The Joe Rogan Experience - #372 - Mariana van Zeller

Episode Date: July 8, 2013

Mariana van Zeller is a Portuguese journalist and is currently a TV correspondent for the National Geographic Channel. Mariana is also known for the Peabody award winning documentary "The Oxycontin Express" made for the Vanguard series on Current TV.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Yeehaw! Alright. So, with me today are Darren Foster and Mariana Von Zeller, and I first found out about Mariana from the show on Vanguard, the Oxycontin Express pain management centers and how it's set up in Florida was true. And the statistics on how many people are addicted to OxyContin, how many prescriptions are being given out for OxyContin in Florida is just absolutely bananas.

bananas and i watched it and i said this is so far beyond out of control that it's amazing that i'm just hearing about it now from a documentary on current tv which is like you know not the most widely viewed channel i mean i felt like this should be on every channel on the front page of every newspaper there's a hijacking going on down there. They've hijacked the legal system somehow or another, and absolutely willfully put these things into position in order to extract money and do it at the expense of all these people being addicted. I mean, how did you find out about this? And how did you go about doing that piece? It's interesting you say that. I mean, it was exactly the same for us, the same surprise that we got when we started looking into this story. We found a little news clipping on one newspaper about some deaths in Florida because of prescription drugs.

And there were more pain clinics around than McDonald's. And we thought, wow, this is really interesting. We should investigate this. And we started looking into it. And then we found out that there were seven people every day dying from prescription pill abuse, that all over the US, there are more people dying from prescription pill overdose and heroin, cocaine and ecstasy combined, that just last year, it surpassed car accidents to become the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States. So this was a story that we could just kind of turn our heads away from. My God, when when I watched it, I went to work. And I told all these people about it. I was like,

you got to see this. This is crazy. And they they didn't believe me. Like when I was saying I go, do you know in Florida, you can go to a doctor and get a prescription and then they don't have a database. You can go to another doctor across the street and get a new prescription and just ping pong your way back and forth down a highway. And they're everywhere. You know, the most insane thing was that we spoke to local journalists who had sort of covered this story a little bit. And they told us, look, you'll go by pain clinics here and you'll see lines of people and out of state cars parked outside and literally lines of people. I mean, very long lines around the corner of

people waiting to get into these pain clinics to get these prescription drugs. And we thought, okay, this is the kind of thing that you hear about, we'll never be able to film or witness ourselves. And then it was easy. I mean, as soon as we left the airport, went straight to this one street that we knew had a lot of pain clinics. And there it was, the parking lots full of out-of-state plates. I mean, people driving all the way from Kentucky, Ohio, as far off as Massachusetts down to Florida to buy their pills. And they pack their cars with people, and then they bring them back and sell them for five, ten times the price that they buy them in Florida. So it's a racket. It's so hard to believe.

When I watched your show, it was so hard to wrap my head around the fact that there was one area that was so completely out of control. Because where I grew up on the East Coast or here in California, I've never seen anything like that. And I never had any inkling that this was something that had to be dealt with somewhere. So watching that was a wow, you really freaked me out. When we tried to film one of the lines, we knew there was this one pain clinic that a lot of people liked going to because it was super easy to get drugs. Basically, you just go in and out and get whatever you wanted. And we started filming outside, and we set our tripod, and we were across the street on the other side of this sort of, it wasn't a freeway. It was sort of a big street.

And as soon as we started filming, these guys come out and they start chasing us. And they asked us what we were doing and we said we were just filming out here. Big guys. Big guys. I mean big, big guys. And they started chasing us and we ran out of gas because every time we tried to stop and get gas in our car, we were running low. They would get out of the car and it was just me, Darren and our other producer, Sarissa. And I was freaked out. The night before I'd been watching The Sopranos and I really felt like I was a part of The Sopranos. I felt, oh my God. We've been, we traveled all around the world, been to war zones and

we're going to be killed right here in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because we were filming a pain clinic. It was really... But those guys, those guys were actually later indicted. They were busted by the DEA. They were later indicted, but in the indictment they found that they had made like $40 million in two years off these pain clinics. And they're in jail for like 17 years now because I think one

of them was even convicted of hiring someone to take out somebody else. Yeah, a gun for hire. Yeah, I mean, these were dangerous people. These were not people that you want to be. Yeah, gun for hire. Yeah, I mean, these were dangerous people. These were not people that you want to be. Yeah, so not good people always getting in behind these rackets. So when you ran out of gas, what happened? So we ran out of gas, and we had just interviewed some law enforcement there,

and he was calling 911. I was calling the contact that we had for law enforcement there and saying, please help us. We don't know what to do. And in the meantime, the 911, I mean, we were about five minutes later. We were on 995, and so, like, Highway Patrol just saw that we were pulled over anyway, and they came and then. But we stopped, and then the other guys stopped behind us,

and they didn't come out of the car because I think they realized that we were calling 911, but they just stayed there, and it was just to intimidate us. So they stayed there, and then they made the story up to the police that we had been stalking them that they had an ex-girlfriend that was stalking them so they thought that we were stalking the ex-girlfriend or something like that um but it's she wants it bro she's filming because she wants me i mean you do have stalker tendencies coming from my husband wow so um the non-database thing that has to be a criminal thing i mean that there's no way that could in this day and age there's no way that could be by accident right

yeah you know they they did pass a um a drug control plan there there now that um is in place what does that mean it means that now doctors they have a database and plan in place. What does that mean? It means that now doctors, they have a database in place, basically, that they are supposed to check to see if a customer is coming or a client is coming to get more drugs. Right. So that you can't go what's called doctor shopping from pain clinic to pain clinic

or pharmacy to pharmacy to get all these meds. However, it's not mandatory. But, I mean, it's far better right now in Florida than it was back when we went. How is's not mandatory. But, I mean, it's far better right now in Florida than it was back when we went. How is it not mandatory? I mean, it all has to do with these privacy laws. They don't want your medical records to be accessible to the government, basically. And so people that are very, I guess, worried about our privacy, which maybe we think about differently now with the whole NSA scandal.

But I mean, people are definitely – that's the resistance to doing the prescription monitoring programs in a lot of places. But most states have them these days. Florida was one of the biggest states that didn't have one for a long time. But now with obviously so many people dying of this and this sort of bad reputation the state was getting, they decided to do some things. Crack down a little bit, but it's still happening. And two years after we did the OxyContin Express, we actually were filming a story about heroin abuse in Massachusetts and how because of the OxyContin epidemic, a lot of kids then went on to do heroin for whatever

reason, because Oxy was getting more expensive or it was harder to get their hands on Oxy. So then they started shooting up heroin because the effects are sort of the same on the body except it's a street drug. So in many ways, it's extremely dangerous as well. And so we actually went to a guy's house who was selling heroin and he said, dude, I'm selling heroin, but what I really like to sell is pills.

And we go down, me and my friends all go down to Florida and get a bunch of these, and we make much more money. Our profit margin is much higher by selling pills than it is selling heroin. So we much prefer to do that. Wow. Yeah. That's hilarious. I know. It's pretty.

2013, it's really shocking to me that that hasn't been addressed and that you're not seeing people talk about that in the mainstream media. Like the president never fields questions on the prescription pill problem in this country and why is this happening? And have you investigated what factors are involved here? Are there dirty doctors? Are they in cahoots with the pharmacy companies? How is it possible that there's... They did a thing on Montana recently, in the Montana, the Billings Daily Gazette or something like that, one of the Billings Daily newspapers, where they said that out of 1 million people in Montana, 240,000 new prescriptions had been written.

Whoa. Yeah. That. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the things that definitely drew us to that story and to the follow up stories that we've done subsequently is the fact that, you know, we spend billions of dollars every year fighting a war on drugs, trying to prevent drugs coming into this country. But meanwhile, you know, the drugs that are being made in this country that are causing the biggest problems in terms of life loss and stuff like that. The war on drugs is like playing cowboys and Indians and pretending you're doing genocide.

I mean it's the worst job ever of controlling drugs that anybody has ever done ever. When you stop and think about how much resources to results, it's so damn stupid. It's like all you're doing is arresting pot dealers. Why don't you just call it the war on people who probably won't shoot you and you can make arrests? You can make them count. You know, how many people are they arresting that are involved in these pill clinics? How many people are they arresting that are involved in the pharmaceutical companies so

obviously bribing local lawmakers to make these laws? I mean, that is one of the creepiest state laws I've ever heard in my life. But it's not surprising that it's coming from Florida. Like, if you wanted to have a crazy place where you would think that would go, you'd go, yeah. I always say that Florida is like the South's Mexico. You know, like, we always look at Mexico like, oh, those, God, Mexico. Like, you think about all the crime that goes on there

and all the craziness goes on there and all the craziness and the shenanigans we always look at like florida is like the south is that part of this country and the florida is like that to the south like they're like jesus christ florida yeah whenever we're stuck for a story we're always like what's going on in florida it wasn't for florida nancy grace would have nothing to talk about it's a a crazy, crazy place. Now, when you guys aired this and you put this, was there any resistance? Did people give you a hard time about this? No. Actually, it's been incredible.

In the past, I mean, this aired three years ago already, and I still get weekly, I get emails or Facebook messages or people reaching out because they've watched this and somehow they've been affected by drugs, by prescription drugs. Their son has died. Their husband is addicted. And they reach out because this documentary has made an impact on them and they want to let us know, which is fantastic. As a journalist, that's the best kind of gift you can get. Yeah, that's beautiful. No, you guys did an amazing job.

Like I said, you completely enlightened me on the subject. I had literally no idea before I saw your show that this was even an issue. I had thought about, you know, people need pills, like they get hurt. And then I remember reading the Rush Limbaugh thing, and I would be like, that crazy bastard, like what the fuck is he doing? He's taking like 99 a day or something nutty like that, wasn't he? Do you know the number? I don't know the number.

No. But I know some people that we've interviewed have gotten quite tolerant to the pills and they could take a huge number, like a surprisingly huge number. And he was going with his housekeeper. He was having his housekeeper go around and collect them for him. And then apparently that's how he got popped. The whole thing was just, I was like, well, this is just this crazy fat guy. Of course he's got a skeleton or two in his closet. The guy's an asshole.

You know, like he's so judgmental and evil and the way he goes after, you know, these, the liberals and the Democrats. I was like, of course that guy's fucking crazy. Of course he's on pills. And then when you hear that he did so much that he lost his hearing like somebody had to describe it to me in medical terms he did so much oxycontin that he blew out his hearing wow i mean i don't know if you remember but todd the main guy in our in our in our documentary the oxycontin express he was this kid he was 28 at the time but he started doing oxys 10 years before he lost lost his brother to OxyContin.

He lost his wife to pills. And you could see, I mean, and recently he died last year as well from drug overdose. And, you know, you could tell just by talking to him that his mind was just not there. And his mom was constantly telling us, like, he couldn't remember things. He was totally fried, and it was all because of pills, the remember things he he was totally fried and it was all because of pills the amount of pills he was doing and he was taking an insane amount i remember him telling us what was it like do you remember the grams 10 to 15 80 milligrams of that which is yeah i remember we consulted a doctor afterwards and told him how much this guy was taking and he

couldn't believe it he said that you know obviously if any of us decided to take that amount today we would die in a second because we just don't have that tolerance. Yeah, I have one of my – well, I had one of my best friends died from it. That and actual heroin and a bunch of other things he was doing. But it was just – I've seen people caught in the grips of physical addiction, and it's a terrifying, terrifying thing. I've never experienced it myself um i the only thing that i've that i've ever taken that's really addictive is coffee and um i guess alcohol to certain people but although it's never been to me um but i've always

been terrified of the actual addictive properties of something becoming a part of your system not an impulsive addiction like gambling which i'm scared scared of that stuff too because I'm a very impulsive person. But the terrifying notion of seeing it get into your bones, which is what these pills do, and it's so just evil. It's almost like vampires in a pill form. It just slowly sucks your life away and forces you to take it. You know, I'm from Europe, from Portugal. And in Europe, it's only prescribed to critically ill cancer patients. So it was so surprising to me to see how easily they're prescribed here. And yeah, it's because, well, it's because of money. I mean, it has to be. I got my nose fixed.

I had a deviated septum. And my doctor gave me a prescription after it was over of two different types of painkillers. And I told him, I go, it doesn't even hurt. Because it really didn't hurt. Like everybody had told me it was like incredibly painful. And oh my God, you're barely going to be able to deal with it. I got out of there. I was like, this is it? I was like, I feel like I have a stuffed nose.

Like it doesn't hurt at all. And it was because my nose had been packed with these things. But he was like, you need pain pills. And I'm like, listen, man, I just got done telling you that I'm not even in pain. What did he give you? He gave me Vicodins and I think it was Percocets. I didn't take it, though. But I just threw the prescriptions away.

I'm scared of that shit. I have a buddy who had a problem with drugs. And then he had back surgery. And then after he had back surgery, they put him on the pills to give to to give him they're like look you need prescription medication they didn't even take into consideration the fact that he used to be a junkie and so immediately has a problem again you know it's all shady and weird now yeah i mean unfortunately that's the way it starts with so many people is that they're an injury and that's why you see like in a lot of places where the where the problem is is that it's around places that have like a lot of workplace injuries like Appalachia where people work the mines and stuff like that.

Can you get like closer? Yeah, sorry. Sorry, man. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a lot of times where you see these clusters of people who have become addicted. Yeah. And so unfortunately it's like that is where you're finding these lower income people or middle class people who work factory jobs have to move things manual labor type jobs and it just seems like they have no hope like once they get caught up in that it's so hard to get out from under the grip of that

monster and they don't have they can't afford to take a month off and go to malibu to some clinic where they're going to feed them green tea and rub their feet. You know, like people are, they get, they're doomed. Like you can get stuck and the amount of willpower required to pull yourself out of that mud is insane. It is. I mean, we spoke to so many people who were getting better and they, we really, I mean, they really, they had this conviction that they were, this was it. They were talking to us as, as ex-drug addicts and they were never going to take pills again. And I would say that 99 percent of those went back to drugs.

Did you know – this is a statistic that somebody put on my message board, a dude named Evil Homer. Thanks, Evil Homer. were agreed to pay $5.5 billion to resolve the U.S. Department of Justice allegations of fraudulent marketing practices, including the promotion of medications for uses that they were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Insane. I mean, if you go back and look at the numbers that they've been paying, like Pfizer in 2009 was fined $2.3 billion, and there's so many of them. There's GlaxoSmithKline 3 billion and it's not that

pharmaceutical drugs haven't done great things there's amazing applications for pharmaceutical drugs that have changed people's lives for the better yeah it's just so unfortunate that it's a it's the bottom line over morality over humanity The bottom line being ones and zeros, collect as many as you can above humanity. And it's not necessary. It's like there's plenty of valid applications for drugs. But if you want to control the entire world and you want to be like the king of the planet and have all the gold, like the best way to do it is to be like, fuck people. Just treat them as little vampire sucklings and take as much blood as you can while keeping them alive for as long as you can until they eventually run out of money or blood and then move on to the next one.

