Sasquatch is a three-part docu-series based on the true crime story of the disappearance of three men in the late 90s and early 00s in Northern California's Mendocino County. The story centers around the mysterious disappearance of the three men, and the possibility that they may have been murdered by Bigfoot. Host Joe Rogan talks with director Joshua Fay about how the idea for the series came about, and how he and co-creator Joshua Fay came to collaborate on the project. They also talk about how they first met, and what it was like working together on the series, and why they think Bigfoot should be included in the movie. And they talk about what it's like to be a true crime reporter in the wilds of Northern California. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to our sponsor, The Blue. The Blue is a supporter of Sasquatch, and supporter of the series. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast. If you like the show, please consider rating and reviewing it in iTunes. It helps us spread the word to your friends and family about our podcast! Thanks for listening and share it with your fellow podulans everywhere! Cheers, Joe and the crew at Joesquatch! and our crew at The Blue Crew at The Joe Rogans Podcast by Night by Day by Night, All Day, by Night All Day All Day by Day, By Night, by By Night by Night all Day by By Day, All by Day. by Day! by Night. All Day. by Night! by Day all Day, all Day. All Day - by Night - by Day and Night, all day, by Day -- by Night by All Day! by Joe and Night by Morning, by Gratitude, by Norma? , All Day? by Norm and the Crew at Night, a Day, a Podcast by Night? by Night and a Night, A Day, A Weekend, by Any Day, and a Weekend, a Weekend by Night... by Day By Day by Sea, a Week, by the Sea, by Parachute, by a Day by a Girl, by A Girl, By a Girl by a Man, By A Girl?
00:00:28.000You know, I've been a fan of marijuana for a long time, so I know a lot of people who've lived up there and grown up there.
00:00:35.000And for people who don't know, the docu-series is called Sasquatch, and you look at it on Hulu, you go, oh man, it's a Bigfoot documentary.
00:00:50.000Like, how did this project fall into your lap?
00:00:53.000Well, the genesis of the project really goes back to the fall of 1993. I was visiting a buddy of mine who was working on a dope farm, and he kind of...
00:01:01.000It was harvest season, which is like a particularly dangerous time of the year up there, but he kind of got me a hall pass with the guy that owned the farm and vouched for me for me to parachute in for about a week.
00:01:14.000And something that didn't make it in the show is that I went up there to do like a heroic mushroom trip with this guy.
00:01:21.000So the day before, the day that the ship went down, okay?
00:01:29.000We took about an eighth of mushrooms each and went tripping around the redwoods.
00:02:38.000And so they were, like, their voices were going up and down in volume, but they were clearly saying that they'd just, like, seen these three bodies, and they'd seen, like, Sasquatch footprints at the murder scene.
00:03:26.000But obviously that story stuck with me for the next quarter century.
00:03:31.000And it was one that I kind of, I told it around like a ghost story around the campfire kind of thing a few times.
00:03:36.000But then a friend of mine and a guy I collaborate with, Joshua Fay, who's the director of the series Sasquatch, We were just finishing up another project together, and he texted me out of the blue, and he'd become a fan of this podcast, Sasquatch Chronicles,
00:03:52.000And he texted me, he's like, dude, if we could find some sort of true crime story wrapped up with a Sasquatch angle, like we'd really have something.
00:04:49.000So, you know, after drawing a lot of blanks, we finally hit this one sort of information ecosystem sub-circle up there, if you will, where people had heard that story.
00:04:58.000And they were like, yes, three guys did get killed, but there's more to it, right?
00:05:05.000They were like, there's a story behind that, and it doesn't really involve a Sasquatch actually killing these guys.
00:05:10.000I mean, I don't want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn't seen it.
00:05:13.000For anybody who hasn't seen it, it's well worth the three...
00:05:39.000DEA's Operation Greensweep, where they had, like, they'd injected a lot of narcs into the scene, so they had a lot of undercover guys.
00:05:47.000They also had, like, these sort of paramilitary squads out there in the woods looking for patches.
00:05:52.000Or if they found one, you know, they'd set up on these guys, like, Rambo-style for days until somebody came to work the patch and then, you know, nail them.
00:06:08.000I knew some people in the 90s who were growing up there and It was at the time where medical marijuana was legal.
00:06:18.000So this is a little bit after the fact is like I think medical marijuana became legal in California was it like 94 or some shit and My friend Todd was one of the first people to go to jail for medical marijuana for growing.
00:06:35.000And one of the weird things, shout out to Todd McCormick, one of the weird things is when he went to jail, they would not let him use the phrase medical marijuana.
00:06:44.000Because they arrested him and they brought him to court and in court, federally, medical marijuana is not recognized.
00:07:00.00096. So this was late 90s and I met quite a few people that were in that sort of circle of people who were growing and it's just like...
00:07:13.000It was this weird sort of gray area where it was kind of legal but not legal federally so they could get busted.
00:07:20.000And then like what happened with Todd, they got busted and you literally couldn't even bring up the phrase medical marijuana in court.
00:07:28.000So you're just railroaded through the court system until you're sentenced and then you're sentenced for possession of a Schedule I substance.
00:07:35.000And they just made examples out of everybody.
00:07:39.000Yeah, and people now, they don't know.
00:07:40.000They don't know like- We're good to go.
00:08:12.000Well, you know, and isn't some of that part of the 1994 crime bill?
00:08:17.000Like, some of that is those people that got three strikes and they got busted growing three times and then they're in jail for the rest of their life.
00:08:25.000Well, and the first two could have been possession.
00:08:30.000And when you show these guys who were the cops, and you show them today, and they're kind of proud of it, and they're talking about how fun it was to bus these people, and I guess they just didn't understand what the documentary was going to be about.
00:09:05.000Again, I don't want to give away too much of it, but some of the families that were...
00:09:10.000A lot of people don't feel like city life and modern life, and even modern life back then in the 1970s and 80s or whatever it was, is for them.
00:09:26.000Jammed up on top of everybody with everybody stressed out and they would rather live close to nature.
00:09:32.000And when you had that family on that didn't even have electricity, you know, their kids went to the school, they had an oil lamp and an outhouse.
00:09:41.000And they were talking about how living like that after a while it started to heal them.
00:09:46.000Like they started literally feeling better.
00:09:49.000You know, I don't live like that, but I think it's better if you do.
00:09:54.000I mean, I think we're in this weird stage as human beings where our bodies are designed to live the way people lived thousands of years ago.
00:10:05.000Because it takes so long for your genes to change.
00:10:08.000You know, I think there's like certain reward systems that are built into being a human being.
00:10:14.000Dogs go outside and all of a sudden they perk up, they start moving around, they hear things, they smell things, they run around, they become alive, right?
00:10:22.000Because dogs are supposed to be outside.
00:10:44.000And these people that were living like that, man, part of that film, part of your series is, you know, I'm watching this and I'm like, wow, that's cool that they figured it out.
