In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the host talks to a journalist who was stuck in the middle of the Sahara Desert for eight days. She talks about how she and her team had to be protected by a military convoy and how they managed to get through the chaos. She also talks about what it was like to be on the receiving end of a military coup in Africa and how she managed to survive it. She also shares the story of how she was able to get back on the plane and get back to the United States. And she tells us how she got to the other side of the crisis and what she did to keep her team safe. This episode is brought to you by Vevolution, a production of Gimlet Media. Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast about the world's most dangerous places and the people who live there. It's hosted by the award-winning journalist and host of the show "The Office" and hosted by Sarah Abdurrahman, host of "VICE" and "VICE London's" "Vevolution's" Alex Blumberg. Thank you for listening to this episode, Sarah! I hope you enjoy it and please please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get a chance to listen to the show. I'll be looking out for more episodes like this! - Sarah and Sarah :) - Thank you, Sarah Sarah's Note: This episode was produced by Sheel Mohnot and Sarah's Music: "The Dark Side" is a song written and produced and produced by the band, "The Lonely Planet" is out of our new EPISODE "The Good Life" is available on SoundCloud. and "The Badlands" is also available on Amazon Prime Video and SoundCloud and Soundtrack is out on the Good Morning Podcast. . We're working on a new album, "Good Morning Podcast" is coming soon! and will be out soon. - The Good Life Podcast is available everywhere. , "The Journey Podcast, Good Day Podcasts, Good Life, Bad Girls Podcast, The Good Day, Bad Day, Good Things, Good Night, Good Morning, Good Nights, Good Luck, Good Rest, Good Blessings, Good Sleep, Good Dreams, Good Thoughts, and Good Day and Good Life and Good Dreams and Good Morning Morning, and So Much More!
00:00:48.000It was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa.
00:00:53.000The U.S. has actually a military presence.
00:00:55.000Remember a few years ago when there were these four U.S. Marines that were killed in the Sahel in Niger and nobody even knew they were there?
00:01:03.000Well, there's actually over a thousand troops stationed in Niger.
00:01:07.000And we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is sort of the southern border of the Sahara Desert.
00:01:15.000And we were doing a story about gold mining.
00:01:27.000We've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous.
00:01:29.000We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to have a military convoy with us at all times.
00:01:36.000So we're talking about four armored trucks with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around.
00:01:46.000A lot of them are actually trained by the American military.
00:01:49.000And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy.
00:01:54.000It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines.
00:01:59.000We're going down these tunnels, and it's, you know, 100 meters down, hand-dug tunnels with nothing to buttress them, no safety precautions or anything.
00:02:10.000But we filmed it all, and we get to the end, and there's people basically...
00:02:24.000So we went to a sort of safety, more safe location to sleep that night under the stars.
00:02:31.000And then the next day it's time to come back to Agadez, the town, which is about 100 miles but takes anywhere between like 3 to 12 hours to get because lots of things can happen along the way.
00:02:43.000And we arrived in Agadez and we got word that there had been a military coup and the president had been deposed and he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace.
00:02:53.000Basically he was stuck there with his family.
00:02:56.000And that we were about to lose our military compound and security.
00:03:01.000And they closed all the land borders and the airspace.
00:05:18.000We managed to get a contact inside and started asking them, we're here with no security, can you guys come and help us and figure out, you know, take us into the base, something.
00:05:29.000We're all American citizens, except for our fixer, our local guy, who was actually from Mali, but everybody else was American.
00:05:36.000And they were stuck in the situation that all the other countries had started calling this a coup, but the U.S. government did not.
00:05:44.000And because the moment they called it a coup, they would have to remove...
00:05:49.000Possibly remove military, remove their aid from the country.
00:05:52.000And that's the last thing you want to do.
00:06:02.000And we started seeing slowly as the days started passing and the situation was deteriorating.
00:06:07.000We started seeing, you know, the French were sending planes to take all the French nationals, the British, the Portuguese, which is where...
00:06:14.000I'm a double nationality where I'm from.
00:06:17.000And I'm on the phone with the ambassador for Portugal telling me there's a plane for you.
00:06:21.000There's like seats for you in the capital, but the capital is eight hours away or 12 hours away by land and we can't go because it's too dangerous.
00:06:53.000Have you watched the movie Argo with Ben Affleck about the guys in Iran and how they don't know until the last minute if they're going to leave or not?
00:07:03.000So we get to the airport in the middle of the night.
00:07:05.000So they told us that we had to be at the airport at this time, that we had to take security with us because the pilot was refusing to land unless we had security there, police.
00:07:16.000The police were supposed to show up, they never did.
00:07:19.000We arrive at the airport, it's sunrise, and the military is there waiting for us.
00:07:28.000And they start creating all sorts of problems, saying we don't have the right paperwork, they're not going to let us leave.
00:07:34.000Meanwhile, there's this amazing man, local man, who worked at the airport that I'd met a few days before when I went there to try to see if there's any plane leaving, let us know.
00:08:04.000So I told him, you know, so he was there to help us, but the military was also there and they didn't want us to leave and creating all sorts of problems.
00:08:12.000And then we see the plane land and we see the pilot come out and we see the military start...
00:09:01.000And he was Portuguese, and he decided to take the risk of getting us on the plane, and we managed to get out of it.
