The Joe Rogan Experience - #1576 - Mariana van Zeller

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Mariana van Zeller is an award-winning journalist and documentarian. Her latest project is Trafficked: a National Geographic television series that takes her deep into the most dangerous black markets in the world.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day when did we do the podcast before what year was it 10 years ago wow that's crazy you were one of the first guests that i remember going we gotta i gotta talk to that lady i go we gotta find them because the the piece the oxycontin express that you did i'm like that was a mind blower that was when i first found out about what was going on the pill mills down in florida i was like that is fucking insane. And that was, like, in the beginning of the podcast, the early days. It was, yeah. You reached out to me on Twitter, and I was super excited.

Is that what it was? Yeah. It's like, do you want to come on the show? I was like, fuck yeah. Yeah. Well, I love your new show. First of all, tell people what it is, what it's called, and how they can- For sure.

It's called Trafficked. It's on Wednesdays, 9 p.m. on National Geographic. And in every episode episode we go on a journey a wild journey into black markets around the world you do real boots on the ground investigative journalism you are a fucking gangster woman the shit that you did in peru and in colombia i was watching that episode on cocaine. My hands were sweating watching you do this. It's like you went to the places where they're growing it, to the places where they make it. You marched with the people that carry it through the route when they're carrying it in their backpacks. I was like, oh, my God.

You're risking your life, like genuinely risking your life. I don't like to see it that way. You know, no story is worth a life. So I hate, I hate, you know, we minimize the risk. But, you know, there's, these are important stories to tell. These black markets are happening all around us. They're super widespread. I think we have this idea that they're happening in sort of faraway lands and deep and secret locations, but they're not. And they have a real impact on our lives. So there is a reason why we do the kind of reporting. And you're right.

You know, boots on the ground, old school journalism, I think, is more important now than ever. And we are seeing less of it nowadays. It's so hard to do. I mean, to find someone willing to do what you did for that cocaine episode i watched it last night i was i was sweating i was like nervous i was riveted it's it's such a it's such a dangerous but yet it's so much more illuminating than any other kind of journalism you could say oh this is happening in col, oh, this is happening in Colombia. Oh, this is happening in Peru.

And I'll just sit at home going, oh, I guess that's happening in Colombia. But to see you, who I know, there, going there, and to see all the stuff that you had to go through to meet with these people and to gain their trust. Yeah. I would say also, I would add to that, that we did Mexico with fentanyl. We did guns here in the U.S. going to Mexico. We did tigers in Asia and all these different scams in Jamaica and Israel. the way that I approach my job and my career as a journalist, is to not only be there to inform of what's happening, like you were saying, but also I think it's important for people to connect

to people in these faraway lands, that at first glance, we have nothing in common, right? These are the bad guys operating in far distant lands, or maybe sometimes around us, but they're considered the bad people, the people that we have nothing in common with. But if you actually sit down with them and listen to their stories, and this is the big shocker of this show, and I think it rubs people the wrong way sometimes when you admit, or when somebody tells you that, look, actually, there is not a lot that differentiates you from the guy smuggling cocaine out of the Peru, the Vreem Valley in Peru. You both have the same, are motivated by the same goals, which is, you know, happiness, an opportunity in life, a chance for, you know, to reach your dreams. And unless you

actually look at it this way and start realizing that that is more often than not the case, of course, there's a lot of bad people there doing it for greed and solely greed. That also happens. And I spent a lot of time with those people as well. But unless you start understanding sort of the root causes of what leads people into these lives, you're never going to be able to address black markets. Well, you really did a fantastic job of getting close to these people and talking to them like you know they were talking about their family they were talking about their children um the one guy who is the chemist who wants to get out because he wants to go to school and like this is my last year yeah it's it's it's horrible that story alone we spent the night with these mochileros these

backpackers teenagers who carry the loads of cocaine on their back out of the valley and spending time with them and, you know, really dangerous work. They tell us stories about how they hike for days on end out of the Amazon, the Vreem Valley, to a place where then it's sent out into outside of the country to Europe and to the United States. And you spend time with these guys and you listen to them and it's incredibly dangerous work, too. They've seen their best friends being killed in front of them.

And I asked them, so why would you ever want to do something like this? And he's like, look, very simple. I grew up in a very poor family. I always wanted to go to college. I knew that the only job opportunities, the whole economy is essentially sustained by the growing of coca leaves, production of cocaine and smuggling of cocaine. So the only job opportunities, the whole economy is essentially sustained by the growing of coca leaves, production of cocaine, and smuggling of cocaine. So the only job opportunity here I had was this. And I asked him, well, why do you want to go to college so badly? Perhaps a stupid question, but he said, you know, because I want to be a dentist. And I said, why a dentist?

Because I want to make people smile. And this just is like, these are the moments that I think will really stay with me. And it was so genuine. Like like the experience was so raw like all of it from showing the families growing the coca leaves and i learned something from it i always assumed that it was the organized crime cartels that were growing the coca leaves but no no, it's these families, these very poor families that are growing these coca leaves and drying them out by the road where everyone can see.

So you have children playing, you have these very poor people that are growing this crop and the vast majority of it is sold to the cartels and they they're not selling it for a lot of money either no not at all it's never the people at the bottom that are making money it's always the people at the top it's crazy that these are the people that are growing it yeah like this whole valley has been growing coca for thousands of years it's what they do and it's also crazy

that the thing itself the coca leaf like there's actually been people that have made a really good argument that not only should that stuff be legal, but it's probably good for you. Yeah, the coca leaf a lot alone if it is not made into cocaine. It's if you they chew it, you know, you go to the Andes and all around they actually chew the coca leaf. I had an opportunity to do that. There was a moment where one of them, I mean, you do it. It helps you without high altitude sickness and it helps you gain more energy. And when we were filming with a group, they actually wanted me to try some. I had tried some before, but I did it as well then.

And it tastes, it's actually, it doesn't taste, it kind of tastes like a leaf, quite frankly. But you do feel a little bit more energy. And there's nothing illegal about that, by the way. That's completely something that's been the tradition in this area for thousands of years. And when you did it, what gave you energy? What did it feel like? It's not like a bump of cocaine. Have you done a bump of cocaine?

I actually have not. You know, it's so funny. I spent my entire life reporting on drugs and the drug trade. And I am, you know, people, you know, like do crazy shit for a living. And yet I am terrified of drugs. I think partly because I've seen how they're done. Well, after the OxyContin Express and seeing how many people's lives are destroyed by a legal drug, I could imagine why you would want to avoid the ones that are illegal.

I've never done coke either. That's what I'm asking. Oh, you haven't? No, never. I think we're some of the only two people. I took tea once, mate de coca tea. Have you ever had that? Made with coca leaves.

Yeah. And I couldn't shut the fuck up, which is a problem already. That's a problem with me too. That's exactly my problem, is that I am high energy all the time. If I were to do cocaine, then I don't think anyone could take me. Exactly. Exactly. My friend Jimmy in high school, when we were young, one of his buddies was selling coke,

and he just looked at me and he goes, you should never do this stuff. I go, why? He goes, because I think you'd love it. And I'm like, okay. That's partly my problem too. I'm afraid that I'm going to like it. I think everybody loves it. I think it makes you feel amazing.

I mean, there's got to be a reason why it's so popular. You know, I've smoked weed and I hated it, actually. It made me totally paranoid. Again, probably one of the only ones. I smoked it for the first time when I was 18 and all my friends had smoked weed before. It was actually, it was, what do you call it in Portugal? It's not weed.

It's stuff that comes from Morocco. Hash? Yeah. And made me totally paranoid, and since smoked weed a few times. And again, it just, it doesn't, I once ate happy pizza in Cambodia. That was a funny story. Happy pizza with marijuana? Yeah.

I had no idea I had marijuana, though. I was filming there, and the people that I was with were saying, you can just have this. And I spent the entire night thinking that they wanted to come after and rape me and do all sorts of things. It was the scariest night. Yeah. It's not something you should just dive right into. I tell anybody, if if you never smoke pot and you're thinking about doing it just take a tiny bit a point where you don't even think it's working

like that's what you want you want like this ready that's it just a little just a little and if you can handle that a couple hours later or the next day then take a little bit more but don't take like five hits and don't smoke hash oh my god no hash is crazy it's crazy that's like really concentrated i know that's all we had growing up in portugal oh my we didn't have weed you're not playing games in portugal you know it's only one of the only countries in the world was the first one to decriminalize with spectacular results spectacular results yeah that's it's really that was one of the things that i wanted to bring up with you. Because it's so it's such a complicated issue. Drugs, and it's so sad to see from your program to see these poor farmers to these kids, who are the chemists who are putting

it together, and then carrying it out on the backpack. And one of the chemists was actually one of the guys who was actually carrying it on his back too, which is even crazier. Yeah, and he jumped into the car the first night that we got access to this illicit lab where we've been trying for so long to get this access, and suddenly we're driving in the middle of the night to go up to this area where we're supposed to meet him. And suddenly the guy driving our car, our guide, basically stops the car. The door opens. This guy jumps in, and they're speaking in Spanish, and I interrupt and say, our guide basically stops the car. The door opens.

This guy jumps in, and they're speaking in Spanish. And I interrupt and say, what's happening? Who are you? You know, our car has all our gear and my team. And he's like, oh, sorry, sorry. Hi, I'm the chemist. I was like, what? I'm the one who's going to take you down to my cocaine lab.

Is the guy who's driving, is his name Ceviche? Yeah. That's his real name? Yeah. Isn't that weird? I mean, that's his nickname. Oh, like Taco. Yeah.

In front of Dan's name. His nickname is Taco. Yeah. So when you first started to put this show together, how did you make these connections? Like, how do you do that without revealing sources? Yeah, for sure. I've been doing it for over 15 years, right? So I've been working in the underworld and black markets almost my whole career as a journalist.

So I have connections in a lot of places. But mostly we really rely a lot on local journalists. They're really sort of the unsung heroes of our industry. They usually don't get the credit. And they're usually the ones that have the most to lose if something goes wrong. So we take, we protect our, the people that talk to us, our sources, we take that very seriously. We disguise their faces, we make sure they're okay with what they look like. We change their voices, we don't reveal locations. I mean, it's a lot of

work put into making absolutely sure that no one, you know, that law enforcement isn't going to find them. And that's because that's what you do as a journalist. You're there to witness and to report and inform. What is their motivation to help you? I think it's three reasons. One is ego. These are some of the best of the best at what they do. You know, the best, we filmed with one of the best guys at finishing fake U.S. dollars in Peru. He was by hand, you know, note by note, finishing each single one of them to make it look and smell and feel and taste like a real dollar. And he's the best at what he does, and nobody knows what he does. His family doesn't know. And so we give them an opportunity to disguise their identity and to sort of boast and talk about what they're passionate about. You know, the same with the chemists, the same with the Sinaloa chemists that we filmed making

fentanyl in front of us. So I think partly it's that. Then it's impunity. In a lot of these parts of the world where we filmed, there's complete impunity. So they don't see really a downside to talking to an internationally recognized name like Nat Geo. And there's trust there as well. And then lastly, and I think more surprising for me, but I think it's the biggest amount, the biggest reason we were given constantly, is this idea that they know they're considered the bad people. They know they're the most shunned people in our society, and we're giving them an opportunity to tell their story and how, you know, people really want others to know, to know why they fall into a life of crime or why they become outlaws. And that, you know, it was a really big goal for me in this documentary was to even, again, the people

that are more that we think have nothing in common with us actually do. And no matter how far you travel into the fringes of our society, that you can still find people that are redeemable and relatable. We're just lucky if we live here. We're just lucky. You're just lucky that you're born in, you know, if you live in Austin, you're lucky you're born here. If you live in L.A. or San Francisco, you're lucky. If you're born in Chicago, you're lucky. Absolutely. I say that all the time.

We won the lottery ticket, and I don't think most people, if you don't travel and you don't experience this, like I've been privileged to, I don't think we realize that. We're not grateful enough for that. I think it needs to be shown like what you showed in that cocaine episode you see these people, you see these children

playing on that car and hanging out by these cocoa leaves that are being dried out and you realize like oh this is not what I thought it was, this isn't some movie where you got these bad guys that are guarding the farm with machine guns, this is not what I thought it was. This isn't, you know, some movie where you got these bad guys that are, you know, guarding the farm with machine guns. Like, this is not it.

Like, you just have poor farmers. Yeah. I mean, that exists, too. You know, we filmed a lot of armed guards protecting their money and their operations as well. But I would say that in the vast majority of cases it really is the lack of opportunities i really don't believe that anyone is born one day and decides hey you know what i want to do is i want to become a sicario for the sinaloa cartel and be killed when i'm 25 years old i want to kill people then and be killed when i'm 25 which happened the poverty was it was obvious even in the people that were protecting their crops and everything.

They have shitty old guns with iron sights on them and shitty rifles. Shitty old guns, yeah. Yeah, you can see this is not some super sophisticated operation. It's taking advantage of people that... Or is it even... It's or, or is it even, it's just like, this is the ecosystem, right?