00:10:55.000And then they got together and they really started kind of homesteading.
00:11:03.000And kind of dangerous, but also there's a lot of freedom there and you see them playing guitar and all that shit and then the fucking laws change, you know?
00:11:12.000They come down on these people and you see these cops.
00:11:15.000I don't think those cops are bad people.
00:11:50.000It's like, what have we done to this place?
00:11:53.000It seems like it could have been amazing.
00:11:55.000And then it turned into this crime-riddled, murderous hellhole.
00:11:59.000You know, the growing scene up there, it started in the late 60s, early 70s, and it was people looking to get off the grid, get back to the land, and they were growing dope to fund that way of life.
00:12:13.000But then, with the war on drugs coming down hard, it, like, drove the price of black market weed up so high that the culture up there started to shift.
00:12:21.000I mean, you still have those sort of back-to-the-land types that are growing weed up there that lead a really sort of positive life.
00:12:28.000But in the 80s, when they started to get three, four, five grand a pound for weed on the East Coast for Northern California, you know, primo bud, It brought in a new element up there, and it wasn't like back to the land hippies anymore.
00:12:42.000It started to bring in a real pretty hardcore criminal element that were drawn there by the opportunity for a quick profit.
00:13:14.000Well, what happened was, like, corporations come in.
00:13:16.000So you've got corporate, you've got, you know, McGonja being grown down around, you know, Death Valley or down around, like, Palm Desert out there in the desert in California.
00:13:24.000They've got these, like, death stars of weed.
00:13:39.000So it's really hard to make a living growing especially legal weed up there because by the time you factor in all the permitting costs, all the zoning hassles, all the bureaucracy basically of growing legal weed, if you're a small-time operator,
00:13:55.000unless you've got sort of a boutique, what they call sun-grown, naturally grown weed that you can charge a lot for, Yeah.
00:14:43.000He is a guy who loved the outdoors and liked to fish and hunt.
00:14:47.000He felt like, hey, that'd be a great job.
00:14:50.000I'd be out there in nature all the time.
00:14:53.000And early on in his career, they started finding these creeks that had run dry, and they couldn't figure out what was going on.
00:15:03.000And, you know, it was really fucking up the trout population.
00:15:06.000So they had to track these creeks down and see maybe it got dammed up, maybe a farmer is using it for...
00:15:13.000Well, they found these grow-ops that were being put in there by the cartels.
00:15:18.000And they turned from a game warden operation where they were checking like fishing and hunting licenses to a paramilitary anti-cartel organization where they had guns and dogs and bulletproof vests.
00:15:38.000But he said because marijuana became legal, when it became legal in California, growing it illegally was a misdemeanor.
00:15:46.000So they grew all of their illegal weed for the rest of the country out of California in the national forests, in the parklands, and they would just go to public land and hike in many miles.
00:16:04.000Fucking hoses and tubes and PVC pipes and all the fertilizer all the shit that they needed they go deep into the forest with this stuff and Super super toxic pesticides yep, and that stuff is in the weed and so people are buying weed that's infested with this toxic pesticide and Yeah,
00:16:25.000I was just on one of those farms last June.
00:17:56.000When you're up in that Redwoods, the Redwoods area, fuck, that's dense.
00:18:02.000I went to Pacific Northwest, me and my friend Duncan, we went to talk to Sasquatch Hunters up there for this sci-fi show I did back in the day, and it was real weird, man.
00:18:30.000There's black bears up there, and black bears walk on foot.
00:18:33.000And sometimes, I mean, the woods are so dense, it's like, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.
00:18:37.000Like, you can't see shit through the woods.
00:18:39.000It's like looking, trying to look through.
00:18:41.000So if you saw something stand up and walk through those Q-tips, and it was a bear that was walking on its hind legs, which they do all the time, and then your brain starts playing tricks on you, you would absolutely believe that there's a giant gorilla up there in the woods.
00:18:55.000Especially if you just catch a glimpse.
00:18:58.000I mean, Sasquatch made a lot more sense to me after I spent time up in northern Mendocino County, like back in those woods, like off trail in the woods.
00:19:05.000I was like, Sasquatch makes sense to me now.
00:19:07.000This seems like a place where a Sasquatch, you know, would hang out.
00:19:11.000You had that Jeff Meldrum guy on for briefly.
00:19:24.000I'm like, man, I don't know about that.
00:19:26.000I mean, I met a lot of people in the course of making this show that I went into it expecting just, like, these people are fucking idiots, you know?
00:19:35.000But I met a lot of Squatchers that they convinced me, like, that they're convinced that they're telling me the truth.
00:21:24.000Gigantopithecus absolutely existed during the same time human beings existed.
00:21:28.000It's a bipedal hominid or bipedal ape-like creature that is somewhere between 8 and 10 feet tall.
00:21:36.000And the way they found it, there was an anthropologist, I believe, was in an apothecary shop I want to say in like the 1920s or 1930s in China, and he found a tooth, a primate tooth, that was enormous.
00:21:48.000And he was like, where did you get this?
00:21:50.000And they took him to the place, and he found some other bones, and he found some jaw bones that indicated it was bipedal, I guess, bipedal animals, the way they carry their body up straight, the jaw is structured differently, or something along those lines, right?
00:22:06.000And so they know that this thing existed and there's depictions of what it looked like next to a human being.
00:22:15.000And this is what they think it looked like.
00:22:19.000Go to that one in the lower left-hand corner because that's the one that's the freakiest.
00:22:23.000They think that that was a real thing that lived alongside people.
00:23:21.000Native Americans have many, many names for, you know, different tribes have many names for this man that lives in the woods.
00:23:27.000But then again, you kind of covered that in your series, that there's, like, a part of it is just wild people that, like, live in the woods.
00:23:37.000Like, we're kind of scared of people that get away from the pack and live off on their own, you know?
00:23:46.000And those people that live up in this area, Mendocino, just growing weed out in the woods.
00:23:54.000It's kind of, it's like, there's two, I had two modes of operating up there, and there's different, like there's in town, okay, and then there's on the mountain.
00:24:03.000And on the mountain up there, it's not just a physical location, it's also like a state of mind.
00:24:09.000And there's growers that have gone up the mountain and never come down, basically.
00:24:18.000They definitely take on that sort of wild man kind of thing that you're talking about.
00:24:22.000And not to give away too much of your documentary, your series, but there's probably been a lot of fucking murders up there.
00:24:30.000Well, the number of reported missing persons cases in northern Mendocino and Humboldt counties is the highest in the country by far, by a factor of 3x, right?
00:24:42.000Like three times higher than the closest county.
00:24:44.000But that's just the number of people that go missing up there and get reported.
00:24:49.000Any crook up there will tell you that most of the murders up there are never reported to the cops.
00:25:28.000And so this was kind of covered in the thing that this guy was aware, his family was aware that he was doing something dangerous, but for him it was an opportunity to make some money.
