On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Alex Blumberg sits down with National Geographic's newest show, Trafficked, where he talks to a woman who has spent the last decade and a half reporting on the black market in drugs, guns, and other illegal items. They talk about her journey into the drug trade, how she got into the business, and how she became one of the most trusted journalists in the business. They also talk about how important it is to get to the bottom of what's going on in the black markets, and what it means to be a journalist in this day and age. It's an episode you don't want to miss. Trafficked is on Wednesdays at 9pm ET on National Geographic, and you can catch it wherever you get your shows on the network's streaming service, Prime Video. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the code CRIMES at checkout. We're giving away $10 and a free copy of Trafficked when you sign up for the show! Thank you so much to our sponsor, VaynerMedia! Thanks to our sponsors: for sponsoring the show and supporting the show. We'll see you next week with a new ad-free version of the show, CRIMECARDO! Subscribe to our newscast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Rate, and leave us a review, and tell us what you think about the show on iTunes, and share it with a friend! and we'll be giving you a rating and review it on the next episode of CRIMEO! If you like it well, we'll get a shout-out on the pod! Thanks for listening and a review! tag us your thoughts on the podcast! if you're listening and rating it on iTunes and reviewing it on your podcast, and we're listening to it on Podchaseray and sharing it on Insta! :) Subscribe, review, rating, and subscribe to the podCastle, we'll send it out to someone else's podcast and other things like that's a review on Instapod, and shout it out on Instafood, and more! it's a big thanks to you'll get it out there!
00:03:01.000I would say also, I would add to that, that, you know, we did Mexico with fentanyl.
00:03:07.000We did guns here in the U.S. going to Mexico.
00:03:09.000We did tigers in Asia and all these different scams in Jamaica and Israel.
00:03:14.000And I think a big important reason or goal for us with this show, and for me in particular because it's the way that I approach my job and my career as a journalist, Is to not only be there to inform of what's happening, like you were saying, but also I think it's important for people to connect to people in these faraway lands that at first glance we have nothing in common,
00:03:36.000These are the bad guys operating in far distant lands or maybe sometimes around us, but they're considered the bad people.
00:03:42.000The people that we have nothing in common with.
00:03:45.000But if you actually sit down with them and listen to their stories, and this is the big shocker of this show, and I think it rubs people the wrong way sometimes when you admit or when somebody tells you that, look, actually there is not a lot that differentiates you from the guy smuggling cocaine out of the Peru,
00:04:06.000You both are motivated by the same goals, which is happiness, an opportunity in life, a chance to reach your dreams.
00:04:17.000And unless you actually look at it this way and start realizing that that is more often than not the case, of course there's a lot of bad people there doing it for greed and solely greed.
00:04:28.000That also happens, and I spent a lot of time with those people as well.
00:04:31.000But unless you start understanding sort of the root causes of what leads people into these lives, you're never going to be able to address black markets.
00:04:39.000Well, you really did a fantastic job of getting close to these people and talking to them like, you know, they were talking about their family, they were talking about their children.
00:04:49.000The one guy who is the chemist who wants to get out because he wants to go to school and like, this is my last year.
00:04:58.000That story alone, we spent the night with these mochileros, these backpackers, teenagers who carry loads of cocaine on their back out of the valley and spending time with them and, you know, really dangerous work.
00:05:10.000They tell us stories about how they hike for days on end out of the Amazon, the Frame Valley, to a place where then it's sent out into outside of the country to Europe and to the United States.
00:05:21.000And you spend time with these guys, and you listen to them, and it's incredibly dangerous work, too.
00:05:26.000They've seen their best friends being killed in front of them.
00:05:29.000And I ask them, so why would you ever want to do something like this?
00:05:38.000I knew that the only job opportunities, the whole economy is essentially sustained by the growing of coca leaves, production of cocaine, and smuggling of cocaine.
00:05:47.000So the only job opportunity here I had was this.
00:05:50.000And I asked him, why do you want to go to college so badly?
00:06:16.000I always assumed that it was the organized crime cartels that were growing the coca leaves.
00:06:23.000But no, it's these families, these very poor families that are growing these coca leaves and drying them out by the road where everyone can see.
00:06:32.000So you have children playing, you have these very poor people that are growing this crop, and the vast majority of it is sold to the cartels, and they're not selling it for a lot of money either.
00:07:01.000And it's also crazy that the thing itself, the coca leaf, like there's actually been people that have made a really good argument that not only should that stuff be legal, but it's probably good for you.
00:07:13.000Yeah, the coca leaf a lot, alone, if it is not made into cocaine.
00:07:18.000They chew it, you know, you go to the Andes and all around they actually chew the coca leaf.
00:08:15.000I think partly because I've seen how they're done.
00:08:18.000Well, after the OxyContin Express and seeing how many people's lives are destroyed by a legal drug, I could imagine why you would want to avoid the ones that are illegal.
00:08:53.000My friend Jimmy in high school, when we were young, one of his buddies was selling coke and he just looked at me and he goes, you should never do this stuff.
00:10:41.000That was one of the things that I wanted to bring up with you.
00:10:45.000Because it's such a complicated issue, drugs, and it's so sad to see from your program to see these poor farmers to these kids who are the chemists who are putting it together and then carrying it out on the backpack.
00:11:02.000And one of the chemists was actually one of the guys who was actually carrying it on his back, too, which is even Yeah, and he jumped into the car the first night that we got access to this illicit lab where we've been trying for so long to get this access and suddenly we're driving in the middle of the night to go up to this area where we're supposed to meet him and suddenly the guy driving our car,
00:11:22.000our guide basically stops the car, the door opens, this guy jumps in and they're speaking in Spanish and I interrupt and say, what's happening?
