Julian Dorey Podcast - Inside Black Markets, 9/11 & Cartel TAKEOVER | Mariana van Zeller • 462

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) SHOPIFY: Build your own business with a free trial at https://shopify.com/julian 2) GHOSTBED: Get an extra 10% off sitewide at https://GhostBed.com/julian with promo code JULIAN. Some exclusions apply; see site for details. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Mariana van Zeller is an Emmy-Winning Journalist & YouTuber. She has had shows on many channels, including National Geographic. MARIANA's LINKS - YT: https://www.youtube.com/marianavanzeller - IG: https://www.instagram.com/marianavz/?hl=en FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey 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 - CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 462 - Mariana van Zeller Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I don't know how you never get scared doing what you do. I sometimes get scared. Sometimes? Sometimes. Do you show it on the outside or is it strictly internalized? Yeah, I got caught in a military culinary year and I was definitely very scared. And I showed it. I was visibly shaken the whole time I was there.

Yeah, that wasn't that long ago, right? No, that was like two years ago, August, two years ago. What happened there again? You were on the ground doing a different documentary and then got... It was an episode of trafficked. From, I think from the beginning, for a season of trafficked, I started pitching that National Geographic story on Niger, because I was, first of all, it's one of my favorite parts of the world. It's the Sahel region of Africa, the southern Sahara desert region. It's been sort of the center of all sorts of trafficking, human trafficking, gold trafficking, guns, everything you can think of.

And gold trafficking is now fueling, which is the story we wanted to investigate there, is how is how, how, how, you can think, you can think of. And gold trafficking is now fueling, which is the story we wanted to investigate there, is how gold trafficking is actually fueling terrorist organizations. And for the longest time, I kept telling National Geographic, it's such a good story. The United States has two big base military bases there. The biggest drone military base outside of the United States is in Niger. Nobody knows a lot about it.

Wait, the biggest drone military base? Outside of the United States was in Agade. is in Niger, which is right in the Sahel region. And this is because the U.S. is fighting against these terrorist organizations and trying to keep them to not grow bigger and more powerful and potentially all of these groups. The ultimate goal is to attack the U.S. Right. So to prevent another 9-11. And I kept telling Nageo that this was such an amazing story and so relevant to us. And so I wanted to really sort of look at the gold mining and how the gold is actually trafficked and how it gets into the hands of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS and Boko Haram.

And I spent, you know, months putting on a plan and every time NACIA would say it was just too risky. This is one of the most dangerous places on earth, essentially. Again, you have all those terrorist groups right there. You have kidnapping squads. You know, there were three, I believe it was three U.S. soldiers who had been killed there a few years before. Like, oh, recently. Yeah. soldiers that were there as part of this operation to fight against the terrorist groups.

And eventually, I think, season four, we finally convinced Nat Geo, we have a plan. There was a president, a democratically elected president at the time that had good connections with the United States. The U.S. had soldiers there. We'd been training the local military. And they had agreed the government, the Nigerian government had agreed to allow us into the country and to let us do our work and provide us a military convoy. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. So we'd go into this very remote region where all the mining is happening and where all the trafficking is happening to, very dangerous region, but we'd go with a military escort, which is not at all what I'm used to doing, right? I don't usually travel with security. But in this case, it was really the only way that I could insure a way in and out. safely out of that place. And so we did. And we spent, it was sort of an eight-hour journey out in the

desert. This is complete desert, so there's no roads, right? And we had, it was two or three of, two cars of ours, and then four trucks with military soldiers on top, all heavily armed and trained. And it's, yeah, an eight-hour journey. Every time we stopped for sort of a bathroom break or snacks or stretch your legs. The soldiers you could see, they'd get out of their trucks and they sort of do a perimeter, armed perimeter around us, you know, binoculars and the whole deal to see if there's any cars coming. Again, heavy on terrorist groups and kidnapping squads. But we managed to make it safely, and it was amazing. It was sort of one of my favorite days I've ever had in my life where we spent the day, we got inside one of the mines,

and this is sort of their dug by hand and dynamite explosions. And you go... Doug by hand. Yeah. First, they explode it, with dynamite, and then they start, like, basically, digging it. Can we pull up an image of this, D.Fle? If you do Niger gold mining, there are so good shots. Yeah, I'm terrified to say the name of that country for obvious reasons.

Yeah. Say it the wrong way, you know. Niger, it's not Nigeria, which is how much people get confused. Yeah. Yeah, sort of that, yeah. Without, yeah, so one of those, the top left corner one, that's sort of what we went down, my team and myself. But this, the one we went was 100 feet deep and it gets really claustrophobic.

I was going to say it's only that wide, but it's 100 feet deep. Oh, yeah, and it is more or less that wide. And you went in that. Oh, yeah, my team and I, yeah, we did. And at one point, you have to go, I sort of have. had to go with my butt on the ground and sort of slide down. Oh, hell no. And we get to the bottom, and it's a bit wider.

And there's a team of people that there were like three or four miners picking at the wall, basically 100 feet deep, picking at the wall, trying to get the little pieces that have golden them to then carry them in huge bags up. But there's sort of no security procedures, right? These guys are doing this in flip-flops, by the way. And they told us, we got there because it was an eight-hour journey. got there, I think it was like 3 p.m. And as we are filming at the bottom, they tell us, oh, by the way, we forgot to tell you, but at 4 p.m. is when the dynamite explosion start around us. And there's

a high risk of this whole thing collapsing. So, you know, it took us about half hour, 30, 40 minutes to go down. And they said, so we have about 20 minutes to get out, up, carrying all the gear and everything. and it was the fastest we've ever gone up. We've ever moved in our lives. But we got up and within like two minutes after being out of the mine, you hear a huge explosion and all over. They're like basically opening up more mines and getting the gold out. So it was an amazing day.

And we ended up camping out in the desert. It was me, my whole team, the only woman, surrounded by men, the soldiers and my team and the miners. And then eventually it was we woke up the next morning. we ate goat. They cooked some goat for us the night before. We all had massive diarrhea during the night, but I was still on cloud nine because this is really, and I knew like how many people in the world have experienced this and it's such, it's exactly the kind of work I like to do. Just quick question on it. So you had gotten to capture. Oh, yeah, we filmed it all. Yeah, we filmed it all.

We filmed interviews with minors. They explained to us how the terrorist groups come over and they get buy gold from them or sometimes don't even pay they just sort of take the gold away from them and that's how they're funding their operations in the region do you ever for a story like that do you ever have a goal besides just you know sunlight is a disinfectant get the word out there and then let hopefully good people do something with it to change it or do you ever actually go beyond that yourself like hey I want this story to be able to show X, Y and Z because that'll literally force I don't know legislation or something like that. I think it's the same thing, right?

It is shining a light, but hopefully by shining a light, you're changing legislation. You're making the world better in some way. It's a bit of a cliche, but it's sort of the cherry on top for every journalist, right? You do the stories. It's not a sacrifice to do the stories I do. I do it because I love it. And I think that I'm very, very privileged to be able to sort of wander in the worlds that I do. I think there is a little bit sometimes those journalists that like to talk.

about the sacrifices and the danger they put themselves out there in order to be able to shine a light on these important subject matters. You'll never hear that for me because I know I'm very privileged. It's a luxury to do what I do. But of course it's the cherry on top always if you can actually make some sort of change and the fact if your work can have an impact. And so for us, yeah, for me in this story particularly was to explain to the world what the heck the United States is doing in this remote country in Africa and to understand why

it is actually important to have military bases and American presence in places as remote as this. And so, yeah, so I was very happy that we finally were able to capture it after years and years of trying to convince National Geographic to let us go. And then suddenly we did and we were able to film it all. It was amazing. And know that very few people in the world had ever been able to get this on camera. So, of course, I was very happy. All in a day. All in a day. Next morning, wake up, head back to Agadez, which is the town.

closest to where we were, and we're out of service, by the way. We don't, there's no cell phone service. And we're arriving in Agadez, and again, we have a two-car convoy plus the trucks with the military. And our fixer, who's a local journalist, who was actually from Mali, but we couldn't find a journalist from Niger that wanted to do this story with us, so we had to bring this guy from Mali who had done any stories in the region.

No, we couldn't. Wow. But this guy had done stories in the region and came with us. amazing guy called Baba. And suddenly I hear Babon in the front car, in the convoy, in a walkie-talkie, telling us something that sounded like there's no cook in Niamé. Niamé is the capital of Niger. And we were like, what? He's talking about a cook. Was he talking about dinner? We're so confused. And then it's sort of after he repeated it several times, we realized there's a coup in Niami. So there's a coup, a military coup. They deposed the elected,

democratically elected president. And the military had taken over. the country. The same guy is protecting you. Or not them. Not them, but they worked for them. And essentially what happened is that immediately we lose our military. We arrived. They dropped us off at the hotel and they said, okay, the country is in disarray right now,

goodbye and left us. And so we were abandoned essentially in a hotel that had been built in the 80s when Gaddafi visited Niger. So as you can imagine, very run down. There was one security guy at the gate that spent most of the day sleeping. And, yeah, in a region surrounded by a lot of danger. And we had to try to figure out how the hell are we – and they closed the airspace and border. So we had to figure out how are we going to get out of here.

And then suddenly they started evacuations from the capital, but we couldn't get to the capital. It was too dangerous. It was three-day drive. It was too dangerous. And everybody told us, absolutely, do not do that. I actually try to hire a human trafficker. He's like, well, I am an expert in this. We were interviewing this guy.

And I was like, actually, brilliant plan. If we pay you, will you smuggle us out of the country? And he said, absolutely not. We were Americans. We said no. He said, yeah, you can't pay me enough. Like, you're high targets. You're Americans.

Absolutely not. If you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is ready and included from day one. Shopify's checkout feature is particularly clutch. This is the critical moment where your first customer is ready to pay. And Shopify checkout's going to help them finish their purchase as smooth as possible. So much so that when they come back, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done.

Money in your account. UX and UI are something that are a real pet peeve of mine. I like things simple so that literally my grandma could figure it out. And Shopify's always had that box check. And because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business and the tools to do it. If you have your own business, you know how annoying it is to get bogged down in the minutia and waste time. Shopify takes care of so much that you're not going to have to worry about that and you can focus on the things that matter. Today, Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Mattel and Jim Shark to small businesses just getting started.

With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make one. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com slash Julian. That link is in my description below. Once again, that's Shopify.com slash Julian. Link in my description below. And yeah, it was the beginning of a huge ordeal. So what did you do?

How long were you there? It's a good story. We got time. We were there for nine days. What happened is that there was a sort of the escalation of a possible war coming because the West African country surrounding Niger had said that if they didn't put the president back in power that they would attack, they would invade Niger to make sure that the president was back.

And the Wagner group and Russia and its allies were saying that if they did that, they would then invade. They would send Wagner Group in, and it would start, it would be start of war, essentially. And again, we were with no protection, no way out. And so every day you'd see it was getting worse and the situation was getting worse and worse. And it was particularly bad on day three when you'd see the French, the British, the Portuguese, where I'm from, the Spanish, all getting evacuated. There were journalists, American journalists who were in Miami at the time, a couple of American journalists that I knew of because I was in touch with people that worked with them who were there doing the same story, but not in a place as remote as us. and they were being evacuated, but we had no way out.

We weren't. And it was an interesting reason why. Essentially, the United States refused to call it a military coup because the moment they did, they would have to remove all their military personnel and all the American personnel from the country, which would mean the loss of millions of dollars. Can't have that. In the country, right?

Yeah. And so they were trying and trying to negotiate to figure out a way how to get President Bazum back in power and just take care of it themselves. And they just weren't able to. So it wasn't after, I think it was like a month later that they declared at a military coup and eventually had to do away with their bases and lose all the investment. But because we were Americans, and we were very close, we were like two miles from this big military base.

We actually went to the base and tried to contact them and talk to them, but they said, I'm sorry, unless there's a war that breaks out, or you're actually an active danger, or, you know, you're kidnapped by ISIS, we aren't able to bring you it to the base right now. And we kept explaining, like, you do understand that that might be too late, right? If you're not, we're seven Americans here.

We need shelter, and they refuse to. And then we had, with all the work that I do, we always obviously have insurance and have an evacuation company that works with us, with us, part of the insurance package. An evacuation company. Yeah. If shit hits the fan, there's always a place, a number you call.

Is that like Mr. Wolf? That helps you out of there. But not in our case. We call the evacuation company. And we were recording all of this. And they basically didn't have a plan in place and weren't psyched on getting us out. I mean, no matter how many times we asked, okay, if the war starts, do you have an idea? All this is in the film, by the way.

You have an idea of where we should go or give us some pointers on what to do in this situation. And are you deploying people or is somebody coming to get us? I mean, we're paying you a lot of money for situations exactly like this. And they just didn't have an answer. We realized that they were completely useless. I hope you got that money back. We did not get that money back. And we ended up actually.

Actually, insurance helped pay for what it was eventually our evacuation. We found another evacuation company. So my husband, who's also a journalist, and co-owns McMillan. Media with me and a couple, a few other partners. MacMedia is a production company that makes trafficked. He and my team in L.A. were 24 hours trying to figure out a way to get us out and eventually found another evacuation company with two pilots who were crazy enough to agree to get on a plane.

Hell yeah. And fly to Niger, to Agadez, and come in the middle of the night to rescue us. And I know this is getting long, but this is the best part of the story. You got me on the edge of my seat. So they told us, we get the call, and it's this evacuation company, and they told us, okay, we've got two pilots, we've got a plane, which happens to be a G5, which is the most expensive private small plane out there, which is a little bit of a sort of a whiplash right after 10 days stuck in this. But we have a G5, these two pilots. They are coming at 4 a.m. middle of the night, they are going to land for 20 minutes, and they only have 20 minutes on the group. So if you're not there and if you're not in the plane within those 20 minutes, they're going to leave without you, right?

And the whole team in L.A. is tracking the flight map. You know, the whole thing is set up. We, no one, we don't sleep. I remember receiving this news and like sort of starting to tear up, but not yet because so much could go wrong that we weren't sure if this was going to work or not. And eventually, meanwhile, I couldn't forget this detail. while we were stuck and trying to figure out a way out, I'd also gone to the airport. I think it was like day two or three. I'd gone to the airport, to the local airport, very small little place.

And I met the manager of the airport, a guy called Cader. And I started talking to him and I asked Cader, do you have children? And he said, yes, and showed me the photos. And I showed him a photo of my son. And I said, look, it's his birthday next Friday. And he's at camp. And usually my husband and I have this tradition where we pick him up from camp. It's his performance camp.

And he does his performance. it also happens to be his birthday. And it's very important for me to be there. As you can imagine, traveling mother, I just, I need to be there this day. So if you hear of any planes taking off or coming in, please let us know. And he started texting me every day and says, still nothing, I'm sorry. And then he found out that there was this plane coming. And he texted me and he said, I've got here some notice of a plane coming.

Is this for you? And I said, yes, but I wasn't sure. I was afraid maybe he was working. with the military and I said yes, but you know, yes, but don't, let's not share it yet. And anyway, get to the airport the next morning, having not slept at all, we were all so nervous. We had a plan in place. We had, actually, we had our flack jackets with us in case there was shootings on our way to the airport, which is about 20 minutes away.

We had a whole plan if we were shot at what to do. And we get to the airport. The airplane is delayed at the airport. this point so it's already the sun is rising it's like 5 30 a.m. And we get there and there's like a ton of military at the airport which was not supposed to be the case. It was supposed to be empty and the manager, Khadr said he would be there to ensure that we'd get out safely. But there was not supposed to be in military but it was kind of like the Argo movie right? Yeah. Ben Affleck where we get there and there it is. I was thinking yeah and the military is

there and they have a huge problem with us. They don't want us to leave and they start start creating problems and and they say we don't have the correct paperwork because the plane was going to Dubai after we're showing them the visas they're just creating problems they just don't want us to leave and eventually they said okay you guys can leave but the Malian guy can't the guy oh your fixer my fixer and this is the moment I'm on the phone with my husband and I tell him look and we can start seeing the plane coming in and I'm said I said look This guy, I'm the owner, co-owner of the company. I'm the executive producer of the show.

I'm going to let everybody else leave, but I'm not leaving without Bama. So I'm staying behind. And it was really hard for me. This was really, really hard. My husband had the most amazing reaction, which was I would do the exact same thing if I was in your shoes. And as much as this hurts me, I know that's the right decision to make. And as we're having this really difficult conversation,

my husband says, wait, wait, I can see the names of the pilots are Portuguese. I think there's a chance that there are Portuguese. Plain lands, the pilots start coming out. I run to the pilot, the first one that comes out, and I ask him, are you Portuguese? And he says, yes. So then in Portuguese, the military arrives, they're around us. And in Portuguese, I tell him, look, we explain the situation. We're a team of journalists.

There's one guy who doesn't have the right paperwork. the visa because he has an African passport to go to Dubai. But my team in LA is taking care of it. And when we're on the flight, it's going to come through. And this is like him saying yes to this. I knew he could risk his flight license, you know. And he says, and he thinks about it for a minute. And the military guy starts yelling at him and saying,

you can't take him, you can't take him. And the pilot, you know, turns again and says, no, no, no, I take full responsibility. He's on my flight and he's coming in. So we are all allowed in the plane. I'm the last one. I'm coming. My whole team is inside.

I'm the last one just making sure everything's okay. I'm going in and suddenly I hear my name being called. Mariana and I look back and it's Qatar, the airport manager, who had been trying very hard and yelling. He'd actually been yelling at the military too and telling them that they couldn't do this to us. And he says, Mariana, and I look back and he says, say happy birthday to your son. Oh, my God. And that was a moment where I couldn't keep it together anymore.

And we all went into the plane and we all, I still get very emotional talking about it. But we all lost it. Lost it. And yeah, I think it was obviously relief. It was a really tense situation, but also a lot of guilt, you know, thinking that for us it was really difficult nine days. But for people like Qatar, the miners, the amazing people that I met there, it was a very uncertain and shitty future without democracy. and, you know, with terrorist organizations that are growing and committing horrific attacks, it was tough.

It was really hard. Well, it's clear throughout your career and what you've done, like you obviously have a huge heart, but I'm always amazed by that too because you know when you go to all these different places around the world doing the stories that you do, you're going to meet people you love in the shittiest situations. And you're going to have to leave at some point.