00:25:37.000And the thing is, they're not even making a lot of money.
00:25:39.000They're not the ones making a lot of money.
00:25:41.000The cartels are making a lot of money.
00:26:56.000One of the things that made us think that we ought to show was, A, finding other people up there that had heard this story.
00:27:02.000But, B, figuring out that there's a long tradition up there of We're good to go.
00:27:29.000And stamp them around their patches and then, like, tear up trees and shit and, like, take the trimigrants from foreign countries out right after they'd hire them and be like, there's a violent, like, aggressive Sasquatch in the area.
00:27:43.000The point to that being, the less traffic you have on and off your farm...
00:27:48.000Like, the lower profile you can keep, the less likely you are to get busted.
00:27:51.000So they don't want these, like, backpacker kids from Europe or South America or wherever.
00:27:55.000It'll be like going into town all the time, right?
00:27:58.000So they would fake this Sasquatch shit to, like, keep them on the farm.
00:28:03.000And you hear that, and you're like, the idea that somebody would take that to the next step and stage a triple homicide to make it look like a Sasquatch, it's like, okay, like, the leap is starting to get a little bit more manageable there.
00:28:21.000Not just because of all the murders, but because of the way the laws have changed the way these people have to live.
00:28:27.000You know, when you go into detail about how these hippies started packing, and they started going into the woods with rifles, and became real aware, and the hanging of the fish hooks on the Fishing line like all that shit was it's it was very disturbing to me like surprisingly so like I've watched a lot of true crime sort of documentaries and you know they're all creepy but there's something extra disturbing about this because it seemed like I These
00:28:57.000war on drug laws and the attitude that people had taken ruined a whole culture.
00:29:05.000It changed everything about the way these people were living, and it changed what it meant to grow marijuana up there.
00:29:46.000They have to take precautionary measures.
00:29:48.000They tend to form their own sort of enclaves up there.
00:29:51.000And yeah, they may have weapons, but they're not like the, you know, the meth-addled Purely profit-driven black market growers and cartel operatives that kind of came in and took over large parts of that scene.
00:30:07.000I just want to draw that distinction because some people have the stereotype that it's all back to the land hippies and some people have the stereotype that it's all toothless meth heads that are crazed and only out for the quick buck.
00:30:38.000I mean, frankly, they started spending more money growing it and perfecting the art and were able to command a higher and higher price for it.
00:30:46.000It was interesting, the one guy was talking about how tomatoes taste better up there, the herbs are better, like everything's better.
00:30:51.000It's just there's something about the soil and the fact that it's just so rich and full of life because of all the rain.
00:31:14.000And the Matanuska Valley was this huge, there was a huge glacier there at last Ice Age.
00:31:18.000And it receded, and it carved out this valley, and you combine it, and the thing is, the secret ingredient of Alaska is like the sunlight in the summer.
00:31:38.000But point being, there is really something to, you know, that the soil in certain parts of the world yields particularly potent and tasty weed.
00:31:49.000Well, it makes sense that if a glacier receded, it would probably leave behind a lot of minerals.
00:32:16.000I've only been a couple of times, but I remember one time we performed in Anchorage and me and my friend Ari went fishing for salmon and hung out.
00:32:24.000I'm like, man, people are hardier here.
00:32:27.000They're a little bit more capable because they realize it gets so cold.
00:32:34.000You know, and there's bears and shit and moose everywhere.
00:36:33.000And he lives up there with his wife and it's really sad too because that's all he does is drives fish and has frozen caribou outside.
00:36:42.000And during the documentary, their camp gets attacked by a grizzly bear and he has to run out and kill it.
00:36:47.000And he talked about how he and his wife, he lives with this woman up there that is, I guess we say Inuit or Eskimo, whatever you would say.
00:39:53.000Well, as I mentioned before, I was surprised at how seriously I took the people that actually believe in Sasquatch.
00:39:58.000Even though that's not the main thread of the show, we did think it was important to interview some Squatchers to get their opinion on whether or not it seemed plausible to them that a Sasquatch would kill three guys on a weed farm.
00:40:12.000I was surprised by my reaction to people that believe in Bigfoot and would tell me about their encounters.
00:40:18.000I didn't dismiss them and I didn't have an inclination to ridicule them, which is what I expected I would have going in.
00:40:25.000To answer your question more fully, I think that I was surprised by just how dangerous a place Northern Mendocino County is.
00:40:34.000Like, I have pushed my luck in reporting stories, you know, more than a few times over the years.
00:40:45.000It's a dangerous place to be under any circumstances.
00:40:49.000That place being like the backwoods of Northern Mendocino dope country, right?
00:40:54.000But to be up there like asking questions about unsolved homicides, you have to tread pretty carefully.
00:41:00.000And I knew from my experience in the early 90s up there that You know, there's an element of danger up there.
00:41:10.000But it's only gotten worse, I think, to that guy Ghost Dance, his point.
00:41:15.000Since the early 90s to now, it's only gotten more dangerous once you're sort of off the beaten path up there.
00:41:23.000Yeah, you were very bold in the way you approached people and the kind of questions that you asked and how you went about trying.
00:41:32.000Like, did you ever think like, fuck, what am I doing?
00:41:34.000Like, I am gonna get myself killed up here.
00:41:36.000My main fear was always that I was gonna get too close to finding out the truth about The murder at the heart of the story?
00:42:18.000And so I was always afraid I was going to be in a situation where I was going to be face-to-face with one of the murderers and not know it.
00:42:34.000In pursuing, like, dangerous stories, there's, like, two kinds of danger.
00:42:38.000There's the danger that you're in because you're a reporter, but there's also just the danger of, like, you just put yourself in dangerous environments.
00:42:45.000There's a danger to anybody, no matter what they're doing.
00:42:47.000So, like, if you're embedded with a street gang and reporting a story on a street gang, and somebody does a drive-by in one of their safe houses, and you're in that safe house, it's like they're not shooting at you because you're a reporter.
00:42:58.000And so there was that element of danger, just being up there knocking around In Northern Mendocino County at all, it's just a dangerous place.
00:43:06.000But to be up there, like, yeah, asking questions about unsolved, unreported murders, there were a few times where I was like, I don't know if I'm getting off this mountain this day, right?
00:43:24.000There's two times where I thought maybe I'd walked into something I wasn't going to walk out of.
00:43:28.000And one was, the last trip I made up there was in June of last year, June 2020. And a source said that there was somebody up on this one particular mountain, Iron Peak,
00:43:43.000which is where the murders supposedly took place in 1993, that had some information for me.
00:43:49.000But I could only meet this person by going up the mountain.
00:43:53.000And on the drive up to this location, this farm, The woman I was riding with was telling me stories about, as we're going up the road, it's like, oh, there's a body buried there.
00:46:54.000Once you move off the first public road onto private roads, and usually the private roads are shared between property owners, they gate them.