00:09:08.000But the guy from the military was still yelling as the door closes.
00:09:12.000But so was the guy that I'd met at the airport, who turns to me, yells my name, and I look back, and he says, Hey, Mariana, say happy birthday to your son.
00:09:21.000So in the midst of the craziness, it was also a beautiful moment of connection and humanity.
00:09:43.000No, it's really, it's what I love to do.
00:09:45.000Obviously, that was a moment of a lot of uncertainty, but still when we spent a week on the ground and we still kept on reporting on the story we were there for, we kept, we're stuck in this dilemma.
00:09:55.000Do we stay closed in our hotel or do we go out and continue reporting on the story we decided to keep reporting?
00:10:00.000But it is, you know, there's a lot of sacrifice that goes into it, but it's what I love to do.
00:14:10.000You know, we had, when I was, one of the first stories I did with my husband back in the day, when we were still traveling and reporting together, was actually in the Brazilian Amazon.
00:14:18.000And it was about this, one of the biggest diamond mines they've ever found.
00:14:21.000And it was on Indian land and white miners came in and the Indians decided to revolt and killed and tortured and cut off the penises of 30 of them.
00:14:33.000And, you know, they killed 30 people, massacred and tortured lots of them.
00:14:45.000But we were in these little tiny, you know, wild west towns in the Amazon.
00:14:50.000And the amount of people that we had come up to us and actually with little paper bags, like rolled paper with little diamonds on the side, asking us if we wanted to buy it for nothing, like close to nothing.
00:16:10.000Well, that's also the story of cell phones, right?
00:16:14.000I mean, Siddharth Kara was on and he discussed his work in the Congo where they were investigating these cobalt mines.
00:16:23.000And in everyone's cell phone is a piece of cobalt.
00:16:26.000And there's a very high likelihood that was pulled out of one of these artesian mines by people who are working For basically slave wages, women with babies on their backs while they're doing it.
00:16:49.000I mean, I want to say that we're capable of better, but what we are as a species, that is like one of the best indicators of how twisted we are.
00:17:00.000The very height of technology that is carried by all these social justice warriors and all these virtue signaling people online, you're literally doing it from a device that's made by slaves.
00:17:34.000Well, it's also weird that we don't even manufacture a single cell phone in America with all parts sourced and put together in America.
00:17:42.000That's totally possible that you could buy a phone that is completely ethical, that's made by people that were paid a fair wage and they work normal hours and they have great health care and all that stuff.
00:18:14.000I mean, even places like China where they make the cell phones, where they have the Foxconn factory that's covered with nets to keep people from jumping off the roof.
00:18:58.000And, you know, one of the things that happened with the rare earth minerals and all of that is that the U.S. used to control a lot of those mines.
00:19:06.000And then China, they sold them to China.
00:19:08.000And now a lot of the stuff we need for the future is in the hands of China.
00:21:40.000And they go out, and the problem with baby chimps is that until they're five years old, they live at the hip of the mother, like always next to the mother.
00:21:53.000And so to be able to take and kidnap the child, they have to kill the whole family because the estimate, the average is like 10 chimps have to be killed in order to be able to take away one baby.
00:22:46.000I'm sure you know about that lady in Connecticut that had a full-grown chimpanzee in her home, and then her friend came over and the chimp decided he didn't like her friend, so he ripped her face off.
00:23:43.000I went to a tiger sanctuary in Thailand with my family a few years back.
00:23:49.000The beginning is kind of cool because the beginning you're around the kittens and the cubs are like super energetic and they're jumping around and attacking things these little tiny tigers they're really cool but it's just like wow and there's a lot of people in the room make sure that the tigers don't go crazy and they're little and then it gets to a slightly larger tiger and there's men with sticks and you could sit there there's like a picture of my daughter when she was 10 she's like sitting there smiling she's sitting next to a tiger A small tiger.
00:24:19.000It's like 40 pounds or something like that.
00:24:20.000Then when they get bigger, they're drugged.
00:24:23.000So these people go in the cage with this massive tiger, and the tiger is just like...
00:24:28.000They're just all fucking heroin-ed out, and these people take selfies.
00:28:28.000So you got these angry, pissed off tigers that actively hunt humans.
00:28:34.000And so these guys that go out to try to survey, they're always trying to figure out how many tigers are there.
00:28:40.000They have to wear these helmets that protect the back of their heads, and the helmet have a mask on the back of the head so that the tigers like to sneak up on you.
00:28:50.000And if they see your face, they're less likely to attack.
00:28:54.000They like to attack you when your back is turned.
00:28:56.000So they have these helmets with a mask on the back to confuse the tigers.
00:29:01.000And what are they doing to try and protect the villagers now?
00:29:14.000We did a story on tiger trafficking in season one, I think.
00:29:18.000And we spent a night in Thailand in one of these jungles where the last remaining tigers in Thailand are.
00:29:25.000And I mean, we were camping out with hammocks, and I didn't sleep at all because we'd been spending the day, they're showing us videos of the camera, the little cameras that they have.
00:29:36.000Activated all throughout the park, the jungle, so that when they step on it, it activates, right?
00:29:41.000So you see the tigers in the wild, and they're beautiful.
00:29:54.000I mean, it's fascinating and incredible that they exist, but...