This obviously was like a movie story. script that ended okay, like leaving. But like either way, you're going to have to leave these places. And I've seen it with other friends of mine as well. I've covered some stories around the world. The saddest part is like you'll meet someone who's just pure and great and was just born in the wrong place. And you have become friends with them. You leave. And then you find out a month later, they died. Yeah. Or their family was killed. And I know you've had that a ton in your career. It's like the fact that you're not, the fact that you're not like, I don't want to overstate. this but like numb to that in some way at that point really speaks to like how much you care

about these stories too because you've had to see it so many times. Thank you, Julian. Yeah. I really, of course, I do care. And I don't think I'd be doing this work if I was numb to it. I think I do it because I care because, yeah. And that's been, I think most people think that after, you know, almost 20 years covering black markets, doing stories about sex trafficking and drugs and guns and all sort of the deepest, darkest corners of the world that I had had, that I would have very through dark view of humanity and it's really quite the opposite quite the opposite yeah quite the opposite the majority of times the people that I meet are people just like you and I who because of lack of opportunities because of the you know horrific inequality that exists in the world

end up um the wrong side of law yes you know and and I always say there's a line that I really love which is the wheel of history turns and where and when you're born decides whether you get lifted or smashed by it, you know? And it's so true for so many people out there. And that's what, you know, whether I'm interviewing a cocaine, a kid, a 16-year-old kid who carries cocaine on his back or a Jamaican scammer,

when you actually find out about why they became, why they do what they do, it's really impossible not to see yourself in their situation, understand that if it was you, you'd probably be doing the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, there's a story I've told a few times on the podcast before that always hits me, but very similar kind of thing.

My buddy Josh from college, he grew up in the projects in the Bronx. And he was really lucky. He had two great parents, both at home. His mom was a teacher at one of the local schools right there. And, you know, that's something a lot of the kids there don't have. You know, they have a broken home, one parent in the household working three jobs just to pay the bills. and so he's a brilliant guy and he was lucky enough when he was in middle school to kind of get into like one of the higher level programs like classes which then when he was finishing eighth grade afforded him the opportunity to do a program where during the week he got to go to school like out in the suburbs in Connecticut. So he told me this story that always stuck with me years ago where he said his first I guess he was like out there full time or

staying with a family and then would come home on breaks i think that's what it was so he came home maybe it was thanksgiving break the first year ninth grade when when when when he went to do that program and he was walking back like towards his block and across the block he saw a kid as a friend of his that he grew up with on the corner you know 14 15 years old clearly a part of the drug gang now so he went over there said what's up to him and his friend was like happy to see him but also like what are you doing here kind of thing? And they talked for a couple minutes and his friend

who obviously by the law is doing something wrong his friend had the presence of mind to be like Josh you don't belong here you're doing a great job you're representing all of us walk across the street

and do not walk back this way and there are people who might see that same kid in a courtroom 15 years later on brought up on fucking 50 charges or whatever and be like throw him away Right. Forever. But I look at that and I'm not like, I never want to be misheard and be like, I'm going to excuse all crime that happens, but I look at that and I always try to ask myself,

how does someone get there? Well, if they weren't born into a situation like me living in the suburbs with two parents and they had X, Y, and Z in their environment, yeah, I'd probably get there too, you know, and you see that in every single story you've ever done like to an extreme. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I really do. And I do think that empathy is such an important part of being a journalist, but being a person in general, right? Particularly nowadays where there seems to be no space for a different difference of opinion or nuance. And yeah, we seem to have forgotten the importance of understanding the why's, not just asking about the watts, what is happening, but understanding why is this happening? Why does this person become a traffic or a scammer or,

you know, a pirate, whatever it is or a drug dealer like that kid? Yeah, so that's a huge part of the work that I do. For sure. How do you not, when you see how widespread so many things are, by the way, in our own country too, we have a lot of problems. And you've covered those stories. But like when you go all over the world or all over America and you just see these underbellies that are, once you pull on the weed, you realize how much bigger it is than you first thought, how do you not lose hope? You know what I mean? Like, how do you not sit back and go, God damn it, we're never going to fix this stuff? Yeah. Well, because I do think that it's a system. that are broken and not the people, right?

And that's really the crux for me. And with all my work, what I'm trying to always show is, that's why when people ask me, you know, we do the majority of our interviews with people with masks. We're very careful about not showing their identities or locations. We travel with a bag of masks and long-sleeve t-shirts and gloves and hats and anything I need to make sure I'm protecting these sources. The reason why is because I'm not trying to get any particular one person in trouble.

because the problem that, you know, that black market is going to continue existing whether this person is in prison or not. Again, it's not that these people are broken. It's these systems that are broken. And there's a lot of people actually profiting from these systems being broken, as we all know. And so my end goal always is to sort of show how this system is broken and try to figure out, you know, by showing what's wrong with it, possibly starting a discussion on how we can fix it. You know, why is it that one of the stories we did for season one of trafficked, actually, and still one of my favorite ones, was about gun trafficking and how, I think, something like 90% of guns found at crime scenes in Mexico, which, as you know, has a huge problem with violence.

Thousands of people dead. Thousands of people disappeared. And 90% of the guns found are American guns. So we talk a lot about the drugs, and I've covered this extensively, obviously. I've been in fentanyl labs and meth super labs in the jungles of Sinaloa, cocaine labs, all of it. But I don't think we talk enough about how those drug trafficking organizations can only operate because of the guns that they bring from the United States, right? Sure. They don't operate under a justice system.

The justice is how much gun power you have. And so they need those guns in order to be able to continue doing their drug trafficking. And all of those guns come from the United States. So one of the stories we did was how easy is it to get guns in the United States? How do the cartels get it down to the U.S.? Who's profiting from this? And again, it's the systems that are broken. And often, yeah, I think we forget.

We forget that. August heat has a way of exposing exactly what's wrong with your mattress. If you're waking up sticky and overheated, instead of rested, that's not just the weather. That's you. You need to go to the doctor and get your health check. I'm just kidding. It's your mattress. It's a big problem. Luckily, my friends, a ghostbed build cooling into every mattress from the ground up. Not a some pricier upgrade tier either.

It's just part of how they build every bed into their lineup. They're a family-owned company with more than 20 years of mattress making experience, and their focus has always been on materials that are meant to last. Every ghost bed mattress also includes their pro-core support layer, which reinforces the center of the mattress right where your body carries the most weight, so your spine stays aligned instead of sinking into a worn-out center. And here's something new from GhostBed this month. A smart adjustable base with a sensor that detect snoring and automatically adjusts head position while you sleep.

It's controllable with the included wireless remote or the free GhostBed app, so you can dial in your own settings if you want to. GhostBed has more than 100,000 positive reviews. Their mattresses are made right here in the USA and Canada. We love Canada. They give you a 101 night sleep trial with all mattresses, and they got fast and free shipping. It's a no-brainer. And right now, GhostBed's Labor Day sale is going to take $250 off a mattress bundles,

while our listeners are also going to get an extra 10% off the top by using code Julian at checkout. So head on over to ghostbed.com slash Julian. Link of my description below and use promo code Julian at checkout. That's ghostbed.com slash Julian promo code Julian. Some exclusion supply, see site for detail. So for that episode, you got to actually, like, do the process and see how it happens? Oh, my God. It's one of my favorites because the access we got was insane.

So we started, the first shoot we did was in close to downtown Los Angeles, and we filmed with a woman they called Blondie, who is American, American citizen of Mexican descent, but who... She had blonde hair? She did. And La Guera, they called her, which is Blondie. And she basically was responsible. She got paid really good money to carry guns from the United States.

So we went to this guy's house, also in undisclosed location in L.A. And we saw, it was incredible. We saw a room full of AK-47s, AR-15s, Glockes, the whole thing. And many of them, by the way, that he told us he bought from the LAPD, guns that the LAPD confiscates, this is in our film. LAPD confiscates. and then they buy them back from LAPD. Some of them...

Like they just walk into the LAPD and they like, here's 100? No, they have contacts within corrupt LAPD that give them guns. Yeah, it was sort of a reveal. I mean, I'd heard this before, but to get it to capture it on camera. And he showed us which one and showed us sort of...

There was one in particular that looked super professional. It had a scope. I believe there was an AR-15 that he said he had gotten from some Marines. in San Diego. So it was all crazy. And then we saw him putting those guns into the trunk of this woman, the blondeie's car. And then we weren't able to follow her as she crossed into Mexico, but we met her the next day in Mexico already and saw the exact same guns being given to the buyer in Mexico. He drove right across the border.

I've rode across. And actually, we filmed at the border a couple of days later and saw as much control as there is on what's coming north. There's no control as what's going south. Nobody stops cars. There's no, rarely does a car get stopped, a car heading south. And we saw it, and we filmed it actually. So she just drove across with a car loaded with AK-47s and the other guns,

sold it to this one guy. That one guy then we filmed him selling his guns, And then we ended up on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that was also incredible with a guy. We went on a tourist boat to this island where one of the biggest arms dealer was going to agree to be interviewed. I'd met him the night before, by the way, without cameras. And he was not, you know, some people you meet and they warm up to you immediately. Others, not like that. And this guy was not warm and fuzzy whatsoever.

He was questioning whether I was the DA or I was actually a journalist. I was showing him my Instagram page and some of my previous work. And he was like, that doesn't mean bullshit. That doesn't mean shit to me. Like, how do I still? You could have made that on your way here. Like that means shit all to me. But he'd, we have really good connections in the cartel world.

I work with a Mexican journalist who has incredible connections. And he'd sort of been told by his boss that he needed to give us this interview. So he reluctantly agreed to meet us the next day in this island. And we get there. So you even went after you were after he was like all over you like. Yeah. And he told me like if you show up tomorrow and you're being trailed and even if you're not a, if you are in fact a journalist, but who knows law enforcement might be trailing you, you know, like they did for El Chapo and Sean Pan met El Chappo. You're dead either way.

Like I don't care. I don't care. Yeah. And you're like, get me on that boat. Yeah. As fast as possible. You're built different. And the next morning we show up on an island.

And there he was. And he was like he had some of the guns with him. He was selling it to a guy there. He was telling us how he sells. At one point he sold 100 AK-47s to a member of the CJNG. Oh, that's nice. He was fighting against the Sinaloa cartel at the time. This was, you know, before the Chapitos got arrested.

So there was a huge fight between the two organized, and before Almencha was killed. So huge infighting between the two cartels. And he was, you know, making tons of money, just selling guns to both sides, by the way. And he told us, like, you were being watched all around us. You see these mountains around us. Like, this is weird.

Yeah, you're being watched right now. So we're making sure. And I asked him, I said, last night you didn't believe me, but you agreed to meet me here now. Do you believe me now? He was like, no, but you're being watched. And whatever happens if you betray us, you're dead. And you weren't, in this situation, you're not scared a little bit?

No, I, you know. She's like, I was good. I think most times there's sort of a fight inside my brain between curiosity and fear and curiosity always wins. And sometimes that's great. And sometimes it's not. But in this situation, it was good because we got incredible access. And yeah, and then we follow the trail of drugs, the gun, sorry, all the way to Cina Loa and filmed more crazy shit. So it was an incredible episode.

Highly recommend it. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's also like people are really cynical about this, too, when you literally see something exposed like Operation Fast and Furious, which we've talked about a ton where it's like the government was literally paying for it. And there's another guy who maybe at some point will come on the podcast. I've teased this a few times over the years. But, you know, basically this dude, I got connected to him through someone else I know. and he kind of scares me, nice guy, but, you know, he says he's not in the CIA, but, you know, he's

been in the CIA for 50 years. And the way he got in was, the way I understand is he was like a bartender or something like that in California dating one of the Felix Ariano brothers, nieces. And the CIA started watching them. And they're like, ah, we like this guy. So they show up and they're like, hey, we're CIA. We think you'd make a great knock, whatever that is, obviously. He didn't know at the time. you know we want you to go down to Mexico and do this he's like no no no no no I'm not listen I'm not a narc like they're like like we don't want you to rat on them are you kidding me no we want you to work with them be inside them do everything that they do go where they go like where our job's not to stop them and when I hear stuff like this and then I have a guy like Matt Hedger sitting there

whose job it was to do that as well in CIA I'm like you know do they do they really want to stop these organizations do they want to stop the gun running like that or is there some sort of calculation that like hey this i'm talking about like the u.s government here this is the cost this is cost of freedom right here and you know these guns got to go across this terror has to exist in other places but we'll control it from the inside and use it to our benefit for the worst terror around the world like am i crazy to think that that might be a little bit of the calculation well i don't know i think that there's a lot that we don't know i think that That's for sure.

For example, I mean, we all know because of recent reporting, something that no one knew about until recently, which is that the CIA is apparently operating inside Mexico. I mean, this was never disclosed. It was the car bombing close to the Mexico City airport recently, which has been reported was fully happened, and it was done by the CIA or planned and done by the CIA. There were the two CIA operatives that died in CILO,

after coming from visiting one of those super meth labs that I've visited in the past as well. And so there's a lot more involvement of the American government. I don't think they're not trying, I don't think they're trying to stop the guns flowing south because that's not in their interest. I do, and I think they should be, because ultimately that violence comes back to us. But I do think there have been multiple administrations trying to stop the flow of drugs to the United States, I just think that it's not being done the way that it should. I think it's been a other, I mean, it's not me. Everybody knows. It's another failure, right? Millions,

billions of dollars loss on this drug war that has had zero consequence whatsoever on American lives. We, in fact, are seeing more and more people die every year. I mean, last year, actually, there was a first time there was a, I think it was a 17% decrease in fentanyl overdoses, but there's something much worse coming out now called nitazines. Trank? Trank. I've also done a story for season five, but even, I mean, Tranktope is terrible because it's the tranquilizer mixed with fentanyl, and it creates these wounds, which we filmed in Kensington, Pennsylvania, these wounds that look like open wounds and people, it's just horrific. But there's a new version, a new sort of synthetic opiate called Nidazines, that people are, anitazine, yeah. And they're still

not enough laws against it. So now the cartel is sort of really doubling down. on these new synthetic drugs because it's not as dangerous for them to make them as it is with fentanyl because anyone that's making fentanyl right now has a target on their backs. Is this a similar thing to fentanyl where they're getting precursors from other places? Yeah, precursors from China.

Oh, this is also coming from China. That's nice. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I'm quite sure, yes. I was just thinking because I haven't done a story on nightazines, but I was recently- How do you spell night-eat-e-n-e------------------. Okay.

Okay. It's funny, so I've been reporting, covering the opiate crisis since the very beginning. The first story I ever did on this was in 2008, and it was about OxyContin in Florida. Oh, you were early, early. Yeah, early, early. Good for you. Nobody knew what OxyContin was at the time. I mean, if you were a doctor, you did, or a terminal cancer patient, but you didn't realize what this, what was happening. And it was, we were working at the time at Current TV, which, which is Al Gore's television station and had read a little article in Miami Herald about how all these pain clinics in South Florida were being inundated with like lines of people out the door that were coming from Appalachia, West Virginia, Kentucky.

I mean, as far out as even California, people coming to buy drugs there. And why is it? Why are they coming from so far away to buy drugs from this pain clinic? These clinics had security guards out front. They had surveillance cameras. I mean, not your traditional pain clinic, right?

And so we started investigating this, and we did a doc about it called the OxyContin Express, which sort of, we made lots of contact sources, and then eventually our sources in law enforcement and on the streets started telling me that, hey, there's something now, they're harder to get OxyContin, they're getting into heroin.

It was the boom of heroin that we also filmed. And then I did one of the first stories ever on fentanyl, even before fentanyl was known too. This was before Prince died of a fentanyl overdose. It was in 2004, 15. Wow. Yeah, also right at the beginning, I was working at Fusion, another TV station at the time. I went to my editor and I told him, hey, I want to do a story about this new drug hitting the streets called fentanyl.

He said, what? Nobody's heard about this. How did you first hear about it? Because I have a really good contact in law enforcement and on the street. And they've been telling me there's this new thing. and it started also as a drug for terminal cancer patients, much like OxyContin, but it's being abused on the street now. And so I started trying to convince my editor that this was an important story. He eventually agreed.

When our story came out, I think came out in March, the year before had been the first year ever, that one state, it was New Hampshire, the only state where there were more deaths from fentanyl than heroin. And at that time, it was just one state. again nobody had heard about fentanyl but i traveled to mexico to sinloa and interviewed a member of the sinolaa cartel showing us he had a kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl at the time it was in pure fentanyl they would mix heroin with fentanyl and and he told us how they had hired the sinola cartel had hired a chemist in columbia they paid him i think it was like 40 or 50 000 to teach them how to make fentanyl using chinese per carcels precursors. And I remember at one point the Marines show up and the guy, there's like this one

kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl right next to me. And the Marine show up and the guy takes off. And then I'm like sitting there. There's a shot of me with the one key heroin being like, what the fuck if the Marine show up here I am with this? What do I do now? That's when you pull out the Instagram and be like journalists. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Press, press, pass. I promise, I have nothing to do with this. But that was right the beginning. And it was sort of the best $50k dollars that the cartel has ever spent.

And that's why the Sinaloa cartel were sort of the ones who really started the whole fentanyl trade. I mean, they were very early on because they realized that Americans were abusing pharmaceutical fentanyl. And they were like, oh, we can make this in our labs. And we don't, heroin is made, as you know, it comes from poppies. You have to depend on the seasons and how that season does and all that cultivation. And this shit, we can make it in a lab with some chemicals that cost nothing coming from China. So we're going to make it. You ever read Ben Westos book, Fentanylink on this?

No. Wrote a great book about it. I had him in here a couple months back. But he like fell into this story he explained on the podcast. guess how he did it but he would he had been working on something else and then found out about the drug and started researching it and it turned into this book and he's like he was like a music reporter like a music and culture reporter like well i guess i should look at this yeah fucking flew to china himself yeah and just like set up a meeting it was kind of hilarious how it happened with the

precursor creators yeah i was like yeah so i'll take like uh 50 000 worth walks right out as if he could do it like they took him into the inter sanctum and he's like this is government funded basically. Yeah, it's sanctioned. Yeah, it's the word. It's government sanctioned. And he saw the scale of it. And what's always struck me though, I understand why China would do that and stuff.

They're over there. It's like a reverse opium war. It makes sense. But, you know, it's dark, obviously. But the cartels, obviously these are very vicious people. They are still business guys, though. And like when you look at marijuana and then, cocaine, you know, especially with cocaine, which was a huge moneymaker for them and continues to be,

it's a party drug. You know, it's something people abuse in the clubs and stuff like that all throughout the United States. Rich people will even do it, you know? But with fentanyl, it kills people. And to me, it's like the huge investment they made in like, let's push this because a bunch of people in America are addicted to it. It feels to me like that put an... extra target on their back. Like, I'm curious what the calculation was there for them to do that besides, like, a quick get rich thing. I don't think they thought that far, quite frankly.

I think they realized it a little too late, particularly the Chapitos of Chapo Sons. And that's why they were, I went, so I've done three stories on fentanyl. And the last one was about trank dope, which is essentially fentanyl mixed with tranquilizer. But we went to Sinaloa and saw how. all the chemists were now prohibited from making fentanyl. Because the chapitas realized that as much money as they were making from this, there's a huge target on their backs, and sooner or later the U.S. was going to catch them, and they did.

And so they prohibited all chemists from making. And for these guys, you know, the chemists, it's their livelihood. So a few of them had been killed. They'd been hung in bridges. there was signs that with photos of the guys hung, the chemists that had, you know, gone against the rule of the cartel. And we interviewed one chemist. It was an incredible interview with a guy who had a fentany lab under his house. He happened to have a house that was built right above one of those sort of drain, what do you call those storm drains?

