This week we have Mariana Van Zeller, Darren Foster, and Joe Diaz. We also talk about the UFC in Vegas and some other stuff. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace and is sponsored by Onnit. Onnit is a human optimization website that focuses on helping you optimize your health and performance through a variety of health and fitness equipment and supplements. They have some really cool tools and equipment that you can use to optimize your life and improve your performance. You can get 10% off your first purchase at Onnit if you use the code "JOE" at checkout and save 10% too! We are also looking to start sponsoring UFC fighters, but that's a little further down the road, so stay tuned till the end of the episode to see if we can get them on the bill. If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and become a supporter of Onnit! We love hearing from you, the Freaks! Cheers, Joe XOXO - The Joe Rogan Podcast and Joe Rogans . This episode was recorded on location in Las Vegas, Nevada at the UFC Fight Night at The Joint on Friday, July 7th, 2019. We had a lot of great people in attendance and we really appreciate all the support we got from the fans, so we wanted to share it with the world. -Joe Rogan and I hope you enjoy it on the podcast! - Joe RogAN , and we hope you all have a great week!! Thank you so much love you, Joe and I will be back soon! - Joe and the UFC! - - xoxo - , :D - Joe . . - J. Rogan J. & the UFC, - ROGAN - OJ & J.R. & D. & J-E. , JOSEPH - SONNICK CHEERING - CHEERS Thanks, Joe & JACOBY AND MUCH MORE! - THE PRODCAST - THE JOE & JOSIE AND THE DOGAN PRODUCER ( ) FOLLOWING... - PODCAST - JOE AND THE FUTURE OF JOE - AND MORE! AND MORE
00:00:12.000I know I've been super busy, and I've been down to one a week over the last couple of weeks, but almost out of the woods with this new TV show, so shit will get normal any second now.
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00:05:19.000So, with me today are Darren Foster and Mariana Von Zeller, and I first found out about Mariana from the show on Vanguard, the OxyContin Express, which I remember watching it in my house and thinking,
00:05:37.000this is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.
00:05:40.000I couldn't believe that all the things you were telling me about the whole system I think?
00:06:03.000And I watched it and I said, this is so far beyond out of control that it's amazing that I'm just hearing about it now from a documentary on current TV, which is like, you know, not the most widely viewed channel.
00:06:19.000I mean, I felt like this should be on every channel on the front page of every newspaper.
00:06:25.000There's a hijacking going on down there.
00:06:27.000They've hijacked the legal system somehow or another and absolutely willfully Put these things into position in order to extract money and do it at the expense of all these people being addicted.
00:06:40.000I mean, how did you find out about this and how did you go about doing that piece?
00:06:46.000I mean, it was exactly the same for us, the same surprise that we got when we started looking into this story.
00:06:51.000We found a little news clipping on one newspaper about some deaths in Florida because of prescription drugs and there were more pain clinics around than McDonald's.
00:07:00.000And we thought, wow, this is really interesting.
00:07:02.000And we started looking into it, and then we found out that there were seven people every day dying from prescription pill abuse, that all over the U.S. there are more people dying from a prescription pill overdose than heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy combined, that just last year it surpassed car accidents to become the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States.
00:07:22.000So this was a story that we're just going to turn our heads away from.
00:07:51.000You know, the most insane thing was that we spoke to local journalists who had sort of covered this story a little bit.
00:07:56.000And they told us, look, you'll go by pain clinics here and you'll see lines of people and out of state cars parked outside and literally lines of people.
00:08:05.000I mean, very long lines around the corner of people waiting to get into these pain clinics to get these prescription drugs.
00:08:11.000And we thought, okay, this is the kind of thing that you hear about.
00:08:13.000We'll never be able to film or witness ourselves.
00:08:17.000I mean, as soon as we left the airport, went straight to this one street that we knew had a lot of pain clinics, and there it was.
00:08:23.000The parking lot's full of out-of-state plates.
00:08:25.000I mean, people driving all the way from Kentucky, Ohio, as far off as Massachusetts down to Florida to buy their pills.
00:08:32.000And they pack their cars with people, and then they bring them back and sell them for five, ten times the price that they buy them in Florida.
00:09:06.000When we tried to film one of the lines, we knew there was this one pain clinic that a lot of people liked going to because it was super easy to get drugs.
00:09:14.000Basically, you just go in and out and get whatever you wanted.
00:09:16.000And we started filming outside and we set our tripod and we were across the street on the other side of this sort of...
00:10:05.000But those guys were actually later indicted.
00:10:07.000They were busted by the DEA. They were later indicted.
00:10:10.000But in the indictment, they found that they had made like $40 million in two years off these pain clinics.
00:10:15.000And they're in jail for like 17 years now because I think one of them was even convicted of hiring someone to take out somebody else or something like that.
00:10:25.000Yeah, I mean, these were dangerous people.
00:10:27.000These were not people that you want to be.
00:10:28.000Yeah, so not good people always getting in behind these rackets.
00:10:32.000So when you ran out of gas, what happened?
00:10:34.000So we ran out of gas, and we had just interviewed some law enforcement there, and he was calling 911. I was calling the contact that we had for law enforcement there and saying, please help us.
00:10:46.000And in the meantime, the 911, I mean, we were about five minutes later.
00:10:49.000We were on 995, and so, like, Highway Patrol just saw that we were pulled over anyway, and they came, and then...
00:10:54.000But we stopped, and then the other guy stopped behind us, and they didn't come out of the car, because I think they realized that we were calling 911, but they just stayed there, and it was just to intimidate us.
00:11:03.000So they stayed there, and then they made the story up to the police that we had been stalking them, that they had an ex-girlfriend that was stalking them, so they thought that we were stalking the ex-girlfriend or something like that.
00:11:44.000It means that now doctors, they have a database in place basically that they are supposed to check to see if a customer is coming or a client is coming to get more drugs.
00:12:11.000I mean, it all has to do with these privacy laws.
00:12:13.000They don't want your medical records to be accessible to the government, basically.
00:12:18.000And so people that are very, I guess, worried about our privacy, which maybe we...
00:12:25.000Think about differently now with the whole NSA scandal, but I mean like, you know, people are definitely, that's the resistance to doing the prescription monitoring programs in a lot of places.
00:12:37.000Florida was one of the biggest states that didn't have one for a long time.
00:12:40.000But now with obviously so many people dying of this and this sort of bad reputation the state was getting, they decided to do something.
