This Past Weekend - E510 Investigative Journalist Nate Halverson

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Nate Halverson is an independent investigative reporter and producer behind the documentary “The Grab” which explores the international race to control access to food and water. He also writes for the Center For Investigative Reporting covering topics such as organized crime, social media, food access, economic inequality and more.  Nate Halverson joins Theo to talk about what he learned producing his documentary “The Grab”, why every world power is working to control the access of food and water, the financial incentives behind it, what he saw firsthand in countries affected by this, why China is buying large amounts of farmland in America, the implications this power dynamic will have on future generations, and more.  Watch “The Grab”: https://www.magpictures.com/thegrab/home  ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: BetterHelp: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp — go to http://betterhelp.com/theo  to get 10% off your first month. Chubbies: Your summer wardrobe awaits! Get 20% off @chubbies with the code theo at https://www.chubbiesshorts.com/theo  #chubbiespod Morgan & Morgan: Text TPW to 4-THE-PEOPLE (484-373-6753) for your chance to win 2 tickets to UFC 303 to see McGregor vs. Chandler, or click this link https://my.community.com/morganandmorgan?t=TPW  Blue Cube: Follow @BlueCubeBaths on Instagram for a chance to win your own cold plunge this Summer!  ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [e-mail] Hit the Hotline: [phone] Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Ben https://www.instagram.com/benbeckermusic/  Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reiner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is an independent writer, journalist, and reporter. He contributed to the documentary The Grab, which is all about the money and power controlling the food industry in America and beyond. Outside of that, he writes for the Center for Investigative Reporting. I'm really fascinated to spend time with today's guest, Nate Halverson. Nate Halverson, thanks for coming, man. Dude, you kidding me? Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. I watched the grab, which is the documentary that you guys are putting out.

And just so I'm clear, what was the goal of the documentary? Because to me it seemed like you're trying to show that a lot of land or arable land, is that land that can grow crops? Yeah. Okay? A lot of land that can sustain crops is being bought up by different countries, that it's kind of like a land grab for that land right now because they're not making more of it. That's it, man.

I mean, it is in the 21st century, it's looking more like, you know, oil was the commodity of the 20th century, you know, gold, diamonds these things. But in the 21st century, it looks like the rich and powerful are increasingly turning to control food and water as, you know, like the basic necessities. And we're just seeing a ton, whether it's foreign governments, you know, wealthy, Wall Street corporations are all beginning to turn to it. You know, I think now Bill Gates' family, they're the largest farmers in the U.S., right? Like, they're now the largest farmland owners in the U.S.

Right. And that's interesting because he's obviously a guy with a lot of foresight, a guy who's able to kind of envision the next step, obviously, from his past, from his history of being able to, like, acquire companies that are doing that in different realms. you kind of broke this story that this was happening years ago. Yeah, because before this, I mean, before I started working on this, dude, I do nothing about any of this, right? Like, I came into a cold turkey, and I was asked to look at China's largest meat company buying the world's largest pork company, which was based in Virginia. And at the time, Congress was kind of freaking out, you know, like is China buying, you know, our meat supply?

And so I was asked to look into it because I had this background and dig it into Hong Kong financials where this meat company was publicly traded. And I went to China. I talked to folks in the U.S. I talked to people in U.S. intelligence. And it turns out, yeah, like the Chinese government was behind this purchase that's effectively one and four American pigs. And the reason is because the Chinese government kind of clued into something before other folks, which is that the 21st century, food is power, right? Like, you need to control food to control your political future. And so the Chinese government began putting into these five-year plans that they put out

an effort to go overseas and begin buying up food and water resources so that they could control it. So it's a strategy that was happening. Definitely. Right. Yep. And so they want to get the pigs because that's a source of food. Yeah. It's a source of food and that's a source of, you know, for China political stability. Right. If you have food, then the people will eventually follow you. It's like, yeah, you'll do anything to eat. Yes. That's exactly it. And, and, you know, like, I've now traveled the world. That was like the first one that the first food story that I looked at. You know, and I thought like, okay, it's a story about food. It's a story about farming. You know, so I was surprised when I'll, you know, then I'm talking to U.S. intelligence people, right? And then I'm talking to like people in the defense department, right? Like all of a sudden, food is this like big national security. And so as I began trying to, you know, I'm talking to. And so as I began trying to. And so, you know, traveling the world. I mean, I began going to other countries where those governments were using the food supply to control the population, right? And I think that's what people are worried about going forward into the 21st century is that by controlling the food, you can control the people. Right. They're just thinking, okay, how do we need to control the people next? How do we still have

control over people? And they start to look at what can become a scarcity? Yep. And they believe it's food. Yeah, exactly. And so like the country, I had gone to was Venezuela. And Venezuela at the time was having all these food riots, right? Like, people you'd go and you'd work your nine to five job and then you'd come home and there'd literally be a one mile long

line to get into the grocery store. And there's no way you're going to work like a 10 hour day and then stand in line all night, right? And then go back. And so, you know, I was talking to these guys that were working class that had jobs and they were literally eating out of dumpsters. I saw these dudes eating raw meat, right? And he's like, I've got a job. He's like, I just can't afford food.

And so then I went to this, you know, like secret location, this, this, this warehouse full of food. After watching people, like starving people, people scraping by trying to survive without food in Venezuela, I went to this government warehouse full of food on a Sunday when it was supposed to be closed. And who was there? It was a bunch of Venezuelan military and police. They were open. The government has opening it up.

And these guys, these big buff dudes were wheeling out cartfuls of food that like I hadn't seen in like my one week there. And they were giving the authority like the authorities were giving the police and the military, the guys that were knocking down the population food so that they would of course continue to control the population. Wow. But how do you start to see that it becomes a bigger story though? I mean, I just, it was crazy, man, because I just started seeing these dots like these stories that you would see around the world. like, oh, this country is running low on food and its people are migrating out or like this, this country just bought up, you know, like half the farmland in like Madagascar, right? You know, like when I think Daewu out of South Korea bought up like, made like a secret deal

for like half the farmland in Madagascar and then the people rise up and overthrow in the countries in civil war. And you, you begin seeing these stories. And then you begin being like, oh, my God, like all of these seemingly separate stories are all connected as part of this like bigger trend, right? And that's when I began tapping into people who were beginning to follow it, like in the shadows, right? Like the government, the intelligence community, others were beginning to sort of piece this together. But for my reporting anyway, it appears that like it really was the Chinese government was probably the first to wake up to this, to really tap into it.

And there's a reason for that. I mean, the leadership of China went through the great famine, right? Like, Xi Jinping has told stories about living through the great famine, which was the late 50s, when estimates are that, like, man, 37 million people died as a result of starvation. In China. In China. Wow. Yeah.

And so when you go through a period where you're looking around and, dude, I've heard, I mean, like, stories I don't even like to tell because they're so awful about what it's like, you know, if you have 37 million people that actually died as a result of starvation, that means you got like a hundred million people that are close, right? And people are just like doing desperate, crazy things. And so when the leadership of China can remember that, like they are more keyed in, when that trend starts, you know, poking up its head when there are these, you know, when there are these forecasts, things are going to get more and more dire in the future, they moved quickly to begin to sort of control food and water supplies for their population. Right. So they're kind of like,

obviously they're a little more sensitive to it, but, but you, you notice that they were kind of at the head of the trend. Yeah. Yeah, my father grew up in Nicaragua and he grew up there like in the 1910s. Okay. And so he would tell me stories about people starving and kids in his village and stuff, eating dirt and like their stomachs becoming distended. That's right.

Literally making dirt, like people say mud pies and stuff that kids make like, but literally making mud pies and eating them, you know. Just to like be able to put something, like feel like you put something in. Yeah. Where in Nicaragua was your dad? He's from Bluefield to Nicaragua. Oh, sure, out on the coast. Yeah.

So I'm not, I know his, some of his family was down there being missionaries, and that's how his parents met each other. But, yeah, he would just tell me stories like that when I was a kid, and it was just, it was unbelievable. I mean, I've even thought, I've been on a fast for a couple days and seen, and this is a little off topic, I guess, but I seen a guy at Best Buy. I'd been on a fast for four days. I seen a guy at Best Buy.

And I was like, I will, I could, I could eat that guy. Yeah, it wasn't. It was like, I'd never had a thought like that before. I've been a best by probably 70 times. And I'd never thought, you know what? I could eat one of these sales attendants or whatever. But it was just in my head. It was like a little bit of that hunger was like, what are we going to do here if this

guy looks the other way? Yeah, dude. Yeah. I know, man. It's weird. Like, and that's what it comes down to. And that's the thing that like, and then people are surprised. They're like, why are all these venasas?

Venezuelans come into our border. And you're like, because they're hungry. They've been staring at other people thinking about eating them. So they're like, maybe it's time to leave. Yeah, you don't even think that that's one of the reasons why people were coming up. What are some of the other dots you start to connect? Because I see in the documentary, there's like land that's bought in Arizona. There's a huge focus on land that's bought in Africa.

Like, what are some of the other dots you start to connect that really make this in your mind, like bring it to a boil kind of besides just. paranoid Chinese, like, and with, with, uh, forethought. Yeah, right. Uh, I mean, dude, you're right. It was, it was, it was all over the place. It was like, you know, I began thinking, okay, so if China's focused on this, like what other, you know, wealthy countries are focused on this? And, um, and, and, you know, lo and behold, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was one, right? Because believe it or not, even though it's a desert country, it had these huge underground water reserves, aquifers, underneath the desert.

And that's why, like, you know, there are springs, you know, flow into the surface of the desert that are mentioned in the Bible, 2000, whatever years ago. And started in, like, the 90s, they began using their oil derricks to tap into that water and actually use that water to grow wheat in the desert. So this, like, wheat country by the 90s was the world's sixth largest exporter of wheat. Wow, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. But dude, that water doesn't last, right? And so they drained it. And so like those

springs that are mentioned from 2000 years ago, they wouldn't dry. Gosh. And so then it's like, where are they going to go? And that was the question I had in my head. Okay. So like if they drained their water with this program, like where are they? Yeah, man, that's when I found them in like the Arizona desert. I'm talking like saguaro cactus, wily coyote, like desert. Yeah. And they were doing the same thing. Pumping up. this ancient water that doesn't get replenished from rain because it's there from like the last ice age or something. And then they use that water right there to grow alfalfa and then they ship the alfalfa from Arizona basically to Los Angeles, put it on a ship and then ship that alfalfa, which is hay,

all the way back to Saudi Arabia because that's how you move water. Like you couldn't fill enough oil tankers full of water to effectively move water. What you do is if you're water short, you use the water wherever it is to grow the crop. and then you ship the crops because we use 70 to 80% of the water, fresh water around the world. We use it for food. That's what we need fresh water for. Okay.

So if one entity shows up in another space and grows a crop, really what they're using is water. That's the real resource because they could grow it at home if they had the water. 100%. China doesn't have the water to grow enough food to feed its population. Wow. And even with the pigs, does that come back to water too or no?

Even more so because, right, like you can grow, You can grow alfalfa in the Arizona desert and then you can ship all that alfalfa back to Saudi Arabia. Or like, in the case of pigs, you can grow all of the grain, right, that the pigs are going to eat here in the U.S. And then you feed that grain to the pigs and then you ship the pigs back. And so like a pig is an even more concentrated form of water. They call it like virtual water is what an economist would call it. Wow. So, wait, explain that part to me more time about the pig.

Yeah, yeah. So, like, yeah. So you would grow the grain here. Yep. With the water here. Yep. And then you would feed the pig here. Yep.

And then you slaughter the pig here. And then you send the meat back, right? And so now you've used the water to grow the grain here. And animals require a lot of livestock feed. So it takes even more grain than if, like, you were just eating like a meat-free diet. It takes just more water to eat a meat-filled diet, right? Okay. Yeah.

And so then you grow the grain. You feed it to the pig. The pig, the pig craps all over the place. You end up with these, like, giant manure lagoons, which are toxic. Those are here. And you slaughter the pig, and then you ship the meat back. So you get stuck with the shit, and they get the meat. Wow.

And so how does, like, for the example in Arizona, how does that affect, like, Americans? Like, how does that affect us? Totally. So, like, when I broke that story about the Saudis in the Arizona desert in 2015, the locals they didn't know, right? Like they didn't, they knew that their, their groundwater, the well that, the water that they relied on for their homes, like it was getting lower every single year, right? What they didn't know was that some other country had run out of water and it'd come here to grab that water, right? And, and so when I broke that story, people are like, yeah, it's like,

our water's been going down and it's just been getting worse. And so what ends up happening to the people here is like, I talked to people and they were like, one woman, she was a nurse from California, worked her whole life, wanted to retire somewhere more affordable. The desert's beautiful, man. It's beautiful out there. Nice. And so she and her husband get this little ranch, you know, small piece of property, super modest, like double wide trailer.

They drill a well. And now they got water and they got their lives. They're going to retire there. They're going to, you know, the grandkids can come visit. Well, what happens is these big international farming's move in. They keep drilling deeper and deeper and pumping more and more water up. And pretty soon these families are going like, dude, I can't pay. half a million dollars to drill a well deep enough to find the water that's still there.

And so they're at risk of losing like everything, like all their life savings that they put into their homes. Right, because now their land has been sold out kind of from under them, really? Their water's been sold out from under them. But isn't there an agency that would protect the homeowners there? Isn't there some sort of? No, I mean, the law is, is that if you, it's different in every region, but in this part of Arizona, if you buy a piece of land, you can pump out as much water as you want.