You know, the gigantic storm drains. And so he took us. We went in a ladder down to this storm drain, and he showed us exactly where he used to have his lab, and he was making tons of fentanyl. And then the cartel came, they two hitmen, and pointed a gun and told them that you are not, you are prohibited for making fentanyl any longer,

and if you do, you were coming back and killing you. And he stopped, and he was like, it sucks, because I don't have anything else. I don't know what else to do. And he was scared. He was super scared. You could see the whole time he was like shaking, telling us this story.

How'd you get in touch with him? Through some sources and through I have an incredible journalist that is that guy. Yeah, Miguel, Anhevega, who's an incredible guy. I've worked with him for many, many years. I've reported more from Senalo than anywhere else in the world. And, yeah, me and him, I mean, we've been, I remember the first time I ever got access to a fentanyl lab. I was there with myself, a cameraman, Miguel, and I've been trying for years. And then finally we got the call

And the cartel told us, okay, we'll pick you guys up In the middle of the night We're going to blindfold you We're going to take you to an undisclosed location, no cell phones But you'll be able to film inside a lab And I called my husband super excited telling him, hey, I got this And his first response was just make sure they film you As you're being blindfolded

I was like, this is why I love you Production first, safety later That's what I'm talking about Wow. When you talk with a guy like that, though, I would imagine you got to, you spoke with him about his background where he was from his childhood. What was his story? What was his environment when he was growing up? Because obviously he's a smart guy. He's a chemist. He had to be educated, right? Yeah. So that time when they said they were coming up, pick us up in the middle of the night, actually didn't happen. They never did. But a couple of years later for another episode we did for traffic, we went inside really smart guy. I mean, really smart guy. He. He owned a pharmacy in town. He had a few other businesses that he didn't want to tell us about on camera. And he really knew his shit. I mean, he was really a chemist.

But I've been in some... But not the other businesses. Yeah, yeah. Well, he was afraid it was to identifiable. But he really knew his shit. And we are, you know, fentanyl lab is very different from a cocaine lab and a meth lab. you know the level of protection is intense we went with full hazmat suits we had a mask that we had to have training to how to use this mask to make sure it had to be fitted to our face uh we brought

we had an expert come to our office in l.A and fit every single one of our team's faces for this mask it was i hated every step of it because i oh safety first yeah i always say safety fourth uh look good sound good, look good, safety, fourth. That's our team motto, it's a joke. And so, which is why I hated this whole process of taking these masks and hazmat suits, but it was really

the only way. But we get there. We were finally inside. We're hard to breathe. And this guy has one of those, like, COVID masks on, and, like, a bandana across his head or neck, and that's pretty much it. and these gloves.

And then when I ask him, like, I mean, this is very, very dangerous. Like, how do you, oh, because a lot of these labs actually explode. It's very, very dangerous. I mean, if you do one thing wrong, these labs explode all the time. All the time. Yeah, people die in these labs all the time. Some are from explosion.

Some are from just touching and overdosing, obviously, of mishandling of the drugs and overdosing. And I'm talking about fentany labs. Meth labs actually tend to explode. much more than fentanyl labs. But in general, drug labs, illicit drug labs tend to not be the safest work environment. And I asked him, how do you know once it's, how do you know it's done? And he said that you feel it in your skin and your heart starts palpitating more.

And that's how he knows that the fentanyl is good, that it's done and it's good quality. And I have said this before and people say, well, that's bullshit because fentanyl is an opium, it's a downer, it's not an upper. Yes, but the symptoms of an overdose is that the heart slows down, right? But his explanation, I actually now can't even remember his explanation was, but there was a reason, oh, I know why. When you start feeling the effects of the chemical, precursor chemicals that are used in fentanyl, your heart actually, and if you're exposed to it the way that he is, your heart actually starts palpitating faster. And that's what he explained to us. filmed it all and again nope he had no protection and yeah and he told us he's he runs a business in

town he's been a chemist all his life he was approached by the cartel and in his situation you know they offer him good money but in a lot of cases it's it's it's not a will you do it or not you have to do it and you either do it or your family is at risk or you or you are we'll kill you so that i was going to ask about if you talked to him about the more question of it. And actually, can I ask Joe for a question? Joe, is there some way that you can research what the, what fentanyl, would, I just want to make sure that I get this right, but what sort of exposure to fentanyl precursors and fentanyl

in a fentanyl lab, what it does to your body? All right, let's get this first. I just want to make sure that I have this, right. So you're saying because something, he's wearing suits and stuff, but because he's actually making it something in him is at least exposed to it enough that he could get that. Yeah, because he didn't have the hazmat suits like we did. Oh, he didn't have it, the full suit. No, no, no. Okay. And we can actually even pull up that clip if we want from our trafficked. Okay, Joe can find that, no problem. Exposure to fentanyl or its immediate chemical precursors

like NPP and ANP triggers a life-threatening shutdown of the body central nervous system. These chemicals are up to 50 to 100 times stronger in heroin. So it could be a profound respiratory depression, extreme sedation, muscle rigidity, cardiovascular changes, blood pressure, and heart rate drops significantly leading to poor circulation. So can we Google? Yeah, exactly. Can you ask if it's possible that your heart beats faster? Because that's what he told us.

If it's a small exposure, something like that, I guess, right? Or just, yeah, that, yeah, or that triggers the heart beating faster. And we can also watch the clip and hear him explaining it to us. All right, let's see, he just asked it. Yes, small exposure can trigger rapid heart palpitations, but pharmacologically it is almost always caused by an adrenaline response or a panic attack rather than the chemical. No, this is interesting though because I was going to ask you about this. One of the things that was happening, and I think still happens, maybe my law enforcement friends in the comments can help us with that. But like, you know, there would be cops who would have these overdoses.

And I put it in air quotes when they'd have, they'd just be in the room with it or whatever. And yes, sometimes that did happen because it's obviously incredibly potent. There were other times where I believe I read this where they determined that it was actually a psychological effect. I've heard about this as well. Because they had been warned about it, you know. So it could be also like maybe, I don't know, pure spec here, but maybe when he's making it, he knows he's getting close or whatever. Or it could be that he actually told me his heart slowed down and in my mind his heart sped out. That's exactly what I'm saying.

So we should actually. at some point watch that clip yeah it says Joe's getting the clip right now just before he pulls it up it says right here even the adrenaline and panic response most common when someone believes or realizes they've been exposed to a deadly substance like fentanyl the brain's fight or flight system instantly kicks in the surge of adrenaline causes immediate physical symptoms that are often mistaken for chemicals direct effects i get this another not to this extent but to like other random things from like oh did i just take like three ibuprofen instead of two you know or something like that And then I'm like, right, or me and the coup, where I get.

Yeah, you and a coup. Yeah, I'm sitting here worried about like hydrogen. But all right, Joe's got the clip right here. Oh, here it is. So keep it not full screen because this is Nat Geo. Dief. Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. And we'll watch it.

And if you guys get a skip in the episode right now, it's because it was copyrighted, but we'll watch it right here. So you see the masks that we have fitted to our faces. Yep. All right, go ahead. Chemical process. It's a little bit of hearticardia. So, that's also a bigger gas.

It's also a bigger gas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just so precious. And what's that he's open in one of the precursors? Hydrolytic acid mixed with tartaric acid. I'm just translating people. I'm hoping, really really hoping that's I know what is killing here. You know, we're going to start to move here.

here? I'm starting to think my team and I should get the hell out of you. How are not going to them is accidentally kill themselves all the time. Yeah. He'd be accidentally killed. Let me just finish this, he says. Do you know what you're doing? Oh, that's, yeah. Yeah.

Okay, yeah. So he said, Taki Cardia. My memory was right. He gets, his heart starts moving faster, for whatever reason that's his case. But this was, I mean, I didn't test the drug. the drugs, but it was very, very, I'm pretty sure that this was in fact fentanyl, that he was mixing in front of us and showing us. And he would crush them into these M30 pills, which is how they're commonly shipped here to the U.S. And it's so cheap too.

So cheap. It's like a couple dollars for a pill. It's ridiculous. Right. I've had so many friends on the show like Tommy G and Brandon Puckiname who have filmed documentaries in Kensington. And it's just like, you know, they know what they're going to see before they go there. And then they see it in person or like, hold. Holy shit, you know, it's everywhere.

Yeah, it is everywhere. And it's just a normal day, someone in sunlight being given Narcan to come back to life. Oh, and that's another thing with these nitazines is that they're so powerful, this new opiate, that in some cases, Narcan doesn't work. And it's not visible in drug testing either. So that's why people are still worried about it. Yeah, you just wait until nightazine is the next big thing. The morality of this, though, as you were saying before we were checking on the symptoms there, this guy was told basically you have. have to do this or your family's going to die and hey that's a as a really hard place to be put in i

can't imagine that i'm glad i'm not him but you know do you ask him about if he ever thinks about the the longs the downstream effects of this always i always ask um every single one of these sinaloa cartel or cartel members in general um if they know what they're doing is actually killing people and you know a lot of the time my time is spent with those families members. One of the first stories I did, that first story that I did on fentanyl, I spent time with a mother who had three sons and lost two of them to fentanyl. And, you know, yeah, again, I spent a lot of time in rooms with particularly mothers who are the ones who are, it's something, I mean, obviously there's a lot of very hurt fathers out there and fathers trying to make a

difference after their loved ones pass away. But more often, than not, in my experience, mothers after a loss like this, they decide that they don't want any other mother to suffer like they have. And they've become very public in their fight against these drugs. So again and again, we interviewed, yeah, mothers who are doing everything, going out there, going to Congress, out on the streets, and trying to prevent more deaths from fentanyl. Yeah, it's the worst club you could ever imagine being in losing a kid. Yeah, the worst. And I can't even fathom it, but I'm always amazed when, you know, even years later with things like this, you'll see moms like really, for lack a better way of putting it, putting in their money where their mouth is and really pushing to make a change to other people don't have to feel that.

So I'm glad you also has another cover that. But like also, how old's your son? 16. He's about to turn 16. Okay. So here's a great time period question for you. you know he's in high school headed to college and stuff like that everyone has fun in these environments you know you ever get really worried about of course the wrong thing being in something that he

doesn't know it's in i have conversations about this with him and have had for years constantly telling him like unfortunately you know drugs aren't the same as they were when we were younger um we did a story on hash in portugal and morocco and spain and where we filmed me actually smoking hash on camera for National Geographic because it was a story of, it sort of hash is the equivalent of weed in Europe, right? You're not going to tell me fentanyls in this, are you? No, it's not. I mean, I don't know.

That was not our story. We wanted to look at the trafficking of hash and how it gets there. And meanwhile, here I am on camera smoking a drug and telling my son that he absolutely cannot touch the shit. But what I told him was like, this is, you know, well, it was cool. Yeah, this is for the job. I didn't enjoy it at all. It was okay to smoke a joint when I was growing up.

It is no longer okay to smoke a joint if you don't. Even when you know, I mean, I got, I never forget getting email oatmeal from parents who told me, this was like a year ago. His kid went to a, got what he thought was just a weed joint and inside the weed joint. And he went, it was like from a public, from a gas station that sold like the synthetic weed. And then they analyzed it and it had fentanyl in it. Oh, in a gas station. Even when you think this shit is safe and you're buying it from reliable sources. Yeah, how about that 70H stuff too?

Is that what it's called? Oh, 7.8. 7.08 that they're selling in gas stations? It's DMT, right? What is it called? No. Oh, wait. Cratum.

Yeah, the synthetic cratum, right? Yes, it's like a different. I mean, all of it is supposedly not good for you, by the way. Yeah. The 70H is like a hundred times more poin, so concentrated. Right. They call it gas station heroin. Yes. Whatever it is.

I've spoken to people addicted to it. All right, right. Grandmothers, by the way. Because it's being bought at gas stations, they don't think it's dangerous. Yeah. There's just something. And that's what I think. Because like also you're from Portugal.

Now I'm not the most caught up on like Portuguese politics and stuff, but I've heard in the winds that like they have full legalization there. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it's not legalization. It's decriminalized. So if you're caught with up until a certain amount of drugs, if you're caught with, 20 keys of cocaine, you're going to prison. But if you're caught up until a certain amount that you would have, as a user, they give you the option.

You can either go to prison or go to drug rehab, the vast majority of people. True's drug rehab, which happens to be less expensive than housing you in prison. So the incarceration rates went down, AIDS went down, drug addiction went down. It was actually huge success in Portugal. Other places have tried to replicate it. You know, Oregon tried a similar thing. but what was what they failed at dramatically, I think, and why it didn't work there is because they didn't have the systems in place, the rehab facilities, ready to go for people.

So you get caught and then you have to wait several days because there's no room for you available yet. And when you pass a law like this, you really have to make sure that you are ready to go, right? Because people's lives are at risk here. And that was from what I've read, not the case in Oregon. So it's a pity because now people think. think that legal or decriminalization is not a good idea. And I'm not sure about that. I've spoken about this many times and whatever we're doing right now is not working. And so we have to come up with a completely different system. Portugal is a small country, 10 million people. We've

seen it work really well there. I know we're not as big, obviously, as U.S. It can be confused. It can get chaotic here perhaps, but I think we should try something because whatever whatever we're doing is not working. Yeah, I'm open-minded on some sort of wild different solution. I don't know if decriminalization across the board is the way to go. Maybe it would be. Someone can make a good argument to me. But I do know what we have right now doesn't work.

And then cynically, you know, what, what Hague says say we spent on Iran so far? Fucking 57 billion or I don't know, whatever it is. It's a big number. It's like we can keep doing shit like this. Yeah, 37. Okay, so I was 37. Sorry, I was 20 off. You know, but then we don't have facilities for people to like try to make something work. Like at least try it. If it doesn't work, okay. But like, know that you put an effort into it. If I, if I try to start running and show up the first day hung over after eating like, you know, a fucking after after drinking a whole diet Coke or something like that, I'm probably not going to run that well. So, but if I show up hydrated and well slept, maybe like I'll stick with it. It's. just human nature, but I do get so down on it when I see like we're supposed to in America freedom and stuff, like we're supposed to lead the world and so many of these metrics and there's

things like this with drug abuse where we're like the worst. Oh, the worst. I mean the worst. Like a million people have died in the past 25 years more than in any war combined since the World War I. And I think constantly the idea is that these, you know, these drug addicts, as we call them, they're failing society. When I do not, I think most people don't understand that we are actually failing them. This is a huge public health crisis that's happening in America.

If it was a regular disease, physical disease, which it is, by the way, but if it was like leprosy, for example, and we'd see people on the streets of Kensington like that, we wouldn't allow it, right? But because we believe that this is their choice and they're choosing to do this, which is false, Nobody chooses to be homeless and to have gigantic open wounds and to, you know, constantly having to be revived by Narcan. Nobody chooses this life. And so unless until we realize that this is a public health crisis and sort of treat it as that, we're never going to be able to solve this problem. I don't think we've been serious enough about it. And we're going after, yes, we're going after the cartels and Ocapo's sons and Mayo and all these people. And that's great. And we should. And we should. but we should equally put as much money, if not more, into curing the source of the problem. I agree. And that is addiction. I agree.

And I think there has to be a real concerted effort on it and also an understanding, like you just said, of people of the level of compassion. Like, hey, someone else had a different life than me, maybe one time. They made a choice to do one thing at a low moment or something like that. And then it spiral into other stuff. That could be you too. What's the old quote? We're all like 10 bad decisions away from being homeless or something. And not only that, I mean, it could be a bad decision.

It could have been doctor prescribed, which is so many cases, a large percentage of people on the streets out there were prescribed by doctors. So we don't know. Instead of judging them, let's understand that it could be us at any moment. So we have to figure it out. This is perfect, too, because I had wanted to come back to this. You mentioned this earlier and how early you were on the opioid crisis in America. which was a legalized cartel within our own borders that caused that when you look at the sacklers

and then obviously people across pharma who jumped in on this if you will but like making a documentary in 2008 i'm just thinking of the timeline in my head of when this started to explode quietly without like people sharing it all over the internet you know it wasn't that long before that and it didn't go mainstream of people realizing holy shit this is like a legalized problem until the 2000 intense. So how did you, I think you started to say this earlier, but just like the full background, what was the first time where you realized besides like seeing the people show up to the pharmacies in Florida and coming in? Like what made you realize it was completely widespread to do like a whole documentary on it? Was it just that? Yeah. I mean, started by just seeing the activity, the people from

all over the country coming to these pain clinics in Florida, then actually looking at the numbers and finding out that 90% 90 of the top 100 oxy-cotton prescribers were in Florida from the whole country, 90 of the top 100 prescribers in the whole country were in Florida. God damn it, Florida. And seeing, oh, my, it's the, it's, it's heaven for journalists. I take my passport there. It's a different country. It's a crazy place.

It's, uh, my husband's favorite place on Earth is Florida because he's a journalist like me. He's, we've worked together on a lot of stories there, but it's, yeah, it's like a, it's heaven for journalists because it's just every corner there's a story idea yeah where's the wind all right there's one um yeah so it was like starting to look at that and then and then and then um and then actually heading down there and it was uh i remember walking into a pain clinic i had a secret camera on me one of those button cameras and uh my husband's in the car with a camera but me from inside the car and I go into this pain clinic and I asked the receptionist I tell her I have a little bit of back pain could I see somebody and how easy is it to get prescribed oxy cotton and she

oh yeah yeah and she actually was one who mentioned oxy what can I be prescribed and she said well you have to go and do an MRI which we have in the back of our pain clinic and and then you'll come back with it and then the doctor can prescribe you oxy it was the the holy tree Trinity in Florida at the time was oxy, Xanax, and a muscle relaxer. And that was sort of the holy grail of drugs. That's why all the people were coming. I mean, it was mainly the oxycotton, but you mixed it with the others. And then interviewing another, we interviewed another mother, which she had two sons,

and she lost both sons to oxy cotton. And we went to her house and she showed us the pills that her son had been prescribed by one of these pain clinic doctors. And we're talking about, you know, 300, 400, 500 pills and boxes for a one-month supply of drugs for a kid who didn't have any physical conditions whatsoever, but had become addicted to drugs and was, he was doctor shopping. So he's going from pain clinics. Pain clinic.

He passed away. And the other, her, the younger son was still alive. And we filmed with him, a kid called Todd. And he should, I mean, he was, he allowed us to film him. as he snorted OxyContin, and this is all over our film. Like he behind his mother's back, which was sort of a difficult decision for us, but he was willing to show us how he does it, how he procures it. And then I think it was a year later, he passed away as well.

So in the same documentary where you're talking to the mom as a journalist about one son, yeah, the other son. You have to adhere to journalistic standards and not tell her about the fact that you're also. We told her, she knew that he was using drugs, and she was trying to keep him safe. And we asked her if we could spend time with him alone. And while we were spending time with him alone, he took out a tin foil and was smoking in front of us.

And we later told her because he could die. Okay. So you did. And then we actually screened, it was one of the rare cases where we screened the documentary for her before it was released for her and Todd. So he still saw it while he was alive. And then he died. But they saw the documentary because I wanted to make sure, you know, that she was okay with it because it was obviously about something very private.

Here's the part I still don't understand. I can see some of these scamy clinics in like Florida or whatever. But I always think back to the third time I broke my wrist. I was in college. This is like 2013. And I had to get surgery when I didn't get a metal plate and all that. It's not in pain or whatever. And the college doctor gave me a prescription for Vicodin.