We spoke to a doctor. He was a rehab doctor, and he told us something really interesting. I think it was the end of the 90s that the medical community got together and they decided that the best thing to do to treat pain was to really go at it aggressively and have the lowest possible tolerance to pain. So if there was any chance that the patient would feel any sort of pain, just treat it aggressively by giving them a lot of drugs. And he says there was a total shift in the end of the 90s, wasn't it, Darren? The end of the 90s, I believe it was. And that's when pain pills started being dispensed much more liberally. And I think at the time, they didn't really realize what this, you know, the addictive

side of this and what this could do. How is that possible, though? How's it possible that they could have not known? I don't buy that. Everyone's known that from the time I was a kid, I knew that people had problems with quaaludes. You would hear about that all the time. I didn't even know what a quaalude was. But I remember people always on lewds. The guy's got a problem with lewds. So, of course, they knew.

They're full of shit. They must have bowed down to pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. There must have been someone who cut a deal and said, listen, if you guys just prescribe a little more, do you know how much money we can all make? And we'll give you a little bit of this, a little bit of that. People say, well, that doesn't happen. Well, here's one thing that definitely does happen. My wife, her mom is a nurse and her mom was working at this clinic and she would tell us about the drug reps and all the things that drug reps would do for the company. They take the whole company out to dinner, to a really nice restaurant.

Like, you know, nurses are on very reasonable salaries. They can't afford, like, a really expensive restaurant or really a fine restaurant. They would take everybody out, buy them all the drinks, order anything on the menu, lobster and steak and this and that. And they did it on a regular basis. They gave them trips and all sorts of other things. And they made everybody like really eager to prescribe these drugs, keep the drug reps around, keep the vacations coming in, you know, keep the lobster dinners coming. It's amazing.

It is insane. It's amazing. And it's amazing that it takes someone like you guys to expose this. Like, where's CNN? Where are these so-called investigative journalists that are supposed to be looking out for us? Where are the people that uncovered Watergate? Where are the people that are really looking out for America? Like, what the fuck happened? What happened to journalism in this country?

Well, I mean, like, for us, I mean, great local reporting is what drew us to this story. So there are great reporters, but for some reason, yeah, some... Local guys, yes, people on the scene. Yeah, people on the scene. And that's where we got the lead to this story. And so, yeah, why it doesn't get better national attention is definitely a question that we should all be asking. Well, it's like when you hear that the CIA gives gigantic news corporations like Fox and CNBC – it gives them talking points.

They follow these talking points. And then you hear that these stories are going on and no one's reporting it. Meanwhile, they'll pay attention to Kim Kardashian's baby will be the lead on CNN. Kim Kardashian! Blah, blah, blah.

And they make it seem like that. Meanwhile, Florida is the fucking apocalypse. There's spots of Florida that like, if it was just a zombie factory and then people went in and came out as zombies, you'd be like, well, we have to stop this. They're becoming zombies. But they are fucking becoming zombies. They're becoming functional zombies who can sort of walk around and live amongst you as long as they keep getting their zombie medicine. Yeah.

who can sort of walk around and live amongst you as long as they keep getting their zombie medicine. Yeah. We had that great sheriff in our doc say that, you know, talk about these doctors and how they were – what was it that he said? They were drug dealers with degrees. Yeah, they really are. Which is such a great way of putting it. And they are. I mean, they know what they're doing.

The other thing you exposed when you showed these pain management centers is that some of them are actually connected to pharmacies. Yeah. show these pain management centers is that some of them are actually connected to pharmacies. First of all, folks, if you haven't seen the documentary, you must. Where can they watch it? Is it online? It's online. Where do they get it? You can actually go to muck.tv, which is muck.tv. M-U-C-K?

M-U-C-K.tv. It's our production company. Oh, great. And we have all our work there, and the OxyContin Express is featured there as well. Beautiful. It's a must-see. It's so enlightening. But the pain management centers, you go there and you say, hey man, my back hurts. And they go, well, you definitely need some Oxycontin and just go three feet down the hall and open up that next door and that's the prescription place.

And you go in there and the pharmacy hooks you up. it's like one stop shopping for drugs and it's legal cash only cash only cash only no insurance not accepted cash only and so that's what happened to us we went we went undercover we put it we got an undercover camera and went into one of these and it was i think the first pain clinic we went into and i just asked the receptionist so i have a back pain what can i get and she said oh well they'll be able to prescribe you Oxycontin. And she listed the long list of drugs. And you just need to go get an MRI. And basically what this is, is that an MRI can show anything and you can point to something and say that that's what's hurting you. And the doctors just need to see something that they can then say, look, I looked at the MRI and it looked like she had, that it was legitimate back pain. And that's all they need. And so we went out the door to get this MRI and we stopped and started talking to these guys that had come down from West Virginia and Kentucky. And they were telling us, you know, we traveled down there here because it's just so easy to get these drugs.

And we just say we have a back pain, but of course we don't have anything. We just want to take a lot of these drugs back home with us. When people are listening to this and saying, well, how easy? Ready for this? Doctors in Florida prescribe 10 times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined. Yeah, red flags all around. But if you smoke pot

in Florida, they'll put you in a cage, son. They will lock you up in a box, throw away the key. What are you, a damn hippie? Trying to ruin your life. You've got problems? Go to the pain management clinic. Get a nice American cocktail

of opiates. Have you guys ever seen the documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia? Yes. Beautiful and sad at the same time and hilarious. Look, if you can't do anything about it and you just accept that going in, you have to. You can't look at it and say,

oh, that poor child growing up, because then you'll get all sad. But if you can treat it as a comedy and pretend they're not real and treat it as like if you're watching a Coen Brothers movie, a big part of that documentary is pills. Huge part of what those people are and that culture of wild, hillbilly, white trash, crazy people is about pill addiction. We spoke to some people in jail some women

in jail that were in jail because of pill trafficking from Florida and they call themselves pillbillies that's yes they are pillbillies what a great name yeah well that's what the hillbilly hillbilly heroin heroin yeah it's uh it's really confusing and to have it all exposed in one piece like yours and just all of a sudden be like what's like that's out there it's was a real paradigm shifting uh moment for me and it was the thing that really got me paying attention to pills in general and then i started reading all these other bizarre stories like i don't know if you ever heard about the man who was awarded the equivalent of $600,000 American dollars because he was on a Parkinson's drug called Requip. This is by GlaxoSmithKline.

They had this Parkinson's drug, and it turned him into a gambling and gay sex addict. He was a straight man man and he took this pill and it was Parkinson's drug, so apparently it has some psychoactive properties. That's something to the way the mind works. And all he wanted to do was have gay sex and gamble. That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

Brilliant. I've never heard that. So he got $600,000 because of this? Yes. So it's not like just an accusation. It's an accusation backed up by at least some science. I mean, I don't know what they used to show that there's some sort of a chemical correlation between his activities and this drug. But they pulled the drug off the market.

The drug doesn't exist anymore. So he got his $600,000 and stopped doing gay sex and gambling. He got off the Parkinson's medication and became a straight man again without a gambling problem. But with $600,000 in his pocket. And a lot of bad memories. A lot of horrible, horrible gay sex gambling memories. He thought OxyContin was bad.

Yeah, it is weird. But it's just, how did, I mean, there's so many drugs, like the late night things. You know those commercials you see for those shady legal guys, 2 o'clock in the morning, like, did you take Fen-Phen in the 80s? Call this number and we'll get you the money that you deserve. You'll get millions of dollars, yeah. It's just shocking how easy it is for these things to get prescribed or for these things to get approved. How much testing is involved?

Do you guys ever find out as far as how much testing is involved? Did you guys ever find out as far as how much testing is involved in making something legal? So the interesting thing is that when all these pain pills started being produced, such as Oxycontin, they were really easy to manipulate so that you can use them. They have this time release so that when you take a pill, they will have an effect on your body but over time. And that was really easy to manipulate so that you would take it and it would immediately have all the effect at once, which is what an addict ultimately wants.

So then they were heavily criticized for that. So then they came up with a pill that wasn't so easy to manipulate. But then, you know then that was easy. They found a way around that too. Addicts found a way around that too. And you just go online and you search how to manipulate the new oxys. And you put them – there are ways – I remember addicts telling us that you just put them in a microwave and do all this certain kind of things. And I'm not going to say here because I'm not trying to get people to do it.

But there are ways to manipulate everything. So even when they try to play it safe, you know, there's always a way around it for an addict. Why are they smoking them? Yeah, it's just, I mean, it's the quickest way to get it into your body, to ingest it. You get it all at once, you know, it's just same as snorting it, crushing it, snorting it, you just get it all at once. Like Marinetta just same as snorting and crushing and snorting and you just get it all at once like marionette was saying it was initially made as a time release formula so that it would sort of dull out over eight hours or 12 hours something like that but if you crush it and you snorted you get all the active ingredient once all the oxycodone at once and

thank you darren you're much better at explaining that i was having a hard time as soon as what people like free basebased cocaine, right? Or smoke crack and stuff like that. It's really kind of a brave new world type thing, isn't it? It really is sort of a horrific version of the future thing, these numbers. Like especially the Florida number of 10 times the number of prescriptions for oxycodone than the entire country combined. I thought before I read it, like I saw, I bet Florida is certainly number one,

but probably only about like 50% or something like that. That was my silly little idea. 10 times. I think there's also a number that there are 100 doctors that most prescribe oxycodone in America. 99 of them are in Florida or something like that, which is awesome. Ooh, powerful Florida. What's that?

Yeah, back then. Back then. It's changed somewhat now. You know, I'm torn on these things because part of me is I'm a huge fan of personal freedom. I'm a huge fan of civil liberties. And I think if you want to be an idiot and ruin your life, you should be able to be an idiot and ruin your life. And there's a lot of things that would ruin some people's life that I enjoy, like whiskey. I like whiskey.

I like having a couple shots. But I'm not a drug addict and I'm not an alcoholic. So I can have a couple shots of whiskey and stop. And that's it. I don't need them every day. And I can do it once a year if I really wanted to. And that's it. I don't need them every day. And I, you know, I can do it once a year about the cambo frog uh we did we did it was a drug that does all this sort of things to your bloodstream and it's supposed to be really good for you but um it's it's crazy it's the skin of

a frog that gets dried and then you puncture a little um hole in your body and you put the skin there uh the skin of the frog the secretion of frog, and then it gives you sort of a burst of energy. You feel your blood coming up and down all over your brain. It seems like your brain is about to explode. And it has a lot of pharmaceutical promise, this particular frog secretion. What's the frog called? It's called the Kambo frog. How do you spell that?

K-A-M-B-O. K-A-M-B-O. And it's a beautiful frog. It is actually beautiful. It's a giant, really green frog. And yeah, it secretes this chemical. And it's, you know, like frogs are like sort of slimy. That slime they take and they dry it out.

And then they, yeah, they do like a crude injection of like burning you. So it's the native tribes down there. They use it as sort of like a cleansing ritual. But it doesn't, it's not hallucinogenic or anything like that. It just, but what attracts like medicine to it is that it breaks the blood brain barrier. So it's like, I don't know what that exactly means, but it's very attractive to science, but they haven't figured out how they're going to use it yet. They think it's going to be good for heart disease, treat heart disease. Wow.

And so that was, we definitely immersed ourselves in that one. But it's not addictive. I don't think. But it's not addictive. It's another sign of how crazy human beings are

that this one spot in the world, like Brazil, the rainforest, where there's so much promise as far as like new healing, new plants that can do all sorts of great things. And what are they doing?

Just chopping it down. Just hacking it down at a record pace. It's insane. We've done several stories about that, and it's just insane. It's so sad every time we go back. So many different wonder cures have been found in the rainforest. They're always looking for the rainforest to come up with new medications for all sorts of things. And there's the good side of the pharmaceutical companies. The fact that pharmaceutical companies are creating things that are helping keep your grandpa around for longer

and keep people healthy. It's such a double-edged sword. And like I said, for me, I'm so torn because I don't think that I would want to be in a neighborhood where they're selling heroin. But I don't think that anybody should be able to tell anybody else they can't buy heroin. But then you get into that area of the addictive properties of it. And that's where it gets sketchy. That's where it gets like, well, if you're going to do anything as a community to try to stop something like that, boy, there's not a lot of ways you can convince people to not do things.

It's very difficult. Yeah. And it gets real weird when you're trying to convince someone to not do something that has a really good chance of ruining your life. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I know you talk a lot about drugs.

And I don't know if you've looked into the Portuguese experience. I'm from Portugal. And Portugal is basically one of the biggest experiments in drug policy in the world. And it's been going on for 10 years. And it's actually quite a success rate. And what they did is they decriminalized drugs. They didn't legalize them. They decriminalized them.

Meaning that if you're caught with, I think it's one gram of heroin or cocaine, 100 gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine or 25 grams of marijuana. If it's anything, if it's that or less, you don't go to jail as you as you do in other countries. And what they do is they send you to a drug rehab commission and to a group of doctors that know what they're talking about that want to find out if this is the first time you're trying drugs, and why are you doing them and they try to address the problem as a disease and not as a crime. And it's had actually great success rate and, you know, much less people are going to rehab centers, much less people are dying. So it's definitely being looked at as a way to go in terms of drug policy.

Well, that's a beautiful idea also in terms of human nature, because it's human nature to not want to be controlled. There's many, many examples. And if you have children, you know that if, you know, one of the best ways to get a kid to want to do something is tell them they can't do it. It's a natural human tendency to try to resist. And when you tell them they can do whatever they want, and you'll be there to help them, like you're honestly better off. And we would like to think that the established laws that we have in this country are set up to protect people, but they're clearly not. When you're dealing with these numbers especially outside of florida like i told you about billings montana newspaper talking about 240 000 different prescriptions for that stuff in

in montana alone it's obviously not the case it's not it's that's not that anybody is trying to look out for anybody it's just simply a matter of a crazy system where it's become this, there's this weird sort of method that you can do to skirt logical thinking and extract money from humans. And you can do it in this really immoral, horrible way by getting them addicted

to these things. And the fact that doctors are in on it, that's the weirdest aspect of it, that these people who supposedly had dedicated their lives to helping people, and that's what their whole career was supposed to be, improving the health of people, keeping people alive. And then somewhere along the line, in the whole storm of student loans and getting sued for malpractice and all this different shit, somewhere along the line, a bunch of them just crack. And they just go, let's just make some money. Yeah, we spoke to some addicts in Florida whose doctor, the doctor that prescribed them the drugs was, and this was a kid actually, a boy, a man, a 25-year-old kid, was a gynecologist.

So he was going to a gynecologist to get his meds. Whoa. Well, if anybody would know. Wow, that's so crazy. This story is also close to me because besides my friend who died, I had another family member that had nothing wrong with him he was a completely normal great guy and then got injured uh in a work accident and became the biggest fuck up i've ever met in my life and it's it's hard for me to even imagine that this

is the same guy i knew from high school he was uh at one point in time he was a hard worker he was a great kid he was always friendly and then he was a great kid. He was always friendly. And then he just became a complete loser, a compulsive liar, anything he could do to get bills. And so I've seen the firsthand effects of someone who didn't have an issue. Like he didn't have any physical issues. He also didn't have any family history of people being addicted to anything. So it was just a monster got into a system. Yeah.