Doesn't matter how it impacts your neighbor. Wow. Yeah. So, like, if you're, you know, a multi-billion dollar corporation, you can go in there and buy up land, put in the deepest well and just suck out as much water as you want. And, you know, the folks that live in modestly around you, their water goes away and that's just tough. You know, that's how the law is written.

Right. Yeah, it says right here, according to the United Nations, World Water Development Report, 2024, 2.2 billion people will still lack access to safe drinking water and 3.5 billion will not have access to safe sanitation by 2024. But that's about drinking water, I think. Because drinking water is that the same as water that you're talking about? Well, like if you're pumping water to grow crops, you're eventually going to, you could have the potential taken away somebody's drinking water. And that's what I see, right? But like when it turns to like quantity, like what we're actually using water for.

Like, you know, because people say this. And they're like, oh, Nestle bought up this aquifer. They're going to bottle it. They're going to use it up. And I'm like, okay, but like put it in perspective, one tenth of one percent, one tenth of one percent of the fresh water we use is for drinking. 70 to 80 percent is for growing crops. Wow.

Right? And so when you're talking about somebody tapping an aquifer to bottle water, like one tenth of one percent is how much we as humans drink. Right? That's nothing. It's nothing. What we're pumping water out of aquifers for at like huge, huge rates, huge amounts is to grow food. Right.

Yeah. And so these are, and like, and if, if, you know, like, if it were just drinking water that was an issue, there are ways to move around enough water to get everyone drinking water in theory, right? But when you start talking about food, that's when you're talking about, like, what people really need to move water and they really need water for is for food. Yeah. So drinking water, we can, we have enough water for that. Pretty much, man. I mean, like, the vast amount of water, like, you use as an individual is the food you put into your body and not the water that you drink. Got it.

Like vast. Understood. Yeah. So, okay, so you start to connect some of these dots. You see the, um, the issue in Arizona from Saudi Arabia. Are there other things like that happening around America? Or is that just kind of a one off? No, no.

It's happening around America, right? Like, it's going through this pretty big transitionary. period where like I think like and maybe you know you and I are roughly the same age I think like a lot of people still kind of have this view of like farmers as like you know Willie Nelson's farm aid right like small medium sized farmers like you know both of you know my family were all farmers in Minnesota and Iowa my dad grew up barefoot on a farm right like we kind of envision it is like these these smaller farms but increasingly what they are these really large farms increasingly owned by like Wall Street Parenthood. pension funds or foreign governments or foreign corporations, right? Like that's been the trend line is that these smaller farmers, these medium-sized farmers are getting bought out by bigger and bigger conglomerates. And so like we're in this transitionary period

in the US as to like how food is getting made. I see and so not getting made by smaller farmers, but getting made in by larger corporations. Yeah. That could have other interests in the farm is just a past or just a placeholder. That's it. It's another profit mechanism because, you know, like if you're a country and you're like,

we need to buy up food and water resources to make sure our people get fed and that they don't overthrow us, right? And if you're, if you're Wall Street and you're looking at that, you're like, oh, if there is a crunch on food in the future, food prices are going to go up. And if food prices go up, that's a profit margin. Right. And so, like, I've read these reports put out by some of the biggest, you know, investment banks. And they're just saying, you know, water is the new oil, food's the new gold of the 21st century.

Like this is where things are going to happen. He says right here, as the December 31st, 2022, foreign entities owned about 43.4 million acres of U.S. agricultural land and forest, which is about 3.4% of all agricultural land and almost 2% of all U.S. farmland. I wonder if it's grown since then. Well, there's two things about that is. Because that doesn't seem like that much. No, it's a trend line. But the other thing was, is I pulled all of that data. And when there's an old law in the books, it says if you're a foreign company, you need to register if you're going to buy U.S. farmland.

Some states just ban it outright. But I looked and I was like, I know that this farm is owned by a foreign corporation and it wasn't in the database. Yeah. And so, like, the government wasn't really following up and making sure. And so like I have great, you know, those numbers to me come with a huge asterix, which is like it requires them to report it. Not everyone's reporting it. And the government doesn't seem to be following up to make sure, right? Understood.

Yeah. And then the other thing is, is like you have huge amounts of foreign wealth that are then put into intermediaries like BlackRock or something, right? Like these huge asset management. What does BlackRock got? $9 trillion that they manage. And so you'll have a sovereign wealth fund from another country that will put money there. And so then BlackRock or some subsidiary of BlackRock or a subsidiary of a subsidiary of BlackRock might own the land. But the financial backing is a foreign government.

I see. So there's just like a lot of loopholes and like hidden LLCs, that sort of thing? Yeah. Yeah. Well, how much of the land in America can be used? And even on the planet, if you know, it can be used to grow crops. Oh, that's interesting, man. I don't know how much of the land.

I mean, like what you see in the Arizona desert, it's like it's desert. But if you pump up the water, then you can grow alfalfa, right? And so it kind of comes down to like, do you have the water there to do it? What we know is what they'll say is that like some huge percent, 40 or 70 percent, I can't remember off the top of my head, some huge percent of the world's, you know, remaining available farmland is in Africa, right? And so that's why there's this huge push now for corporations to go down and to try to grab up land in Africa because now they'll say, oh, Africa's going to feed the world.

Africa is going to feed the world? But I'm not saying no, but I remember 20 years ago when we were having to do, wasn't there the annual music every year to feed Africa? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, man, the problem with that, that thing is, is like, so then I went to Africa. I was like, okay, so where's all of this vacant land? And it wasn't vacant, man. People had ancestrally been living on that land.

And they'd been farming for their needs, you know, for their families, right? And what had happened was, is these huge international corporations had come in and just moved people off. Wow. And so I was visiting these places where people were literally dying, having had their land taken from them by one of these international corporations that then could ship the food to a wealthier country. You know, whether that was Europe, China or Saudi Arabia, you know, know, they were literally had their land taken from them, had everything taken from them, right? And you saw it firsthand.

I saw it firsthand. Yeah, there's a really tough part in the documentary where there's a woman crying, really breaking down because of the fear of losing their land. She was really having a tough time with it, you know? That was pretty hard to watch. Yeah, I mean, that stuff's a downer. And what's, you know, and when I showed the film

to people there that are fighting back against this, what they didn't see is that it's part of this like giant international trend, right? Like it really is where you've got like, again, like intelligence communities, governments, like all like kind of behind this big push and this big movement, right? And like you said, it's like when you're when you don't have access to water because somebody upstream, let's say, has dammed the river to grow food and now you don't even have drinking water. oftentimes the thing that's going to get you is your body begins to just slowly get sicker and sicker from not having food or good water.

You just pick up a parasite. You pick up a disease. Your body just becomes way more vulnerable, you know. Yeah. Oh, you even, yeah, you pet a strong shrimp and you could be done, you know? I mean, a lot of things could happen. You eat one bad oyster or whatever, and it could be lights out. Did you know that our friends over at Morgan and Morgan are the official injury law firm

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with our code Theo at chubbies shorts.com. That's code T-H-E-O at chubbies shorts.com. Support our show and tell them we sent you. Don't blend in with the crowd. Stand out with Chubbies. So in Africa, it's, it's even more prevalent, you're saying. Yeah. And I think what, I think, you know, it's, it does seem to be, I talked to a bunch of African investigative journalists at this thing in D.C.

And they saw the documentary and they came up to me after and they're like, dude, I've been seeing this in my country. I didn't realize it was part of this, like, giant international trend, right? Like, it's all sort of tied in. And that's how that was like the same revelation that I had as I started digging in deeper. and deeper was just how interconnected these things are, right? Because like, you know, when you say that, like, yeah, what do you mean when you say that? I just mean, like, I think the dude was from Sierra Leone and he was talking about a big rice farm that had come in and plowed down the forest and moved people off their land and then they were exporting the rice to wherever,

you know, a wealthier country. And he's like, you know, how do I contextualize that? Like, it's obviously an injustice, right? Like, people have been, their ancestral lands been taken from them, but like, where does that fit in? And then you see, oh, it fits in that, like, people in Arizona are basically dealing with the same thing. Maybe not to the same degree, but all of a sudden, they're finding what, like, well, it was once theirs being taken by somebody else. I see. You know, and I think, like, I think the, and so that's what I mean. It's just like there is this big global push. And yes, I do think it's probably happening, and these kind of numbers are super hard to get. And this is the only reason I hesitate.

Anecdotally, I would say, yeah, it appears to be happening most prevalently in Africa. but like getting any good numbers on that. Like nobody, you know, like they're not going out and nobody's going out and like documenting every single instance. So as a journalist, I always hesitate, right? So like in the documentary, you've seen it. We, like just to give you a sense of what we go through, I took every single fact that's mentioned in that documentary

and I put it into a spreadsheet. And then me and a woman who's now a fact checker at the New Yorker, we went through every single fact that's in there. And then we put three sorts of, making sure it was true. And then we hired an outside fact checker to fact check our fact check. You know, like, and so like I always,

and that's like, that's the value to me of good investigative journalism is like, we're gonna put in that extra effort so that like everything is documented. And so, you know, I love this format because this is how like when I'm hanging out with friends, this is how we talk, right? And we're like sharing knowledge.

And like as humans, we sit around the campfire. This is all we've been telling stories. And I love stories, you know. But I'm always, like a little hesitant because I'm like, I don't got a fact checker behind me to whisper my ear like, oh, Nate, you screwed that fact up. And she doesn't have a fact checker behind her to be like, oh, no, you screwed up the fact check. I need the fact check, you know. Right. So yeah, you're just having a, yeah, you're just doing your best, you know, but you obviously spend a lot of time investigating it.

Yeah, yeah. And what, at what point do you start to go down a trail with investigative journalism where you're like, I've already gone too far. I have to fluff this thing up to at least make it hold the value of the weight that I've already put into with my time. Is that a weird question? Well, I think. Or does that ever happen, you know? Well, you made me laugh when he said fluff. Like, do you ever get going on a story?

Yes, and you abandon it. Yes. Yes. And you're like, there's not enough here, even if you spend a long time. Yeah. What often happens, man, is you'll be like, huh, I'm, this is what happens to me. I'm like, huh, I'm curious about that, right? And then I'll start, like, digging into that.

And that thing that I started digging into, I'll be like, oh, no, actually, that makes sense. You know, like, I don't think the world needs to know more about that. I don't think it's going to make anyone's lives better. I don't think it's going to change anyone's perception on how they interact with the world. But as I was doing that, like, I started seeing this other thing, right? And then so then I start looking into that other thing. And I'm like, well, that is pretty interesting.

But in the process of looking into that, then I'm like, holy shit, look at that thing over there. And then I'm moving in. And these things are sometimes, you know, they can be totally unrelational. oftentimes are somewhat related. And then it's that thing that I end up really going after, right? And so I would never, I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to waste your time.

And I don't want to do an injustice to a story by being like, well, I spent time on looking into A and now I have to do something on A. Right. Because oftentimes it's just A slowly shifts into B. And the next thing I know, I'm like, dude, I think people need to, would want to know about C, right? Like, I think people should take a little break from their lives. And lives are tough.

Lives are complicated. We've all got so much going on. I want to like, you know, I want to honor people's time. But I'm like, but I think C is probably worth their time. Right. Yeah. What parts of this as you went through this did it start to like, be like, okay, this is something that makes me realize I have to keep going here?

Oh, I, you know, with this one, I think it was kind of early on because again, man, you know, it's like when, you know, before this I'd been doing organized crime and now I'm doing food and I was asked to do it and I'm like, okay, it's a food story. You know, like, it's not going to blow my mind. It's like Papa John almost. Yeah, dude. And I was just like, but then all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute, you're an intelligence officer for the CIA or you were and you're like telling me X, Y, and Z like, that's pretty

interesting. Well, let me go talk to somebody else to try to corroborate that or get like another hot take on it, you know, and it just kept building. And I'm like, and then I started seeing the stakes, right? Like I, but the number of people that it was going to impact. And we're talking about like billions, you know, like we're talking. about, you know, when you have Wall Street saying this is going to be the biggest trajectory, when you have the world economic forum saying this is one of the top five's existential

threats to our species, you start going like, food and water, you know? And you're like, this is probably worth my time and a lot of sleepless nights. At some point, you just realized, I just think this is this story. This is what, so can I tell you like when I, when we, so we made a film, right? And I'm super lucky because I worked with this amazing director, Gabriella Copperth weight, you know, and she knows how to tell an amazing story. The grab, the documentary. Yeah, it's just like, she made this thing like an international ripper, right?

And, and, but when we're going out and we're pitching it to the studios, they're all like, well, what do you want to come with this? And I wanted, I wanted, what I wanted to happen when people see this documentary is the same thing that happened to me. When I started working on this stuff, it shifted my perception of how I see the world. Like, I fundamentally see the world differently now, having worked on this story. And so I wanted people to have access to that same information. because I think when you begin to, when you see this,

and I don't know if this was your experience or not, but when you see it, you're like, oh shit, like food isn't just food. Food has become like a weapon. Food has become like a power tool for governments to control people in other countries. Like it becomes way bigger. Like how, yeah, how would we see that start to show up in our daily lives? Oh man, food prices. Right.

Go to the grocery store. Right. I mean, do you remember during COVID when, when, in they were like, oh, everybody can stay at home except people that work in slaughterhouses. We got to get everybody that works in slaughterhouses back because we're really worried that there's not going to be meat on the shelves. Well, dude, as I recall, during that time, pork exports to China increased. So the executives of these big meat companies are like, oh, we got to get everybody back.