00:12:48.000Crack down a little bit, but it's still happening.
00:12:50.000And two years after we did the OxyContin Express, we actually were filming a story about heroin abuse in Massachusetts and how because of the OxyContin epidemic, a lot of kids...
00:13:00.000Then went on to do heroin for whatever reason because Oxy was getting more expensive or it was harder to get their hands on Oxy.
00:13:06.000So then they started shooting up heroin because the effects are sort of the same on the body except it's a street drug.
00:13:14.000So in many ways it's extremely dangerous as well.
00:13:17.000And so we actually went to a guy's house who was selling heroin.
00:13:21.000Heroin, and he said, dude, I'm selling heroin, but what I really like to sell is pills.
00:13:26.000Me and my friends all go down to Florida and get a bunch of these and we make much more money.
00:13:31.000Our profit margin is much higher by selling pills than it is selling heroin.
00:14:10.000Recently, in the Montana, the Billings Daily Gazette or something like that, one of the Billings Daily newspapers, where they said that out of one million people in Montana, 240,000 new prescriptions had been written.
00:14:29.000One of the things that definitely drew us to that story and to the follow-up stories that we've done subsequently is the fact that, you know, we spend billions of dollars every year fighting a war on drugs, trying to prevent drugs coming into this country.
00:14:41.000But meanwhile, it's, you know, the drugs that are being made in this country that are causing the biggest, you know...
00:14:47.000Problems in terms of life's loss and stuff like that.
00:14:49.000The war on drugs is like playing cowboys and Indians and pretending you're doing genocide.
00:14:55.000I mean, it's the worst job ever of controlling drugs that anybody's ever done ever.
00:15:00.000When you stop and think about how much resources to results, it's so damn stupid.
00:15:05.000It's like all you're doing is arresting pot dealers.
00:15:07.000Why don't you just call it the war on people who probably won't shoot you and you can make arrests?
00:16:16.000In the past, I mean, this aired three years ago already, and I still get, weekly, I get emails or Facebook messages or people reaching out because they've been somewhat, they've watched this, and somehow they've been affected by drugs, by prescription drugs.
00:16:29.000You know, their son has died, their husband is addicted, and they reach out because this documentary has made an impact on them, and they want to let us know, which is fantastic.
00:16:40.000You know, as a journalist, that's the best kind of gift you can get.
00:20:58.000I mean, unfortunately, that's the way it starts with so many people, is that they're an injury.
00:21:02.000And that's why you see, like, in a lot of places where the problem is, is that it's around places that have, like, a lot of workplace injuries, like Appalachia, where people work the mines and stuff like that.
00:21:14.000Yeah, so, I mean, that's a lot of times where you see these clusters of people who have become addicted.
00:21:21.000Yeah, and so unfortunately, it's like that is where you're finding these lower-income people or middle-class people who work factory jobs and have to move things, manual labor-type jobs, and it just seems like they have no hope.
00:21:34.000Once they get caught up in that, it's so hard to get out from under the grip of that monster, and they don't have...
00:21:39.000They can't afford to take a month off and go to Malibu to some clinic where they're going to feed them green tea and rub their feet.
00:21:56.000I mean, we spoke to so many people who were getting better and they really, I mean, they really, they had this conviction that they were, this was it.
00:22:05.000They were talking to us as ex-drug addicts and they were never going to take pills again.
00:22:09.000And I would say that 99% of those went back to drugs.
00:22:13.000Did you know, this is a statistic that somebody put on my message board, a dude named Evil Homer, thanks Evil Homer, that last year five pharmaceutical companies were agreed to pay $5.5 billion to resolve the U.S. Department of Justice allegations of fraudulent marketing practices including the promotion of medications for uses that they were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
00:23:12.000It's like there's plenty of valid applications for drugs.
00:23:16.000But if you want to control the entire world and you want to be like the king of the planet and have all the gold, the best way to do it is to be like, fuck people.
00:23:26.000Just treat them as little vampire sucklings and take as much blood as you can while keeping them alive for as long as you can until they eventually run out of money or blood and then move on to the next one.
00:23:38.000We spoke to a doctor, he was a rehab doctor, and he told us something really interesting.
00:23:42.000I think it was the end of the 90s that the medical community got together and they decided that the best thing to do to treat pain was to really go at it aggressively and have the lowest possible tolerance to pain.
00:23:56.000So if there was any chance that the patient would feel any sort of pain, just treat it aggressively by giving them a lot of drugs.
00:24:03.000And he says there was a total shift In the end of the 90s, wasn't it Darren?
00:24:42.000They must have bowed down to pressure from the pharmaceutical companies.
00:24:45.000There must have been someone who cut a deal and said, listen, if you guys just prescribe a little more, do you know how much money we can all make?
00:24:51.000And we'll give you a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
00:24:54.000People say, well, that doesn't happen.
00:24:55.000Well, here's one thing that definitely does happen.
00:24:57.000My wife, her mom is a nurse, and her mom was working at this clinic, and she would tell us about the drug reps and all the things the drug reps would do for the company.
00:25:07.000They'd take the whole company out to dinner, to a really nice restaurant.
00:25:11.000Nurses are on very reasonable salaries.
00:25:13.000They can't afford a really expensive restaurant or a really fine restaurant.
00:25:16.000They would take everybody out, buy them all the drinks, order anything on the menu, lobster and steak and this and that.
00:25:55.000What happened to journalism in this country?
00:25:57.000Well, I mean, like, for us, I mean, you know, great local reporting is what drew us to the story, so there are great reports, but for some reason, yeah, some...
00:26:06.000Yeah, people on the scene, and, like, that's, you know, where we got the lead to this story, and so, yeah, why it doesn't get better national attention is definitely a question that we should all be asking, yeah.
00:26:16.000Well, it's like when you hear that the CIA gives gigantic news corporations like Fox and CNBC, it gives them talking points.
00:28:31.000And you just need to go get an MRI. And basically what this is, is that an MRI can show anything and you can point to something and say that that's what's hurting you.
00:28:40.000And doctors just need to see something that they can then say, look, I looked at the MRI and it looked like she had That it was legitimate back pain, and that's all they need.
00:28:49.000And so we went out the door to get this MRI, and we stopped and started talking to these guys that had come down from West Virginia and Kentucky, and they were telling us, you know, we traveled down there here because it's just so easy to get these drugs.
00:29:00.000And we just say we have a back pain, but of course we don't have anything.
00:29:03.000We just want to take a lot of these drugs back home with us.