00:29:58.000This desire that people have to kidnap them and bring them to America and put them in a cage so they could just point to them and stare at them.
00:31:07.000Everybody knows that the majority of hash in the world comes from Morocco.
00:31:09.000But now I thought, wow, the unique opportunity to actually go and try to figure out how it gets here.
00:31:15.000And so we started in Portugal, and I reached out to a bunch of my girlfriends in Portugal and said, hey, let's meet at this time in the rocks where we used to, like, hang out and hide and smoke hash.
00:32:30.000And you'd think that people would have used this example and it would have spread around the world.
00:32:36.000Well, the problem with America is the system is...
00:32:39.000It's so deeply unjust that there's privatized prisons and there's union guards.
00:32:46.000So the guards union, the prison guards union, actively campaign to stop drugs from being decriminalized and made legal because that would take them out of work.
00:33:37.000And how many lives did they ruin because of the abuse that they suffered and wound up having this tortured existence and they went out and committed more crimes and ruined more lives and this one fucking judge.
00:34:25.000Yeah, there's definitely a bunch of organizations.
00:34:27.000We spent time with one called Conserve Congo, a local Congolese man who's trying to sort of investigate and stop it.
00:34:35.000We also spent one of the best days of filming was spent when we went to see the gorillas.
00:34:39.000We spent time with these park rangers.
00:34:42.000This guy is incredible who's basically devoted his life to trying to protect these gorillas.
00:34:47.000So they go out with AK-47s every day up in the mountains and go up and spend time with this family or these families of gorillas to try and make sure that No one is coming and hurting them.
00:35:47.000And he's telling us along the way, but you're still unsure if you're actually going to see a gorilla – And suddenly they're completely nonchalantly say, oh, it's right here.
00:36:15.000And there was a moment that we're filming and my producer and my team is like next to me and then another huge gorilla comes jumping and rushes right by them.
00:37:38.000You know, it's like high THC. It's resin.
00:37:40.000And if you saw how it's made, it's incredible.
00:37:43.000We went up to the, it's the Kif Mountains in Morocco.
00:37:48.000They basically, it's these like farmers and they beat these drums so that the resin and the little seeds come out and then they mix it all into like this paste.
00:37:59.000And yeah, it's actually a beautiful process.
00:38:01.000Very dangerous because obviously when there's a lot of money in black markets...
00:38:12.000They dry the whole plant and the leaves and then, yeah, it's this like drum process where the stuff they want falls to the bottom and then...
00:38:20.000I wonder why some countries gravitated towards that method of using cannabis.
00:39:02.000Well, I mean, unfortunately, because of our prison industrial complex, I just don't see a mass decriminalization akin to what's happening in Portugal.
00:39:13.000Despite what's going on on our southern border and the fentanyl trafficking and the fact that it's propping up These cartels, and they're worth billions and billions of dollars because of that.
00:39:25.000They are, and they're mixing it in all sorts of drugs, as you know.
00:39:28.000We're working on an episode on fentanyl.
00:39:30.000We've done the whole opiate crisis and everything.
00:39:33.000Smoking did not become common in Old World until after the introduction of tobacco in the 1500s.
00:39:38.000Hashish was consumed as an edible in the Muslim world.
00:39:44.000The first attestation of the term hashish is a pamphlet published in Cairo in 1123, current era, accusing Nizari Muslims of being hashish eaters.
00:39:58.000The cult of Nizari militants, which emerged after the fall of the Fatimid Caliphate, is commonly called the sect of the assassins.
00:40:58.000I mean, obviously, it's a subject matter that I've wanted to do for a long time.
00:41:03.000It's almost an impossible one to do for many reasons, as you can imagine.
00:41:07.000But we actually found, all started with an interview that we did with an assassin in L.A., Yeah?
00:41:12.000About 15 minutes from my house in L.A. And we have a contact in L.A. that whenever we're looking at the black markets, we contact him and ask him, hey, do you know anyone who's basically making meth or drugs or guns or whatnot?
00:41:29.000And the off chance that he knew an assassin, we contacted him.
00:42:31.000And he, yeah, as soon as I met him, he took out his gun and he said, you guys, if this is a fucking setup, you guys are all, it's going to be really easy to kill you all right now.
00:42:42.000And it was me and three or four other people.
00:42:44.000And my fear, we told him, it's not a setup.
00:42:48.000He says, I just came here because I trust my buddy, but, you know, you don't fuck me.
00:42:52.000If the police shows up, you guys are all dead.
00:42:54.000So we're in a corner of L.A., close to downtown, and I'm constantly looking at the end of the road thinking, if the police shows up for any reason, he's going to think it's us.
00:44:20.000And we actually then ended up going to South Africa that has one of the highest assassination rates in the world and spent time with a bunch of different inkabi, which are, as they are called, in South Africa.
00:47:41.000How do you feel safe in a place like that?
00:47:44.000Actually, I sometimes feel in certain countries, say for—in Sinaloa, for example, if you've been given the green light to go into the cartel,
00:48:01.000the territory controlled by the cartel, to talk to cartel members, and it takes weeks, months, sometimes years to get that access— Once we're under their protection, we're under their protection.
00:48:12.000Like, we have their protection to be there.
00:48:14.000But, you know, then certain things happen.