We're worried about getting meat. And then they were shipping more meat to China. Well, it might have even been there. their farms. Well, yeah, they own, they own, you know, this company that's in China that was, you know, this deal that was backed by the Chinese government. Yeah, they control one and four American pigs. Wow. Yeah.

Can you bring up that article that we're talking about if you can? On April 28th, 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to keep meatpacking plants open. The executive order exempted plants from state and local orders to close non-essential businesses but did not solve plants problems with sick. workers. Wow. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's just interesting because if people are going to need to eat, people are going to need meat, you're going to need people to be able to continue to eat or they're going to freak out. So even if they're stuck at home, as long as they can get a burger, then they're going to keep going until their next burger. You're right, though. I mean, you're kind of like put your finger on it, man. It's like, it is like food is that one thing.

that people want to keep going, right? Like the Chinese government, everybody. And that's kind of that's what takes you to the Arab Spring, right? Like when you saw all of these Middle Eastern governments getting toppled, right? Like the Arab Spring, it was like... What do you mean, the Arab Spring? But Arab Spring was like a little over 10 years ago now. And it was that period where you just saw civil wars breaking out across like North Africa and the Middle East.

And those things never happen. is just like one single issue. They're like super complex. People don't like their leaders. They don't feel like they have hope. But increasingly, the thing that the intelligence community is saying is driving those issues is food prices. You know, like you were talking about food prices here, where we were talking about food

prices here in the grocery store. But like Americans, man, we only spend about 7% of our income on food, on groceries, right? other countries, do they spend like 50%. So whatever they're making, like half their paycheck is going to food. And so when food prices go up for us, it's only going up on like 7% of what we're spending on, right? Right. So it's not hitting us overall as much. Exactly.

Why do they spend so much on food? Because in, I mean, we're just a wealthy nation, you know, and so we have bigger incomes. Oh, I see. So we have larger income. Yeah. So obviously, yeah, if you're making $100 a day, then that's just $7 a day. where if you're making $100 a, if you're making $10 a day, then $7 is 70% of your income.

Yep. And a lot of people, you know, like we're buying food that's like finished. We're buying processed food. We're buying things you can like open a package and eat. But a lot of people in these other countries, they're just buying like commodities like grain and they're baking their own bread. And so when those prices like, you know, basically double, all of a sudden, those people are seeing, you know, 50% of their income almost eat up.

their entire income and they can't feed themselves. They can't feed their kids. And I think that's what it comes down to, right? So in the Arab Spring, there was a ton of that? It was a ton of that. Food prices shot up. You know, they went to historic highs and that sustained. And people started taken to the streets, right?

A whole grievance of issues, but this was a big one. And you saw it move just across these countries. And how was it alleviated? How did they, like, what kind of catharsis did they get into? Is catharsis the right word? now. A lot of them just took out their leaders. Oh, yeah. Like Egypt overthrew their leader, didn't they? Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

And so you just saw, yeah. So you saw like, man, you saw this, and this is the thing about the 21st century is like, that was probably the first blip that we saw like that. And the forecast is for an increasing number of those. And when countries fall apart because of civil wars, oftentimes their people then migrate out. right and then they put pressure on the countries around them because now they've got to feed more people because now you've got a failed nation next to you and it became on almost like a domino effect wow yeah and are the forecast saying that there is going to be like less water that there's going to be less food like where are we getting those forecasts from yeah so um we could pull something up but it's like like 70% of the world's population or some number is going to be living in some form of water scarcity by like 2050, it's like a huge number, right, of people that are dealing with water shortages. And again, like, usually you can eke out enough water for your drinking water,

but can you, do you have enough water to grow the foods you need to eat or for somebody else to grow the foods you need to eat? And so, and then the other thing we're looking at, it's like some places are going to have, you know, people are going to have droughts, of course, but then some places are going to have floods, and too much water can have the same impact as not enough water. Right? Like we just saw this in Pakistan where like their crop was wiped out by these massive floods that just kill off the crops.

Yeah, I used to work on a soybean and corn and cotton farm for a couple of years. And it was amazing how like water was just, I mean, you would stand around and talk about it. You would go look at a radar. You'd ask somebody if they'd seen any water. Totally. It was just crazy. It was unbelievable.

How that was the biggest thing. Yeah. That was the biggest thing. It was like, is it going to rain? Is it not? How are you going to manage your crops if it doesn't? And then how are you going to get subsidized by the government if it doesn't happen at all? Yeah, that's right. And what happens is in those countries that are dealing with all these economic hardships, these dictatorial leaders weren't subsidizing the farmers, right? And what's worse is they were given like their buddies access to whatever, better, better. And so this is what you see. What you're saying in Venezuela when you open the, and you see that the people who are going to maintain the status quo of keeping starving people at bay are getting full groceries. Yes, that's it. It's crazy how quick you will become the Gestapo in that moment, you know? Yeah, yeah. Food becomes the ultimate currency. Yeah. What else were you going to say?

I interrupted you. Well, I was going to say something similar in Syria where, you know, a drought hits Syria and, you know, all of these farmers are losing their crops. people having to move into the cities, food prices are going up. And, you know, rather than being like, okay, the government being like, okay, we need to make sure everyone's taken care of. From what I've read wasn't in Syria at the time.

But it was like Bashir was just giving subsidies to like his buddies, you know? And then you're building up this, this, this, this, you're just building up a lot of anger. Yeah. And you can't feed your kids. It's like, and this is what the, when I talk to people that are in the intelligence community,

this is the thing they say. It's, it's not when this, And this sounds shitty, but this is what they say. It's not when the lowest income, the people that are the poorest can't eat that you see a country topple. Because unfortunately, those people have already adjusted their mental mindset to just being shit on. Yeah. It's when the middle class can eat, people that are used to being comfortable. Right.

People with Honda Accords. Yes. And then when they can't afford to eat and when they're having to tell their kids, sorry, we can't eat today. We got to wait until tomorrow. Right. those people take to the streets. Fuck yeah. Yeah.

And then they overthrow governments. You know, and sometimes the government turns out better. And sometimes the government turns out worse. And people live in violence and bloodshed for years, you know. So it's, yeah, and this is kind of the trend line that we're seeing. And you believe it's an overall trend after all your research and all your digging. You believe that it's an overall trend that's going to continue. It's totally, it's, I think, personally, I think it's solvable.

Okay. Right? I think it's solvable. but it is the trend line that we are on, that if we don't get into another lane of traffic, this is the direction that this road is heading. Got it. And this is straight up from like the,

the U.S. government, I keep saying intelligence community, right? But there is the ODNI, the office of director of national intelligence that oversees the CIA, the DIA, the NIC, all of these intelligence agencies. And the highest level work product they do is something called a national intelligence. intelligence estimate. And they did a national intelligence estimate on water in the year 2012. So basically, they came out and the guy who was spearheading and this is like the highest level work product, the intelligence, U.S.

intelligence community does, said business as usual, you know, is going to be a catastrophe, right? Like, and that was their prediction. Basically, yeah. And they lay out solutions like, we can move things, right? But it, you know, it has, that's going to have to happen on an international level. And like we look at our domestic politics and we're like, there's a mess. And you look at international politics and you're like, there's a real mess. So, you know, we're all going to keep doing what we can and we all get, you know, we're going to keep living. But like. But still this is, I mean, having foresight is super important, especially in a time where it's like we don't even,

there's so much artificial site that you don't know what is foresight anymore. You know, there's so much manipulation. It's so hard to know what's real. On March 22nd, 2012, the National Intelligence Council, which you're saying is a conglomerate of all of those. The Nick exists underneath the ODNI. Okay. Yeah, the ODNI, but yeah.

Release the unclassified report, the intelligence community assessment on global water security. The report concludes that several regions of the world, such as North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems, and that during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems

that will increase the risk of instability and state failure, exacerbate regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important policy objectives. Yeah, I guess how you barter and trade and deal with things is going to become a lot different. Wow. You mentioned Africa, and you guys go into a lot in the dock, why is Africa always get screwed? I mean, since the beginning of time, whether it's the, British coming in or a foreign entity coming in and enslaving or claiming, whether it's them enslaving each other, whether it's the tribes that just can't get along, whether it's a government

that starts up and then sells out. Like, why do they have so much trauma there? Yeah, man, it's a good question. And, you know, I always try to operate from like a place of historically informed journalism, right? Because some of these trend lines are massive. And, you know, what we saw was that Western Europe for some centuries just had this intense power as they sort of globalized the world. And Africa had a lot of resources that they wanted. And they went in there and they grabbed them and they created artificial boundaries and borders around, you know, that suited Western Europe. Like Africa got carved up into territories that suited Western Europe and their treaties so that they wouldn't fight with each other in Europe. Right.

And that wasn't always the boundaries of like the governments and the nations that had lived there. And you know, that and you go back even farther than when Western Europe was sort of the international dominant player, right? Like you look at Genghis Khan, right? Gangis Khan, born in the central steeps of Asia, the dude became a slave, then went from being a slave to controlling like the entire Mongolian empire. then they went into China and they took over China. Then he pushes east and starts taking over Eastern Europe. And then he drives down into Southern Asia, you know, the Middle East. Dude controlled the largest empire of any human in history, right?

And when he, this is the thing. And I'm getting a lot of this. Yeah, totally. It's like the Denver Nuggets. It's like the kind of one person. Yeah, man. But go on. Sorry.

Yeah. And he gets to Europe at that time. And I'm getting this from this guy, Jack Weatherford's book, Genghis Khan, in the making of the, modern world. He's a historian in Minnesota somewhere, one of those, one of those colleges. And when Genghis Khan gets to Europe, he's looking around. He's like, these people are too dumb and too poor for me to bother conquering. You know, like they didn't even have pants at that point. Like pants, like pants are an Asian invention, right? Like pants came from Asia. At that

time in Europe, people were just wearing cloaks. Like they didn't even have pants yet. They didn't, you know, that gunpowder came from China, movable type from China. And so Genghis Khan gets to Europe and he's like, these people are too dumb, too poor, and too ignorant. And he just drove south into the Middle East, where people were doing like algebra and advanced math and like had all of this technology, right? And then that set up these trading routes.

And those trading routes connected some of these great advanced technologies from the Middle East and from Asia. And they started working their way into Europe. And then boom, Europe has the Renaissance. And boom, the Renaissance blows up into the Industrial Revolution. And then that Industrial Revolution, now you have like the Pope carving up the entire world between Spain and Portugal, like Portugal gets one half, Spain gets the other half. And then they're going down and they're carving up Africa,

right? And, and then you just, you get to where we are today, which is that, you know, Africa had a strong say. Yeah, yeah. And how they were and what went on. Yeah. And in the, in the last few, you know, centuries. What things did you notice when you started to explore some of the stuff happening in Africa? Well, issues at what sense? Like I guess like the ownership like who was doing the like you say land getting bought up that had ancestral value of course. Yeah. Who was doing that? Like who was.

Is it hard to know who was doing it? Well, oftentimes it's really hard to trace back who's doing it because you can be like this rush. It can just be these layers of LLC. And who ultimately is behind this LLC can be really tough. Like I can go there and be like, okay, so this is the white South African dude or white Zimbabwean dude. who now is in like Zambia and he's you know moved people off the historic ancestral land and he's doing this like super modern farming right and and these other people that had been there for the families have been there for centuries are now like dying right because they don't have

access to even enough drinking water much less enough water to grow food right um and i can i can be i can see that but like then i look at the property ownership and it's just a jumble of LLCs and that can be pretty tough but you know in the film one of the things we were able to we got this like trove of information documents. I mean, we see that in some cases, it's the leaders of foreign governments that are paying essentially mercenaries to go in and gobble up these resources, right?

And one of the ways they do it, you know, and these emails that we get, we see they just talk about giving gifts to the chief, right? And, you know, essentially bribes, right? It's how I'd interpret that. And what is a mercenary just so everybody knows? Well, a mercenary is effectively somebody who can provide military logistics on behalf of another government. Okay.

So, like, how would I use a mercenary? Well, you could use a mercenary to go into... Are they good guys or bad guys? Oh, they can be... This is interesting. You brought up Rwanda just a minute ago, and I'm trying to remember the name of the actress that was going to hire a mercenary outfit to go in... Like when no one on the international level was stopping the Rwandan genocide, this, this Hollywood actress wanted to hire a mercenary group to try to go in and stop it, right?

Wow. So, like, she was using it potentially, like, she thought of using it as this force of good. But so there are these examples of people wanting to use these types of groups to, like, quell violence, to bring stability, right? To move food into areas that are being controlled by warlords, right? Like so you can, you know, sometimes people make an argument that you need to meet force with force to do good, right? And then you also see them being used by corporations to make deals with warlords, you know, to extract resources. And those tend to have a more deleterious or, you know, fucking create, make life shittier for the people who live there.

Did you see some of that? Like, what were some of the things that you saw like people struggling with? Oh, dude, just feeding themselves, having shelter, you know, like super basic stuff. super basic stuff and it sucks it sucks to see that stuff i don't want to see that stuff you know and then i got to carry it home you know and then in you know it's like it's that thing they always say like you you see these people who have done nothing wrong or just like struggling to survive yeah you know and i go in there is essentially like a storyteller and i'm like you know and they're like dude like we need food we need water and you're like oh you know like what can i what can i what can

I do that's not my role. My role is to tell people about what's happening to you. And then I fly back to San Francisco and I turn on the faucet and I can drink fresh water. You know, and you're like, you know, so these are the, these are, this is, these are some of the challenges, um, of going in and anyways, I went off a little bit, but like this is a lot of effects though. Yeah. I've seen the shit, you know, and like there's, you know, there are stories I've heard and there are things that I've seen that, you know, like I, I wish, you know, which didn't happen to people. And then I wish that I didn't have to experience first end, you know. Do you feel like we're doing the same thing in other countries, though?

