your body There could be long-term consequences for this You could really fuck yourself up But this is why it's also really Brave reporting on your part Not just the international implications And the crime implications And the trafficking implications

Which we haven't even talked about that yet But like If you are able to get this conversation Started even more in this nascent era of legalization, we can fix some of these problems and create a system where it's like a bar because I will tell you

one of the dumbest takes I ever had was, I mean, it wasn't my take but I happily adopted it. Of course. That makes sense, you know? That's culture, baby. Back in like 2017 when all those weed stocks were coming onto the market, right?

Yeah. So I was working on Wall Street at the time. And like... I was a Tilray investor. I was a Tulare investor too So you know what it is I think I was probably one of the few people Who sold and made money

Because I didn't know what I was doing was stocks I mean I had 10 bucks to invest So it didn't really hurt But I let's put this way I didn't make money I came back from my honeymoon and checked And I was like what the hell just happened I was like this is a little shit pot coming

This is like two guys growing pot in Canada Why is the stock worth this bunch to sell Yeah it blew the fuck up And then blew the fuck down but one of the things not i can't remember i don't think till ray is a good example but there were a lot of other companies where they were being subsidized or bought up by like anheiser bush constellation brands all these alcohol companies that sell regular alcohol you know what product you're getting they distribute it in the millions across the country and the world and i remember

thinking oh perfect yeah marlborough green they'll be able to handle this no problem nothing will get in there and it's like that is not that's not at all how it turned out yeah yeah i mean you know i guess you it's back to uh maybe we're talking about this before we started recording but you know is it is it intentional or emergent which is you know was this was this by design did some people in a you know a smoke-filled shadowy room plan it this way or is it just the emergent result of you know independent actors you know following their own uh incentive structures well yeah it's a good question part of it's the the state by state legality of it uh lends itself to smaller shops it basically be like the alcohol market if you couldn't move alcohol

across state lines legally so you like if all the alcohol uh created in main had to be consumed in main legally it's the only legal way to do it although all the alcohol you consume and all uh in Maine has to come from Maine and all the alcohol you generate has to be consumed in Maine if you're doing things legally. That's the way the wheat market works. Ditto for Oklahoma, California, Michigan, you know, you can't move it across state lines legally. So anybody doing it perfectly by the books legally is only selling within their state. And so it's harder to be that national economy of scale like anheiser Bush or InBev. You know, it's harder to do that in the marijuana a space unless you're a multi-state operator and you're you know you've got like an overhead

brand but you've got different setups in each state and different suppliers in each state so I think some of it's emergent based on how the regulatory landscape unfolded because nobody could have predicted like you know California does their medicinal marijuana program in 1996 and it kind of evolves you have normal and there's all these advocates you know maybe like you and I in our high school or college years probably could have seen the trajectory of the way things were headed but could you have guessed that like you know main's going to be among the first states that legalizes the you know a robust marijuana economy whereas florida is going to take a sharp turn red and be one of the states that says no to a marijuana like a legal um real cannabis economy

it'd be it'd be tough to predict that um but um as a result you do see that um you have it's a free-for-all you know there's a lot of really really small actors and again the the system has been set up to reward those with the loosest ethical principles because there's a huge fucking huge incentive to just take your weed from Maine and over the border in south New Hampshire at a tobacco shop as hemp you're going to make uh you know four times the price you're going to have no regulatory oversight and you're right into traditional mainstream payment rails and that can't be um it can't be overstated what a benefit that is because legal marijuana operators have such a tough time getting banked. Finding someone who's just

going to keep their savings account and their checking account is very hard because they're high risk business. It's federally illegal still. So they have to go with credit unions or financial institutions that are just operating within a given state. And they're getting their accounts canceled all the time. They can have trouble getting insurance, which you can't get insurance and you've got three quarters of a million into your grow house. Like, geez, like how are you going to do that. So the inability to keep their money at a bank, the inability to use payments processing like Visa or Square, because those entities don't want anything to do with legal cannabis, honest cannabis, I guess you could call it. They won't touch that. So it has to be an all cash transaction.

So there are all these weird ways that the ethical legal operators have to contort themselves, adds expense to their product, makes it harder to do business. But if you take the same exact plant and you sell it at a smoke shop down the street or in the next state over, you swipe your visa card, swipe your square, boom, right into your, you know, insert megabank here account. And it's clean money, it's no strings attached. That's just tobacco shop revenue, just like the thousands of other tobacco shops. It's, you know, I actually passed one on the way here, just a convenience store, actually. But it had feel free. Feel free.

Have you seen that advertised? No. They're little drinks that have, I think it's 70H and Kava, which are two, I guess, newish, newer drugs. 7-O-H is synthetic. Kava is like a South American root or something. But feel-free is one of the common products. Yeah, there you go. Looks like a little five-hour energy drink.

It's an alcohol alternative. Alcohol-al-regulated. No hangover. Just feel great. 18 plus? yeah sure it depends on what gas station you go to yeah yeah see that's a that's a common one you can see just when you search for it uh the other brands come up but i use this another product at the head shop this is something you and i were talking about out there before and i think it's a good

example so because people weren't listening to us out there i do want to bring it up but you know we live in an increasingly everything or nothing society which creates very harsh swings and now with social media being around for the last 18, 19 years, we can all scream opinions about it as well, which, you know, ends up not helping with the dialogue and nuance here. But I look at the example of a perfect example that's different than what we talked about today of like the NIL in college sports. So for years, the NCAA took advantage of these kids and made billions of dollars off the backs of these kids and, you know, something. They couldn't even go separate from the university and go make a dollar on their name, which was absolutely crazy to me.

I fully supported and continued to support athletes being able to do that. I was all my best friends in college were D1 athletes. I saw what a full-time 60 days, 60 hour a week job this was and what they were doing. And, you know, I just always empathize with that. And I think they should. But these guys at the NCAA fought it for so long and said, no, no, no. you know basically like the old dudes and suits in the smoky filled room were like fuck fuck these kids right well they were making money they were making money yeah and then finally

yeah the pressure got so much that they had to let it happen and what i think happened is mark emmer the head of nca at the time when when this i think at the time when when when this got legalized was like okay you want us to legalize it great we're going to legalize all of it so now you have they not only legalized it, but they created it so that there's unlimited transfers. You can transfer on a fucking Tuesday whenever you want, you can transfer. God knows how many times across different colleges. They made it so all the boosters at schools can go directly as a financial vehicle through the school to pay the kids directly. And they create, I mean, it's, it is. It's an arms race. Oh, dude, it's 50 times more unregulated. Yeah, it's 50 times more unregulated than professional sports.