00:48:17.000Like, we were filming in Sinaloa once, and we were filming these Sicarios, and they had their walkie-talkies.
00:48:24.000And so they're communicating with the whole group, and they know everybody that comes in and out of their territory.
00:48:29.000And suddenly they started panicking because the Marines had a helicopter coming their way.
00:48:34.000And the Marines in Mexico are known to shoot first and ask questions after.
00:49:11.000And funny story, my director of photography, Fred Manu, who was the director of photography for Bourdain on Parts Unknown before.
00:49:19.000And he got, we were filming the scene and we'd driven into the Sierra Madre mountains and then we had to walk for...
00:49:27.000A mile or two to a place where they felt comfortable showing us their guns and they were going to start shooting and they were going to give us the interview.
00:49:36.000It was the story about the American guns flowing down south and how they're used in the violence.
00:49:42.000And we're walking there and suddenly Fred basically turns to us and says, I don't feel good.
00:49:48.000And he had a massive case of, what is it that you call it?
00:50:41.000And then it wasn't actually a very good idea for us to stay with them for so long.
00:50:45.000It was a learning lesson for all of us because that night we were filming with them in a bunker where they kept a lot of their guns.
00:50:52.000And one of them had been snorting cocaine all day and basically pulled the trigger on the floor and the bullet came out just like two inches from Fred's head because he was in the bunker right in that hole.
00:52:33.000And if you make it legal, you're going to have more people doing it.
00:52:36.000We're not accustomed to things being legal.
00:52:39.000If you made cocaine legal in this country, a bunch of people would try it that wouldn't ordinarily try it because they wouldn't know who to get it from.
00:54:04.000They have these district attorneys that are funded by George Soros, and they put them in, and their mandate is to let as many people out as possible.
00:54:13.000And violent crime, whatever it is, no cash bail, they're just letting people out.
00:54:18.000And they're letting people out of prison that are violent prisoners.
00:54:49.000But I do think that we tend to look at the problem the other way around.
00:54:53.000I think that we tend to look at how to try to stop the problem when it's already a problem without actually tackling the root causes of what is happening and why it's happening.
00:55:04.000Yeah, we've talked about that many times in this podcast.
00:55:07.000If you wanted to solve the root cause, you would clean up inner cities.
00:55:11.000You'd take these crime-ridden, drug-ridden, gang-infested communities, and you'd invest a massive amount of money and resources into fixing and rehabilitating them.
00:55:21.000And the money that we have spent just in the Ukraine war could have done that many times over in this country.
00:55:28.000And they've not lifted a finger to stop it.
00:55:32.000It's almost like there's a formula to ensure control and power, and you need a certain amount of crime and violence.
00:55:40.000You need a certain amount of people in prison.
00:55:42.000You need a certain amount of despair in the inner cities to ensure that people don't rise up and figure out the system and realize they've been screwed over.
00:55:50.000Yeah, also talking about security helps a lot of politicians, right?
00:56:04.000But even outside of the U.S., I mean, these black markets, you know, so much of it, the lesson for me has always been when reporting on these black markets, it's all about inequality, right?
00:56:16.000Your choices are only as good as the opportunities you're given, right?
00:56:22.000If you don't have those opportunities, you're going to become, you know, first like a watcher for the cartel and then eventually climb the ladder and become a sicario.
00:56:42.000And if your family doesn't have anything on the table to eat and they offer you $10, which will feed your family for a week to go and kill the chimp, you're going to go and kill the chimp.
00:57:14.000We spent time with a group called La Union in Mexico City, where 80% of their job, of their money right now, comes from fake pharmaceutical pills.
00:57:23.000Yeah, I mean, they're making these pills.
00:57:25.000And then we went to Wendy as well, which is another source of pharmaceutical pills.
00:57:28.000You have like 40,000 online pharmacies that you can go to and buy prescription drugs without a prescription.
00:57:34.000So a lot of Americans are doing that because it's much cheaper.
00:57:36.000I think it's something like 20 million Americans are using the black market for their pills, for their drugs, because they can't afford them here, which is crazy.
00:57:46.000And people that can't afford, that need these medications to survive, and they can't afford them here because we have the highest drug prices in the entire world.
00:57:54.000And so when you say fake, it's not manufactured by Pfizer or whatever, but is it the same components?
00:58:03.000It looks exactly the same, but a lot of these pills don't actually have any active ingredients.
00:58:08.000So we spent time with a guy making 20,000 pills a night out of this little, you know, back house with a machine, a pill presser.
00:58:17.000And it was just calcium and food dye to make it look the color, whatever color he wanted.
00:58:23.000And he was selling it as amoxicillin and, you know, very likely ending up in American homes because they ship it all around the world.
00:58:32.000And in that case, you know, the good luck of the buyer is that it was just calcium, but in many cases it gets mixed with cement and rat poison and all sorts of things.
00:59:15.000For doing this, but it's all our fault.
00:59:18.000It's the broken system that we have in our country.
00:59:20.000Why are we paying, you know, why are we, this woman that we filmed with, she was paying $700 for this medication that she needs and she couldn't afford it.
00:59:29.000Her health insurance wasn't covering it.
00:59:31.000So she would go across the border and pay $60 for it.
01:01:17.000I doubt that they knew, for example, there was fentanyl and meth mixed in with some of their other medications because that creates a huge problem for them.