The U.S. government or like U.S. corporations? Yeah, like are we doing the same thing that's happening here in other places? For sure. For sure. Yeah. So is it all just even out? Well, no. I mean, I would say that if you're like, if, if, if you're looking at it like, oh,

China's a bad guy or the Saudis are the bad guys, but, you know, the U.S. is, is okay. It evens out in that sense, right? Like we have massive corporations that are going in and are contributing, I think, to this pattern of people who are living on land losing their land or people whose water supplies are being taken from them. And it's destabilizing the world is like the short of it. And then you end up with a destabilized world and you end up with like mass migration. And you end up with countries being like, we don't want any more immigrants. You know, and you're like, yeah, but they left because they were hungry. I'm like, why were they hungry?

Like what was happening to them? Right. And so you're right. Right, you're not getting just immigrants. You're getting starving in some cases. Increasingly, that is the case. Like, at one point, the State Department said the reason, you know, the number one reason people were leaving Guatemala was because they were hungry.

And think about Guatemala, man. Like, think about that region of the world. What have they given us? Avocados, chocolate. I think tomatoes come from that region, right? Yeah. What's that thing called when you go under the stick or whatever? Under the stick.

The Limbata or whatever? I don't know that. the limbo limbo yeah yeah yeah like those countries have given us so much food like how is it possible that a country that is the source

of so many like you think of tomatoes you're like oh Italians must have invented right you're like no man that came from the Americas potatoes came from the Americas chocolate came from the Americas avocados came from the Americas right and how do you have now a region like that where half of the children

are stunted because they're not getting enough calories in nutrition right And so, like, people are leaving Guatemala because there's not enough food. And that's crazy because this place is growing plenty of food. So what's happening to the food is just being exported to wealthier countries. So do you think that we're like some of the reason for China's low water supplies because of us? No, I don't think that's the case with China. I think China's a really interesting example, right?

Because we manufacture a ton over there. Yeah, yeah, totally. No. China is an interesting case, right, man? because this is like, I don't think this is well enough known, but one of the greatest achievements, in my opinion, of the 20th century was what China accomplished. And that was pulling 400 million people out of poverty in like three decades, right? Like you'll hear people talking about all of the great achievements of our species, you know, over the last, you know, whatever,

50 years. And they'll be like, you know, we've reduced, we reduce poverty and hunger by this 80% of poverty reduction, as I understand it, 70 or 80% of poverty reduction in the world is what China accomplished. One country, 400 million people they pulled out of poverty in like two or three decades. Gosh. They now have the world's largest middle class, right? I think their middle class might be bigger than the entire population of the U.S. The challenge there, man, is that they want to eat diets more like our diet, right?

Like in the 1980s, you basically had a country full of vegetarians because they couldn't afford meat. Now you have the world's largest middle class, and they want to eat more meat, right? They want sausage patties, yeah. Exactly, man. And to have meat, you have to grow more grains, more feeds for the animals. It's kind of an inefficient way to develop a calorie.

And they don't have enough water to grow enough grains to be able to feed all of the animals that the people want to eat. Right, so they're doing it over here. They're doing it over here. They're doing it in Brazil. They're doing it across the world. Oh, so they're doing it in a lot of places.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. probably this might even be one of the fewer places. It's just that the U.S. is an agricultural superpower, right? Like we are one of the largest exporters of food in the world. And this, you know, then takes you to like, so who are the other ones? And you're like, well, it turns out now Russia is. And that's not by accident.

Putin has built the country up over the last 15 years to be a food superpower, right? And then you're like, well, huh. So if Russia is becoming a food superpower, what does that tell me about? about, you know, the Ukraine war. Because you know what Ukraine's been known for, man. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. Yeah. It has for, you know, for centuries

been considered the breadbasket of Europe. And when the Nazis, they invaded Poland, but what do they do right after that? The first place they invade when they go into USSR. Stop over to Ukraine for a little bit of bread. Exactly. And Hitler said it,

we need to control food to keep our soldiers fed. And people don't realize this, but the Nazis had what they called the hunger plan. And by controlling Ukraine, they intended, according to these little known documents that historians have on earthed, you know, from the Nazis, they intended to starve 30 million people to death by controlling Ukraine. And if you're the leader of like Russia, right, and you're trying to build a food superpower, right? And just below you is the most fertile soil, right? And that,

that country was deeply aligned to your country until like 2010. right and now all of a sudden it's moving its way to the west right it was thinking about going into nato right yes ukraine was yeah and then moving in me closer to europe and that food supply you know and so that historically that food supply has been used as a weapon against russia right it's been used as a weapon against others right it's a huge strategic asset it's ukraine's biggest strategic asset and so you think that that basically for water is one of the reasons why we're why that war is going on i think all of these things have many facets and are super complicated.

But when you're saying what is Ukraine's strategic importance and it's food, production of food, and you see Putin saying, you know, like in the film, because I went to Russia. In the film, I go to Russia. And we sit down with the largest, the CEO of Russia's biggest beef company. He says, yeah, Putin came to me.

He said, whatever you guys need. Because food and water are going to give us more strategic power in the future than all of our weapons and oil. it does, right? Yeah, I mean, some of my fattest friends are the most guns, too. To be honest with you. Because they want to keep eating.

I think they just, you know, if you're fat and happy, you'll start shooting, I feel like. And if you're not happy, you'll start shooting. So it's really kind of a... Yeah, right. The circles meet in the back. Yeah. It's like on this end, it's kind of fireworks, like, pish-pish. But on this end, it's like, I need to survive.

Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Better Help. That's right. Better Help, if you. you've been struggling with something in your brain or in your life, if there's something that's not making sense anymore, you're not associating to your world, maybe the way you once were, you're having a tough time. You don't know who to talk to. Better help can help. That's right. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online. It's designed

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blue cube baths and uh we wish them the best a lot um and thank them for supporting the podcast so early on and so i just think you start seeing like a bigger picture you know like you start seeing how these things interplay with each other yeah no i look that's what i mean yeah that's because i i first i was watching the document i was like well is this just kind of fear is this creating fear and then And that's why I wanted to get to talk to. I was like, I was just, I was like, is Nate, like, just creating fear here, is the director? Or are they, is this just a trend that they're seeing? And is this, like, something that they really believe in and notice?

Yeah, dude, that's a great question. Thanks, thanks for that. Because it is, like, it doesn't do anybody any good to just be afraid, right? Just to, like, stress people out, bum people out. And, and, and, but no, I mean, I think, like, fundamentally when, when the landscape is shifting in front of us and like the most powerful people are shifting with that landscape. I'm a big advocate of the everyday guy. And I'm like, dude, we got to empower ourselves with that same information. You know, we have to know how this thing is shifting, right? Because otherwise those people in

Arizona, they just see this big farm come in and they're like, well, okay. What they don't know is that it's part of this big international trend and they're coming for the water. Right. They don't know that their own government is allowing that, which in some ways are nice things that America does, you know, and that we've also, we've done a ton of, like, of open-handedness, you know. Yeah. But there does become a point where, yeah, if it gets back to survival, that you're going to change your tune. Yeah. And America's.

I don't know if you'll do it as a country. Yeah. But you, as an individual, you won't have a choice but to do it, right? I think for some people, yeah, I mean, food prices will probably continue to climb, right? And people are going to have to make, like, real, you know, lifestyle decisions based on that, you know, we'll probably see food potentially becoming a bigger and bigger percentage of our, like, take-home incomes. Wow.

Potentially, you know, like, that's the trend line. Especially, yeah, so I think, you know, I think, I just think it, information is power. Yeah. And what I'll tell you is that the most powerful have access to better information today. I think the disparity of information between the powerful and the everyday person has just grown. Like, we always talk about income disparity. And it's a real thing, totally.

But information disparity, man, it might even be worse. 100%. Even just to go to accredited news sources online, not to get information, you have to pay for it. Yeah. Right. Even to get what used to be just a newspaper, right? Yeah. You have to pay for that information.

So whether you even believe it, it's going to be true or not, to have information that's even kind of sourced. Yeah. You know, that's put together, that's formatted. Yep. That's not done by AI. Yeah. You're having to pay for that. Yeah.

And I hope that we get back to. more of that man because that's how it used to be when we were kids right like you'd you pay have a newspaper subscription um right i think people decided they couldn't trust the news anymore i think a lot of that has occurred in the past 10 years for sure i think i feel like the news every time i turn it on i feel like it is there's some lobbyist behind it there's some um you know i mean people say big farm all the time but we have so many drug ads on our television it's like you know, it just feel, I wouldn't be surprised if it's compromised. That's what it feels like. The news industry is in a tailspam, man. I'll give you my two cents for what it's worth, because I've been a journalist now for like 25 years, some insane amount of time. I can't believe that.

but when I started as a daily newspaper reporter, like we had a nice big staff, man. Like we had, we had librarians on staff. We had researchers on staff. You know, we had photographers, a sports desk,

a business desk, you know, and I think, I don't know, man, was it like there's like a third as many journalists as there used to be, right?

Like if there's fewer people doing anything, it's going to be a shittier job. You're going to get a crappier product, right? And so, and, and the trend line, And that gutted journalism wasn't initially that, because I totally agree, all the stats say what you're saying,

people don't trust the news like they used to. But it wasn't, the trend line wasn't that people stop subscribing. What happened was is that newspapers used to make huge profits from things like classified ads, right? Like, you know, we used to read the classified ads in the back, right? So you could meet a woman or even get a adopt a pet. Get a new BMX bike or like a dirt bike, like your new car. Like it was all back there, right?

And that stuff, man, that subsidized the journalists. And so, of course, that went away, and that was like a lion's share of the profits, right? Craigslist kind of killed that in a way. Totally. And it's fine. Technology is going to do. And like, the newspapers didn't, they didn't react in time. You know, they lost this big thing.

And so, like, you just started seeing the industry shrinking and shrinking. And now the layoffs in the last two years have just been, like, brutal. But the problem there is, man, it's like, I could quit journalism and I could go become a private researcher doing the exact same thing I'm doing now as an investigative journalist. but instead of giving it to the public, I would be giving it to hedge funds. I'd be giving it to super wealthy people that would literally, I'm not shitting you, would pay me four to five times

what I'm getting paid now, right? And that's actually what's happening, right? And so, like, you have the public who is increasingly just getting not as good as much information, especially if you're in like a local news market, right? Like you're not getting information. People aren't paying for it.

There are fewer journalists, and then the wealthiest are paying for it still, and they're getting incredibly in-depth information. Right. And now you're starting to see privatized spaces have the journalists almost on their side working for them to give them information that better helps them to market to the everyday person.

Yeah, and I wouldn't say call that person a journalist, but that same like deep researcher investigative project, especially in tech, man. Well, I think it's like, you know, they had even if you look at the case of, the opioid epidemic, right? And that there was a documentary, there was a television show.

I can't remember the name of it. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was a doc that came out that looked super deep at the opioid or, I can't remember, Alice Gibney, maybe on HBO looked at the opioid epidemic too. This one had Michael Keaton. Okay. You know my, is that a real person?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know Hollywood, so I don't know actors and I don't know the space as well, but yeah. Yeah, they had this, there you go, dope sick. They had this, this series came out, it's unbelievable. It's how, um, it's how the opioid companies

basically hired people that had been working on the Food and Drug Administration to come and work for them so they could work the loopholes. Totally. And I mean, I'll just tell you my two cents. The reason that we often know stories like this, like how FDA former employees were then going,

is because a journalist went in and dug it out and published it, right? Like these types of fictionalized versions get written off of like hard work of investigative. journalists and there are fewer and fewer people pulling out stories like this and I'll tell you man as a journalist like my problem 20 years ago was that I was always worried that some other journalist was going to scoop the story and get it before me today my problem is that people are coming to me with important stories and I don't have the time to work on them because I'm already working on something and I don't even have another journalist I can tell them to go to right

like we're just not getting out as many important stories like that as we used to because there's just fewer of us. And there are more people working for the lobbyists. There are more people working for the PR firms that are spinning stuff. And so this is, we're getting into this really imbalanced place of information. And the dark time. And that's why conspiracy theories rise. I totally agree.

Because it's like, well, people are going by their gut. People are looking to fill a void. Yep. And people want some truth. I think if you don't have truth, you can feel it. Yeah. I think so. And I always say, and this is the other thing, man, is for me, journalism.

It's okay, so like take a football, right? Like the surface of a football is imperfect, right? It's why a quarterback spirals the ball. Because if you throw the football without spiraling it, because the surface of the football is... Fancy, yeah. Yeah, it's like imperfect. It just flops around.

Yeah. And but you spiral it and all of those imperfections get smoothed out. And journalism is the same way. Like, no journalist is the voice of God. But when you've got 10 journalists covering the same thing, you're going to get as close to the, to the obtainable version of the truth as possible because you have 10 different people

that are competing to get it out. They're going to, they're going to check each other. They're going to point out of somebody else, you know, misses something or screw something up. And you get at the closest possible, obtainable version of the truth. Now when you just have one person, it's like a football that's not spiraling anymore.