Right. Now, I was just like, let's make. this really easy. Kids can go get marketing deals and accept money on the side for their services and leave it away from the universities, which should be great because the universities get to keep a lot of money on their work as well. It's like, this is a nice bounce. But no, those guys had to push it all the way so that now there are people like, oh, maybe we should put this rabbit back on the hat here, you know? And that is what it feels like with things like weed as well, which some i think it's ridiculous that weed is a schedule one drug and all this shit and was and the way it was elite we've covered it on the show the way it was illegalized back in the day and what it's

like in the purest forms of what it's supposed to be it's like anti-american but when you then let it out of the box and you allow criminal enterprises to to enter like the whole point was to get rid of criminal enterprises you create the greatest legalized criminal enterprise ever to come in here and do things to products that consumers don't even know what's happening. We are going to talk about that 708 in a minute, which is fucking crazy. It makes me cynical because it's like, can we ever have nice things? Or are they always just going to go, that emergent argument? Are they just going to be in the back room and be like, oh, we'll show you legalization?

Here you go. Oh, and by the way, how about the timing with all this too? It gets legalized and it's like right in the COVID era. People are home. They're chilling. You know, COVID. Yeah, I'm trying to use land. by the way.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm just saying. Yeah. Well, we can circle back around on what happens if they want to use the marijuana distribution network to distribute the next product of the Wuhan Institute for Virology. Why, why not? Why can't they just switch out the vials of THC juice for, you know, bat juice?

Absolutely, they could do that in two seconds, just swap them out of the truck and we'll go buy him at the tobacco store. I'm going to get high. Everybody's going to be smoking bat juice. that what's to stop them from doing that well anyways yeah that's wow you're i think your your point though is a valid one that we seem to it seems like the marijuana legalization was almost like a rubber ban that stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and we tried to like decriminalize stuff and now we're trying to do state legalization and we just don't want

people being locked up for 15 years of their life having a bag of a bag of weed there's like racial there's a disproportionate enforcement against minorities. It's just insane. Nobody wants that. Everybody agrees that no one should be going to jail for life for growing a pot plant or doing whatever. But the rubber band snapped and we went all the way so far over to the other end of the spectrum. And now we, I think it's safe to say

that at least in the state of Maine, we had no idea what we were getting into. There might have been some people close in the business who had kind of an inclination but nobody knew the scale of the market that we were throwing up for grabs. We set off just like a pig scramble for $10 billion in revenue. Just all right, come and get it, whoever wants it. And yeah, people did some crazy, crazy things in order to gain market share there. They still do crazy things in order to gain market share there.

I think the taxed regulated market for cannabis in Maine is somewhere between $5,000. 500 million and a billion dollars, way more than that. The black market is huge. And most of the sales aren't even happening in Maine. And you can just, it's like Oklahoma, there was a congressional testimony about Chinese cannabis networks hearings that came into existence, by the way, because of my reporting. And the staff, the staff interviewed me and decided that some doofus from the Heritage Foundation would be better to interview.

I think it was because I was going to talk about the hemp loophole. And there are some Republicans who like the hemp loophole. so they didn't want me. Why do they like it? Because their states are hemp states. Their states have hemp businesses, hemp cultivators, like Kentucky, for example, has lots of hemp cultivators. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, these were the congressional hearings. Media advisor, advisory, chairman Brechen Brechen, Brechen, announces hearing on Chinese criminal networks operating illicit marijuana farms in Oklahoma across the country. Rep. Josh Brechin, chairman of the subcommittee on oversight investigations, accountability, announced a hearing for tomorrow, September 18, 2025, to examine the national security threats

posed by Chinese criminal organizations operating illicit marijuana farms across America, including Oklahoma. And then Deep is highlighting the infiltration of Chinese criminal courts into Oklahoma's farmland is not just a state problem. It's a national security threat. These illegal marijuana grow operations serve as gateways to a wider enterprise of drug and human trafficking, as well as money laundering. This hearing will shine a light on how criminal networks that are potentially linked.

to the Chinese Communist Party, undermine our national security and facilitate transnational crime. We must take decisive action to address vulnerabilities that could be exploited by our adversaries. And I, you know what? So this is, it was this one specifically where they went to the heritage guy? Yes. He was one of their expert witnesses. But I mean, in credit to Representative Bricene for having this. I know there's tremendous resistance to, and there's a lot of work that goes into making, just like three hours or whatever of congressional testimony happen it's a really big problem in Oklahoma bigger I think even than the problem in Maine they just they don't have in Oklahoma someone like me who's I don't know like my mom my mom took too much Tylenol or something and I just became obsessed

with this it was just like I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with this story they need they need uh you know yeah exactly they need they need someone out there who can that's shame goes his line I like that a lot. He's like, I got Nick by the, by the syndrome. Well, maybe. Yeah. But they estimated that their market, their illicit market in Oklahoma was 150 billion. 150 billion.

In Oklahoma. Yes. 150 billion. And Oklahoma only has a medicinal marijuana program. They don't have adult use recreation, but they can do the math. And they can do the similar things in Oklahoma where you can say, okay, we have X number of licenses out for people to grow this many plants, do some basic math to figure out what the annual output is for all of our licensed marijuana grows, and they realize, oh, holy shit, like we're licensing, you know, 50 times more marijuana production than could ever conceivably be consumed in this state legally if every single adult in this state was a full-time daily heavy marijuana user. Hmm, I wonder where the rest of that marijuana is going.

well very obviously at a state you know you can just you can infer that crimes are being committed at least violations of federal marijuana laws infer you can explicitly yeah yeah i mean we we know we know they're not like growing at a loss they're not destroying their product yep uh because they can't find you know they've saturated the market um so it's a uh a very very big market and we like we didn't anticipate how people would take advantage of that how much money was on the line this the huge appetite for cannabis products I mean I think it came out at the hearing that other countries are complaining about the export of American cannabis America always used to be like importing weed from Mexico or even Canada but now we're an export country and states like