I understand what you say, that a person should be able to get whatever they want if they're adults and they can make up their own minds, but they should also be able to know what they're getting. Yes. And that's many times a problem. Again, the injury is a big problem. It's a big reason why people get into prescription drugs is because they're prescribed this by their doctor.

And there aren't enough warnings as to how addictive this stuff can be. And then, you know, we spoke to one kid who was also a star athlete in college, and he was featured in the second documentary we did about this issue. And he was in the hospital for five days, and he left the hospital. He was already addicted to pills and never left. And now he's doing heroin. Wow. It's so crazy. So this is, you you know a story i know a story so just imagine how many stories there are out there just people that get injured and get addicted and how do we stop this is there a way is it too far into the the the cultural system i mean is it a part of

us now i don't think so i think think a lot more needs to be done. And there are fantastic people out there, a lot of moms, actually mothers who've lost kids who are leading the way and trying to raise awareness and pass legislation. I definitely think that more needs to be done. More doctors need to prescribe less and know what they're prescribing. And, you know, people need to know more about what they're being prescribed and the addictiveness of it. Wow. To me, it's one of the most disturbing aspects of our culture.

It's one of the most disturbing. It's like second only to war. The idea that there's these massive corporations that are profiting off of these people becoming zombies. It's really, really crazy. So I want to thank you very much for doing that document because you guys really, you knocked it out of the park and you changed the way I look at it. Thank you.

So this new show you're doing, it's called Inside Secret America. It is. It's on Nat Geo. And has it aired yet? Has it started? It starts Wednesday night. This Wednesday? This Wednesday night at 10 p.m.

Wednesday at 10 p.m. is the first episode. Oh, awesome. And what is the show? What are you guys doing? The first one is drugs. Oh, hilarious. You just can't get away from them. What kind?

It's actually synthetic drugs. So we look into sort of bath salts and spice and K2 and all that stuff. And the show is basically Darren, who's my producing partner, and my husband and myself, we go around America exploring and infiltrating these subcultures, some of the U.S.'s most controversial subcultures, and everything from sex trafficking to unregulated and illegal guns

to the first episode, which is about synthetic drugs. Wow. Did you guys follow the John McAfee case? Yeah. I mean, a little bit. I saw what the vice guys were down there. Did you follow the drug aspect of it?

So I've heard about it, but I'm not like too up to speed on what was going on. But I heard he was making his own stuff, right? I have no idea. Well, in the entrance of All Fairness, he says that it was all a troll. And then he was just joking about the drug part. But the reality is he had a laboratory set up in his backyard in Belize, like a real legit laboratory. And inside that laboratory, I don't know what he was actually doing. laboratory, I don't know what he was actually doing, but he made a post under a pseudonym on this drug forum describing his freebasing of basalts.

And he did some work with, I don't know what the technical aspects of his transformation of the basalts into something else, but he had claimed that it made you this incredibly hyper-sexual person. to something else but he had claimed that it made you this incredibly hyper sexual uh person and he was trying to market it as like like a he was trying to come up with a drug that would turn women into like nymphomaniacs essentially the female viagra yes sort of but viagra doesn't make you erotic yeah but you know what i mean Like Viagra is an aid to a man achieving an erection, but it doesn't necessarily make you like a horny person. Right. Whereas this was a mental thing.

Like it would change you, make you very, very, very aroused. And, you know, he described it on his post as like, you know, clawing your genitals and like freaking out and masturbating all day. And, I mean, he had these really detailed depictions of the chemical transformation of these drugs and clearly had this massive laboratory, well, not massive, but really high-end, high-tech laboratory set up in his crazy fucking jungle house, and this guy was cooking bath salts back there. The doctors we spoke to definitely said that hypersexuality is one of the

sort of symptoms, not symptoms. Side effects? Yeah, side effects. Benefits? Benefits, I don't know. However you want to describe it. Yeah, depending on how you slice it. I wonder who he was targeting for these drugs. I know they're for women, but would men buy these drugs to give to their wives and girlfriends?

Well, what he was doing, he had a bunch of young girls from this, you know, is Belize a third world country? Yeah. I guess, sort of. Developing. Developing.

The PC way. So he had these young jungle girls, like 20 years old or however they were. I think his girlfriend was 20. And he was like, you know, had all these pictures of these different girls and he was getting hooked up on bath salts. He's a crazy dude. We had him on the podcast when he was getting hooked up on bath salts crazy dude

we we had him on the podcast when he's actually on the run no yeah yeah yeah after he was being charged with murder yeah um he fled the country and he was calling us i think he's calling us from mexico on a um one of those little kmart cell phones that you buy or burners yeah yeah and so he was he called into the podcast and spoke to us for like an hour. It was fascinating. We asked him about the drugs and he was... What did he say? You can't believe everything that you read. So he says...

I am a notorious prankster. I think that was his... It's just funning. I know that's how I prank. When I prank, I set up a lab and I fucking do it hardcore, man. I make you really believe that I'm cooking bath salts. Meanwhile, I'm just back there with some glitter and some glue. I mean, he made these really high-resolution photographs of his work

and detailed the whole process. Oh, man. So if he was a troll, man, he's a really well-thought-out troll. He's a character and a half. But the bath salts aspects were one of the parts of the whole story where they just sort of painted him like this maniac. Yeah. Some of the names of these bath salts are just insane.

We were able to actually acquire some just at smoke shops here in Southern California. One was called Scooby-Doo. The other one was called Sexy Zombie. And we went into a smoke shop and bought this stuff. Our first episode, we actually filmed some... We featured a marine who was

at the time addicted to bath salts. We should explain to people that these are not actually bath salts. No, no. There's a few people that live happy lives that stay off the internet. The term bath salts is a term given to these synthetic drugs that escape regulation because they're not technically legal or illegal. Illegal. Illegal.

Yeah, they're not defined. Yeah, undefined. Well, they're defined compounds that haven't been. And they sell them as basalts and it says not for human consumption. Wank, wank. Right. Right? Exactly.

And they sell them as bath salts and it says not for human consumption. Wank, wank. Right. Right? Exactly. So they're made in labs, but they have the same sort of effects on your body as cocaine or meth. But it's made in labs, so there's nothing natural about it. It is entirely made with chemicals, most of which come from China and India. And you can order them and then you have a garage and there are these kids.

This is how it started off with these kids putting all these chemicals together. You have it all on the internet, step by step on how to make it pretty easy. And you make these batches of both what they call bath salts, and they initially call them bath salts so that they could sell them with a not for human consumption wink, wink, wink, although they're super expensive compared to regular bath salts. And they made this spice and K2. And these were drugs that were sold over the counter, smoke shops. I mean, we were able to buy them at shell stations, gas stations, and they're sold all over the country. And it's really hard to go after these drugs

because as soon as the government comes out and prohibits one compound, they immediately, you know, China and India have already all these other chemicals ready to ship. So they just need to change a little compound and it's a new drug and it's legal all of a sudden. So that's why it's so hard to get. It's amazing that that sort of popped up out of nowhere. It's like all of a sudden someone figured out, oh, we could do this.

Yeah. Well, I think they were sitting around in chemistry labs at universities. They were doing legitimate research on them and then this sort of monkey got out of the cage. And next thing you know, it's running rampant. 28 Days Later style. Exactly. So it was actually really interesting. It was a professor at a university in – do you remember what the name of the university was?

I don't remember. Michigan, maybe. I can't remember. But it was a professor in the 70s who was doing this research. He wanted to know what kind of effects drugs have on a person's brain. So he was doing all this research and came out with all these compounds and all this came out and suddenly it was you know the the the the the instructions and the manual on how to create these crazy drugs that are now everywhere around us and legal quasi-legal, yeah. Quasi-legal. Quasi-legal, yeah.

Now- But, you know, John McAfee? McAfee. McAfee, yeah. McAfee. I never know how to say that. It always pops up on your computer and you're like,

McAfee? He's the one that created that, right? No, he didn't create bath salts. No, McAfee. McAfee. Yes, yes, yes. The antiviral software. Yeah, sorry.

So he's a legitimately smart guy. Well, he was at one point in time. Yeah, he might be a little crazy. But, like, most of these bath salts and synthetic marijuana are being put together by some yahoos in their garage. So that's where the problem comes in is that you don't know what you're getting. And you don't know if they're mixing it correctly. You get these things called hot spots where one portion of the batch will have 30 times the amount of the product compared to another part that might just have just been missed, you know? So, so you never know what you're getting.

And obviously, you know, when you have like a 19, 20 year old kid who's, you know, just looking to make some money mixing it together, he's not probably doing his, the best science to, uh. Yeah. Yeah. And you're, you're also, there's a bunch of different effects of these things, right? It's not, they're not, it's not uniform. Yeah.

We, we spoke about the over-sexualization, aggressiveness. People believe that they have superhuman force. There's all these videos that you can search it on YouTube too of people going out and believing they're supermen and throwing themselves off cliffs. We spoke to a doctor who had treated a patient who was a lawyer. He was studying for the bar exam and took some of this stuff and decided that his hands, his own hands were trying to attack him. He thought paranoia. He thought his hands were trying to attack him. So he put both his hands on a stovetop and burnt his arms and he couldn't feel the pain.

So it was just because the neighbor smelt the burning of his arms that they came. So he was cooking his own arms, sitting there. He was cooking his own arms. Ouch. How? Yeah. arms that they came so he was cooking his own arms sitting in his own arms so some of these drugs are related to um other drugs where they like take it and they change a molecule or twist something around but they're they're not it's not uniform so it's not like they're all derivatives of this they're they're they vary wildly. So you buy a batch of sexy zombie today, and you snort it or smoke it, and it does something to you really like.

It's a really great high. It wasn't too bad. Next day, there's not much of a hangover. So the next day, you decide you want to go to the smoke shop and buy some more of this stuff, but that batch can have the same name, possibly come from the same place, but it's entirely different. You never know. Every single batch is have the same name, possibly come from the same place, but it's entirely different. You never know.

Every single batch is different. So suddenly you might be taken to the hospital or you might be out trying to attack somebody. And there's also that story in Florida, that guy that ate that guy's face. Yeah, that's where I put bath salts on the map, that story. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that they said, well, it's been refuted because he didn't test positive for bath salts. But then I read there is no test for basalts. He didn't test positive for basalts because it doesn't exist.

First of all, they don't know what to look for because it could be any and number one of these different substances. And second of all, they're not looking. Exactly. And that's why they're so popular that we heard that they're so popular in places where drug testing is mandatory, such as the military or rehab communities or even bullfighting. We were in Arizona and interviewed people from the bullfighting community. And this is really popular there because it's so hard to test these drugs. So they can just take them and know that nobody's going to ever find out. So they take these bath salts and then hop on a bull.

Yeah. Holy shit. Exactly. We spoke to a kid who did that. You want to talk about a reckless person. The guy who takes bath salts and gets on a bull. Yeah. Holy shit. We spoke to a kid who did that. You want to talk about a reckless person. The guy who takes bath salts and gets in a bull. Wow. So it's very possible, apparently,

that that guy who ate that guy's face was on bath salts. It is possible. And that sounds right, right? Doesn't it? I guess, yeah. It's consistent with behavior. That's a very nice way. Scientific way of saying it.

Yeah, I mean, we can't have no idea if the guy was on bath salts. Definitely, I think the cops were like, this is the craziest thing we've ever seen. And it's just consistent with behavior that we've seen of other people that have been on bath salts. That's why they jumped to the conclusion that maybe it was bath salts. And even after the autopsy or whatever they did, they said they ruled out that. Well, I don't know if they ruled it out, but they said it probably wasn't bath salts or something, but who knows.

How long before the pharmaceutical companies realize how much money is in bath salts and just say, listen, what we need to do is to set up some labs in Mexico or Peru or whatever, churn out our own bath salts, launch them over the border with catapults, have people pick them up, slip them in trucks. Well, there's an article that came out today, actually, about how the DA had just busted

and is really concerned about synthetic drugs because it is becoming quite a big problem here in the United States, and how they're finding out that actually it is, they said that it was, they're finding some connections of how it's funding terrorism in the Middle East. It's funny how everything ends up funding terrorism in the Middle East. It just means we need to spend more money on tanks. That's the tank companies. You know, but there are some really sad stories that we, you know,

we interviewed the father of a kid who took bath salts for the first time because a friend gave it to him. And the kid went totally wild, came into his parents' house and slit his throat in front of his parents and died five days later. So, yeah, it's definitely something, too. Well, when you have children, that's when drugs really start worrying you. Like, drugs never worried me when I was single because I was like, you know, I'm not doing anything stupid. I'm not worried about it.

I would hear stories about people dying and, you know, it would make me sad, but it didn't hit home. I would hear stories about people dying and it would make me sad, but it didn't hit home. When you start having children and you think about all the dumb things that you did growing up and somehow or another dodged all those bullets and got to be an adult and you think about these little ones growing up in this new world where it's not so easy. Because when I was a kid, there was no such thing as OxyContin. There was no such thing as pain management centers. There was no such thing as 240,000 people in a year getting a prescription for Oxy's in Montana. There was none of those things. So those hurdles, even though it was still, there's lots of scary stuff that that wasn't there. But I got really fortunate that I saw my friends when I was a kid, my friend's cousin was a Coke dealer. And I go, I got to watch him rot away. I mean, I got to watch his life like fall apart over the course of like a year.

Like a guy lost all this weight, became creepy, was hiding all the time, just became like a vampire. Like he got bitten by a vampire and became this like sick person. It was really weird. He was a dealer? Yes. He was a dealer and an addict himself. He was doing it himself. And in watching that, watching him go from like a regular guy to becoming this guy, it was a huge lesson to be learned.

And I was in Vegas this weekend and I was talking to this guy who's the driver and I said, you know, how do you like living in Vegas? Is it a problem? He goes, well, he goes, you know, the thing is it's the drugs, man. You got to avoid the drugs. If you can avoid the drugs, it's a good place to live. It's like most people just avoid the strip. But fortunately for me, my sister was hooked on drugs and this other person was hooked on drugs.

He's telling me all the people he knew that are hooked on drugs that had sort of he learned from them to not do it. It's almost like how we need to learn. We need to learn by watching other people fuck up. Hard way. You're not going to believe the government. If the government comes out and tells you to avoid it, you're like, whatever. What do you, fuck you crooks now.

You know, it's, what can be done? Like, besides, you know, you talking or you doing a show like that. Did you guys ever, is there anybody that you talked to that had like some really concrete plans on how this could be halted? No, there's some great organizations out there, support group organizations. Again, a lot of them are being led by women, by mothers, which I think is phenomenal.

And they're really trying to raise awareness and pass legislation to make these bills harder to get and to stop these crazy doctors from overprescribing. But there is a way. And I do love whenever I speak to some of these mothers, it's really refreshing to see these women who are so strong and wanting to fight for this. Yeah, well, that is a nice thing, but it just sucks that they have to fight for that.