00:29:06.000When people are listening to this and saying, well, how easy?
00:29:54.000Beautiful and sad at the same time and hilarious.
00:29:57.000Look, if you can't do anything about it and you just accept that going in, you have to.
00:30:01.000You can't look at it and say, oh, that poor child growing up because then you'll get all sad.
00:30:05.000But if you can treat it as a comedy and pretend they're not real and treat it as like if you're watching a Coen Brothers movie, a big part of that documentary is pills.
00:30:15.000Huge part of what those people are and that culture of wild, hillbilly, white trash, crazy people is about pill addiction.
00:30:24.000We spoke to some people in jail, some women in jail that were in jail because of pill trafficking from Florida, and they call themselves pillbillies.
00:30:32.000That's what they say they are, pillbillies.
00:30:51.000It was a real paradigm shifting moment for me and it was the thing that really got me paying attention to pills in general.
00:30:59.000And then I started reading all these other bizarre stories.
00:31:02.000I don't know if you ever heard about the man who was awarded the equivalent of $600,000 American dollars because he was on a Parkinson's drug called Requip.
00:31:18.000They had this Parkinson's drug and it turned him into a gambling and gay sex addict.
00:31:24.000He was a straight man, and he took this pill, and it was Parkinson's drug, so apparently it has some psychoactive properties, does something to the way the mind works, and all he wanted to do was have gay sex and gamble.
00:31:38.000That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
00:31:46.000It's an accusation backed up by at least some science.
00:31:50.000I mean, I don't know what they use to show that there's some sort of a chemical correlation between his activities and this drug, but they pulled the drug off the market.
00:32:45.000Did you guys ever find out as far as how much testing is involved in making something legal?
00:32:51.000So the interesting thing is that when all these pain pills started being produced, such as OxyContin, they were really easy to manipulate so that you can use them.
00:33:02.000So that when you take a pill, they will have an effect on your body, but over time.
00:33:10.000And that was really easy to manipulate so that you would take it and it would immediately have all the effect at once, which is what an addict ultimately wants.
00:33:19.000So then they were heavily criticized for that.
00:33:22.000So then they came up with A pill that wasn't so easy to manipulate.
00:37:33.000It's another sign of how crazy human beings are.
00:37:35.000This one spot in the world, like Brazil, the rainforest, where there's so much promise as far as new healing, new plants that can do all sorts of great things.
00:38:19.000And like I said, for me, I'm so torn because I don't think that I would want to be in a neighborhood where they're selling heroin, but I don't think that anybody should be able to tell anybody else they can't buy heroin.
00:38:32.000But then you get into that area of the addictive properties of it, and that's where it gets sketchy.
00:38:38.000That's where it gets like, well, if you're going to do anything as a community to try to stop something like that, Boy, there's not a lot of ways you can convince people to not do things.
00:38:51.000And it gets real weird when you're trying to convince someone to not do something that has a really good chance of ruining your life.
00:38:59.000Yeah, I know you talk a lot about drugs, and I don't know if you've looked into the Portuguese experience.
00:39:03.000I'm from Portugal, and Portugal is basically one of the biggest experiments in drug policy in the world, and it's been going on for 10 years, and it's actually quite a success rate.
00:39:12.000And what they did is they did decriminalize drugs.
00:39:15.000They didn't legalize them, they decriminalized them, meaning that if you're caught with, I think it's one gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of marijuana, if it's anything, if it's that or less, You don't go to jail as you do in other countries and what they do is they send you to a drug rehab commission and to a group of doctors that know what they're talking about that want to find out if this is the first time you're trying drugs and why are you doing them and they try to address the problem as a disease and not as a crime
00:39:45.000and it's had actually great success rate and you know much less people are going to rehab centers much less people are dying so it's definitely being looked at as a way to go in terms of drug policy.
00:39:56.000Well, that's a beautiful idea also in terms of human nature because it's human nature to not want to be controlled.
00:40:06.000And if you have children, you know that one of the best ways to get a kid to want to do something is to tell them they can't do it.
00:40:11.000It's a natural human tendency to try to resist.
00:40:14.000And when you tell them they can do whatever they want and you'll be there to help them, you're honestly better off.
00:40:21.000We would like to think that the established laws that we have in this country are set up to protect people, but they're clearly not.
00:40:27.000When you're dealing with these numbers, especially outside of Florida, like I told you about Billings, Montana newspaper talking about 240,000 different prescriptions for that stuff in Montana alone.
00:41:18.000To helping people and that's what their whole career was supposed to be, improving the health of people, keeping people alive.
00:41:25.000And then somewhere along the line, in the whole storm of student loans and getting sued for malpractice and all this different shit, somewhere along the line, a bunch of them just crack and they just go, let's just make some money.
00:41:39.000We spoke to some addicts in Florida whose doctor, the doctor that prescribed them the drugs, and this was a kid, actually a boy, a man, a 25-year-old kid, was a gynecologist.
00:41:50.000So he was going to a gynecologist to get his meds.
00:42:49.000I understand what you say, that a person should be able to get whatever they want if they're adults and they can make up their own minds, but they should also be able to know what they're getting.
00:43:00.000The big reason why people get into prescription drugs is because they're prescribed this by their doctor and there aren't enough warnings as to how addictive this stuff can be.
00:43:11.000We spoke to one kid who was also a star athlete in college, and he was featured in the second documentary we did about this issue.
00:43:18.000And he was in the hospital for five days, and he left the hospital he was already addicted to pills and never left, and now he's doing heroin.
00:43:29.000So this is, you know, you know a story, I know a story, so just imagine how many stories there are out there, just people that get injured and get addicted.
00:43:47.000And there are fantastic people out there, a lot of moms, actually mothers who've lost kids who are leading the way and trying to raise awareness and pass legislation.
00:43:56.000I definitely think that more needs to be done.
00:43:59.000Doctors need to prescribe this, know what they're prescribing, and people need to know more about what they're being prescribed and the addictiveness of it.
00:44:57.000So we look into sort of bath salts and spice and K2 and all that stuff.
00:45:03.000And the show is basically Darren, who's my producing partner and my husband and myself, we go around America exploring and infiltrating these subcultures, some of the U.S.'s most controversial subcultures and everything from sex trafficking to unregulated and illegal guns to the first episode,
00:46:15.000I don't know what the technical aspects of his transformation of the basalts into something else, but he had claimed that it made you this incredibly hypersexual person, and he was trying to market it as like a...