UK are complaining about American cannabis flooding their streets and part of that is because we we just didn't we underestimated how quickly appetite for cannabis would grow like I think freakonomics does a super freakonomics does a interesting podcast they did one maybe a year ago about it's like a three-part series on on weed and um we just crossed the point where the number of daily alcohol consumers was lower than the number of daily marijuana consumers that doesn't surprise me doesn't surprise me at all either but I think you know if you're an economist trying to forecast out or a business analyst trying to say like, oh, what's the demand for this product? You can't really take into account very well changing social norms or like people being okay,

you know, vaping at bars or people just deciding, well, I'm not really going to go out as much because I'm not going to drink. I'm just going to be happy to stay home and play Xbox or something. I think, but now I almost wonder if you can just because it's like we're getting into those years of the post-COVID effects, right? so you can you can that you can scientifically measure some of the psychological effects which can lead to let's say product research being able to spit out like this that maybe you wouldn't have been able to do effectively or even somewhat accurately a decade yeah yeah you've definitely got more um you've got more data at least to to plug into your model but i think initially everyone underestimated i i think the mental model was like everybody i know who already smokes

weed is just going to start smoking weed legally. You know, that wasn't the case. Use has exploded and the amount of money to be made has exploded. There are products on the market now that were inconceivable to hippies 70 years ago. Like, you'd never be able to tell them, oh, you're going to have this like, you know, the same amount of weed that would fill up this baggie is going to be in a little cart and you're just going to be able to vape it and it's going to taste like watermelons and it's going to be like the cleanest, happiest tie you've ever had. Happen fast. Yes. Yeah, it did. It did. there were some people who knew how quickly it would happen, I think, you know, there were people who were, had been experimenting and were, you know, knew how. Who were these people?

I mean, some of the existing scientists, some of the, you know, not scientists, some of the existing marijuana companies and their scientists, it's not, it's not like rocket science. You take a whole bunch of weed, you pack it into a big metal or glass tube, and you blow gas through it. Like, I knew, I knew, I went to high school with people who have, like, done smaller. versions of this back when it was illegal. Take the trimmings rather than the bud from your plant, and they've still got some cannabinoids in them. And most people would just throw that leaf away because you can't smoke it and get high. But if you pack all that leaf in and you stick a butane refill thing in one end, out the other end comes a little gooey pot tar, cannabis tar, THC oil. So these kind of techniques have been known about. You basically got like, I think there was a why I forget what movie this was in but about the um they make fun of like the utility pothead who can make a bong out of like a snorkel and an avocado forget it might have been from a chapelle

sketch or something but we basically gave these like engineer stoners unlimited legality to build the biggest pot extraction pot cultivation setups they possibly could and um they did it very well um whether it was the um the gross setups or the high potency extracts you know they've got like Shatter, vape oil, um, uh, dabs is another one. I mean, I'm probably, I probably sound like an old fogy even talking about this, even though I don't feel like that, but there's a lot of these products where are inconceivable to like the hippie generation. Yeah. Um, no, I remember taking a dab for the first time. That was, I entered another fucking stratosphere. Well, the great thing about a dab is your that's the highest you're ever going to be is right after you're like whoa

you feel like hunter biden hit the crack pipe it wasn't even a roller coaster bro you were i was i was just fucking sitting up on another planet with that stuff but it you're right it's crazy how easily accessible just like that you're 7-11 you know that you can go get this stuff but you keep referring actually before i go here i've been thinking this for a while when you were saying that you thought at the beginning like oh maybe i do a few reports on this someone will start doing anything about it and then you know nothing happened the reason that then like i was like god that's surprising and then in my head i'm like you know what no it's not my you ever see my friend john norris and his reporting out in california yeah all right so john john was it's a different

context than what you're doing i would actually argue it's probably even darker what you found to be honest with you but you know fishing fishing game guy in california comes across a fucking mountain weed plantation yeah run by the cartels operated here the whole bit and then comes across a million of them no one's doing shit about it the water diversion yeah the environmental destruction that comes with that oh my god insane destruction of property values you're like you're suddenly your river dries up yeah like what the hell did this is this climate change yep he's oh no it's the cartel weed factory giving a shootout to it like it like they're just openly shooting at it yeah like what the fuck

is this yeah the Hispanic cartels have a different um yeah approach to violence that is true they they they go to that their switch is a little faster but you know and then my friend horay ventura who was actually the one i believe who originally connected me with john you know he made a documentary in like 2020, 2020, 2021, about this where he came across like these, you know, fucking desert. Yeah, yeah, these, these plantations like outside of L.A., you know, got in car chases with some of these guys and no one does anything about it. And so what you're seeing now on the East Coast that you're dealing with, you know, seems to be purely a Chinese operation rather than Mexican cartel involved at all here. but it's like it's the same movie in a different context to where for whatever reason, reasons, these people are operating with impunity here.

Yeah. And someone like you can be going like this, like the person in the movie while the train's coming, look, look. And everyone's like, yeah, don't worry about it. I mean, you've, I'm sure, experience some of this too, but it's like the incumbents in whatever space, like in this instance, media or journalism, they don't like the people coming in you know or you know the people who are already doing news and media in some kind of area they don't like someone trying to start something new or experiment or take a different approach

so as independent media um you know the the established newspapers that have been around for a hundred years and then it's like you never written an interesting story ever but they're the official vanguards of what is news and what isn't news they kind of you know they get a little offended that someone else is here breaking stories or someone's making interesting content and like oh that's not you know We don't want to talk about that. We don't want to talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Stop, stop paying attention to that.

That's not, that's not news. He's just a racist, xenophob, you know, whatever. You know, don't, you don't have to pay attention to that. But I think that that's, you know, you see versions of that as well from, like, you know, the L.A. Times. Are they going to want to go out there and admit that, like, they got, you know, scooped. And the, to be, to give the devil as due, the L.A. Times has done some good work on the pesticides coming from the Chinese grows. But they're not going, they're not going to, they're not going to want to quote, you know, some independent startup, your cite them or give a hat tip to them

even for breaking a story, any more than I'm going to want to be like, oh, you know, as the, you know, the Boston Globe reported, the Boston Globe did this excellent story, blah, blah, blah, blah, well, I'm not going to want to do that, but it's not going to reach the point where I'm willingly blinding myself to a major news story, like a transnational crime ring in my backyard. I'm not going to blind myself to that just because I don't want to give some other guy credit for it, but I can at least understand it. And I think that that's a factor that's happening in newsrooms all over the place. You know, you don't want to give someone else credit for that. There's a little bit of protectionism around your industry, I guess. But I don't know, it's a weird.