00:13:50.000And then lastly, and I think more surprising for me, but I think it's the biggest amount, the biggest reason we were given constantly, is this idea that they know they're considered the bad people.
00:14:01.000They know they're, you know, the most shunned people in our society, and we're giving them an opportunity to tell their story and how, you know, people really want others to know, to know why they fall into a life of crime or why they become outlaws.
00:14:19.000And that, you know, was a really big goal for me in this documentary, was to even, again, the people that are more, that we think have nothing in common with us, actually do.
00:14:30.000And no matter how far you travel into the fringes of our society, that you can still find people that are redeemable and relatable.
00:14:54.000We won the lottery ticket and I don't think most people, if you don't travel and you don't experience this, like I've been privileged to, I don't think we realize that.
00:15:32.000You know, we filmed a lot of armed guards protecting their money and their operations as well.
00:15:39.000But I would say that in the vast majority of cases, it really is the lack of opportunities.
00:15:43.000I really don't believe that anyone is born one day and decides, hey, you know, what I want to do is I want to become a sicario for the Sinaloa cartel and be killed when I'm 25 years old.
00:15:54.000I want to kill people and then be killed when I'm 25, which happened.
00:16:40.000How many decades would it have to take before a large pharmaceutical company or some alcohol company or a tobacco company said, fuck it, let's grow coke.
00:16:50.000And then just started selling it legally.
00:17:01.000Would people do it more is the question.
00:17:04.000You know, that's what we're seeing with the marijuana business in California right now, where it was legalized.
00:17:09.000And what's happening is that the people that have been operating these, at the time, illegal shops for weed and operations for weed are now being kicked out of the business.
00:17:19.000And there's all these bigger companies coming in and taking away the business from them.
00:18:46.000Other than the person that's doing it.
00:18:48.000If it was just two of us, the only two people in the world, and you thought pot should be illegal and you made the rule, and I wanted to smoke pot, you would lock me in a cage?
00:19:53.000All the money that the government was spending on incarcerating people, they're now spending on rehab centers and making sure that people get the help they need.
00:21:00.000I know they're trying to get by, and I know the guy was talking about feeding his family, but you're also in this horrible system that you're probably never going to get out, and if you do get out, what are you going to do now?
00:21:14.000Hey, Mike, it says here for the last 15 years you've done nothing.
00:21:40.000I get comments on my work sometimes, you know, especially since the show started airing where people reach out and say, and, you know, there's stories, you know, I understand part of it.
00:21:50.000It's, for example, the first one that we aired, the first two were the scams episode and then the fentanyl one where we follow the pipeline of fentanyl all the way from the coast of Mexico where we saw, we filmed the precursor chemicals that come from Asia being thrown overboard and then we filmed fentanyl.
00:22:24.000We were there when a woman, in this case, she was pregnant, American citizen, drove into the United States with five kilos of fentanyl inside, hidden inside her car.
00:22:35.000And there was a moment where she actually gets called for secondary inspection.
00:22:41.000I mean, we're not filming her because we're keeping the cameras low, but I'm watching what is happening.
00:22:45.000And as you know, I've been reporting on the opiate crisis for many years, and I've spent numerous amount, countless times with mothers who've lost loved ones to the opiate epidemic.
00:22:55.000So to me, that was very hard on my shoulders, the idea that on one hand, I was seeing this woman, and I knew she had kids, she was pregnant, and I knew what that meant for her family if she got caught.
00:23:05.000And on the other hand, I also knew what that would mean for American families if the drugs went across and came through.
00:23:12.000So it was a really hard time for me as a journalist.
00:23:15.000And I think I get flack for that, for not being absolutely clear that, you know, I think people would prefer if I was just, okay, these are bad people.
00:23:24.000And because there's so much suffering around some of these trades, right, such as fentanyl, and even cocaine, that I think people just have an easier time in life thinking of the world as black and white, that they are bad people, we would never do that, you know, us in that position would never do that.
00:23:40.000And I think it's a harder, more challenging look of life if you realize that actually it's a lot more grey and that people are a lot more similar to us.
00:23:49.000Well, I think that's one of the reasons why your work is so important because you do take those risks and you do show the human side of the people that we like to demonize.
00:23:59.000We like to demonize them and think of them as being just evil, this evil scourge that comes from these other places to our good place.
00:26:16.000But this guy, who in a lot of people represents your father or your boss, this really cold, sort of fact-based, no-nonsense, super-successful guy,
00:26:32.000who's telling this fool, this liberal fool, if you buy drugs, you support terrorism.
00:26:51.000What you're doing is so important because you're showing...
00:26:56.000You're showing human beings who got handed a terrible roll of the dice, a bad hand of cards, and they're stuck in this very poor village in Peru with dirt roads and no money and no opportunity and no way out.
00:27:13.000And this is what most of the people do.
00:27:18.000And we can either choose to ignore it and pretend it's not there and not do, you know, just keep on demonizing these people and keep on consuming and keep on buying because that's why it's because there's demand or else it wouldn't exist.
00:27:29.000Or we can actually go and shine a light and try and understand why they happen, why these people turn to black markets and why the trade exists and try to do something about it.
00:27:38.000Well, in a lot of ways, it's as gross as it sounds.
00:27:41.000I think your expose on this is one of the best arguments for legalization.
00:27:48.000To show people, yes, this is all horrible.
00:27:51.000However, you're not going to stop people from doing drugs.
00:27:55.000People have been doing drugs since the beginning of time.