00:47:01.000And one reason for that is, I mean, it's security, but it's also like the more gates you have, the more chance you have for law enforcement to fuck up their search warrant.
00:47:09.000So if they haven't gotten the search warrant perfectly dialed and they don't have a warrant to be entering every stage of the private property...
00:48:22.000Isn't it odd how human beings sort of adapt to the culture that's around them?
00:48:28.000If you're around a culture of growers that are really accustomed to people being murdered and drug deals going south and a lot of hippies packing some serious weapons, you kind of get used to that.
00:48:47.000You know, and it's interesting you say that because this particular woman, she was literally born into that culture and raised in it up there.
00:49:45.000And you guys have no fucking idea what's going on up there.
00:49:48.000You think it's just a bunch of utopian growers just living in peace and harmony and growing this great organic weed that they ship down to you kids here in Santa Cruz so you can enjoy yourselves.
00:49:59.000He's like, there's as much violence associated with the weed game up there as there is the coke game in southern Florida.
00:50:06.000I've only been to Mendocino on the coast.
00:50:08.000I went up there on the coast with my family, and we stayed up there for a couple days, and it was nice.
00:50:13.000Nice restaurants, beautiful view of the ocean and shit.
00:50:16.000But just even driving through the woods, just seeing those redwoods.
00:50:21.000And we went to the redwood, the one that you could drive through, that whole deal.
00:50:25.000There's something about the woods that gives you this feeling like, man, you could just vanish here.
00:51:32.000I think there's still such a market for black market weed.
00:51:38.000As long as there's a market for black market weed, there's gonna be black market grows.
00:51:45.000That was the thing that John Norris was telling me, that I think he said somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the illegal weed that's sold in the United States, that's sold in states where it's illegal, is grown in public land in Northern California.
00:53:21.000They're either outlaws and they're never going to not be outlaws.
00:53:24.000And so they're never going to do the, like, get permits and jump through the bureaucratic hoops to grow legal weed because it's just contrary to being a fucking outlaw.
00:53:33.000Or a lot of them, and or, a lot of them are...
00:56:34.000The same way I... For a long time, I couldn't read stories that I wrote in the 90s or the 2000s when I was like a gonzo print journalist because all I could see were flaws.
00:56:44.000And now enough time has gone by that I can look back at those stories and sort of enjoy them and read them for what they are, like most people experience them.
00:58:45.000You want to have me be an on-camera character in this?
00:58:48.000And he just sort of gradually got me more and more comfortable with the process and with that role in the project.
00:58:56.000Well, there was also some pretty heavy moments in the documentary, the series, where you talk about yourself, and you talk about your own experiences as a child being raped, which is unexpected and very intense.
00:59:16.000How difficult was that to sort of express on camera?
00:59:20.000Well, I'm pretty comfortable talking about that.
00:59:59.000It was difficult for me to go public with that story for the first time, which was in 2004. I mean, I'd lived with it as a secret pretty much my entire life.
01:00:09.000But the decision to write about it That was a very difficult decision, a very difficult thing to do.
01:00:16.000But since then, I've gotten pretty comfortable talking about it publicly.
01:00:20.000I mean, that story's been adapted as a play.
01:00:23.000It's been produced all over the world.
01:01:25.000He was a juvenile when it happened, and also, like, the statute of limitations, it happened in Alaska, the statute of limitations expired, and also, you know, it's my word against his, you know, at that point.
01:01:36.000I mean, so, I have since gone to the police and filed an official police report, um...
01:01:44.000I mean, I withheld his name in the first piece that I published, and I let him know, because I met with him in person as part of the reporting, if you will, of that piece.
01:02:15.000He was, he was at the, when it happened, he was in his late teens, was still a juvenile though, so 16, 17. So he was a bit in his early 40s when I was stalking him.
01:04:59.000When they put that out there as an excuse or a rationalization or a reason for their behavior, because that just infuriates me.
01:05:09.000But he apologized, he said that it happened to him when he was a kid, and he swore that it had only happened with me, that I was the only person that he'd raped when that person was a child, right?
01:05:41.000Like, up to when, again, to that point of they have to take the story away from me, it was like we were just like an hour from the print deadline, and I still didn't know whether I was going to name him.
01:05:51.000And my editor, Patti Calhoun at The Westward, she was like, just go block yourself in a room for 30 minutes, write both endings, and then we just got to pick one, man.
01:05:59.000Just go with whichever one feels right.
01:06:01.000So I wrote one ending that ended with his name, and one ending that ended with how the essay actually ends, which is not naming him and him just sort of disappearing into the crowd on the mall.
01:07:08.000I was really into monster books and monster movies and stuff like that and I was at a library and I was looking at these books and this guy came up to me and I was just I was so young and naive and he was like do you like monster books?
01:07:22.000I said yeah yeah I love monster books and he said Come out to my car.
01:07:44.000Just screaming and crying or just I was paralyzed with fear and and the guy ran he ran away you know and that was his thing he would pick up kids and I just I remember forever after that just feeling so vulnerable feeling so scared I It just changed how I thought about people.
01:08:07.000Because up until that point, people, you know, adults had always been like, nice to me.
01:08:13.000You know, they've always just been adults.
01:09:00.000And I remember him telling me that he loved me.
01:09:05.000And then I remember being real weirded out because he was drunk and I was fishing and he was just standing there and standing next to me and I was like, yeah, I like you too or something, you know.
01:09:44.000I just assumed, here's this guy, and he's a big guy, too.
01:09:48.000I remember him telling me that he was a teacher and he got fired for being a teacher and he gave some weird excuse for why he got fired mentoring kids or something like that.
01:09:57.000I'm assuming he probably raped a kid or something or at least had an inappropriate relationship with a kid.
01:10:05.000I hear stories like yours and as a parent, it just makes my blood boil.
01:10:18.000It just makes me so furious and also so confused.
01:10:22.000As to how human beings can become that.
01:10:24.000And as you said, a guy who is a victim of that very same horrific act himself when he's young then becomes the perpetrator when he gets older.
01:10:35.000And that is real common for whatever reason.
01:10:39.000It's almost like a vampire that infects you and you become a vampire.
01:10:59.000I even had the couloir and this one mountain picked out.
01:11:03.000That I was going to be able to stage my own death and it would look like an accident because I wouldn't want my parents to know that I'd killed myself because I was starting to have the desire to rape kids.
01:11:13.000Yes, it is common, but it's also dangerous for kids who have been raped, especially boys, to think that it's like they've been bitten by a werewolf or a vampire.
01:11:27.000It's only a matter of time before it's going to happen to you because Although it's common, it doesn't happen in most cases, right?
01:11:34.000Most men who were raped when they were boys do not grow up to then rape children.
01:12:30.000I spent a good chunk of my childhood until he went off to college.
01:12:35.000And he was a star athlete in Anchorage, kind of a small town at the time.