I shit you not. It was three canisters of it. I never took a single one of them. Now, I'm going to be honest. Whenever I've had four surgeries before, whenever I've done those surgeries, there's like 48 hours afterwards where you take like whatever, it's Vicodin usually, I think.

I always throw it away at 48 hours just to be safe. For whatever reason, whatever that feeling is that people like, I don't like it. Yeah, I don't know. But I could imagine that maybe other people do and then they get addicted. I think the stats have backed me up. But I remember looking at this and I never took it. I actually later, I put it, it's a funny story, I put it in my backpack, forgot about it.

And so I went to fly to Florida six months later with my mom and we go to security. And she's, I had accidentally taken some bagel knives through security a couple years before, which was a funny story. So she's like, are there any surprises in your backpack? I'm like, no. And I go through the backpack and I get to this pocket. I'm like, and I reach in and it had, they'd all exploded open. So it was a giant white powder. And I had to go like in front of the security lady and like dump the white powder in the trash can. She's like shaking around anything. But anyway, I didn't take any of it. But I remember thinking about that. And I'm like, why did he just give me 90 pills for a broken wrist? And why is, why does that guy have a medical license? Like, shouldn't there be some kind of onus on the doctor knowing what the fuck? they're prescribing you. Yeah. And I think the vast majority of doctors who overprescribe these pills,

it was pain management. It's a sort of an expertise within itself. It's like, and a lot of these doctors that are treating pain aren't pain management experts. So, and you had the Sackler family, you had Purdue Farmer telling people that this was safe, right? And there were ads out there, and they were pushing these on doctors

and telling them that the biggest plague that American suffer is suffering itself and we had to figure out it's pain and we had to figure out how to deal with pain because American doctors weren't good at dealing with pain. And so they really pushed this idea. And a lot of doctors decided that there was the doctorly thing to do, the right thing to do was to treat people and treat their pain. But there was also, as we all know, a lot of very, very dirty doctors out there. We interviewed. We interviewed, you had a kid who is at the time doing the oxy thing in Florida and his doctor was a gynecologist and he was going to a gynecologist. He was a boy and he was going to a gynecologist who was an

OBGYN, and she was the one who prescribed him oxycotton. Now how does she have a medical license now? Yeah. How's that? That makes no sense. I not one single, I don't think a single one of these doctors has seen a day in prison. Our doc, the one, the oxycotton Express, actually focuses on this one pain clinic in South Florida called American Pain that was run by these two twins. My husband did a feature doc about it called American Pain. It's on HBO. You should watch it. It's really good.

But it was basically focused on these two twins who ran, they used to have a, they used to sell illegal steroids, basically. And then a friend of them told them, what are you guys doing? You can be selling oxycodone and making much more money. So they set up these pain clinics all throughout South Florida. And we're making, I mean, they had $40 million. or something like stash underneath the mother's mattress. It was like insane amounts.

They were like going on helicopters, having sex with stripper. It was like crazy display of wolf. They're making so much money. And my husband and I had spent time in Kentucky filming this with a sheriff who was finding these pill bottles next to dead bodies, overdose bodies, that set American pain. So we knew this was the pain clinic once we went back to Florida. We really wanted to film outside. this pain clinic. And we get there and we're on the other side of this sort of big road

because we know that these guys are, they're known to be sort of aggressive and not like cameras outside. Meanwhile, there's like two security guys outside, surveillance cameras. And as soon as we take out the camera, the car comes around, stops right next to us, two cars. And it's the twins. And they start threatening us. And they say, what the fuck are you guys doing here, get the shit, get the fuck out of our place, get the fucking cameras out of our face, what are you doing? And we're like, okay, it's time to go. And we start driving out.

And we had planned this so we could film right before we were supposed to fly out. So we have a rental car and we're driving towards the airport down 995. And I realize that we're out of gas. I mean, we have like a tiny bit of gas left. And they're following us down 995. And we stop at the gas station following us. And we stop at the gas station. gas station and they stop right behind us and they get out of the car and they come right to our to the

window and i'm at this point a little scared and i decided this is a terrible idea so i continue driving and and then on nine 95 uh we had we had uh interviewed a share someone from the sheriff's department the night before and i called her and i said hey we're being followed by the guys from american pain and she said hung up the phone and call 911 right now you do not want to mess with these guys there was an active DEA and FBI investigation to these guys at the time. What were their names? The George brothers. The George brothers?

Yeah. George brothers. Yeah. That was sarcasm of people. Yeah. Yeah. And if you pull up American pain, which is my husband's a documentary, you'll see them. I think they're.

So when you were making this, though, in 2007, 2008, it came out in 2008. So you're making it in 2007? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How close to the Holy Grail did, you know, I'll read this person. Chris and Jeff George are identical twin brothers who operated the largest network of illegal pill mill clinics in the United States from 2007 and 2010 based out of South Florida. Their cash only, that's how you know, their cash only clinics trafficked over 20 million doses of oxycodone fueling the American opioid crisis.

Operating out of strip malls and former bank buildings, the George brothers. created what they called the Disneyland of pain clinics, pulling in over $40 million in cash. They catered not just to local Floridians, but heavily to thousands of customers who traveled thousands of miles or rented buses from Appalachian states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio to get highly addictive pain pills. The operation required cash up front, relied on corrupt doctors, and generated more than $500 million in pain pills. How long did they, what was the sentences there, Dee? Just back to that page real quick. Sorry for them right there. Yeah, so they were caught, discovered $4.5 million in cash stashed in the attic of the twins' mother.

Yeah, okay, 4.5. They were making, they made $500 million. Yeah. Okay. So Christopher, the Pill Mill Kingpin, pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy and served 11 years in prison. The brother was set free after serving roughly 13 years behind bars. So they're both out now. And you see it mentions their massive drug enterprise of the extremely detail in the award-winning CNN documentary American campaign. There you go. And he interviewed, and he interviewed both of them for the doc. And this is the funny story. So they're following us down on 95.

I'm on the phone. The woman tells me call 911 right now. This is actually seriously dangerous. We call 911 and tell them we're being followed by these. Psychos. Gigantic, big-looking guys threatening us. And as I'm on the phone with 911, our car runs out, the car runs out of gas. And I veer off to the side and I just stop the car.

but they have no idea what's happening. They didn't put two and two together that we had stopped at the gas station because we needed gas and we ran out of gas. They just thought, what the fuck are these people doing? So they just stopped behind us and they don't get out of the car because at this point they're trying to figure out

what is happening here. And within like minutes, actually, police shows up and they come and they ask us questions and they ask them questions. They come up with an excuse that they thought I was a psycho ex-girlfriend. Oh, shit, obviously. I tell the police what had just happened.

And then it turns out that during this time, at this whole, our whole, uh, filming, because I later also called them and got them on the phone, and all of this made it into their trial, um, the tapes because the police was, had a wire on them the whole time. Wow. So they, they heard them talking about us, our investigation, this annoying journalists that were looking into their business. And then when they were in prison, my husband sends them a letter and he's saying, he really

wanted to do this documentary on the rise and fall of the twin brothers. and we discuss, like, should I say that I directed the OxyContin Express or should I not? And he decides not to. And so he writes a letter, I think it was to Chris. And Chris writes back and says, at the end, says, by the way, say hi to your wife. He knew full well who he was. But he said he agreed, and he ended up doing the doc about these guys. And it's fascinating.

And, yeah, and yeah, none of the doctors did any time. in prison and or yeah not not not not enough time at least yeah it's also crazy because it's just another thematic thing here in the 21st century where we've seen such a split of like you know elite members of society and everyone else and yeah i wouldn't call doctors living in the in the billionaire class or anything like that by any stretch i don't want to exaggerate this no but when you see it take they're living well they're rich yeah they're taking they're taking it they're taking taking advantage of people, taking advantage of they're breaking their oath of what they did. And they're laughing about it and probably all fucking strippers and doing whatever they do because they're scumbags.

And yet then they get no justice. It's like it's a two-tiered kind of system because I know the dude that gets caught slinging on the corner with the wrong amount of kilos is doing 25 years on a Tuesday at 12.05 p.m. When the judge gets back from lunch and says, all right, yeah, 24 and seven months. Sorry, next case. I can understand. I mean, can understand. I'm a part of the people that are just like, what the fuck? Like, why is this like this?

And the FBI actually did an amazing job in this case. I interviewed for the podcast, the Hidden Third, which I haven't described, explained. At some point, I should explain what the Hidden Third means. Why I'm the Hidden Third Experts. It's the illicit underbelly of the world. It is. I love that name. Good.

It's estimated at 35% of the global economy are black and gray markets. It's what Econa is called the Hidden Third, and it's what I specialize in, where I spend most of my time on. And I think it was my second episode of the Hidden Third podcast, which is the podcast that I now do. Link down below. Yeah, exactly.

We can also collab this too, so people can hit the, you can literally hit next to the title and subscribe to Marianas channel. That's great. Thanks, Julie. Sure. And, yeah, we interviewed Kurt McKenzie, who's the FBI agent in charge of the operation

in Florida. in Florida to bring these guys down. And he still talks about how the biggest frustration was not being able to get, particularly one doctor that he really wanted to get who was responsible for a lot of deaths. And they tried so hard through their investigation to prove that she knew that she was responsible

for these deaths, and they were never able to get her in prison. Well, that person's going to have to answer for it at some point themselves. They've got to live with themselves. It's crazy. But all the way, back when you did this, were you able to get all the way there to like the Sacklers or was it still a little too early to know the real full story there?

So at this point, it's, I mean, we knew Purdue Pharma was a big thing and was a big part of this whole thing. But our story was more on the OxyContin Express. So it was more how the pain clinics are leading to overdoses and how it's all connected to Appalachia, so we actually followed the OxyContin Express from one place to the other. We did actually talk about Purdue Pharma, where we weren't, I mean, we were exposing it. We weren't investigating. I mean, it was an investigation, but it was more of an expose of this crazy situation that

very few Americans knew about. And meanwhile, I think in Florida at the time, seven Americans a week or a day, sorry, a day were already dying, let alone everybody outside of the state. Again, this was the early ages of what became the opioid crisis, the biggest. drug epidemic in America's history. But then we did, when I did my first fentanyl story, we went after this one pharmaceutical company that was, it was called Incist Pharmaceutical based in Arizona,

run by a guy called Kapoor, John Kapoor. Was this the titrations one where they made the song? Oh yeah, exactly. They made the song, making fun and saying they want people, more people. And we got an amazing woman, a whistleblower, who agreed to talk to us to her own risk. And she explained exactly how she was the one who supposed she was responsible for making phone calls to the insurance companies and lie to the insurance companies and tell them that the doctor prescribing pills to this woman, that this patient was in fact had cancer when they didn't. Because they, you know, because it was, you could only prescribe fentanyl to terminally ill cancer patients.

And so they lied consistently. And these medications were very. expensive, this fentanyl that was called subsis. And it was very expensive. So you had, yeah, it was a spray. And you had all these companies, these insurance companies basically paying out and people dying from these drugs. And this was where the cartel came in. They were very smart.

And they realized, wait, they were abusing these drugs. They're having to go through hoops and loops or whatever the expression is. I fuck up all my American expression. Through hoops, right? Through hoops. Yeah, you're really doing. I was going to let either one go. It was fun.

Through hoops to get these drugs when we can be supplying them right here and putting them out on the streets for people to use them without having to go to the doctor. And they were very smart. But this guy, John Kapoor, we started investigating us, him. We reached out and told him we want to interview you or anyone in your company. And this was before, obviously, he was taken down. And he threatened us. He sent us a cease and assist and said if our...

story came out, he would put all his resources into suing the shit out of us. And we went ahead and aired it. And a few years later, we actually tried to go to his house. He lives in a very mansion and a gayly community. We try to film outside his house and everything. And of course, he was the only pharmaceutical exec ever to spend time in prison. He's out now, I believe, but he did a few years in prison. You know what? He said he was going to throw all the lawyers at you and everything. You ever see the show The Wire? Yeah, my favorite.

It's the best show ever made. I always think it's number two behind The Sopranos, but I think the show is so good, it's like a documentary. It's because it's created by a journalist. Literally. Yeah, David Simon. Shout out David Simon. We'd love to talk to you sometime, by the way.

But, you know, there's many great lines in that show, but one, it's probably come up five, six different times on the podcast is when Omar Little is testifying in the second season with the lawyer who represents all the drug kingpins and knows it. And the guy's like, so this is what you do, Mr. Little. You just run around and you shoot people you don't like. And he goes, just like you. And the guy goes, what?

And he goes, I got a shotgun. You got a briefcase all in the game, though. And these guys, like the Kippoor's of the world, they got lawyers with briefcases, they got money, they can throw the court system at you to fuck you into 40 million hearings until you go away. And they look at it. the dude who walks down the street with two Sicario's in an armed guard and doesn't speak a word

to English and they look at them like below them. No, you're the same person. You are the same exact thing. One has a gun. The other has a courtroom. Sometimes they have both, by the way. And it's just this mental thing to where it even led to the family like the Sacklers, no one there went to jail. They had to pay like some record fine or whatever. They could afford that. But they still have wings named after them in some colleges, I believe, unless all that's been taken down now as it should, it's like, I mean, they're still living free out. Living free. And at the backs, there's so much suffering, right? So many people have died in this country. And the fact, I think it was, the daughter was recently quoted saying something that she still doesn't see any responsibility whatsoever.

The Sackler, one of the daughters that I was reading about recently. I mean, not even admitting that, that they obviously played a gigantic role in the creation of this epidemic. It's, yeah, it's horrible. Do you ever sit back, you know, go 30,000 feet in the air and just kind of look at it and say like, start to take away the idea that like maybe some of this, I don't know who

or from where or how or even why, but like some of this is just kind of planned out. Like they, it's not just the Sackler family really wanted to be rich. It was allowed to happen at so many different layers for so long to where the, you know, the horse left the barn. And you couldn't just put it back in and everything. Do you ever wonder if it's like on purpose for some reason, some of these things? I don't.

I think it's money. It's all about money. All money. And it doesn't matter how, you know, it must matter if you've got billions. You want more billions. And it's all about money. And as a journalist, you know, when you're investigating these stories, it's follow the money. It's the best way to get there.

And the power of money is really dangerous. Not only for the Sacklers, but recently we did a story for the last season of traffic, which is about, it's called Cartel USA. Season five. Season five, yeah. The presence of the cartel here in the United States, which we don't talk about often enough. And we spoke to cartel members here and spent time with law enforcement when they were investigating the cartel and actually went to a place in Georgia, really remote little town

where there had been a horrific crime scene. This woman was brought into this essentially Airbnb, and this is how they found out. This woman that there's a cartel leader who believed she was an Uber driver, but a trafficker, a dealer on the side. She would traffic drugs for the cartel on the side, as well as being an Uber driver. And this cartel leader believed she was stealing from him.

So they brought her into this house in the woods that happened to be an Airbnb and that happened to have cameras outside. So the owner of the Airbnb, meanwhile, gets notifications anytime anyone gets in and out. And so he was watching one of these videos and sees a woman being brought in arms, like with her head covered. And he was like, what's happening? So then, and he sees this actually a few weeks later after this has happened. Anyway, the cartel brings this woman in and they torture her. They end up killing her using a chainsaw.

They cut off her fingers. It's just one of those horrific crimes. They clean the crime scene out really, really well. The police only finds out because the Airbnb guy sees the videos and sees what's happening here, contacts the police. The police heads there. They start looking into it. They see no evidence whatsoever. And then one of the police officers has this idea, like, why don't we see what's under the drain?

So they take open the drain, they put that chemical or the light or whatever it is that shows when there is blood. And there's massive amounts of blood and there's bones there and there's everything. So then they eventually arrest the people. But this is in a small town fucking Georgia, you know, in middle America and the least places that you'd think. So that got me thinking we should really do an investigation, figure out how massive is it where they're operating from? Because it's not big city. It's actually small town America. How are they moving money?

And how violent are there? and what was surprising to me in that reporting was finding out the corruption side of it. Because we know that they're here. We know that there's drugs. We know that they're guns. We know that they're death. There's death. But I don't think we know enough about the corruption and how they've sort of corrupted politicians

and law enforcement all throughout the country. So that's when you talk about this big sort of idea that we're allowing this. I think it's more in terms of the corruption side of it, right? That we allow this because we're making money or because law enforcement or politicians at some point are making money from this. It's not this big idea that we want people dead. It's more how much if I'm making money from this,

I'll turn a blind eye. Yeah, I always do think that there could be people, though, who see some of these other people operating and they know human nature, they know they just want money or whatever. And they're like, all right, we won't stop that. it's not the worst thing ever you know what i mean that and and that will never unfortunately cynically we'll never know the answer to that but it's just i know part of it is we live in the internet age so we have an unprecedented access to information around the world anecdotally and widespread

regardless of what it is and so we're aware of a lot more than we would have been 20 years ago 30 years ago 40 years ago but it does feel like especially looking at it from the lens of america we're living through such a chaotic moment at every level where there's just, I don't know how to describe it, but almost like the way our civilization has been set up here is tearing at the seams in different ways, whether it be we're being ravaged by drug crises, whether it be, you know, the average American, almost 50% of people don't have $500 or more in their savings account, you know, or obviously political unrest. Wars happen in all over the world that, you know, somehow could be interconnected as well. It's like, you know, I'm an optimist. But I look at this

sometimes and I'm like, this is a bit of a, you know, kettle waiting to explode here. And I really hope like the world's going to be a better place for my kids when I have them. You know, do you worry about that sometimes? Like, oh, shit, maybe this experiment's going the wrong way. I'm an optimist do. And I keep thinking about, like, we are far better now than we were as, you know, better living conditions than we were decades ago, right? Less people are dying at birth. There are more women rights. They're more, you know, in general, we're pulling people more out of poverty. Inequality is still massive in the world. Don't get me wrong. I know that. But I think in general we're better off than we were, let's say, 500, 100. years ago. I mean, we talk about, again, voting rights and civil liberties and, you know, I think we're going in the right direction. What worries me most nowadays is politics and the division that exists where everything has become politicized. And again, where there is just no space for nuance and difference of opinion. And once you have this division and you can't

people to agree on easy things, simple things, like, you know, better schooling, better infrastructure, and how are we going to fight fentanyl, easy things, right? I mean, not easy, but things that we should all agree upon. When we can't get to people that are supposed to be in power for this, to sit down across from each other and try to make America better, that's what really, really worries me. And it's, I see it's getting worse and worse. I mean, you know, I go on podcasts like yours and, you know, I'm a journalist, so I always try, it's part of what I do, even as a human being. I always try to see all sides and try to understand and give people, understand the why people decide to do what they do or do they think how they think.

So that's very part of, a lot part of what I do. But there are some issues that I'm more passionate about that I really have strong opinions on. And as soon as I disclose those opinions, it is, it's like, you know, I receive death threats. Death threats. Oh, yeah, I've received death threats. I've said, like, you should be dead or you should go back, you're a bitch, and you should go back to your country. I mean, name calling, all of it. And, yeah, and that's, that's where it gets, I think, really dangerous.