Jamie, there's something going on. It's buffering every few minutes. People are complaining a lot. It's the Ustream side? Yeah. Yeah. We've got 100 megabytes a second upload, ladies and gentlemen, now, so it's all Ustream, those dirty bitches. Tell me what I figured out.

Complain to Ustream. We can't help you. The show, you're going to basically – you're going after a lot of different things. It's not just drugs. When you do this kind of investigative journalism and you ruffle feathers and sort of make noise, do you guys experience any blowback from that? Occasionally, but this series, as we did in the OxyContin piece that we started with, we did a lot of undercover filming.

piece that we started with. We did a lot of undercover filming. And our sort of approach to that is that we're not looking to get any individual in trouble. We're not trying to do any gotcha kind of journalism and bust any individual. We're just trying to shed light on an issue. And so I think if we were targeting a specific individual, there might be a little bit of blowback, whether rightly or wrongly, whether we were doing it that way. But I think the fact that we're just trying to shed light on an issue, and the only way that we can do that is with undercover cameras. You sort of mute the blowback a little bit because it's just enlightening for most people to see what goes on when people don't know the camera's rolling.

Yeah, that's probably a very good point. Yeah, I didn't think of that. That's probably what very good point. Yeah, I didn't think of that. That's probably what's saving you guys. Well, Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes pioneered the undercover camera. Then they started doing away with it. And Mike Wallace said the idea was to draw light, but we started drawing heat. And so once it just becomes a bit of drawing heat and not shedding enough light, then it's time to sort of stop doing it.

Yeah, so I think that will be our time to stop as well. But I do get nervous every time. I just rewatched for the 10th time the first episode of this series that is airing on Wednesday night at 10 p.m. And it made me really nervous just to watch some of the stuff because we did go undercover and filmed a lot of things, filmed a lot of people selling drugs and filmed people taking drugs, and a lot of it was filmed undercover. It makes me nervous for sure. But it was an issue that we thought was an important issue.

Not enough people know about it. What other subjects did you guys cover? The second one is about it. What other subjects do you guys cover? The second one is about guns. And we go to Arizona. We spent a lot of time in Arizona. And we basically transformed ourselves into the bad guys, into criminals trying to get guns, just to see how easy it would be for a criminal to get their hands on guns in Arizona. And in the space of about two, three days, we were able to get three handguns, one of which is the most powerful handgun, a Smith & Wesson 500 Magnum. I now am an expert on guns.

I knew nothing about guns before this. And we were able to get an AK-47 and a.50 caliber, which is the most powerful guns in the world. The AK-47 we got out of a Taco Bell parking lot. We went online, backpage.com, looked for AK-47, and within 45 minutes, we had bought an AK-47 out of this guy's car. And then he wanted to sell us two more AR-15s that he had in his car as well. Oh my god. We were on a budget. So this person when

you air the show do you block their face out you block their faces out yes because who knows why they're doing this in that case they actually look like drug addicts so it was really important for us to not again not knowing going after anyone personally yeah right well that's beautiful of you and congratulations on handling it that way because that's uh i think the the right way to do it and it's also obviously this person is a part of a much greater issue and to turn it on to make it about one person it's like it's the tendency to do in this country like to victimize or to um uh criminalize this one person or whatever you know focus on this one person when it's really what's going on is the issue right the issue of

being able to buy guns that easy do you you know what's so interesting, though, is that right after we bought that AK-47, it was, I think it was the first assault rifle that we bought in Arizona, and we'd been nervous whether, you know, we'd invested money to go there, are we going to be able to buy these guns, and so to sort of celebrate our purchase,

we went to the bar right next to Taco Bell, and we ordered three beers, myself, Darren, and the other producer, Alex, and because Alex didn't have his ID with him, they didn't sell him a beer. Meanwhile, we just bought an AK-47 outside, and no one asked for our ID or even our names. That's funny. It keeps cutting out, Jamie. Maybe we should switch it over to a lower stream or something like that. Try that. Try that. See if that helps. We'll fix it for you, folks. stream or something like that try that try that see if that helps we'll fix it for you folks folks um the uh the the gun issue is a really uh a creepy one in this country and it's also in my opinion connected to the pharmaceutical issue and the reason being is that there's this massive

connection between the things that people are afraid of when it comes to guns which is school shootings and and the like a massive connection between those and the use of SSRIs and antidepressants. And there's something like, I think the latest statistic was it was more than 90% of all school shooters either are on antidepressants when they do it or are recovering from antidepressants when they do it. And that's one of those things that makes you wonder, like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Right. You know? Yeah.

No, definitely. I mean, like, I think when you talk about those mass shootings, and actually we shot this, and the last day of shooting was the Aurora shooting. The last day of our filming, I should say. Oh, wow. The guns piece was the Aurora shooting, less Dave on filming. Oh, wow. The, the guns piece was the, the Aurora shooting.

That's incredible. Yeah. And then, you know, so it's been in the can for a while, this piece. And then, you know,

when new town happened, you know, there was some question of whether we should air the show, the, the, the, the, the guns episode early,

but we decided, you know, there was enough debate going on at that point to just to hold it off. Yeah. And, but he used the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting. He used a Bushmaster, which we also saw for sale at gun shows. What is that? It's an R-15.

I thought the Sandy Hook guy used pistols. I think the Sandy Hook guy used a Bushmaster. I was looking it up to look that up. I'm pretty sure the new findings of the Sandy Hook shooting was that he actually didn't use an assault weapon.

Pistols. Hold on. We should know. NBC admitted no assault rifle used in a Newtown shooting. Four handguns. Apparently, the only handguns were taken into the school. Yeah. I think, yeah, it had been said that he had an AR-15 assault rifle that he had taken into the school, and it was in the car that he drove there.

But they've been told by several officials that he had left it in the car, and then he came in and just shot everyone with pistols. I remember when the reports came out hearing about the Bushmaster, that he had a Bushmaster. And I remember clearly having seen it in the gun shows. And we almost bought one. I mean we're really just being – this is just sort of a technicality here. But what kind of gun he used. He obviously shot a bunch of people. That's what's important is that someone can get this tool. And really that's what it is.

It's an inanimate tool. And a person can get it and go do these things. And these things happen very rarely, and when they happen, there's this massive reaction, and the reaction is almost always to try to take guns away. And that's what gets the real nutters crazy. They're like, you ain't going to take my guns. I'm going to climb a cold, dead fingers from a gun. And it's almost like it's one of the strangest debates in our culture because it's not a gun that's killing all these people.

It's a person who's doing something that is horrific and impossible to stop. It's a person who's doing something that is horrific and impossible to stop. It's a person that's doing something. So if they didn't have a gun, who knows what they would do? Would they try to do it with a car? Would they just plow over a bunch of people in the road? Would they make a bomb? The idea is that this tool makes it easier for them to do it. But the reality is the gun's not doing shit on its own.

And the real issue in my mind has always been a person able to do something like that. Like how does that happen? And why is that sort of brushed away? Everyone just wants to talk about gun control. And then it gets up this debate and humans are so wacky that when there's a debate there's two sides screaming at each other and nothing gets done you know you have the ted nugent side that stockpile and ammo because they think obama's gonna you know turn the whole country into communist russia and then you know you've got the other side that want the you know that say fuck hunters you should just

kill hunters no one should have a gun you know Get your meat from a supermarket. This is bullshit. We need to evolve. There's that argument as well. In my opinion, it's a mental health issue. And just the fact that guns exist, look, guns are crazy. The idea that you could just point at something and make it disappear. But there's so many guns. There's so many gun owners.

And it's so rare if you look at it statistically that something like this happens. If you look at how many human beings we have in this country, it's like 300 million. And how many shootings like this happen where someone indiscriminately just starts whacking people around them. It's kind of strange that it's so rare because there's so many fucking nuts. So many fucking crazy people in this country. It's almost, we're like blessed that these things don't happen on a regular basis. Well, in many ways, I think the gun debate is an easier debate to have. It's the same with addiction, right? I mean, addiction is a very complicated issue. Mental health is a very complicated issue. And, you know, it's not as easy as to talk about do you want guns or do you not want guns? And I think, you know, what are – Can you have guns or can you not have guns? Can you not have guns and I think you know what yeah okay can you not have guns yeah and I think what we you know which are showing

and our piece is that like the same laws that make it easy for anybody to access guns also makes it easy for people who you don't want having guns to have guns and so if you're comfortable with that and there are many states and there are many people that are comfortable with that that's that's great and you know if you're not if you if you fear the damage that a gun can do in the wrong person's hand, then that's also a worthy thing to debate, I think. Yeah. But it's a much easier debate. I agree with you. It's much more black and white. It's about having the right to have arms and what should be the limits on that. And then pills,

which actually, you know, it's a much more of a gray area debate. Yeah, it certainly is. And even if there is gun laws, I guess you could punish people harder for selling you an AK-47 in a parking lot. But the fact that you could just do it. Yeah. Anybody who wants to stop background checks from owning guns is an asshole. It's really that simple. Yeah.

I mean I think it's – there is – the vast majority of people just have – agree on most things and then it's the sort of extremes of both sides that sort of hijack the debate. And background checks, we go through background checks anytime we want to buy a car or, you know, like, you know. And they ask for our ID if you want to get a beer to make sure you're over 21. So why not ask for your ID or get a background check if you want to buy a dangerous weapon? I saw the best Twitter post on this. Somebody wrote, this is the way to solve the gun problems. Take everybody who has a gun and kill them i was like jesus christ see that is talk about missing that point that doesn't help the

debate but it was just one of those things that like this extreme reaction that people have right to to the gun issue when the reality is and you know and I'm not in the Ted Nugent camp, but the reality is when you look at the actual numbers of people with guns and the small amount of times that these things happen, it's really not a gun issue. It's a mental health issue. No, but there's the sort of pedestrian violence that happens

every day with guns. Sure. You know, there's rare mass shootings and stuff like that, but every day, you know, either accidentally or on purpose, people are getting shot with guns and killed. I think there's half a million a year. Yeah, it's true. And the thing is that the part that I loved about doing the piece

was when we started out is we went to this shooting range and we took part in this festival. It was the Independence Day rifle match. And there were guys that are obviously very pro-gun and would disagree with anybody who says that there should be any limits on gun ownership or anything like that. But at the same time, a lot of the guys that we were speaking to were very serious about the safety that went into owning a gun.

There's a responsibility there that if you own something, just like if you drive a car, there's a responsibility to know how to drive a car and how, you know, to, to educate yourself. And so, you know, the NRA, um, they often, they offer these pistol classes and they teach you how to, you know, unload, load and how to do everything safely. And, you know, I think it's not mandatory for gun owners, but I think anybody that wants to own a gun should certainly take a class in how to handle, handle, handle a weapon because, to handle a weapon because they're super dangerous. Yeah, I don't think there's any debate in that whatsoever. And I think another issue that needs to be taken into consideration is how many people's

lives are saved with guns from bad guys. I mean, how many times have police in justifiable cases shot people? I mean, when you look at the number of people that shot in this country sometimes it's people that are protecting their home from a a burglar or sometimes it's a woman trying to prevent a rape i mean all these things are true as well so it isn't a black and white issue and that's what gets people really weird and you know by the way if you really if you're really adamant about gun control and you're really adamant about stopping gun violence, pay attention to the fact that we're involved in wars. Two crazy ones. And they're in places that don't make any sense.

And people are dying over there. Innocent people. Yeah, a lot of innocent people. And how about drones? There's a lot of other shit going on. It's not just happening right here. It's a violence issue. It's a detachment from humanity issue. It's a very strange one. It's one that seems to be lingering in our transition from this primal alpha male monkey thing that we used to be to whatever we're becoming as we become more and more educated and more and more aware of the consequences of our actions and more and more hopefully enlightened.

and more and more aware of the consequences of our actions and more and more hopefully enlightened, we still have this thing where you can just press a button and people explode. And anybody can get one in the parking lot after being online for 45 minutes. After a couple of tacos. We're so strange. I mean, people are so goddamn strange. And if you really look at it that way, if you were an objective observer from another planet that's sent here to report back on Earth, boy, what a fucking story you would have.

You'd have to sit them down and you'd have to go, okay. Where can I start? Yeah, you go, this is not what we had hoped for. Let me just say that first. They're fucking crazy. First of all, they're all on pills. They got a lot of guns. They got guns. They're on pills. no one knows they got guns they're on pills

no one knows what the fuck they're doing it's all bananas yeah journalists are driving into trees on 90 miles an hour not leaving skid marks when you guys saw that did you get scared like thinking about the business that you're in we're talking about michael hastings who was a a journalist for the uh rolling stone magazine and he was involved in exactly what you're not involved in. He was involved in singling out individuals and going after them, and he did it to a very powerful general and wrote some piece in Rolling Stone that got the guy fired and repeatedly told people that people had told him they were going to kill him and then one day his car um going 100 miles an hour uh in hollywood slammed directly into a pole or a tree and uh killed him burst into flames no skid marks at all and you you know you think well that's uh that's crazy then this guy who was uh involved in security for president clinton and bush said that you can

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

I applaud you on your effort. So basically tell us what you think he was killed. Oh, I don't know. I have no idea. I think it would be foolish of me with my zero understanding of the mechanics of modern automobiles, zero understanding of the computer equipment that runs them.

I have zero technical knowledge. I'm just – Richard Clark, is that who it was? Yeah. There's several others as well who have studied the mechanisms behind the possibilities of remote controlling various things, hacking into them. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it's true. I have no idea.

But it's scary. That sounds like such a scary scenario. It's very scary. Yeah. I mean, it's right out of a movie. The guy just drives. He's about to release this crazy story, tells everyone that the FBI is looking into him and interviewing all of his friends, and then right into a tree.

Boom. And the car explodes and he dies. And now the story is just going to slowly disappear. You know, Kim Kardashian will get pregnant from some other dude in like a couple of months. Kanye West will be on the outs. And everybody will forget about Michael Hastings. Yeah. You know, a few people will try to talk about it on the line.

And other folks will go, oh, God, are you still talking about Michael Hastings? Let it go. Please. No, we should talk about the great work that he definitely did. Yes. Yeah. But I think also a thing to take into consideration is that we live in an age of extreme transparency. And anybody who does something that evil, it seems like it's almost impossible to completely cover things up.

And if it's not impossible now, I feel like it will be in a few years. I feel like any sort of record of something of that magnitude, this is going to be a way that that's going to come to light in some sort of a WikiLeaks type scenario. You're an optimist. Me? I like that. I'm an optimist.

I'm what I would call a technological optimist. There's that famous Orson Welles quote that history is a race between education and catastrophe. And I think if you look at the trends, education seems to kind of always be winning. And I think part of that is that ultimately what's good for the entire race triumphs over what's good for the few. And I think even what's good for the few in terms of bad for the entire race is bad for the few because I think there's a thing called karma. And I think that's real. And I think that the effect that you have on your environment is a very tangible thing. The way people react to you is a very physical real measurable thing and that comes from being a piece of shit if you're a piece of shit you do horrible things it's very difficult to feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy love and happiness and have friends and i think that uh ultimately technology most likely will be the

tool that balances all that out because i think that with technology comes this transparency. With this transparency, you get to see the actions of these few in a different light than we got to see, like whether it was in the 60s or the 70s or when Eisenhower warned of the – when he left office and he was warning about the military industrial complex. That was just a film that was on television for one brief moment in a time where there was no VCRs. So it's like how much impact is that even going to have then? Whereas now, many, many years later, over half a century later, that film is being played over and over again on the internet as an example of how this is probably an issue that's been around secretly behind the curtain for a long time. But now every day there's some new thing. Every day there's some new piece of information. Every day there's some new story, whether it's Edward Snowden or whether it's someone else releasing something else or some people getting arrested for something that you can't believe is real.

