Joe Rogan is back in the office. We talk about how he s recovering from an emergency appendectomy, why he doesn t drink anymore, and why he s excited about a new podcast he s starting called The Black Market.
00:00:44.000Yeah, because when you think about it, we roll in.
00:00:48.000So when I stopped drinking, uh I was probably having like two or three glasses of some kind of alcohol a night, two or three nights a week.
00:00:59.000And then I'd go out to dinner with my wife and have like a glass or two of wine.
00:01:37.000Um day, and then my husband forced me because I had stomach pain and I just thought I had food poisoning or something, so I kept on going to the toilet.
00:01:49.000But uh my husband forced me to go to the hospital and I got there, and yeah, it was an uh appendicitis and we had emergency appendectomy the next morning.
00:01:57.000Um but so uh which recovery has been t totally fine, but I haven't wanted to drink because I want to make sure I was gonna be able to come here today.
00:03:06.000It's um n Disney decided that Nigerios should be doing more natural history and animal programming.
00:03:14.000And uh yeah, I think traffic is just a difficult show.
00:03:17.000It is a really challenging show to put together.
00:03:19.000But I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done and this last season, the fifth season has some of my favorite stories we've done, and um I'm now starting a podcast.
00:03:28.000Oh, you know, I launched it yesterday.
00:03:55.000Estimated 35%, which is what economists call the hidden third.
00:03:58.000So we're not just talking about illegal activities and goods like drugs and scams and whatnot and guns.
00:04:04.000We're also talking about un so the gray that's the black market, and then there's the gray market, which are the is the irregular unregulated part of the economy.
00:04:12.000So untaxed work, untaxed goods, everything from like the man selling fruit on the corner, um, you know, to um other other jobs and and goods that are in tax.
00:04:24.000But this actually has an effect on all of us because it's less money that comes in for schools and infrastructure and hospitals And all the stuff we need.
00:04:31.000And then apart from all that we know, which is the black market and how that affects us all, which is, you know, whether you talk about guns or drugs or immigration, I mean it all has a direct impact on our lives.
00:04:42.000So with this podcast, what I really wanted to do is after reporting on these black markets for twenty years, is I wanted to have a place like this where I can have intimate, raw, you know, sometimes difficult conversations with people who have lived or are living on the other side of the law and um who uh you know I wanted to figure out why somebody decides to become a smuggler, a trafficker, a scammer, uh a bookie, uh, you know, all these crazy lives that people lead.
00:05:12.000Uh see how it affects us all, understand why that what they do affects us all.
00:05:17.000And also I think the most important part for me, which has always been, and I I've talked about this with you, which is trying to understand if um the circumstances were different, if it could have been you and me doing that, you know?
00:05:29.000I think most certainly that that's the case.
00:05:43.000It was that story that we did in uh uh the same episode you mentioned the cocaine trafficking, which I will never forget, which was the kid who was carrying in his backpack, right?
00:05:51.000He was sixteen, seventeen-year-old kid carrying cocaine, twenty kilos of cocaine on his back for days on end on the in the jungles, seen so many of his friends being killed in front of him by rebel gangs, rival gangs.
00:06:04.000And uh when he um you know, when I asked him, why are you doing what you do?
00:06:07.000He says, because I've always wanted to be a dentist.
00:06:10.000I want to go to school and be a dentist, but my family's too poor and they can't afford my education, and the only job that I have available for me now is uh is doing this cocaine trafficking or you know, carrying cocaine on my back.
00:06:22.000And these are stories I hear all the time.
00:06:25.000So the the idea of being able to place ourselves in people's shoes and understand that yes, even the people that we consider the bad guys could be me and you, as as you know, has always been very important for me.
00:06:37.000When when you say that like it's one third, how much of it is stuff that's not dangerous, like selling fruit on the side of the road and tax labor.
00:06:47.000It's difficult to have exact numbers, but the estimate is that about fifteen percent, fifteen to twenty percent are black markets, and the rest are gray markets.
00:06:57.000So the totality is around thirty-five percent, an estimate.
00:07:11.000Because um, you know, a lot of times what happens in one side affects the other, you know.