I agree. Yeah, that division and that hate. and not allowing, yeah, for conversation and debate and understanding of it, why does a person think the way they do? And let's try to unpack this and see if we can get to some sort of understanding. Yeah, and I think that unfortunately our politicians are heavily responsible for this level of... I agree. And they're motivated to keep that going because it's also what keeps them in business.

Yeah. You know, and you're right. It's like, I do love... that free speech has a bigger public square than ever but there's you know it can be painful sometimes because one of the unprecedented things in history obviously we deal with now and you're alluding to it right there is that people can sign up behind faceless accounts online whether it be an email or a Twitter account or whatever and horrible no consequences I'm sure you get this as well sure I was actually just

talking with with a friend of mine today who just got he's had to like he literally had like a couple of death threats for something he said on some other show and I'm just like what are we doing here I can't even say anything bad or anything like that it's just people you know I think people are pissed off at so many things that like they have to find their blood sport yeah and I think they've made their blood sport the politics I also think though like you know I could listen to some of the economic plans that like Hassan Piker has because he's literally is self-described like socialist and be like yeah I I don't think that works as well at all. In fact, I think it's been proven over and over again. But I think his right to say that

loudly and proudly in the public square so that it can be hashed out in debate supersedes everything. And there's just not enough people right now, I think, that think that way. And something about us being at the 250th, right, at the moment, is kind of symbolic too, because that is one, the founders didn't all agree on everything. Like, that's a mess of fights. But like, this is one thing most of them, they foresaw this. Like, hey, you've got to let it air out. Yeah. And I don't know. It seems like a good moment to maybe take a lesson from that for sure. Yeah, I agree. I'll give you an example of the kind of hate. Sure. You know this better than anyone, but I had a guest on the podcast, a guy who, a big fan of the show, reached out to me, had never been on a podcast before,

but reached out to me with a story about trafficking marijuana that was okay. But then while talking to him, before the podcast, he told me how his 12-year-old daughter had been groomed by a man online, and he'd found the phone that she was not supposed to have. He didn't allow her to have a phone. She was 12 years old, but he found a phone, walks into a room one day. She's taking nude photos of herself. That whole story. Right, she was 12 years old.

And then he goes and becomes obviously obsessed, takes the phone away from her, and starts communicating with the predator. as if he's the daughter and wants to meet him face to face. And he researched the law and tried to figure out what am I going to do and wants to do sort of a citizen's arrest. So he calls his best friend and they're going to go there and have a meeting with this guy, pretend it's the daughter going to meet him

and do a citizen's arrest, call the police, and have him arrested. And he's telling me all this story, which is, you know, a good story. Oh, yeah. At the level of what he had to go through. And he says that after he obviously became so involved in fighting predators that he joined some of these YouTube groups that are, you know, to catch a predator type groups, right? And in my discussion with him, I was saying how I find some of these groups out there doing great work, necessary work. I am not the type, the journalism that I do, the work that I do is never, I don't like gotcha journalism. I don't go, you know, I spend months or years trying to get people to open up to me.

Like I said, I'm not trying to get one particular, if I can expose the problem and the broken system to me, it's much more impactful than going after this one guy. Of course, there's a line. If there's human harm or animal harm being done, I will obviously call the police, but generally, you know, I'm exposing the problem. And so what I was explaining to him was that some of these groups have grown so fast, and many of them are doing it for clicks. I agree with you. And they're being sponsored. Like they're getting paid money to then get these people who might or might not be predators. For sure, a ton of them, maybe the majority of them are.

But that's why we have law enforcement. And that's why we have a system of law that is supposed to do. deal with them. And are they perfect? No. Are they doing a good job? Not even. Because unfortunately, even the predator that this father, that abused this father's daughter, 12-year-old daughter, ended up doing less than a year in prison. And that shall not be the case. But I was showing how these groups can also have a negative impact and how they can be dangerous. And particularly talking about this one case of this guy who wanted to be internet famous and decided he was going to go out there. And, and, you know,

went into this man's house who he had who was supposedly a predator and beat the crap out of this man and hit him repeatedly and he ended up in the hospital and again there hasn't been due process in this case we have no idea if he is in fact i mean there's a there's a reason why we need evidence actual evidence that's right and so that's what that's all i was saying i was called a predator they said check her computer right now she's a predator lover uh i mean all all all of it. Like I got so much hate. And this wasn't just one or two comments. It was the vast majority of the comments that I got on the clips that we put out for that episode were like that. That's because people don't listen to the context of what you're saying. You are not saying

what they're accusing you of at all. In fact, I'll join you in getting hate right now. I love the work that like Chris Hansen has done. I've had him sitting in that chair. Since they did this at the beginning like there is a whole process they go through to do this correctly and bring in law enforcement and catch real predators and you are a hundred percent right that yes while there are other utubers and stuff who are doing those things and doing it like on the internet now and doing it well and those guys should be commended there are other ones who are just jumping in on it to try to get the quick clicks and like yes let me just throw out random numbers maybe five out of 10 times they do it they're getting a full blown actual predator and like great but then what if they fuck up because they're not

doing any of the legwork and then they beat up innocent people or something like that you know no that has not we know this has we know it's happened and you're not saying like hey you know let's get one of the guys who's guilty off you're saying like do it the right way and so yeah like people you got yeah i know you have to just you got to let people you got to let people like you explain things And we don't do that on the internet. Everything's out of context. We all the time, like all the time, we will have a clip that we go to make from a podcast that was three hours long. And I'll look at it.

And this is like my bread and butter. It's the reason my show exists. Like I've just done more edit to that than fucking I can ever remember. And I'll look at a clip that Danny Gonzalez, our editor and I'll put together. And I'll say, you know, Danny, this is a great clip. This would do a couple million and, you know, grow the account or whatever. I'm like, but it's out of context, we can't do it. Good job.

And it happens all the time. And then sometimes you miss one and you're like, fuck, man, they even took that one out of context. But like, I've always tried to be conscious of that. You can't be perfect. But it's sad you have to be because people will just, depending on what it is, either the best version of what you're saying or the worst version of what you're saying. Frankly, the truth is in here. It's just like, you know, what's the context of what you're saying. But that's crazy.

You can't, you know, you can't let that bother. You're handling that the right way. But that's nuts. 12 years old. Yeah, 12 years old. She was being, I mean, you know, sadly, I'm not surprised, but. He's actually a great guy. You should have him on your podcast.

He has a fascinating story, but then sort of the way he handled it all and how open he is about his own failures, how he feels. He failed his daughter. And not only he failed his daughter that allowed this to happen, which he feels, even though obviously he's not responsible for it. I mean, it was obviously was out of his control. but how he felt he dealt with it once it happened and how he was angry at her instead of trying to again understand and be an actual father and an example of understanding instead of you know blaming her right of course his whole he was so open uh yeah he's very in touch with this his feelings and emotions he was a great guy yeah i'd love to check that out i'm sure there's a

lot of people on your guest list i'd be like yeah let's talk to them but you know absolutely which by the way if there's people we want to talk to 100% we'll hook that up but you know it also goes back to like even the reaction like as a father with that too i'm sure you're familiar with the cane velasquez story the ufc guy no tell me that's not you'll probably remind this was like maybe four or five years ago now but cane velasquez famous fighter found out i believe it was his son was being abused by at the daycare they were leaving him at by i want to say it's been a while but I want to say it was the son of the owner of the daycare who was you know like a 35 year old guy and they found out you know he was doing that and you know to quote dana white at the time

who said this he said you know a lot of us myself included always say if someone ever did blank to my kid I would blank and he goes well Kane did that because Kane got in the car and chased the guy down and well he wasn't a good shot luckily for him I guess but he missed but he tried to to. And in all seriousness, though, I looked at that and I'm like, he did the thing that every father says they would do. And I understand, like, you're not supposed to take the law in your own hands, but then he, you know, he ended up serving a year in prison or something like that. But I'm like, man, I'm not a father yet. But if that were my kid, like, of course, that would be my inclination to go do that. And do you know, it was amazing that this father told me and why I taught when I say

he was so in tune. He's a very smart man. he said the first thought he had was, I'm going to go and kill this guy. But the second thought was, if I kill the guy, I'll end up in prison and I will no longer be able to be a father to my 12-year-old daughter like I need to. And he said something that I, you know,

there's, I'm sure you have those two, like these quotes and these interviews, episodes that stay with you, right? For me, this was violence is a young person's, a young man's, response to an adult problem and and and he realized that that was not the way he wanted to go about it he wanted to see this man in prison for the rest of his life that unfortunately did not happen violence is a young man's response to an adult

problem with something like that good for him I butcher other people's sayings as much as I know but that was really yeah if it was somehow better than that he was really spitting because that's good it's it's hard though it's hard you know one of the quotes I say this all the time but like people love throwing around the whole phrase if I were blank then I would blank about the most serious types of things and you don't fucking know you don't know how you respond until you're in those situations yeah the house is on fire I'd totally go up to the second floor if the dog was in there then the house catches on fire and you're standing out there frozen you've no idea you know but that's the thing like with cane you could say like all right

know it was a reactionary kind of thing but like he found out about it and and he got in his car and he went for it and you know he's he's he's he's hailed online as as a hero in a lot of ways and emotionally like I feel that you know I I I would have liked to think if I was his friend I would have calmed him down and said hold on we're gonna do this the right way or whatever but I don't know that anyone was there I think he kind of found out about it and got in the fucking car you know it's it's one of those strange things but I think we've also seen, you know, you've covered human trafficking throughout your career. You've literally had a show called that. But, you know, I think there's been more than ever an understanding

in this country of just how widespread the problem is here. Mm-hmm. Oh, my, yeah. We're like, what my friend Katarina Soltz was telling me were like the largest America has. There's more sex trafficking here in America. Like, more women, Americans are sex, we think of sex trafficking, we think international. We think that maybe it's like foreign women being brought in or this happens in other countries, but it's actually here, right here. Yeah, I've covered this extensively. Sex trafficking extensively.

Yeah, if I remember correctly, I've had Kat on my show a bunch. I'm pretty sure the first episode she was ever in here, she said you were a huge influence of her. I don't know right about that, but I'm pretty sure she said that. Thank you. She's like 24, 25. She's been on the ground in Mexico for four years. That's awesome. Insane stories.

That's great. A story she did last year that she got so much shit for when she reported it and then she was 100% right was she broke the story about the CJNG, replacing some of their income losses with the border being a little tighter by kidnapping young pregnant women, 16, 17, 18, 19 years old, taking them to trap houses, performing illegal C-sections, leaving them on the side of the road to die, and then taking the babies and selling them across border. And everyone's like she's full of shit. She has no idea what she's talking about. Two weeks later, La Diablo was arrested for this very thing. That was the name of the woman, C.J&G. But like, again, the part of the story that I feel like people continue to ignore is like whatever the final product was, whether it was a live child that they were trafficking or a dead child they're trafficking because they killed them.

It was being bought in America. Right. Like, we have to look in the mirror. Oh, my. Yeah. I mean, the biggest problem for Mexico is that they are neighbors with the biggest consumers in the world, right, of drugs in this case or that case. Yeah, I have never heard about that, but that's crazy. Yeah.

That's insane. I know one thing I know C.J&G was replacing the drug money, fentanyl money with was scams. They got really into the scam business. Scaming Americans. Yeah, really big. I don't think we've talked about this. Yeah, really big. What happened there?

They realized that there's a massive, there's a lot of money you can make from, they were, I mean, all sorts of scams. As you know, now we're living in the age of scams. Like I think it's Warren Buffett who says that scam and fraud are the fastest growing business in the world. And that's where we should all be putting our money on because it is. It's crazy. It's like fast getting to the levels of drug trafficking in terms of profits. And I've reported extensively on this. The one that C.G&G was getting involved in, the type of scam, was the timeshare scams.

Oh, my God. You've heard about these. Oh, yeah. That was a lot of it was CJ&G. Really? Yeah. They had, and they were working with a lot of Americans, you know, who spoke obviously English fluently, living here or living in Mexico. And I got contacted so much.

I got tons of messages from people. I even got contacted by a kid who worked inside because he thought. thought he was going to get a legal job and then realize he was paid to scam people and he left. And he was trying to figure out a way to get me inside. It didn't work out at the time. But yeah, it's insane. And yeah, it's they call many times older Americans who either own timeshares and tell them that they want out of their time share. I'm going to buy your time share for this amount. But in order for me to pay you that, you have to pay a small fee first. And then you pay $10,000, let's say. And then you need to pay the Mexican taxes. So that's,

$10,000 more, and, you know, suddenly you were $150,000 out and you're still want to believe that there's somebody on the other side of the line that is eventually going to buy your time share. Or they sell you on entirely fake timeshare. So it's like a double side of it. It's crazy. They're so creative. Sadly. They find a way.

Yeah. So my, I wanted to tell you about this. My latest story for NETIO, which is not trafficked because we're not doing that anymore, is so you have. your own company and you're working, the production company goes in and makes content for Natio still. Yeah, exactly. We're a production company.

We do series and documentaries. We're also starting to do work in the scripted world as well. But we pitched them, I pitched them a story last year that they really liked. And so it's going to where we filmed it and it's airing in September. It's called Super Scam Me. And it's where I say yes to every single scam that comes my way, every email, every phone call, we create a persona for me called Mary's. It's an older, a little older version of myself.

We did a whole makeover like brown, long hair, fake nose. We filmed everything. And we put photos of me all throughout social media and we created a fake person, basically, Mary Zelle on dating websites and everything. And I start connecting with scammers either from, you know, people were texting or emailing, but eventually also I start having a romantic relationship with one four-star general in Syria. American 4-star general in Syria. That's who he said he was. And it is the wildest

journalistic experiment of my life. So catfishing and scamming all at once? On both ends. It was so good. It was wild. It was so good. It's coming out in September, and I'm so excited.

Once they put everything on for the first time and you saw yourself in the mirror, did you believe it? Were you like, this will pass? You know, I actually thought I looked too much like myself, but everybody else around me said I looked totally different. So I guess it passed. Nobody, I was never recognized.

We actually debated putting my real face, but obviously we were afraid they would realize we just, you know, a photo search and you realize I'm a journalist. But it just meant that everywhere I went for several months, I just had to have the whole disguise with me the whole time. I was filming everything. I was in the car. I was, at one point I was talking to three Brad Pitt's, two George Clooney, several Keanu Reeves.

It was the best. I was getting videos from George Clooney saying, Good morning, Mary Zelle, the love of my life. Oh, my God. Oh, we are so fucked. Was it AI? Like, totally AI? Unfortunately, it was the real guy.

I wish it was. Yeah, but like when I say, was it AI, like, could you tell to the naked eye? It was completely AI. Some were really good. And we explore that in the dock. I mean, we show it all. And some of it wasn't very good. But some of it was really good.

And it's only getting better. And that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really scary world out there. When it comes to scams, it's only going to get worse. And I've become sort of a 911 call for people who've been scammed around the country, just because I've reported so much on it.

And so weekly I get messages from people. I actually just went, I can't say this because it will spoil the end of the film. But one of the characters in Super Scammy is a woman who thought she was talking to a celebrity for the longest time. and gave was about to lose her house gave her all her money oh to this celebrity um and i can't say but there's a great twist at the end related to this so we'll have to tune in on that yeah what what made you so you grew up in portugal your whole childhood when did you come to america for the first time to columbia university's journalism school in uh 2 000 how old were

9-11 i was 24 25 just turned 25 so you spent the first 25 years of your life affected in Portugal. I did, but I started, I did college in Portugal, and I started applying to grad school, to journalism, Columbia University. As soon as I got out of university, I didn't get in the first year, I didn't get in the second year. The third year, I flew to New York, and I knocked on the dean's door, and I introduced myself, and I told him why I wanted to be a journalist, and that year I was accepted. Oh, that's cool. That taught me sort of my first, first big lesson, determination, persistence, all the things you need as a journalist, and I think as a human being in general. And then I was there a month into my program in 9-11 happened.

And I was the only Portuguese journalist in Manhattan at the time. So I ended up doing all the live reporting for the biggest Portuguese television station. Where were you? Midtown. They sent me to the rooftop of this Midtown building. I was surrounded by international journalists, correspondents. Many of whom were my heroes that I'd watched growing up on television, you know. And I was very inexperienced.

I'd never done a live story in my life. Wait, how did you get, hold on a minute. You're one month into your program as a student. And I get a call in the morning when 9-11 happened. The Twin Towers had just fallen. I was fast asleep because I'd been working really hard on an assignment the night before. And my phone, both my cell phone and my landline start ringing. And I'm ignoring both.

And eventually I can. So I pick up the phone. And the first person that calls me is my television station that I'd worked at in Portugal. Okay. Because I wasn't accepted to grad school. Right. So you were working there? Yeah.

I was working there. I was working at a travel show, by the way. I was going to places like the Maldives and asking the honeymooners if this was their idea of paradise, which was so embarrassing. You've got a long way since then. Like here, on your sandals vacation, how's it going? Exactly. It's so much.

And, yeah, so then they called me and they said, hey, we have no one in Manhattan. I know you don't really know how to do this, but we need you to go to Middown to this building and do the life coverage. On the other line, I had my mom crying and yelling and begging for me not to leave the house. Where did you live in Manhattan? Were you up by Colombia? I was at 76 in Broadway. Okay. So you're up there a little bit, but like you could look out

your window and see the smoke and everything at that point in the morning. Couldn't see the smoke because I wasn't that high up. I was in a tiny little studio, but I turned on the TV immediately and saw, I think I turned on the TV. The second era had just collapsed. And yeah, my mom's begging me not to leave the TV. the house and I'm explaining to her that I have to and I get there as fast as I can. I remember very well I was wearing like a not white nylon top that looked horrific on television. Can we Google this real fast? I don't.

I actually do not think it is. We've tried. We've tried. If it's out there, Diff will find it at the time. Diff will find it if it's there. But so you go to the top of this building outside. I go to the top. I have this really heavy light blue eye shadow which was in at the time.

the time but does again not look good on camera and I'm extremely nervous I'm shaking I'm having a full-on panic attack my heart's beating really fast sweaty hands I'm having a hard time speaking and I'm about to go on live with the biggest Portuguese anchor you know like the give me one that you the peers Morgan no nightly news the nightly news of what's that guy's name the dude on it David Meir something like that David Muir, sorry, the David Muir of television. And at this time, at this, everybody in Portugal sits down to watch the nightly news. Oh, yeah.

This is pre-internet, like, in that way. Exactly. And so it was big. My whole family was assembled. And so I was very, very nervous. And then I go live, I explain what's happening. I managed to put two words together. I was so proud of myself.