It's a weird instinct on that part. I feel like that ship has sailed, though, too. And I think, you know, as much as people don't want to hear this in either side. apparently there has to just for the sake of society there has to be some sort of like cross-recognition where it's not how do i want to say this you shouldn't have to recognize things that are clearly corrupt let's start there so where people on either side of the issue mainstream we've seen it for years and independent media we see it now as well with a growing industry when people are just lying cheating and stealing to fucking do a story fuck that like you know i don't want to be in your Club, but where people are at least trying, even if they're not doing an amazing job, they're trying to

actually report stories. There needs to be some sort of hopefully mutual respect that ends up happening between these industries if the priority is actually on trying to report things that are happening and make a difference. And that's what I would hope it is. That's what it seems like it is for you. I'd like to think there's people still left in mainstream media that may feel that way as well. and like I want to find those people where they are I don't give a fuck whether it's independent or mainstream it seems to be there's more people actually getting this shit in independent right now but I like that I don't give a fuck where it's coming from I just want I want the facts you know and we'll do with that what we can yeah I mean I think you judge people by their work you know just because someone works at Fox News or CNN or whatever doesn't necessarily mean that they have you know maybe a an approach to journalism that would be the opposite of what you just described you're looking for. But, you know, you can look at an individual's work and kind of see how you feel about it, judge them by their work. But I think that you are increasingly seeing most of the interesting journalism, if not all of it, is coming from independent creators.

And I don't know, I don't know why that is. You could probably write an entire book about the culture at some of these big media companies and how it discourages risk-taking or certain things like, you know, a lot of report on China. you know, like ABC, CBS, NBC, if they were going to do a story about this, they'd have to run that up the food chain, you know, make sure we're not offending any of our, you know, Chinese business partners. So what is that? What is that about? Because, you know, they say, what is it, journalism is supposed to comfort the afflicted

and afflict the comfortable. I like to, people accuse us of being the, when I say us, I mean the main wire, of being advocacy journalists. like we're out there trying to get, you know, legislation passed or taxes cut or something. I'd like to say that we're adversarial journalists. And certainly I would like my taxes cut. And I believe that that would be better long term for society, just to be clear. But we're adversarial in the sense that just because someone in the government comes out and says,

this is the way things are, we're not going to turn around and take that and hand it to our readers and say, this is the way things are. We're going to say, well, this is what the government said. And these are the things that we've observed that either conflict with that or, you're seem to confirm that, and this is what other people think about what the government has said. The view, the consensus view in the mainstream media seems to be that, like, if someone in the intelligence community tells you this and two of their people confirm it off the record, it doesn't matter if it's all like James Comey leak into his friends or whatever.

Like, that's the truth now. We've, like, created the truth because it comes from the government. I think it's a very dangerous place to be when your sources of, whether it's you're relying on Bureau of Labor Statistics as the truth about. the economy and the jobs numbers I think that's a dangerous place to be or relying for you know this is what happened when Trump was negotiating on you know the IRA deal or something three intelligence officials say that you know whatever happened see it all the time so the government I think needs to be viewed from an adversarial position with intense skepticism

I tell my reporters hold on one sec Steve I'm gonna go talk to the guys next door doing some construction I just don't want that feedback on here we'll be right back all right sorry about that man they there's like a little bit of drilling they got to do over there so they've been good about yeah when i'm on air not doing that so i just told them we need a little more time so they should be stopping but we've been talking this whole time like insinuating about this 70H thing that you uncovered you and i actually in our first phone conversation we had a month or two ago we're talking about this a bunch this blows my mind i guess it shouldn't seeing as i've lived through a country that had the whole sackler cause

fucking opioid epidemic that said for people out there who have never heard of this which is going to be most people what's going on with this what is this product where is it going the whole bit yeah well and just to be clear i didn't uh uncover it i think there's been plenty of writing about it but i don't think that it's been understood um the the i guess the the national scale of it the international scale of it uh and i don't think that someone has talked about it on such a a high level like we Tucker and I kind of glanced at it and we talked about that length with Sean and that bringing it up to that level kind of triggered this like tsunami of information people coming to me with their stories about addiction or being in the business and some people

who are in related businesses who have spent you know time investigating the supply chains for these kind of products so I've learned a lot more just in the last three weeks about this operation but there's fantastic reporting that the Kansas City Star did about a company called CBD American Shaman. CBD American Shaman is a company run by Vince Sanders, and this is a guy who is openly boasted about being the top 70H producer. Oh, he boasts about it. Yeah. Yeah.

In the Kansas City Star stories, he's at these conventions where he goes around and basically brags about. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, CBD American. You get a free sample of 70H mailed to you. Imagine that.

Product's so good you can make money giving away free samples. I wonder what's going on with this stuff. Maybe a little addiction. And if you look at the code words, if you scroll up to the ad that they have there, so the code words, advanced alkaloids, well, what that says to an addict is, oh, so this is like opium. This is like opioids. This is like percocet.

This is like oxycotton. This is like heroin. Like alkaloids, like the stuff that makes me high. that's like code language to communicate with them what's going on here but the standards even started he bought up billboards around Kansas City with QR codes you scan a QR code and get a sample or he would put samples of 70H in CBD shipments so even people who didn't order it didn't want it didn't know what it was we're getting little tastes of the the synthetic you know opioid and it's an opioid yeah well I don't know what the scientific classification would be

it interacts with the opioid receptors in your brain. The same receptors in your brain that, like, morphine would interact with. But it's more potent by weight, depending on how you measure it. But it's a, it's, you know, it's distinguishable from morphine in the same way that, like, you know, percocet and Vicodin and OxyContin are different. You know, it's like, it's just that, you know, a fentanyl, even I would throw in that class. So it's just as addictive as an opioid. You're going to get the same opioid level withdrawal.

The detox is going to be the same if you've been a heavy user and addict for a long period of time. But just to be clear, 7-0-H is perfectly legal. I think Florida might have recently banned it. And there are some other, there are some states that have banned it. But yeah, it's not federally scheduled. Over the counter. Yeah, you can buy this at gas stations. Like I said, the convenience store of my Uber driver passed on the way coming here had a product that contains this.

You can buy it everywhere. Really, the trick is to get a tobacco license, basically. If you get the tobacco license, then you can put up the signs, you know, CBD, you know, hemp, whatever, and that kind of signals to your potential customer. But there's this product, so I guess we should go back and say, where does it come from? Why is it exploding? Please, yes. So the product starts out as a coniferous tree indigenous to Southeast Asia, Indonesia, India, India.