01:01:26.000And so for the consumer, how do they find the legitimate stuff?
01:01:31.000They don't, which is why it's so hard.
01:01:32.000So this woman that we followed, she goes there, she buys her medication, and I asked her, do you know what's in there?
01:01:37.000Oh, no, but my friend told me that it's a legitimate pharmacy.
01:01:40.000Of course, she has no idea that this is happening, that the cartel is actually threatening them to death if they don't stock their shelves with their fake pharmaceuticals.
01:01:49.000Did you take any of that stuff and test it?
01:01:51.000It's a lot more complicated than it seems.
01:01:55.000The LA Times, again, did an amazing investigation where they did test it.
01:01:59.000And again, I think it was something like seven or eight out of their ten that they tested had fentanyl and meth, which was crazy, out of two pharmacies, I think.
01:02:06.000And what kind of drugs are they talking about that have fentanyl and meth in it?
01:02:17.000And yeah, in our story, we sort of looked at how it ends up in the shelves and who's making it and how it's being produced.
01:02:23.000There's an amazing doctor in Mexico City called Dr. Loco, who we spend time with, a doctor, a crazy doctor, Dr. Loco.
01:02:31.000Who was a chemist himself, a doctor as well, and his father owned a pharmacy, so he sort of knew how to, and he showed us, he's putting the little silicone pouch inside, and the cotton ball that goes inside, and it looks exactly the same.
01:02:48.000Like, no one would have been able to tell.
01:03:22.000But again, at the end we went and visited a spokesperson for a group called Pharma that is a lobby group that represents the pharmaceutical companies.
01:03:32.000And she was very happy to talk about how counterfeit medications are very damaging for America, right?
01:04:19.000But she keeps saying that without that expense, without that money, they wouldn't be able to look for all these new drugs.
01:04:27.000Which is also BS because I think it's something like 34% or 35% of the money that was spent or it was 35% more money spent on advertisement and trying to sell the drug than it was on actual R&D research and development.
01:05:15.000That was 2008. When did we first talk?
01:05:19.000I think 2008 or 9. It had to be 9 because the podcast didn't start until 9. Okay, so it was 9. It might have been 10. 2010. Oh, maybe, maybe.
01:05:45.000Yeah, that OxyContin Express story was insane.
01:05:48.000And I think part of the exposure from your work led to them changing the laws because they had no database.
01:05:56.000So the way it would work, I'll explain it to people, is that there was no database.
01:06:00.000So if you got a prescription from a doctor and you went in to get OxyContin, you could go to another doctor down the street and get another prescription.
01:06:08.000And they clearly had it set up like that so that there could be abuse because that was how to maximize profits.
01:06:15.000And they have these pain management centers.
01:06:18.000And I used to see them when I would do stand-up in Florida, where you would go and it would be called a pain management center.
01:06:25.000And it's essentially You would go to a doctor, and all the doctors there is to write a prescription for OxyContin.
01:06:31.000And then you go right next door to their little pharmacy that they had on site, and all they had was OxyContin.
01:06:38.000And you had just a parking lot filled with zombies.
01:06:41.000These people that were just like, zonked out.
01:09:21.000And then you see the trail of devastation everywhere these pharmaceutical drugs went.
01:09:26.000And all these communities that got hooked on the pills and then when they changed the regulation and made them more difficult to get, then these people started doing heroin.
01:09:36.000And then the exact same thing happened.
01:09:38.000We did another documentary called Death by Fentanyl where we looked at the fentanyl and we investigated this one pharmaceutical company called Insys Pharmaceuticals, or Insys Therapeutics, where they were selling subsys, which was a fentanyl product.
01:09:53.000And they were doing the exact same thing that Purdue had done just, you know, a few years before, where they were paying doctors for fees to basically prescribe.
01:10:02.000They were prescribing fentanyl to people with headaches and, like, shoulder pain.
01:10:06.000And we got a whistleblower to tell us exactly how it was happening and how they were, you know, calling because the pills or this product was really, really expensive, so insurance companies were paying for it.
01:10:16.000So she would call insurance companies and say, oh, and they would ask, but, you know, this is only supposed to be prescribed to cancer patients.
01:11:45.000Funnily enough, I worry more when we're going after people in high positions of power than I do after, you know, months of trying to get access to the cartel, for example, and when they say yes, it's a yes,
01:12:08.000And the guy that owned that in CIS Therapeutics, for example, threatened to sue us.
01:12:14.000Because we compared him to El Chapo and said basically he saw an opportunity in fentanyl just like El Chapo from the Sinaloa cartel saw an opportunity in selling fentanyl.
01:12:24.000And how they were sort of the same in different parts.
01:12:27.000And they threatened to sue you for that, for the truth?
01:14:01.000I mean less, but it's like these black and gray markets.
01:14:03.000And gray markets can be anything from people selling counterfeit goods or anything that's basically not – or like gray markets basically.
01:14:10.000Cash in hand and you're not actually working in an office.
01:14:18.000And no one knows anything about these worlds.
01:14:20.000And I'm fascinated not by the pointing of the finger of these guys are the bad guys and we're spending time with the bad guys, but more about what is the motivation and why, how is the system broken that got us to this place?
01:14:32.000Because again, it's trying to figure out the root cause instead of the enforcement side of it.