I was sort of patting myself in the back. And I, I've spoken about this so many times and I always get emotional. but yeah the moment you walk out and you see the first signs of people holding posters and photos of their loved ones and not knowing if they died or not yeah that was basically the moment that obviously had a huge impact on so many people's lives and a moment that for me I realized the type of journalism I wanted to do was where I try to understand the why things like this happened so a year after I moved to Syria and And I started reporting on these sort of sub-worlds and underworlds. Yeah. That was the beginning of it all. So when you are rushed to get up there, woken up in the morning, and then you're up on the rooftop, obviously, you know, you're being seen by, I guess, the whole country

of Portugal, basically reporting on it. And so you're kind of in it. But then when you come downstairs at when you're done, that's when the gravity actually hit you for the first time. It's when I walk out to the streets of New York because I've been rushing to get there. And it wasn't immediate, right? People didn't go out with posters immediately. I remember they were, were you in the city at the time?

No. Were you born? I was from South Jersey. I was eight. Okay. I remember it very well. Yeah. There were people lining up in front of hospitals wanting to give blood,

donating blood for the possible. They were still hoping that they were injured people instead of deaths, you know. Injured people that never arrived because of vast majority of them had died. And so, yeah, when I walked out, I'd spend two, three hours up on the rooftop of this building. And when I walked out is when you started seeing. It was, yeah, like people holding posters, holding just photos and, you know, not knowing where their fathers or children were. Yeah, it was a, yeah, I think it was a horrible moment for all of us.

And, yeah, it was a. I remember going home that day and being on sort of a weird high and low, right? And deciding, yeah, I really want to, this was great, awesome experience, being able to witness history and communicate it. But realizing that I really wanted to understand the why and be as close to the action as possible. And yeah, then moved to Syria and did the first story about foreign fighters cross. into Iraq to fight against the Americans, the first ever story done. I want to come back to that in a second, but just taking a step back before 9-11 then. So obviously you ended up going to Columbia Journalism School and you wanted to be in that world as a kid.

But if I'm understanding you correctly, you hadn't thought of like you just wanted to be a journalist. You hadn't thought of what types of stories specifically you wanted to cover. And then this event happens and you're like, I want to cover the things that change the world, the underbelly, that kind of stuff. Yeah, the underbelly. Yeah, that's exactly it. I actually, I also hadn't had much exposure to documentaries growing up.

I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know you could be a journalist and make documentaries. So I thought the only job I could possibly have was sort of as a nightly news producer. I didn't even think I was ever going to be on camera because I'm not American. And I thought there wasn't, you know,

I don't, I speak very well, but I, you know, you can tell I'm not American. And I just... Not really. You have really lost. Your accent, like it's, I got to be like this to hear. hear that you were ever somewhere else. Thank you.

But yeah, but I fuck up expressions all the time. I think people can tell. And so I just never even thought I was going to be on camera. And that was not my aspiration at all. I just thought I'm going to, what I know is nightly news because that's what I had to watch with my family. That's why I wanted to be a journalist, was watching the nightly news every night with my family in Portugal and seeing these people on television talk about the most, everything

that's going out in the world. And I was generally a very curious person, always love traveling and thought, okay, this is what I want to do. And so that was the idea. And then, yeah, then 9-11 happened. I had started knowing more about documentaries through Colombia, having more exposure to long-form journalism. And then, yeah, when that happened, realizing, wow, this totally changes my paradigm. And, you know, yes, it was great. I went up there and I spoke for a few minutes and I explained to our viewers what was happening around me, but I'm not really, you know, contributing much to the story in a way that I thought was at least important to me. So you wanted to be able to go tell

the stories rather than actually point to them already happen. I understand. Okay. So how did you, you said you went to Syria a year later it was? It was a year after I graduated. So I graduated from Columbia in 2002, May 2002. The documentary I had done at that I ended up doing a documentary class. I did a documentary about children asylum seekers in this country. It won the best documentary at Columbia that year. And because it won the best documentary, I got an internship at the documentary production company in London.

So I moved to London. I was there for several months. I ended up producing some documentaries with this company, which were my ideas, which I was psyched about. Is this the kind of stuff that ends up on BBC? Yeah, I was on Channel 4. I think the first one we did was BBC,

then another one did on Channel 4, and this company worked with all of those. And I was paid only in one, story ideas got picked so it was great they got picked I got to do stories and then I decided that the war in Iraq was happening I knew that the Middle East was going to be the center of stories for a long time and so I just picked up moved to Syria enrolled in the University of Damascus started selling carpets because I needed to make money wait you enrolled into the University of Damascus to learn Arabic oh wow very cool and and would buy would go around the old town and

Damascus and buy these beautiful carpets, I would put them in like FedEx boxes and ship them to my mom. She would have these tea parties, would sell them for twice that price, send me back the money. And that's how I survived in Syria. And it was through that that I became friends with a Syrian guy called Tarek, who was living in Damascus at the time, spoke English. Well, we became really good friends. And he was telling me that how all his friends from his little border town in Syria, border with Iraq, were crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans.

And this was at the time that President Bush was hailing the invasion as a success. Saddam Hussein had been toppled. The Iraqis had received the Americans with open arms. Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished. And this is not what I was hearing. It was like these are people from other countries coming in and fighting against the Americans. And why isn't this on the news?

And so I convinced my husband now boyfriend at the time who had met at Columbia University, Darren, came to visit me in Syria. And he was a print journalist at the time. He didn't want to be a camera journalist, TV journalist. And I told him about the story, and he said, we have to go and do this story. It's like, it's crazy, right? Tarik thinks we might be able to talk to some of his friends with gone and fought the Americans. And it's if we actually get access to these guys and hear their story, this, I mean, it could reverberate around the world, right?

What were they fighting under? What did Tarik say they were fighting under? Like what emblem? Al-Qaeda was. they were a sects. Al Qaeda was present in the area. They weren't paid by Al Qaeda or they were members of Al Qaeda, but they were heavily influenced by Al Qaeda. And there was more the calling. We ended up traveling there basically. We bought a little camcorder on the border with Lebanon, partly from the money of the carpets that I was selling. And we traveled up there. We couldn't tell

anyone that we were journalists. You're not allowed to be a freelance. journalist. Yeah, they don't like it. No, they don't like it. Free press is not popular out there. And so we traveled with Tarek to his hometown. We get there and super conservative, no women on the streets. The few women we saw are fully covered. Like really, the rest of the series is not like this, but this area is incredibly conservative. And we knew that there was a lot of big presence of Al-Qaeda in this region, even though the Assad regime, who was, by the way, against obviously Al-Qaeda. and they were, because they're not Sunnis, it's very complicated.

The politics and religion and that area is very complicated, but they refused to admit that al-Qaeda was operating in Syria, and they kept on telling the American government that that was not the case, and that there were no foreign fighters or Syrian fighters crossing to fight, and they kept on saying that. So we knew that what we were doing was dangerous. Not only with the Muhavarat, which is the secret police, if they find out it wouldn't be good,

and we were operating in al-Qaeda territory, which also wouldn't be good. So we went... I'm sorry to cut you off. I just want to clarify the fighters that were going in to fight the Americans. Were they fighting like under Al Zikawi's leadership? No, no. So this was purely a bunch, a group of friends who got together, ideologues, and were training, pumping iron in their garage.

And would in the middle of the night cross the desert, dressed as civilians. cross the desert into Iraq. Once they arrived in Iraq, they had other groups of friends that were there too. They were, and they would look like Iraqis, right? They didn't look out of, and they were fully armed

and would shoot at Americans. Got it. And then they would come back. The ones who were killed were hailed as martyrs, and there were posters of them, and we filmed this. There were posters of the martyrs,

Syrian martyrs all over this little town. And the ones who came back were the biggest heroes in town. And so we ended up interviewing three of these guys who'd gone and come back. And they explained everything how they did it, why they did it, their tactics. We went into mosques where I was the only woman ever to have stepped foot into this mosque that only men were allowed and saw seven-year-old kids reciting the Quran by heart,

but also reciting all these chants against America and death to America. But all this under the guise that we were friends, we were foreign friends of Tarek, and we were there to learn more about Islam and their religious. And through it, we eventually met the foreign fighters and convinced them there were Tarek's some of his best friends and convinced them to tell us about their story and we filmed it all. And brought it back. What did you think at the time? I know you're a journalist.

You're covering the story, but this is not that long after 9-11, which you saw with your own two eyes. It's before we know what a disaster Iraq actually turned into and all that. And you go to this place. Oh, of course. Yeah, I have some for you right here. For me. I have a first one. haven't.

Great. Sorry, I didn't even see that empty. But, you know, you go to this place and it's still pretty fresh and everything. And you see, like you said, even young kids being pulled into this to be anti-American and going over to fight American soldiers to kill them. Obviously, like, you have to cover the story. But are you thinking to yourself like, oh, boy, we have an unfixable cultural problem here? Yeah, absolutely.

So the first thing that I remember thinking is obviously these guys. have to be monsters, right? They have to be the worst of the worst. They're killing Americans. You know, America is there, whether I agreed whether America should not go to Iraq. I didn't. I think it was a huge mistake. I think we all know it was a huge mistake. But there was America suffered this horrific attack and this is their way of going in. They should not be in Iraq, but I also don't think I'm not going to agree with these guys' tactics of killing Americans, right? So I was ready to see these like cold-hearted killers. And when I got there, what I found instead,

I always give the example of this one guy that the guy that we spent most time with, he was sort of the class clown. You know, we've all had it, right? The guy in class was always making jokes. He loved kids and was always like the kind of guy that he walks in town, again, small towns where everyone knows each other. He'd walk around and he'd always be followed by these kids.

And they'd like, he'd pick the kids up and bring them up. You know, those guys that you've met. We've all met them, right? Human. Exactly, human. And I will never forget when we did his interview, we went up to this mountain because everything had to be sort of secretive. And he gets down on his knees to me.

And he starts singing the song from Titanic. Heart will go on. Yes. My heart will go on by Celine Dion. And this guy, this guy who doesn't speak a word of English and yet has memorized in his mind an idea of what the English word sounded, but he knows it by heart, and he sings the song from beginning to wind

on his knees in English, bad English, to me. Kind of like the Kenley lady. Yeah. The Ken Lee. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, his favorite film was Titanic. He cried every time he watched it. He was the clas clown.

He was relatable in so many ways that I wasn't expecting it. And they brought us into their house and showed us videos of America's wars. around the world and how, you know, a lot of these videos were obviously propaganda. A lot of these videos didn't contextualize it, but it was what they were seeing as Muslim people being killed all around the world. And in their minds, what was being sold to them, the messaging being sold to them, was that Americans hated them and wanted all of their children to die and suffer.

And so it was their responsibility as men to protect the women and children, to protect their families. And so it was very black and white to them in a way that's very dangerous. So this sort of system had created these monstrous effects, right? But these guys at the center of the weren't monsters themselves. And that was for me very revealing. Do I agree with what they were doing? 100% not.

Do we condone their acts? Absolutely not. But is it important to understand how they became the people that they are? and why they were doing it, yeah, it is. And this is the part that really breaks my heart, is that we came back with those tapes. We smuggled the tapes out of Syria. Again, all of this.

We smuggled them. We had a third person who was a Scottish guy called Mike, who's working with us, also a journalist. It was myself, Darren, and Mike. Mike Healy, amazing guy, was a student of Arabic in Damascus at the time. He was a friend of mine, and so we decided, and he was the one who had camera experience. my husband at the time was print journalist.

Darren's story ended up airing actually. He wrote a story that was the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle magazine. And Mike, we decided this was how we're going to smuggle these tapes out. Darren and I would go to Lebanon first because it's a two-hour drive from Damascus, Beirutas, the capital of Lebanon. So we'll get there first. As we cross the border, we'll notice immediately if our names are out there. If we're stopped and searched, then we'll call Mike and tell him, lose the tapes and leave the country without the tapes because they're on us, right? But if we were able to go across the border, then it's because nobody were on nobody's radar.

And so that's what we did. We got to Beirut. We called him. We said, nobody checked us. You're good. He got on a bus. He hid the tapes. I can't remember where, but the tape trip was supposed to take two hours, four hours past, and Mike is still not there.

And Darren and I are waiting where the boss is supposed to arrive, and we're thinking, what the heck did we just do? We just got our friend killed or imprisoned, and we're worried out of our minds. And then finally, the boss arrived. A night comes out. We're hugging, crying. It's like such a moment of relief. We managed to then fly with the tapes back to London.

We put this story together with the production company that it worked with. Ron McCullough was the boss at the company at the time, Amazing, BBC Journal. and we put together this fucking amazing story, like the first time ever. We sit down with these, you know, fighters and they're explaining it's access like no other. No one had seen this shit. And we start pitching it to American broadcasters. And then we get on a phone with some pretty heavy hitters. And I was 25 years old and they're on the phone with me and asking me, how do you know they're saying the truth?

You know, and I'm like shaking. Well, because they have no incentive for lying. Like they can actually, they're putting their lives at risk by telling us what happened. And because there's plenty of evidence in the town of the people that have been killed and the families that are grieving and the posters everywhere. And then we get the most depressing callback where basically they told us, and again, I'm not going to reveal the names, but it's people that if I mention their names you would know. Saying, I'm sorry, but it's been decided pretty high up. in our organization that it's too soon to give voice to the enemy and then Americans aren't ready to, you know, to hear the other side.

And so I never aired in the United States. It ended up airing on Channel 4 in the UK. And they had the Syrian ambassador interviewed. He called me a blonde, dumb girl who doesn't know what she's talking about. But it aired in the UK and I'm very, very proud of the work that we did. And I'm heartbroken until this day that we weren't able to wear it back then here. You still have those tapes. This was my first story as a freelance journalist.

Yeah, it's amazing. Do you have those tapes? We do. We have the tapes. You never thought about releasing them now? The full tapes. Yeah. Yeah, we'd have to be careful with protecting the identity of the folks who spoke to us.

I think we could. We could do that. You got to put that out because it's like that is basically like a time capsule. Yeah, it is. What you captured there. Yeah. And like I hindsight is 2020. I get it that like the time, there was so much that was still unknown.

and now obviously it's aged well in the sense that it's like yeah there were a lot of issues here that we weren't told about but you know it's kind of at the core of that old phrase that can be taken the wrong way sometimes but they they said they'll be like one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and it's like my journalistic idea is like you let people decide you tell the story you do it without opinion you talk to just like you do it and then put it out there And people at home can listen to it and be like, yeah, you're nay. And go about their lives. And that's how I like to do the podcast too.

But that's, you know, I think about this a lot now. And I talk, you know, I'd always talk with my special forces guys about it, who were over there and my military guys when they're on the podcast. It's like, you know, I was just, I just had another one in here recently. And I said, you know, you were going door to door in Iraq. You're doing your job. What people in suits in D.C. decided to tell the generals we have to do.

and you know everywhere is dangerous and you got to go in there with guns and everything but do you understand why when you know a father's a threat and he might actually be a threat and his seven-year-old kids tied up on the floor and watching you beat up daddy do you understand why maybe 11 years later he's blown up buildings right and all of them to a man are like completely of course completely it's downstream effects and now you see like things that are going on in gaza and things that are going on in lebanon and i understand you know you always got to watch the sources and videos that go online go online, especially in today's day and age. But like, you see some of these videos and you see those guttural calls from kids that, I'm sorry, there's no faking that. That is what it is.

And, you know, their little brother and little sister and mom and dad just got fucking blown up by a scud missile so one guy could die. And like, I always say this, I'm not going to condone it when that kid blows up a grocery store in 10 years. But it was like that, that's why it was like music to my ears, what you were saying earlier, where you were talking about how do people get there. Don't empathize with the act, but empathize with the how did they get there so we can prevent that in the future. And sometimes it feels like things that you were capturing 23 years ago, we are still making the same mistakes, maybe exponentially now, to this day. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think censoring the news is never a good idea. Right. And that's what happened back then.

Thinking you should always operate under the impression that, you know, I think sometimes as new makers, newsmakers or journalists, we come from a place of believing that Americans are ignorant. And that should never be the case, but that is not the case. And so we give people the news and we allow them to deal with it and, you know, again, censoring the news in order to be to try to, protect people is never a good idea 100% and it backfires every time the cover up is always worse right yes always and they never learned that lesson they never learned that we're watching it over and over again you know and like sometimes it's worse when it was already like horrifically bad yeah you know and it's just it's crazy but that's also such a hard you do all that work you literally like risk your life to do it you tell the story you bring it back you're quite literally doing your job and then they're like yeah

We're not going to run it, you know, but obviously, you know, we look at where your career ended up going. It didn't deter you or anything like that. But did you have a low moment after that? Were you like, what the fuck are we even doing here? We did. Yeah, my husband, I mean, yeah, Darren and I were. Yeah, and Ron McCullough, who was the head of this production company. He'd been a journalist for decades for the BBC, and he couldn't believe it.

We were all in shock. We couldn't believe that this was actually happening. But I was happy that it actually ended up airing somewhere. right? I remember perfectly well. We were paid 5,000 pounds for that story, which for me and Darren was so much money and we used that money to buy tickets to go to Brazil because I speak Portuguese and I thought, okay, now we're going to start because he ended up actually filming a lot of it. We picked up a camera and Darren started filming so we realized we really wanted to work together and he was going to leave print journalism and just start working on stories with me.

Wait, what was you filming? Like just the whole process of this? Yeah, the interviews. The interviews we did. It was Mike and Darren ended up filming and I ended up being the person on camera. Again, not by choice, but it ended up, neither of them wanted to be on camera

and then so I ended up being the one doing the interviews and the reporting. And it all sort of fell that way. And then, yeah, and then we were 5,000 pounds. What are we going to do with so much money? which is, by the way, is like $7,000. So what are we going to do with all this money? Again, freelance journalists.

It was an enormous amount of money for us. What's our next move? Let's move to Brazil because we knew it was a place that was full of great story ideas, stories. And I speak the language. I have an advantage. Is it like British and American kind of? Yeah, Portuguese and Brazilian accent.

Yeah, exactly like that. And so we did. And on our first day there, open up the newspaper. local newspaper, and there's a story about this massive diamond mine, one of the biggest diamond mines in the world that's in the Amazon on tribal land, where these Indians basically ended up torturing and killing 30 white miners that had come in to mine their land. And there was a huge case in Brazil going on, and the federal police was all over it. So we ended up doing that. That was our second story. We did it for CBC and Canada and for Frontline Worlds.

PBS. And each of them gave us a little bit more money. With that money, we bought an actual semi-professional camera and we kept on building from there and there. And then current TV started, which was Al Gore's TV station. And they were looking for digital correspondence, people who knew how to edit and film and tell a story. And both Darren and I applied separately. And they called us both in. They flew us to San Francisco. And we told them, actually, we're partner, we're boyfriend and girlfriend, we weren't married yet. And they hired us to go around the world. And the next seven years of our lives were spent traveling all around the world, doing stories from beginning to end. He would film, direct and write, and I would edit and be the correspondent and do the

interviews. Yeah, Ian and Yang. And we compliment each other very well. And then we had my son, our son, actually our son. He gives me shit all the time. It is both. Yeah. And that's when we decided it probably wasn't such a great idea for us to travel so much together. So we started a production company and now he directs documentaries. I do my series, but we're very involved in each other's jobs and work. All right. I want to ask about those seven years, but to go back for one second, that story in Brazil is interesting to me. So I spent some time down in the Peruvian Amazon. I'm wildly fascinated by it. Isn't it amazing? It's unbelievable. It's one of my favorite places on the internet, but Amazon in general, yeah. You feel like a spec. Yeah. You're like,

wow, you know? The little kid in me was like very excited. But were you doing ayahuasca? I did do I was going down there. Of course, that's why everybody goes through. Well, that wasn't why I went, but it was like, when in Rome, you know, because, you know, you can go do it with a fucking shaman in Chinatown and probably get, you know, co-claced with whatever. Or with a fake shaman into Panic Canyon. Yeah, we got that, we got, we got the, we got the real deal down there. But it's such a cool place, but there is so much going on there because it's the literal real world heart of darkness, you know, the governments in these various countries that make up, what is the Amazon rainforest.