Um, there it's called the, the cradum tree and it has this naturally occurring chemical called a metragene, um, metragene, some people pronounce it, mitradina, mitradina, mitragenine speciosa is the name of the tree. Anyways, take these leaves and it's just like the cocoa leaf where the indigenous people have been chewing this stuff for a long time. And you get a little buzz like coffee or tea or something, nicotine. Um, but if you make extracts of it, you can make it a little bit strong. stronger. So like raw cratum leaf has been kicking around the United States for a long time. You can buy it online and just use the leaf to make tea, whatever. You may get a little bit of a buzz off of it, but nobody's like really gone nuts with it because of the amounts you'd have to

consume to get a addictive level of a dose is huge. You have to eat like a haybill of this stuff to get as much of the alkaloids as they're now condensing down into one dose. So 70H is naturally occurring in cratum in only a very, very small amount. And it's also has to be the leaves as they decay, as they, as oxidation occurs, 7-O-H is created in the leaf. And then when your body metabolizes the leaves, you create a little bit of 7-O-H in your liver. So that's how it was discovered. People said like, this plant, you know, a lot of people kind of like this. kind of makes you feel good, like, let's investigate this a little bit and see if we could turn

this into a drug. And at some point in time, somebody did. Vince Sanders, I don't know if he invented it, but he was certainly one of the most successful people to come out and be like, yeah, I'm the 70H guy. Like, I'm producing a lot of 70H. Now, you've had people reach out, though, who have gotten addicted to this. Crazy, crazy number of people. And they claim to be functioning on it on a daily basis. Yeah. I mean, this could be, you know, I guess, survivor bias or just a biased sample of people who listen to Sean Ryan's show or see me on social media and have reached out with their story. Maybe it's not a totally representative sample. But the people who have reached out to me have been overwhelmingly people who had no

prior street drug experience, no hard drug experience. They're people who maybe even don't smoke weed or don't even drink that much, but they were at a gas station and saw a little five-hour style bottle and thought, oh, that'd be an interesting pick me up, or they're frequently marketed as alcohol alternatives. So a lot of times people are like, I don't feel like drinking tonight. I'm just going to try something, you know, safer. And this little thing, they're selling at the gas station, not even, you know, 21 and up, like can't be that dangerous, right? They wouldn't sell it at a gas station if it's dangerous. And eight months later, they're spending $300 a week to feed an addiction to that they're not like, you know, it's like any addiction. It's not like they're

they're feeling good they're they're buying it and using it to not feel bad right and that was like all the people who have reached out are i are in some stage of recovery um you know trying to you know manage an addiction and you know like one case a guy um has you know found his way from the drinks to these little tablets that are like 80 milligram tablets um so he told me his dose is like a quarter of one of those tablets and he'll take like 200 milligrams throughout the of this just to manage that's just so he doesn't like have withdrawal symptoms and he's trying to balance like he's a you know a father he's got some kids and he's got a job he's trying to figure out like when is he going to be able to take off from work to go through rehab because

he's not able to work while he's going through withdrawals and he wants to provide for his family otherwise he's you know functioning he's working he's still holding down a job you know raising his kids but he's in this trap now and there's so many people that I've heard from and you know this product also is it's it's not just getting to people like very few people are actively sitting you know at home being like you know some gas station heroin let's go find some gas station heroin I want to try this for the first time I said you know I read about this online I want to go try some gas station heroin a lot of people are just incidentally exposed to it like they order

some CBD to help them sleep from CBD American shaman and they slip up you know another product into their shipment and they encounter it there and you know that's how they first experience it but there are also some people who are getting it as in additive to their cannabis products and actually texted you some of the images from a marketplace called cush.com so cush.com was this huge robust essentially a business to business this marketplace. Yeah. Cush.com, it's down now. So somebody bought it and they're squatting on it. But it used to be an actual marketplace where it was like any online store. But you can see those products. Those aren't for the casual user. They're kilograms. Yeah, those, you're selling

kilo quantities. And the other critical thing is not, it's not just 70H. It's a, they've figured out a way to synthesize 70H to make it vapable. So you can combine it with THC oil. and you've effectively produced a product that can be sold just like a marijuana vape. Same user experience, same marketing, and it's got a little bit of that 70H in it. And so the user is going to think, I don't know, is this just some really good weed? This is great. It's like smoking opium. It's like smoking morphine with a little bit of weed in it.

And yeah, there you go. Disposable. That's nice. Disposable, seven hydroxy. It's in a case of 200. Yeah. Yeah, that's normal, right? The case of 200 for your, your smokeable products.

I don't even think I can get that for nicotine pouches. Yeah, $3,600. So that's obviously a business-to-business, you know, marketplace there. But cush.com, when people started reporting on it, just wiped it. Whole website came down. Who do you think was behind it? Oh, there was a, there was a, the investors are known. It was a, it was an equity fund based in Florida, but I don't know the details.

The investors are known. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the people, the investors and the people who owned it and ran it are known, but I don't know the details too super well, so I don't want to speculate overly much about it, other than to say, if you're doing commerce on a website and somebody starts talking about you online and suddenly you disappear, well, I mean, that's mens rea, the guilty mind, right? You don't delete your website when you start to get a

little buzz. Right. You know, you start to, you double down, you do some advertising. You embrace that, baby, right? You're trying to, you're trying to get some business and some attention. You know, it's a weird kind of business that doesn't want attention. This makes me so upset, though, seeing this. It really does. It makes me think back to, I got, when I started doing the, um, the reporting on the Chinese grows in Maine, I became like a lightning rod for people with stories about encountering, you know, bunk weed or whatever. People wanted to, you know, contact me and see if I knew anything or just share a story and see if I wanted to investigate. And I remember there was a woman in

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who contacted me because their daughter had, you know, purchased a vape on Snapchat. How old? High school age. It was like 15, 16. Their daughter purchased a vape on Snapchat. And in the email, she said that she became hooked. And I was like, I don't know, I'm always, I've been told you can't be addicted to marijuana. Can't be addicted to cannabis. It's not physically. You can be addicted to anything. Yeah. Psychologically, sure. But, you know, there's no physical addiction to cannabis. So, you know, having had that, you know, bashed into my skull, I was like, I don't know.