01:12:38.000He was like a local athlete, celebrity, kind of cool guy, right?
01:12:43.000Somebody that I really looked up to before he raped me.
01:12:50.000And so I spent a good chunk of my childhood, like, having to be in proximity with him, you know, and having to, like, keep myself safe and having to, like, maneuver situations so that he wouldn't be able to get me alone in fear.
01:13:01.000Basically, it's like, spent a lot of time in fear.
01:13:04.000And the other thing is that other survivors, especially male survivors, told me this.
01:13:08.000It's like, once you've been raped as a kid, it's like...
01:13:11.000To other pedophiles, it's like a sign has been hung around your neck for some reason.
01:13:42.000But yet I know from firsthand experience that one of these adults or like a big kid, you know, some of them were adults, he was a big kid, can just like rip off the mask and there's a monster there.
01:13:54.000So it was, it really, yeah, it's, I try not to like, Go back and think like what my life would have been like had that not happened because now that I'm 50, life's turned out pretty fucking great.
01:14:11.000But I went through some dark shit because of that.
01:14:17.000Was that experience part of what led you to journalism?
01:15:27.000If I saw some man holding down a seven-year-old boy, yeah.
01:15:31.000I don't think I'd have a problem with that at all.
01:15:33.000I guess also what I was trying to say is I was drawn to like breaking the law or breaking the rules even when I was a kid.
01:15:42.000I was just like this is bullshit because you're telling me there's rules and there's laws but your rules and your laws are coming from the same place where you're assuring me as a child that the world is essentially good and that adults are looking out for me and I know that's bullshit.
01:15:59.000So that's what I mean about something essential got kind of Well, most adults are looking out for you.
01:16:33.000When you think about human beings, it's almost like they want, you know, when some people, that's not the expression, you know, the expression, hurt people hurt people.
01:16:46.000You know, when someone has had their life destroyed, like sometimes they want to destroy other people's lives.
01:18:34.000So yes, to get back to your original question, yes, I can draw...
01:18:40.000Now at 50, I can draw a direct line between being raped when I was seven years old and the type of journalism that I started to practice Really in my late teens.
01:18:51.000So you've done some pretty wild shit as far as journalism.
01:19:00.000The first time I went undercover as a skinhead was in 2002. And I was right kind of in the thick of about a 15 year run of gonzo journalism right where I where my specialty was full immersion in a subculture whether it's like staying up for three days with with tweakers or like embedding with street gangs living on the street with gutter punks you know hopping freight trains
01:19:30.000and shit whatever like I would just like participant observer but fully participating whatever I was reporting on and so there was a there was a hate crimes investigator for I probably shouldn't name the organization.
01:19:43.000For a major civil rights organization in the U.S. And she contacted the paper that I worked for.
01:19:49.000She had this idea of helping to train a reporter to go undercover as a skinhead.
01:19:54.000And she hadn't been getting any traction because she called up most publications and they were like, no, we don't have anybody that wants to do that.
01:20:00.000But she called the Westward, the weekly paper in Denver I worked for, and ran this idea.
01:20:03.000And the editor was like, yeah, we got a guy.
01:20:06.000So they put me in touch with her and she trained me On how to dress, walk, talk, you know, steep myself in the ideology and pass as a neo-Nazi skinhead in advance of this event that was coming up in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest,
01:20:25.000which was like the first major semi-underground neo-Nazi gathering in Colorado in quite a while.
01:20:32.000And so I went undercover as a skinhead at that gathering, fully expecting that this was just going to be a one-off.
01:20:41.000I was going to pose as a skinhead, I was going to report this story, and then I was going to be done with it.
01:20:46.000But once I got behind that curtain and saw how well-organized, well-financed, and...
01:21:41.000Right-wing domestic terrorism, neo-Nazi movement, whatever you want to call it, is in the U.S. And so I did that for a couple years, and then there was this organization based in Alabama that I will name, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they called me up and they were like, hey, why don't you just come do this full-time?
01:21:56.000You seem to have a knack for this shit.
01:22:38.000But just to see the recruiting that was going on, just talking with people there and getting tips from them about other events that were going on or chapters of different organizations in different places around the country where they were from,
01:22:54.000seeing how mobile they were, seeing that they had dough.
01:22:57.000Like, it wasn't what I was expecting a neo-Nazi skinhead gathering to be.
01:23:02.000Yes, there were like a bunch of like drunk knucklehead guys throwing Sieg Heil's and like moshing with their shirts off.
01:23:11.000But the more adult neo-Nazis that were there, like trying to move the skinheads into a more sort of lower profile stealth mode neo-Nazism.
01:23:23.000And what they were preaching was like, look, we need to get elected.
01:23:26.000We need to get elected to school boards.
01:23:27.000We need to get elected to zoning commissions.
01:23:29.000We need to get elected to county sheriff's Like, that's how we're going to eventually get our hands on the levers of power in this country.
01:23:36.000It's like, grow some hair, put on a suit, and get elected.
01:23:41.000And when I saw that, I was like, this is, these people are fucking serious.
01:23:46.000This isn't just like kids that took a wrong turn at the Renaissance Fair, you know?
01:23:51.000This is like really serious white national, you know...
01:24:00.000Did you just show up and make friends?
01:24:03.000So I never lived full-time as a skinhead.
01:24:05.000So once social media started to come on, then it's as much about maintaining and curating your online presence as it is showing up at the physical events.
01:24:52.000But here in the U.S., because the First Amendment is perfectly legal to make this stuff.
01:24:56.000So they make it and they burn CDs or whatever.
01:24:59.000When I got into this in the early aughts, it was all CDs.
01:25:03.000And so they would smuggle CDs into Europe and sell them, and that would finance the neo-Nazi movement here in the U.S. So you start going to these places.
01:26:44.000One thing I did, this is funny, one thing I did, the second one, the second gathering I went to is there's this organization called the Women for Aryan Unity.
01:26:51.000And they're like, basically they are an Aryan baby drive, but they're also like a matchmaking service.
01:26:58.000And so the second one of these that I went to was in Arizona, and I was getting some heat.
01:27:05.000I showed up a little early, and guys were sober, and there wasn't too many, and they didn't really recognize me.
01:27:10.000And so I went over to the Women for Arian Unity booth and started chatting them up.
01:27:13.000And they immediately assessed, I mean, told them I was a fishing guy and everything, but they assessed, like, this guy's reasonably well-spoken, reasonably, like, good-looking, like, tall, seems to have his shit together, has a job, you know?
01:27:23.000And so they were, like, bringing over all these skinhead chicks to, like, introduce me to them.
01:27:45.000A lot of them were, like two of them were truckers and then they were trying to get me to go with them into their like truck and like consummate the deal, you know.
01:33:17.000At the time, and you get it in a position where it's like a short-sleeved shirt just barely covers it.