01:14:37.000Yeah, I did not know it was that much.
01:14:46.000But one of the other things you did that was terrifying was, and just terrifying to know this, was that Los Angeles police were confiscating weapons and then selling them to the cartels in Mexico.
01:14:58.000And that you could just go to Mexico easy.
01:15:01.000It's easy to go straight across the border into Mexico.
01:15:04.000So you can go to Mexico with a trunk full of weapons.
01:15:17.000These are the same guns that are being used to create the violence, that create the reason why many people want to leave Mexico and come to the United States.
01:15:48.000And that's why when we went to Niger, we only went because we knew that we were going to have military convoy with us and people protecting us because we knew.
01:15:57.000But yet, I mean, it was months of planning because we were all, yeah, you don't...
01:16:51.000That person eventually asks you to send a photo of yourself, a compromising photo or video of yourself, and they'll send you a photo or video back.
01:16:59.000And it's mainly targeting teens, which is really sad, American teenagers.
01:17:04.000And then once you do send those photos or videos, the person says, well, I have all the contact information on Facebook of all your friends and your work and your parents and your school, whatever, and I'm going to send this to everyone if you don't send us money right now.
01:17:17.000And the really sad part of that is that we spent time with parents whose kids committed suicide.
01:17:23.000And within the span of like a couple of days.
01:17:48.000But amazingly, he left behind a letter for his mother and instructions on how to access his phone so she could see what had happened to him and also who he had sent money to in the hopes that she would be able to investigate or send people to investigate.
01:18:31.000A lot of them, interestingly enough, are actually trans people.
01:18:34.000In the trans community, we spoke to a drag queen, for example, who was scamming a lot of people.
01:18:40.000And during COVID, what happened is that they usually do drag queen contests.
01:18:48.000They make money that way or work at clubs or...
01:18:51.000And a lot of them lost their jobs during COVID and they had no government assistance and so they found a way to make some money this way by sextorting Americans.
01:19:04.000And that was super, a crazy journey too.
01:19:08.000Just one of the scenes we filmed was we spent time in a prison with a guy that was in prison for extorting Filipino women.
01:19:18.000And it was sort of the beginning of our investigation.
01:19:21.000We were trying to figure out if he was connected to anyone else, thinking he was like sort of small fish just extorting people in the Philippines.
01:19:28.000And then by talking to him, he basically admits on camera while talking to me.
01:19:33.000Actually, I've done this to many, many Americans, and one of them...
01:19:37.000And I asked him, do you know anyone who's committed suicide?
01:19:40.000Because it's a huge problem in the U.S. He was like, yes.
01:20:51.000But I mean, sextortion is essentially the whole theme behind this whole Jeffrey Epstein thing.
01:20:56.000That was just a massive intelligence operation to compromise very wealthy and powerful people and to, I mean, probably influence all sorts of things.
01:21:09.000If you have a bunch of information on someone, videotapes of someone.
01:22:03.000This guy, he gets endorsed by all these other people.
01:22:06.000Oh, Jeffrey Epstein is this wonderful billionaire philanthropist and he's just very eccentric and he loves to have these incredible parties and all the most interesting people.
01:22:15.000And then you go there and next thing you know you're doing drugs and You lose your little inhibitions, and there's a bunch of lovely young ladies.
01:23:15.000Wasn't everybody expecting some big names to come out of the documents?
01:23:19.000They still haven't released all of them.
01:23:21.000And what I understand is the list is only one victim's encounters with people.
01:23:27.000And she's relaying the list of the people.
01:23:30.000The list of people that were at the island.
01:23:32.000That she interacted with and that she knows of and that she either had sex with or knows people that had sex with and that knows that they were all filmed.
01:23:58.000It's a fascinating show that was on...
01:24:01.000A while back that it was basically how this guy, Michael Baden, who's this brilliant forensic specialist, would examine these bodies and find evidence of them being murdered when, you know, they'd said they'd fell down a flight of stairs or this or that.
01:24:18.000When he examined Jeffrey Epstein's neck, he said that the injuries were indicative of someone being strangled, ligature strangulation, not hanging.
01:24:29.000And that it was at the base of his neck, which is not where you get strangled if you hang yourself.
01:24:34.000If you hang yourself, all your weight goes up here, and he gets strangled up like near where your jawline is.
01:24:40.000But this was down at the base of his neck.
01:24:41.000Indicating like someone strangled him from behind.
01:24:44.000And his bones in his neck were fractured.
01:24:47.000Which is also indicative of someone who's strangled to death.
01:24:58.000This is without doubt a bunch of incredibly powerful people who are using their influence to make sure that this information doesn't get out.
01:25:07.000Or that the impact of this information getting out is very minimal.
01:25:11.000And that it just gets swept under the rug.
01:25:13.000And every time more information comes out, there's a brief little burst of outrage, but no one goes to jail, no one gets caught.
01:25:21.000Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex trafficking, right?
01:25:27.000You have to sex traffic to someone to be arrested for sex trafficking.
01:25:33.000And when there's no one that's being listed as the people that you sex trafficked, but the implication is that these people who you're sex trafficking to are the most powerful people in the world.
01:25:46.000That these powerful, influential people are the ones that were the ones that were using this, the ones that were there, the ones that were victimized by the scheme.