00:46:31.000He was trying to come up with a drug that would turn women into like nymphomaniacs, essentially.
00:46:54.000It would change you, make you very, very, very aroused.
00:46:57.000He described it on his post as clawing your genitals and freaking out and masturbating all day.
00:47:06.000He had these really detailed depictions of the chemical transformation of these drugs.
00:47:12.000And clearly had this massive laboratory, not massive, but really high-end, high-tech laboratory, set up in his crazy fucking jungle house, and this guy was cooking bath salts back there.
00:47:24.000I mean, the doctors we spoke to definitely said that hypersexuality is one of the sort of symptoms, not symptoms?
00:47:54.000So he had these, you know, young jungle girls, like 20 years old or however they were, like I think his girlfriend was 20, and he was like, you know, had all these pictures of these different girls and he was getting hooked up on bath salts.
00:49:25.000And we went into a smoke shop and bought this stuff.
00:49:28.000And then we were actually, so our first episode, we actually filmed some, we featured some, a marine who's addicted to, or who was at the time addicted to bath salts.
00:49:37.000We should explain to people that these are not actually bath salts.
00:50:54.000As soon as the government comes out and prohibits one compound, they immediately, you know, China and India have already all these other chemicals ready to ship.
00:51:04.000So they just need to change a little compound, and it's a new drug, and it's legal all of a sudden.
00:52:26.000Yeah, it might be a little crazy, but most of these bath salts and synthetic marijuana are being put together by some yahoos in their garage.
00:52:34.000So that's where the problem comes in, is that you don't know what you're getting, and you don't know if they're mixing it correctly.
00:52:39.000You get these things called hot spots, where one portion of the batch will have 30 times the amount of the product, compared to another part that might have just been missed.
00:52:49.000So you never know what you're getting, and obviously when you have a 19, 20-year-old kid who's just looking to make some money mixing it together, he's not probably doing the best science.
00:53:00.000Yeah, and you're also, there's a bunch of different effects of these things, right?
00:53:05.000Yeah, we spoke about the over-sexualization, aggressiveness.
00:53:11.000People believe that they have superhuman force.
00:53:14.000There's all these videos, you can search it on YouTube too, of people going out and believing they're supermen and throwing themselves off cliffs.
00:53:20.000We spoke to a doctor who had treated a patient who was a lawyer.
00:53:23.000He was studying for the bar exam and took some of this stuff and decided that his own hands were trying to attack him.
00:53:30.000He thought his hands were trying to attack him.
00:53:32.000So he put both his hands on a stove top and burnt his arms.
00:54:59.000And that's why they're so popular that we heard, that they're so popular in places where drug testing is mandatory, such as military or rehab communities or even bullfighting.
00:55:10.000We were in Arizona and interviewed people from the bullfighting community, and this is really popular there because it's so hard to test these drugs.
00:55:16.000So they can just take them and know that nobody's going to ever find out.
00:55:20.000So they take these bath salts and then hop on a bull.
00:55:41.000It's, I guess, yeah, it's consistent with behavior.
00:55:45.000That's a very nice way, scientific way of saying it.
00:55:48.000Yeah, I mean, we can't, I have no idea if the guy was on bath salts.
00:55:52.000It would definitely, you know, I think the cops were like, this is the craziest thing we've ever seen.
00:55:55.000And it's just consistent with behavior that we've seen of other people that have been on bath salts.
00:56:00.000That's why they jumped to the conclusion that maybe it was bath salts.
00:56:03.000And even after the autopsy or whatever they did, you know, they, uh, How long before the pharmaceutical companies realize how much money is in bath salts and just say, listen, what we need to do is set up some labs in Mexico or Peru or whatever,
00:56:21.000churn out our own bath salts, launch them over the border with catapults, have people pick them up, sit in trucks.
00:56:28.000Well, there's an article that came out today actually about how the DEA had just busted and is really concerned about synthetic drugs because it is becoming quite a big problem here in the United States and how they're finding out that actually it is...
00:56:53.000You know, but there are some really sad stories that we, you know, we interview the father of a kid who took bath salts for the first time because a friend gave it to him.
00:57:00.000And the kid went totally wild, came into his parents' house and slit his throat in front of his parents and died five days later.
00:57:22.000I would hear stories about people dying, and it would make me sad, but it didn't hit home.
00:57:27.000When you start having children, you think about all the dumb things that you did growing up, and somehow or another dodged all those bullets.
00:59:14.000What can be done besides you talking or you doing a show like that?
00:59:20.000Is there anybody that you talked to that had some really concrete plans on how this could be halted?
00:59:25.000There's some great organizations out there, support group organizations.
00:59:30.000You know, again, a lot of them are being led by women, by mothers, which I think is phenomenal.
00:59:35.000And they're really trying to raise awareness and pass legislation to make these bills harder to get and to stop these, you know, crazy doctors from overprescribing.
01:00:28.000When you do this kind of investigative journalism and you ruffle feathers and sort of make noise, do you guys experience any blowback from that?
01:00:58.000You know, if we were targeting a specific individual, you know, there might be a little bit of blowback, whether rightly or wrong, whether we were doing it that way.
01:01:08.000But I think, you know, the fact that we're just trying to shed light on an issue, and the only way that we can do that is with undercover cameras, you sort of, you know, mute the blowback a little bit because it's just enlightening for most people to see what goes on when people don't know the camera's rolling, you know?
01:01:22.000Yeah, that's probably a very good point.
01:01:56.000I just re-watched for the 10th time the first episode of this series that is airing on Wednesday night at 10pm.
01:02:04.000And it made me really nervous just to watch some of the stuff because we did go undercover and filmed a lot of things, filmed a lot of people selling drugs.
01:02:12.000We filmed people taking drugs and a lot of it was filmed undercover and it makes me nervous for sure.
01:02:18.000But it was an issue that we thought was an important issue, not enough people know about it.
01:02:23.000What other subjects did you guys cover?
01:02:34.000And we basically transformed ourselves into the bad guys, into criminals trying to get guns, just to see how easy it would be for a criminal to get their hands on guns in Arizona.
01:02:45.000And in the space of about two, three days...
01:03:40.000And congratulations on handling it that way, because that's, I think, the right way to do it.
01:03:45.000And it's also, obviously, this person is a part of a much greater issue.
01:03:49.000And to turn it on, to make it about one person, it's like, it's the tendency to do in this country, like to victimize or to criminalize this one person or whatever, you know, focus on this one person when it's really what's going on is the issue, right?