00:27:58.000If you say, people shouldn't do drugs because drugs are bad, Because it's a fact.
00:28:03.000If you're one of those guys, like, okay, simple.
00:28:06.000You've just taken one of the most complex, nuanced problems the world has ever known.
00:28:11.000Human beings love to perturb their consciousness.
00:30:21.000But I also think maybe the only way we're going to really resolve it is if you have treatment centers and rehabilitations that are funded by the profit off of legalized cocaine and heroin and all these other drugs.
00:30:34.000If we had, look, if heroin was legal tomorrow, I'm not going to fucking do heroin.
00:31:33.000My friend Ed Clay, he started a clinic down in Mexico because he got hooked on pills because he got hurt, and he wanted to figure out how to get off of them.
00:32:24.000There's a ton of soldiers that come back, and they have severe PTSD, and then on top of that they have CTE, so they have legitimate trauma, physical trauma to their brain, and they wind up getting addicted.
00:32:37.000And they also get injured and healed a lot, and then they're given OxyContin and other painkillers, and yeah, it's a recipe for disaster, really.
00:33:32.000This simplistic approach to it, this childlike approach to it, there is not a single intelligent person, if you laid out the facts, and they looked at it objectively, would think that this is a successful method of handling this.
00:33:46.000We keep pretending that we don't know that what we're doing and the billions of dollars we're spending on this is pretending that it's making a difference, and it really isn't.
00:34:13.000When you showed those Coast Guard people, that was incredibly illuminating.
00:34:18.000Because the way that guy described it, where he said, you're dealing with an area that we patrol that's larger than the United States, and we have about four boats.
00:34:28.000He's like, imagine four police cars patrolling the entire United States.
00:34:34.000Then you know how these drugs are getting in.
00:34:36.000Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time with law enforcement and you hear their stories and, you know, they're really out there on the front lines trying to make a difference, most of them.
00:34:45.000And again and again you hear just how frustrating their job is because they know, you know, that they're really not making a dent.
00:34:53.000But I think it's also hard to admit in many ways because this is their lives and their livelihoods that if you talk to law enforcement, even now, I actually just did a story for season two about weed, black market weed in California.
00:35:09.000And even now, you know, they will tell you that they think that it shouldn't have been legalized.
00:37:31.000So they followed the dry creek up into this crazy marijuana grow-op.
00:37:36.000We went to one of these grows this summer with an operation much like that.
00:37:39.000And it was funny because all of the law enforcement that was there, they were brought in sort of, you know, those ropes on helicopters where they come and they drop them because it's really out there in the middle of the forest.
00:37:51.000So we had to actually drive part of the way and then hike down.
00:37:55.000And it took us like, you know, almost a whole day of hiking through like Thick brush to get to this area where they were diverting water and where there's marijuana growing all around us and it was all cartel operated.
00:38:06.000And you realize just like what these guys have to go through because then it's also on a weekly basis they have to get supplies and food and they have to get the, you know, the drugs out of there.
00:38:37.000The things that I've seen that people do to hide their product, to make their product, to make it better, to make it stronger, it's really incredible.
00:39:12.000On my way driving here to the show, I passed by the place where I had filmed just three weeks ago, actually, this guy in his hotel room, a dealer, a meth dealer.
00:39:23.000But he was washing one of the things he did before he started getting clients.
00:39:26.000And the clients are not the people that you think are meth users at all, by the way.
00:40:06.000The amount of shit that goes into these drugs, if that alone is not going to dissuade you from doing them, it's chemicals, it's gasoline, it's lime.
00:40:19.000Lime is something that goes into a lot of these.
00:40:43.000So this guy was a bioengineer and incredibly smart and knowledgeable.
00:40:49.000And we met him in this abandoned location where he's basically making fentanyl and pressing it into the M30 pills, which are fake.
00:40:56.000It goes round back to the beginning of the opiate crisis because they make them to look like Oxycontin, like the 30 milligram pills that Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin had.
00:41:17.000Like, I spent time in some of these illicit labs where you kind of get a sense that shit could go wrong very fast because they have no idea what they're dealing with.
00:41:27.000But in this case, you know, it's not easy to make.
00:41:29.000I mean, it is because it's cheap, and once you know how to do it, you know how to do it, but it's, you know, I can't show up and try to make that, the whole thing could explode just because the chemicals are so potent.
00:41:39.000And yet, here he was, and we were wearing our hazmat suits and our masks and everything.
00:41:44.000And I started talking to him and he was, I mean, I suddenly thought I was talking to Walter White from Breaking Red.
00:41:51.000He was exactly that, like a geek when it came to chemistry and had always loved chemistry and, you know, had worked in chemistry for a while and then was approached by the Sinaloa cartel and they needed a guy who knew how to make this stuff.
00:44:20.000But I don't think there's a lot of drawbacks to it.
00:44:23.000It's so weird that Tim Ferriss, who is all about biohacking and all about the four-hour body, the four-hour work week, he didn't put it in his book.
00:44:35.000And he told me he didn't want to put it in his book because he was worried that people were going to just fucking eat it like candy.
00:44:41.000He's like, I don't want to endorse this.
00:44:42.000He goes, because I don't think there's such a thing as a biological free lunch.
00:44:46.000He goes, when something is doing that to you, there's got to be something that's happening on the other end.
00:44:52.000There's got to be something that, and I don't know what it is, and I don't want to be the guy.
00:45:47.000Well, I came here right from the gym, so I'm pretty, pretty amped up.
00:45:52.000Wait, how do you stand on steroids, by the way?
00:45:55.000Because one of our episodes was about steroids.