It just gets totally off-kilter. And I think we're getting closer to that. And I think that's like, in a democracy, when we're supposed to be an informed group of people that are going to go to the ballot box and vote, you know, it's a problem. If we were in China, it wouldn't matter because the government's going to tell us what to do anyway. But in a country where we're like, no, no, we need to be informed so we can go to vote. That becomes a problem. How does that end for us? Was that football analogy, the dumbest analogy you've ever heard?

I just kind of came to me. No, I thought it was pretty good. Okay, cool. Yeah. But I'm also dumb a lot of times. So it's like, I wouldn't have asked me, but I thought it, it worked for me. All right, cool. I'm easily susceptible to just whatever. But yeah, I wonder what does that look like for us if we, when you get to a place where you don't trust, I wonder if it's that we don't trust authority now. But I never trusted authority. Right. I never trusted authority either. Yeah.

But I always thought there was this level of integrity maybe in the distance that I, maybe I thought. It's so hard for me to figure out what I feel like is missing these days. I feel like as individuals, a lot of us are missing purpose and our purpose is. being farmed out to technology and to big corporations instead of things that are meaningful. I think we're losing community. Yes. And that's going to happen too. You have no purpose.

You don't have a local newspaper. You don't have like a local place where everybody can even go meet up. People aren't going to church. So there's at that point, you're just a lot of strangers living near each other. I think that's it, man. I think that's a huge problem in this country. And how does that change, I wonder, you know? like what does the future of that look like?

Do we just turn into like these lemmings, just waiting for the next cheeseburger? Like, you know, I, I've done some investigative reporting on big tech. And that's a space, you know, like, that I, you know, like, man, my reporting has shown me like things that just like as a human, as a person concern me, you know, like, it's like really cool because there, they become these beautiful creative spaces, right? And like as people that are artistic and like to share their stories, people get on there and they can connect with communities.

And there's all these great things that happen. But I increasingly see those spaces as a hunting ground for big tech companies to target specific people and take them down. And I'll give you one of the examples I'm talking about is that I did this investigative product where I got this investigation where I got internal emails from inside of Facebook and I got documents from inside. of this company that was like a social casino company. It was essentially like you could play games on your phone that looked like a slot machine and you would never win any money. Like you just got to understand it.

You would never win any money back. And if you used up all your coins that they get in the day for free, you would then have to buy more coins. Something like 99% of people never pay for coins. It's like 1%. And then it's something like 1 tenth of one, percent drive like 97 percent of the revenue at that company. And those companies that, again,

you can never win your money back, were now generating more revenue than the Las Vegas strip. Billions and billions of dollars. So who were the people that were spending money? Well, I found one of those women. She was living outside of Dallas. She was living modest middle income. She spent $400,000 buying virtual coins that she could never. win back. So who does that, right? Well, it turns out that a certain slice of people, very small slight, have a type of brain that can get super fixated on this. Like they compulsively can't stop. Wow. And the technology companies devised algorithms, they used artificial intelligence, where the CEO of one of these companies said the first time somebody opens that app and starts

playing, they can identify them from all of the little habits and a, immediately mark them as what they would call a VIP or a whale, right? And they would put them down this path where they would actually get a special representative, like an actual human who would call them. This woman outside of Texas who lost 400,000 when her mom died, they sent flowers to her mom's funeral, right? Like they immediately identify that you have this type of brain that's going to keep spending money that you can't, A, you can't afford, and B, you'll never get back.

And they just target you and they push you and they pull as much money. out of you as they can. That's what I see, man. I see this like, I see now like people are spending their time on there, but people are watching you spend your time. And they're building your behavior and they're looking for your weakness. And as soon as they can exploit your weakness, man, they are going to grab everything they can. Wow. It's really the devil. It's what you would think of as the devil using yourself against you even. I mean, look, what if your own shadow could fucking pick your pocket? What would your life be like? You know what? I'm saying like hey or I mean maybe that's a crazy thing that's almost as bad as your football thing but

but no bro it's the it's the dark arts it's like yeah the algorithm learning you and learning you and learning you massaging you and all that matters but is it is it for profit or is it for control I don't understand I'm guessing it's probably both I just don't understand how that behooves anybody like who closes their eyes at night and was like, yeah. Dude, those companies that I just talked about went from nothing in like 2009 to 2010 to being billion-dollar companies.

And they were owned by a few dudes who started them up. Like, it behooved those dudes. Those dudes are killing it. I found one of the women who worked at one of these companies who was pushing this woman outside of Dallas to spend all of this money, right? And I got on her Instagram. That girl was just flying around the world,

living it up. Egypt, oh, look how cool I am now. Oh, look at me and I'm photos in front of the Sphinx. Now I'm in Italy eating in Tuscany, right? Right. Living this life. And in the meantime, she's just encouraging people to lose their money. Wow. And can we name these people or is it kind of private information? Well, I can, you know, I mean, I wrote my story. Susie Kelly is the woman outside of Dallas. Let's see, product madness. Is that the name of the company that was targeting? I'd want to pull up this story to make sure I was getting this right because this is the challenge I have as an investigative journalist. I misspeak just a little bit. I can get sued. Yeah, for sure. We can get sued

as well. And so I always want to be accurate, right? And so, you know, we can pull up this story. Because I did this story now. What was that six, seven years ago? These are companies where you can't win, really. Oh, you can't win your money back back. But you people have like figured out that there's a type of person with a behavior that can, that it's basically a definitive victim. Right here it says, social casinos now use behavioral analysis software

to quickly identify people who are likely to become big spenders. Behaviors like increasing your bed or playing frequently are signals to the companies and they target these players with heavy marketing and label them proto whales, as Brotons explained to a room full of game developers back in 2015.

And if I remember correctly, that guy, Jose Broughton, was like a stand for graduate, you know, uh, in like computer science or something, took that knowledge, you know, they pair it up with,

uh, like essentially like behavioral scientists, psychologists. And then they just start getting better and better at focusing on these people who they can extract from. Yeah. Man, it's like you're up against it.

And sometimes though there's a part of people that go to gamble like that. There's a part of them that wants to, sometimes I think that there's a part of them that wants to, sometimes I think that there's a part of, part of us when I'm amazed that we don't stand up sometimes as a population, right? I don't think we always know. That's the problem, man. I don't think we have the information to know this story.

Like how many, like that, to me, that story is mind-blowing that that's going on. Right. Yeah, how many people are gambling on their phone are looking at playing solitaire and then it turns into a finite, yeah. Right? Or how many of us are just aware in which like the patterns of ads that we see are like, oh, because they have your behavioral profile. right? Like you're getting a pattern this way or your news feed looks this way or you're getting

content this way. And how is that affecting you? Right? Like how is that affecting your everyday decisions? And in Susie's case, it was affecting her everyday decision to the point where she was lying to her husband. She was taking out, if I recall correctly, second mortgages on her homes and spending $400,000 that she did not have. I had the emails, the messages back and forth with her and the rep from that company and she was begging them to cut her off. I've spent $400,000. $4,000 last night. Please don't let me cut me off. Oh, Susie, no, Susie, we love you.

We'd hate to see you leave. Here's a billion free coins. You know, if you still want to quit when you're done with that. It's a drug dealer. Well, that's what's interesting to me, too. It's like, when would we stop allowing certain things? You would think, like even pornography, right? Like, I've fallen victim to it, obviously.

And a lot of people use it, right? but it's like at a certain point I recognize oh I'm not using this safely right like I go use it when I'm feeling down or when I'm agitated or something it's like and then just like it's bad we know it's probably bad for us right I'm not disparaging any of the people that use it or that that perform it I have friends that are in the industry it's not anything against any person but I wonder if overall sometimes we know that it hurts us or like They just had that documentary on Ashley Madison, right? Yeah. And it was so strange. You had this couple pushing the company and they're married and the husband was the owner. And they're saying, well, we don't cheat, but you might need to, right? Life's short, have an affair.

Just like, it's just evil, it feels like. I mean, like, why would we allow that? Like, it seemed like if you took a vote amongst people, would we, do we want this in our lives? Right. that most of them would probably say no, but if you are tempted with it, if it comes in, like if a cat comes on your,

if you tell me, hey, man, do you want a free cat? I'll tell you, dude, honestly, you can fuck off, right?

Yeah, I'll tell you straight up. But if a cat keeps coming on my porch, dude, I'm going to go out there and touch it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like at some point,

even if I might be like, man, fuck this thing, I might be out there petting at the same time. Yeah, so it's like, you know,

and is that our responsibility? Or is that, the cat's in your pocket. carry the cat around in your pocket with you all the time. I guess you can get a baby cat. But yeah, it's like I guess I often wonder like, is that just our responsibility? Or is there should there be a, yeah, I guess you can't depend on the government, but you would think as a society we wouldn't want these things.

Does that make sense to you? No, dude, totally makes sense. And I think part of it is like these things are being developed in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, wherever, faster than like we can learn about them and adjust to them. Yeah. The government's always a few years behind. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And again, like, I mean, I don't, I mean, obviously I'm biased because I'm an investigative journalist, but like this is the role that I think we're losing in our society by as journalism keeps going away is because like in that story that we were just talking about with Susie and the social casinos, those dudes would suit me if I got it wrong. Right. Like if, like they are going to ask for a correction if I got something wrong. And they didn't, right? In the end, Susie and a bunch of other people got 155 million bucks back from them.

Really? Yeah. Fuck yeah. Right. So, you know, and like, I don't have it out against anybody, man. I just want good information out there in the public. Yeah. You know, like it empowers all of us.

Even if like, dude, it could be the same piece of information. And from that same accurate, good piece of information, you might decide that A is the best course. and I might decide that B is the best course, but to me that's a democracy, because now you and I are passionate out whether A's better or B is better, but we're operating off the same good information. Right.

Yeah, and if you're saying that information, that information is also becoming like what's valuable and what isn't, and that there's better information out there that obviously corporations can afford, that they can afford the researchers now to privatize them and put them to work for themselves, then, yeah, for the regular person,

it just gets, it gets a little interest. Dude, I'm never going to have good enough information to tell you who are the people most likely to compulsively spend on something, right? Those companies do. But if I'm given enough time, I can probably find out what the companies are

that have that information that are targeting people like Susie and I can at least make us aware of it. So we probably, as a society, will never have access to that. We probably don't want all of us to know who the compulsive gamblers are, right? But at least we want to know

who the companies are that are targeting people who have that behavior. Yeah. Right. Or targeting people for whatever their weaknesses is, right? Because we all have them, man. We all have our weaknesses, right?

Yeah. And they can almost be mathematically equated now. Are mathematically equated now. And then that's used to attack us. I mean, that's the scary part. It's like, it's like, I want to say it's like our reflection is using the fact that it's our reflection against us. I don't know.

I can't know what I'm trying to say. No, you know what it is? think you're right, man. It's like they're creating like a data profile, like a virtual one of us, like evil Kirk from Star Trek, right? And then like that person's telling them our weaknesses, right? It's like you're looking in. You're like, God, that's like a version of me they've created. And that person is ratting me out and they're coming at me with that dude's info. Yeah. Right. I mean, and it's getting stronger and better that technology. Yeah. And then it also makes you a little bit upset at yourself because you're the one feeding into the,

same thing that's, you know, beckoning you with things that'll end up being painful to you. Yeah. And look, I have a stoic philosophy on these things. Like I believe that we can't control, you know, what happens outside of us, but we can control how we react to it, right? And I think this is some of like, you and I were talking about cold plunges or like, you know, just like how you can reset. Like, and it's super uncomfortable. But like, you can control your body and your body's like, dude, I do not want to go in that cold water. And you're like, no, no, I control you. I'm going to dip you in there for two minutes because I know that when I get out, I'm going to feel better, right? And part of it is personal responsibility. Part of it is being like,

I control me, I'm going to set the phone down, right? I'm going to delete that app, right? Right. Like we do have personal, but we also shouldn't be targeted in that way. Right. It's crazy to let somebody continue to be targeted. Yeah. It's like at a certain point, you would stop a pedophile from coming near a child, you know? At a certain point, if somebody had a hatchet and somebody was just trying to sit there and need a sandwich, you would stop the hatchet guy. Yeah. From bothering the sandwich eater.

Yes. You know? It's like, yeah. Could the sandwich eater get up and leave the restaurant? But maybe the solution is just getting the hatchet guy out of the restaurant. Right. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Instead of making this huge hullabaloo, like now every sandwich eater can only eat sandwiches in this air. Or yeah, it's just. Because some sandwiches are good, man. You just want to sit there and finish your sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

In the end, it comes down to our own personal responsibility for now. That's it. I think that's a piece of it. And I also think we should be demanding better environments for ourselves and our children. I don't have kids, but, you know, I always bring in kids because people seem to be more responsive, you know. But I think kids are living in. Yeah, and they're living in that environment, right? And I don't know that those, you know, I think we just need to be more proactive about what are the environments we want as a society.

Right. You know? But how do we get this? Because it feels like everybody has kind of the same things in mind, but we never seem to get them. And it feels even more like the voting is coming from the other side, like that it's big business. Like, you know, like tech is the new fossil fuel. I've said that for a long time where it's like that's the thing that's power. It's like, you know, they control everything, it feels like.