01:04:04.000The issue of being able to buy guns that easy.
01:04:06.000Do you know what's so interesting, though, is that right after we bought that AK-47, I think it was the first assault rifle that we bought in Arizona, and we'd been nervous whether we'd invested money to go there, are we going to be able to buy these guns?
01:04:20.000So to sort of celebrate our purchase, we went into the bar right next to Taco Bell, and we ordered three beers, myself, Darren, and the other producer, Alex, and because Alex didn't have his ID with him, they didn't sell him a beer.
01:04:32.000Meanwhile, we just bought an AK-47 outside.
01:04:34.000And no one asks for our ID or even our names.
01:04:48.000The gun issue is really a creepy one in this country.
01:04:52.000And it's also, in my opinion, connected to the pharmaceutical issue.
01:04:56.000And the reason being is that there's this massive connection between the things that people are afraid of I think the latest statistic was more than 90% of all school shooters Uh,
01:05:21.000either are on antidepressants when they do it or are recovering from antidepressants when they do it.
01:05:27.000And that's one of those things that makes you wonder, like, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
01:07:03.000I think, yeah, it had been said that he had an AR-15 assault rifle that he had taken into the school, and it was in the car that he drove there.
01:07:15.000But they've been told by several officials that he had left it in the car, and then he came in and just shot everyone with pistols.
01:07:22.000I remember when the reports came out hearing about the Bushmaster, that he had a Bushmaster, and I remember clearly having seen it in the gun shows, and we almost bought one.
01:07:32.000I mean, this is just sort of a technicality here, but what kind of gun he used.
01:09:15.000You know, turn the whole country into communist Russia.
01:09:17.000And then, you know, you've got the other side that want the, you know, that say, fuck hunters, you should just kill hunters, no one should have a gun, you know, get your meat from a supermarket, this is bullshit, we need to, we need to evolve, you know, there's that argument as well.
01:09:31.000In my opinion, it's a mental health issue.
01:10:32.000The same laws that make it easy for anybody to access guns also makes it easy for people who you don't want having guns to have guns.
01:10:39.000And so if you're comfortable with that, and there are many states and there are many people that are comfortable with that, then that's great.
01:10:44.000And if you're not, if you fear the damage that a gun can do in the wrong person's hand, then that's also a worthy thing to debate, I think.
01:10:58.000It's about having the right to bear arms, to have arms, and what should be the limits on that, and then pills, which actually, you know, it's a much more of a gray area debate.
01:11:13.000And even if there is gun laws, I guess you could punish people harder for selling you an AK-47 in a parking lot, but the fact that you could just do it, Anybody who wants to stop background checks from owning guns is an asshole.
01:11:33.000I think the vast majority of people just agree on most things, and then it's the sort of extremes of both sides that sort of hijack the debate.
01:11:46.000We go through background checks anytime we want to buy a car.
01:11:51.000And they ask for ID if you want to get a beer to make sure you're over 21. So why not ask for your ID or get a background check if you want to buy a dangerous weapon?
01:12:16.000But it was just one of those things that, like, this extreme reaction that people have to the gun issue.
01:12:23.000When the reality is, and I'm not in the Ted Nugent camp, but the reality is when you look at the actual numbers of people with guns and the small amount of times that these things happen, it's really not a gun issue.
01:12:52.000And, you know, the thing is, is that the part that I loved about doing the piece, and was when we started that, is we went...
01:12:59.000To this shooting range and we took part in this festival.
01:13:03.000It was the Independence Day rifle match.
01:13:06.000And, you know, there were guys that are obviously very pro-gun and would disagree with anybody who says that there should be any limits on gun ownership or anything like that.
01:13:15.000But at the same time, a lot of the guys we were speaking to were very serious about the safety that went into owning a gun.
01:13:22.000There's a responsibility there that if you own something, just like if you own...
01:13:26.000There's a responsibility to know how to drive a car and to educate yourself.
01:13:30.000So the NRA, they offer these pistol classes and they teach you how to unload, load, and how to do everything safely.
01:13:40.000I think it's not mandatory for gun owners, but I think anybody that wants to own a gun should certainly take a class on how to handle a weapon.
01:13:50.000Yeah, I don't think there's any debate now whatsoever.
01:13:52.000And I think another issue that needs to be taken into consideration is how many people's lives are saved with guns from bad guys.
01:13:59.000I mean, how many times have police in justifiable cases shot people?
01:14:05.000I mean, when you look at the number of people that are shot in this country, Sometimes it's people that are protecting their home from a burglar.
01:14:11.000Sometimes it's a woman trying to prevent a rape.
01:14:13.000I mean, all these things are true as well.
01:14:16.000So it isn't a black and white issue, and that's what gets people really weird.
01:14:19.000And, you know, by the way, if you're really adamant about gun control and you're really adamant about stopping gun violence...
01:14:27.000Pay attention to the fact that we're involved in wars.
01:14:50.000It's one that seems to be lingering in our transition from this primal alpha male monkey thing that we used to be to whatever we're becoming as we become more and more educated and more and more Aware of the consequences of our actions and more and more hopefully enlightened.
01:15:07.000We still have this thing where you can just press a button and people explode.
01:15:12.000And anybody can get one in the parking lot after being online in 45 minutes.
01:15:20.000I mean, people are so goddamn strange.
01:15:23.000And if you really look at it that way, if you were an objective observer, You know, from another planet that's sent here to report back on Earth.
01:15:30.000Boy, what a fucking story you would have.
01:15:32.000You'd have to sit them down and you'd have to go, okay.
01:15:54.000Journalists are driving into trees on 90 miles an hour, not leaving skid marks.
01:15:59.000When you guys saw that, did you get scared?
01:16:00.000Thinking about the business that you're in.
01:16:02.000We're talking about Michael Hastings, who's a journalist for the Rolling Stone magazine, and he was involved in exactly what you're not involved in.
01:16:11.000He was involved in singling out individuals and going after them, and he did Did it to a very powerful general and wrote some piece in Rolling Stone that got the guy fired and repeatedly told people that people had told him they were going to kill him.
01:16:24.000And then one day his car going 100 miles an hour in Hollywood slammed directly into a pole or a tree and killed him.
01:16:52.000Yeah, and that today it's possible to hack into a modern car and control the steering, control the acceleration, control the brakes, and then it's very possible you could remote control a car and make someone accelerate and slam into a tree and make the car explode.