00:45:57.000I think that steroids are many, there's a lot of different things that are legal now in terms of like you can get testosterone replacement therapy, hormone replacement therapy, and they basically give you the vial, right?
00:46:12.000But only if you have low levels of testosterone, right?
00:47:11.000Another thing is when people have done steroids.
00:47:13.000See, I know about this initially because of the UFC and the UFC had a – there was a testosterone – a TUE, testosterone use exemption.
00:47:23.000That testosterone use exemption allowed people to replace their hormones if they showed low levels of hormones.
00:47:30.000So testosterone replacement therapy was for people that had some sort of a condition that would allow the doctor to prescribe testosterone for them.
00:47:39.000The problem with that is a lot of the people that had low testosterone had low testosterone Because they were taking steroids.
00:49:14.000I mean like big giant arms, like really thick guy, but just really dedicated.
00:49:19.000He is nothing like those giants that you see at the gym that are on steroids.
00:49:26.000There are people that walk around, like if you go to like a Gold's gym in Venice in the heyday when all the elite bodybuilders would go there, they don't even look like humans.
00:49:38.000I went to a bodybuilding competition in Vegas for the show where we were following this kid who was mostly not doing steroids at this time.
00:49:44.000And like your friend, he was trying to see if he could make it into this competition without heavily using steroids and other PEDs.
00:49:53.000And he went on stage and you could see the difference between him and the other guys.
00:49:58.000I mean, everybody else there was heavily using PEDs.
00:51:14.000Spends most of his time at the gym and eats right and all that.
00:51:17.000And in the middle of the competition, Tony Hughes says, okay, it's time for us to go back to your apartment and get you ready for round two.
00:51:23.000They go back, and we filmed all of this, and he opens up a big suitcase, and inside this suitcase, it's like the Mary Poppins suitcase that more and more shit's coming out, you know?
00:51:34.000And starts giving him injections of insulin and all sorts, I don't know, half of the things that he was giving.
00:51:40.000And the kid's like, are you sure this is okay?
00:54:01.000They don't exactly know if steroids killed them, but it's like, you know, if you see a body and then there's a gun right next to the body, and the body has a bullet hole.
00:54:33.000So he says, okay, this is, I used to be handsome.
00:54:35.000This is maybe six or seven years ago when I was 31 or 32. I was still a full-time lawyer, wearing a suit, going to court, meeting clients, da-da-da.
00:59:11.000And he was saying, you know, I was asking, like, isn't it for somebody, he apparently loves baseball, has been a huge fan of baseball in his life, and then became the supplier of steroids for, you know, big shots in baseball.
00:59:22.000And I was asking him, don't you think that's unfair, you know, considering that these are illegal and it's just some people are taking them and others aren't?
00:59:29.000He's like, yeah, unfair is not to take them because everybody's taking them.
00:59:33.000Well, it's the way I felt about Lance Armstrong.
00:59:37.000The real problem with Lance Armstrong was not that he was taking drugs.
00:59:57.000And they were all admitting they were doing it.
00:59:59.000So they were getting, you know, immunity.
01:00:02.000If you got rid of all the people that tested positive when they took away Lance Armstrong's jerseys or whatever, you get a jersey from winning all his victories.
01:00:13.000I mean, he has them on the wall in his house.
01:00:15.000If you took away all those, well, who wins then?
01:01:21.000Well, I did know that one, we don't have to say the name, but there was a prominent tennis star that the World Anti-Doping Agency or one of them came to knock on this person's door and they locked themselves in a safe room.
01:01:35.000And they said, oh, I think there's an intruder, someone trying to come and get me.
01:02:52.000The documentary is so well done because Brian Fogel, who is the director and the guy who made the documentary, he had a plan and his plan was film him with no drugs doing this bike race and then come back next year with the supervision of an anti-doping expert from the Soviet Union.
01:03:13.000In the middle of all this happening, it gets exposed that the Sochi Olympics, that the urine samples had been tampered with, and that there was, like, micro-scratches on there, that they had devised some sort of a method to open up the urine samples and replace the urine with clean urine,
01:04:25.000It's one of our documentaries when you start by watching and you think it's going to be about one thing and then something completely different.
01:04:52.000He's got a really good argument for it.
01:04:55.000That they're doing things, and this is for fighters, they're doing things, they're just getting away with it.
01:05:02.000They're doing things in some sort of a sneaky way, they're microdosing, they're figuring out a way, and that if you just like regulated the levels that they could compete at and just let them do whatever they want, it'd probably be better for everybody.
01:05:15.000In the early days of the sport, and I'm sorry Luke if I've distorted your argument, In the early days of the sport, it was Wild West, and everybody was juiced to the gills.
01:05:25.000And in Japan, when they competed in Japan, it was actually in the contract that they would actually, not only would they not test, they would say in all, like my friend Ensign Inoue, he's a legend in mixed martial arts, like one of the early pioneers, and he said that when he was in PRIDE,
01:05:42.000it was in all caps, WE DO NOT TEST FOR STEROIDS. It was in the contract.
01:06:12.000And, you know, if you're on a host of these performance-enhancing drugs, you will have more endurance, you'll be able to recover faster, you'll be able to train harder, and you'll be able to endure more punishment when you're actually inside the ring or the cage.
01:06:30.000That this is, we're trying to stick our finger in a well, or in a dam, rather, that has a bunch of holes, and the holes are going to increase.
01:06:39.000There's going to be more and more holes, and then you're going to have genetic engineering.
01:06:41.000And I think we are maybe one, two generations away from CRISPR kids fighting in MMA. Kids with perfect genes.