It's almost impossible to cover that stuff up these days. Yeah, no. It's crazy. I like that worldview, though. I like that idea. Yeah, people say I'm ridiculous. You could easily say I'm ridiculous. First of all, I'm not qualified to give any prognostication whatsoever.

I can't give a prognosis. This is just a gut reaction. But I think that if you look at the way life used to be a thousand years ago and the way life is today, you know, try living during the Inquisition. Try living in the Middle Ages. That's what's so funny. You always hear people, oh, we're living in the most violent time of our history. And it's not actually. It's the least violent time in history.

And we actually have it pretty good. But's the least violent time in history and we actually have it pretty good but yeah but i'm a strong believer in karma as well i think we're dealing with a time where we're really confused there's obviously some bad spots everywhere there always have been it's very difficult to be a human being and it's very difficult to develop a human being to raise a person so to have a baby become an adult the process is insane there's so many pitfalls and nobody gives you a guidebook. Nobody knows what the fuck we're doing. And we're getting information from 7 million or 7 billion rather people a day essentially. We're getting not all the information but anything crazy, anything fucked up. A man born with 10 penises, there he is.

That'll get through. Yeah, that gets through. yeah that gets through everything crazy gets through and it's almost like we weren't we weren't designed for that we're designed for what's happening in the tribe uh who are those guys with swords coming over the hill hey we got to get the fuck out of here you know that's what we're sort of designed for we're dealing with the same genetics essentially that people had 10 000 years ago and there was no communication back then there was nothing and now then. There was nothing. And now it's on your phone.

I was at a restaurant the other day with a buddy of mine, and I'm like, I'm a fucking junkie. I can't put this goddamn phone down. I have to keep checking this stupid phone. I'm such an asshole. Like, I can't stop. What's going on on Twitter? It's so bad.

But it's this, what's happening is, I keep getting information. And I'll go, and I'll see something, and ooh. And maybe I'll see nothing I'll see something and ooh, and maybe I'll see nothing and I'll look more and I'll see nothing and I'll look more and then ooh, a new post by someone I follow or something crazy is happening. Especially when it's a married couple and we're in the same sort of business and we're always – we're journalists and we're always looking for information. But I find that we're – it's almost like a ping pong ball for us. but I find that where it's almost like a ping pong ball for us. I'm looking at the phone and he's really mad at me because we're having dinner and I'm looking at the phone and then I put it down and then he's looking at the phone and I'm getting really mad at him.

Try to keep the romance alive and she's checking her phone. I was at a restaurant the other day and I watched four people and none of them talked and they all stayed on their phone the entire time they were sitting there eating together. Yeah, but then you look at them and you're like, oh, at least people. And then five minutes later, you're the one checking your phone and they're looking at you saying the same thing. So it's like, that's so true. Yeah, we are junkies. We really are.

I interviewed Ray Kurzweil for my – I have a new show that's coming out on SyFy. Yeah, congrats. Thank you. And one of the episodes, we were talking about the convergence, the human to machine convergence, So we're talking about the convergence, the human to machine convergence, and then the idea that one day we will be some sort of a combination of people and technology. And he was essentially making the argument that it's already happened and we are so attached to our phones that it could be argued that if you have a certain number of people that constantly carry phones with them, the argument could be that you're already a part of that.

It's like you just haven't figured out a way to put it in your body. So the way before they had hearing aids, those dudes used to carry those horns. What? Lean forward. You remember those? You'd see them in the old Three Stooges movies and shit.

It was like a giant buffalo horn. What? It would get close to you. Well, now Google Glass, and now you don't even have to hold anything. Yeah. Have you played with that yet? No, I haven't.

Have you? Yes. Yeah, I got a chance. I have a friend who works at Google, and she let me... That's one of those things. Yeah, the ear thing. That's what they used to look like.

Nice. That would help you. Horn. She let me play with it. It's very, used to look like. Nice. That would help you. Good morning. She let me play with it. It's very, very interesting. Yeah. And it feels to me like a step. Like, ooh, I'm holding on to a Model T right here.

Yeah. Like, this is what's one day going to be a Tesla. You know, one day it's going to be a contact lens, and we're all going to have one. Or it'll be some sort of an implant. So describe it to me. Well, it's sort of crude because uh sorry google but right now uh it has to be tethered to a phone um and this is a i played with a it's not ready for prime time like a prototype yes it's a prototype and uh a google

phone at that and um you can do things to it like you can ask for – one of the things I thought was cool is like you could Google like Ray Kurzweil. Google Ray Kurzweil and all of a sudden it shows you like a page like right out of Google on Ray Kurzweil. And you can like see – like Google Ray Kurzweil video and it shows you all these video options. And then you could play them off of YouTube. But is it like projected somewhere or are you looking at the glass? Yes. Yes, there it is. That's me with one of those things on.

You can see it over there too. This TV in front of you actually. Sorry, I'm turning around. No worries. Nice. Yeah. You see it sort of floating in space. But nobody can see it.

Like if I have it on and I'm talking to you, you can't see what I'm seeing. I see it but you can't see it. And it's one of those things where if you look over here, you don't see it. But you look here, you see it like if i have it on and i'm talking to you you can't see what i'm seeing i see it but you can't see it and it's one of those things where if you like look over here you don't see it but you look here you see it is really trippy it's strange but the strangest aspect is that i felt like i was holding on to something that was going to be something way greater someday and this is just the first steps of this weird sort of a transformation into the uh the symbiote so wild yeah yeah that's right it's freaky not not sure if i'm looking forward to it i have to say i feel like i am because i feel like um i enjoy so many aspects of technology already i think people are afraid for the most we're afraid of a loss of privacy but if we could get people to stop being assholes if everybody

was like really cool, would you care if everybody looked at your pictures and got into email? Or not that we know that everybody's looking, that people are looking at everything we do. But our issue is not with people looking at our stuff. Our issues are with assholes looking at our stuff or people using our information against us. That's what we're really concerned with. Right. If it was possible to somehow or another encourage that in human behavior as well as with technology, if technology could be used by in aiding in this sort of like connection with people, in aiding in emphasizing empathy and emphasizing camaraderie and friendship and love, if that could be like seen as like a more worthwhile ethic a more worthwhile like a state

of of consciousness and behavior it sounds like very hippie no you you are you're really optimistic well i think it's possible yeah i really do great yeah i love that there's repercussions that people experience now when they do something terrible to someone on like on the internet where there's a flood of people will go after them now that no one ever had before. You know, like, did you ever see there was a video where Anonymous released this video of this girl who was throwing puppies into a river.

Oh my God. And then they went after her, exposed her, and chased her. And it was really horrific stuff. But this, people swarmed on this evil behavior. They saw that someone was doing something terrible and they went after it. And this one example is also the example of the what happened in Ohio with the rapes where they were they were trying to cover it up.

And that was also exposed by hackers. And then the massive amount of negative attention that was given on those people. And it's like, in time, would that not slowly sort of like cure people of this sort of behavior? If not cure people, make it far less likely to happen. Yeah, because the golden rule becomes. Because people know what the fuck's going on. And they're not going to tolerate it. If everyone knows that something like that happened, someone did a horrible thing, wouldn't that lessen the occurrences of these things?

If there were repercussions, the masses had access. The problem is, of course, that we don't think of that loss of privacy in that way. We think of a loss of privacy in Big Brother. We think of the NSAs listening to all your phone calls and copying all your emails. And it sounds very Orwellian and dangerous and scary, and that this is an erosion of privacy. But it's also, it seems inevitable. It seems inevitable.

And if it's not inevitable in the sense that the government gets it, I think they're just going to get, they might get a hold of it first. But it seems like everybody's going to get it. Right. Yeah. It's like – it's just that's where it's going. It's all moving to this area of no boundaries. It's very weird.

But if you look at how life has changed since the internet – when did we get it? Like 90-ish, 94-ish when it really took hold? I got on AOL. I think it was in 94 I was on. You were an early adopter. Yeah, well, I owe it to my friend Robbie. My friend Robbie was a computer major. Robbie Prince, what's up, dude? He was a computer major in college and then became a stand-up comedian

and was telling me, like, oh, it's a great way to write your jokes. I didn't have a fucking, I didn't know how to type at all, honestly. But I remember getting online the first day on AOL, and they have all these categories you can look into. And I was fascinated. I was like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. If you have a question, and it was so rudimentary and crude with a 14-4 baud modem. But extrapolate that from 1994. Take 1994 and go and look at how we are now in 2013.

I would have never guessed. First of all, I'd never guessed that I'd be sitting in some room talking to some people who made a documentary. And the only way we communicated until today was strictly through this electronic medium. No publicists, no nothing, no one hooking this up and no like no formal process and then now no producers no network no nothing no filtration no censorship instantaneously broadcast and my my ustream page has right now 14 million views like yeah so it's it's reaches a lot of people it's not like it's not like a couple weirdos are checking

it out and then it goes on itunes and at least a half a million will download each individual episode from the either that or stitcher or just the raw mp3 like this is a crazy shift in the way things were done just 20 years from now and then you think about facebook you think about twitter you can take a picture of something you put it online and then this guy retweets it and that guy retweets it. And if it's something, especially if it's something big or a story big, it could get retweeted by millions. And then before you know it, it becomes a news story. And then before you know it, it becomes something that the whole country knows about. And it's almost instantaneous. I look at that and I say, how is it possible that that's not going to continue to go in that same

direction? And I really do think it's going to be beneficial. I think there's going to be pitfalls for sure as we sort of figure out our way and how to navigate this new world that we live in. Pardon the phrase. But I ultimately think that it's going to be beneficial. I am sold. I think it's going to be beneficial. How dare you? I am, too. I was it's going to be interesting. How dare you? I am too.

I was not trying to stop technology here. No, I am too. It's just that it's going to make our romantic dinners even harder. Yeah, because you're going, are you looking at me or are you looking at your Google contact lens? Exactly. You son of a bitch. Are you looking at my eyes? I'm not sure.

Well, the thing is about these things, they seem to want to operate operate on voice recognition it seems to be that's what the trend is with these things that'd be very difficult to hide yeah you know you can't say oh listen honey i totally google i totally agree with you google new shoes yeah it'll be i don't know i guess i mean it would be nice if we all took our google contact lenses off as we entered in. Exactly. Mandatory. Yeah. I guess it's just an inevitability of the world we live in.

We just have to accept the fact that times, they are changing. Yeah. For the better. Hopefully. I think so. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm fucking wrong all the time. Don't listen to me.

What other subjects did you guys cover? The third episode is sex trafficking, actually. Oh, snap. That was a really interesting one. Yeah. So it is, you know, you think about sex trafficking and you think of foreign women being brought into the United States. Well, it's ten times more likely that an American is being trafficked than it is a foreigner here in the United States. In another country or here in?

An American here in the United States. Yes, an American here in the U states yes an american here in the u.s so we basically went undercover um i went undercover as a a prostitute trying to get a job at a massage parlor in houston and i mean within five minutes i was approached by this guy who tried to get me to be a prostitute for him he wanted to be he wanted to be my pimp and uh meanwhile darren was filming all of this from across the street in the car oh my god how are you not freaking out you must be he was he was freaking out a little bit he was and because you know technology has evolved so much but yet we we don't we didn't have all the technology we needed with us at the time we just had our iphone

i had my iphone on mute but on speakerphone so he could hear what was happening and then i had the little glasses secret filming glasses and but the only way he could hear me was through my speakerphone iPhone. And the whole time I was holding the iPhone while talking to this guy. So it looked really strange, right? Right. Trying to get Darren to hear what was happening. And the guy's saying, you know, you're, where are you from? You look like you're from Sweden, don't you? You can get a lot of clients, I can make you thousands of dollars every night. And you look so clean, which is a compliment that I've never gotten before. You look really clean.

Yeah, it's kind of gross. It made me wonder what other kind of girls he had. Look at you. No scams. No puss. You're a clean, clean girl. Wow. And meanwhile, and he kept on insisting for me to go into the car with him. And Darren across the street couldn't see where I was at and thought that I had gotten into the car with him and was sort of cursing me and saying is she crazy what is she doing and and then I hadn't gotten into

the car and he kept on saying why don't you come into the car with me and I just gave excuses that I didn't feel very comfortable yet but but I was really looking forward to working with him because I wanted to know more information about how these whole rings, prostitution rings, work here in the United States. And it's really, really sad. It's these many times teenage girls who are at a shopping mall and they're approached by this guy who says, you're beautiful. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. I'll give you everything you need in the world. Come with me, travel with me. Sometimes these girls are, for whatever reason, they don't have good relationships with their parents or they come from a bad background. And they accept and they go travel around America with these guys. And very soon after, they become – they're sex slaves and they're sold out for $200 a night.

It's very, very sad. And they somehow or another, they keep them from escaping? They keep them from escaping, yes. First, by just... Persuasion. Persuasion. Coercion. And beating them by violence.

And some girls are even branded with tattoos of their pimps and stuff like that. Yeah, we interviewed one girl that had a dragon tattoo with the name... It was a panther, I think. A panther, sorry. A panther tattoo with the name of her pimp in the back. And all the girls that were in her ring all had the same tattoo. Oh, God. And, you know, sometimes they're scared to go back home.

Some of the girls get hooked on drugs. The pimps get them hooked on drugs. And a few of the girls that we interviewed said they went to the police and told the police, but the police didn't believe them. And they just arrested them for being prostitutes. So they spent a night in jail and they kept on saying they had a pimp and the police said nothing about it. And as soon as they were released, the pimp was outside of the jail waiting for them to come out. Put them right back to work. To work, yeah.

I mean, they're worth a lot of money, you know. Jesus. Yeah, it's like they're shepherds, you know. It is. It was. Farmers. Yeah, it was. It's insane. It is you know? It is. Farmers. Yeah. It's insane.

It is. It really is sad. And it was really interesting. One of the operations, these sort of undercover operations we did was in Charlotte, which is a big place for sex trafficking. Because there are all these interstates. This is North Carolina, all these interstates that meet there. And so we went out with this religious group because religious groups are out there doing a lot of outreach for sex trafficking. And we went out with this religious group that goes out every night or many weeks, many nights a week to look

for women to try to recruit them, take them out of these rings, out of prostitution, essentially. And it was me and this other woman who works in this organization. And we went out with again, with a secret camera, Darren, again, filming from the car. And we saw a girl who seemed to be sort of lost, she had just gotten out of the car, her jeans were ripped. And we called her and start asking, Are you okay? And she said, No, I'm not okay. A guy just, you know, just beat me and I'm not feeling well. And as we're talking to this girl, suddenly it's as if we had disrupted some sort of crazy sex trafficking ecosystem and all these pimps come out of the woodworks, out of the bushes, literally in the middle of Charlotte, in the main prostitution street and come out

and start circling us. And they don't know we're watching because Darren's in the car watching them and start seeing these two pimps sort of circling us to find out why we were talking to their girl. And that's when they came out and started calling us and then we left. But it's really interesting and it's happening all around the United States. God. Wow. It's so disturbing. Now, does that happen in countries where there's prostitution? Where there's legalized prostitution?