And the ecosystem, this is what I was going to get at before only exists because drugs are illegal. And if the ecosystem was different, if drugs were legal and then all, I mean, how long would it take? How many decades would it have to take before a large pharmaceutical company or some alcohol company or a tobacco company said, fuck it, let's grow coke? And then just started selling it legally.

Like 100% pure cocaine. The price would probably drop. It would be much more accessible. Would people do it more is the question. You know, that's what we're seeing with the marijuana business in California right now yeah it was legalized and what's happening is that the people that have been operating these at the time illegal shops for weed and operations for weed are now being

kicked out of the business and there's all these bigger companies coming in and taking you know taking away the business from them. Well, there's a little bit of that. But there's still a lot of people that are just growing it now. And it's not just big businesses. I know a lot of people that grow pot. It's a lot of small businesses too that grow it and sell it. And doing so illegally still. The black market is still huge in California for weed

because people don't want to pay taxes. Well, that was the thing up in Humboldt. In the Emerald Triangle or whatever they call it up there. They don't want to pay taxes. Well, that was the thing up in Humboldt, you know, like in the Emerald Triangle or whatever they call it up there. Like they didn't want any part. Like there's people out there that grew pot that voted against it being legalized. And, you know, I have friends that were trying to explain it to me. They're like, we don't want this to be legal.

I'm like, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Like you're missing the whole point whole i get you don't want to pay taxes but do you do you like living under the threat of being locked in a cage and do you think that the other people that grow it and sell it or the other people that even possess it don't you don't you want progress in this regard where kids can grow up and become adults in a world where you have autonomy you have control over your body you have the freedom because like i was saying to this one guy i was like he was anti-marijuana we had this conversation i said okay what do you think it should be illegal he goes yeah i go do you understand what illegal means it means you can put someone in jail for

doing something that you don't agree with it doesn't hurt anybody other than yourself right other than the person that's doing it like why would if it was just two of us the only two people in the world and you thought pot should be illegal and you made the rule and I want to smoke pot you would lock me in a cage does that make sense no so why does it make sense if there's 200 million people or two billion people it doesn't it doesn't make sense with adults adults should be able to do whatever if you could go buy whiskey which i like whiskey you should be able to buy whiskey why why can't you buy pot it makes no sense and we know whiskey will fuck you up we know

there's a reason why alcoholics anonymous exists right people have huge problems with alcohol why why can't we figure out how to do that with these other compounds? And they're trying to do that in Oregon. Oregon just legalized everything. They decriminalized everything, including steroids. They decriminalized psychedelics. They decriminalized everything, which is going to be very weird to see how that works up there. Well, you have the example of Portugal, though, right? And again, it's worked really well. Incarceration rates have gone down.

AIDS, which was high, went down. All the money that the government was spending on incarcerating people, they're now spending on rehab centers and making sure that people get the help they need. And this is hard drugs. I'm not talking about weed, of course. I'm talking about heroin. And people with addictions, that's gone down as well. And people with addiction. And this is hard drugs. I'm not talking about weed, of course. I'm talking about heroin. Yeah. And people with addictions, that's gone down as well.

It's really crazy. It's been, there's a problem with people too that if you tell them they can't do something, they want to do it. If you tell them something's illegal, they want to be naughty.

Yeah. Also, there's a lot of money. I think mostly it's about the money that's to be made with an illegal business. Yes. And I'm not just talking about the traffickers.

I'm talking about corruption. I'm talking about where all that money ends up. But in this, what I wanted to get to is like in doing this show and seeing these people from the poor farmers to these kids that are risking their lives and, as you said, seeing their friends get murdered for this drug and they're making a tiny fraction of the profit

off of this to getting to these making a tiny fraction of the profit off of this to getting to these nightclubs and even the guy that you showed in miami that was selling coke like even he was making a pittance in comparison to the cartels in comparison to it it's just disheartening it's like they i know they're trying to get by and I know I'm like the guy was talking about like feeding his family You know, but you're also you're you're in this horrible system that you're probably never gonna get out And if you do get out, what are you gonna do now? Hey, Mike, uh, it says here for the last 15 years You've done nothing like what have you been doing? Oh, I've been selling coke Like you can't say that like I met i managed to get out of the game without getting

shot and killed so uh i'm on the straight and narrow like well thank you for your time like no one's gonna hire you i get so much flack for that uh for showing that side for humanizing this i definitely like from who i get comments on my work sometimes um you know especially since the show started airing where people reach out and say, and, you know, there's their stories. You know, I understand part of it. It's, for example, the one the first one that we aired, we aired the first two were the scams episode and then the fentanyl one where we follow the pipeline of fentanyl all the way from the coast of Mexico, where we saw we filmed the precursor chemicals that come from Asia being thrown overboard. And then we filmed a speedboat that belongs to the cartel or cartel operators picking up these barrels and then moving them eventually to a lab. We saw fentanyl being made.

We saw then fentanyl being packed. And then eventually at the end, we saw it being smuggled into California from Mexico. And we were there when a woman, in this case, she was pregnant, American citizen, drove into the United States with five kilos of fentanyl inside, hidden inside her car. And there was a moment where she actually gets called for secondary inspection. And we're close to her. We're filming. I mean, we're not filming her because we're keeping the cameras low, but I'm watching what is happening. And as you know, I've been reporting on the opiate crisis for many years, and I've spent numerous amount, countless times with mothers who've lost loved ones to the opiate epidemic. So to me, that was very hard on my shoulders, the idea that on one

hand, I was seeing this woman and I knew she had kids, she was pregnant, and I knew what that meant for her family if she got caught. And on the other hand, I also knew what that would mean for American families if the drugs went across and came through. So it was a really hard time for me as a journalist. And I think I get flack for that, for not being absolutely clear that, you know, I think people would prefer if I was just, okay, these are bad people. And because there's so much suffering around some of these traits, right, such as fentanyl, and even cocaine, that I think people just have an easier time in life thinking of the world as black and white, that they are bad people. We would never do that. You know, us in that position would never do that. And I think it's a harder, more challenging look of life if you realize that actually it's a lot more gray and that people are a lot more similar to us.

Well, I think that's one of the reasons why your work is so important is because you do take those risks and you do show the human side of the people that we like to demonize. We like to demonize them and think of them as being just evil, this evil scourge that comes from these other places to our good place. Yeah. And I was there to witness it and I didn't do anything to stop it is usually what I get told. They're foolish. The people that are saying that are foolish. And I understand their perspective as well.

I understand, especially if they have loved ones that they've lost a fentanyl. And I know people. I know people that have died from it.. I know people that have died from it. And I know people that have problems with it. And not just problems. It's like ruined their lives. I know people that have had injuries. And then from that injury, they just went down a road and never returned.

And they went down a road with the doctor prescribed opiates. And they never came back. And they're never the same again. Yeah. And now they're addicts. Yeah. And it's the most helpless feeling. And if it's family members and if it's someone you care about,

you don't know what you can do. They don't want to listen. They're lost. And you will lose your life trying to help them. You will lose your life if you try to pick them up and wake them up every day and take them to a rehab. You'll lose your life because you can't babysit an adult. So what do you do?

And so I see the perspective from the person that's saying, you should do something. You should have stopped it. I do too, but I'm a journalist. But you have to do it the way you do it because there's not that many people doing it. The way you do it, there's very, very few people that are willing to show it raw like that. And that's what people need to see.

We need to understand that this is like a super complex issue. Do you remember there was a really corny drug ad, one of those say no to drug ads from the bush administration i believe i think it was the bush administration where um there was this guy who is one of these uh silly sort of like uh just a fax man republicans and he's eating they're eating in a restaurant and the guy's eating he's like uh he goes if you buy drugs you support terrorism like and he's like what like what are you saying it was when the terrorism craze like i believe it was post 9-11 oh wow and um and he goes why do you say that he goes because it's a fact it's a fact and that's it like no stats no nothing but this guy who a lot of people represents your father or your boss this like really like cold sort of like fact-based no nonsense super successful guy who's telling this fool this liberal fool if you buy drugs you support

terrorism and it was like the weirdest campaign and it's it didn't work and people mocked it surprising well it's just but this this is the attitude that people have like you should stop them you should stop them without ever questioning what what you're doing is so important because you're showing you're showing human beings who got handed like a terrible roll of the dice, a bad hand of cards. That's it. And they're stuck in this very poor village in Peru with dirt roads and no money and no opportunity and no way out. And this is what most of the people do.

They grow coca. Right. And we can either choose to ignore it and pretend it's not there and not do, you know, just keep on demonizing these people and keep on consuming and keep on buying because that's why, it's because there's demand or else it wouldn't exist. Or we can actually go and shine a light and try and understand why they happen,

why these people turn to black markets and why the trade exists and try to do something about it. Well in a lot of ways, it's as gross as it sounds, I think that is, your expose on this is one of the best arguments for legalization. Like to show people, yes, this is all horrible. However, you're not going to stop people from doing drugs. People have been doing drugs since the beginning of time. If you say people shouldn't do drugs because drugs are bad, because it's a fact.

If you're one of those guys like okay simple like you've just taken like one of the most complex nuanced problems the world has ever known human beings love to perturb their consciousness they've been doing it forever monkeys do it they they drink fermented fruit you know they they eat things that they know can get get them high fucking jaguars do it in the Amazon. They eat leaves. They know we're psychedelic, and they lie down and trip out. Animals love to do it. Humans are animals.

We're never going to stop. And as long as there's legal drugs, too. By the way, there's so many drugs. Like, just coffee, right? Cigarettes. You wanted a cigarette before the show started. Hey, Joe. Sorry, I ratted you out.

It's only when i get nervous but i mean look these are drugs these are all drugs there's so many drugs you know are is is is that a like a valid parallel you know coffee and cocaine no i don't think it is but it's also a drug alcohol tobacco all these different prescription drugs these are all drugs i don't think that we can keep doing what we're doing and pretending that we're doing the right thing yeah and spending billions of dollars in the process of trying to combat thing something you know the drug war uh you know the u.s has spent billions of dollars in something that has been a huge failure yeah huge failure like Violence is increasing in

Mexico every year. The drugs are coming across easier than ever. So it's not making a dent. It really isn't. No, it's propping up organized crime. The same thing that happened in America during the prohibition. I mean, that's where Al Capone got all his

money. That's where the Kennedys, allegedly, not necessarily true, right? Supposedly not. Supposedly not. I think they got a good PR agent, these motherfuckers. But whoever was profiting off of moonshine and illegal whiskey, they're still selling it. You know, speakeasies were still open. You had a special knock on the door and you had to know somebody, but they were still drinking.

People like to drink. I don't do coke and you don't do coke. So you and I, we could look at this, I think, as objectively as possible. I think it should be legal. I don't want my children to do it. I don't want my friends to get addicted to it. Neither do I, yeah. But I also think maybe the only way we're going to really resolve it is if you

have treatment centers and rehabilitations that are funded by the profit off of legalized cocaine and heroin and all these other drugs if we had look if heroin is legal tomorrow i'm not going to fucking do heroin like i don't want to do heroin but it it is legal in OxyContin. That's basically the same thing, right? There should be, if you want to make sense of this, there should be some sort of a percentage of the profits that has to go to rehabilitation centers. And then there's another one, Ibogaine. Ibogaine has been proven to be the very best method

for many people for kicking addictions. And not just addictions of chemicals, but addictions of endogenous chemicals like gambling. People that are gambling addicts have found great relief with Ibogaine. People that are addicted to alcohol, people that are addicted to a lot of different controlled substances have found amazing relief through ibogaine. Ibogaine is not something you get addicted to. It is a ruthlessly introspective drug. And you have to go to Mexico to do it. There's ibogaine clinics.

My friend Ed Clay, he started a clinic down in Mexico because he got hooked on pills because he got hurt and he wanted to figure out how to get off of them. Found out about ibogaine, did it. It was so mind-blowing. He decided to open up a clinic. I knew it was for, I didn't know, I thought it was just for opiates. I had no idea that it cured or helped cure so many of the other things. A lot of personality disorders.

Wow. Yeah, a lot of people. There's a lot of weird addictions that people have that are in many ways connected to trauma. You know, Gabor Monte thinks that like almost, almost all addiction is connected to childhood trauma, and he makes a very compelling argument about it. And it's interesting to hear him discuss it because everyone that I know that's an addict has had a fucked-up childhood.

You know, it kind of makes sense. There's something there that was often wrong, or there's abuse, or there's something. And a lot of soldiers. There's a ton of soldiers that come back and they have severe PTSD. And then on top of that, they have CTE. So they have like legitimate trauma,

physical trauma to their brain. And they wind up getting addicted. And they also get injured in the field a lot. And then they're given Oxycontins and other painkillers. And yeah, it's the recipe for disaster, really. But we have this sort of, we're like a cat. Like my cat used to play this game where he would hide, but he would hide and his tail would be sticking out.

And I'd be like, bitch, I see you. But if he couldn't see me, he thought I couldn't see him. And I'd grab his tail and he'd poke his head out and swat at me. And then he'd go back in there. I'm like, bitch, I see you. And we would play games, you know. But it was fun. But I would laugh.

But like, I think he thinks that I can't see him because he can't see me. Like, it's a childish game. But it's a fucking cat, right? We're playing this same kind of stupid game. It's right on, yeah. You know, it's like we're pretending that drugs are illegal.