01:26:53.000But wait, the findings of this expert didn't make it to the final report on how he got killed?
01:26:59.000No, this was post the, look, there was an official autopsy, so he hung himself, and then they brought in, the family brought in Dr. Michael Badden to examine it.
01:27:08.000I think it was Jeffrey Epstein's brother brought him in.
01:27:10.000I forget who brought him in, but Dr. Michael Badden goes in there and he's like, no, this guy was killed.
01:27:16.000And nothing changed in the official report.
01:27:48.000But the idea is that he was either, you know, intelligence agency from America or Mossad and that this was a long-term tactic to control people and to get influence over them.
01:28:03.000I mean, you take these men and most of these men that are in these positions of power, these politicians and heads of enormous corporations and I mean, look, the guy who was the CEO of Victoria's Secrets donated a $60 million house to him in Manhattan.
01:28:21.000And there was another guy who was a big CEO who wound up giving him over $100 million.
01:28:25.000There was a bunch of people that gave him sizable chunks of money.
01:29:53.000But also you would want like legitimate good intelligence agents on the ground January 6th just so that things don't go south so that you know what the fuck is happening.
01:30:03.000If you've got a bunch of people that are like some crazy militia group and they're planning on detonating a nuclear bomb in the capital, the only way to find out is to have people on the ground, right?
01:30:11.000But what happens is Those people then have a vested interest in getting people to do things so that they can arrest them, which is like the Governor Whitmer case, where the 14 people that kidnapped, or were planning to kidnap, 12 of them were FBI informants,
01:31:01.000And the guys who were doing, they were like, we never thought it was really going to happen.
01:31:05.000Like they were just losers who all of a sudden they're a part of like some crazy rebellious organization that's supposed to do something that's going to – we're going to stand up against tyranny and we're going to arrest that bitch and what they were really doing was being tricked by federal informants.
01:31:45.000What's the number of people, I know we've looked this up before, but it's pretty confusing.
01:31:50.000The number of people that are under 85 IQ is pretty high.
01:31:55.000And if you can get one of them and tell them that you're going to kidnap the governor, the next thing you know, oh god, you have nothing going on in your life, your life is meaningless, and all of a sudden it's exciting, and you think you're a part of a good group, like, we're doing the right thing.
01:33:22.000Maybe they knew that they were doing something, and in order to catch them, they had to sort of give them a little bit of fuel or— Yeah, they're probably radical.
01:33:29.000They're probably online talking a lot of shit.
01:33:31.000And then someone contacted them and took it to the next level.
01:33:36.000But there's a lot of people that say things.
01:33:43.000It is a difficult, I have to say, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but if you're a law enforcement and you're constantly being accused of showing up after the crime happens, if you're trying to prevent crime, then that's what you do.
01:33:56.000You're monitoring chat groups and trying to figure out how you can stop this from happening in the future.
01:35:36.000It's an interesting conversation, right?
01:35:38.000I don't want to get into politics at all, but it's an interesting conversation about how much do we want the government to regulate more or less, right?
01:35:48.000It's all about regulation and so many of these.
01:35:50.000And for my investigations, a lot of what happens actually happens because of lack of regulation.
01:36:31.000A mother and daughter in Colorado who had a funeral home, and they also had a donation center on the side.
01:36:38.000And they had people come in and say they wanted their loved ones to be cremated, and instead of cremating them, they were, again, chopping up body parts and selling them to biogenetics and scientific centers around the world.
01:37:21.000And, you know, having surgeons operate on your hip, practicing with a hip, all of that is science.
01:37:28.000But that's better, I think, because at least you're aware that you donated the body.
01:37:32.000In these cases, they thought they'd received ashes that contained their loved ones, and instead there was like batteries, burnt batteries, and other bodies mixed in.
01:37:43.000People would go, this is such a crazy story, people would go into this funeral home, and as they're signing the paperwork for the cremation, they would hear a chainsaw in the back.
01:38:39.000We heard of skulls being sold for $5,000, so we met with a funeral director that brought us a pen like this, and inside the pen there was a little human skull.
01:38:48.000And he told us all about how it works, like how they were...
01:38:53.000Selling, again, instead of cremating the bodies, they were selling their parts.
01:38:57.000There was a skin wallet being sold online for $2,500.
01:40:21.000And so these groups, you would see the tongues and wombs.
01:40:25.000There was one that had a uterus in a formaldehyde, and they're being sold, but it's these secretive groups that you need somebody who's been accepted into the group, but we saw all the listings.
01:40:35.000Have you ever looked into the bodies exhibit?
01:40:38.000So that was made with prisoners from China, I heard, right?
01:40:43.000If you Google the definition or the explanation of where the bodies come from, it's Chinese unclaimed bodies, which may include political prisoners.
01:41:17.000Not only that, one of the wildest stories was there was a mayor in a city in China that was having an affair with a local television anchor.
01:41:31.000Her name was scrubbed off the internet.
01:41:35.000Months later, a new exhibit was in the body's exhibit of a pregnant woman who's exactly the same size and exactly the same amount pregnant that was when she went, lady, when she went missing.
01:41:47.000She was eight months pregnant when she went missing.
01:41:50.000And the woman, who is the wife, who is married to the mayor who is having an affair, was the manager of the plastination factory.