They have a lot of information, man. They do. They do. What trumps information then, I wonder? Well, I think like people like the, like if all of us have. better information, right? Like, again, like, we can push, like the, part of, like, the documentary, man. Like, you were talking about it earlier, like, you know, like, I do you think there's

stuff in the documentary, it's going to freak people out, freak me out when I learned about it, right? So at the end of the day, it's the point of it just to freak people out. No, it's to be like, you know, we have no national water policy in the United States. You know that? We have no national water policy. So that means that people from anywhere or any country, whatever, can move here and use our water to grow their crops.

Is that true or no? It's true in some places. Like different states, different counties have different laws, right? Okay. But we have no, we have no national water policy that just says like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Water's a big deal. Let's make sure that we're not using it for just like any old thing.

Let's make sure that just like as a general of thumb, we're using it for like the best purpose. Right. Right. And then let's help states and counties in these places come to the decision what's the best purpose. We just don't. Other countries do, right?

Other countries have put that in place. But if water is such a solid, like a, if it's so important for the future, wouldn't that be one of the first things we would do probably? But this goes back. It's like, I don't know that people know, I don't know if just like, when I go to, when I, you know, when I go to family reunions, I don't know that all my family knows. And a lot of my families, they're like farmers, right? But I don't know that they know that this is the trend line that's happening, right? And so you put this documentary out there, not to freak people out, but so that we all just have this like baseline of information, right? And then we can push our elected officials who, and man, you all, you hear about all the different lobbies and all, you know, that push the government around.

The agricultural lobby is one of the most, if not the most powerful lobby in the country. And in part for really good reasons, man, you screw up farmers. Like, you can really jack up a country. Oh, yeah. We need to support farmers. Growing food's great, right? And they should have a voice. Amen.

You know, but at the same time, like communities that are around the farms and others and. and who's coming in and who's controlling it, that needs to make sense to, right? And so it needs to be a conversation and tell people have good information, it's tough to have a good conversation. So whether or not we're talking about tech and like people targeting you

because they're a big technology company and they know that you're going to be compulsive about this one thing and they can extract something from you, whether it's like how you choose to behave or how you choose to spend, or whether it's like, you know, foreign countries coming in

or Wall Street coming in and pumping out water in places that really need that right there. You know, like we just need good information. Yeah. Yeah, because it's the days are over where people have anybody else's best interest, a lot of over like it's where companies certainly don't because they're not an individual. Yeah. It's a spreadsheet. They're thinking with a different. Yes, they are. They're thinking it's a spreadsheet. Yep, trying to have a brain. Yes. And so like how, if you're China, right, and you now have like some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds,

you know, which is what does that mean? Oh, man, it's, it's crazy because, you know, I have friends. I grew up with. Some of them got of advanced degrees from college and some of them barely graduated high school. I mean, I was somebody that barely graduated high school. But, you know, they didn't go to college, right? And so, like, I have a huge spectrum of people I love. And someone will tell me about, like, the Illuminati, the Illuminati or control and things. I'm like, dude, no.

But go look at sovereign wealth funds, right? Sovereign wealth funds are countries like China that are pooling together these huge pools of cash, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. And then they can use that strategically to buy things, you know, to drive the markets how they want. Now, here in the United States, we just believe that the profit is how everything. So like, oh, if you can make more money doing A than B, then you should go do A because that's how our system operates. But China goes, no, no, we want to create the most jobs we can for the country. And therefore we're going to take all of our assets.

We're going to try to create the most jobs, not the most profit, but the most jobs, right? And so then what happens is you have Smithfield Foods, one in four American pigs, and you have a Chinese company, and they go like, we don't care necessarily about per se driving the maximum profit, right? Like our government is saying to us that we need to go overseas and buy up food and water. So we'll pay you a 30% premium over the share price.

Well, for the American company, that's like 30% premium over the share price. Like, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders. Like, I have to sell the company. Like, I have to give you guys the company. Otherwise, I can actually legally get in jeopardy here for saying no to that offer, right? Because I am legally obligated to return profits to the shareholder. Well, the Chinese company is operating under a completely different system, right?

And so that's where you begin to see, gosh, this is probably super in the weeds, but that's where you begin to see, like, this international power play. And like you're talking about, like, where the U.S. is so focused on profits, China's like, cool, you're super focused on profits. We're focused on the future. And we can manipulate you because you're super focused. on profits. Oh, because if they own a fourth of the, of the industry. Yeah, or they, they just know, like, the American company is always going to do whatever is most profitable. And, and, and we don't, like,

so we can buy that, you know, like, they, they know how our system works. Right. And they're getting better at manipulating that system is, like, right out of the gate when I started looking at this. Oh, I was saying, so instead of this, of this American company saying, hey, this is an American company, let's keep it here. Let's keep it American. It's a part of, like, you know, it affects our, um, GDP, all these sorts of things, they just think, oh, for profit, and China knows that. So it's like, let's just pay more and we'll definitely get it. That's a wrap.

That's it. Because the way that the American companies built, their shareholders would get upset if they didn't. If they took a vote, the shareholders were like, why didn't you do it? We would have made dividends or whatever. Not only why didn't you do, but we could sue you and probably win if you didn't return us the max profits. And so China has sovereign wealth funds, which are literally trillions and trillions of dollars of pools of cash.

Whose money? Is it theirs? It's their money. Individuals or the government? The governments. Okay. Yep. And the government can decide how to allocate that, right?

And so if the U.S. had that, you would always be allocating it for whatever is going to make you the most profits. China's going to be allocating it potentially for whatever gives them the most political strength, whatever makes them the most powerful country. It's very different. And that's what sovereign wealth funds are. And they've become huge.

They're like, as I understand, I wouldn't talk to this professor. this academic at Stanford, who's one of the foremost experts on the country on these things. As I understand it, they're fairly new. The Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, they also have really big sovereign wealth funds. China's got really big sovereign wealth funds. Surprisingly, Norway has a really big sovereign wealth fund. But they can use these things strategically, especially against a profit-driven country like the U.S. Wow.

So it's crazy to think that being profitable could be your weakness. That's interesting, right? Yeah. Wow. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund as of December 2020 was China Investment Corporation, managing assets reaching around $1.35 trillion U.S. dollars. Where do we rank in that? Pull up like the top 10 list of sovereign wealth funds.

Norway, Qatar, GIC, the one we just talked about, national welfare. Oh, no, China Investment Corporation. And Tamasek, that's Singapore. Public investment fund could be us, but who knows? It's Saudi Arabia. Huh. So those are the 10 biggest sovereign wealth fund. So those can really...

And somebody's got to have a list for how much assets each of them have. At 1.7 trillion seems small to me. But we're not even on the top 10 list. We don't operate a sovereign... As far as I know, the U.S. doesn't offer a sovereign wealth fund like this because it's not how we think. Got it. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't think about how perspective and mindset affects how an entire country operates, really. No, the United States does not have a federal sovereign wealth fund, but several states do. These funds are usually smaller than international SWFs and can serve different purposes. For example, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation established in the early 1980s has roughly $67 billion in assets and was created to ensure that Alaskaans citizens benefited from oil extracted from state lands. Wow. So that's important. And that's like Norway too.

Norway's is very similar to Alaska where it's like they are an oil wealthy nation. And so they created a sovereign wealth fund to benefit the citizens. Oh, that's smart. Texas also, it says, has two sovereign wealth funds, including the Texas Permanent School Fund, which was founded in 1854 and manages 46.5 billion in assets to benefit public schools. Wow. That's pretty incredible.

Yeah. Just to think that they had that forethought. Yeah, yeah, totally. And they're going to think maybe I'm going to own. own the land, the schools on, just different things like that. Yeah. And then so these foreign countries have these massive pools of cash that they can use strategically. Yeah, it gets interesting, man.

You start, like, seeing the chess players on the board, like moving in different ways. What states are looking out for their land? What states are kind of at the head of the forefront? Were you able to notice any of that? Off the top of my head, you know, so, like, I think Iowa has a law that, that foreign companies can't own farmland in Iowa. It's off the top of my head. And, but like, is it, you know, like, the question is, like, does it really matter

if it's a foreign company or a domestic company if they're doing good by the local people? Right. Right. Like, ultimately in that, like, who cares? Like, are you doing well by the local people? Is there enough water there? Are you creating jobs? like, you know, is it like people, local people prospering?

Like that's like, I don't know, at the end of the day, like what people are going to care about. Right. Right. Like, I think what becomes dangerous is when you see these things that are just like highly extractive to the detriment, you know, of the local folks who are seeing their water disappear, who aren't seeing like a lot of job creation, you know, like. Right. There's no return on it for them. Yeah. Right.

And especially if it's their space, you know. I even pulled up on that Saudi farm. I remember, I think I pulled up. visas and they were bringing in workers, if I'm recalling correctly, from the Philippines. You know, so they'd be like, well, we're creating jobs. And I'm like, man, you guys are pulling visas. So you're bringing in workers from the Philippines to work on your farm. Yeah. You know, like. Yeah, you probably have, yeah, you probably have farmers right in the area that would do it. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so these things are so many loopholes and stuff. There's so many

tricky ways out there. Yeah. So when you look at like places not having enough water. Yeah. Right. America has a lot of water. Totally. Right. And a lot of land in a small population. Okay. So we're probably in a really good space.

We're in a good space. Right. What places aren't in good spaces? And we're in a good space except for like these like regional examples, right? Like places in the west and the southwest, places that are going to get potentially a lot hotter, you know. So I got these classified cables, answering your question like what places aren't in a good space. I got these classified cables and I'm from the U.S. embassy that had gone. Cables, what does that mean? Like diplomatic cables that the state department

was sending back from its embassy in Switzerland back to the U.S. government here. Sometimes that stuff goes to like the CIA, the state department, other other. But cables, what's the term? It's paperwork or information? Yeah, it's like a report they'll send back. Yeah. Got it. And so there, some folks from the U.S. embassy in Switzerland had gone to the headquarters of Nestle. And Nestle is like the world's largest food company. And the chief economist at Nestle sort of gave them a tour and like a perspective from the world's largest food company about how screwed up everything was. And they talked about the regions that were going to get hit hardest by not having enough water. And so that's like China.

It was like India, the Middle East, but it was also the Western United States. You know, like the Western United States is in a pretty tough spot when it comes to having enough water to keep doing all the things they're currently doing. And so, yeah, and that was like the hot take from Nestle was like, you know, forget about it. That time it was like the 2009. It was the great recession. And Nestle is just like, forget about it. That's going to resolve itself. The world is running out of enough water to feed everybody.

Right. Yeah. And so do states start to plan ahead? You think some of them would? I think some of them do these things like water. People will always tell you water is super local, right? And so some counties, some regions within states and some states themselves are doing better than others. And some countries are definitely doing better than others just in terms of like planning ahead, you know.

And it is solvable, man. That's like the thing with a lot of the issues that we face, you know, like we can, we're a super smart species. You know, like we've done a lot of stuff. We could still do a lot of stuff. We just have to move off of the trend lines that we're currently headed on, you know. And those trend lines are more like me, me, me. instead of us, is that it? Or is it like, because is there enough water for everybody?

There is enough water to grow enough food that everyone in the world could eat, not even like today, man, which we, what are we, 7 billion people or so? Like, there's enough water to grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, you know? Like, it's not just a population. It's huge. It kind of goes back to what I was saying about China, where it's like, they just, now they're just wealthier, man, and they're eating more meat. And Nestle in that classified cable said, like,

if everyone in the world ate as much meat per capita as Americans do, we would have run out of fresh water in the year 2000. Wow. Right. And I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a vegan. Right. I'm just like,

this is what the world's largest food company is saying, you know? And I know people love beef and I know people love steak, you know, and like it's there. Yeah. But like, but that's, all of it. But when it comes to like, how can we shift, how can we take some personal responsibility to putting us in a place we want to be, that's one area we can look at.

And it's not even saying like, you need to become vegetarian or vegan. It's just like, how much meat do you need to be a healthy human? Right. And you got people of obesity and heart attacks, you know, and all these issues.

Oh, you got people damn snorting meat out there. Dude, you know, you got some real mammal purves out there. You know, people who will just cook anything that wandered up on their porch even and eat it. I don't even share with their spouse either. I had a buddy that had a T-shirt, And this is in San Francisco, so he definitely pissed people off. But his shirt said, meat is murder.

Delicious, delicious, delicious murder. Just trolling people. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely, definitely. People love it. Well, you do have businesses like Bill Gates is starting like a Beyond Meat. Is that his company or no?

I can't remember if you invested in that one. There's like, yeah, Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers. Yeah, I think it's Impossible Burgers. Yeah, a lot of those guys got really, they got funding. And again, those were like, that's a way to replace meat with a less water-intensive meat substitute, you know, something that tastes like meat. Right. Yeah. Right.

So that's one way that people could preserve water probably. We used to have to grow the. Yeah, it just requires a lot, lot, lot less water to eat a grain than it does to feed enough grains to eat an animal. Got it. Yeah. And what about other methods that people, you hear about, like desalinization? You hear about cloud seeding. Yeah.

I'm not sure what other methods they are. I believe cloud seating is very expensive. Yeah, and I don't know as much about cloud seating. And I remember one of my buddies, he learned I was doing this, that I'd moved off organized crime. And I was looking at it. You got to look at cloud seating. And I was like, dude, that's some conspiracy shit.

You read online. And I looked into it. I was like, oh, no, people really do cloud seeding. Like, I think the ski resorts were doing cloud seeding. I think the Israeli government was doing cloud seeding. But yeah, I think it's expensive. It hasn't really found a practical application. As far as I know, this isn't my area of expertise.