That's a very good question. I don't know. I don't know. I would think that would be you. from out of the top of my head, I wouldn't think, you know, obviously one of the big things, the reason why these rings exist, it's because it's illegal to be a prostitute. So the prostitutes feel safer. If they want to sell themselves, they feel safer having somebody who looks after them and who essentially at the end of the day takes away all their money. So this is what we heard again and again. It's sort of the same issue that exists in the drug world where if you make things illegal, then you sort of create this atmosphere where only the outlaws profit. And I know that in Amsterdam where drugs are pretty much legal or at least tolerated as far as marijuana and many drugs, they have like a very low rate of addiction

and very low rate of AIDS. They have legalized prostitution. I would wonder how much of this type of thing of sex slavery is mitigated by that. Well, this place is in Nevada, right, where it's legal. And I think that's the argument that a lot of the brothel owners make is that we can make it safe. We can make it, you know, the girls are tested, the girls are there under their own volition and, you know, they get to keep their money as opposed to have the money taken away. We visited some of these brothels and I was actually really impressed.

No, a different show. A different show. But, you know, they get tested for AIDS on a weekly basis, for all sorts of sexual transmitted disease on a weekly basis. And, you know, the girls feel safe, at least they're in the brothel and they're not out in the streets. Yeah. Look, it's another one of those things. It's like a personal freedom issue almost. Like should a woman, if she's crazy and she loves sex, should she be allowed to be a prostitute? I wouldn't want my daughter or my friend's daughter or my friend. I wouldn't want anybody that I know doing that.

I wouldn't want anyone that I know being a prostitute. But I also wouldn't want anybody I know being a hired killer. I wouldn't want anybody I know working on an oil field when it blows up. There's a lot of things I wouldn't want my friends to do. But do I think that they should be allowed to be a prostitute? Why is it that sex is something that everybody wants, but you can't sell it? Why is that? I mean, who says? Yeah, who says? Yeah, we've met, I mean, we've met women on all sides of this issue. And you know, women that are high paid call girls and stuff like that

who very much see it as an empowerment issue. But the vast majority, I think, of girls out there are being exploited against their will, and I think that's the issue. And it is because, obviously... Because it's illegal. Well, yeah. Again, it goes down to that same issue of human nature.

We're such a strange animal. And when you tell us that something is wrong, that we can't do it, then it becomes this weird itch that people want to scratch. And I wonder how many people actually go to prostitutes because it's illegal, as opposed to legal prostitutes in countries where it's tolerated. I wonder if they have less people. Side-by-side study between... Double-blind placebo prostitute study.

Exactly. Can we do it? No. Can we get funding for that? Well, it's so... It seems like a pattern that exists. Things are illegal. People want to do them.

Bad people sell them to the people that want to do them. Then you have crime. Yeah. Right. So basically that's what our show is, essentially. And then we go do a show about them all. Yeah, exactly. Is there anything you guys did during this new show that really shocked you?

Is there anything that, like, really stands out or something that you never expected? I mean, I thought it was the pimp moment was a shocking one. I've never seen a pimp like sort of use his game to try to pick someone up before. I've heard about it, you know, secondhand stories, but I actually see. Especially your wife. Especially since it was my wife. But that was really interesting how they sort of talk about it and they try to sell it. I was really nervous going in, not only because I was filming undercover and that is always

nerve-wracking, but also because I was trying to apply for a job just to show what this is like, what this sex trafficking underworld is like. Not that I was going to work as a prostitute, but just to be able to get into these massage parlors and see how easy it is to

get a job. And I was nervous that they were going to turn me down and say, I'm sorry, you're too old or too fat or too this or too that. That's funny. As a woman, that's the first thing. So when this guy approaches me and starts saying that I look very clean. Did you always go, hey, all right, I can pass. Yeah, I came back to the car.

The first thing I told Darren was like, I still got it. That's hilarious. What other subjects were covered? I mean, how many episodes did you guys do? It's six episodes. Six episodes. We covered animal rights, activism. Oh, did you cover the animal liberation organization?

No, we didn't really delve into that too much. What we were looking into was the guys that go undercover into farms and film like the abuse of animals on factory farms and then they you know turn it into campaigns to uh try to get people to stop eating meat or to sort of improve conditions for um for factory farm animals and stuff like that so um there's yeah that you know this sort of whole um very successful campaign by animal rights groups in the last decade or so that have you know used the undercover camera and so we figured since we're doing a show about undercover filming you know like what's uh let's see if we can you know hook up with these guys and see what their world is like so we we hooked up with this one guy who's been doing it for like 10 years

and he's he remains anonymous um it goes by you know a fake fake name in the show. But his whole life has just been penetrating these farms and capturing pictures of abuse on film and stuff like that. And this is a guy who's obviously – he's vegan. He's completely against the eating consumption of animal meat. And he still – every day he goes to work when he goes undercover and he has to kill these animals just to be able to record what happens inside these factory farms. And then there's legislation that is being passed right now in several states to try to stop – to prohibit what these guys are doing by filming undercover. Yeah, I've seen that. And how is that flying? How are they allowing people to do that?

Because everyone is outraged when they see those videos, even a meteor. When they see those videos, even a meteor, they watch those videos of people like, I saw one of this abuse that was going on with these cows where this guy was like hitting a cow with a crowbar. They're so horrific. And again, another thing that's being exposed by technology. I believe that video could have very well come from the guy that we feature. He's sort of the main, one of the biggest undercover animal rights activists. So did you alter his voice and blur out his face? We didn't alter his voice, but he was in disguise, actually.

But he's had, I don't know how many name changes throughout his life, and he's been doing it for 10 years. He's really hardcore. If you ever want to do any undercover filming, this is the guy you need to talk to. And he actually gave me some because a lot all of this show is about undercover filming he gave me some training into filming undercover he sent me out into a parking lot and told me that first i had to go to that woman over there she's a perfect stranger and you have to ask her you have to get information from her i want to know where she lived before she lived here and i had to go and do that and i passed that really easily but then the second test that he made me do was I had to go out there and make a woman sort of run away from me because she was scared. And I'm not very good

at that. I'm good at getting information from people, but I can't. It's not in my nature to be mean or to be scary or intimidating. And so I went to a sparking lot and I just started acting wild, crazy and not really scary, just crazy. Like, where is water? Where can I find some water? People were just staring at me. Who is this crazy woman? Probably thinking I was on bath salts or something. Why were they trying to get you to do all these different things?

So this is part of the training is that you have to be able to make people feel either very comfortable with you. So they give you information that you need, that you want to get for your undercover filming, or very uncomfortable with you, so that you feel the need to either leave so you can film or intimidated to a point that you will release any information you give without actually resorting to violence, obviously. So it was really an interesting little practice that we had with him. Wow. And how long has this guy been doing this? 10 years. Yeah. He trains other people.

He's the major, the main trainer of undercover filming for animal rights activists in the United States. And it's an incredible guy. It seems to me that that's another one of those things where it's sort of a diffusion of responsibility thing. When there's so many people that want meat, so many people that want,

you know, food. And if you could figure out how to stuff them into smaller packages, you can extract more ones and zeros. Right. Definitely. Right. And I mean, that's just that, you know, these guys that do the undercover, you know, filming, they obviously have an agenda, which is they want people to become vegan, but they're very sympathetic to the workers who, you know, sort of toil under conditions that can

be at times be pretty stressful. And that's what sort of causes them to lash out many times. And then the sort of agriculture industry obviously just sees this as a pretty big threat, these guys coming in and filming on the cover in their farms, and their argument is that they're capturing these anomalies. This doesn't happen every day, and they're using it to sort of amplify, you know, their issue. What is his take on this, though? His take is not that it's not anomaly at all. He says it's not.

He says that in every single farm he's ever entered, he's ever filmed undercover, he has witnessed animal abuse. Wow. That was his take. Does he go to these organic, free-range places? Does he ever try those? I think that, you know, the biggest sort of target for them are the bigger… Factory farms. Factory farms. Does he go to these organic, free-range places? Does he ever try those? I think that the biggest sort of target for them are the bigger... Factory farms.

Factory farms, yeah. Boy, would it freak people out, though, if you go to a grass-fed, free-range farm and watch them abusing cows, too. And you'd be like, oh, shit. Because that's what everybody wants to pretend. Like, I don't have any murder on my hands. Why? My meat is grass-fed. And they smile right before they cut their throats.

Right, right. We actually went to a slaughterhouse. Actually, smile right before they cut their throats. Right, right. We actually went to a slaughterhouse. And actually, that was probably. Oh, that was absolutely, yeah. You asked before what would have been one of the most surprising things. That was probably the most surprising thing we did is we went to a slaughterhouse. But it was at a humane ranch. It was a certified humane ranch.

And we saw the whole process. We saw them tagging a baby calf, like a baby calf that was just born within like the last 24 hours. Mariana got to like tag the calves here. And then, you know, we saw the other end of the process where, you know, what is it, 18 months later or something like that, they're slaughtered and they led us onto the floor of the slaughterhouse. And they said, you know, we have an open door policy because, you know, we want to be sort of as transparent as possible, you know, about how this food is, you know, raised and how it's slaughtered. I've been eating meat all my life, and I've never once seen a cow slaughtered,

and I thought it was a really eye-opening experience to be able to sort of consume thousands and thousands of meals and not know exactly where you're – so disconnected from where our food comes from. How do they kill the cow? So they use what they call a knocker. And they basically... Like no country for old men? Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. And it sort of stuns the cow.

It doesn't kill them right away. But it definitely sort of paralyzes them for a moment and puts them into a deep unconscious state. And then they hang them upside down and they state um and then they hang up that upside down and they slit the throat and they cut the you know the arteries and and they never wake up from that no no they bleed them to death so it's almost instant yeah yeah yeah that seems fairly humane yeah you know like it's not how it happens at every farm though you know again this is a humane farm what's the least humane way they do it kosher kosher is really bad i have no idea pretty sure kosher they just cut their neck i think kosher uh that's there's a process that

has to be uh followed and um one of the parts of the process involves cutting the neck yeah i think they yeah i don't think you're allowed to use that stun thing it's kosher you know there's some things that are called standard farming procedures. I think it is, right? Standard farming procedures. Common farming practices. Perfectly legal,

but so violent to see. We watched tons of videos of this that were filmed undercover. The de-beaking of chickens. So they don't poke each other because they get so close to each other. Yeah, the cutting of the tails of the pigs, all that is just hard to see. The taking away of the baby pigs from their mothers, you know, and you can see them caged in these little tiny compartments.

All that is, you know, again, common farming practices, but very hard to see. And obviously there's a lot of interest there for us to be disconnected from our food and not see what happens. And I'm not a vegetarian at all. I still eat meat, but it was definitely a very interesting place to be a part of and to find out more about how it all works. I'm not a vegetarian either, but I certainly am not a fan of human cruelty. And I think that's the real issue.

It's not whether – because these animals do not live forever. And the reality is that they're – there's quite a few realities when it comes to being a vegan. One of them is if you do decide that no one's going to eat meat anymore, and we make a law and the whole world has to let all their animals go, they're going to keep fucking, and they're going to keep making baby animals, and then you've got a real problem. Because what are you going to do then? Are you going to castrate the males?

Are you going to sterilize them in some way? Are you going to reintroduce predators into the environment? You're going to have to do something to keep the population down. I don't know how you plan on doing that, but how are you going to do that and not put into jeopardy human beings? There's a reason why we rose to the top of the food chain. And one of the reasons why is because we can control our environment from predators. We can box up a city, make it nice and tall, and keep out the mountain lions.

And we know how to do that. There's never been a mountain lion in New York City. LA, there's been. Santa Monica recently. Oh, my God. Yeah. See that one? Every time I run a griffith park man i'm afraid i'm gonna get pounced on yeah i saw one very recently in santa barbara wow i was driving through montecito you know where montecito is a really beautiful neighborhood and this fucking thing ran across the road and my wife initially said coyote she goes look it's coyote and i thought it was a

coyote you know we saw in our headlights and then i saw the tail and it's tail and it's and i noticed that its body was like kind of bouncy whereas coyotes are really stiff and you know they have that sort of stiff twitchy leg movement sort of a thing oh shit it's a mountain lion and i'm like in santa barbara oh man this is crazy yeah it's like this is a really urban place but there's a guy some guy at national geographic right now doing a story on like wildlife, and he recently released a picture of, I think it was a bobcat. I don't think it was a mountain lion, but it was a bobcat, and it was caught by one of those trigger cams. And it's at night, and the whole background of downtown LA was basically taken by the observatory where there are millions of little children running around. But the Griffith Observatory is hardly LA.

It's pretty rural. It's a small area that's rural, but they have coyotes biting people there. Like some homeless person went to sleep there and woke up because they got bit by a coyote. The coyote came around and tested them just to see if they could eat you. Is that good? Well, the guy might have been really fucked up. Who knows how drunk or high or messed up he was. I mean, there are coyotes in our backyard constantly.

Oh, yeah. It's LA. It's a bunch of cat-eating assholes they are. They steal your cat. Very few people in LA let their cats out. Right. Well, because you see all the missing signs in the neighborhoods, right? It's like, you know what happens.

Yeah, I live in a really rural place. And there was a mountain lion sighting in my neighborhood about a year ago, and coyotes are there every day. I see hawks, and we saw a crow in our yard, and all these other crows were squawking. We're trying to figure out what's going on, and the crow was, there was something wrong with it, obviously. It was like kind of hobbling and hopping around in this branch, but it couldn't fly away. So we went inside, and then we came out like couple hours later, and there was just feathers and guts everywhere. All it had to do was people had to get away for a little bit, and then some predator came swooping in. It was probably a raptor, some sort of a hawk.

Hawks are everywhere around where I live. They're big, too, man. They're big, creepy murderers, just are everywhere around where I live. They're big, too, man. Big, creepy murderers. Just flying murderers from the sky. Swooped in and jacked this crow. I mean, they don't eat berries. Original drones. Yeah.

Hawks don't steal tomatoes. They're jack-moving things. Anything's sick. Oh, I'll take care of this. I got it. They're like the cleanup crew for the wounded animals. So animals eat other animals. That's another problem.

Is that okay? Is it much more humane for a deer to get eaten slowly by a pack of wolves than it is to get shot by a hunter? I don't like the idea of veganism, but I don't like the idea of animal cruelty either. Yeah, I think that's where most people land, right? like the idea of veganism, but I don't like the idea of animal cruelty either. Yeah, I think that's where most people land, right? I mean, so, but they're, you know, like the animal rights groups, they, you know, they think have done an effective job of sort of getting people like us who eat meat and... Thinking about it. Yeah, thinking about it.