They can only go so far into there. And then there's no laws and, you know, shit happens. But this was a situation where it was a gold mine. So it was accessible. A diamond mine, I'm sorry. So it's accessible by roads to get there. So they have people that don't live in the Amazon working in there. And you said it was 30 of them.

I mean, it wasn't accessible by roads. You'd still have to hike in. But they were. Oh, so they didn't even have roads going to it. No. No. And we went, we visited some of these mines. So we ended up camping out with the federal police for weeks and weeks on end.

And sleeping in hammocks. It was amazing. I loved it. Again, only woman surrounded by men. It was so fun. There's some very good-looking federal police in Brazil, too. So that made it fun. How darned feel about that.

He's okay. He's allowed to tell me when he finds ladies pretty, too. I'm allowed to tell him when I find guys hot. It is evolutionary biology. That's right. I won't ask any more questions on that. Please don't. And here I am, blushing over here.

But it's beautiful. I mean, beautiful people, beautiful rainforests. And we eventually actually get access to the tribal land, the Sinta Larga, the wide belts, as they're not known. This tribe is called. And, I mean, we got an interview with the head of the leader of the tribal land. We witnessed the craziest fucking shit. The federal police shows up one day. And there's, it's like sensitive, right?

They're trying to investigate this case and find out if these Indians had killed these, Indians had killed these minors. And it's like they decapitated them. They cut off their penises. It was like brutal, brutal shit and killed 30 people. and the federal police is investigating and we go in but they're doing it they have to do it

in a sort of diplomatic way they're going in the head of the federal police in the Amazon region at the time was this kind of like John Wayne character amazing guy and he goes in with his team and we're with him we're following him

and we arrive and this the Sinta Larga have organized this massive like ceremony to receive us and the ceremony involved of having a live cow in front that they, with a bow and arrow, kill with bow and arrows, kill in front of us. And it is the craziest. We don't know that this is happening.

None of this has been explained to us. And we are filming in front of the federal police as they are arriving, right? And then we turn the cameras and we start filming the tribal guys receiving the federal police. And then we just see them picking up the bows and arrows and started shooting. We're thinking that they're shooting at us or the federal police behind us.

We're like, what the fuck is going on? And then we turn and there is this like cow. And then the cow dies and then everybody's eating the cow. And then we all have to drink this thing that is fermented saliva. It's fucking bizarre. Fermented saliva. Yeah. They have a drink that they spit into and it ferment something.

And then you're supposed to drink it. We had to. All of it was bananas. And yeah, it was my first sort of story in the Amazon. And I've gone back again and again because it's. I think one of the most fascinating places on earth. So it was just kind of misunderstanding that they killed these dirty guys? Yeah, it was a bit of a misunderstanding.

Because they were also involved in the diamond business. Oh, the tribe was. Yeah, they were making a lot of money from it. And there was a misunderstanding on the shareability of the profits. And then they went and killed all these people. Unfortunate. Yeah. But then they stayed in the business, I guess.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. They had landing strips. They had planes coming in to traffic. Oh, this was like a real with-it kind of tribe. Oh, yeah. Okay. So they weren't like those are magical planes from the sky like some of the other tribes.

No, but all of this had happened, what was fascinated, all the change had happened in the last 10, 20 years. I remember interviewing this tribal leader and him explaining, we, we, like before we didn't even have electricity. We didn't know. Yeah, we would see these things. We didn't know what they were. And within 20, 30 years, now we have soccer. He was so excited. that they had a soccer field in their land.

They had a landing strip. Can you believe how rich we are? You know, it was like, now what about those spiked head stuff? Can we just roll back there real fast? Yeah, what a misunderstanding. It was fun. So then you get this job and the next seven years you're going all over, but when you have your kid,

obviously you guys split up so that's one at a time in that way. Yeah, but we had the best seven years. It was really fun. I mean, we talk of crazy stories together. You've done a ton of shows. So you were doing your first, like, feature shows during this time period. What were those called at the time? So this was for current TV.

It was a show called Vanguard. It's what people say was vice before vice when I hate that designation. You hate that designation? Yeah, because it was different. But the idea was we had five or six correspondents going around the world and telling these sort of foreign stories in a non-traditional way, right? So, you know, I went back to the Amazon and did lots of stories. I did stories on the Iraq-Iran border, Iran-Border about the Kandilmountain's, about the Kurdish guerrilla fighters, and did stories about the Sri Lanka war. And, I mean, we traveled all around and did great stories. But it wasn't done in the traditional way that you'd see on the news. You know, I wasn't. It was just the delivery was different. It was very sort of guerrilla journalism.

On the ground. Me and my husband, little cameras, much sort of lighter equipment. much more mobile. It was, remember when my boss at the time was also a correspondent on the show, but was also the head of Vanguard, that department, is Laura Ling. She was detained. Laura Ling, she's Lisa Ling's sister.

She was detained in North Korea for several months, imprisoned, captured and detained. And she was doing a story about trafficking, human trafficking on the border, but she was in China and had gone to the river that separates. the two and was captured by North Korean military and detained. And she was in prison, her and another

American woman for months on end. It was horrible. Did she cross or did they come across into Chinese territory? So that's what's debatable. She was definitely caught on Chinese territory, already on the Chinese side of the bank or the river bank. But she had gone, I believe the river was frozen and she got right to the center where she might have taken a step into North Korea to show perhaps how easy it is to cross and how nobody, you know, kind of stops you. And then they heard a whistle. They start being chased. It was her, a cameraman and another woman who was a translator. She's Korean. And they start being chased. And then the Korean woman falls, Laura stops to help her up and they both get obtained.

The cameraman, man, you just escape. And they spent months in a North Korean prison. And it was horrible. It was Bill Clinton, actually, who went to North Korea and helped them release them. Oh, I remember this story. Can we pull that up, actually? So, yeah. Yeah, it's just pre-Dennis Rodman ambassadorship days, right?

But what, so what was it like? How did they describe North Korean prison at the time? She wrote an amazing book about it, her and her sister. It's the story of the two sisters because Lisa, as a journalist, she had been on the view. She was a well-known journalist. She still is. She's an amazing journalist. I really admire her.

Was here doing, from her side, trying to do everything to get her sister out. And then it's from Laura's perspective of being in prison. And, yeah, like trying to find humanity and even the guards. Some were more human and nicer than others. Like the, she talks about sort of the... the meditation or the stuff that she had to do in prison to stay positive and how hard it was, all of it. And then the amazing thing, we were very close friends. And I wrote her a lot of, she was allowed to receive mail. In North Korea. Yeah. And through diplomatic channels. I think

it was Switzerland at that time was a diplomatic channel that they were using. But she was able to get mail, we'd all write letters all the time. And then I was there. We were there. But myself, Darren, husband were tasked with filming her arrival on the plane with Bill Clinton and we filmed her. She was amazing. She came out and gave this speech where beautiful speech super articulate where she's not, she's just spent several months thinking she's going to be killed and she comes out and gives this incredible speech thanking Clinton and Al Gore who is heavily involved in getting her out as well and she's amazing. And then a few months later of like just three months later, I called her and I said, hey, Laura, I have huge news.

And she said, you are kidding me, huge news for you too. And we organized, let's meet. Then she was coming to my house. We're on the driveway of my house. And she's running to me and I'm running to her. And we both realize that we're going to say the same thing, that we're both pregnant. That's awesome. We're both pregnant.

And it was been a thing she decided when she was in captivity, that she really, that her biggest regret was not having a child. And it was this, I'm going to get emotional again. I mean, it's this really beautiful moment where we're hugging each other and, and yeah, and then, and then, yeah, but then having kids kind of changed our lives in different ways. But I love Laura. She's amazing. Yeah, how did it, how did it change it so much for you? Obviously, everyone I talk to is like, when you have a child, your whole worldview changes, but like you were doing all these really heavy human stories long before as well. You understood. probably better than most people on the service, like how precious and fragile life and freedom are.

But then you have your own son and you're bringing them into this world that has a lot of good and a lot of bad. Like, did that shift your perspective in one direction or the other from like protection or like more like opportunity standpoint? It didn't prevent me. A lot of people ask if I like wanted to stop traveling as much or putting myself in such risky situations after having a child. that was not the effect that being a mother had on me. What happened is that it became much softer and more empathetic. I've always been an empathetic person. But now when I was interviewing the mothers who've lost loved ones

or who are out there in Mexico, digging holes, looking for their missing children, that hits differently for me, right? And so it just made me sort of softer and feel like the responsibility to tell these stories right is even more important in many ways. It is the biggest guilt that I have, you know, as a mother, traveling and spending so much time away from your child on traffic these last six years. Each story, we do 10 episodes a year, two weeks per story.

So it's a lot of time on the road, a lot of time, plus domestic shoots. And so half of my time is on the road. And yeah, I definitely live with the guilt of spending all that time. away from my son. Thankfully, I remember this mother describing her son when asked, she was the mother of an Israeli kid who was killed in the music festival. And they were interviewing her and asked her to describe her son who just died. And she says, how can I describe him? He was the perfect son for me. And that is often how I described my son too, is that he is the perfect child for me because he has been able to deal with the fact that his mother travels all the time

and still be proud of me and still be a really amazing, level-headed, smart, emotionally, very mature person. We have this really special connection. I tell him about all my stories. I tell him when I'm sad. I tell him about the things I'm worried about. He has the same relationship when he first girlfriend he ever had. All his first, he shares them with me. And it's been, you know, the biggest privilege of my life. That's so cool. And now at 16, obviously, you were just saying, like, you get to share all the stories with them and everything.

And now he's got to understand the gravity. Yeah. And fortunately, I started sharing them perhaps a little too early. That's all right. He's been watching traffic since he was like 10. He's like, oh, there they are, going across the border. There you go. That's wild.

Your friend that we pulled this up. So this is what you were talking about in 2009, 2009 imprisonment of American Journalist by North Korea on March 17th. Unilee, the other journalist, yeah. 2009, North Korean soldiers detained two American journalists, Unilee and Laura Ling, who were working for the American-based independent television station, current TV at the Truman River on the China and North Korea and Porter. It is contested whether the film crew entered North Korea, like you were saying.

North Korean leader Kim Young, the second, pardoned the two on August 5th, 2009, the day after the former U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in country on a publicly unannounced visit. That's, he got that dog in him for that one. We give Clinton a lot of shit, correctly so, but that's just unannounced fucking visit to North Korea. That's pretty hard right there.

Yeah, it was amazing. You've never been to North Korea yourself? No. Are you tempted? Oh, my God, yes. Absolutely, I'd love to. As a journalist, if you tell me there's a place I can't go, that's absolutely where you want to go.

Yeah. But you see, it mentions her sister, too, Lisa Ling, special correspondent for the Oprah Winfrey show. she had actually been in North Korea and didn't disclose she was a journalist. So that whole story is, yeah, fascinating. Yeah, we've had a couple. So my buddy Wally is a professional ping pong player and he ended up going there for like six days. Oh, wow.

And doing ping pong diplomacy. Awesome, dude. And it, like, he had video there from the tournament where the whole crowd is booing him. Wow. And then at the end of the match against the North Korean, who was great at ping pong, he hugged the guy unexpectedly. And then people were like, oh, I guess we clap now. And it was like very, it was, but it's, there's a video of it on YouTube. I don't know if we can pull that up deep.

It's a little nondescript. But it's so cool because it's like, you know, sports can pull the farthest places together in a small way. But his experience, even in those five, six days of like having the handler and, you know, getting out of the country when he's like, oh, shit, this is getting hot. And the way you got to get in, dude, China. He had to cut it short. He left before he was supposed to. He was going to, trying to remember. This is back in episode 147, but he...

Oh, wow, good memory. He... You remember all the numbers? Holy shit. Are you... Yeah. Oh, wait. Are you...

What's happening with your head? I have a photograph of memory, which helps. It's like audio visual. But what's funny is recently, the last few months, we've been... We added a show on the weekend where it's like us reacting to news and stuff. and it fucks up my photographic memory since like episode 381 because there's like

I know which ones we did on like every three and then sometimes four where we do like four and two but then like some of the guests flowed in and I'm like no was Clint 419 or was he 416 or Clint was 419 but it's like kind of weird how much Yeah this is it you're probably Oh you don't know yet right

We put out 452 with Joe Kent This is a little bit evergreen This might be a few weeks. He'll probably be like 460 or something like that. But yeah, this is Wally right here. Great dude. And this was the game he was playing in North Korea. They let him set up like a, like I guess his cell, his iPhone to film this.

Yeah. Can we play it real fast, Steve? It's pretty cool. They're also, I'm always blown away how fast there. But watch, it's so serious. And then while he goes to shake his hand. But then he pulls him in a chance. Oh, he's so good.

He didn't know what to do, but Wally talks about it. It's like it happens fast, but he's like he could feel him like, oh, wow. Did you have him on the podcast? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And did you have them because you saw this clip or how did he end up here? So he had been connected.

I think Tyler Sherman knew him and then he connected me with Wally and that was when I was still in my parents' house in South Jersey and he came down and we just, we just, we just vived and he really, his story's amazing. Like he really, he had a really interesting life and then found his way into ping pong. So fun. I think he was also in that Marty Supreme movie, I believe. Was he really? Yeah.

I'm working my, I just watched the first 45 minutes last night. It was really good so far. You haven't finished? I haven't finished. How do you start, not finished that movie? Because I was watching. It's amazing. It's so good.

It's amazing. A lot of people didn't like it. I loved it. I think it's incredible so far. But Wallyo, like, he'll go in and he'll take a, he carries around like a iPhone 14. and he plays ping pong with the iPhone 14 and just beats people. Is the iPhone 14 bigger than the rest or why the 13? It's whatever the smaller version of it was and it's like all cracked and shit, but he plays with it.

It's like doop, doop, but he did amazing, in my opinion, diplomacy there, like a small little pebble. But then we had in Lee Sung. Did I get the last name right on that, Dief? So we had him in for six hours last year. It was two episodes. and his Yeah His father

He and his family Defected from North Korea Out of China When his father was stationed there His father was about to be named The Minister of Tourism Oh wow Like he was high up

And he was so cool Because he didn't exaggerate things He talked about where everything was And we got the picture Like it's dystopian Wow You know But he wasn't like

It was very matter of fact as he went through it. But man, like Dave and I were sitting here and he left and we're like, God damn, we're really glad we live in America when you hear stuff like that, which I'm sure you've had that thought a million times in your life. Absolutely. We won the lottery. Yeah. That's what I say all the time. Did he defect to, he went to China first? Well, he was in China and they defected to the United States.

Wow. They defected. They started. They worked with South Korean intelligence. They got into South Korea. The North Koreans found out about it. They arrested their existing family there, like the grandmother and stuff.

And we're pumping videos into South Korea. Like, we're going to go grandma. It's awful, awful shit. And then eventually, you know, he and his mother and father, and I believe his, I want to say sister, got to the United States. And, you know, he works on it here.

There's not, as you know, there's not a ton of defectors in the United States. He's one of the few, but really cool guy. That's great. He speaks English fluently. He's been here for many years. Yeah, yeah, speaks great. I mean, we had him for six hours.

I thought he did great, you know? Maybe I'll have him out. Actually, yeah, I should hook you. He would 100% do that. He'd be a great guest for you. But, yeah, I mean, what kind of, is there like a particular story you would want to do there? Or is it more just like, I want to see this for myself and just capture what life is. I'd love to see it for myself.

Yeah. I mean, there's also a lot of one story we were looking at doing in that. at some point was the sex trafficking. There's a lot of sex trafficking. Women who are trying to escape and then get sort of caught up by these traffickers who tell them they were going to bring them to safety, but then actually enslave them and force them to become prostitutes. And so that's happening a lot.

And we were trying to figure out a way that we could do this story. But in order to understand why people are fleeing and so desperate, you'd really have to go to the country to see what the conditions are. 100%. And even if you're given, which the majority of foreigners, when they go to North Korea, they're given the dog and pony show. Even that is telling, right, of the situation. If you're, this is what you, they allow you to see, but as you can tell, every second of my day is being monitored. So what is, what are they hiding?

It's not good. Yeah. Right. It's also strange that this is a country that operates that way and like they have nuclear weapons. Yeah. It's like, ooh. Yeah, that's not who you want to have that power, right? But it's, it's like, you know, to play, like this, you want to say like, fuck you or, you know, go after them and take them out. But the reality is it's this strange game. I mean, you see Bill Clinton go there. He didn't go there with a gun. You went there saying, hey, can I bring these people home?

It's a strange diplomatic game. You got to play even though in the West we obviously totally disagree with how they have the country set up and people do suffer there. It's a tough part about it. It's like you can't just invade everywhere. The breakdown of talks is always when things get worse, right? maintaining some sort of a diplomatic channel. In that case, it was actually, I think it was, yeah, Kim Jong-Oar already,

who had said that the only way that he would release these two American journalists is because Al Gore had said that he would go to the country because he was also the owner of the television station. But they said that's not big enough for us. We want to form a precedent. So that's why Bill Clinton was the one who then said, okay, I'll go. Optics. Yeah, optics.

I'm looking out for the optics. That's one of those. So after you did the Vanguard show, what was the show you did after that? So then after Vanguard, I worked for Explorer on National Geographic for a couple of years. And then I was hired to go to Fusion, which was ABC News, Univision network that they started. And I was the sort of lead investigative journalist there for a couple of years. and then Nat Geo was starting restarting Explorer again. They called me to start doing more.

I went back to explore and then I kept on doing stories that were related to black markets and eventually the president of Nat Geo basically decided that they wanted to do a show around my reporting. So that's how traffics came about. Now how do you, there's so many different stories in the hidden third to go through in the world. What is it that draws you to a story and says,

I got to do that one right now, or is it different every time? It's usually stories that I think are relevant to an American viewer, because that's, you know, who we're trying to, I mean, it's a global show night you is watched all over the world, but ultimately we want, this, we're paid for by an American organization, and it's important that Americans watch this and sort of, there's some relatability. Access is very important, and that's your way.

and that's usually the hardest part, right? We can want to do a story about anything, but unless we actually get access, we can't tell the story. So that's usually what takes the longest, which is why the coup story was also, the military gold trafficking story was important, was difficult.

The organ trafficking, for several seasons, we're trying to do an organ trafficking story. Ended up doing it. It was really, really hard. I mean, we had to do reshoots. We had to go back to Mexico several times. We went to Colombia. Did to do reshoots for that?