01:41:59.000So she killed the lady that her husband was having an affair with, allegedly, and then turned that lady and her eight-month-old fetus into a fucking statue, which is still on display.
01:42:21.000And the woman is essentially scrubbed for the internet.
01:42:24.000The woman that was murdered, you can't find her.
01:42:27.000But the woman who was the wife who was accused of murdering the pregnant lady also got arrested for murdering an English businessman after that.
01:42:38.000So she poisoned this English businessman.
01:45:32.000Like have the people that organized this or came up with this idea said who they come from?
01:45:35.000Well, they've done investigative journalist reports on this.
01:45:37.000And one of the things they did is they went to one of the plastination factories and you see on the ground they have bodies laid out with pillow covers over their heads with blood on them.
01:45:47.000So these people are tied up, they're executed, there's a bullet hole in their head, and they're all laid out.
01:47:32.000So we're really high walking around this exhibit of all these dead people like, this is fucking twisted.
01:47:37.000Because it doesn't, it's not just the anatomy.
01:47:40.000It'd be one thing if it was these bodies and they remove the skin and you see all of the muscle doing all the different, it's fascinating, right?
01:47:49.000But it's weird what they're doing to these bodies.
01:47:53.000Like, you know, the guy holding his skin, the people's heads split in half, and the brain is floating in the air above it.
01:52:14.000Von Hagen faces investigation over use of bodies without consent.
01:52:18.000Gunther Von Hagen is a pioneer of body plastination, the technique of preserving bodies using saturating them with polymer resin, who was criticized for his televised autopsy in London, is under investigation in the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan.
01:53:03.000Kyrgyz, member of the parliament, Abakan Tashkhtanbeko, accused Professor Von Hagen of having illegally abducted several hundred bodies from former Soviet prisoners, hospitals, and psychiatric asylums.
01:55:44.000And he basically told us the most horrific story.
01:55:47.000Like, he's in charge of basically killing people and gathering all the stuff, the organs and all that, with the doctor that comes that they pay.
01:55:55.000But it was one of those interviews that when he left, I was like...
01:56:00.000I'm not sure how much of this is actually true.
01:56:03.000And I talk about it on camera and talk about how it's so hard to verify.
01:56:07.000But then we went to Mexico and actually interviewed a doctor who was basically threatened by the cartel if he didn't do some of these operations.
01:56:15.000So he had no interest in lying to us and told us how this whole thing worked.
01:56:22.000And then we interviewed an American that went and got an organ in Mexico.
01:56:26.000And so this American, did he know that it came from a murdered immigrant?
01:56:32.000I mean, there's no way of verifying that it came from the black market, so we don't know where the source is.
01:56:38.000And he said, basically, you can judge me all you want, but if you were dying or if your son or daughter was dying and you knew that the only way you could get this organ was on the black market, wouldn't you do it?
01:57:27.000And there's plenty of people out there that are willing to sell their organs, you know, in places like India and even Mexico.
01:57:37.000Do you know when they do like a liver donation, like say if you needed a liver and you and I were the same blood type, they could take half my liver and give it to you and my body would regenerate that liver to full size in six to eight weeks?
02:01:23.000And they came on and they are extremely concerned about AI and the race to sentient AI and who controls it and what happens when it gets released and what it does.
02:01:40.000It seems like it's just going to happen.
02:01:41.000And China is involved in it, Russia is involved in it, the United States is involved in it, and who knows how many other countries are involved in this research as well.
02:02:18.000You know, that's one of the big speculations that people have about these aliens and that what we're seeing is an alternative dimension or an alternative timeline and what these things are is us in the future.
02:03:25.000But this one, it started with a DM, a direct message from a woman in Minnesota who told me that her father was in prison in Mozambique, Africa.
02:03:34.000And that she was absolutely sure he was not guilty.
02:03:37.000And it started a huge investigation into Mozambique used to be Portuguese.
02:04:34.000And as he's in the airport about to board his flight to Europe, he was stopped by the authorities, and he was carrying five kilos of heroin inside these chocolates that he was completely unaware.
02:04:45.000And I completely believe he had no idea.
02:06:19.000It was interesting because at first we sat down and I was saying that Rodney Baldus, which is this man's name, the Rodney Baldus name, and you have his inheritance.
02:06:28.000And I said, I think it's $2.7 million and is that money still available?
02:06:33.000And he was like, actually, it's 2.4, 2.5.
02:07:54.000They say they're doing what they can to help him, but he's in completely substandard conditions in this prison with no real access to good health care.
02:09:40.000Which is crazy, considering what you've seen.
02:09:42.000But it's not, because when you're able to sit down with a cartel member, you know, or a scammer in the Philippines or all these people that I meet around the world, and I'm able to find humanity in them, I'm able to find commonalities between me and him, I'm able to see that if this person in the majority of cases was given other opportunities that he wouldn't be the person he turned out to be.
02:10:05.000That shows me that it's not entirely humanity that's broken.
02:10:26.000It's amazing that you can maintain that perspective and that just really is an amazing testament to your character that you're able to see that for what it is and not lose faith in people.
02:11:02.000You're one of the real last boots on the ground journalists who goes into terrifying places and consistently exposes these incredibly fascinating, horrific scenes.
02:11:17.000And if it wasn't for you, a lot of people wouldn't know about a lot of these things.