When drugs are everywhere, we're pretending we're stopping drugs by keeping them illegal, but we're just propping up organized crime. It's so much worse. This simplistic approach to it, this childlike approach to it, there is not a single intelligent person, if you laid out the facts, and they looked at it objectively, would think that this is a successful method of handling this. Yeah, and we keep spending money you know we keep pretending that we don't know that what we're doing and the billions of dollars we're spending on this is we pretending that it's making a

difference and it really isn't and we have a war on it this is the shittiest war that the united states has ever fought if you think we did a bad job in vietnam and af and Afghanistan. At least we didn't, like, the war on drugs has been a loss. Like, they've lost every year. They've never won the war on drugs. When you showed those Coast Guard people, that was incredibly illuminating. Because the way that guy described it, where he said, you're dealing with an area that we patrol that's larger than the united states and we have about four boats yeah you're like what he's like imagine four police cars patrolling the entire united states then you know how this these drugs are getting in yeah you know i've spent a lot of time with law enforcement and you hear their stories and you know they're

really out there and the front lines trying to make a difference, most of them. And again and again, you hear just how frustrating their job is because they know, you know, that they're really not making a dent. But I think it's also hard to admit in many ways because this is their lives and their livelihoods that if you talk to law enforcement, even now, I actually just did a story for season two about weed, black market weed in California. And even now, you know, they will tell you that that's, they think that it shouldn't have been legalized because they have a point.

Black market weed has only exploded since legalization. But I don't think that not making legal is, it's really about the regulations that are in place in california sounds like they're thinking like cops the the real problem is uh my friend john norris who's been on the podcast before he is a game warden and he was uh he got a job as a game warden because he loves the outdoors and he thought he was just gonna like check people's fishing licenses and things along those lines and along the way he started finding these grow ops on public land and so his department became a tactical drug enforcement department to fight cartels who are illegally growing marijuana and

so they have like trained belgian malinois who attack these cartels. They get shot at. He's lost members of his team. Like they're like a tactical group now. And he wrote a – was it Hidden War? Was that the book? We have it at the old studio. We spent the summer actually filming that, those operations. Hidden War?

It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. And his take is that what happened was when they made marijuana legal, what they did was they made growing it illegally a misdemeanor. So in most of the country, marijuana is still illegal in most states, right? So if you have 50 states, how many states like 19 or something where it's legal? How many states is it legal? 50 states how many states like 19 or something where it's legal how many states is it legal 80 of all of the marijuana supplied to the states where it's illegal is grown in california and it's grown on public land and it's grown by the cartels so they move these guys in and they're incredibly industrious i mean you want to talk about hard working dudes these guys walk in like 10 15 miles into public land with all the equipment on their back like their camp they they have like the hoses and and they take the water they create

their own dams and take the water from these creeks and they run it into their grow ops that's how they found it they thought that like a farmer was uh it was channeling the river or a creek away from these steelhead and salmon fisheries. And it turned out it was like the cartel. Yeah. So they followed the dry creek up into this crazy marijuana grow up. We went to one of these grows this summer with an operation much like that. And it was funny because all of the law enforcement that was there, they were brought in sort of, you know those ropes on helicopters where they come and they drop them because it's really out there in the middle of the forest.

But they couldn't do that to us. So we had to actually drive part of the way and then hike down. And it took us like, you know, almost a whole day of hiking through like thick brush to get to this area where they were diverting water and where there's marijuana growing all around us. And it was all cartel operated and you realize just like what these guys have to go through because then it's also on a weekly basis they have to get supplies and food and they have to get the you know the drugs out of there so it is actually a lot of work if those guys were working like a regular job they like to be the best employees ever yeah but like this guys dude that's what i see in all of these black markets.

These are some of the most industrious. You might not, obviously you don't agree with what they're doing. You might not even like them, but you have to give it to them. They're industrious. They're hardworking. They're really creative. The things that I've seen that people do to hide their product, to make their product, to make it better, to make it stronger, it's really incredible.

Well, it's crazy to watch the method. When you see the method of how they cut the cocaine on your show, where they're pouring cement into it, you're like, what? And then gasoline, just giant jug, and then all the other shit that they're, all the different chemicals, acid. You're like, oh my God, this is crazy.

I had no idea. I had no idea that's how they make it. Yeah, so another episode that we filmed recently was here in Austin, was actually meth. Meth is in Austin? Yes. Austin's got a meth problem. On my way driving here to the show, I passed by the place where I had filmed just three weeks ago, actually, this guy in his hotel room, a dealer, a meth dealer.

But he was washing one of the things he did before he started getting clients. And the clients are not the people that you think are meth users at all, by the way. We filmed, we interviewed a lawyer. We interviewed a mom with kids at home. It was an entrepreneur, not at all the people that you think are meth users. And this guy, before he started, he's washing the meth. And that's because he says he prides himself on selling good quality meth but he had purchased it from mexico and he wasn't sure about the quality so

he washes it i can't remember what it is the product that he puts in but it's to see all the other stuff that comes out and uh and him you know you can and then you can see just sort of all this other chemicals that are put in there and you sort of realize and when i was filming in the cocaine lab the same thing and the fentanyl lab too the amount of shit that goes into these drugs if that alone is not going to dissuade you from from doing them is yeah it's chemicals it's gasoline it's yeah lime lime is something that goes into a lot of these. Yeah. They use lime to get rid of bodies. Yeah. Oh.

Yeah. This meth guy, was he a big Breaking Bad fan? Was he a big Bryan Cranston fan? Wanted to be the guy? He was actually younger. I'm not sure. You know one guy that we filmed for the fentanyl episode? It was a cartel chemist. So this guy was a bioengineer

and incredibly smart and knowledgeable. And we met him in this abandoned location where he's basically making fentanyl and pressing it into the M30 pills, which are fake. It goes round back to the beginning of the opiate crisis because they make them to look like OxyContin,

like the 30 milligram pills that Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin have. But it's pure fentanyl, essentially. And they're becoming really popular on the streets of America and part of, you know, really deadly stuff. And so we saw him making it. And you never know with these guys. Like I spent time in some of these illicit labs where you kind of get a sense that shit could go wrong very fast because they have no idea what they're dealing with, and these are very potent chemicals.

But in this case, you know, it's not easy to make. I mean, it is because it's cheap, and once you know how to do it, you know how to do it, but it's, you know, I can't show up and try to make the whole thing could explode just because the chemicals are so potent. And yet here he was, and we were wearing our hazmat suits and our masks and everything, And I started talking to him, and he was, I mean, I suddenly thought I was talking to Walter White from Breaking Bad.

He was exactly that, like a geek when it came to chemistry and had always loved chemistry and, you know, had worked in chemistry for a while and then was approached by the Sinaloa Cartel, and they needed a guy who knew how to make this stuff. Wow. And he's decided, why not? I can make a lot more money making this and now he's like one of the biggest chemists for the Sinaloa cartel yeah so when you talk to the people that did the meth did they have a reason the people that that actually consume it when you said you talked to... Oh, they use it? Yeah, the mom and the lawyers.

It's a good party drug. It's a good... It helps with inhibition. Oh, I bet. For people, yeah. And apparently it really helps with sex, especially it's very consumed in the gay community as well. It helps, yeah, just having a good time. Just getting wild.

Yeah, getting wild. Have you done Adderall? I have not. Good for you. You and I together. Give me some knuckles, woman. All right. You have another? No, but that's a tempting one. People keep telling me how amazing it is for just cleaning your house. Is it really?

You just get on a roll. Jamie, you've perhaps participated in some... I've taken it twice, but I've done Provigil now twice. Not the same in any way, shape, or form. No, Provigil is... I have done Provigil, and I've done NuVigil, too.

NuVigil's another... It's a drug that... Now, this is... I might be wrong about this, so we might have to Google this. I believe it was created as a performance-enhancing drug. But then they said, well, you can't just sell it as a performance-enhancing drug, as a cognitive enhancer. And I do believe it has some proven cognitive-boosting functions.

But I think they decided to sell it as a narcolepsy drug when they found out that it keeps people awake. It's amazing for road trips. This is what I love it for. Like if I used to drive to San Diego to do a gig and the gig would be over at like midnight and I'm like, fuck it, I want to be home. And I would drive two hours. Like around an hour in,

you start getting that road sleepiness with ProVigil. I'm listening to books on tape. I'm fucking howling at the moon. Like I'm wide awake, but i'm not on speed like it's not like your heart doesn't beat fast you don't get like you you just are a weirdly awake is this an over-the-counter drug no no no you have to get a prescription um but it's easy to get a prescription um yeah but i don't think there's a lot of drawbacks to it. It's so weird that Tim Ferriss, who is all about biohacking and all about like, you know, the four hour body, the four hour work week. He didn't put it in his book.

And he told me he didn't want to put it in his book because he was worried that people are going to just fucking eat it like candy. He's like, I don't want to endorse this. He goes, because I don't think there's such a thing as a biological free lunch. He goes, when something is doing that to you, there's got to be something that's happening on the other end. There's got to be something that, and I don't know what it is,

and I don't want to be the guy that says, hey, do this. So I thought that was very interesting. So how different is Adderall from that then? I don't know. I don't know because I have not done the Adderall. A lot different. A lot different.

Yeah, Jamie's done both. I'm looking it up. Adderall has A lot different. Is it? A lot different. Yeah, Jamie's done both. I'm looking it up. Adderall has amphetamine in it. This is not. It says a wakefulness promoting agent. I don't know what that means. Right. Yeah, but see if the origin of ProVigil was the first one.

And I believe NuVigil, they changed it. They altered it slightly to get around a patent or something. I forget what the exact reason was but um these are not they're not speed but i think they are addictive at least addictive in the fact that it has an effect an impact like i was very careful not to take it too often like sometimes i'd take it before a podcast and i'd be like wait even more energy than right now yes well I came here right from the gym so I'm pretty pretty amped up um but uh is that how do you stand on

steroids by the way what's your because one of our episodes was about steroids I think that steroids are many there's there's a lot of different things that are legal now in terms of like you can get testosterone replacement therapy, hormone replacement therapy, and they basically give you the vial. But only if you have low levels of those, of testosterone, right? Or can you just... You can just kind of get it.

And you can get low levels pretty easy. All you have to do, like if you want low levels, folks out there, this is not my advice, but I'm just telling you you a fact all you'd have to do is eat a massive meal and then get your blood taken because if you want to take your blood um like the idea is they take your blood when you're fasting right so you're supposed to fast i think it's 10 hours before your blood work the reason for that is then your hormone levels will level out. They'll be normal. If you crack, like that feeling that you get when you have a massive meal, especially like high carbohydrate, high sugar.

Like if you eat like three Big Macs and fries and a large Coke, you'll be like boom. That feeling, get your blood done right then. You will show very low hormone levels. You'll show low growth hormone. You'll show low testosterone. You'll show low everything. Yeah.

Another thing is when people have done steroids. See, I know about this initially because of the UFC, and the UFC had a, there was a TUE, testosterone use exemption, and that testosterone use exemption allowed people to replace their hormones if they showed low levels of hormones. So testosterone replacement therapy was for people that had some sort of a condition that would allow the doctor to prescribe testosterone for them. The problem with that is a lot of the people that had low testosterone had low testosterone because they were taking steroids. Yeah, so you take steroids your endocrine system crashes and then you get on

uh testosterone replacement therapy and you become a super person this was a real problem in the ufc for several years there was like two or three years where there was a few guys and i don't need to name names because all you folks know who they are. All the people that are MMA fans know exactly what I'm talking about. But these guys where their career was kind of stagnated, they became fucking murderers for like three years. And then USADA, the U.S. anti-doping agency, got involved with the UFC. And now USADA randomly tests everybody. They kill testosterone use exemptions. No more testosterone replacement

therapy and people's bodies melted they shrink and then you became entirely the sport is as clean as you can make it with today's science and today's technology um but there's some sports like let's look at uh power lifting yes or let's look at powerlifting. Yes. Or let's look at bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is the best one. Yeah. Doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. What do you mean?

Testing doesn't exist. Bodybuilding doesn't exist. Oh, right. It doesn't exist if it weren't for steroids. Bodybuilding with steroids exists. Regular bodybuilding? I had a friend, my friend Brian, who lived in Boston, was a natural bodybuilder. And he was very dedicated.

And he was a legitimate natural bodybuilder and he was very dedicated and he was like legitimate natural bodybuilder he worked out very hard he was he ate very clean and he was like super super dedicated and you would swear he was on steroids he was big I mean like big giant arms like really thick guy but just really dedicated he is nothing like those giants that you see at the gym that are on steroids. There are people that walk around, like if you go to like a Gold's Gym in Venice in the heyday, when all the elite bodybuilders would go there, they don't even look like humans. They look like walls with feet. I saw it.