Yeah. Because, you know, it is hard to watch people beating a cow or something like that. And it should never exist. And again, it goes back to the same thing. It's a human issue. It's about humanity. It's about what is causing a person to do something like that. Well, it's a mental illness.

It's a sickness. Hitting a cow with a crowbar. What is happening? How is that possible? I couldn't do it. You couldn't do it. Why is it happening? Yeah.

So when we interviewed the woman who runs this humane farm, one of the questions I had was, why do you treat them? Because they really put a lot of effort into treating these cows well while they're alive. Why do you put such emphasis in treating well the cows if you know they're going to die, if the farm's going to kill them anyway? And she said, exactly because we're going to kill them and use them for meat. They're going to be our food exactly because of that. It is mandatory for us to treat them well. And I really like that philosophy. I think that's a beautiful philosophy. I watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain's old show, No Reservations. And one of the things,

it was about this place in New York that is, they are not just a restaurant, they're a restaurant and they have their own butcher shop, and they also have their own farm. So they grow all of their food. I guess it was Maine. Yes. Okay, I'm confusing two different things. One of them was a butcher shop that's also a farm,

and they grow their own food, and they kill their own animals, and then sell the meat. So you know you're getting it humanely. And the other one was a farm in Maine where they locally source everything from their own farm, all their food, all the vegetables, all the animals, and they were showing all the different pigs they raise and they're petting the pigs and talking about the different parts that are going to be delicious. And it's kind of weird because you're like, well, you're petting that thing and you're going to kill it.

But is it better that way yeah it's better that way to be nice to him until you decide to be really mean you know yeah i mean it's probably one of those things that as we develop synthetic meat oh man yeah we're probably gonna move away well they're really close to doing that then some guy in like london London or England has done it, right? He's figured out how to do it. He made the first hamburger or something like that. I don't know. I don't know where they have, but I do know that they're capable of doing things now where they can reproduce cells and they can reproduce certain types of tissue.

Like Kurzweil was telling me about this woman who had something wrong with her esophagus. So they built an esophagus out of biodegradable material, used stem cells, and used the biodegradable material as a scaffolding. The stem cells built a brand new esophagus, and they operated on her, installed the new one, and now she's fine. And that's like they're making parts for humans so it just seems to make sense that they're going to make meat yeah like and i don't know how i feel about that yeah maybe vegans will eat like a fake steak yeah maybe they're down with that that'd would be like the best thing for them. Yeah, they realize how delicious and karma-free, a nice karma-free cheeseburger.

That would be awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think that's inevitable. It's a headache fish. That's great. It's coming. I mean, they're going to, well, you're talking about doing it with humans. They're talking about developing parts that are completely artificial, completely artificial cells that interact with your cells with no immune response.

They're talking about these things being an inevitability of the future that's not science fiction in fact it's all based on proven research and and uh there's proof of concepts already available and it just seems to make sense they're gonna have a fake chicken a fake headless chicken running around just waiting for you to eat it. Breasts and legs. Doesn't know what's going on. Literally has no brain. It's not that they're stupid. They have zero brain. Because every chicken's stupid.

But this would be like there's nothing going on. You don't have to worry at all. Just pick it up and kill it. You're not even killing it. It's not even alive. Featherless. It's like all the annoying things

that you have to do when you Yeah. We've actually had to kill a chicken. But in Colombia, that was... It's not a pretty process, taking the feathers off a chicken. And it seems to me that the real thing about killing an animal and eating an animal is the fact that this... It's not just that it's alive, because vegetables are alive as well. It's the fact that it's alive and it can move.

Yeah. And feel pain. And feel pain, yeah. But if you take away the whole feel pain part and it can't think and just headless chickens. Like you got to, you know, you have some new sort of a way to make the heart beat without a brain. Just really fucking stupid headless chickens. Vegans still wouldn't go for it because they don't eat eggs. And I have chickens, and the chickens lay an egg every day.

And you can eat the eggs, and no one gets hurt. But vegans are still not down with that. No, they're not. But that's how far removed we are from the farm, is that I only found out that chickens lay an egg a day, like two years ago. Yeah, it's true. I had no idea. Oh, I only found out a year ago that an egg doesn't become a chicken i thought that an egg became a chicken and the only you eat them before it happens

but no it's a hen lays an egg whether the rooster's involved or not but if the rooster's in the house then the chicken can get pregnant and then the egg can become a chick but if there's no rooster i didn't know that. See? Most people don't know that. I had no idea. It's amazing how removed we are from the whole process of food. So there's no life there.

No life at all. Zero. Zero life. Zero threat of life. Impossible to make life. And in fact, if you don't eat the egg, then the chickens will probably eat their own eggs and go crazy. They'll become fucking cannibals or something. I don't know.

They do eat their own eggs if you don't leave them in too long. Yeah. For vegans, though, the problem is not that they're eating the egg because there would be life in the egg. It's because you're eating an egg that comes from a chicken that is probably being abused in order to produce these eggs. Sure. That's, I think, the thinking behind it.

But you could have it the way I have it, where my chickens live on a full – they have a full acre lawn and they go inside the chicken coop at night, which is huge. And we set it up like – we wanted to make it as nice as possible, super humane, really big place. Like the chicken coop itself is bigger than the studio where I have 14 chickens and they just go in whenever they want at night and we shut the door and lock it down. So you get 14 eggs a day? Yeah. What do you do with them? I eat them. All 14?

They're delicious. I don't eat them all. I mean, I have a whole family. But I give them to friends if they want them to. Yeah, they just started laying the eggs recently. But yeah, we had people over this weekend and we gave them some fresh eggs. They taste delicious too.

Yeah. Because we give the chickens like vegetables. We buy vegetables. I make kale shakes pretty much every morning. And it's cucumbers and kale and celery and fruit and stuff like that. So a lot of times we have leftover stuff, leftover kale and leftover. And we feed them that. And then we feed them chicken feed.

And they wander around the lawn. And they basically eat anything they find. They try to eat your house. They're stupid as shit. They peck at your house. They're like, hmm, maybe this house is edible. They're just checking everything for food. but they've become like our pets you know they're not they're not chickens that we're eating we're just getting eggs out of them but it's amazing how much you get out

of them they give you food and that food is based entirely on food that you give them so it's just this process it's like a natural healthy cycle and gets hurt. They're happy when they see you. You know, there's no cruelty involved. And so for me, it's like, I just started doing this really recently. We started growing our own vegetables and raising our own chickens. And not as like a doomsday prepper sort of a thing. But just as like, let's see what this is like. You know, my wife super got into it. So it's been really fun. It's been kind of cool. What vegetables do you grow? My wife super got into it, so it's been really fun.

It's been kind of cool. What vegetables do you grow? All sorts. We grow hot peppers. We grow cucumbers. We grow tomatoes. We grow squash. We grow a lot of different things that you can eat.

Kale? We haven't started doing that yet, but that's the next step. Kale, we're trying to move our little garden to a new spot, and we have this new area we're going to set up. It gives a lot of sunlight and the idea is to just uh the the best idea i think would be completely self-sustaining we're going to go solar power too but one of the things we found out is like solar doesn't help you if the power goes out you still need a generator and i was like that's stupid that's so dumb like how is that possible like the guy explained to me at the solar place i go so if the power goes out we're still up he goes no actually you have to have a generator and i go what what are you talking about what does that mean like doesn't make any sense like somehow or another there's got to be a way to have a completely standalone system but uh it's it's not that

easy i think you have to have because your house is still connected to the grid is that maybe could be i mean maybe completely removed from the grid? Is that the reason? Maybe. Could be. I mean, maybe if you're completely removed from the grid. So you just want to be completely removed from the grid? Oh, yeah. I would think that would be the smartest thing that anybody could do. So maybe you are a doomsday prepper. No, it's not that I'm a doomsday prepper.

It's that, like, I think to be self-sustainable would be – ultimately, what I want to do – these are my beginning steps. Ultimately, what I want to do is get a bunch of friends involved and buy a piece of land, build houses, and have a farm on it. Not a cult. Just get like a few couples. Sounds a little culty. A little culty. Everything I do is a little culty. But I do it.

It's a fine dance. a large plot of land, you know, like several hundred acres with a few families and everyone sort of have this big space that's their own and we share in like a community farm and that everyone gets their food from there. That way, see, one of the weird things about neighborhoods is that you don't pick them. You sort of just, you pick where your neighborhood is, of course, if you can, if you have that freedom, but you don't really pick your neighbors. They're there. We like this house.

We like Manhattan Beach. Let's move in. And then you're moving in around a bunch of people that you don't even know. Whereas the whole idea of community and culture and tribes used to be that we lived near all of our loved ones. We had them all together. We don't do that anymore. It's kind of rare. Yeah, it's funny.

We were playing the lottery game the other day, as you often do. If you won the lottery, what would you do? And that was definitely, it was on the top of my list. I would buy a big house that I could build lots of houses around and I could move all the people I love around me, my friends and family. Yeah. Well, I've actually, we've actually sat down, our family sat down with a couple other families that we really like and we actually started talking about doing that and uh where we've decided to make some uh have some meetings have some dinners where we uh meet and discuss the idea and uh look

at like various locations whether or not it'd be feasible with you know all the people that are they all have sort of alternative entertainment type jobs like comedians and writers and stuff like that and so we're all just thinking like what an awesome community that would be into to live in a place where you're in a town where there's uh you know like a good town like a healthy place with a city that's close by but set up an establishment where you could grow your own food so you don't't have to worry, like, is this organic? Are these grass-raised? Is this farm healthy and clean? It's your own farm, and it wouldn't be hard to do. And if you think about how much money you spend on food every year,

it seems to me that if you have quite a few people hiring some really competent, nice people to run a farm for you, well, people would appreciate a good job where they work for nice people and everybody's ethical about the whole situation and how everything's done and fair. And you set up a nice little community farm. I don't think that that's impossible. It doesn't seem like a big dream. It seems like something that's entirely doable. And a new reality show. Yeah.

That's where it all goes awry. So you don't need to be tough to get the lottery, to win the lottery, I show. Yeah. That's where it all goes awry. So you don't need to be tough to get the lottery, to win the lottery, I guess. Well, it seems like you're going to need some money for sure. You need some money to set up almost anything. But the real problem would be you'd have to planning and you'd have to get permits to build houses. Or you'd have to buy a bunch of houses together, which is even more ridiculous. How are you going to pull that off that would be hard but i just think that ultimately that seems like it would be the ideal situation to get all of your food that way not all of it i mean you still go to

the supermarket buy mayonnaise and some shit you don't want to sit around making yourself but how beautiful would it be to not worry like Like, okay, the power goes out. Well, guess what? We have power. Okay. The supermarkets are empty. We have a farm.

We get all of our food from this, with this area. Then you just have to worry about the other people. Yeah. The shit hits the fan. Yeah, exactly. That's where the problems start.

Trying to steal your crops. Well, we took this to a doomsday place again. That's what I do. Yes, you did. Try to stay positive. That's why we do. Yes, you did. Try to stay positive. That's why we need our guns.

Six episodes. So any other interesting topics? We did one about homeless youth where we actually spent a lot of time with young people who are homeless here in Los Angeles and we spent a couple of nights sleeping under the bridge. Whoa. Oh my God, you did? Yeah, we did. Both of you together?

Yeah. You live in LA, you know what it's like, you know, driving downtown or Hollywood and you see all these homeless, you know, kids and sometimes adults. Did you guys go to Skid Row? So we went to Skid Row. It starts off in Skid Row and, you know, we walked. Explain that place for people who don't know. So Skid Row is the largest homeless community in the nation.

That's, I mean, thousands and thousands of homeless people. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's sleeping on the streets in tents. And, you know, they've tried various times to clean it up. But it's, you know, there's a lot of issues there. It's like, where are you going to house them? And there's a lot of housing and there is a lot of shelters down there, but not enough to sort of meet the demand of how many homeless people are actually down there. And so if you go down there day or night, you'll see, you know, hundreds, if not thousands

of people walking the streets, you know, with their carts. And it's just another side of the city that, you know, it's actually right next to the architecture downtown and so it's sort of, you've run across it here and there if you're living in LA, but it's definitely an eye-opening experience to walk down there because there's a whole ecosystem down there that sort of caters to, not caters, probably not the right word, but you know, like that is, uh,

supports, um, the homeless down there, um, from, uh, you know, clinics and shelters and stuff like that to obviously drug dealers and, uh, and gangs that sort of run the territory down there. Because, um, as the activists who we follow down there told us, it's not just the homeless community. It's probably the largest concentration of addicts in the country as well because most people, obviously, if you're living on the streets, you're either dealing with a mental health issue or some sort of addiction or both. So, yeah, that was crazy. It was fairly eye-opening, I'm sure, to see the population, right? It was. And the idea is that if you're sort of above 35 and you're homeless, you're on Skid Row.

If you're under 35 and you're homeless, you're in Hollywood. And that's even more sort of surprising because you think of Hollywood, you think of the Walk of Fame, right? You think of all the stars and celebrities. And then for us who live here in L.A. and we drive by Hollywood every day and you see all those homeless kids every day and you know that they're sleeping out on the streets. And this, again, because of mental health issues or addiction or just because they come from broke down families and have nowhere to sleep, which was some of the cases of the people that we filmed. And so we decided it was, you know, sort of important if we were really going to dive deeper into this issue to spend the night with them, with two of the people that we were filming. I would have faked it.

I would have did it just like that dude, not Survivor Man, who's real, Les Stroud. Who's that other guy? The fake guy? Oh, who's the fake guy? The English dude, handsome bastard. Bear, Bear Grylls? Bear Grylls, yeah. Does he fake it?

Oh, yeah. He sleeps in hotels. No, he does not. Oh, yes, he does. Oh, yes, he does. yeah. He sleeps in hotels. No, he does not. Really? Oh, yes, he does. He got busted. No way. Yes, he did.

Yes. What I like is that when he... I can't really dish it out. Well, go ahead. I like that you always say, and now I'm here in the middle of nowhere. You can't see. And you know that there's like a big camera and a camera guy and everything filming you.

Well, that's one of the beautiful things about Les Stroud. There's nothing but him. He brings cameras and a backpack. He does everything himself. himself he sets up the cameras he even has videos of him setting up the cameras so you can see him when he walks off like he'll walk 100 yards in the distance and film it he has to go back and get the camera and then take it and put it 100 years for 400 yards forward and have him walking towards it like he sets everything up himself it's very time consuming what's the name of that show? Survivor Man. Survivor Man is the real one.

The other one, Man Against. Whatever the fuck it is. It's total horse shit. The reason why that show was created was because Les Stroud wouldn't play ball with producers and set up fake shots. They wanted to like, oh, Les stumbled upon this dead animal.