01:06:51.000Say if they engineer myostatin inhibitors into children.
01:06:56.000You know what myostatin inhibitors are?
01:06:58.000Myostatin inhibitors, it happens accidentally with animals sometimes, sometimes with cows, but commonly with whippets for some strange reason.
01:07:07.000When they breed whippets, sometimes they have this weird error in their genes, and they have myostatin inhibitors in their genes.
01:07:18.000And myostatin inhibitors, apparently what it does is it stops your body's Like regulation of how much muscle you can grow.
01:07:27.000So you have whippets that don't even look like real animals.
01:07:30.000If you see them, you'll think they're photoshopped.
01:09:09.000Now, with CRISPR, obviously I'm not a scientist, so I'm going to butcher this, but there's going to be good things that they can do where they can remove genes that can cause leukemia, they can remove genes that can cause Alzheimer's, but they're also going to be able to alter people,
01:10:03.000And they actually did it with, I think there was something they did in China, I believe it was, where it improved their cognitive function.
01:10:10.000They were trying to engineer something.
01:10:12.000It might have been something against HIV. A gene to stop them from potentially getting HIV and it actually wound up improving their cognitive function.
01:10:24.000It's going to be weird shit they're doing with people.
01:10:34.000Yeah, how in Argentina, actually, which is sort of the center of polo horses and the polo, the sport, polo.
01:10:41.000And the majority of the horses and the best teams are all cloned.
01:10:45.000And it's all actually being done by an American company, owned company by this American guy who has diabetes and who's, I believe somebody in his family died from diabetes, his grandmother perhaps.
01:10:57.000And he's trying to figure out a way that he can clone parts of his body and make them healthier and really fascinating stuff.
01:11:19.000You think of a clone, you think of something that looks exactly like the other.
01:11:22.000Apparently, the part that is more visible, which is the outward skin and the horse's hair, Actually, the hair, the color of your hair has something to do with the temperature of you when you're in the body before you were born.
01:11:38.000And so the horses that were cloned, actually the hair were different colors.
01:11:43.000But in the physical abilities and health-wise, the way your body operates, that's what's cloned.
01:11:51.000Right, so if somebody wanted to make a perfect team of bodybuilders, they would just clone Ronnie Coleman and just make a bunch of Ronnie Coleman's.
01:11:58.000And the rest would look similar to him, but they're not identical.
01:12:02.000And also, apparently, they were saying that the personality of these clone horses were very similar to the original horse In terms of being fighters and not giving up and all that.
01:13:27.000So it's this very strange thing that I'm like, this passed down clearly because it's unusual the way she is.
01:13:34.000I'm like, this is very strange to see this in a young girl.
01:13:38.000My son definitely shares some things with me.
01:13:41.000We both get so excited when we go into a plane.
01:13:44.000Every time, even though I fly constantly, I still am the kind of person that I walk into a plane, I step foot on a plane, and I get excited about everything.
01:14:11.000I love to say that I have exploration in my blood because I'm Portuguese and we come from a long line of explorers around the world in history.
01:14:41.000He wanted to do everything, like put the, what do you call the thing, the scarf on your head, like the Tuaregs there, because we went camping in the Sahara Desert.
01:14:50.000And yeah, he really embraces all of it.
01:14:59.000Because it's like, think of the things that people are inherently afraid of.
01:15:03.000Like, I think it was Rupert Sheldrake was talking about this, that children, even children that grow up in New York City, they're not worried about car accidents or child molesters.
01:16:57.000And then I went to bed that night in these hammocks that we hung on trees out completely in the open.
01:17:01.000And I had the hammock on the far end because I was a woman and the scientist stayed and my husband next to me, but still I was more exposed than them.
01:17:30.000The scientist had just told us that he's not scared of anything except for jaguars because he knows that they are in this area and they've killed little kids.
01:17:38.000So this is happening to me in the middle of the night.
01:17:40.000And I had this reaction that I didn't think was possible.
01:17:43.000You know when you have nightmares when you were a kid and something horrifying happens and then you want to talk and scream and ask for help, but you can't.
01:17:51.000That actually happened to me where I was suddenly, I felt it here.
01:17:55.000I knew I needed to ask for help, but I completely froze and I couldn't get any words to come out.
01:18:00.000But apparently my teeth were shattering so damn loud that my husband next to me woke up and said, hey, are you okay?
01:18:06.000And I was able to say no, and then he came up with this flashlight and looked all around and didn't see anything and thought, obviously, I was probably dreaming.
01:19:06.000There's people that were poo-pooing it because there was a mountain lion sighting in the area and some people think that he was killed by the mountain lion, but...
01:21:02.000Well, he saw the babies first and then he started walking towards it and then it started walking towards him and then he started backing up and it chased him.
01:21:11.000My friend in my old neighborhood had stopped outside of her house and she saw a mountain lion and started filming it.
01:21:23.000And while she was filming the mountain lion, a second one ran right by.
01:22:21.000They eat dogs, they eat cats, they eat everything they can.
01:22:24.000They did a study in San Francisco where they, you know, whenever they have what's called a depredation permit, when they find that a cat's been killing a bunch of animals, they'll issue a permit where you can kill it.
01:22:34.000When they kill these cats, the most shocking thing was 50% of their diet was pets.
01:23:26.000And you know that the guy that he tells a story about when they were attacked by bears, the guy that he tells always that on his team actually rode the back of the bear.
01:23:44.000Yeah, he was the guy who was literally, as the bear charged them, found himself somehow on the back of the bear as it's running down the hill.
01:24:09.000I know a lot of the guys in that crew.