01:33:23.000And so then if you want to throw up a flag, we call it throwing up a flag, you just kind of do this, like you're maybe stretching your shoulder, and it brings the shirt sleeve down and reveals the tattoo.
01:33:34.000So if you see somebody that you want to throw up a flag to, you go like that, and then they see it.
01:33:47.000So I got an Othala rune there in that spot.
01:33:50.000But the problem is that when that Unite the Right shit went down in Charlottesville, There was this neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement, and they had changed their symbol from a Swazi, from a swastika, to the Othala rune.
01:34:05.000And so when these guys were marching in 2016 in Charlottesville, I'm looking at the same thing I got on my right arm, like, on their banners.
01:34:29.000I came out of retirement one time and I went undercover at a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it wasn't a neo-Nazi rally.
01:34:40.000It was supposed to be a bunch of neo-Nazis defending a Civil War statue.
01:34:46.000And I showed up, and it basically turned out to be, like, a couple yahoos in, like, Confederate reenactment Civil War uniforms, some Klan guys, a couple neo-Nazis skinheads from Portland, and, like, me on one side of the street.
01:35:02.000And on the other side of the street, like, 4,000 anti-racist demonstrators, including what looked to be, like, the entire University of Tennessee football team, like, hurling invective at us for, like, two hours.
01:35:15.000And after the rally, I was trying to...
01:35:18.000They shut down all the downtown Knoxville, and I was trying to get back to my hotel.
01:35:25.000And protesters, including some big dudes who were from the football team, because I later talked to them, and they were like, there's the long-haired Nazi.
01:35:36.000Get him, because my hair was long now.
01:35:52.000And you couldn't explain to them, hey guys, I'm undercover.
01:35:54.000I finally got in a jam where I realized, because I kept running across them, and they kept recognizing me.
01:36:00.000And so I got out a phone, and I pulled up, I had my driver's license, and I pulled up one of my articles that I'd written for the Southern Poverty Law Center on my phone.
01:36:09.000And the next time they confronted me, I was just like, give me 10 seconds.
01:37:28.000I don't know if this is going to make sense, but I can sort of tap into that in a way in situations that a quote-unquote normal person might find terrifying.
01:37:36.000I can just like remove myself from the fear of it a little bit.
01:37:41.000Hmm and be able to Pass I guess because one of the things they're gonna like somebody's gonna look for is like Do you does it seem like you belong in this situation?
01:37:52.000Right or does it seem like you're scared because if you're scared then you don't belong here That's what's craziest right your childhood experiences horrific act put in you this like switch we could hit the the anger outsider switch and Right.
01:39:39.000If you take a guy who's like a nerd and you put him in Mendocino around these savages that are out there growing weed and murdering people and using backhoes to shove them into the earth, they'd stand out.
01:39:50.000And they're not going to learn anything.
01:39:56.000The organization and the financial backing of these people, like, there's this thing like...
01:40:05.000There's this weird thing that happens simultaneously where people want to call everything and everyone racist to the point where it's like you're ruining the word because there's real racism.
01:40:19.000Those skinhead people and many more like them and Nazis and there's real ones.
01:40:26.000When you call everybody a Nazi, you fuck it up because there's ones like you're encountering that actually are real.
01:42:11.000If you're slightly above average intelligence and you're fairly well organized and you can gather a little bit of dough, you can become a major fucking player in this movement.
01:42:19.000In the same way that if you're in a punk band and you're not getting anywhere, if you change your lyrics to white power lyrics, you're going to go from being a floundering punk band to having a worldwide fan base in the space of about three months.
01:42:34.000If you can play your instruments reasonably competently and that's the ideology you put out, Because the standards really kind of aren't that high.
01:42:43.000So by the same token, the point is that I think a lot of people are drawn to the power.
01:42:47.000They see it as a way that they can easily amass power and control over other people.
01:42:52.000Because the followers are waiting in that movement.
01:43:12.000Yeah, you know how political grifters, like someone will be a Republican their whole life and then they'll see an opening and then they'll go, you know what, I'm going to be progressive.
01:43:20.000And they'll be like aggressively progressive and then shit all over Republicans or vice versa.
01:43:25.000You know how there's people that do that and you go...
01:43:28.000I think you're just latching on to a thing.
01:44:29.000The one lady was just being this, like, fucking complaining Karen, and this other lady was like, hey, bitch, I'm all in on this I live in the 1400s shit, so get the fuck out of here with your medication shit.
01:45:15.000And whether it's a tribe of, you know, growers up in the middle of the mountains that have all agreed that it's okay to murder people, that try to steal your crop, or whether it's a bunch of people that just decide because you got beat up by a Mexican guy.
01:45:31.000When you're 15 that, you know, the white power movement is valid and we need to purify the race and then you're about a bunch of other people that are like really hardcore and committed to this and you feel like a brotherhood in this weird fucking crazy way of thinking.
01:45:48.000It's like a fucking virus that gets into people's brains and it just overrides the operating system.
01:45:56.000But it finds a place where it's like, oh, here's the tribal place.
01:46:57.000There's this tribe part that you could tap into with good and bad.
01:47:02.000I had this thing for a while that I was watching a lot of like radical Islam videos.
01:47:08.000Like these Islamicists that would talk to all these people and they would say like wild shit, and I don't even know these videos are still available on YouTube, but they would talk about death to apostates, death to homosexuals,
01:47:25.000and I got down this rabbit hole because someone sent me this video saying that here's these guys that are speaking to these people in this other country and they're They're trying to say that it's not radical Islam.
01:50:46.000It's weird, these little traps, these little switches that can go off in the brain where they can become attached to anything or any person or any ideology.
01:52:18.000Did it feel, was part of you, like, going, this is, like, you know where they really did a great job of exposing that was American History X? That's a great movie.
01:56:00.000It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon with clawed feet, a mane of fire, and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk.
01:56:22.000In fact, it's 25 grams, a little less than one ounce, of nearly 100% pure, crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride known on the streets of Asia as shabu.
01:56:49.000And these guys that were doing this stuff, did they have normal lives and they would occasionally go off the rails and do meth or were they just meth till they die?
01:56:57.000At the time, you know, interesting, another great question.
01:56:59.000At the time, they all did this once a month.
01:57:01.000They would get together once a month and, you know...
01:59:57.000Amphetamine was first made in 1887 in Germany.
01:59:59.000And then methamphetamine, more potent and easier to make, was developed in Japan in 1919. Crystalline powder was soluble in water, making it the perfect candidate for injection.
02:00:08.000Methamphetamine went into wide use during World War II when both sides used to keep the troops awake.
02:00:13.000High doses were given to Japanese kamikaze pilots for the suicide missions.
02:00:18.000Methamphetamine abuse by injection reached epidemic proportions when supplies stored for military use became available to the Japanese public.
02:00:27.000What scares the shit out of me, and I'm sure you know journalists, journalists like Adderall.
02:00:44.000It's three different kinds of amphetamines.