It reshoots us in. We had to travel back to those places because usually we get a two-week window to film, right? But in many stories, that access falls through or somebody doesn't show up and then, and you don't, you still don't have a story. If I'm doing a story about organ trafficking, but I've never interviewed anyone, you know, the whole show is about access. So I have to interview, have to figure out a way to interview somebody who's trafficking organs. And also trying to figure out, we also wanted to talk. In that case, specifically, we also want to talk to a doctor who's involved in organ trafficking and a patient who's received one of these black market organs. So all of that was complicated, and it took months and many trips back to, you know,

Colombia and Mexico until we eventually got all the folks that we needed to interview to tell the story. Now, that's a really dark industry right there, and it's far bigger than a lot of us realize. but you know first of all what what were the specifics of that story who was doing it who was the end buyer and again i asked us on every story how do you not sit there in like disgust watching this because as i understand it there's a lot of this industry around the world where they quite literally take a very alive healthy person and just kill them and take their organs yes that happens i always approach all these stories, particularly this one, because it has been so sort of Hollywood-dized in a way. There's a lot of myth around it. The way we told the story is, I had the number.

I can't remember. It was like 70 Americans die every month waiting for an organ. It was like a crazy number. A crazy amount of people needlessly die while waiting for an organ. And so there is definitely demand there, right? And we know that there's a lot of people that are willing to sell their organs, particularly organs that you can live without. And so,

and we know there is a black market for it. Is it as it, I mean, it's more than we know it exists, but I also, I'm very afraid of doing a story like this and then us having this idea that it's massive and it's everywhere and it's happening and, you know,

people are found in bathtubs, bloody, that's just not the case. But it is happening. And so much so that we ended up interviewing several people involved in the business. So the victims from the people that we interviewed are a lot of time migrants, people who are crossing, trying to make their way to the United States that are very easy prey. If they die, nobody will notice. And, you know, either migrants have then become donors, willing donors, or migrants that are killed, they remove their organs. and then they have buyers. A lot of the times buyers are people who can afford it,

so often rich buyers. And what I'm really happy that we got in one of my favorite interviews in that story was we interviewed an American buyer who went down to Tijuana to get an organ, which I cannot remember what organ it was right now, which I should. But like I said, we've done so many of these stories. But he was explaining to me how he got it, how much you paid for it, how difficult it was, why he decided to do it.

And I remember asking him, do you realize that there is that, do you know where yours came from? He said, I don't, and I prefer not to know. And I said, do you realize that it is possible that somebody was murdered in order for you to get this organ? And what he told me was that it is very easy for you to be sitting there and asking me this question with judgment. But if it was your son, what would you do?

Yeah. It was, yeah, it was one of those moments. That's exactly what I sort of always look after or want to happen on our show. Like these sort of bigger questions that we're all confronted with, where we all should be confronted with, right? My man, Remy Adelaque, who is a Navy SEAL, did a lot of work on this in his post career from things he saw in the SEALs. And he actually, he's an actor, writer, director, among many other things as well.

And he made a, I want to say it was a 35-minute short film called the Un-something. Can we look that up, Remy Adelaque, untouchable or un-I-I-Fergette. I forget what it was called, but it shows in reverse. The unexpected, the unexpected. It shows in reverse an organ traffic and how it happens. And so the film starts in a Mexican hospital with an American couple. And then the doctor walks out and says, your son's going to live. And then it goes to the next thing that happened before that all the way back to the beginning.

And it was based on something he'd actually seen in his career with the Navy SEALs. And it's scary, but poses that exact question. It's like two parents that wanted to save their kid and they could pay to do it. So they came down to Mexico to do it. And it's like, man. Yeah. Because they don't have to watch it happen. you know what I mean yeah they don't have to watch that's why he said I prefer not to know he doesn't want to know

right but in his case was him but yeah it like to me it was immediately yeah well would I do yeah my son was dying and all I needed was you know to go down across the border into Mexico and it was there and it was available and it was something that would save him and I could live for the rest you know he wouldn't have to die tomorrow like what would I do what would you do I prefer to think that I wouldn't do it right it's the worst part of the the zero-sum game part of life, you know? Yeah. Someone has to live, someone has to die for someone. That's so bad. Yeah. But you've done a lot of work too on the border and like the trafficking that happens from like the literal coyotes and like the migrant crisis and stuff like that. The first question

I have is like, have we seen, I've heard about some improvements with that mathematically just with some numbers over the past year. Less people crossing the border. Less people crossing the border. crossing border, yeah. But like that's a extremely widespread problem still. It is massive. We spent time with a guy called King Coyote. King Coyote. Yeah, because he's responsible for huge amounts.

He calls himself the king of the migrants coming to the United States. And he set up a huge operation. I mean, it took us months to get this guy to agree to talk to us. And eventually we met in a very remote area in southern Mexico. and he gave us an incredible interview. I mean, he described his operation as essentially like a company. It works like a company. It has an HR department where, you know, you have to keep your customers happy

because it's only by keeping them happier you're going to get repeat clients, right? He had a marketing department that put out there and figured out ways to promote his services by saying that, you know, they were safe. they, you know, you paid, he was charging $10,000 for migrants, and he would bring them from southern Mexico, sometimes even from places like Guatemala, all the way to the United States for $10,000, and he would do it safely, and there would be none of the stories that we hear that happened to these migrants. That's how he promoted his work. And he also had a legal department, which consists of lawyers, most of them in the United States, American lawyers, that were constantly

reading the news and analyzing the changes in law by state, federally, to try to figure out when was a good time to cross. Oh, my God. When not to cross, where to go, where not to go, all that stuff. So it was like a full-on company, right? And he was making millions of dollars a week from this. And, you know, what's sad, and we spent time with him, we also spent time on the streets of Southern Mexico in a place called Tapachula,

which was one of the first story ever did for Current TV, for the American television station, was actually about the death train. You've heard about the death train. It's a cargo train that goes from Southern Mexico to the northern Mexico, and people, desperate migrants bore this train or hop onto this train.

They fall off the train. They lose arms and limbs. And Darren and I was the first story we did for Current TV. We went down there. We actually went on the freight train, ourselves, filmed a group of migrants, a woman, Maria, we'll never forget her, and four women that she was traveling with, and a kid who we met in an amputee shelter. He had lost his arm, his name is Guillermo from Honduras, had lost his arm.

And the day that we're filming Maria on going on the freight train, we see Guillermo coming and jumping on the train. He's going to try it one more time with his little brother, even though he'd lost his own arm. So this should tell you enough about how desperate the situation is in their home country, that they're trying so desperately to make it to the United States, right? Maria had kids that she couldn't feed. She was desperate. She knew that there was high risk of her being raped and possibly killed on the road,

but she was like, I have to do this for my children. I cannot afford to feed them. I have to figure out a way to get to America. And so Tapachula, back to this story here on King Coyote, we traveled back to Tapachula, and the death train is no longer operating. So now what we saw instead, this was a year and a half, two years ago, was hundreds and hundreds of people on the public main large square, hundreds of hundreds of Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians, people from Brazilians from all over the world that couldn't afford paying King Coyote the $10,000. So they're stuck.

Stuck in the situation where they can't, if in order to be able to leave, they have to pay the local authorities money. So they actually pay border patrol and Mexican police. They have to pay them in order to leave. But then at every checkpoint they would have to pay and they can't afford it. They can't pay King Coyote. They can't go back to their countries. And the whole system is profiting from them, right? The police, the local governments, the border patrol, the King Coyotes of this world,

they're all profiting from this. No one wants them to leave because they can make a lot of money from these people, right? So it's an exploitation. We're essentially exploiting the most of the first of, vulnerable people in the world. And then you have politicians in America that are doing the exact same thing, right? Exploiting them and exploiting this issue and calling these people the worst scum of the world, people who want to come to America to denigrate this land and to, you know, create violence and kill. And that is just not the case for 90% or 99% of the migrants that I

have encountered. That's right. That I have encountered. And I have spent a lot of time with people and yes are there bad people horrible people also trying to come across they are where are the majority of drug trafficking happening not in the deserts where these migrants come across it's happening at legal ports of entry that's where the vast majority of drugs come across legal port of entry by the way moved in by Americans Americans Americans citizens not by Americans immigrants by American citizens so it's it's on all sides this issue and these people that are the most vulnerable

the most, you know, definitely the people that didn't win the lottery, and there are fleeing poverty and persecution and violence, and that all they're trying to do is to protect their loved ones and their children, where 100%, I would do the exact same thing as if I was in their shoes. Yes, the incentives are also built that way to do that. And that's the thing. When you see, like, the extremes of this issue, on one end, you have the people who are like, you know, they'll demonize a lot of these people when they're just, there's no other option for them and they're just trying and they're being take advantage of

and a lot of them become indentured service servants when they come here, which is crazy. You know, or way worse, by the way. And sex trafficking victims, absolutely. Or don't live, you know, like horrible things. And then on the other end of the spectrum, the people who are like, open up the whole border, just let them across with open arms.

I'm like, well, do you care about the downstream effects of the trafficking and the, and the mass crime that you're allowing to, happen to these people if you care about them so much and they don't and it just that stuff makes me lose hope in politicians because i'm like you're ignoring this and you're ignoring this but you're the people legislating us it's kind of crazy yeah it is crazy and you just see that yeah again everybody is just exploiting this issue and they're getting votes and getting into office on the back of of this issue will actually not wanting to um you know create a better system and that's right allow

figure out quotas for people to come here. This economy will, our economy will collapse without immigrants. We need them. Let's figure out how, you know, how to not only exploit them, but treat them fairly and humanly as all human beings should be treated. That's right. There has to be a way to fix a legal system so that it's not, that's the other thing. Like, they make it 40 billion hoops and also economically and feasible. Yeah, there's 11, the backlog is like 11 million cases. Right. of people waiting to get status in America and asylum seeking cases. So what do you think they're going to do?

Of course they're going to come across the border. Of course they're. Like you have to fix the root of the system first and then yes, take care of Native American people as well to be able to be like, all right, well, if we have problems at home and people aren't getting jobs, let's fix that first. Cool. But like it doesn't need to be this really toxic kind of conversation that happens. I agree with you there. And inhumane, the way that many of these people that we depend on for our own. economic well-being and then we treat it so inhumanely it's uh i can go on and on about this it's

yeah an issue that i feel very passionate about because i've spent so much time on the ground actually reporting on it yeah i also saw a documentary where you went to ukraine i think this was a couple years ago a surrogacy one yeah was it the baby yeah the baby's just getting sold and stuff and i did people forget this war's now been going on for four and a half years it's older than world war two in america was you know coming up on another year it'll be older it'll be older than World War II for what Europe was. Like, it's nuts. And the, the, Catarina was actually just there covering a story

about how a bunch of cartel mercenaries are on the ground fighting in Ukraine. Like, this is insane that we, because we're also funding it, that we still allow this to happen. And like, first of all, how did you get a hold of that story in the first place? Yeah, so it's a really fascinating story. So the Ukraine before the war was sort of a leading country

in surrogacy. Sergacy, you know, lots of parents can't give birth naturally, so you pay for a surrogate to carry your child. Sometimes genetically it's your child. Sometimes it's not even, there's no genetics, but a lot of times it is genetically your child, but you just, the mother can't carry it. And so they hire a surrogate. In the United States, it is possible. You can do that, but it costs upwards of $150,000. So too expensive.

So there are other countries in the world that have popped up. it's not legal, it's in the majority of countries, but some countries it is, and it's safe. Ukraine was one of those places. When the war broke out, there were a lot of American parents who had Ukrainian surrogates carrying their babies. And so the story was about what happens in that situation. How do you, what do you do then? How can you bring this baby to safety in the middle of a war?

But also how when places, when this happens in a place like Ukraine, where, you know, where it was actually totally safe to do it and legal, how then there are other places where it's not legal and not safe that pop up to fill that vacuum. And so Kenya, we traveled to Kenya, which had become at the time sort of the new place that parents from all over the world were going to, or people from all over the world,

we're going to gay couples as well, very popular gay couple surrogacy, we're going to try to have surrogacy in a way that they could afford. But yeah, so we're, We went, we follow this amazing couple from the Bay Area who'd for years wanted to have kids. She couldn't carry a child, had a wonderful Ukrainian woman carrying her child, and we follow them into the war as they go and meet their baby for the first.

The baby is born that morning. We're on hold on the Polish side with a couple. They're so nervous. And we got worried that the woman, the surrogate, had just delivered the baby. So we, or he's about to deliver the baby, so we make our way into the family. to Ukraine and we filmed them and we're with them when they meet their baby for the first time. And it was incredibly emotional and beautiful. And you understand why Sergis is important and we're so happy that it exists because it allows parents to be parents and all of that.

And then a week later, we're in Kenya and we're seeing like massive exploitation of women who are often, you know, poor women who have their own kids who can't figure out how to feed them and who, you know, fall into this surrogacy network, trafficking network, essentially. And they're paid almost nothing. There's these really sort of bad doctors and bad folks involved in all of it. And I remember one story that stuck with me was this woman who was carrying this baby. She told her family. She had kids of her own.

She told her family that she was going to go to Dubai to do sort of housework. And I would send money. But in fact, she was in a small. apartment confined in Nairobi, Kenya, wasn't allowed out as, you know, her belly is growing and she's growing this baby inside her. And then it's delivery day and she wakes up at the hospital without the baby and everyone has disappeared without the money. She wasn't paid a sense and she was abandoned and drugged and it was awful. It was just awful. And there were stories like this again and again. So that was our investigation.

I don't even doing this a long time and like, you know, you have to report on it and it's all an individual here. It's just a part of a bigger story. But like, are you ever tempted to save some of these people? Oh, yeah, all the time. You know, we did a story about the scam factories in Myanmar where these people are forced to scam Americans. I don't know if you've heard about the pig butchering scams. The pig butchering scams? It's called pig butchering scams.

It's sort of a crypto romance scam combined. You're online, you make a friend, you think it's your friend, you might fall in love with this person. This person convinces you that there's a lot of money to be done in crypto, convinces you to put all your savings into this account. The account isn't a real a crypto account. Basically, they drown you of all your money, drain you of all your money. But a lot of these scams are being made in these factories, essentially.

these huge compounds housing hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. In totality, it's hundreds of thousands of people that come from all over the world. India, a place as far off as Brazil, China, Kenya, Africa all over and they're brought into, they're lured into these compounds by people who tell them they're going to get a job in IT or a job in, you know, online. And when they get there, they take away their passports and they force them. them to scam. And if they don't scam, Americans usually, they're beaten, they're tortured, they're killed. It's really, really awful. So we spent time trying to gain access to these

compounds. We got access to a scam city with all of these, a lot of these scam centers and spent time with a group, an American group and a local group of amazing people who are on the ground trying to actively rescue people inside. And some of these compounds allow for what's called sort of ransom money. If you give $15,000, I'll allow this woman from the Philippines to go home to her family, you know, but you first have to figure out how to get me $15,000, right? And so we were there and we were watching them save all these people, coming across the border and saving them and negotiating with the prime bosses.

And yeah, I mean, the biggest question for us was, you know, fuck, how can we start making money, lots of money and rescue all these people? But at the same time, it's hard, right? You're basically paying these crime bosses, which ultimately is not what you want to do either. Yeah. Yeah, there's all these moments where you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. But, like, again, someone's got to go in there.

I know you were saying earlier, like, you don't talk about being brave and all that, but like the places you go, it takes incredible bravery, not just to go there and do them, but to tell the stories because there's a lot about like your shows over the years where you were breaking ground on things that really hadn't been talked about, at least like on the mainstream and people at home, my fucking parents or something could see it and be like, oh, wow, I never knew that existed. Like, that's a really special thing. I, I would, you got to feel the graphic. of that a little bit. You've been doing it for so long. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very lucky. Like I said, very, very fortunate. Yeah, it's privilege of a lifetime. I love my job so much and I can't believe I've been able to do all of the stuff that I've done and I hope to continue doing it. Well, I could talk to you all day, but we've already been on for about three hours and 15 minutes. So longer than Rogan. There's one thing I did want to ask you about at least this time before I get you out of here, which is, you know, like on your podcast, which you're now doing, which again, subscribe via. literally on the title right there great stuff that was that was how i found out you were doing a

podcast i saw a bunch of your clips in my feed so that's that's good to say but you you've covered a bit of the epstein story as well and i'm curious what it's like for you to cover something that is happening at such a rich elite level in this country and internationally to be clear but you know from you know very wealthy people in this country who are involved in something like that when And you've covered a lot of the same kind of story where it's like not to downplay it at all, but more in a place you might expect it, like a war-torn country or things like that or where people are desperately trying to get across borders. Yet at home where we're supposed to be the example for things,

we have people that are supposedly highly respected, huge air quotes there, in our society taking a part in something so sick. Did that change your perspective on things a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I haven't covered, I don't, haven't covered it the way I've covered our subject matters, but I did have Lisa Phillips, who you've had on your podcast as well, and I had her on mine. So my extent of covering it has been reading everything that's out there and interviewing her. So I don't consider myself an expert, but I think it's back to the follow the money, right? It's the fucked up world

we live in, which if you're rich enough and powerful enough, and you can do anything in the world. and there's complete impunity. And that was to me the most shocking, how the fuck is it possible that this guy already, we knew what he was doing for years before, how the fuck was he still out there? How was he allowed to continue doing this?

How did he not do, you know, why was he not in prison for the last for his life? And also, I've not sure if you've spoken to the journalist that first did, it was a journalist, a British journalist. I can't remember her name now, unfortunately, but she did, if you can pull it up, actually. She did a story for Vanity Fair.

It's a fucking... Vicki Ward. Yeah, Vicki Ward. Oh, sorry. It's the fucking Vanity Fair story. And where she has all the goods, she has the farmer sisters who risk are risking their lives to tell the story, to go out there publicly, openly, because they believe it's important to save other people's lives.

And yet, you know what? You have enough money and power in this country, and anything can go away. And that, to me, is the biggest and most depressing lesson of that whole story. Yeah, and no one's been prosecuted. here at that level for it, which is really sick. And the files are still not out. I mean, half of the files are still not out. That whole bullshit that they gave us.

Yeah. I hope this is a moment, and I've been saying this over and over again, I'll keep saying it because I think it's worth repeating. But I hope this is a moment where people really start to realize some of the battle here for, you know, having a better country in the future for the next generations is realizing the fight is up versus down rather than left versus right on a lot of things. 100%. It is absolutely. It's what I keep hammering about. It's inequality. It's not about bad people and good people. Black versus white, good versus bad. It's inequality. It's the lack of opportunities that some people have and the complete impunity and power that people with money have these days around the world. Well, we're going to have to do this again. I can talk to you all day. You've had a hell of a career. So thank you so much for coming in to do it.

Congrats on having like your own company with this as well and expanding to the podcast. That's great. So we have, you have more things you said you're working on with Nat Geo as well that are going to be coming. So we'll, we'll plug that. I have my podcast and that's my number one focus right now. Hit a third hit the subscribe down below. But thank you so much for doing this.

Thanks, Julian. I had a blast. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give this thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys.

If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you.