01:24:11.000And they all tell it the same way, that everyone was just like, you go to a place that you didn't know your brain, like a room in your brain you didn't know you have.
01:25:41.000Like my friend Johnny, he is a hunting guide in Colorado and he gets hired to hunt mountain lions because these mountain lions will take out calves and cattle and they'll attack livestock and once they start going into...
01:25:57.000So they have the wildlife management companies, they have these sort of very...
01:26:04.000Calculated processes where they determine how many tags can be issued and how many mountain lions can be sustained in an area without them encroaching on livestock and things along those lines.
01:26:16.000And then you get to this animal rights argument where people are like, hey, they have a right too.
01:26:36.000And so that's on purpose because they don't want to think of these things as a resource that people hunt.
01:26:43.000They want to think of them as wild animals that they protect.
01:26:46.000And so the Department of Fish and Wildlife is...
01:26:50.000In many ways populated by people who are animal rights activists versus people who are hunters and fishermen and conservationists and people who understand this sort of pragmatic approach to managing wildlife.
01:27:09.000They've decided to just let these animals handle themselves.
01:27:12.000I talked to one person who's worked with the Department of Fish and Wildlife who said their ultimate goal is to have no hunting at all in California.
01:27:21.000They would like the animals to manage themselves.
01:27:25.000But when that happens, then the animals kill dogs and wildlife, and then you kill those animals.
01:28:29.000Yeah, so we looked at Asia, where they're killing, you know, chopping up and using tigers to sell for tiger wine, which is a luxury good in Asia.
01:28:39.000They seep the tiger bones, the older the tiger, and the more they're wild, so instead of being farmed, because there are also tigers being farmed in Asia.
01:28:49.000But if they can catch them from the wild, it's even better.
01:28:52.000And they seep them in these vats of rice wine.
01:31:07.000So much money to be made by these tigers.
01:31:09.000But then we came to the U.S. and we looked at a crazy shocking number, which is that there are more tigers in captivity in the U.S. than there are in the wild, in the entire world.
01:31:16.000There's more tigers in Texas than there are in all the wild of the world.
01:31:34.000And I like that we so tend to look at Asia and criticize these people are being crazy and I can't believe what they do to these animals and yet the commodification of tigers is happening right here because it's all, they're making money out of roadside zoos and taking selfies with the tigers and Or just rich assholes who have a bunch of tigers.
01:31:54.000Mike Tyson had a tiger, and it was really funny.
01:31:56.000He was telling me on the podcast that I think he's buying horses, and someone said to him, you get a tiger.
01:32:43.000Now, what is it about certain countries, because I don't want to say Asia, but it's in Asia, where they like these weird exotic things that are proven to not be functional?
01:33:32.000I do think because they're paying so much money, I do think that they believe in traditional Chinese medicine.
01:33:38.000There's a belief that a lot of these things have been scientifically disproven, but they still believe it.
01:33:42.000I do think because who is going to pay, you know, $10,000, $20,000 for a bottle of tiger wine if they don't think that it's not just for the taste?
01:33:51.000I think the way my friend was describing it, the culture values things that are difficult to get, that are exclusive.
01:33:58.000Yeah, the more expensive it is and the more difficult it is to get, that is for sure.
01:34:01.000But I think there's an enormous, the traditional medicine part of it.
01:34:06.000Right, because I think it's probably difficult for us to understand this long history of the use that's been, like, it's been sort of celebrated, use of rhino horn and tiger parts and shit.
01:36:39.000And so this is because of this one fish.
01:36:42.000And what is so great about this one fish?
01:36:44.000Again, it's the belief that it has some sort of medicinal value, the bladder of the tatawaba fish.
01:36:51.000You know, in BC, you're not allowed to, if you hunt bear, like they hunt, like black bear is a, it actually tastes good.
01:37:01.000Like it's a commonly hunted meat in terms of like the pioneers used to hunt deer and like even bison, they would just cut the tongues out and use the hide and they would hunt black bear for the meat.
01:37:30.000So people were shooting bears just for the gallbladder.
01:37:33.000So in BC, if you hunt bear legally, you're not allowed to gut them.
01:37:37.000Because they want to make sure that you're not doing it just for the gallbladder.
01:37:41.000So in some sort of a weird twisted logic, you leave the gallbladder there to rot because you can't be in possession of a bare gallbladder.
01:37:50.000So it's really anti-conservationist because like...
01:37:54.000First of all, I don't think there really is a medicinal purpose for the bare gallbladder.
01:37:59.000But in certain animals, like with buffalo, when the Native American, like particularly the Comanche, would eat the buffalo, they would take the gallbladder and squirt the bile over the liver.
01:38:11.000And they would eat raw liver and use the bile as seasoning.
01:40:03.000Like I think it was okay to have back then.
01:40:06.000And then eventually I watched some documentary where I saw that they catch these sharks and just hack their fins off and throw them back in the water.
01:40:23.000Like sometimes you go to a Chinese restaurant and like my friend Ed told me that at some Chinese restaurants they would say it was scallops but it was really skate wing.
01:40:32.000So they would take like and they would punch holes in like a stingray wing and sell that as scallops.
01:40:43.000That's a thing where, for whatever reason, it's prized, but it's not that good.
01:40:50.000Like, there's weird things, like lobster.
01:40:52.000Like, if lobster somehow or another was like some thing where you really shouldn't eat it because it's terrible for the environment, it's destroying lives, and there's only four lobsters left, and look, I got lobster for dinner.
01:41:17.000It makes at least a little bit of sense.