Desal, desal I'm more familiar with. Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that improves a cloud's ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny ice nuclei in certain types of sub-freezing clouds. So you have a cloud that's already there, and I guess you then, it looks like just fire ice particles into it. And precipitates the rain out or something. Four-hour operation. a four-hour operation that seeds 24 clouds can cost around $5,000. Wow.

So rich people could have rain or something if they wanted to have like a Noah's art party or like a, like the perfect storm, if they want to do a perfect storm reenactment of that movie. Per acre, cloud seeding operations can cost around 40 cents per planted acre or $10 to $15 per acre foot for additional water. That's in Utah. Well, that's actually not, you know, This is not my area of expertise, but $10 to $15 for an acre foot of water.

That's a lot of water. And that's a really low price. So if that, you know, and that's in Utah specifically, right? So they're going to have their own like climatology, their own hydrology. Like, so it can be super specific. But $10 to $15 for an acre foot is really cheap for water. Yeah. Because you start talking about desalination plant and now you're talking about $2,000 per acre foot.

Really? Yeah. So that's very expensive. Yeah. And like we're growing tomatoes typically with like $50 per acre foot water. An acre foot just, it's actually super simple. It's how, if an acre foot is the equivalent of flooding an acre of land with one foot of water. Okay.

Yeah. The global cloud seeding market is estimated to have a valuation of $131.4 million in 2020. Over the forecast period from 2023 to 2030, it is projected to experience substantial growth with an estimated compound annual growth of 5.8%. By 2030, the market is expected to reach a value of $194.4 million. So it's getting more popular. They're saying this is a Market Insights website. So I don't know if that's legit or not, but what else does it say? Anything else on there? Here's an article right here. Not since Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD has the American West been so dry. a recent study in nature climate change found the period

2021 was the driest in 22 years in more than a millennium attributing a fifth of that anomaly to human-caused climate change. Hmm. Lake Mead and Lake Powell have reached their lowest levels ever, triggering unprecedented cuts in water allocations. Cloud seating operations have also expanded in water-stretched regions outside. Let me see.

Within the past two years, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and California have experienced, expanded cloud seeding operations. So they're trying it. Yeah. And I mean, I remember the ski resorts doing it. And people are doing it. I wonder how much water ultimately you're going to be able to squeeze out of the atmosphere by shooting these minerals up into it.

But yeah. Ian, how effective is it? Like if you spend the money to shoot the water to put the particles out there. But cloud seeding should not be thought of as a response to drought experts agree. For one, in a drought, there are likely to be fewer seatable storms. That's a good point. And when there are storms, even the estimates from cloud seeding companies themselves show the practice increases precipitation by only around 10% in a given area.

That might be worth the effort when every acre foot counts, but it's not going to end a drought across an entire region. So you have to have a storm already there. I see. So that's kind of interesting. Oh, super interesting. You can't just completely create a storm, not yet anyway. Right, right.

It's like terraforming the earth at that point. Yeah. Yeah. That gets right. That gets, yeah, when it becomes like air sims or whatever, it's going to get weird. And what about desalinization? It's super expensive. Okay.

Because like basically it takes a ton of energy, like electricity, to basically push water through what's just like a giant filter and pull out the salt or whatever it is that's contaminated the water. And so it ends up, the water ends up costing, you know, a hundred times what, you know, farmers can, are paying for it now. And oftentimes it makes crops on affordable. So it's good for like drinking water. People use desal all the time for drinking water and for some industrial use. But at the price, it becomes very difficult to create food with that expensive of water. Are some countries saying you can't buy land here? Some countries are like that, right?

For sure. Right. Yeah, yeah. And they're saying you can't grow that type of crop here because it requires too much water. Yeah. Right. People are, other countries getting really selective as to how their water is going to be used. used and what it can be used for.

It's so tough for us to think because we've manipulated so many other markets and has done things ourselves, you know? You would go upstream from your neighbor and split that river that split that creek that's headed your way if you had to. And that's what that's what you're seeing. And that's, you know, people are just seeing like the river their village relies on. All of a sudden now is diverted. And it's for a palm oil plantation, right?

And that's more and more of what you're seeing. In Africa and places like that, you mean? Yeah. Central America, like Guatemala. I think as one of the largest expanding palm oil plantation in the world. Yeah, what do you think there's a way, a solution? Like, yeah, what do you look at is? Well, first off, I think people just need to know what's happening.

Right. Just like bottom line. Yeah, bottom line. And then, and then, dude, we just need to empower and push our government to putting forward, like the best minds. You know, I think, like right now, basically the laws that we have on the books for water around this country are from like the 1800s. Yeah. Right. Like when water, when there were few people, there was water was plentiful.

Yeah, no gargling water in church and stuff. You're like, that shouldn't be in the state doctrine, you know? Yeah. And now, and now water's tight. And there's a lot more people. And so we, you know, they need to go back on the books and revise the laws to be like, okay, so what do we want our water laws to look like in this place, given the realities we have now in the 21st century and not the 19th century, right? Like it's kind of all these stuff, man. It's kind of common sense. But we're just not getting it done. Yeah. And it's like how is it tough to get it done when a lot of the great minds, it feels like are working on the other side. of popular sentiment. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, how do you mean? Like that the best researchers and a lot of great journalists and lobbyists even are working for bigger companies or in the private sector more to garner information and learn information to give that to the private sector to better do their doings that they're doing.

Does that make sense? It does. I think journalists are always going to try. try to give the information to the public. There's just fewer of them. Right. And yeah, I think the private sector has a lot more resources to manipulate, you know, the markets to what they want, right, which oftentimes can be quarterly profits or annual profits. And we need our government to be like, okay, okay, okay, but what's in our long term best interest, right? Like, what do we want for, for your kids and your grandkids? And I think that's where we really need to be pushing folks.

Yeah, and some of the, some of the companies are doing it not because they're beholding to their stockholders who are the very people who are wishing they wouldn't, that companies wouldn't do this sort of thing. That's really crazy, isn't it? I mean, dude, you see in the duck and it's like in the duck, man, it's like, so Holly Irwin is, is the county supervisor in Arizona that we follow. And what county is that in? It's in LaPas County, right? And that's like a deeply red county. You know, Holly is a Republican, like a conservative Republican. And now she's she's fighting for what? People might be like, that's an environmental issue. No, she's fighting for the water of the country, of the county, right? And she's working with Democrats, which is great. Like you got Republicans and Democrats coming together finally to like work on something

and come up with solutions. But what I showed to Holly was, and she didn't know this, you know, she's like, oh, the Saudis have come. They're taking our water, you know. And I said, but Holly, look here. This is your pension fund from the state of Arizona. Look what it's invested in. That farm right over there that shows.

shipping hay to China and the UAE, that was bought with your pension fund money. Like it's your own pension fund. Your retirement fund is helping export the water that you need to be here and for people to retire here. But how I'm not following that. Yeah, right. So like how they use the money. So they had a pension fund. Yeah.

But the Saudis came in and bought the land. So that's a separate one, right? So you got the Saudis are there. But there's another big farm owned by a company. out in North Carolina, and the Arizona State pension fund gave a bunch of money to that, to IFC, this company on in North Carolina. And then IFC rented it to a company

from the United Arab Emirates that's controlled by the brother of the ruler of the country, that's controlled by a guy who's like job it is to control national security in the country. And so they're shipping it overseas. And so like at the end of the day, Holly's pension fund, you know, she's like fighting so hard to keep

water there in her county so her people can stay there. And then our own pension fund is financing a deal that's shipping water overseas. Right, because it's more short-term profit than it is a long-term vision. Yeah. And so how do you try to align those things? How do you, how do you line with Holly wants money to retire on? Holly wants water for her county to live on for the next 100-plus years. Right. Wow. Interesting, man. What were some other, there was some other stories that I was investigating that you had, or that I was research and that you had looked at. One that I found was interesting was this Somali pirate scenario. Yeah, isn't that interesting? So this was a guy from the intelligence community who told me this, you know, and wasn't the only person that

told me this. But he just said, look, like Somali pirates, like we think of them as like pirates, like they took to the high seas, you know, like, but what they were, they were fishermen. They were just fishermen along the coast and foreign trawlers from other countries, I think he is an example was primarily China, were coming in and just depleting the fishing stocks, right? So these guys that are on the Somali coast, they got pretty basic systems for fishing. And then these big, badass boats come in

with these super deep nets and they just scoop up all the fish. So what do the dudes do? The same thing you and I would do if somebody was doing that to us. We come together, we sit around, we have a drink. We're like, dude, how do we stop that? And we're like, dude, next time one of those things come through, we're going to go out there in our shitty little boat with some guns and take it over and tell them to stop doing it.

And we create like a little small coast guard. Well, that sounds like what they kind of did, right? And so then they have a little coast guard and they're trying to fight back against these trawlers. And then they take one hostage and they're like, dude, you guys have been taking all our fish. Give us money and we'll give you your boat back because you've been taking all our fish. And they do, right?

And then they're like, well, that kind of escalates because maybe we should get a bigger, we should hijack a bigger boat next time because now we don't have any fish. Like we're not selling anything. We can't buy our kids books. Now they're in the boat abduction business. Yes. Yeah. Right.

And so that's how these things evolved. It started as some dudes just being like, we just wanted to protect our fishing stock, right? To being like, now we're taking over huge oil tankers and demanding. And then when that happened, and then the oil tankers hire mercenaries or private security corporations to come in, oftentimes former like special forces guys or, you know, guys that have a background working for a national military service. And they come in with guns and they're blowing everyone up.

And you're like, these dudes, in the beginning of this story, these dudes just want to They just wanted their fish. Right. They just wanted their food supply. Yes. Which is so ironic because it's really the same other same thing we're talking about. It is, man. They just wanted to eat.

Yep. It's super basic. And when they did, when you're not eating two months later, you are a pirate. Yeah. It turns out, man, if we saw like something super basic, like just making sure everyone around the world has enough food, we're going to see, because this other thing is like, Boko Haram, again, I mean, I could go on to these stories forever, man. And what is? It's a terrorist organization in Nigeria.

And in that region of the world. Well, that was where Lake Chad was. And if you look back on maps, a satellite maps of Lake Chad, like 30 years ago, it was the giant lake. And now it's just like a pond. It shrunk way down because people have been diverting the rivers that flow into it for farming fields and the people that lived there that were fishing out of that. It was a huge lake.

They lost their livelihoods. And then people start getting pissed. They start getting radicalized. People are hungry. then like some people with crazy ideas start being like, well, you join my group, I'll feed you. People are taken from us all of a sudden, you know, just like, and it just spirals, man.

And then you just end up with these crazy groups that are abducting children that are blowing things up. And like the beginning, like the origin of that story was like people got thrown into shit by not having their basic necessities met like food and then things spiral out of control, right? A little like Mad Max kind of style. Yeah.

You know? I mean, it could get really weird everywhere. Yeah. So that's what like, that's what we're hoping doesn't happen. Right. But then, you know, it's life. It's always going on. Society is always going on in some form or other, whether we end up in tribes or whatever, you know. Yeah. It's like that's humanity. You know, you start to get this idea of what humanity is based on your own childhood and things you've heard or and also the safety that we feel in America. Don't you feel like we've lost our tribes, our community though? Like everyone's got their little like. 100% suburb they don't have to interact with anybody anymore and like 100% everybody's just like

like yeah and it's um i feel it's like a country of loneliness man i feel like half the problems we see is just because people feel isolated and lonely and depressed and they're not like they're not like in a community anymore they're not seeing the same people every sunday or they're not going out like dude i play ice hockey right i play ice hockey and those dudes are awesome and i am so lucky to be able to go and see that same group of cool dudes and just play hockey and have that community. And like, I think a lot of us and so much of our communities around what going out to the bar and getting drunk. And like, I used to drink a lot.

And now I think alcohol is a shitty drug, right? Like, I think it's bad medicine. Like, you know, like, I think I view like, you know, a lot of this stuff, I think they should be viewed medicinally. Yeah, it's just like sports piss almost, really, you know? I mean, yeah, I don't drink. I mean, I prefer cocaine probably, but that's not even that good for you. And it's like, I think, yeah, I definitely feel you, though.

It's like, where do you meet up with people? I mean, I go to recovery meeting. So I see people there all the time. So you have like some semblance of groupness. Yeah. But yeah, it's like everybody gets their food delivered a lot of times. The family, it's just. You're staring at a phone.

Your food's getting delivered. You're not going outside. And it's like, how do we re-instill like a stronger community in the U.S.? Right? Because like, I, okay, dude, I have a little cabin in a teeny town, like 100 people. and those people are across the board politically on the spectrum. And it doesn't matter if somebody's voting one way and somebody else is voting the other way. If somebody's like house floods, people are going to show up.

Yeah. Right. People are going to help each other out. Like that's what it is to be a good person. It's not who you vote for or what you necessarily like your political ethos. It's like, dude, did something bad happen to you? Does your community come out and support you? That's community.

And that's what I feel like we're losing, right? We're so distracted about, I feel like, petty crap right now. that we're forgetting it's time we just need to show up for each other. Yeah, I wonder if you're going to see more of an influx towards like religious services, not even entirely for religion, but for community. It's like some of the first places you go back to for community. Like one thing I always loved about church was just seeing like the kids play together. You're all sitting there in peace.

Even it's like if you're just in your own thoughts, like thinking of something bigger than yourself, no matter what your denomination was or whatever. Or, yeah. Yeah. So I grew up. My dad was a Lutheran pastor. And, and, you know, I don't, I don't go to, I don't go to church anymore. I don't follow those beliefs anymore.