Seems kind of weird. And then as I'm reading into her email, her daughter was found unresponsive from hitting this vape and had to be revived with Narcan. From hitting a vape. From hitting a vape. And Narcan will work for a 70H overdose because all it does is block those little spots in your brain where an opioid is going to interact with you. So 7.O.H will reverse, I mean, Narcan, the overdose drug, will reverse a separate a, 70H overdose just as well as it will fentanyl or a heroin overdose. But no one's ever going to

ask questions about it. They're just going to assume that you're a fentanyl user because it's so free and broadly available, at least in Maine it certainly is. And if you get revived by Narcan, everybody's just going to think that you overdosed on some prescription opioids or some fentanyl. And as much as you say, no, no, no, I swear, I wasn't taking fentanyl. I just thought I just had this weed, vape, yeah, sure, okay, druggy. No one's going to believe you and no one's going to investigate it very far. I bought it on fucking Snapchat. Jesus.

And they don't even have the tools to investigate it. You know, it's not like they've got a kit sitting there where they can take this vape pen and put it in the Star Trek box and analyze instantly every chemical ingredient in it. They're not going to be able to do that. They're just going to assume that it was a fentanyl overdose and move on with their day. And I didn't really know what I was dealing with when that mom wrote to me. I didn't really have any answers for her.

But now, in retrospect, I'm like, I wonder if that vape was. was 70H. I don't know right now. All I know is, you know, she says, passed out Narcan vape that was purchased on Snapchat. Could it have been? She thought it was just cannabis. But I heard from another individual after we did Sean's podcast who reached out and had bought a, um, a vape product in Florida that he thought was intoxicating hemp or something, THCAA. I don't know exactly what the branding was when it was sold to him. But he was at like a UFC fight in Massachusetts, and he's like, they're ripping his vape, and next thing he knows, he's being revived.

And that guy who's never touched, like, street opioids before being revived with Narcan after hitting a commercially available vape product that he bought in Florida. Yeah, I mean, like we were saying earlier, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, fucks like a duck, it's a duck. We are, to state the obvious very clearly in a reverse opium war. and it's not just one place doing it I think it's a lot of different places around the world doing it and using our system

and using people within our system and using Americans who just want to make money as a vehicle, a perfect Trojan horse to go through and it is my God man you know what the scarier element there could be like with the girl who bought it off Snapchat because my mind goes to this

I don't know if this is realistic but it feels unfortunately like it'd be realistic I think it would be horrible if it was 70H, but could also be a great example to prove why something like this is out there and should never be on the market. However, I wonder if she bought like a regular vape and somehow because this is such an unwatched industry or whatever. It was fucking sprinkled with fentanyl or something. Like, as dumb as that sounds, maybe it's not dumb, you know? Maybe and if there's people in the comments who can speak to anything that is similar to that, that you've been around or heard. whatever, please pipe in here.

I would love to hear. I mean, I'd love to hear, but I definitely want to get some evidence on that. But it's just terrifying. And like the text that you're sending me, showing me these ads with stuff, it's like, you know. Yeah, patent pending. They came up with a formula for vapable 70H. Like I want stuff that just has fucking real THC. like how hard is this yeah well these i would say um these products you're deliberately

no one's no one's accidentally manufacturing a vapid product that has this in this you know i've talked with uh you know dozens hundreds of legal marijuana business operators in main and if you walked into one of their manufacturing facilities you'd be like wow this is state-of-the-art science everything is like clean controlled like they're testing you know different temperatures to decarboxulate their marijuana, to get it to the exactly the way they want it. Everything is controlled. They take pride in the purity of what they're supplying. But it's because they're honest. They're ethical and they're following the rules. But they also care about their customers. If you don't ever know your customer, if you're never going to see your customer,

the hell do you care? Like if you're just bulk shipping these things, your customers just want repeat customers themselves. They just want people who come back to the head shop and the tobacco shop all the time. And a 70H addict is, a very good customer because they're consistent they're they're less likely to uh die than a fentanyl addict um they're going to be able in from my experience from what i've seen from the people who have given me feedback um they're able to hold down jobs and they're going to pay you you know a hundred three hundred dollars a week and you're going to swipe that credit card and it's going to go right into the existing payment rails have you written stories on people who are known to have died

of seven oh there's been a ton well so this like that you got personally and involved with knowing the details, though? No, no. So I've interacted with some people who have, you know, given me their testimonies about their experiences with 70H and how rapidly it took over their lives. But there was a, I guess there was maybe a day after, yes, here we go. So there's, this is September.

Yes, so this I think was 7-O-H products out in LA. But there was also, there was a guy in Richmond who, within the last month, walked into a smoke shop, and got some tablets of 7-0-H and died in the parking lot. Oh, my God. And as is often the case, it could be that it's comorbid with other things. Like, you know, maybe he was drinking. Maybe he was using this drug.

Maybe he was using that drug. We don't know if it was actually, like, if you can just blame this. But there was also more recently, there was a guy out in Ohio who just bought some, like, tablets at a gas station and wasn't intending to use, like, a hard narcotic and wound up overdosing. So it's it's it's catching people you wouldn't, um, expect or stereotypical stereotypically think are junkies or drug users, um, just normal everyday people who happen to buy the wrong thing. There you go. Right there. Columbus wife blamed 70H. Blame 70H for husband's death. Yeah, he'd like text, he like, he like, he like sent texts to his

brother. Young family. He sent texts to his brother saying like, uh, um, yeah, just wanted something you just wanted something to give him energy give him a mood booster yeah oh my god which is how these products are marketed have you have have you have you have you have you have okay yeah no rocko knows a lot about this yeah yeah he's yeah he's yeah he's it's it's a it's like anything you know you've got something huge amounts of money to be made by having flexible moral principles that's a recipe for organized crime yeah and if it's if it's lucrative enough that's a recipe for state-backed organized crime state-backed organized crime jesus christ like the chinese marijuana cartels in maine that's what that is state backed state sanctioned state you know the

tacit tacit approval yeah maybe some help along the way like you know the the uh the fentanyl industry in america's you know supported by the cc giving pill presses at cost to the mexican cartels oh yeah dude i told i told you about that old rogan podcast with that guy ben west off and we're on the phone I mean, shout out to that guy, Ben. That podcast was probably from, like, 2019. He wrote that book, Fentanyl, Inc. Falls into this story, had never covered anything like that. Talks to someone on a totally separate story who mentions fentanyl.