00:07:17.000Um one of the really interest the the things that I think we've talked about a lot is uh I think this number shocks a lot of people, but if you think of the drug trade alone, six hundred billion dollars, that's the estimate, anywhere between three hundred and six hundred billion dollars every year just from the drug trade alone.
00:07:38.000Um, you know, these these are crazy numbers.
00:07:42.000And so it's it's not so out of the box to think that yeah, this is a hard lar large percentage of our economy.
00:07:50.000Is it difficult to get people to come and sit with you on a podcast and talk about illegal activities?
00:07:56.000Yes, but it's it was also on the show.
00:07:59.000I think the harder part is that on the show we figured out a way of how to make them comfortable because I would go to them, right?
00:08:06.000On the podcast, it's harder to convince an active trafficker or smuggler to come and sit down in my office.
00:08:16.000So uh, you know, a lot of times the meetings that we had on the show happened in undisclosed locations in vans, for example, or in places that they felt comfortable with.
00:08:25.000Their, you know, drug labs or their drug houses or their homes sometimes.
00:08:29.000So this has been a little bit harder, but we're we're making it we're making it work.
00:08:33.000We're having we're hoping that it grows so then we actually have money to start traveling more and going to some of these places.
00:08:40.000Is this something that you always wanted to do, like do a podcast, or is it something that was a necessity when the show was canceled, or did you just think maybe I should branch out?
00:08:51.000I've always wanted to do it, and I tried uh we had done an iteration of it a couple of years ago, but I just didn't have the time because I was traveling, you know, half the year or more for traffic, so it was really hard to do a weekly podcast.
00:09:49.000So as long as soon as I start brand as this starts building up the podcast, the hope is that I'll build it myself from the ground up because all the contacts are mine, you know all the expertise you have contacts with like assassins and drug dealers.
00:10:09.000I mean the assassins less so but the traffickers and the smugglers and the scammers absolutely I'm still in touch with a lot of people do you have like a file or you like the like yeah.
00:10:22.000But do you have them like labeled like super shady less than just unfortunate circumstances.
00:10:33.000It's all under my encrypted messaging apps.
00:10:37.000No you know it's really crazy because of the success of traffic the amount of messages I still get on Instagram and social media on a weekly basis from people who want to be on the show.
00:10:49.000Now with the podcast as well I'm hoping that it will grow into that but people just showing me their drugs and their guns they show me photos of the stuff that they are doing and they they because these people feel like they're gonna die anyway like they're gonna probably get killed a lot of them are you know afraid one of the most interesting people we filmed for this last season of traffic was a guy that we called El Gringo.
00:11:09.000So it was the premier episode of this season.
00:11:11.000It was about cartel it was called cartel USA it's about the cartel presence in the United States.
00:11:16.000I've reported extensively on cartels in Mexico, right?
00:11:19.000And in Colombia and in other parts but I haven't actually spent a lot of time with the cartel here or seen what kind of influence they have in the US.
00:11:28.000And uh so I had this idea okay let's try to figure out how massive their presence is is here, how they make the money, how do they they distribute the drugs, and what impact is it having on um on in America and what I found was uh um several very surprising facts.
00:11:46.000Um the story actually starts in Sinaloa because I had to go there to get access to the people in the US.
00:11:52.000So I had to go to the top bosses to be able to to get the green light to then film their operations here.
00:11:57.000What is that like Sinaloa, I mean it's the place in the world that I've reported most more from apart from the United States.
00:12:05.000I've reported more from Sinaloa than anywhere else.
00:12:09.000I have an incredible local journalist call called Miguel Angel Vega who's called he's uh Il fixer he's the guy that any journalist in the world who wants to get access to the cartel will contact him and then he has his own contacts he's uh just incredibly brave journalist with his own contacts and then he um basically contacts his people and then they decide if they want to talk or not and uh a lot of times they don't and a lot sometimes I've done this so many times that that by now they trust me.
00:12:38.000They know that I'm not law enforcement and so they allow me to film their operation.
00:12:43.000So we've I filmed super meth labs, uh super labs of meth there.
00:12:47.000I filmed uh Fentanyl lab, I filmed a guy cooking fentanyl we were all full you know masked up and I filmed the whole operation um I mean uh I filmed uh sicarios I've uh I yeah I I filmed more from Sinaloa than anywhere else in the world but it's gotta be very scary to go there and hang out with those people.