This is how you fix this dead animal so you could eat it. This is how you cure the meat or cut it up. Bear Grylls does all that stuff. So he's like, he would do it. He would fudge shit. And Les Stroud said the only way to do this is to do it real. So he will starve. He'll be out there for five days with no food and really freaking out and not knowing whether or not he's going to get out of there and trying to figure out how to alert the crew and how to start a fire when it's raining out like

all that stuff is real when you watch that show he deals a hundred percent real which is it's so fascinating yeah when i when the people found out about the other show the barrel grill show they were like get the fuck out the guy sleeps in tents no come on man he's out there for real hotels really he really is in four seasons oh man like He's out there for real. Hotels? Really? He really is in Four Seasons. Oh, man. Like he's pretending he's covered in mud. To keep the flies off your face, you've got to smother your face in mud.

No, no mud, dude. He's in a mud mask. He's getting his feet massaged. Oh, my. Pretending he's out there. I knew there was some fakeness to it, but that much, I had no idea. It's fake as fuck. It's totally fake. You know, like this one, he found like a dead sheep and he like turned the sheep, like made but that much I had no idea it's fake as fuck it's totally fake he's you know like

this one he found like a dead sheep and he like turned the sheep like made clothing out of it that's probably fake too

I mean I don't know I would assume he's not drinking his own piss I mean if you're gonna fake everything else why wouldn't you fake drinking your own piss

I mean I hate to admit this I draw the line I'm drinking my own piss I've drank my own piss before why well because someone told me that there's a thing called urine therapy.

And I said that. Why? Like, this is a person who has covered investigative journalism for her whole life. She's seen horrific things. She's been to the Oxycontin Center of the world. I tell her I drank my own pee. Why? Just immediately.

Like, what is wrong with you? Can I leave now several athletes uh have uh thought that it's a good thing to do that somehow or another you get vitamins that pass through your body and then you recycle them in your urine and that your urine is sterile and it's not nothing to worry about and there's actually antibodies in your it's very controversial but i had uh done it to see if there's anything to like when i was I was sick, I drank my own pee a couple of times. I don't know whether it helped me or not. Room temperature?

Body temperature? Right out of the hatch. Really? Right into a cup and down the old pipe. It's more, I don't recommend it, first of all. I want to be really clear. And I don't do it all the time. I've done it a few times.

Once on the radio. Just because I wanted to see. Because I'm not squeamish. I hosted Fear Factor for six years. I know what's bad and what's not and drinking your own urine even if it's terrible

it's no big deal compared to some of the shit that I've seen I've seen face to face people eat horrific things and not just once I've seen it hundreds of times so it's like

for me drinking my own pee oh god animal dicks urine 24 ounces of donkey cum. I saw people drink donkey semen. That was what got the show canceled, actually. They had to drink donkey semen, and TMZ got a hold of the video.

It got online before the show aired, and then NBC pulled the episode first and then canceled the whole show. I had no idea. Yeah, that was the second run season of Fear Factor. The video's online. How far can we take it? Yeah, exactly. That's about as far as you can take it. Well, that's the thing is that that was approved by the network.

That's the most fascinating aspect of it. And when I say by the network, I should not say by the network. I should say some executive that decided for the network. That's what I should say. Whether or not it represents the corporation of NBC as a whole. I think that would be misjudging it because they pulled it when they found out about it. But someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to make people drink

cum. They say, it seems reasonable. And the four contestants drank it? Oh, yes. Not just one. Three people drank it. It was twins and three groups of twins. The video is actually available online. You can still get it because in other countries they didn't censor it. Yeah. There was three, it was twins and three groups of twins. The video is actually available online. You can still get it because in other countries they didn't censor it.

In other countries, Fear Factor airs all over. I think it aired like more than a dozen countries worldwide. And they- In other countries that's customary though. That's actually one of the ways that we got it passed. Oh, really? I was just kidding. Yeah.

New Zealand. One of the things about Fear Factor is if we, especially during the first season, if anyone, if we aired people eating things, it had to be something that people ate in other countries. So, like, insects are very common. People in poor countries eat insects all the time. In fact, insects are probably eaten more than livestock in a lot of countries. So that was an easy one. We could prove that. And then in New Zealand, they started selling shots of horse semen at bars.

Like, as a novelty. And people would, you know, mosey up to the bar and buy a shot of horse semen. And apparently they said it gave them energy and all sorts of crazy things were attributed to it. Most likely placebo effect. I don't know. You better have a good story afterwards. You got to justify it somehow. Somehow or another, you got to say,

listen, I know it seems crazy, but I feel awesome. I drank that horse. You're probably so freaked out that you drank horse cum. You don't know what's going on in your body. Your fingers are tingling. You can't feel your feet. You don't know what the fuck you just did. So because of that, NBC said,

well, the people are serving it. We brought them a news story. Not we. It was not my idea. I should stress that. And so that allowed them to sign off on people drinking 24 ounces of Donkey Kong. 24 ounces?

Yeah, it was ridiculous. Not only that, how about the contestants at least had a shot at winning some money, but we had PAs drink it. And they only did it because it was part of their job. Just the festival. They got like $100. No, no, no. Why?

To see if it could be done. Whenever we did a stunt on Fear Factor, there was several times where we'd look at a stunt, whether it was a physical task or whether it was someone eating something. look at a stunt whether it was a physical task or whether it was something and some someone eating something we had to figure out what's the correct amount and whether or not physically a task could be completed so the the physical aspect was handled by stuntmen first of all who would look at it and say well you shouldn't do it that way because i don't think a guy could do that and if he does do that he's probably going to hurt himself in this way or that way. And then with the eating thing, that's really the only way to find out. You've got to like how many bugs can a person eat? Hmm, let's see.

Okay, we'll try to get a PA to eat 10. And then the PA would have like 10 minutes to eat 10 bugs and they'd be like three bugs in just hurling. And you're like, okay, this is too much. Let's cut it down to five. We'd have to make it some sort of a reasonable amount. So you'd have to have more than one PA because you want to have a control group.

So you have a few PAs. And I hope you pay them really well. I would give them extra money. I would give them extra money all the time, especially the horrific ones. I don't remember how many dollars I gave them. It was several hundred dollars I gave them as extra PAs.

But that's nothing. Several hundred dollars. What the fuck, man? You just drank cum. You know? What's really... I'm just making a note here that next time a PA complains to us i think

we should tell them about fear factor yeah being a pa sucks for a lot of a lot of places i mean sometimes it's cool you know but for the most part not good we were offered actually we didn't eat we were offered um monkey brain in the amazon right that's the time remember it wasn't the brain what was that awful thing It wasn't the brain. It was just monkey. No, it was monkey head. He cut off the monkey. Well, the head was there.

I don't know. And then what was it that you ate that I hated that had all those hairs? It was... The little hairs? The armadillo of the Amazon.

The tattoo? The tattoo. It's an armadillo? Yeah, it's like an Amazonian armadillo. How do you spell tattoo? T-A-T-U? T... No, I think it's T-adillo? Yeah, it's like an Amazonian armadillo. How do you spell tattoo? T-A-T-U? No, I think it's T-A-T-U.

T-A-T-U, maybe? It's Portuguese. I should know this, but I don't. Yeah, you should. What's up? I'm from Portugal. We don't have tattoos in my country. Oh, but is the Brazilian Portuguese the same? It's the same language. They say everything? Different accent, yes.

Like there's no confusion? Some words say everything? Different accent, yes. Like you don't, there's nothing, no confusion? Some words here and there are different, but not English and American. I went to tattoo and it's all... Here it is. Here it is. This is what Darren ate. Yeah, there it is. Whoa.

It's an ugly looking thing, right? How do you spell that? It tastes like it looks. T-A-T-U. T-A-T-U. Wow. Armadillo. What a creepy looking thing.

It was awful. It tasted, I mean, worse than it looks like. There's also a Russian music duo of these little sexpot Russians called Tatu. T-A-T-U. And there's all these pictures of them like naked, making out, touching each other's boobs. Is that what you're looking at right now? Yeah. I didn't mean to.

But the thing is that when, I remember when we ate the meat, the hair is still there. So they sort of burn, they don't take the, so it's slightly burned from the barbecuing of the meat. That's it? And you can still taste it. And it tastes awful. It really does. But they love it. It's a delicacy there.

They did. What does it taste like? It just tastes terrible. It tastes like, what's that stuff? Tripe. Tripe. Oh, I like tripe that stuff? Tripe. Tripe. Tripe? Oh, I like tripe. Really?

Yeah. I like menudo. Menudo is, yeah. I like menudo. I like tripe and menudo and organs and all that stuff. It's a little gamier. There's a place in Boulder, Colorado called Papusas. And man, we used to go there all the time. If you're in Boulder, I guess it's not Mexican.

It's Spanish food. Maybe it is Mexican. Papusas, though, they have the most sensational menudo. It's amazing. It's all hearts and organs and liver and tripe. Sounds terrible. I like that stuff. It's fantastic.

I love all that stuff. Super legit. This one place is so good. It's spicy. They say it's a hangover cure. I think it's just so good you forget the fact that you hungover. But I've had it in other places and it's nasty. I've had it in a place in LA and it tasted like shit.

It's all about doing it right. It definitely tasted like shit. It wasn't good. I've had Menudo and maybe it's not a fair comparison. Well, if you live in the middle of the Amazon, you're going to eat what's there, right? Do they eat those capybaras, those crazy big rat things?

Do they eat those things? They must. I mean, it must. We saw a couple. We didn't see them being eaten, but we saw the capybaras everywhere. I think anything

is open. It's open season for whatever's there if you actually need to survive there. Yeah, they eat crazy shit. Do they eat jaguars? Well, probably not.

They're actually really hard to see. I think most people that come in contact with them, it's too late. They're like really stealth predators. You know, I was almost attacked by a jaguar. Really? Like really stealth predators. You know, I was almost attacked by a jaguar. Really?

So we went to do the story on the cambo frog looking for the pharmaceutical promise of the Amazon. And we went in with two herpetologists. These are guys who study poisonous amphibians and snakes. And they go out every month. They go out for a week at a time. And they go deep, deep, deep into the Amazon. I mean, they take a canoe deep inside where there's nothing around. And they said that after much haggling, they decided that they were going to take these two gringos along with them,

me and Darren. And we are camped out in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing. We bought a couple of hammocks. We hung them as soon as we got there. And then at night, they go out with these lights, with these headlamps to look for the most dangerous and most venomous snakes and frogs there are in the world in the middle of the Amazon. It was a crazy, crazy experience. But for some reason, because we were

filming it, we were on this high of filming this documentary and how cool it would be if we found the most dangerous thing in the world. For us, it was we we didn't feel like scared. And we thought it was great. We were filming all this crazy stuff. We got back to the hammocks at night. And I'm sleeping on the edge because they decided they wanted to give me a little privacy. So it was a sort of like little wooden camp thing and I bet no walls, no roof, nothing, just these hammocks. And I was on the last hammock right on the edge. And in the middle of the night, I woke up, nobody told me that in the Amazon, it gets really cold at night. So we had nothing to protect us. And we had these mosquito nets.

And in the middle of the night, I woke up because I was freezing. And then I heard. And we'd been talking about all these stories. They'd been telling us all these stories on the onsa. They call it the onsa there and how it's the most dangerous animal in the Amazon. And suddenly I start hearing it, hearing a breathing right next to my head. And it was breathing and it was breathing really hard. And I could smell it. I could smell it was a big creature, a big, hairy, scary creature breathing

right next to me. And I had one of those, you know, when you have those dreams and you try to scream and nothing comes out. That happened to me. I panicked and I was trying to call out for Darren or for the other guys and nothing came out. I was literally frozen, panicked. And Darren woke up with my breathing because I was breathing really heavily and really scared. And he asked me, are you okay? And I was able to get out just, no.

And Darren comes up to me and I told him I was about to be attacked by an ulcer, by a jaguar. And we went around the camp with the lights just so I could see that there was nothing there. The morning after, wake up, I look at my bag and it was full of hair, full of hair. And I said, I told you, I knew it, I knew it. And I told the scientists that were with us, you know, I saw it was a jaguar it was right next to me and then we looked around and there was a freaking stray dog that had come from like an Indian reservation close by and it had been the stray dog so it would have been a much cooler story if it was a jaguar it's a long way to go it was the scare of my life oh you freak me out. You freak me out for no reason.

I had the image, the smell of death, the hot breath right through the mosquito netting. But it was just a dream. I am terrified of big cats more than anything on the planet. They're so... I have cats at home, like little cats. And I just watch the way they move. They jump on... We feed them on... They always eat on the counter, which is equivalent to

me jumping on the roof of this building. I mean, it's not happening, but to them it's like, boing! They just hop up on the counter to eat. It's so crazy to think that there's one of those that's 200 pounds and it's black as night and it's wandering through the jungle. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about when I was breathing heavily. What kind of poisonous stuff did you guys find when you were out there? I have Bushmaster also.

The snake, not the gun. The snake, not the gun. A lot of things. But, you know, ultimately we were afraid of all these things. And actually Darren has a fascination for snakes, so he wasn't as scared as I was. But what got us was several months after we came back, I had this little thing growing on my finger that I thought it was just a bug and then I decided I had to get it checked out because it was growing and growing and suddenly pus was coming out of it so I thought it was maybe skin cancer and I went to dermatologist and it turns out I got a flesh

eating parasite copulation isis that I caught in Brazil that only exists in a few parts of the world so they didn't have the treatment here. So CDC, the Center for Disease Control, had to make a special treatment for me that had a nurse come to my house. And it was pretty scary. That's why I say, fuck going in the ambulance. I hear stories like that. It's either that or...

What is that show, The Enemy Inside You, or something like that? There's a show that is always about people going to these places and catching parasites. Oh, yeah. And they don't even realize they have them until they – Crawls across their eyeball or something like that. Yeah, they start having weird behavior because there's like a baseball-sized cluster of worms growing inside their head.

I watched that too. Nature, you scary. Nature is very scary. Nature is very scary. So this Wednesday is the show and it's on Nat Geo and it's called Inside Secret America, 10 p.m. this Wednesday. Set your DVRs. Watch it. I am going to. I'm running home.

I'm going to set my DVR. This has been an awesome conversation. I really, really appreciate you guys coming down. Thanks for having us, Joe. And again, I really appreciate that OxyContin Express. That really opened my eyes to you guys and also to the subject at whole. And I think it was just brilliantly done. So I really can't wait to see this.

Awesome. So National Geographic, or it's Nat Geo now is what they're calling themselves. They're being slick. Wednesday, 10 p.m., Inside Secret America. Thank you guys very much. Thank you so much, Joe. Thank you also to On it.com go to o-n-n-i-t and use the code name rogan to save 10 off any and all supplements thank you also to squarespace go to

squarespace.com for slash joe and use the code joe7 to save yourself some cash. And thanks also to Audible.com. Go to Audible.com forward slash Joe and get yourself a free audio book and 30 free days of Audible service. We will be back tomorrow with the great Joey Coco Diaz, a.k.a. Mad Flavor. My little buddy Red Band

will be joining us again as well. He's off doing his own podcast tonight at the comedy store with the great tony hinchcliffe they're doing one there on a regular basis you can check that out at death squad.tv and uh that's you can check out all brian's podcasts there as well as his new t-shirt that he's releasing he uh he just got done designing it and he's got a pre-sale that's available now on death squad.tv.TV. All right. We love you guys. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, everybody. Big kiss.

Mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah. Awesome. Bye.