He goes, oh, that's interesting, starts investigating it, realizes, holy shit, this is the story turns into a book. Savage guy flies out to China and says, oh, by himself as an author, let's see how easy it is to get it. Goes to the fucking lab and they're like, do you want it by two, you know. It's like, it's not easy. Yeah. They have no problem exporting to America substances that they would hand down the death penalty for selling domestically. And you don't do that without nation state level of approval. You know, you don't. I mean, and they're subsidizing it. They know what they're doing. And you said reverse opium war. I mean, it's chemical warfare. 100%. And what we're what we're seeing now is, you know, they did this with fentanyl. And now you've got the fourth generation of the opium addiction crisis. You, you starts out with the sacklers and the prescription. drugs and, you know, the Federation of State Medical Boards writes a book about how safe prescription opioids are and then asks Purdue Pharma, you know, for some money to put that book in every doctor's office. And, you know, then you wind up with every guy who, like,

hurt his back on the job site, gets a prescription for oxycotton. And then suddenly there's this opioid crisis. And then everyone realizes, oh, this is bad. They take away the prescription opioids. And then addicts have to go out and find street drugs. So they find heroin. And then the heroin, you know, that's got some issues with it. But hey, here's this new synthetic product, fentanyl. We don't have to grow our poppies in Afghanistan or Thailand, you know. We've got this synthetic compound. It's been around for quite a while. But now we're going to start putting it in pill presses that make it look like it's a, you know, an adderol or an oxycontin. And we're going to sell it by the bushel fucking basket into the United States. And it's so potent, you know,

we can smuggle huge amounts of it. And now we're, we're cracking down on like the border. And we seem to be having some success. You know, Trump's like, you know, using the space laser on the Venezuelan boats trafficking this stuff in. I think Eric Prince might be doing a little something too. Yeah, you might have a little something involved. I don't know anything. That's a speculation. Yeah. I mean, if you were speculating about what Eric might be doing, tell him to come up to Maine, let's, you know, I've been wondering why. Maybe I can make that happen. I don't know. I've been wondering why the Maine National Guard isn't called out to dismantle some of these sites. Oh, I bet he can. If I could find him. If I could find him.

him you know like i'll find him with his with his finger on a button yeah yeah yeah well something needs to be done um but uh now that okay so fentanyl's third generation now they're cracking down on fentanyl everybody's aware of what fentanyl is well here just in time comes 70h nobody knows about it it's this obscure plant in southeast asia what are we doing about this it's available at head shops. When Sean Ryan tweeted about our episode about gas station heroin, former congressman Matt Getz replied, or I should say, could have been our attorney general, replied, how many people have died from this? And it's something that he's posted on X a couple of times in a very dismissive way like, oh, this can't be a problem, like how many people have died from

this? Where are your stats? And Matt knows that that's a bad faith question. because no one's been measuring for this. No one's been testing for this. Every 70H overdose or death has been assumed to be caused by other drugs or not detected at all because you're not looking for it. You can't find something if you don't know what you're looking for. And that applies hugely to a drug that you have to would like deliberately test for in an autopsy or use like some kind of product that's been developed for you specifically to test for that.

Like the police now have strips that they can, you know, put the strip on the ground and you sprinkle some white powder on it and a drop of water. If it turns this color, fentanyl. They've got that product now. You don't have that for 70H. It's much harder to figure out that that's what you're dealing with. So Matt is out there saying, well, are, you know, this is only going to be a problem if we start to see how many people have to die before we're concerned about this and before it's okay to talk about this. Yeah, maybe we should get out in front of it.

Yeah, I think he said, you know, 500 people a year die from Tylenol or something. well, I'm certain that there's more pain and suffering caused by 70H. And that attitude, it also makes me wonder if there's, you know, are we seeing an emergent 70H lobby that's going to come out and say, oh, no, this is, this is great. There's actually, there is some, you know, propaganda trade group, I don't know if it's a 501C3 or a 501C4, but it's called the Seven Hope Alliance. um seven referring to seven oh yeah oh god no don't even give them yeah oh no you're gonna want it go pull it pull it up they could they could use some press the seven oh h alliance they they they um they're

they're putting seven oh h forward as a uh a tool for harm reduction if you see the the woman on the left here oh like suboxin or something no they're not saying hey Not so much. They're saying it's like an herbal remedy. You know, it's like a natural, it's like a natural herbal way for addicts to transition off of the drug. Jail. So this woman on the left, though, her name's Jackie Suebeck.

And I'm sure she's a wonderful woman who has just totally done everything by the books lawfully. She's advocating for a natural solution. I'm sure she just wants the best for everybody in America. It might just be a coincidence that Jackie on her professional profiles boasts singularly. of her longstanding deep ties to the People's Republic of China, including going into China, learning how their businesses operate, sourcing products, manufacturing, whatever, in China. Spent 15 years in China, according to the biography that she advertises herself and her services. We're not saying anything. We're just reporting publicly available facts. I'm sure Jackie,

I'm sure Jackie's doing nothing wrong. I'm sure all of her, all of her ducks are in a row, and this is completely above board and I'm not suggesting anything and I know you aren't either but that's quite interesting nice to meet you Jackie that's fucking crazy bro

yeah so you just have to have in hope there you go there's the there's her bio deep experience she's one of the earliest pioneers to venture into the China market even before Marco Polo oh this is so

disheartening yeah so because you You would think, you would, you would think that now we have the hindsight 2020 of the normalization of the opioid crisis, which, by the way, all that lobbying that was going on, a lot that was happening pre-social media and in the early parts of social media, right, when the Sacklers were doing that. Now you would think, documentary era, Netflix era, social media era, everyone being aware of this era, people, everyone I know had it hit home somehow, whether it was family. or friends or whatever, you would think that we would, I don't know, have a little pause about something like this and not ask the question like, well, how many people have died? It feels like I need to learn more. I'm really just hearing about this the first time through you, but it feels like we're watching

a very similar movie. Yeah. Again. Yeah. Safe, effective, non-addictive. Safe, effective, non-addictive. We actually, randomly, it's funny how things work out, but after I'd gotten the invite to go on Sean's podcast, somebody found me because of my reporting on Chinese cannabis, who's affiliated with a group, an advocacy group that tries to educate people about 70H, which they refer to as gas station heroin. This is as good a name as any, because that's a pretty accurate description of what the product does.