01:17:40.000I think it would be foolish of me with my zero understanding of the mechanics of modern automobiles, zero understanding of the computer equipment that runs them.
01:17:55.000There's several others as well who have studied the mechanisms behind the possibilities of remote controlling various things, hacking into them, you know.
01:18:15.000The guy just drives, he's about to release this crazy story, tells everyone that the FBI is looking into him and interviewing all of his friends, and then right into a tree.
01:18:53.000I think also a thing to take into consideration is that we live in an age of extreme transparency.
01:18:58.000And anybody who does something that evil, it seems like it's almost impossible to completely cover things up.
01:19:05.000And if it's not impossible now, I feel like it will be in a few years.
01:19:10.000I feel like any sort of record of something of that magnitude, there's going to be a way that that's going to come to light in some sort of a WikiLeaks type scenario.
01:19:24.000I'm what I would call a technological optimist.
01:19:26.000There's that famous Orson Welles quote that history is a race between education and catastrophe.
01:19:35.000And I think if you look at the trends, education seems to kind of always be winning.
01:19:42.000And I think part of that is that ultimately what's good for the entire race triumphs over what's good for the few.
01:19:51.000And I think even what's good for the few in terms of bad for the entire race is bad for the few because I think there's a thing called karma and I think that's real.
01:20:01.000And I think that the effect that you have on your environment is a very tangible thing.
01:20:05.000The way people react to you is a very physical, real, measurable thing and that comes from being a piece of shit.
01:20:12.000If you're a piece of shit and you do horrible things, it's very difficult to feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy love and happiness and have friends and I think that ultimately technology most likely will be the tool that balances all that out because I think that with technology comes this transparency.
01:20:31.000With this transparency, you get to see the actions of these few.
01:20:36.000In a different light than we got to see, like whether it was in the 60s or the 70s or when Eisenhower warned of the – when he left office and he was warning about the military-industrial complex.
01:20:47.000That was just a film that was on television for one brief moment in a time where there was no VCRs.
01:20:54.000So it's like how much impact is that even going to have then?
01:20:57.000Whereas now, many, many years later, over half a century later, That film is being played over and over again on the internet as an example of how this is probably an issue that's been around secretly behind the curtain for a long time.
01:21:11.000But now every day there's some new thing.
01:21:15.000Every day there's some new piece of information.
01:21:19.000Whether it's Edward Snowden or whether it's someone else releasing something else or some people getting arrested for something that you can't believe is real.
01:21:28.000It's almost impossible to cover that stuff up these days.
01:23:23.000What's happening is I keep getting information, and I'll go, and I'll see something, and ooh, and maybe I'll see nothing, and I'll look more, and I'll see nothing, and I'll look more, and then ooh, a new post by someone I follow or something crazy is happening.
01:23:35.000Especially when it's a married couple, and we're in the same sort of business, and we're always, we're journalists, and we're always looking for information, but I find that it's almost like a ping pong ball for us.
01:23:45.000I'm looking at the phone, and he's really mad at me because we're having dinner, and I'm looking at the phone, and then I put it down, and then he's looking at the phone, and I'm getting really mad at him.
01:23:53.000Try to keep the romance alive and she's checking her phone.
01:23:58.000I was at a restaurant the other day, and I watched four people, and none of them talked, and they all stayed on their phone the entire time they were sitting there eating together.
01:24:05.000Yeah, but then you look at them, you're like, oh, these people, and five minutes later, you're the one checking your phone, and they're looking at you saying the same thing.
01:24:21.000And one of the episodes, we were talking about the convergence, the human...
01:24:25.000To machine convergence and then the idea that one day we will be some sort of a combination of people and technology.
01:24:32.000And he was essentially making the argument that it's already happened and that it's just we're slowly accepting it but that technology is in pacemakers and in hearing aids and we are so attached to our phones that It could be argued that if you have a certain number of people that constantly carry phones with them,
01:24:51.000the argument could be that you're already a part of that.
01:24:55.000You just haven't figured out a way to put it in your body.
01:24:57.000So the way before they had hearing aids, those dudes used to carry those horns.
01:27:10.000Not sure if I'm looking forward to it, I have to say.
01:27:12.000I feel like I am, because I feel like I enjoy so many aspects of technology already.
01:27:18.000I think people are afraid, for the most, we're afraid of a loss of privacy.
01:27:22.000But if we could get people to stop being assholes, if everybody was really cool...
01:27:28.000Would you care if everybody looked at your pictures and got into email?
01:27:32.000Or that we know that people are looking at everything we do.
01:27:35.000But our issue is not with people looking at our stuff.
01:27:38.000Our issues are with assholes looking at our stuff or people using our information against us.
01:27:45.000That's what we're really concerned with.
01:27:46.000And I wonder if you could extrapolate this sort of – This thing that we're going through with technology where there's this massive curve and it's spinning and spinning faster and faster until this exponential growth,
01:28:02.000if it was possible to somehow or another encourage that in human behavior as well as with technology, if technology could be used by By in aiding in this sort of like connection with people and aiding in emphasizing empathy and emphasizing camaraderie and friendship and love.
01:28:22.000If that could be like seen as like a more worthwhile ethic.
01:28:27.000A more worthwhile state of consciousness and behavior.
01:28:38.000Because I think there's repercussions that people experience now when they do something terrible to someone on the internet where there's a flood of people who will go after them now that no one ever had before.
01:28:49.000Did you ever see there was a video where Anonymous released this video of this girl who was throwing puppies into a river?
01:30:34.000It's all moving to this area of no boundaries.
01:30:37.000It's very weird, but if you look at how life has changed since the internet, you know, when did we get it, like 90-ish, 94-ish, when it really took hold?
01:30:47.000I got on AOL, I think I was in 94, I was on.
01:32:08.000And then it goes on iTunes and at least a half a million will download each individual episode from either that or Stitcher or just the raw MP3. Like this is a crazy shift in the way things were done just 20 years from now.
01:32:22.000And then you think about Facebook, you think about Twitter, you could take a picture of something, you put it online and then this guy retweets it and that guy retweets it.
01:32:30.000And if it's something, especially if it's something big or a story big, it could get retweeted by millions.
01:32:34.000And then before you know it, it becomes a news story and then before you know it, It becomes something that the whole country knows about.
01:36:15.000Many times teenage girls who, you know, are at a shopping mall and they're approached by this guy who says, you're beautiful, you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, I'll give you everything you need in the world, come with me, travel with me.