00:13:14.000Aaron Ross Powell I'm not on top yes for example I'm not even though I'm in Sinaloa I'm not supposed to ask which cartel people work for where it's obvious that when you're in Sinaloa everyone works for the Sinolo cartel or I mean everybody that's involved in the cartel works for the Sinolo cartel.
00:13:28.000Um they are the cartels trying To make um in headway in the in that region, but usually it's all Sinaloa.
00:13:36.000Um so you're not supposed to ask uh who exactly they work for and um and yeah, there are some questions about money, for example, how much money they make, people don't like to a be asked that.
00:13:46.000But I always ask all those questions anyway.
00:13:49.000And I I you know you get a sense whether you're pushing it too far.
00:13:53.000Have you ever had a moment when you're doing that where you're like, I think I crossed the line?
00:13:58.000Um we had a mo I had a moment where we stayed too long.
00:14:02.000So it was a day we were doing a story, it was for season one was about guns and how about American guns, the flow of American guns to Mexico.
00:14:10.000That was when you got the police people that were selling drugs illegally.
00:14:15.000So for people that didn't see that episode, it's quite fascinating.
00:14:18.000Police in Los Angeles, dirty cops were loading up their trunks with guns that they've confiscated and then selling them across the border in Mexico.
00:14:28.000Aaron Ross Powell So they were selling it to gang members or affiliate of cartel members in LA who would then ship it.
00:14:35.000Yeah, they would cross the border and ship it to LA.
00:14:40.000It started with a scene in that episode started with a scene in LA where we interviewed a guy who goes by the name of T and uh he had a room packed with rifles, and when I started asking him where they were from, he was like, Oh, this one was confiscated.
00:14:53.000I we have an LAPD contact that you know sells us a lot of our drugs.
00:14:58.000Well, I just don't understand what benefit to them.
00:15:12.000So I it's uh the question that I get the m the cops didn't talk, we didn't get the topics.
00:15:18.000We got it from the gang member that the cops sold the guns to.
00:15:22.000So I've spoken spoken to cops who are doing amazing work here in the US in combating drug trafficking and and gun trafficking, and in Mexico as well.
00:15:30.000Um but um but these we're talking about corrupt cops.
00:15:36.000Uh this was a gang member telling me how he had acquired those guns from LAPD, confiscated guns that he had acquired from the like what would be the benefit to him to talk to you.
00:15:46.000I think for so in that case, it went back to my contacts in Sinaloa.
00:15:50.000And I think it's three reasons why people talk to us.
00:15:53.000I think the first one is ego, people want to boast.
00:15:56.000And if you're part of the Sinaloa cartel, or even if you're a boss in the Sinaloa cartel, and you're there's an ongoing war between you, a turf war between you and another gang, like the CNJNG, uh which is a cartel jalisco, um they're you they're fighting for power, right?
00:16:13.000So here's an opportunity to show how powerful you were.
00:16:18.000And a lot of these people that talk to me, I don't, you know, very often or more often than not, it's not the bosses or the kingpins that I'm talking to, right?
00:16:26.000It's the sicarios, it's the middle and low-level people.
00:16:29.000It's the traffickers, it's the chemists, the smugglers, it's not the kingpins.
00:16:33.000And for them, they spend their whole lives doing something that sometimes their own families don't know they're they do.
00:16:40.000Like I remember uh an episode we did about counterfeit money, people who make fake US uh dollars and euros in Peru in Lima.
00:16:49.000And this guy, like shiny eyes, so excited showing me how he finishes these bills to make it look and feel and smell exactly like a hundred dollar bill.
00:17:00.000And when I asked him, and he's a taxi driver by day and he does this by night, and and uh and I was asking him, but so why did you accept talking to us?
00:17:08.000He says, Look, my wife doesn't even know how good I am.
00:17:12.000I am the best of the best of doing this.
00:17:14.000Like nobody in the whole world can make this as well as I do.
00:17:18.000And I always wanted to be able to talk to somebody and show off how good my skills are.
00:17:23.000And you're giving me an opportunity to do this.
00:17:29.000And then impunity, like in places like Mexico, so much corruption, like what's the downside to talking to this woman who comes and asks funny questions, right?