But I miss that Sunday get together, man, because you would show up and, you know, there would be like a tax preparer there. And you knew you'd see them every Sunday and you could rely on them. There was a mechanic that was there. And you knew that they'd show up every Sunday and you would rely and they weren't going to screw you. And there was a sense of community. Like, in that community were people that had vocational trades across the board.

And you could trust each other. and you can know each other, and you can ask them questions, you could get knowledge, you could share experience, you could carry each other, right? Like, showing up to that one place every week and having that community,

that's what I feel like, so much is what that's been lost. I feel like it'll be a few generations, and I feel like there will be a rebellious generation that will throw off the VR headsets and masturbate naturally if there's a way to do that into the ocean or whatever. And reclaim what it feels like,

or at least go in search of what it feels like to be human. Yeah, man. That's what I think would probably happen. And are you talking about this with other buddies too? Because I feel like having this conversation more and more with buddies. Like, dude, how do we create community again? Like I said, it can be as simple as like finding a good hockey team, right? And just like, because after every game, man,

it doesn't matter if that game starts at 10.30 p.m. at night. And we're not in the parking lot until midnight or like 1 a.m. Dudes are going to stand around and drink a beer. Oh, yeah. Just catch up. Have a blast. to have a nice time. It's the same after any real get together.

People always kind of mill around, see what's going on. You and one buddy or two guys might stay late if one of them's having a problem and they'll talk about it. If everything's cool that you're out of there, kind of like one of the first couple of guys out, but you're joking around. Yeah, I think that thing is, I feel like we would find ways. In the end, I feel like you just believe enough in something that we can't create outside of us. that's inside of us, that would lead us to victory in some sense. Like some human spirit or something that will prevail. It always kind of feels like that.

I think it just feels like we're down maybe two rounds to one right now. Yeah. I feel like it's tough for that human spirit to connect through a phone. Yeah. I think it's hard, man. And I think there's a lot of like I have to be doing something all the time. There's a lot of factors in it. It's interesting to think about.

Before you leave, I know you worked in. organized crime. You mentioned that a little while ago? Yeah. And was you, what'd you do in it? Bookies or what was it? Pretty close, man. It was a lot of casino work. It was a lot of Asian organized crime. I went over to Macau, which became like, Oh, you're just by Hong Kong, huh? Yeah, yeah. I went there once. Hong Kong or Macau? I went across the ferry there. I went to both of them. That's a fun ferry ride. Yeah, it was nice, dude. Some lady I think was either flirting with me or trying to tell me I had some on my shirt or something. Yeah, it's a wild place, man. It's, it's, they do more revenue than

Vegas does now. It became massive. When I was there, it'd become just like in a very short period, it'd become massive. And I was over there because we were looking into how what the U.S. government largely considered was organized crime, people connection to triads, etc. were working inside of the casinos to bring money from mainland China that could be gambled in Macau because at that time there was like, I think it was a $5,000 cap, right? Like this was the law. Like you could only bring $5,000 from mainland China into Macau. But then you'd go and you'd go and you'd go to the casino and people are betting like 500,000 U.S. per hand. You're like, well, how is that money? And it was basically this informal credit network, which is like, we know you're good for it in China. So we'll spot it for you in Macau, right? But if you don't pay your debts, you're probably going to be found burned up and shot in your car. Wow. You know? And so like that was the ecosystem and then these big U.S. casinos were operating in that ecosystem. And so how does all of that? Yeah. So I went over there my job was to try to get these guys to go on camera, to open up to me and to tell me about this operation.

And as one of the U.S. casino bosses, a white guy from America said to me is like, he's like, man, that dude whose casino you're staying in for the six weeks you're here here is known if people say stuff he doesn't like for hanging them out their window. And like that's where I was staying. And yeah, and it was, it was. Gosh, that's a rough start. Yeah, yeah. And so it was.

So you just down there looking and we say triads. What does that mean? triads are like a British word for what they would describe as Asian organized crime networks. And the triads actually have this super interesting history that go back to martial arts to the Shaolin Temple and to like all the way back to like the overthrow of the emperor. And it's like it gets like that's why the triad guys are known for being such badasses with regards to martial arts. Like I still get calls from federal prison pretty frequently from a guy named Raymond Shrimp Boy Chow. And shrimp boy. Shrimp boy.

Amen. Yeah. And dude, just crazy badass martial arts guy. But yeah, he'll call, you know, he, he, I, I went to him because I knew I was going to Macau and he hadn't been arrested. Now he's, now he's in prison doing, I think, multiple life sentences. Shrimp boy.

Yeah. But, but that's just a, that's a different world, man, because you're operating in a world of violence. Right. Yeah. That's how they solve it there. If you, yeah. That, you know, it can be.

They're punishable by real violence. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. And it's kind of organized. So it's difficult to go in as an investigative journalist into that, you know. And so the first thing I'd always do is just tell people right away, like, I am an investigative journalist. I'm looking into this.

You know, that's my role. And I don't necessarily need to push people for answers right away. But like, I don't want anybody thinking that like I'm sneaking around behind their back or like trying to be transparent. Super transparent. So there's a different level of respect if you come in like that over there. Yeah. And I do that with everybody. Like as a journalist, if I'm working on a story, I always identify myself as a journalist right away.

You know, like this is what I'm working on. This is my interest. You know, and over there, it's like we don't got to, you know, deal with that right away. You can just identify me as a person, you know, in parts of China that I've traveled to, one of the things people want to do when they're going to get into business with you is they just want to get hammered with you. Yeah. They just want to get hammered because I want to see what kind of drunk you are. Are you going to be a total dick when you're drunk?

or are you going to still just be like kind of funny and happy and upbeat and like honest or what kind of drunk are you? And so like there are just different ways. And so sometimes you identify who you are and then you just kind of a human for a little bit. Just like just hang out. Yeah, I never wanted to be Chinese that much really. I mean, I haven't, I haven't not wanted to be it, but I haven't, I'll be honest. Yeah, I haven't really wanted to be it.

I guess I would be willing to be it. But I don't, I would probably think about it a lot more than I have recently. Why do Chinese businessmen insist on getting you drunk? That's interesting. In a culture where relationships can make or break you in business, getting drunk with a potential business partner is often viewed as a crucial way of solidifying that relationship and showing that you are, in fact, friends. Huh.

If you say anything about the liquor, anything more about booze? Alcohol is a very long tradition in Confucian society. Confucius who advocated only eating at meal time. and not in between made an exception for wine. He said only wine drinking is not limited. So Confucian really liked to have that. He liked to have a little sip in the daytime. No shade.

No shade. Before you go, have there been stories that you wanted to go on and you just didn't have the time? Oh, dude, that's all the time. That's like the thing that haunts me most right now. Just like really important stories that people come to me and they want me to look into. And it's just like it's super tough to find. the time, you know. There's just too many things that I would love to be able. I wish, you know, yeah. So it happens. Yeah. And who funds like investigative reporting? Who funds like guys like

you? So I work at a nonprofit called the Center for Investigative Reporting. Okay. It's like a super old nonprofit's been around since the 70s. It was a bunch of Rolling Stones reporters. When Rolling Stones used to be based in San Francisco, um, they ended up moving it to New York and a bunch of the reporters didn't want to move to the East Coast. They liked San Francisco. And one of those guys was one of my mentor, Lowell Bergman, who, I don't know if you ever saw the movie Insider with Al Pacino, but Al Pacino was playing Lull. Low was the one that got the documents from, you know, inside the tobacco companies that showed that like the, they knew that it was a carcinogen, they knew it was addictive and they were, they were hiding and not being straight up with Congress. So I

work at a nonprofit, which is a super fortunate place to be because we're not profit. Like, you know, I worked on this documentary. That documentary, could make a gazillion dollars and I'm not going to make a dime more. It's just not like what the drive is. Right. Right. You know, like, and so,

and it's also because investigative journalism isn't profitable. Really? Yeah, no, dude. Letting me spend a year and a half diving into like, is Facebook and this social media company targeting your weakness?

It is not profitable. And so we have to get foundations and others to give us money, to give us the time and people, people donate to us, to give us the time to look into this stuff so I can just share it with the public. It would be hugely profitable

if I wanted to take that my same skills and go work for a hedge fund. I can make four or five times what I make, right? But people are willing to pay me to do it, you know, like a modest salary. Like I'll do it, man. Like, because I love stories. Dude, I love stories.

I love, like I used to sit and I was a little kid and I used to tell my grandma, my mom's mom, just tell me a story from your mind, you know? And she would just wax. And now, meaning people, you know, like, I just like to hear their stories. Like, what's their background? Where'd they come from? You know, it doesn't have to be, like, totally revelatory.

It's just like, we're also complex. We're also interesting, you know? But when I can spend time diving into something like Susie Kelly's story where, like, this crazy technology company identified that her brain had this weakness and targeted her, then I want to spend a bunch of time and share it with people, right? Because we know it's not just happening to Susie. Yeah. I mean, and it's so sick that that would have to be.

It was almost if you saw someone who was disabled and someone had a broken leg and someone kept kicking him in it, you know? Yeah. And that's, and I, dude, I think that's a really good analogy. And then, like, they were kicking them because it was making them money. Right. Yeah. And you're like, what are you doing?

How are you? And I don't get it. I'll just tell you that, like, fundamentally on a personal level, I don't get it because I couldn't do that. You know, like. Yeah, that's the thing that's tough. It's like, and then sometimes I feel like, am I normal or am I the weirdo? that gives a fuck about stuff. You know what I'm saying?

Is that ever crossing your mind? Yeah, dude, it does. It does. And I don't know. I think whatever, I think we're all broken in our own way. And whatever my little broken way has made me an investigative journalist. But whatever.

It feels fun, though. To be Paul Revere or whatever, even though somebody said he was trying to meet men, that's the only reason he was going through town or whatever. That's what I've heard. But to be that kind of guy who's like, you know, trying to, you know, like, yeah,

we've always loved the. Underdog, dude. We are, you know, underdog. That's who you want the underdog. Yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. Like everybody's like, everybody wants a nude picture of like,

um, Pam Anderson or something. You know, I wanted a new picture of Aaron Brockovich on my wall, you know? No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, that was a badass that uncovered a lot of stuff and got a lot of good out there in the world. And pretty dimey too in her time. I'll say that.

And I think it's a compliment, Aaron. But, um, what else do we have? anything else that I wanted to talk about. I don't, I feel like we covered a really good bit, Nate. So we can, people can donate to the Center for Investigative Research. Reporting, yeah. So the Center for Investigative Reporting, that's a legitimate company. Yeah, man, it's a legitimate nonprofit. And, you know, people can even just check it out. We got a, we got a, uh, radio show we do that's just all investigated journalism. Really? Yeah, we print, you know, we work with other folks. And we have the documentary out. I mean, at the end of the day, dude, just trying to get good

information into people's hands and like, call to account, like, people that are targeted. getting other people. Yeah. If you don't have food, you'll get so caught in the moment, you don't even have a chance to look ahead at that point. It's going to be moment to moment. That's all right, dude. That's totally right.

So then it's a wrap. Then you're just trying to get food for you and your family and you start doing weirder and weirder stuff. And even people that, you know, do you ever recall McCarty? He wrote like the road. Yeah, dude. He wrote some real. No country for old men.

Yeah. Strange stuff, dude. And I love it. But like, the road. He basically breaks it down to like, are you willing to kill if like, if it comes down to it, would you kill somebody else to eat them, right? And like, you're a good person if you're willing to just like, be like, damn, I'm just going to have to starve to death because I'm not going to murder somebody else to eat them.

Or are you going to murder somebody else to eat them? Like, kind of bifurcates humanity along that track. Yeah. And people get weird, man. People get weird when the basic necessities aren't there. Yeah, you'll say that you wouldn't, right? But you would also say you would, I wouldn't eat out of a dumpster. If there's a dumpster outside right now, I would not go eat out of it.

But give me three days without food. Right. If you're about to eat a dude in Best Buy, right? Like, yeah, you're getting it out of that dumpster. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what's crazy. You would eat that ali sashimi, baby.

You'd eat whatever out of there. Yeah, for sure. And you'd be, you'd be stoked in. You know, like, yeah. Those are crepes. That's what I keep yelling. Those crepes. I'm going to go foraging with you.

Yeah. I'm going to be in just garbage. You'd like, dude, that's a crepe. And I'd be like, really? I think you got to trick yourself. Yeah. It's all crepes, bro. Yeah.

We're both just going to like mentally just redesign whatever garbage we're eating. That's a wet napkin. I mean, what are you talking about, brother? Don't tell me that. Yeah. It's got to be nutritional value. That's a damn crepe. Nate Halverson, thanks so much to grab.

It's coming out on Netflix. No, it's coming out on June 14th in theaters. Yeah. And then people can rent it online and then it'll be on one of the street. streaming platforms in the fall. Okay. So the grab, it's coming out on June 14th in theaters. Yeah, it's really interesting, man.

Just thought provoking to get me to start thinking like, yeah, what are, because you just think, oh, that's just a farm in my neighborhood. Or you just think like, oh, that's just the way things are. That's just the way things go. You don't sometimes see, like, maybe the chess board that's being put together or that's already been, you know, the plays that have already been played. Nate Halverson, thanks so much for being an investigator and for spending time with us. Hey, Theo. Thanks so much, I'm on, man.

Yeah, you bet, man.