01:36:25.000You know, sometimes these girls are for whatever reason, they don't have good relationships with their parents or they come from a bad background and they accept and they go travel around America with these guys and very soon after they become, you know, they're sex slaves and they're sold out for,
01:39:39.000Just from out of the top of my head, I wouldn't think, you know, obviously one of the big things, the reason why these rings exist, it's because it's illegal to be a prostitute.
01:39:53.000If they want to sell themselves, they feel safer having somebody who looks after them and who essentially at the end of the day takes away all their money.
01:40:00.000So this is what we heard again and again.
01:40:04.000It's sort of the same issue that exists in the drug world where if you make things illegal, then you sort of create this atmosphere where only the outlaws profit.
01:40:15.000And I know that in Amsterdam where drugs are pretty much legal or at least tolerated as far as marijuana and many drugs, They have a very low rate of addiction and very low rate of AIDS. They have legalized prostitution.
01:40:31.000I would wonder how much of this type of thing, of sex slavery, is mitigated by that.
01:40:43.000Most places in Nevada, right, where it's legal, and I think that's the argument that a lot of the brothel owners make, is that we can make it safe, we can make it, you know, the girls attested, the girls...
01:40:54.000Are there under their own volition and, you know, they get to keep their money as opposed to have the money taken away.
01:41:01.000We visited some of these brothels and I was actually really impressed.
01:43:39.000That was really interesting how they sort of talk about it and they try to sell it.
01:43:43.000I was really nervous going in, not only because I was filming undercover and that is always nerve-wracking, but also because I was trying to apply for a job just to show sort of what this is like, what this sex trafficking underworld is like.
01:43:58.000Not that I was going to work as a prostitute, but just to be able to get into these massage parlors and see how easy it is to get a job.
01:44:04.000And I was nervous that they were going to turn me down and say, I'm sorry, you're too old or too fat or too this or too that.
01:44:35.000Oh, did you cover the Animal Liberation Organization?
01:44:39.000No, we didn't really delve into that too much.
01:44:42.000What we were looking into was the guys that go undercover into factory farms and film abusive animals on factory farms, and then they turn it into campaigns to I try to get people to stop eating meat or to sort of improve conditions for factory farm animals and stuff like that.
01:44:59.000So there's this sort of whole very successful campaign by animal rights groups in the last decade or so that have used the undercover camera and so we figured since we're doing a show about undercover filming, Let's see if we can hook up with these guys and see what their world is like.
01:45:17.000So we hooked up with this one guy who's been doing it for like 10 years, and he remains anonymous.
01:45:23.000It goes by a fake name in the show, but his old Life has just been penetrating these farms and capturing pictures of abuse on film and stuff like that.
01:45:33.000And this is a guy who's obviously vegan.
01:45:35.000He's completely against the eating consumption of animal meat.
01:45:41.000And he still, every day, he goes to work when he goes undercover and he has to kill these animals just to be able to record what happens inside these factory farms.
01:45:49.000And then there's legislation that is being passed right now in several states to try to stop, to prohibit what these guys are doing by filming undercover.
01:46:02.000When they see those videos, even a meteor, they watch those videos of people like, I saw one of this abuse that was going on with these cows, where this guy was hitting a cow with a crowbar.
01:47:29.000And People were just staring at me with this crazy woman, probably thinking I was on bath salts or something.
01:47:36.000Why were they trying to get you to do all these different things?
01:47:39.000So this is part of the training, is that you have to be able to make people feel either very comfortable with you, so they give you information that you need, that you want to get for your undercover filming, Or very uncomfortable with you so that you feel the need to either leave so you can film or intimidated to a point that you will release any information you give without actually resorting to violence,
01:48:16.000It seems to me that that's another one of those things where it's sort of a diffusion of responsibility thing when there's so many people that want meat, so many people that want food, and if you could figure out how to stuff them into smaller packages, you could extract more ones and zeros.
01:48:32.000I mean, that's just that these guys that do the undercover filming, they obviously have an agenda, which is they want people to become vegan, but they're very sympathetic to the workers who sort of toil on their conditions that can at times be pretty stressful, and that's what sort of causes them to lash out many times.
01:48:50.000And then the sort of agriculture industry obviously just sees this as a pretty big threat, these guys coming in and filming undercover in their farms.
01:48:58.000Their argument is that they're capturing these anomalies.
01:49:02.000This doesn't happen every day and they're using it to sort of amplify their issue.
01:50:11.000And then we saw the other end of the process where...
01:50:14.000What is it, 18 months later or something like that, they're slaughtered and they led us onto the floor of the slaughterhouse and they said, you know, we have an open door policy because, you know, we want to be sort of as transparent as possible, you know, about how this food is, you know, raised and how it's slaughtered and, you know,
01:50:29.000I've been eating meat all my life and I've never once seen a cow slaughtered and I thought it was a really eye-opening experience, you know, to be able to sort of consume thousands and thousands of meals and, you know, not know exactly where you're We're so disconnected from where our food comes from.
01:52:55.000These animals do not live forever, and the reality is that they're There's quite a few realities when it comes to being a vegan.
01:53:03.000One of them is, if you do decide that no one's going to eat meat anymore, and we make a law and the whole world has to let all their animals go, they're going to keep fucking, and they're going to keep making baby animals, and then you've got a real problem.
01:53:16.000Because what are you going to do then?
01:54:34.000I don't think it was a mountain lion, but it was a bobcat.
01:54:36.000And it's like caught by one of those trigger cams.
01:54:38.000And it's like at night and the whole background of downtown LA. It was basically taken by the observatory where, you know, there are millions of little children running around.
01:54:49.000But the Griffith Observatory is hardly L.A. It's pretty rural.
01:54:53.000It's a small area that's rural, but they have coyotes biting people there.
01:54:57.000Like some homeless person went to sleep there and woke up because they got bit by a coyote.
01:55:02.000The coyote came around and tested them just to see if they could eat you.
01:59:13.000I don't know where they have, but I do know that they're capable of doing things now where they can reproduce cells and they can reproduce certain types of tissue.
01:59:23.000Like Kurzweil was telling me about this woman who had something wrong with her esophagus.
01:59:29.000So they built an esophagus out of biodegradable material, used stem cells.
01:59:36.000And you use the biodegradable material as a scaffolding.
01:59:39.000The stem cells built a brand new esophagus, and the operator and her installed the new one, and now she's fine.