02:00:46.000The thing about amphetamines, though, is it doesn't make you a better writer, but it does make you a more productive one.
02:00:50.000So people think they can become Philip K. Dick or something by taking speed, and then they look at what they produce the next day, and it's like, you know, it's as if...
02:00:59.000For me, it works for me in terms of being more productive.
02:02:11.000I found something that I liked and stuck with it.
02:02:14.000So I was like, gonzo journalist by day, raver at night, but really it was just like, gonzo journalist, one night, raver every weekend kind of thing.
02:02:25.000And it was something that you enjoyed recreationally.
02:03:41.000Ongoing studies that seem to hold great promise in helping people alleviate some really traumatic moments from their past So there's like it's a it's a weird drug and that it's probably better if it's legal and regulated and if people figure out some sort of a way to keep it To keep it pure,
02:04:03.000where you know what you're actually getting.
02:04:05.000And then there's also some pharmaceutical or some supplemental strategies to re-boost your serotonin after you're off of it.
02:04:16.000There's this, what is that shit called?
02:04:54.000And then tryptophan converts to 5-HTP so you get like two versions of it and then you take it while you're tripping.
02:05:00.000So that like as your body depletes it because you're on this wild high because of the drug, this stuff forces your body to start reboosting it.
02:05:10.000And then I know a lot of people who have depression, who suffer from low serotonin.
02:05:16.000Like my friend Neil Brennan was taking that stuff for a while.
02:05:19.000Just as a supplement and he found that it helped him a lot.
02:05:22.000So there's ways that they could do this where they could maybe administer it Yeah.
02:07:48.000It starts in the summer of 1997. And there were these hackers that were some of the best sources that I had.
02:07:54.000There were these hackers and this group called the National Security Anarchists.
02:07:58.000Anyway, they would send me information.
02:08:00.000And one of them sent me a tip that there was a mafia hitman I'm going to get to the ecstasy, trust me.
02:08:08.000Who was hanging out at this coffee shop near the Arizona State University campus called the Gold Bar Coffee Shop every Friday night.
02:08:16.000And he was like signing autographs and this hacker had found this information on like a goth bulletin board on campus, like online bulletin board.
02:08:53.000So, I'm thinking, like, at this time, Gravano was in witness protection.
02:08:59.000It was just a few years after he'd ratted out John Gotti.
02:09:02.000This is like, he was the highest-ranking, you know this guy, highest-ranking mob informant turncoat ever, right?
02:09:07.000So I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be a good story, because there's some, somebody has convinced these goth chicks that he's Sammy the Bull Gravano, you know, because there's no fucking way.
02:09:31.000And Sammy the Bull Gravano proceeds to go over and, like, sign these chicks' books and hold court for about an hour while he's drinking his double espresso, telling stories about, like, the mob and shit, okay?
02:09:43.000I'm going to get to the ecstasy, trust me.
02:10:54.000These guys from New York that were in their 20s like showed up kind of in the rave culture and they were like they had thick like Brooklyn accents and they stood out because they would wear like they were kind of trying to dress like ravers but we gave them the nickname the shiny shirt mafia because they would wear just these like gold and silver lame shirts and finally somebody's like dude that's not the shirts you want to wear let me take you to like a proper rape clothing store and thing but it's the rave scene everybody's accepted And they,
02:11:21.000you know, they were going to warehouse parties and stuff and doing ecstasy, and they were just like part of the scene.
02:11:27.000A few months after that, raves started to get robbed.
02:11:31.000It took, it was like, looking back, it's a wonder it took so long for us to get robbed.
02:11:37.000But these guys came in, guns, masks, took the gate, like, you know, probably 10 grand in cash at the gate, and they knew who was selling the ecstasy, and they took the pills and the cash.
02:11:48.000Three raves got hit on the same night.
02:11:51.000Then, ecstasy dealers started to get robbed.
02:11:54.000One guy got kidnapped and held for ransom.
02:12:42.000So, everybody starts buying their ecstasy from a single source.
02:12:46.000Ecstasy is not great, to your earlier point, but it's like the price per pill is such that everybody's making more money, the violence stops, the robberies stop, all the hassles stop.
02:12:59.0001999, I get off a plane at Sky Harbor Airport, and there's front page news.
02:13:03.000Sam and the Abro Gravano busted for running Ecstasy Ring.
02:13:06.000And I open it up, and there's the news story.
02:13:30.000So, I can't prove it, but I know what happened.
02:13:34.000And what happened is, at a certain point...
02:13:36.000Sammy the Bull Gravano's son told his dad about what they were doing, ripping off parties, robbing drug dealers and everything.
02:13:43.000And Sammy the Bull Gravano said, you fucking knucklehead, instead of terrorizing these guys and extorting money from them, just take over their entire operation.
02:13:51.000Because what Sammy the Bull Gravano got caught for was trafficking ecstasy in Arizona.
02:13:58.000That's what he got popped for and went back to prison for.
02:14:03.000Imagine if you're one of those guys that's in jail for the rest of your life for cannabis, and you hear this story about Sammy the Bull, murdered people, got into witness protection, got out, signing autographs, starts running ecstasy,
02:16:29.000When I was in New York, I used to go to this pool hall and it was a really interesting mix of people but a lot of gambling addicts and weirdos and a lot of ex-cons and criminals and shit.
02:16:40.000And this one guy who was this ex-con used to play no board chess with this kid.
02:16:47.000Who was this young Jewish kid who was hanging around the pool hall.
02:16:51.000He got kind of obsessed with the culture of gambling.
02:16:56.000But he was a chess master, like a legit chess master.
02:16:59.000So this guy was in his 40s with gray hair, his criminal with fucking missing teeth and shit.
02:17:05.000Would play no-board chess with this young kid who's like 16 years old.
02:17:09.000They would sit there and say the moves in their head.
02:19:13.000And when I move to one, I'm not going back to zero.
02:19:16.000And I go to two and to three and checkmate.
02:19:19.000And this guy is a legitimate, I don't know if you know who Hicks and Gracie is, but he's a revered master, like a yogi, and like super exceptional jiu-jitsu player.
02:19:31.000But he would talk about checkmate, and that's how a lot of guys talk about it.
02:19:36.000That it is like, it's like you're trying to, this guy's trying to keep up a rhythm with you.
02:19:41.000You're trying to get his back, he's trying to counter, and he's trying...
02:20:13.000Other than that, it's really all about an understanding of the movements, and then it's about this deep well of knowledge that you have to have at a certain level, you know, at a level of a Marcelo Garcia that we were talking about before.
02:20:27.000It's a deep, deep, deep well of knowledge.
02:20:30.000You don't realize it until you start doing it.
02:20:32.000So, like, one of my best friends, Eddie Bravo, who's a jiu-jitsu instructor, and he always says, like, the best guys are like nerd assassins.