I went to a bodybuilding competition in Vegas for the show where we were following this kid who was mostly not doing steroids at this time. And like your friend, he was trying to see if he could make it into this competition without the heavy use of or heavily using steroids and other PEDs. And it was he went on stage and you could see the difference between him and the other guys. I mean, everybody else there was heavily using PEDs. And then you'd see him. We actually followed him. We were with this guy called Tony Huge, who calls himself Tony Huge. Have you heard of this guy? He's pretty incredible. He has a huge following, a huge following. And he calls himself Dr. Tony Huge, even though he's not a doctor,

but he is a lawyer. And he's, if anyone wants, is interested in, he's basically a spokesperson for steroids. He's people who are bodybuilders. He's also a bodybuilder himself and goes to gyms and competitions. And he was with this kid, and kids adore him. I mean, we spoke to teenagers who look up to Tony Huge and want to do everything he does, which is mostly PEDs. And this kid wanted to be, he went to Vegas to help this kid out. How old was this kid?

He was like 19, I believe. His name is Zach from Florida. Super nice kid. Met his mom, all of it. But had tried steroids, had had sort of a bad experience with steroids, decided he was going to try and do it with other things but not steroids, not testosterone itself but other substances. Tony Huge was helping him out.

He gets there the day of the competition. He goes on stage, and again, he looks like the others around him who have been doing steroids look so much stronger than him. And he comes out, yet, you know, again, super dedicated kid. Like, this is his life. Spends most of his time at the gym and eats right and all that. And in the middle of the competition, Tony Huge says, okay, it's time for us to go back to your apartment

and get you ready for round two. They go back, and we filmed all of this, and he opens up a big suitcase and inside this suitcase, it's like the Mary Poppins suitcase that more and more shit's coming out, you know, and starts giving him injections of insulin and ulcers. I don't know half of the things that he was giving. And the kid's like, are you sure this is okay? Are you sure this is okay? And I'm worried for him. He says, okay, I'm starting to feel my heart beating really fast. You know, you don't, don't, don't you worry. And then he goes back and you could actually see the transformation in this kid's body within an hour of him taking these drugs. I am not joking.

What is a transformation? What happened? His vessels, his blood veins. Vascularity. Yes. We're popping his veins so that's something good apparently for these kind of competitions uh you're funny the way you talk that's something good apparently i know i know i know it was my first time at a bodybuilding competition for sure it's weird it's so weird but it's weird when you see those people in real life yeah i love world that look nothing like what I'm used to.

I'm so fascinated by them. I was watching a video last night on Vice of a woman who does bodybuilding. She's my height and my weight. She weighed 196 pounds. And she has like her neck is like my neck, but her traps are even bigger than mine. They start like here. They go straight down. Her shoulders were massive.

And she was talking like this. This is what I eat. This is every morning. I have to consume 6,000 calories. She sounded like The Rock. Yeah. Like it was bizarre. It was so bizarre.

It was so strange to see this weird obsession. They're like sculptors, right? And in a way, it is kind of an art form. But what they're doing is freakish. But they're all into it. They all love it. Yeah. This Tony Huge guy, I actually kind of grew very fond of him just because he's so honest about what he does.

I don't think his message is very safe for kids, you know, especially. And, you know, taking steroids, you know the side effects and you have to be careful. But yet him saying, you know, I am basically a human experiment on myself and I'm trying all of these things. Is there videos of him?

Can we see what he looks like? This Tony huge fellow? Does he look ridiculous? He's going to love this. Oh, Tony. No, he actually doesn't look ridiculous. Yeah, Tony. Tony huge fail. These look ridiculous. He's going to love this. Oh, Tony. Oh no, he actually doesn't look ridiculous. He's a Tony,

Tony. Well, there's a guy who's, uh, who died recently, who was famous for looking ridiculous. His name was rich Piana. Do you know who that is?

I remember when I was doing research for this story. Yeah. I was hearing about that. Um, they don't exactly know if steroids killed them but it's like you know if you see a body and then there's a gun right next to the body like and the gun the body has a bullet hole oh he's pretty big yeah he's big yeah but he's tiny compared to rich piano no yeah yeah oh he looks very good yeah see he doesn't look preposterous he looks like a very big strong guy like right there with the shirt off picture

still he looks great like that's that is a guy who's in very good shape yeah so he says okay this is uh i used to be handsome this is maybe six or seven years ago when i was 31 or 32 i was still full-time in laura wearing a suit going to court meeting clients so yeah so that is he decided to start taking steroids that's when he decided is that da da so yeah so that is he decided to start taking steroids that's when he decided is that what it says okay so that that can be achieved naturally that absolutely can be achieved naturally especially with good genetics and that's uh one of the things that i had do you know who ronnie coleman is no ronnie coleman's if there's a mount rushmore of bodybuilding he's on it 100 it's like ar Arnold, Franco Colombo, Lee Haney.

I mean, how many, Mount Rushmore doesn't have enough heads, right? Dorian Yates. But Ronnie Coleman is without doubt on there. He was a multiple time Mr. Olympia. Enormous guy. Oh, that's him. Yeah, with spectacular genetics.

Spectacular genetics. And Ronnie did the the podcast and he said that when he was he's really in rough shape now like he can barely walk his back is really fucked up he's had many many surgeries and uh he's basically had every disc in his back fused except for one and uh has a really hard time walking and even standing up. But that's because he pushed himself so hard. So it wasn't just the steroids. He pushed himself through pain. So when he got injured, he didn't give a fuck.

He just kept working out hard and stacking weights and squatting spectacular amounts of weight. But he was, I believe he said he was 30 before he took steroids. So he was a full-time cop, and he was, I believe he said he was 30 before he took steroids. So he was a full-time cop and he was competing just like, I mean, perfect genetics. Just perfect. I mean, he's just a stud. And then realized he couldn't beat these guys. Yeah, there's no way.

Tired of getting his ass kicked. And so then he got on, like, he had, that's when he was a cop. I just get pulled over by that guy. Yes, sir. Here's license, sir. Sir, don't squeeze my head like a cop. I'd just get pulled over by that guy. Yes, sir. Here's license, sir. Sir, don't squeeze my head like a zit. He's just a really sweet guy, too. An awesome guy.

But he was very honest about it. He was like, I couldn't compete. I was tired of getting my butt kicked. Right. And then he started taking it. So in the USC, it's not allowed now? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

A lot of people get busted. So in the USC, it's not allowed now? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A lot of people get busted. They get busted for trace amounts that are in supplements. Like say if you buy like creatine, there's a lot of like cheap supplements that you'll buy that they make them in vats. And the vats that they make them in, they're like in China,

and they don't clean these vats. So they might have made steroids right before they made your shit, and then they'll throw the next thing in there and mix up the creatine. There's a lot of that, a lot of cross-contamination. I just interviewed recently for the Traffic podcast. We also have a podcast. I just started doing a podcast. Congratulations.

I was so nervous before talking to you. I've interviewed so many people, but I'd never done it for a podcast, so I was here sitting to talk to my first podcast interviewee, and I was shaking. I don't know. Because when it's something new and you've never done it, I don't know. I just got nervous. Am I going to be able to be half as good as Joe? If you ever get nervous, go and listen to the early ones that I did.

They're fucking terrible. Yeah. It's like me and television. The first things that I did on TV, it was my husband, actually, whom you met, Darren. Yes. Traveling around the world with me, filming. Our first assignment, or we were freelance journalists, we bought a little camcorder in Syria. I was living in Syria at the time. 9-11 had happened. I wanted to be close to the action, learn Arabic, and we bought a little camcorder. And we went, we filmed with jihadis crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans.

These were Syrian jihadis. And it was our first story as freelancers. And, you know, there was a moment where one of us had to decide who's going to be on camera. And I'm much more gregarious than he is. He's, you know, quieter than I am. And so we decided it was me. And he would turn the camera to me and say,

okay, now tell us what's happening. And I could not put two words together. And he kept on giving me shit for this. Like, how can you not say something that is so simple? And I was like, oh, yeah, wait a second. I picked up the camera and I turned it to him. I said, okay, now you say those words. And he couldn't say them either.

Well, you figured it out. You're great at it now. You're great at it now. But I was going to say that I interviewed Tony Bosch. Do you know Tony Bosch, right? No. You do. I do? Yes, you do. Because I think you had one of your friends made the film about him he's the guy

the steroids in baseball guy he was the guy that was providing oh the billy corbin documentary screwball screwballs yeah which is amazing it's so good i can't recommend that enough it's so good but so we interviewed him hilarious the podcast. It's hilarious. The way Billy Corbin filmed it with the little kids. Oh, my God. It's brilliant. He's really brilliant. That's the guy. Okay, okay, okay.

And he was saying, you know, I was asking, like, isn't it for somebody he apparently loves? He loves baseball, has been a huge fan of baseball all his life, and then became the supplier of steroids for, you know, the biggest big shots in baseball. And I was asking him, don't you think that's unfair? You know, considering that these are illegal and it's just some people are taking them and others aren't. He was like, yeah, it's unfair is not to take them because everybody's taking them.

Yes. Well, it's the way I felt about Lance Armstrong. You know, like when people, the real problem with Lance Armstrong was not that he was taking drugs. It was a lie. The real problem was the lies. Yeah. And also suing the other people that were was taking drugs. It was a lie. The real problem was the lies. Yeah, and also suing the other people

that were calling him out. But in his eyes, they betrayed him and that they were selling him out so that they could get a cheaper deal. But they were doing it too. And they were all admitting they were doing it, so they were getting immunity. If you got rid of all the people that tested positive when they took away

Lance Armstrong's jerseys or whatever you get a jersey from winning you know all his victories I mean he has them on the wall in his house you took away all those well who wins then who wins those years well you have to go back to 18th place to find someone who didn't test positive wow do you know that no I had no idea 18th place to find someone who didn't test positive. Wow. Do you know that? No, I had no idea. 18th place.

And that guy probably just had a really good chemist, and he probably is full of shit, too. Or maybe he cycled off right before the race. It's a dirty sport. Yeah. Bill Burr has a great bit about it. Bill Burr, the comedian, has a hilarious bit about, like, our psycho is better than your psycho. It's like you're dealing with a dirty sport it's an entirely dirty sport they've been blood doping and they've been doing epo and

testosterone all the different things and then there's a real argument that it's actually healthier to do that with drugs than it is to not do with drugs because without the drugs your body has such a difficult time recovering from the massive amount of work you have to do when you're doing something like the Tour de France. Because you're racing every day for a long time. Yes, super, super human. You know another sport I had no idea where apparently it's used heavily?

It's in tennis. Did you know that? Really? Yeah. Well, I did know that one, we don't have to say the name, but there's a prominent tennis star that the World Anti-Doping Agency or one of them came knock on this person's door

and they locked themselves in a safe room. And they said, oh, I think there's an intruder, someone trying to come and get me. And they avoided being tested. Was this reported? Yes. Yes. I don't know very popular story yeah no need to dig up dirt jamie don't google it i bet you do and a lot of people like hmm things that make you go hmm uh yeah i didn't know that though but I just assumed that any explosive athletic endeavor

whatever it is sprinting that was the other thing remember when Ben Johnson won the Olympics Carl Lewis was on the shit too that's what's crazy like Ben Johnson got shamed and Carl Lewis was like he was doing drugs too they were all doing it

the dirty secret about Olympic sprinting apparently is that they were all doing it they're like the the dirty secret about olympic sprinting apparently is that they're all doing something yeah then it's when you start asking yourself at what point does it make sense to make it illegal why not just like have you seen icarus the brian fogle documentary so good it's so good so good it's and it's all about that folks it's all about the sochi olympics and about about how Russia essentially doped the entire Olympic team. Insane. It's insane. Insane how they did it.

It's crazy. The documentary is so well done because Brian Fogle, who is the director and the guy who made the documentary, he had a plan and his plan was film him with no drugs doing this bike race and then come back next year with the supervision of an anti-doping expert from the Soviet Union. In the middle of all this happening, it gets exposed that the Sochi Olympics, that the urine samples had been tampered with and that there was like micro scratches on there that they devised some sort of a method to open up the urine samples and replace the urine with clean urine and holy shit it's crazy it's insane it's it is the craziest that guy is still the russian guy is still in hiding i had no idea oh yeah he's under like he's he gave state's evidence so he's like this guy is under witness protection program yes allegedly he might be in

antarctica who the fuck knows but they offered him as a guest like like i don't like in some sort of remote fashion i think remotely and you didn't want to well well i'd talk about it it's just one of those i don't want to put him in jeopardy i feel like that's one of those you don't want to do what i do no i don't think you think you're in jeopardy. You're out. You're out in the open. I just think that guy's life is in like real danger right now. I mean, he exposed the Soviet Union, the state, like the state-sponsored anti-doping agency. I don't, I mean, the documentary and the whole case itself, for sure, put that guy's life in danger. Yeah, that was a good one it was you know

it's whenever documentaries when you start by watching and you think it's going to be about one thing and then something completely different those are the best stories yes yes it's amazing so my take on the adult use of these things is very different than my take on the use of them for competition now i've had people was it was luke thomas that was saying that they should just be able to take drugs right wasn't it i believe it was he's got a really good argument for it um that they're doing things and this is for fighters they're doing things they're just they're getting away with it they're doing things in some sort of a sneaky way they They're microdosing.