01:41:20.000But from what I understand, like, these things, whether it's a tiger wine or, you know, rhino dick or whatever you're eating, it's not good stuff.
01:41:30.000There's a dish in Portugal that I love and that has been banned that I used to eat as a kid.
01:42:00.000And I guess it's bad for the environment, so they stopped eating that.
01:42:04.000But that's the kind of thing that I understand, again, like the lobster filled with butter, where you had to understand why you'd pay the amounts of money, because it is really good.
01:42:12.000Yeah, things that are delicious make sense.
01:42:55.000You know, I've covered the gun sort of trade and illegal guns here in America, but I had never...
01:43:03.000And I've always wanted to do a show about where I explore the pipeline of guns going down south from the west to Mexico and how it's contributing to the violence there.
01:44:33.000There were trucks with.50 calibers coming from the U.S. And yeah, and we filmed with, essentially we spent time with three sicarios, three gunmen from the Sinaloa cartel.
01:44:43.000All of them had and owned American guns.
01:44:47.000And since then, two of them have been killed.
01:44:49.000So we spent time with three and it's been only a year and two of them have been killed and they were 20 something year olds.
01:44:55.000And at the end of the film, I think, you know, we thought, okay, we've gotten to the terminus of what they call the Iron River, which is the pipeline of guns coming from the West to Mexico.
01:45:08.000They even have a saying for it, which is Mexico, the West supplies the guns, Mexico supplies the corpses.
01:45:15.000That's what we heard, like one of the guys that we interviewed said.
01:45:19.000And the U.S. has become the supermarket of guns for Mexico and for a lot of Latin America.
01:45:25.000You know, I spent time reporting on the violence in Brazil, and you go to the favelas in Brazil, and, you know, you look into the guns and where they came from, and it's from the U.S., the majority of them.
01:45:35.000Did you ever look into the Fast and Furious debacle during the Obama administration?
01:45:46.000It's been a long time, but I'm trying my best.
01:45:48.000What was happening is that the ATF, which is the agency responsible for tobacco and firearms, was allowing, had an operation happening where they knew guns were being sold and smuggled to Mexico, and they were allowing this to happen because they were trying to figure out,
01:46:19.000Yeah, they were heavily criticized for this, for sure.
01:46:23.000They literally supplied guns to the cartel.
01:46:25.000Yeah, they were allowing them to go to the hands of the cartel because they say they were trying to get information from where those guns were going, which is essentially what we filmed.
01:46:35.000We saw the whole process of where they arrive, how they're shipped, what they do to avoid border blocks.
01:46:48.000So when they told me, okay, we're going to get access to this Iron River, this operation happening, and it starts in California, I said, you're wrong.
01:46:58.000It can't start in California because we have the most restrictive gun laws.
01:47:10.000But some of the most restrictive, especially compared to Texas and Arizona.
01:47:16.000And I thought, you know, this is probably wrong.
01:47:18.000They're telling us it's California because we get a lot of times they tell us it's one place because they don't want to spill the beans immediately before they trust us.
01:47:24.000And eventually it was realized that it was happening in California.
01:47:29.000So we went to meet with this guy who lives in L.A., just, again, 15 minutes from my house.
01:47:35.000And there he was in this house packing the guns and he had his cousins working with him and helping him out.
01:48:12.000The other one was an AK-47, and then he had a couple of handguns.
01:48:16.000And I was asking, how did you get your hands in this?
01:48:19.000And I, having done reporting on this, definitely thought it was from a gun show or, you know, getting people to go to shops and buy stores and buy guns legally and then selling them on the side.
01:48:30.000And he said, in his case, he gets most of his guns from law enforcement, from LAPD or from military, down in the military bases in Southern California.
01:48:53.000So they get guns, confiscate guns, and then illegally sell them to this guy who brings them down to the cartel.
01:49:01.000So the AK-47, he had, I believe it was the AK-47, he said, so this gun here, for example, this belonged to my homie, my, you know, guy that works with me or I'm friends with.
01:49:12.000The LAPD found it, confiscated it, and then we have a connection, and they sold it back to us for $1,000.
01:50:31.000Now, when an episode like that airs, is that when it aired yet?
01:50:35.000No, that's the last one and it's a two-hour.
01:50:37.000There was so much there happening and because we were there during the siege and...
01:50:42.000I mean, they were arming themselves for that case, for the Ovidio Guzman.
01:50:48.000If that were to happen, we went and visited a bunker loaded with, again, AK-47s, AR-15s, the lot, where they were arming themselves for something.
01:50:56.000And then the event happened as we were reporting.
01:50:59.000So it's a two-hour, and that's a really good one.
01:51:01.000I mean, I don't know right now because resources are so strapped if there's anything that anybody can do any differently than what's being done currently, like what budgets are.
01:51:10.000But I do know that your piece on the OxyContin Express had a giant impact on legislation.
01:51:19.000Literally, people saw that and then people saw the podcast that we did.
01:51:24.000And we're alerted to what a gigantic issue it is.
01:51:26.000And politicians started talking about it.
01:51:29.000And constituents started talking about it.
01:51:30.000And people were like, hey, what are you doing about this?
01:51:32.000Yeah, we were called by law enforcement around the country and senators in Florida trying to, you know, sort of get more knowledge of what we'd seen, what we'd witnessed, and if we could try and help in any way in changing the laws there.
01:51:46.000I would think that if I was the cartel and I relied on this Iron River, I would not want someone like you exposing it just so I could snub my nose up at the Americans unless they're so brazen that they think no matter what happens, there's always going to be this pipeline of drugs and guns.
01:52:04.000There is always going to be a pipeline.