00:18:17.000And uh he said he was the best finisher in the job, and I said he's I I started calling him Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player, because he's the finisher in soccer.
00:18:25.000So I called him Ronaldo, okay, you're Ronaldo.
00:18:28.000And he uses he uses a a um it's kind of like a porridge that I used to eat when I was a kid in in Portugal.
00:18:35.000It's called like uh it's a type of like a Cere Lac.
00:18:38.000You don't you guys don't have it here, but it's like a a meal, um what do you call that?
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00:21:41.000This was five years ago, season one, but it was a lot.
00:21:44.000And it's the U.S. Secret Services that are in charge of uh going after these guys.
00:21:49.000So we actually saw the real money being made when we came back to the US.
00:21:53.000And um but I can't remember, but it was millions of dollars.
00:21:55.000I mean, there was a there were it was like five or six families in Peru in Lima, they're the center of all this that were make that were in charge uh that were the best of the best at making these.
00:22:28.000They actually start uh they go to small towns and they distribute it in grocery stores and they don't go to like a Walmart or a big superstore.
00:22:56.000Yeah, that know, and they end up getting like seventy percent of what I think of something like seventy percent of the actual cost for real bills.
00:23:03.000So they get real money in exchange for getting 70 percent of what a real bill.
00:23:08.000I mean, the whole operation I think was.
00:23:10.000So if you have a twenty dollar bill, you get seventy percent of that back in profit?
00:23:37.000And and so one of the things we started was we reported on a lot of these small businesses that found out that they were having massive amounts of loss every year from fake bills.
00:23:48.000And uh and I remember it was in in Oregon.
00:23:51.000Um we did a few stories there where a lot of people were complaining about this small business.
00:23:56.000How does it get how do they get discovered that they have fake bills?
00:23:58.000I think they go to the bank and try to.
00:24:12.000Because I think it it it you know it would fool us, but it doesn't fool somebody who's trained to look at these bills.
00:24:18.000the bank when you bring money to the bank they look at every bill and make sure it's legit I know that that's how they figured out that they had given account you gotta go to a lazy bank you gotta go to a bank where people are just phoning in partying all night Yeah, there's they just assume that it's real.
00:24:49.000But this all back to the story of why I talked about this guy about why people talk to us.
00:24:54.000And oh, and back to the cartel USA story, um which uh started in Sinaloa.
00:25:00.000There was a point to this you were asking me about how it ended up in the US.
00:25:04.000Oh, that what I discovered with cartel's operations in the United States.
00:25:08.000Um so one of the people we interviewed, which was really fascinating, um, and it was somebody who had this carried this load on his back and why he taught decided to talk to us was this guy called El Gringo, or we called him El Gringo.
00:25:21.000And El Gringo is an American citizen who doesn't speak a word of Spanish and who's sort of the wholesale buyer of drugs from the cartel, and then is in charge of distributing the drugs here in the US.
00:25:32.000He distributes most of his drugs uh through commercial airlines, usually Delta, because they have a really good baggage fees.
00:25:39.000They 70 pounds, uh two bags, 70 pounds if you fly business.
00:25:43.000And so a lot of times it was strippers who would carry the drugs from the west coast to the east coast.
00:25:49.000And he one of the things I'll never forget, he says, if you're taking a Delta flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, I guarantee that there's a very high chance that somebody is carrying drugs on one of those flights.
00:26:42.000And when uh telling me that he had a story he wanted to share, that he was uh involved with the cartel.
00:26:48.000And then so when we started doing the story about the cartel, I reached back out to him and said, actually I'm doing a story about cartel presence here.
00:26:53.000Would you want to come you know be on the show?
00:26:56.000And um and he agreed and he uh traveled out to me And we met and he said, Look, I've been dying to tell this story because if I get whacked, uh which he thought he might, he wanted his story to be out there.
00:27:09.000He wanted somebody to have heard his whole story.
00:27:57.000They just don't want us recording and they they are afraid that if we by any chance are being followed by American law enforcement, they're uh way more scared of the American law enforcement than they are of Mexican law enforcement.
00:28:09.000Aaron Powell Because Mexican law enforcement's probably because there's a lot of corruption, yes.
00:28:41.000We did a story about militias um where I filmed a militia in Brazil with cops around.