They're figuring out a way. And that if you just regulated the levels that they could compete at and just let them do whatever they want, it would probably be better for everybody. In the early days of the sport, and I'm sorry, Luke, if I've distorted your argument. In the early days of the sport, it was Wild West, and everybody was juiced to the gills. And in Japan, when they compete in Japan, it was actually in the contract that they would actually, not only would they not test, they would say in all, like my friend Ensign Inoue, he's a legend in mixed martial arts, like one of the early pioneers. And he said when he was in Pride, it was in all caps. We do not test for steroids. It was in the contract Yeah, like so they would test you a lot of guys like no they tested everybody when we go that yeah

Yeah, they test you you got penis cop They said throw it over there get out there get juiced up like a friend of mine went to compete over there They told him to get on steroids. This is one of the Japanese fight organizations. They told him, we want you to gain weight. We want you to be bigger, stronger, better for TV. Yeah, better for the show. Yeah, more money to be made. And if you're on a host of these performance-enhancing drugs,

you will have more endurance. You'll be able to recover faster. You'll be able to train harder. And you'll be able to endure more punishment when you're actually inside the ring or the cage. So you think they should? No. I'm torn here's here's my my real feeling um that this is we're trying to stick our finger in a well or in a dam rather that has a bunch of holes and the holes are going to increase there's going to be more and more holes and then you're going to have genetic

engineering and i think we are maybe one two generations away from crisper kids fighting in mma kids with perfect genes kids that when like say if they engineer uh myostatin inhibitors into children you know what myostatin inhibitors are myostatin inhibitors are it's it happens accidentally with animals sometimes, sometimes with cows, but commonly with whippets for some strange reason. When they breed whippets, sometimes they have this weird error in their genes and they develop – they have myostatin inhibitors in their genes. And their – myostatin inhibitors, apparently what it does is it stops your body's regulation of how much muscle you can grow. Oh, wow. So you have whippets that don't even look like real animals. If you see them, you'll think they're Photoshopped.

You see them, that's a whippet. That's a myostatin inhibitor whippet. Now, a normal whippet is the one on the right. Whoa. Yeah. So they grow massive, massive muscles. And they literally look like a hulk dog like someone gave a dog some kind of crazy drug oh my god and then there's the cow over there yeah that's a that's a

cow that also has uh myostatin inhibitors yeah so you have a cow that looks like ronnie coleman or dorian yates in his prime you know like we're just insanely huge um now it happens occasionally in children and there have been children that have been born with this aberration and they're massive kids that are just wow i had never seen yeah um that one might not be right that might be there's there was one kid kid yeah there was one sad one where this kid, that's steroids. The father was giving the kid steroids at a very early age. But if you Google myostatin inhibitor, I think the one

in the middle, that might be legit. Actually, it looks like CGI. Anyway, there have been cases of kids that have this genetic aberration and they're just freakily muscled as children. And you think they're going to start trying to do that too genetic aberration and uh they're just frequently muscled as children and you think they're gonna start trying to do that yes yeah i think they're definitely going

to do it i think they're probably doing it already in china yeah look at that kid yeah okay that's it yeah for sure look at that kid i mean that is fucking insane the kid's jacked that kid's getting all the second graders yeah i mean he's got the face of like yeah exactly six year old and then the arms of a yeah fighter yeah so it's some weird uh aberration now with crisper you know obviously i'm not a scientist so i'm going to butcher this but they're they're able to there there's going to be good things that they can do where they can remove genes that can cause leukemia they can remove genes and cause alzheimer's but they're also going to be able to alter people. And it's just a matter of time. I think right now we're on the third iteration of CRISPR, I believe, where they keep improving the method. Now, as they continue to improve this method, there's going to be innovation with everything. Nothing

ever stops. And it's going to be worldwide. They're not, once this technology is reaching China and Russia and wherever, who's to stop people from making people with this? It's so scary. Well, they've already used it on, Google CRISPR used on adults currently. They've done it. They've done it with people. And they actually did it with, I think there was something they did in China, I believe it was, where it improved their cognitive function.

They were trying to engineer something. It might have been something against HIV, a gene to stop them from potentially getting HIV, and it actually wound up improving their cognitive function. This is going to be weird shit they're doing with people. You're going to have, like, steroids are going to be, like, a joke. Yeah, like a walk in the park compared to the rest. And cloning, too. I did a story about cloning once.

Who? Yeah, how in Argentina, actually, which is sort of the center of polo horses, the polo, the sport polo, and they're all, the majority of the horses and the best teams are all cloned and it's all actually being done by an american company uh owned company by this american guy who has diabetes and who's i believe somebody in his family died from diabetes his grandmother perhaps and he's trying to figure out a way that he can clone parts of his body and make them healthier and really fascinating stuff yeah jesus yeah but Yeah, but whole horses, whole teams of

polo teams being run and just cloned from the same horse, which was his champion horse. How many times can you make a copy of a copy until it's like a shitty VHS tape? Do you know what's so interesting? I had no idea. You think of a clone, you think of something that looks exactly like the other. Apparently, the part that is more visible, which is the outward skin and the horse's hair, actually the color of your hair has something to do with the temperature of you when you're in the body before you were born. And so the horses that were cloned, actually the hair were different colors.

But in the physical abilities and health-wise the way your body operates that's what's cloned right like so if somebody wanted to make a perfect team of bodybuilders they would just clone ronnie coleman and just make a bunch of ronnie the rest would look similar to him but they're not identical but physically they'd have and also apparently they were saying that the personality of these clone horses were very similar to the original horse in terms of being fighters and not giving up and all that. Oh, that's what's crazy. Yeah, it's insane. And that they, this is even crazier, how they believed, the owners of these horses, that they actually came equipped with some knowledge that you can only that courses aren't equipped with like the knowledge of how grass feels or there was something

about the game of polo that you have to learn and practice and some of these horses were born with some of these characteristics wow i know it was insane do you have children i have a son yeah 10 year old um one of the things that i noticed I noticed with one of my daughters in particular, I have an obsessive personality. If I'm trying to do something, I just can't stop thinking about it. I want to get better at it. I've had that since I was a boy. My daughter has that, but she doesn't have all the fucked up parts about me.

I had it because I wasn't getting any attention when I was young and I wanted to be great so that people pay attention to me. She just has it. So, but she gets tons of attention. So she's like happy and confident, but she also, she's like a freak. Like she like concentrates on things. She gets really good at stuff, but it's very bizarre. My wife and I were looking at her.

She's like, she's like a weird 12-year-old girl version of me. How old is she? She's 12. So it's this very strange thing that I'm like, this passed down clearly because it's unusual the way she is. I'm like, this is very strange to see this in a young girl. My son definitely shares some things with me. We both get so excited when we go into a plane.

Every time, even though I fly constantly, I still am the kind of person that I walk into a plane, I step foot on a plane, and I get excited about everything. The food, everything. He does too? And he is like that too. Actually, it's before. We're on the airport and we look at each other and it's like,

yes, we're doing this, yes. Do you think that's the way? Well, he must have learned some of that from you. No? Do you think he learned it? Or do you think it's genetic? I think it's partly genetic. I love to say that I have exploration in my blood because I'm Portuguese and we come from a long line of explorers around the world in history.

And he has it, too. But I don't know. I think partly, yeah, he just shares with me the joy of traveling and the exploration and the weird of the places. Like I took him to Morocco a couple of years ago. And because it was so unlike anything he had seen, he was in heaven. He wanted to dress with the same, the jalabas, as they call them. Men wear jalabas. He's long dresses.

He wanted to wear the jalabas. He wanted to do everything. Like put the, what do you call the thing, the scarf on your head, like the tuaregs there because we went camping in the Sahara Desert. And, yeah, he really embraces all of it. So maybe he's got your travel lust. Yeah, for sure. And the weirder it is, the more he likes it. That makes sense because it's like think of the things that people are inherently afraid of.

Think of the things that people are inherently afraid of. Like I think it was Rupert Sheldrake was talking about this, that children, even children that grow up in New York City, they're not worried about car accidents or child molesters. They're worried about monsters. They're worried about monsters in the room. They're worried about monsters in the dark. And that, they believe, stems from some sort of a genetic memory of cats, big cats, hunting us when we used to be primates living in trees. And the thing that every chimp and every monkey is afraid of is a fucking cat. Oh, wow.

Like if you live in the jungle, which we all came from Africa as human beings, that is what was killing us and eating us. I had no idea. Yeah. So the thing that everyone's afraid of is something with big fangs. Oh, for sure.

It's in the dark. That's cats. I'm going to tell you a story that happened to me. I actually told your team before coming in. I am terrified. So I meet with cartel members. I meet with these people all around the world. And usually, I don't tend to be scared.

But I'm terrified of big animals, and especially big cats. I was in the Amazon once. I was doing a story about biopiracy there. And again, it was my husband, Aaron. And we went deep into the Amazon, like really deep to camp with these two Brazilian scientists. And we were looking for poisonous snakes and poisonous spiders and the most poisonous creatures in the Amazon. We went out at night in the middle of the night with them with just flashlights and our snake boots. And initially I was kind of scared. And, you know, they would pick up these really dangerous fer de lance and the most dangerous snakes and all that. And I went back to camp after this night thinking I am the bravest person in the universe.

I can do this as well, if not even better than men can. I came back and I wasn't afraid and I did this. It's something that terrified me, you know, poisonous snakes, but I did it and I'm so strong and I'm so powerful. I'm so brave. I'm the queen of the Amazon. And then I went to bed that night in these hammocks that we hung on trees out completely in the open. And I had the hammock on the far end because I was a woman and the scientist stayed and my husband next to me, but still I was more exposed than them. And in the middle of the night in the Amazon where it actually gets really cold, I didn't know that, but I woke up kind of cold and suddenly I felt it. And there was a breath right next to me, a warm,

smelly breath right next to my face. And I'm out in the open in this hammock. And I was absolutely sure. Of course, I know it's a jaguar. The scientist had just told us that he's not scared of anything except for jaguars because he knows that they are in this area and they've killed little kids. Oh, Jesus Christ. So this is happening to me in the middle of the night.

And I had this reaction that I didn't think was possible. You know when you have nightmares when you were a kid and something horrifying happens and then you want to talk and scream and ask for help, but you can't. You're frozen. That actually happened to me where I was suddenly, I felt it here. I knew I needed to ask for help, but I completely froze and I couldn't get any words to come out. But apparently my teeth were shattering so damn loud that my husband next to me woke up and said, hey, are you okay? And I was able to say no.

And then he came up with this flashlight and looked all around and didn't see anything and thought obviously I was probably dreaming. This wasn't true. It told me it's nothing. I'm sure you just imagined this. This didn't happen. The next morning I wake up. I didn't sleep at all obviously. But my backpack was full of hair.

And I was so ready to like turn to them and tell them, okay, see, guys, see, you think I'm just afraid, and I imagined this stuff, but this stuff actually happened, and here's the hair. And then the scientist points out, this guy Paolo, who's great, Paolo says, hey, Mariana, look there. There's a dog, and there's this little dog that had spent the whole night sitting on my little backpack.

So it wasn't a jaguar. It was a dog breathing in? It was a dog. and there's this little dog that had spent the whole night sitting on my little backpack. So it wasn't a jaguar. It was a dog breathing in it? It was a dog, but I'm terrified, terrified. I mean, especially since I was terrified of wild cats. A guy in Texas got killed by a mountain lion yesterday. No way. Yeah, yeah. It was in the news this morning.

How did—what happened? He got jacked. That's just what happens. You know, they—and it was really funny. They were like—it's so—there's people that were poo-pooing it because there was a mountain lion sighting in the area. And some people think that he was killed by the mountain lion. But some people are saying, well, we're not sure. It's exceedingly rare that people get killed by mountain lions.

Why? There's only been 30 recorded cases of people being killed by mountain lions in Texas. Like, bitch, that's 30. It was 30 werewolves. Right. 30 people have been killed by werewolves. Would you be skeptical if you found a man torn apart? Wouldn't you just assume he got killed by a werewolf?

Oh, we got 31 now. Like, yeah, cats kill people. If they know for sure they can get away with it and they're hungry, especially if they're old, they kill people all the time. It says there's no evidence of a predatory attack by a mountain lion or maybe even any other animal. Yeah, but there's other... Here, I'll send you another article that says there is evidence. I'm looking from a couple hours ago right now. Yeah, there's several didn't.

ABC News. Go to the ABC News one. That's the one I had up. Oh, did they change it? They changed their position? It says Texas officials conflicted on whether Mountain Lion is responsible for man's death three hours ago. And so how did he die?

I mean, how did they find his body? Was it mauled or not? Well, we're not going to know unless we get real data from it. Right. But. Yeah, it happens. And I'm terrified. There's a crazy video of a guy walking down this road and the cat comes rushing at him.

It's insane. Throwing her paws. It's insane. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He's backing up screaming. And how well did he do? He did amazing.

Right? He kept his cool. I know. Amazing. He's amazing. But I didn't know. I kind of knew how fast they were, but I didn't know it would be that terrifying. Like the movement that the cat was making,

like waving its arms out wide, like coming at him, like a demon. I know, like a demon. Like a demon. Totally. And they're just wandering around. People are like, amazing. Oh, my God.