they had done some very in-depth undercover work going to CBD American Shaman locations and interacting with their salespeople and their salespeople, it's like they picked up the Purdue Pharma or the, you know, the Saccular Family Playbook, safe, effective, non-addictive. Oh, you're an Adderall? This will replace your Adderall. Oh, you're taking pain meds? This will replace your pain meds. I know someone who died thinking they were buying Adderall too. And it wasn't. Yeah. By the way, just to add here, I'm just reading Jackie's publicly available bio. Prior to 2015, Jackie spent her time as founder and CEO of Footprint Worldwide,

a China-centric entertainment marketing branding and production company based in Los Angeles and Beijing, with achievements spanning across the globe, including 30 years in the music industry and 13 years in China. She most recently served as music and post-production consultant to DreamWorks Animation in Shanghai. high. You know, oh, there's more. She sits on the advisory board of the UNICEF. Oh, the UNICEF Chinese Children's Initiative. That's nice enough. Is educated at University of California, Santa Barbara, and regularly volunteers her time to music, cannabis policy, political campaigns and philanthropic organizations. I'm less upset about that one than I am about what I read up above maybe her work for the seven oh h alliance or the seven hope alliance whatever it is uh is part of

her philanthropic work it seems like a weird career move uh but anyways and uh to be clear like this is such a massive industry um and it's almost invisible because the sales from um manufacturer to smoke shop selling it are happening in telegram channels or on websites, obscure websites, foreign websites sometimes. They're being shipped through hidden channels or disguised as other things to be shipped. They're being mixed in with other products. So we don't really know how big this market is, totally. We have no idea how big the marketplace could be or how many other players are involved. So there could be a million Jackie's for all we know who are out there advocating that this is you know you know a wonderful cure-all product um there are so many different

brands that this product pops up under but one of the things that we know just based on uh you know i guess plant science tree science it all starts in southeast asia it's the only place these trees are growing it all starts in southeast asia so it's all coming for a lot of it's coming from indonesia india china um and there's a lot of um chemical manufacturing manufacturers over there that are willing to make you know extracts of the the tree the plant the plant itself we also just left Afghanistan behind by the way they happen to be bordered with someone pretty interesting yeah and they happen a whole very interesting plant there as well yeah I don't know yeah I don't know I

don't know I don't know how much they're into the 7 oh H game but I can find a way I we I'd been investigating prior like simultaneous to the Chinese marijuana networks in Maine, as I was driving around looking at all these places, I just happened to notice this phenomenon of like every gas station and convenience store in Maine had been purchased by a new family and out-of-state family, family that didn't really speak English or spoke broken English. And it was one of these pattern recognition things where as I'm driving around, you know, looking for Chinese wheat houses. I'm noticing this. I'm like, I'm like, oh, hold on saying. I want to be the guy who's just like driving around. Like there's people from

out of America who are doing bad things in my state like I don't want that to be my beat okay I'm not gonna be like these sketchy foreigners in my state I'm like Clinties yeah grand dorino yes I do like I do like I do not kept kept in at bay I got not trying to look away from the pattern and then one day I was seeing this happen in my hometown at Dexter at you know we used to call it crazy bobs discount tobacco there's like 18 LLCs registered at what used to be uh a Dexter Variety or Crazy Bob's Discount Tobacco. And they're all the names of like Indian gods or something. And each of those LLCs correspond to another convenience store or another gas station somewhere

in Maine. And if you start following the corporate trails, it's like, oh, this isn't just, again, it's not just this random phenomenon of Indian American entrepreneurs who are buying a gas station or a C store because they think that's the recipe to live the American dream. This is one organization. It's like one family. almost like one organization. They're all coming in and buying these gas stations

and it's the weirdest thing because you'll get a town in Maine of 4,000 people. How profitable could one gas station be in that town? But they'll buy the other gas station across the street from it. That's weird. You're buying two businesses right across the street from each other that compete against

each other. And then they like get rid of the pizza that everyone loved at that store and then come the potpipes and the bongs in the 70H. and the sketchy drugs and right next to Tucker's studio actually rural main the this exact thing happened and I went next door and I bought 70H products and intoxicating hemp products from someone who didn't speak English probably didn't even know that carding was a thing and when I indicated that I was looking to buy some 70H he just starts taking it off the shelf and laying it out And I have to, like, indicate by pointing what I'm looking to buy.

And then a woman who did speak pretty good English, who I think was the owner, saw what was happening. And she comes over, and this bitch tries to upsell me on the higher strength, 70H. She's like, most of our customers like this. I was like, really? How many customers do you have? Do you know what this is? Is this why you bought this store?

Where are you getting it from? When did you learn about 7. I'm curious about those questions. Do they know what they're doing? Did they buy these stores? with the intention of selling 7-O-H because if they were intentionally trying to distribute and addict

as many Americans as they possibly could, they wouldn't do it any differently. If you get a product that comes from Southeast Asia and you have Southeast Asians buying the distribution at endpoint. And it's another one of those things where it's like, is that racist to notice? Or is there something there where we should ask some questions? No, no, it's not.

It seems like a racketeering enterprise that you're going to come in here and you're going to like sell your sketchy, you know, uh, uh, uh, narcotic, synthetic drugs. And, you know, it's one thing if people want to take a leaf off a tree and have like the normal plant, like cocoa leaves are still used in Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola still gets a permit to import Coca-leaves. There's some coca tea. You're, you're not going to, you know, be up like an owl.

Right. You're not going to go crazy off Coca-Tee. But, uh, there has to be a line somewhere with this country. can protect itself from the importation there's nothing wrong it's bullshit that you even have to think like that if you are seeing ties that all go to one place i don't give a fuck who it is call it the south park rule of life doesn't matter what their background is whether it's Caucasian cisgender white male or whatever insert here that is what it is and the goal for everyone should be the same which is that if there's going to be something that harms and kills anyone

especially within our country where we can do something about it, it should be stopped. But, I mean, like, it just upsets me to hear a lot of this, man. I am very glad that you're reporting on it, and I'm glad we could cover that on here and, you know, give more people some awareness. I'm glad some of these other places, Sean and Tucker and different guys have, I guess, Rocco as well, have talked with you and also done that. And I hope you get on some more stuff as well because I knew nothing about this. you're going to get swamped i'm telling you you're in it swamped with people yeah telling you their

stories well i will read them when i get them so you got the robinson report on substack you're on x as well anywhere else we should link uh so the primary place with i guess the outlet that i run in main is uh the mainwire dot com someone's squatting on mainwire.com i don't like that so you get to put the mainwire.com the main wire and uh my substack you can find it as main goes and I'm on Twitter at Big Steve 207. Big Steve 207. All right, we'll link it below. Thank you so much for coming in, man.

It's been great talking about with you. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. All right, everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video.

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