00:28:46.000So yeah, that happens unfortunately everywhere.
00:28:49.000Um but so when it's not as if they don't know where these people are.
00:28:53.000They are just afraid that maybe the DEA knowing that I'm a journalist and I go and do the this stuff that they might be following me.
00:28:58.000So sometimes they ask for our phones to stay behind, but a lot of times they just want our phones off so that we don't transmit any signals.
00:29:06.000Um but once we're in their territory, it takes months to get them to say yes.
00:29:12.000And there's all these ground rules, right?
00:29:14.000We can't disclose locations or people, we have to make sure we always bring masks and t-shirts, long-sleeve t-shirts and hoodies and everything with us because if they have tattoos and we want to make sure that they we don't show who they are.
00:29:27.000Because that can create a problem for them, but it can also create a problem for us, and it can create a problem to the local journalists that help us because they're gonna be the first targets.
00:29:36.000If I was this finisher guy, I would say you gotta put sunglasses on me because I have very recognizable eyes.
00:32:26.000In California alone, we had an insurance, the head of the insurance investigations in California, an insurance fraud investigator in California told us that in his estimates, but he said they're probably very low.
00:32:40.00010% of the thousands of rehab facilities out there are probably a fraud in a scam.
00:32:45.000And which they did 10%, which is a crazy number.
00:32:49.000But he thinks it's a low number, that it's probably much higher than that.
00:32:52.000So we what we our story was all about body brokering and rehab scams.
00:32:59.000It's a it's an it's a term applied that applies to uh rehab scams.
00:33:04.000So rehab scams is basically the the uh buying and selling of addicts uh in this billion dollar market, right?
00:33:12.000So it's uh these they create these fake uh rehab centers that bill insurance for treatments that they are not actually giving people.
00:33:25.000Um so uh for example, it's a huge problem in Arizona, and that's why we started and in California, but we started in Arizona.
00:33:33.000Native Americans have really easy access to um health insurance through the the Indian American health plan that they created.
00:33:42.000And it started as a good thing because there's it it was difficult, a lot of people lived in reservations far away, a lot of people, you know, because of generational trauma and alcohol abuse and drug abuse, there's a real need for health insurance and for them to have access to health insurance.
00:33:58.000So you have these ho huge communities that when COVID happened, uh the state made it even easier for them to get the help that they needed through health insurance.
00:34:07.000But all these bad actors realized, oh, this is great.
00:34:10.000We're just gonna build these fake rehab centers, go around in white vans, literally.
00:34:15.000There's like thousands of people still missing in Arizona, most of them uh Native Americans.
00:34:21.000And they go out in white vans to these reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, and they bring people, people who, you know, um have problems with drug and alcohol, and they bring people to these centers, and then they start building insurance, they get you on an insurance plan, and they start building insurance crazy amounts of money.
00:34:40.000Like we spoke, we were investigating this one facility that they were making eight hundred and something um million dollars sorry, eight hundred and something thousand uh eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars a week, a week from you know, dozens of people that they were housing.
00:34:58.000And not actually providing them the treatment that they so desperately needed.
00:35:04.000You can't house some you can't offer somebody free housing and then tell them that you will only get the free housing if you go and do our treatment.
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00:37:21.000Well I could see why they would do that.
00:37:23.000If that's a possibility to make money.
00:37:26.000Yeah, if you open the door to criminals, and the thing about rehabilitation centers is a lot of people that get go to rehab or get involved in rehab, they've also had shady pasts.
00:38:03.000But if someone was a terrible person, like what would someone do?
00:38:05.000Uh what uh like what are the parameters?
00:38:08.000Like what do you have to do to open up a rebound?
00:38:09.000But you need a license, probably a state license, but in some cases it was just really easy to get a state license.
00:38:14.000There was in Florida it became a huge problem.
00:38:16.000It was called the Florida shuffle, which was this you were going back and forth between you know detox and rehabs and uh outpatient treatment centers, and they were all owned by the same sort of uh you know well-known frosters.
00:38:30.000So you have to get a uh a license, but there's not much more, and that was the problem is that anyone could get a license and anyone can operate one of these.
00:38:37.000I was reading about a judge that recently got busted because this judge was sentencing people to the rehab that they owned.