In my old neighborhood. I heard that one that was like protecting it. Yes. Well, he saw the babies first, and then he started walking towards it, and then it he saw the babies first and then he started walking towards it and then it started walking towards him and then he started backing up and it chased him um my friend in my old neighborhood uh had stopped outside of her house and uh um she saw a mountain lion and started filming it and while she was filming the mountain lion uh

a second one ran right by look at this oh my god yeah it's a big ass cat that's in fucking calabasas that's that's in yeah that's suburb of la big two cats two big ass predatory cats there's a lot of them in LA. Oh, yeah. Well, there's some of them that have been collared and there's some of them that haven't. And there's a lot of people that think it's wonderful that they're around. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. Look, I'm glad they're real.

I love the fact that a mountain lion is a real animal. But they shouldn't be in fucking Calabasas. Jesus Christ, you hippies. Like, kill that thing. Net it. Do whatever you got toies. Kill that thing. Net it. Do whatever you gotta do. Get the fuck out of there. Just eat a bunch of dog eaters and kid eaters. Listen, it will definitely eat a baby. 100%.

You got your little baby wandering around the middle of the night? It shouldn't be. But if it was and that cat came along, that baby's dead. It's gonna eat it. They'll eat everything. They eat dogs. They eat cats. They eat everything they can. They did a study in San Francisco where they, you know, whenever they have what's called a depredation permit, when they find that a cat's been killing a bunch of animals, they'll issue a permit where you can kill it. When they kill these cats, the most shocking thing was 50% of their diet was pets.

Whoa. Yeah, 50%. Yeah, 50% with dogs and cats yeah coyotes do you know coyotes also in la are responsible for a lot of little pet dogs and killed my daughter's dog really yeah killed uh all my chickens right yeah coyotes are gross yeah i fucking mountain lion killed my dog in colorado i lived in colorado one of my dogs got killed by a mountain lion. They're no joke. No, they're not. They're fucking sketchy animals, and they live around people for that very reason. And look, no, man.

You're in their territory. Like, okay. What are you, a mountain lion? No, it's a person's house, you fuck. Like, it's not theirs. Once you put a house there, it's yours. Can I pivot to bears right now? Yes.

You had a guest, guest actually a few times already Steve Rinella? Yes And do you know that the guy that He tells a story about when they were attacked by bears The guy that he tells always that on his team Actually rode the back of the bear Yeah

Because the bear was He was our assistant Dirt myth Yeah, dirt myth Yeah He's in our team He filmed the cocaine He filmed all our

Oh, he's great He's incredible Wow, yeah He was the guy who was He filmed the cocaine. He filmed all our hazards. Oh, he's great. He's incredible. Wow. Yeah, he was the guy who was literally, as the bear charged them, found himself somehow on the back of the bear as it's running down the hill. That's right. Yeah. For several yards, Garrett was on the back of a fucking massive bear. You hear him telling the story, which was when we hired him.

I was like, okay, tell the bear story. It's insane. It's a crazy story. Many of my friends were there. My friend Ry was there my friend yannis was there i know a lot of the guys in that crew and they all tell it the same way that everyone was just like you go to a place that you didn't know your brain like a room in your brain you didn't know you have like oh look at that you've never been in here before this is what happens when you're about to die this is what happens when a giant super animal is about to eat you right oh my god that scares me those bears are the biggest bears in the world that area of a fognac island that's like those

are like the kodiak island bears they're that's alaska yeah and then you keep thinking about the revenant and the sea yeah um and they're terrifying but again i love that they're terrifying. But again, I love that they're real. I love, like, I'm not a person that thinks you should go and kill all the predators that kill people. I love the fact that we have this rich sort of just tapestry of life. There's so many different things. And I love the fact that there's so many different things. But they shouldn't be in Calabasas. They want to make wildlife corridors over the 101 because these cats keep getting hit by cars.

Like, hey guys, maybe we just concentrate on keeping them healthy where people aren't. I don't think we should encourage. There's all this weirdness that comes in california when it comes these animals like they kill just as many of them as they used to but they only kill them by hiring people to kill them they don't allow hunting anymore whereas in other places that they have problems with mountain lions hunting is still legal like colorado like my friend johnny he is a hunting guide in colorado and he gets hired to hunt mountain lions because these mountain lions will take out calves and cattle and they they'll attack livestock and once they start going into so they have the wildlife um

management companies they have these sort of very calculated processes where they determine how many tags can be issued and how many mountain lions can be sustained in an area without them encroaching on you know livestock and things along those lines and then you get to this like animal rights argument where people are like hey they have a right to you know they should we're in their land you know you shouldn't do anything. You should leave them alone. And this is sort of what they've decided to do in California. In California, the ultimate goal,

California's weird in that it's not Department of Fish and Game. It's Department of Fish and Wildlife. And so that's on purpose because they don't want to think of these things as a resource that people hunt. They want to think of them as wild animals that they protect. And so the Department of Fish and Wildlife is in many ways populated by people who are animal rights activists versus people who are hunters and fishermen and

conservationists and people who understand this sort of pragmatic approach to managing wildlife it's a real complex issue and it's uh they've decided to just let these animals handle themselves and i talked to one person who's worked with the department of fish and wildlife who said their ultimate goal is to have no hunting at all in california they would like the animals to manage themselves right but when that happens, then the animals kill dogs and wildlife, and then you kill those animals. So they don't manage themselves.

So you're paying people to kill the animals. Yeah, but it's sneaky. Because it's like you look like you care more about the animals. Because we don't allow hunting mountain lions here in California. Yeah, but you still kill just as many. You have hired killers who go and track them down and kill them. It's very weird.

And people who live on ranches, they have a completely different attitude because they see these things dragging deers across the road or attacking calves. It's like you live around monsters. Yeah, they're on the front lines seeing them. Yeah, you're dealing with monsters. And again, I love those monsters. I'm glad they're real. I've seen mountain lions twice in my life,

and it's a pretty cool thing to see them. It's wild. It's like you're seeing this thing that somehow or another manages to exist around people, and it hustles, and it makes its way. Yeah, one of the episodes we did was actually about tigers and tiger trafficking wildlife trafficking was that about people that own tigers both okay yeah so we looked at asia where they're killing um you know chopping up and using tigers to sell for tiger wine which is a luxury good in asia wine yes it's they seep the tiger bones the older the the tiger and the the more they're wild.

So instead of being farmed, because tigers are being farmed in Asia. But the wilder, if they can catch them from the wild, it's even better. And they seep them in these vats of rice wine. And they stay for years and years. And then they sell this for incredibly, really expensive bottles of wine. Wait, how do they do it? They seep the tiger. So they kill the tiger.

They kill the tiger. And then they let the body rot in a vat of wine? In a vat of rice wine. And then you might actually be able to find a photo of one of these things. That sounds disgusting. And then they stay there for years. And then eventually they make little or big bottles of this stuff and sell them for a ton of money. How much does tiger wine go for?

big bottles of this stuff and sell them for a ton of money. How much does Tiger Wine go for? They can go for anywhere from like $300, $400 for a bottle to thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Have you tried Tiger Wine? No, I did not. Did you feel tempted? Yeah. So that is the bones?

There's one that you can see the whole tiger. Is that the bones in that bottle? Yeah, those are the bones. In our film, you can actually see the vet. Do they just use the bones or do they use the tissue as well? The pelts, they usually take it out because they also sell the pelts. Oh, whoa. This is crazy.

Yeah. Tiger bone trade. Shocking reason why people... Oh, you see? Yeah, that's a good one. The first one, if you press that one. That picture? Oh, what?

Yeah. Oh, my God. So they suspend this tiger carcass inside this enormous vat of wine. Let me see that person's face again through the whole thing. Look at the dude. Is that a woman? It's non-binary. Don't be rude.

That could be anything. You get out of here. We're doing good things. Look at that carcass. That's crazy. So we were trying to figure out who were the people involved in this, you know, sort of tiger cartel land. That's for you guys. That's National Geographic, that photograph. So was this something that you actually physically saw yourself? We didn't see that vet, but we saw other things. Look at that picture. That picture is wild.

Do they take the meat off of that thing before they put it in that or does the meat just rot off i'm actually not sure i know they definitely take the pelts because they can make a lot of money out of go back to the photo jamie scroll down so i can see that that is wild yeah that picture is so disturbing it's just so weird it's like it's got no tissue on it but it's it's like a dinosaur in the zoo where it's like sort of suspended in the in the zoo where it's sort of suspended in a walking position. It's so strange. So much money to be made by these tigers. But then we came to the U.S. and we looked at a crazy, shocking number, which is that there are more tigers in captivity in the U.S. than there are in the wild.

There's more tigers in Texas than there are in all the wild of the world. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I had a whole bit about it in my 2016 netflix special really you didn't yeah about how crazy texas is yeah yeah it's uh yeah yeah there's i think there's somewhere around 5 000 tigers just in texas yeah it's insane and i i like that we so tend to look at asia and criticize these people are being crazy and i can't believe what they do to these animals and yet the commodification of tigers is happening right here because it's all they're making money out of roadside

zoos and taking selfies with the tigers or just rich assholes who have a bunch of tigers Mike Tyson had a tiger and it was really funny he was telling me on the podcast that I think he's buying horses and someone said to him you get a tiger what's up

we got a list of here they had used tiger parts there's a lot of various tiger parts that are used for various yeah uh medicine things how much of it has to do with erectile dysfunction it's obviously been scientifically correct disproven yeah yeah exactly fat prescribed for dog bites feces a cure for boils hemorrhoids and alcoholism oh eyeballs treatment for malaria and epilepsy nervousness or fevers in children convulsions and cataracts claws a sedative for sleeplessness wait the brain can you go up again the brain is the best a treatment for laziness and pimples now what is it about certain countries because i don't want to say asia but it's in asia

where they they like these weird exotic things that are proven to not be functional like like rhino horn yeah rhino horn is a thing that they love in uh certain circles in china right that's where the big trade like and's, the way it's described to me by a friend who's Chinese was that it's more of that it is very difficult to get. And like, so you have some people over your house and you're like, would you like some rhino horn? I'm like, oh shit, this dude's balling. He brought out the rhino horn tea and you all sit around with pinkies up

and drink your wine. But not that you really think that, I mean, they know about Viagra. It doesn't, it's not, they don't think that this is really. I think they do. I do think because they're paying so much money, I do think that they believe.

In traditional Chinese medicine, there's a belief that a lot of these things have been scientifically disproven, but they still believe it. I do think because who is going to pay, you know, $10,000, $20,000 for a bottle of Tiger wine if they don't think that it's not just for the taste? I think the way my friend was describing it,

the culture values things that are difficult to get, that are exclusive. Yeah, the more expensive it is, the more difficult it is to get. That is for sure. But I think there's an enormous, the traditional medicine part of it. Right, because there's a big part of it too. It's probably difficult for us to understand this long history of the use that's been,

like it's been sort of celebrated, use of rhino horn and tiger parts and shit. Yeah, I mean, it's a belief. Yeah, like we don't have a frame of reference. Right, I mean, we could if we, you know, don't have a frame of reference right i mean we we could if we you know don't want to be unpopular but if we looked at religion right they poured you a shot of the rhino horn would you would you take a little just see what's up or a tiger i should have tried that tiger we actually spent we got our hands in the tiger and bottle of tiger

wine for the show and we were able to gain it. Did anybody try it? No, we didn't. I opened it up, and I smelled it, and it's just a powerful alcohol smell, not particularly good, nothing that I would want to try. Like a moonshiny type smell? Yeah, but kind of bitter. I would drink moonshine any day. God, it's so strange what people are willing to do to get something that's not even that

it's not enjoyable like i know not it's not like you eat it and you're like oh my god this is the most amazing thing ever did you see sea of shadows the documentary about the tatuaba fish no what is it about the vaquitas tatuaba fish is this fish that exists only in the gulf of mexico apparently and it's highly prized the bladder of the tatuaba fish is highly prized in Asia and China as well for its medicinal value, which has been disproven too. But in order to get the tatuaba fish, you have, yeah, this is it. Wow, pretty fish. So that's the vaquita.

In order to get the tatuaba fish, they're killing the vaquitas. What is that? Isn't that a dolphin? A couple dozen left or something. What? Yeah, they look like dolphins. No, that's the tatuaba. The other one is the vaquita that has

a round nose over there. That's the vaquita. Why do they kill the vaquita? Because they get caught in the nets, but it's the only place in the world where these vaquitas, and there's only like 20 left or something like that. Just a few dozen left in the world, and they're these beautiful creatures. So the film is actually really well done. It's also a National Ge national geographic film but they go and explore the whole market for this and how

cartels are involved and wow what a pretty animal it's beautiful it's like a dolphin fish oh it has a blowhole it's so pretty wait a minute so is it a dolphin is it a mammal this is a called the vaquita yeah i believe it's a mammal. Oh, wow. It's just a weird porpoise. So cool, right? Yeah, very. Yeah. Very strange.

It's sad that so many of these are being destroyed just because of... And this is because... Only 30 remain in the wild. 30, I see. Yeah. And so this is because of this one fish. And what is so great about this one fish? Again, it's the belief that it has some sort of medicinal value, the bladder of the tatawaba fish.