01:52:06.000There is so much money to be made, and not just in Mexico, but here in the U.S. with corruption and people being involved in this.
01:52:14.000There is not much encouragement there for it to stop.
01:52:18.000And I think part of it, you're right, it's impunity.
01:52:20.000I mean, this guy can do whatever he wants.
01:52:51.000Yeah, we spoke to a state police woman, actually, who was in tears, saying, you know, I was there, I went out, I protected Mexicans that day, my fellow Mexicans.
01:53:02.000And the moment that she realized that they were going to give him up, she just broke down in tears.
01:53:09.000You know, I put my life on the line repeatedly for what?
01:53:15.000Do you think that these exposes that you're doing currently, these episodes, do you think that they have the potential to have the kind of impact that the OxyContin Express had?
01:53:33.000You know, again, I'm not law enforcement.
01:53:35.000I'm not there to stop them from doing what they do, but I'm certainly there to create awareness.
01:53:39.000Does that make your job harder, though, to know that if people find out that you can, in fact, put the brakes on whatever illegal business they're running?
01:54:06.000I mean, in some situations, yes, people are making a lot of money.
01:54:09.000But I don't think that the actual, the majority of the operators, like the backpacker kids, you know, like the mule, you know, like the scammer in Jamaica that we interviewed, I truly believe that if they could,
01:54:56.000And so we spent time with like all these scammers and like surrounded with their bodyguards with guns and one of them told us as we started interviewing this guy called Victor, I'm putting on his mic and he tells me, I'll only let you do this, Mariana, because you're a woman.
01:55:10.000If you were a man, you wouldn't touch me, you know.
01:55:35.000And, yeah, so we ended up interviewing five or a handful of people there and sort of listening to their stories and why they do what they do.
01:55:43.000And there was Tweety, the female scammer, she's an incredible woman, who tells us a story that she works at a resort in Montego Bay, where full of Americans, and every day she goes to work knowing that the Americans spend more money a day at the resort than she makes in a week or a month working there.
01:55:58.000And she comes back home one day and her grandfather is very sick and needs an easy treatment but can't get it because she can't afford it because healthcare is very expensive in Jamaica.
01:56:11.000And she realized the only way she can save her grandfather is by turning to scamming.
01:58:18.000So they get you for $500, and then they get you for $5,000 once you get the key.
01:58:22.000Yeah, and then it's really sad because we also, you know, show the other side, which is Americans, even some committing suicide because they've lost all their savings.
01:58:35.000There was a show on scammers once that was really sad because there was this man, he was in his 60s, and he was convinced there was this woman in Europe that he was having a correspondence with, and it was really a scammer, and he went over there twice.
01:58:49.000He never talked on the phone, just exchanged emails and photographs and never talked on the phone, but they made a plan to meet somewhere twice.
01:58:58.000So twice, this guy went over to Europe.
01:59:00.000And his family, his daughter in particular, was trying to tell him.
01:59:04.000And you could see he felt like such a fool.
01:59:07.000But he was still holding out hope because he really was convinced.
01:59:11.000But then here he was in Europe and nothing was happening.
01:59:44.000When you have vulnerabilities and you have people that take advantage of those vulnerabilities...
01:59:50.000You know, that are also vulnerable, like financially vulnerable, and they have a lot of incentive to try to do things, and it turns out to be profitable, and then it turns out to be their business.
02:00:00.000And you go, well that's awful, that's terrible.
02:00:46.000And the food chain takes advantage of vulnerable people.
02:00:49.000If you call me up and say, you know, all you have to do is give me 500 bucks and, you know, I'll give you your key to your Mercedes that you just won.
02:01:20.000And he was going through something, and he believed it.
02:01:25.000And they said, you're very late in payments, and if you don't pay $500 right now in the late fees, we're going to cut the electricity at your house.
02:01:30.000And he was in the middle of doing a million things as kids, his job, everything, and decided, okay, what do I need to do?
02:02:44.000Happiness and beauty, yeah, we don't know.
02:02:45.000One of the things that was really strange and made me nervous was when the people in the town found out that you guys were there when you were with the guy that was making the coke and you had to get the fuck out of there immediately.
02:03:19.000And, you know, we're Nat Geo, so we come geared with...
02:03:22.000All these flashlights and headlamps and we're ready for everything that can happen.
02:03:26.000But we get there and the guy tells us, okay, no lights allowed because if the population, if the people around the villages see you, they're going to be pissed and they're going to come after you.
02:03:34.000Because the people need the money from the coke business.
02:04:14.000He didn't want the people around it to know.
02:04:16.000And he also thought that if they were going to know, they were going to want to come after us, not just us, but him as well, and try to harm us.
02:04:30.000There were other moments when we were filming with the sicarios, the gunmen in Sinaloa, for example, and they told us that while we're with them, we're protected, but if the Marines show up, that there's nothing they can do, the Marines will start firing at us, and we are going to be stuck in the middle.
02:04:44.000And two hours into filming with the sicarios, their walkie-talkies start buzzing, and we know something's off, and they turn to us, and you could see they're panicked, and there's a Marine helicopter coming our way.
02:04:55.000And there's this really uncomfortable situation where we're like stuck.
02:06:44.000They're all, you know, we put so much, you have no idea how much work goes into every single one of these pieces.
02:06:51.000You know, it's months and months of preparation, and then it's months of editing.
02:06:54.000And it's, you know, it's been two years in the making, two years to this day, more or less, when we started working on this series, and it finally was released.
02:07:02.000And yeah, I mean, every single second that you see in the film is thought out and Well, you nailed it.