01:59:47.000And that's like they're making parts for humans.
01:59:50.000So it just seems to make sense that they're going to make meat.
01:59:55.000I don't know how I feel about that, Cynthia.
01:59:59.000Yeah, maybe vegans will eat a fake steak.
02:01:13.000And it seems to me that the real thing about killing an animal and eating an animal is the fact that it's not just that it's alive, because vegetables are alive as well.
02:01:24.000It's the fact that it's alive and it can move and feel pain.
02:01:29.000But if you take away the whole feel pain part, and it can't think, and just headless chickens, like you gotta, you know, you have some new sort of a way to make the heart beat without a brain.
02:03:45.000I make kale shakes pretty much every morning, and it's cucumbers, and kale, and celery, and fruit, and stuff like that.
02:03:52.000So a lot of times, you have leftover stuff, leftover kale, and we feed them that, and then we feed them chicken feed, and they wander around the lawn, and they basically eat anything they find.
02:07:23.000Well, I've actually, we've actually sat down, our family sat down with a couple other families that we really like, and we actually started talking about doing that.
02:07:30.000And we've decided to make some, have some meetings, have some dinners, where we meet and discuss the idea.
02:07:39.000And look at like various locations, whether or not it'd be feasible with, you know, all the people that are, they all have sort of alternative entertainment type jobs, like comedians and writers and stuff like that.
02:07:48.000And so we're all just singing like, What an awesome community that would be.
02:07:51.000To live in a place where you're in a town, where there's a good town, like a healthy place with a city that's close by, but set up an establishment where you could grow your own food.
02:08:03.000So you don't have to worry, like, is this organic?
02:08:13.000And if you think about how much money you spend on food every year, It seems to me that if you have quite a few people hiring some really competent, nice people to run a farm for you, well, people would appreciate a good job where they work for nice people and everybody's ethical about the whole situation and how everything's done and fair,
02:08:32.000and you set up a nice little community farm.
02:08:48.000So you don't need to get the lottery, to win the lottery, I guess.
02:08:51.000Well, it seems like you're going to need some money for sure.
02:08:54.000You need some money to set up almost anything, but the real problem would be you'd have to You'd have to get permits to build houses, or you'd have to buy a bunch of houses together, which is even more ridiculous.
02:09:52.000We did one about homeless youth where we actually spent a lot of time with young people who are homeless here in Los Angeles and we spent a couple of nights sleeping under the bridge.
02:10:06.000Yeah, I mean, you live in LA, you know, it's like, you know, driving downtown or Hollywood and you see all these homeless, you know, kids and sometimes adults.
02:10:39.000It's like, where are you going to house them?
02:10:41.000There's a lot of housing, and there is a lot of shelters down there, but not enough to sort of meet the demand of how many homeless people are actually down there.
02:10:50.000And so if you go down there, day or night, you'll see hundreds, if not thousands of people walking in the streets with their carts, and it's just another side of the city that...
02:11:04.000You know, it's actually right next to the Arch District downtown, and so it's sort of, you've run across it here and there if you're living in L.A., but it's definitely an eye-opening experience to walk down there because there's a whole ecosystem down there that sort of It caters to – caters is probably not the right word,
02:11:26.000but that supports the homeless down there from clinics and shelters and stuff like that to obviously drug dealers and gangs that sort of run the territory down there.
02:11:41.000Because, as the activists who we follow down there told us, you know, it's not just the homeless community.
02:11:48.000It's probably the largest concentration of addicts in the country as well.
02:11:52.000Because most people, obviously, if you're living on the streets, you're either dealing with the mental health issue or some sort of addiction or both.
02:12:25.000And then, you know, for us who live here in LA and we drive by Hollywood every day and you see all those homeless kids every day and you know that they're sleeping out on the streets.
02:12:32.000And this, again, because of mental health issues or addiction or just because they come from broke down families and have nowhere to sleep, which was some of the cases of the people that we filmed.
02:12:42.000And so we decided it was, you know, sort of important if we were really going to dive deeper into this issue to spend the night with them, with two of the people that we were filming.
02:14:20.000He'll be out there for five days with no food and really freaking out and not knowing whether or not he's going to get out of there and trying to figure out how to alert the crew and how to start a fire when it's raining out.
02:15:47.000Several athletes have thought that it's a good thing to do.
02:15:52.000That somehow or another you get vitamins that pass through your body and then you recycle them into your urine and that your urine is sterile and it's not nothing to worry about and there's actually antibodies in your urine.
02:18:05.000One of the things about Fear Factor is, especially during the first season, if we aired people eating things, it had to be something that people ate in other countries.
02:19:23.000Not only that, how about the contestants at least had a shot at winning some money, but we had PAs drink it, and they only did it because it was part of their job.
02:19:37.000Whenever we did a stunt on Fear Factor, there was several times where we'd look at a stunt, whether it was a physical task or whether it was someone eating something.
02:19:47.000We had to figure out what's the correct amount and whether or not physically a task could be completed.
02:19:54.000So the physical aspect was handled by stuntmen, first of all, who would look at it and say, well, you shouldn't do it that way because I don't think a guy could do that.
02:20:02.000And if he does do that, he's probably going to hurt himself in this way or that way.
02:20:05.000And then with the eating thing, it's really the only way to find out.
02:20:08.000You've got to, like, how many bugs can a person eat?
02:25:03.000And then at night, they go out with these lights, with these headlamps to look for the most dangerous and most venomous snakes and frogs there are in the world in the middle of the Amazon.
02:25:15.000But for some reason, because we were filming it, we were on this high of filming this documentary and how cool it would be if we found the most dangerous thing in the world.
02:25:23.000For us, we didn't feel scared and we thought it was great.
02:28:16.000A lot of things, but you know, ultimately we were afraid of all these things, and actually Darren has a fascination for snakes, so he wasn't as scared as I was, but what got us was several months after we came back, I had this little thing growing on my finger that I thought it was just a bug, and then I decided I had to get it checked out because it was growing and growing,
02:28:35.000and suddenly pus was coming out of it, so I thought it was maybe skin cancer, and I went to a dermatologist in a Turns out I got a flesh-eating parasite that I caught in Brazil that only exists in a few parts of the world, so they didn't have the treatment here.
02:28:47.000CDC, the Center for Disease Control, had to make a special treatment for me that had a nurse come to my house, and it was pretty scary.
02:28:55.000That's why I say fuck going to the airport.