Yeah. You know, in BC, you're not allowed to, if you hunt bear, like black bear, it actually tastes good. It's a commonly hunted meat. it actually tastes good like it's a commonly hunted uh meat in terms of um like the the pioneers used to uh hunt deer and like even bison they would just cut the tongues out and use the hide and they would hunt black bear for the meat weird like black i've had black bear it actually tastes good does it seems like it shouldn't but it good. But the point is that because of Chinese medicine, in Chinese medicine, bear gallbladder is very valuable.

So people were shooting bears just for the gallbladder. So in BC, if you hunt bear legally, you're not allowed to gut them because they want to make sure that you're not doing it just for the gallbladder. So in some sort of a weird twisted logic, you leave the gallbladder there to rot because you can't be in possession of a bear gallbladder. So in some sort of a weird twisted logic, you leave the gallbladder there to rot because you can't be in possession of a bear gallbladder. So it's really anti conservationist because like, first of all, I don't think there really is a medicinal purpose for the bear gallbladder, but in certain animals, like with a buffalo, when the native American,

like particularly the Comanche would eat the buffalo buffalo they would take the gallbladder and squirt the bile over the liver and they would eat raw liver and use the bile as seasoning because it's kind of salty i guess i've never tried it this way uh but so they had a use for it but if you ever did that with bear like bears are predators like you can't eat them raw like you would you would get really fucked up you'd get trichinosis and all sorts of parasites but i don't know what they're doing with the gallbladder they think but it's so common that they actually had to pass a law to say that you can't gut the bears so when you shoot a bear you have to leave all that stuff you can't be in possession of it so

if you shot a bear um and you you know took the bear and you know butchered it and all that stuff you have to leave and that's because they're trying to prevent it from being sold to the black market yeah yeah because people will hunt them just for the gallbladder and we'll pay a lot of money for them and particularly bc like, like Vancouver has a large Asian population. And some of these people have this belief that there's something in the gallbladder. The sea bladder from the fish, it says in this article that many of the Chinese store them as they would store gold. They cook them in soup. It's good for their skin.

Instead of buying a Ferrari, they buy a bladder or two. They sell for upwards of $100,000 a piece. For one. For a fish bladder? Wow. It's like the bladder that allows them to stay buoyant. Oh, so it's an air bladder. Yeah, it's a swim bladder. Weird.

Weird things. Like shark's fin soup. Have you ever had shark's fin soup? No. I had it once. Long time ago. weird things that people like like shark's fin soup have you ever had shark's fin soup no i had it once long time ago like before i ever heard that it was a bad thing like that they were killing sharks for it i think like in the maybe the early 90s or something like that i don't even remember where i was but i remember eating it going it's okay you had it at a chinese restaurant i think i might have had it when i was young too yeah, I think it was okay to have back then.

And then eventually I watched some documentary where I saw that they catch these sharks and just hack their fins off and throw them back in the water. I'm like, whoa. And you stopped eating it? Yeah. Well, I only ate it once. I don't even remember. I'm pretty sure I ate it. But it might have been bullshit.

You know what i mean like sometimes you go to a chinese restaurant and like uh my friend ed told me that at some chinese restaurants they would say it was scallops but it was really skate wing so they would take like and they would punch holes in a like a stingray wing and sell that as scallops like i don't know but whatever um that was that's a thing where for whatever reason it's prized but it's not that good like there's weird things like lobster like if lobster somehow or another was like some thing where you really shouldn't eat it because it's terrible for the environment it's destroying lives and there's only four lobsters left, and look, I got lobster for dinner. It was like, ooh. And he sat around and ate it and put fucking tinfoil over the window

so nobody could see in. That would make kind of sense. Like, god damn, lobster is delicious. Lobster with melted butter is pretty tough to beat. It's pretty good. It makes at least a little bit of sense. But from what I understand, like these things, whether it's a tiger wine or you know rhino dick or whatever you're eating it's not good stuff there's a dish in portugal that i love

and that has been banned that i used to eat as a kid it's the baby eels have you ever tried it no it's the best so you know it's been banned it's been banned meanwhile you can get heroin there without going to prison. But I used to eat it a lot. And yeah, we call them angulas in Portugal. It's also a dish apparently in Spain, but they make it better in Portugal. And it's full of olive oil and garlic, which is all you need to make something taste really good. And it's these tiny little worms, essentially. They're mini baby eels.

And I guess it's bad for the environment, so they stopped eating them. You stopped. But that's the kind of thing that i understand again like the lobster filled with butter where you understand why you'd pay the amounts of money because it is really good yeah things that are delicious make sense yeah yeah but like fish bladder or tiger soaked in uh for years and years but it's weird stuff that's exclusive is weird you know it's it's like there's a desire to be one of the few people that can eat this thing. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just, it appeals to a weird aspect of human nature. Yeah. I mean, you can play that to cars as well. And it's all the stuff that I don't. In doing this show, your show is all about trafficking things. What was the most disturbing? Was there a most disturbing episode for you?

There were a bunch of situations in each episode. I think we did one, actually. You know, I've covered the gun sort of trade and illegal guns here in America, but I had never, and I've always wanted to do a show about where I explore the pipeline of guns going down south from the U.S. to Mexico and how it's contributing to the violence there. And we were given incredible access. The films essentially

started with a car of a woman being loaded with AK-47s and AR-15s in LA, just a few minutes from my house, right next to the 710 freeway on the middle of a weekday night. It's insane. And we can see them packing the guns. We interview them. And these are LA people, people who live in LA and who work essentially for the cartel.

And we saw them packing this car. And then we saw that night, we followed that car across the borderel. And we saw them packing this car, and then we saw that night we followed that car across the border into Mexico. Nobody stopped them. I mean, there isn't even any border patrol when you're going south, only when you come north. And then we saw the guns being sold to the middleman and then eventually heading to Sinaloa.

And we were in Sinaloa. I don't know if you read in the news last year. There was a, when Ovidio Guzman, who was the son of El Chapo, remember he was. Oh, yeah, we saw that. And then they basically took hostage of the whole city. There was a siege of the city of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, and the cartels wouldn't let it go and were threatening the whole city with violence if the authorities wouldn't release El Chapo's son. And we were actually in Sinaloa reporting when this happened. And all around there were, again, American guns.

There was AK-47s. There were even.50 cals. There were trucks with.50 calibers coming from the U.S. And, yeah, and we filmed with, essentially we spent time with three sicarios, three gunmen from the Sinaloa cartel. All of them had and owned American guns. And since then, two of them have been killed. We spent time with three, and it's been only a year, and two of them have been killed.

And they were 20-something-year-olds. And at the end of the film, and I think, you know, we thought, okay, we've gotten to the terminus of what they call the Iron River, which is the pipeline of guns coming from the U.S. to Mexico. Called the Iron River. They do. They even have a saying for it, which is Mexico, the U.S. supplies the guns. Mexico supplies the corpses. That's what we heard, like one of the guys that we interviewed said.

And the U.S. has become the supermarket of guns for Mexico and for a lot of Latin America. I spend time reporting on the violence in Brazil, and you go to the favelas in Brazil. U.S. has become the supermarket of guns for Mexico and for a lot of Latin America. You know, I spent time reporting on the violence in Brazil. And you go to the favelas in Brazil and, you know, you look into the guns and where they came from. And it's from the U.S., the majority of them. Did you ever look into the Fast and Furious debacle? I did. During the Obama administration?

Yeah, it was a debacle. It was horrible. Explain to people what happened. It's been a long time, but I'm trying my best. What was happening is that the EATF, which is the agency responsible for tobacco and firearms, was allowing, had an operation happening where they knew guns were being sold and smuggled to Mexico, and they were allowing this to happen because they were trying to figure out, gain information from this. And what happened is that one of those guns eventually was used to kill a Border Patrol agent, I believe.

I think it was an ATF agent. Or it was an ATF, sorry. I think. It was used to kill an ATF agent. Or maybe it might have been Border. I can't remember. But either way, it was horrible. Yeah, they were heavily criticized for this, for sure.

They literally supplied guns to the cartel. Yeah, they were allowing them to go to the hands of the cartel because they say they were trying to get information from where those guns were going, which is essentially what we filmed. We saw the whole process of where they arrive, how they're shipped, what they do to avoid border blocks. How do they get the guns?

It's insane. So this blew my mind. I had no idea. So one day they told me, okay, we're going to get access to this Iron River, this operation happening. And it starts in California. I said, you're wrong. It can't start in California because we have the most restrictive gun laws.

It's not possible. It's probably, you're wrong. Not the most restrictive. Some of the most restrictive in the country. You can get a handgun in California. Good luck trying to get one in New York. I know New York has the heart. Yeah. But some of the most restrictive and especially compared to Texas and Arizona. And I thought, you know, this is probably wrong. They're telling us it's California because we get a lot of times they tell us it's one place because they don't want to spill the beans immediately before they trust us. And eventually they, and eventually it was realized that it was

happening in California. So we went to meet with this guy who lives in LA, just again, 15 minutes from my house. And there he was in this house packing the guns and he had his cousins working with him and helping him out. And he says he's been doing this. It's been the family business for years and years. He started working for the family business when he was seven years old. Yeah. And helping with the gun trade and the drug trade. He's also involved in the drug trade.

He was seven, he said. No, how old was he when you met him? Now he's in his 30s. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. And he, and I talked and I asked him, so where, you know, and this was one of them was a semi auto AR-15. It had the scope. It was super professional looking. The other one was a bit little, it was an AK-47. And then he had a couple of handguns. And I was asking, how did

you get your hands in this? And I, having done reporting on this, definitely thought it was from a gun show or, you know, getting people to go to shops and buy stores and buy guns legally and then selling them on the side. And he said in his case, he gets most of his guns from law enforcement, from LAPD or from military, down in the military bases in Southern California. Yeah. And that was really shocking. Wait a minute. So LAPD illegally sells guns. I'm not sure it's not everyone, but they have a connection. That's what he told us. He has a connection.

So they get guns, confiscate guns. That's right. And then illegally sell them to this guy who brings them down to the cartel. So the AK-47, he had, I believe it was the AK-47, he said, so this gun here, for example, this belonged to my

homey, my, you know, guy that works with me or I'm friends with. The LAPD found it, confiscated it, and then we have a connection

and they sold it back to us for $1,000. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, this is really hard

to prove and obviously it's not all of... Right, he might have been bullshitting because he hates cops. He totally could be bullshitting. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, this is really hard to prove. Right. He might have been bullshitting because he hates cops. He totally could be bullshitting. Yeah. But how does he get his hands on these guns? Right. What are the other options?

Is it only one source? I mean... So this is a guy that is done time in prison, so he can't buy them. Right. You know? But I mean, is this... Were there other sources that were bringing guns down? Did you look at other cases of different individuals? No, so we were following this one group, so this one Iron River.

How did you find out, without giving away your source, how did you find out about this? Through connections that I have in that world. And it's one of the sort of bosses that we meet later on when we arrive in sinaloa that we actually interviewed him in a strip club and uh he's the one he essentially told me it was because of me i gave you access to this whole iron river and you know one of the biggest reasons why is because americans always point as those mexicans as being responsible for everything and i wanted to show you guys americans how it's your guns that are responsible for everything. And I wanted to show you guys, Americans, how it's your guns that are responsible for the violence here. Holy shit. Yeah, it was incredible.

Now, when an episode like that airs, is that when it aired yet? No, that's the last one. And it's a two hour. It became, it was, there was so much there happening. And because we were there during the siege, and I mean, they were arming themselves for that case, for the Ovidio Guzman. If that were to happen, we went and visited a bunker loaded with, again, AK-47s, AR-15s, the lot, where they were arming themselves for something. And then the event happened as we were reporting. So it's a two-hour, and that's a really good one.

I mean, I don't know right now because resources are so strapped if there's anything that anybody could do any differently than what's being done currently. and that's a really good one. I mean, I don't know right now because resources are so strapped if there's anything that anybody can do any differently than what's being done currently, like what budgets are. But I do know that your piece on the OxyContin Express had a giant impact on legislation. Literally, people saw that

and then people saw the podcast that we did and were alerted to what a gigantic issue it is. And politicians started talking about it and constituents started talking about it and people were like, hey, what are you doing about this? Yeah. We were called by law enforcement around the country and senators in Florida trying to sort of get more knowledge of what we'd seen, what we'd witnessed, and if we could try and help in any way in changing the laws there. And eventually they did. we'd seen, what we'd witnessed, and if we could try and help in any way in changing the laws there.