02:20:41.000Like these super smart guys who like you and if you met them like you would never believe in a million years Right these guys are like until you looked at their ears their ears are all fucked up You know they're all cauliflower ear, but so many of them are just these really sort of thoughtful Thinking people who are just obsessed with these ideas that that that in comping encompasses jujitsu and Yeah.
02:21:07.000That's why on the street, man, you never know who you're talking to on the street, right?
02:21:27.000I always wanted to study jujitsu and wrestling and stuff, but even to this day, I flash back to the fucking sexual assault when I was a kid.
02:24:58.000And you see them going over techniques and talking about these techniques.
02:25:01.000And it's kind of similar to the way you see in the Queen's Gambit, people talking about chess moves.
02:25:08.000So it's just another thing, like people go down a hole, a rabbit hole, and what it really is is them trying to figure out a game.
02:25:16.000And this game is jujitsu, and with some people it's chess, with some people it's a video game or whatever it is, but that's what they're doing, you know?
02:25:49.000There was a guy who was playing online, and I think he was from Indonesia.
02:25:56.000And he was playing online and his score jumped up way too fast and someone decided this guy was a cheater and so they red flagged him and banned him and then that person got a bunch of hate from all these other people like no that's my relative and he just hasn't played in a long time but he used to be a professional player and the reason why it takes him a long time to do the moves is because he's got an old phone and his phone just doesn't process very well.
02:26:26.000And so they convinced this person to let this guy have a match.
02:26:31.000And so this guy had a match against this woman who was a real master.
02:26:40.000Instead of being like at 90% accuracy, like a really elite chess player, he was making all these mistakes and he got trounced by this girl.
02:27:27.000Cheating controversy results in most watched chess stream in history.
02:27:31.000So that guy on the left is full of shit.
02:27:36.000And they caught him because, like, it's, you know, it's like jujitsu.
02:27:39.000It's very similar in that if you pretend you're a black belt and you roll with a black belt, That black belt will say, yeah, man, you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
02:28:07.000And like, hmm, that's interesting because my cousin's from Pedro Sauer's academy and he's never heard of you.
02:28:13.000And then, because there's only, you know, every elite instructor, you know, even the best instructors ever, maybe they have a hundred black belts.
02:29:47.000But the thing I really found out is that...
02:29:51.000I really enjoyed being part of a collaborative team effort in a creative pursuit.
02:29:56.000The type of journalism I did, pretty lonely pursuit.
02:29:59.000Every once in a while, I pair up with a photographer, but for the most part, just out there on my own, you know, reporting.
02:30:05.000And the play, which was an off-Broadway production, and just working with the actors and the director and the set designers and everything, hey, I actually like working with other people, and they're smart, creative people.
02:31:30.000There's this secret police force that's especially in that part of Moscow.
02:31:33.000Then they're Chechens, and you can spot them.
02:31:35.000They're wearing these ill-fitting suits, and they have big beards, and they're always sitting in the lobby wearing newspapers and shit.
02:31:40.000And after the second of three days of interviews, Tiller and I and Tarzan, the Russian mob guy that was buying a sub for the cartel, right?
02:31:50.000We left the hotel and we went to walk around and talk and stuff.
02:31:54.000And I noticed that the Chechens have left the lobby and are now following us.
02:31:58.000And so we're texting with one of the producers and we're like, because every day we've been sending the footage by FedEx, we thought, back to L.A. And then we had a copy with us in the hotel room safe.
02:32:09.000So we're texting the producer and we're like, that footage is gone, right?
02:33:35.000He doesn't have a birth certificate because his family, his mom gave birth to him in the woods, and they convinced him until he was 12 years old that he was a wizard.
02:34:18.000I think he would be a great podcast guest.
02:34:21.000There's a couple stories that I wrote that I never felt like I cracked them.
02:34:25.000Back to that earlier point early on today about never feeling like the story's finished.
02:34:29.000And the director that I worked with on Sasquatch, Joshua Faye and I, he and I are trying to put together also like Going back and reinvestigating a story I wrote about unsolved murders, basically.
02:34:40.000Another unsolved murder that I wrote about in Denver in the early 2000s.
02:34:44.000So I'm hoping to go back and kind of get a second bite of that apple, too.
02:34:49.000So a different, completely different environment?
02:34:55.000But I mean, a completely different, this Unsolved Murders, like, you want to say what it's about?
02:34:59.000No, it was a drug dealer who was murdered in Denver in 2002, and I wrote about his murder at the time, and, you know, kind of got a few leads on whodunit, but just kind of ran out of time and had to move on to the next story.
02:35:14.000And so it's, like, similar to Sasquatch, it could be going back and, like, investigating the crime.
02:35:18.000The key difference here is that actually, like, there was for sure there was an actual murder in a body.
02:35:23.000But also kind of an autobiographical story that will probably get into the stalking the boogeyman, stalking the guy that raped me kind of thing.
02:35:31.000Because at the same time I was investigating this murder, I was plotting a murder that I was plotting to commit.
02:35:41.000Once you opened that door in your head and you actually committed to it, was it difficult to back away from that idea?
02:35:49.000Yeah, because it was, you know, I get asked a lot, like, would you have actually done it?
02:35:55.000And I think so, because it was, I freaked out.
02:35:58.000I mean, now I know, like, I have PTSD. Ecstasy has been hugely helpful to me with treating PTSD. But it was the first kind of full-blown PTSD episode I had was when I found out that I'd just moved to Denver and that this fucking guy lived there.
02:36:14.000I'd lost track of where he was living, right?
02:36:16.000So I just flipped out, like nightmares, flashbacks, adrenaline surges, panic attacks, all of it.
02:36:34.000And the more I started to plot it, I, like, calmed down more to where it was, like, the plotting and the planning and the following and everything.
02:36:42.000It was like, that's what I needed to do to kind of keep myself calm.
02:36:45.000And it felt good in the sense that I didn't feel as bad as I did.
02:36:58.000It's like the same way that outer space is calm.
02:37:01.000You know, that's like the space that I was sort of operating in, the mind space I was operating in.
02:37:08.000So to give that up was hard, but I found that I achieved the same effect by then writing the story and plotting the story and how am I going to write that?
02:37:20.000Like I was able to sort of like self-treat my own PTSD. When they arrested you about it though, did you tell them, you know, hey, is this a story?
02:39:52.000But I have moral qualms about it because I know that that sick fuck, Ramirez, would have loved the fact that there was a Netflix series made about him and his crime spree.
02:40:04.000And it's more about the cops that caught him.
02:40:11.000Giving victims and surviving family members of victims their say, and not just treating the victims as abstract names and ages, which most serial killer shows do, and showing the real human impact of what he did.
02:40:28.000He would have loved seeing his face on billboards around L.A., and when they came out with the marketing campaign, I was like, ah, God, fuck.
02:40:36.000So I had mixed feelings about that one.
02:40:38.000You are very attracted, obviously, to these dark stories, these heavy, intense, disturbing stories.