And eventually they did. I would think that if I was the cartel and I relied on this Iron River, I would not want someone like you exposing it just so I could snub my nose up at the Americans, unless they're so brazen that they think no matter what happens, there's always going to be this pipeline of drugs and guns. There is always going to be a pipeline. There is so much money to be made and not just in Mexico, but here in the US, you know, with corruption and people being involved in this, there is not much encouragement there for it to stop. And I think part of it, you're right, it's impunity. I mean, this guy can do whatever he wants. You know, he has been doing whatever he wants. it's impunity. I mean, this guy can do whatever he wants. You know, he has been doing whatever he wants. They basically, with that siege, they made the Mexican government, they brought it down to its knees. And they said, if you don't release this guy, we are going to kill the families of the

military. You know, they surrounded the compound where the military families lived. And they said, if you don't release this guy, we're going to kill everyone inside. And they would have. Yeah. that was a telling moment when they released him like who is running this show oh this is not the government yeah we spoke to seen a little state police woman actually who was in tears saying you know i was there i went out i protected mexicans that day my fellow mexicans and the moment that she realized that they were going to give him up um she just broke down in tears. And she said, all of this for what? You know, I put my life on the line repeatedly for what? Yeah. Do you think that these exposes that you're doing currently,

these episodes, do you think that they have the potential to have the kind of impact that the Oxycontin Express had? I hope so. That's always the goal as a journalist. Always. You want to have some sort of impact. You know, again, I'm not law enforcement. I'm not there to stop them from doing what they do, but I'm certainly there to create awareness. Does that make your job harder, though, to know that if people find out that you can in fact put the brakes on whatever business illegal business they're running but i can't but i can by by raising awareness yeah yeah yeah oh does it stop does it make my heart job harder in terms of gaining access to these worlds i don't think the people want this.

I mean, in some situations, yes, people are making a lot of money. But I don't think that the actual, the majority of the operators, like the backpacker kids, you know, like the mule, you know, like the scammer in Jamaica that we interviewed. They, I truly believe that that's, if they could, they would lead another life. Did you go to Nigeria for Scammers? No. Do you know Jamaica has become the new front lines of Scammers? The new Nigeria? So the calls that you get on your phone are actually coming from Jamaica.

Really? It was one of my favorite episodes. Did Nigeria just make enough money? They're like, we're out? Yeah, I think we're on to Nigerians. And Jamaicans are just, they're so, have you been to Jamaica? no i have not it's i'm jamaicans i'm obsessed with them they're they have such great accents they can make they can impersonate an american in a second yeah they're really really good and so we spent time with like all these scammers and like surrounded with their bodyguards

with guns and one of them told us as we started interviewing this guy called Victor, I'm putting on his mic and he tells me, I'll only let you do this, Mariana, because you're a woman. If you were a man, you wouldn't touch me, you know. And then I go on. I said, OK, Victor, what do you do? Let's start this. What do you do? And he says, you know what I do, Mariana. I'm in the money game. You call it scamming. I call it the money game. And then he said, you know, and then we start talking more. And then he says, look, I was even thinking of robbing you and your crew. I was going to take away all your gear. I'm going to rough you up a little bit.

But you're a nice person. So I'll let you be. Whoa. And, yeah, so we ended up interviewing five or a handful of people there and sort of listening to their stories and why they do what they do. And there was Tweety, the female scammer. She's an incredible woman who tells us a story that she works at a resort in Montego Bay where full of Americans. And every day she goes to work knowing that the Americans make, spend more money in a day at the resort than she makes in a week or a month working there.

And she comes back home one day and her grandfather is very sick and needs an easy treatment, but can't get it because she doesn't have she can't afford it because health care is very expensive in Jamaica and she realized the only way she can get she can save her grandfather is by turning to scamming and she starts calling Americans there are these lead lists that actually sell for a lot of money a lot of them are coming from call centers because Jamaica has become sort of a center for call centers because it's cheaper labor they They speak English fluently. So they do call centers for legitimate businesses? For legitimate businesses. And then they, on the side, they sell. They get their hands on these lead lists, which is names of Americans. I got my hands on some of

these lead lists. So they get the, say like Dell computer. I don't know. Yes. Whatever it is. Whatever company has an issue with customer complaints or customer service, they call them. They answer the phone. So they even get lists that come from Vegas casinos of clients, people that go to Vegas casinos. And so somehow these cameras also have their hands on these lists with names from hotels. So I had, it was a stack, I don't know, 50 pages or something of name after name with phone numbers. So they call and they say, hi, Mr. Smith.

And they do the whole thing. And it's fascinating. We saw them doing it. And they say something like, okay, so hi, Joe. How are you doing today? Hi, Mr. Rogan. How are you doing today? You say.

Fine, thank you. Did you go to Whole Foods today or last week? Yeah, I did. I knew you did because, sir, you just won the lottery. Wow, I did? You did. It's a big prize. It's a Mercedes-Benz and it's waiting for you, sir.

Wow, what do I have to do? Well, you just have to pay the transportation fee and it's about $500. That's it? That's it, sir. $500 for a free Mercedes. How do I pay this? Yeah, exactly. Should I use my credit card?

Yeah, so you can use your credit card. You can buy a little credit card, you know, one of those prepaid ones, and then you do it. And then they actually send you, in some cases, the key to the Mercedes-Benz. Oh, that's hilarious. That's insane, right? So you are at home, and you get the key, and they call you, Sir, have you received your key to your new brand new mercedes-benz and you say yeah i have oh so then you're more than willing now

you just have to pay tax and it's only five thousand dollars and you go and you go and you go because you got your key yeah so they get you for 500 and then they get you for 5 000 once you get the key yeah and then it's really sad because we also, you know, show the other side, which is Americans, even some committing suicide because they've lost all their savings. It's very sad. There was a show on scammers once that was really sad because there was this man, he was in his 60s,

and he was convinced there was this woman in Europe that he was having a correspondence with, and it was really a scammer and it wasn't a woman went over there twice yeah he never talked on the phone just exchanged emails and photographs and never talked on the phone but they made a plan to meet somewhere twice so twice this guy went over to europe and his family his daughter in particular was trying to tell him and you could see he felt like such a fool but he was still holding out hope because he really was convinced but then here he was in europe and nothing was happening and he's like where is she like i told her we're here this is oh such a bummer the real man scam i think that's called it's a bummer. It's like the real man scam, I think that's called. It's a bummer, right?

But it's also, it's like... Don't say it. Don't say it. It's the law of the jungle. Oh, okay. I thought you were going to say that it's... Because I heard this a lot. What?

That people are stupid who fall for this. But it's not. Like I've... No, no. It's not stupid. It's not that they're stupid. They're vulnerable. Yeah.

You know? And it's weird when you have vulnerabilities and then you have people that take advantage of those vulnerabilities that are also vulnerable, like financially vulnerable. And they have a lot of incentive to try to do things. And it turns out to be profitable. And then it turns out to be their business. And you go, well, that's awful.

That's terrible. But is it terrible to buy an iPhone? Because when you buy, well, that's awful. That's terrible. But is it terrible to buy an iPhone? Because when you buy an iPhone, an iPhone, if you follow, you know, I talked about this the other day with Matthew Iglesias. If you follow an iPhone all the way down to where the metal comes out of the ground, you find slave labor. I know. Like, this is a fact when you go to foxconn you see the people that work for the the company that actually constructs these phones there's fucking nets around the building because so many people jump off the top of the roof they just put

nets up to catch them this is is that okay no that's okay well you're taking it so we're all somehow or another a part of this weird food chain. And the food chain takes advantage of vulnerable people. If you call me up and say, you know, all you have to do is give me 500 bucks and, you know, I'll give you your key to your Mercedes that you just won. I'd be like, oh, for real? Yeah, hang on. And I'll just put the phone down and I'll go watch TV and I'll leave. Fuck you, man.

Or I'll hang up on you because I'm not dumb. I know, but okay, but wait. So there was a good friend of mine in LA who recently got one of these phone calls. It wasn't a Mercedes Benz. They said it was LA or it was the power company. I don't know if they actually knew it was LADWP, but they said it's the power company and you're late in payments and he was going through something and he believed you know, he might have, and he believed it. And they said, you're very late in payments. And if you don't pay $500 right now in the late fees,

we're going to cut the electricity at your house. And he was in the middle of doing a million things as kids, you know, his job, everything and decided, okay, what do I need to do? Give me,

I'll pay for it easily. Like, and then, yeah, it was a scam. So yeah. How much did they get them for? I think it was like 300,

400, $500, something like that. It wasn't thousands, but it was definitely. Well, he might have been distracted. You know, his zygmunt should have zagged. Yeah, I know. Zygmunt, I love that.

This is the food chain. This is the ecosystem. It's weird. I mean, it's not like we were talking about the people that live in Peru that grow the coca leaves. This is not fair. Nothing is fair. It's not fair to be them. And if they can make a phone call and trick some gringo into sending some cash,

like, I don't know. There's a sucker born every minute. It's not just that there's a sucker born every minute. It's not fair that you get to be born in Philadelphia where this person is born in Peru. It's not fair. I'm not saying that you did something bad to be born in a nice place. Yeah, I know.

But it's not fair. I think what many would argue that actually Peru is nicer than Philadelphia. Well, in many ways. It's gorgeous, right? No, it's true. It is funny, right? It's true. Like financially, you're better off living in New York City.

But as far as like natural beauty. Happiness and beauty and yeah we don't know that was one of the things that was really strange was when um and and made me nervous was when the uh people in the town found out that you guys were there when you were with the guy that was making the coke and you had to get the fuck out of there immediately what was that like it helped that I had Dirt Smith Garrett Smith the, the bear rider with me. It was crazy. So just the whole day was insane. We finally get access.

We get on the road. This chemist jumps into the car with us. We're going out there. And then we get there, and it's completely night. Middle of the night. There's not even a moon that day. So it was dark, dark, dark. And, you know, we're Nat Geo.

So we come geared with all these flashlights and headlamps, and we're ready for everything that can happen. But we get there, and the guy tells us, okay, no lights allowed because if the population, if the people around the village see you, they're going to be pissed, and they're going to come after you. Because the people need the money from the coke business. Yes. And they would have had to, you know, given the okay, although this guy said it was his cocaine lab and he wanted to give us access. And so we just had to be discreet. But there was no way that you could get the green light from the entire village. They would never agree to it.

No. And also he doesn't want the entire village to know that he's running his cocaine lab there. Right. So although they know that the whole economy is sustained on coca leaves and illegal cocaine, that know they don't want they don't know exactly where i wouldn't say that the whole population knows exactly where the drug labs are that's hidden and secretive so he was gaining his access he didn't want the population the people around it to know and he also thought that if they were going to know they were going to want

to come after us not just us but him as well and try to harm us. Was that the most danger that you had been in while filming this series? No. There were other moments when we were filming with the sicarios, the gunmen in Sinaloa, for example, and they told us that while we're with them, we're protected, but if the Marines show up, that there's nothing they can do. The Marines will start firing at us, and we are going to be stuck in the middle. And two hours into filming with the Sicario's, their walkie talkies start buzzing and we know something's

off and they turn to us and you could see they're panicked. And there's a Marine helicopter coming our way. And there's this really uncomfortable situation where we're like stuck. They start going out with their cars. We go where our car is out in the open and we see the helicopter and do we follow them and then they're going to think that we're with them and if they start shooting at the car they're going to start shooting at us too or do we pretend that uh or we stay here and hide and look even more suspicious so it was a really nasty moment no by marines the mexican marines yeah the mexican marines which are feared feared in Mexico, very feared. But see, from the perspective of someone here, you think that everyone's on the take down there.

The Mexican Marines were the ones that went after El Chapo and caught El Chapo. They're considered the cleanest of the authorities down there. But it's one of those things. In America, we think that no one is above the influence of the authorities. The cleanest. Down there. You know, but it's one of those things, like in America, we think that no one is above the influence of the cartels. And that's the... In Mexico. The narrative.

Yeah. Yeah, and did you hear the story recently? Was it the minister, the defense secretary, I believe, in Mexico who was caught at LAX and charged with being involved in the drug trade? Yeah. And then sent back to Mexico.

Back to the deals. I'm not sure what happened. Oh, they sent him oh yeah so they caught him charged here yeah and then they're like oh sorry go ahead take them yeah some sort of conversation happened behind closed doors between the trump administration and the mexican and they let him go oh fucking trump yeah wow What a crazy scene. Yeah. When filming a show like this and then and then releasing it, do does it give you a sense of satisfaction of completion? Do you feel connected to these each individual stories? Like what is it like to make such an it seems so intense? Absolutely. They're all you know, we put so, you have an idea how much work goes into every single one of these pieces.

You know, it's months and months of preparation and then it's months of editing. And it's, you know, it's been two years in the making, two years to this day, more or less, when we started working on this series and it finally was released. And yeah, I mean, every single second that you see in the film is thought out and heavily studied and researched to make sure that we're getting everything right and that we're making good television at the same time and that it's compelling.

Well, you nailed it. You really did. I mean, it's so compelling. It's so good. I mean, you're out there doing fantastic work. I really, really appreciate it. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your work.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for coming on again. It was cool to see you after all these years. It's been wild. But all right, good luck with the show. And tell people again what the name is, when they can see it. For sure. So it's Trafficked, 9 p.m. Wednesdays on National Geographic.

And then you can catch me on the Trafficked podcast as well. We'll be competition for Geronimo's podcast. Yes. There it is. Trafficked. And social media, I know you're on Twitter

because that's how I got a hold of you. That's right. Mariana VZ on Twitter and on Instagram which Instagram is my preferred method of social media-ing.

Me too. All right. Thank you, Mariana. I really, really appreciate it. Bye, everybody.