00:38:46.000And so taking like like v dangerous violent criminals and not incarcerating them, but instead sending them to these rehabilitation centers that they owned.
00:39:57.000So it's it's a really interesting, you know, as we all know, it all started with Huxicottin.
00:40:03.000And then it went to heroin, and heroin was a great high for people who are addicted to opiates because it was a powerful high and it would keep keep you high for a long time.
00:40:13.000And Sentinel gives you an even more powerful high, but it's fast acting, so you get out of it fast.
00:40:18.000So somebody realized if we mix Trank um animal tranquilizer with this, you will you will still have the big high, but it will extend the time that You have that high.
00:40:31.000And what is happening to, you know, thousands of people across the U.S. is that they are taking these drugs, getting the high that they want.
00:42:24.000But I I think, yeah, in many ways, people sometimes think, oh, these they're junkies, they're they're out there, they just want this life, and they have failed society.
00:42:34.000I quite frankly think we have failed them.
00:42:37.000Well, not you and me, but the structure of society.
00:42:54.000And now fortunately, because of former governor Rick Perry, it's available in Texas.
00:42:59.000So they're doing it now in Texas with uh soldiers with PTSD, people coming back from the war with great efficacy and people that that have also been hooked on substances because of some of the things that they've seen.
00:43:12.000So I think that's a great doorway into the right.
00:43:17.000Because the right has always viewed these things, like particularly a psychedelic, which I will gain is, I guess.
00:43:32.000Um but it's certainly illegal in America and it's thought of as I don't know how you could ever consider it recreational because it's uh apparently a very brutal experience and very introspective, and most people say I did not enjoy that at all.
00:44:14.000This is why you're addicted to ruining your life.
00:44:16.000Like these are the things that happened to you when you're young, and these are the things that you did when you were adult that you had shame over, and all these different things.
00:44:23.000These are the things that you've seen that are horrific that have scarred you.
00:44:27.000And it has like an 80% effective rate for people getting off drugs with one session.
00:44:35.000And it's in the nineties with two sessions.
00:44:44.000Well, I don't know what the regulations are or how they're doing it, but at least they're they're giving it to some people in Texas.
00:44:51.000And I think like I was saying, this is a doorway for the right to understand.
00:44:55.000And I think this is a lot of the case with a lot of these um special Forces guys, a lot of SEALs and Green Berets, they come back from combat and they're all fucked up, and some of their friends take them on ayahuasca journeys.
00:45:09.000So that's another like doorway into the right, because people on the right have always thought of psychedelics as being for losers and hippies and people just trying to escape life, but just the sheer horror of combat experience has forced a lot of people to reconsider this position,
00:45:27.000and then they've had so many family members that are veterans and that are, you know, especially guys that are like in the heart of combat, and then they come back and they they're just fucked up and no one wants to help them.
00:46:28.000Loved the outdoors, became a game warden.
00:46:30.000He really wanted to like check people's fishing licenses and hunting licenses and making sure the the land was taken care of and making sure people aren't littering or doing anything stupid.
00:46:38.000So he gets this call that the stream is blocked up.
00:46:41.000It's like the stream stopped running and they can't figure out why.
00:47:07.000So they're bringing AKs and assault rifles out into the woods, setting up camps, super toxic pesticides, super toxic, like shit that's totally illegal in modern farming in America, like way worse than glyphosate.
00:47:23.000And that's somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty plus percent of all the marijuana that gets sold in the places where marijuana is illegal, it's all getting sold from these grow-ups in California.
00:48:05.000And because it's it's impossible to get a license in California when they legalized it initially.
00:48:09.000It was they made it so hard for people to actually get their licenses and doing and do it legally that the actual black black market increased when they legalized it.
00:48:59.000He had great insight as to uh what's going on in Texas too, where these Christian fundamentalists who are very, very wealthy are trying to turn Texas into a theocracy.
00:49:09.000Like these guys sound like full-on nutters.
00:49:12.000And this is something that people have to be really careful of when you become aligned with one party or another party.
00:49:20.000If you become a aligned with the left, like Jimmy Kimmel was like ignoring he was like mocking the president for saying that Antifa, like Antifa's not real.
00:50:00.000They get you find a community and all of a sudden these people are yours and they're real and the and also they're willing to fight for something.
00:50:07.000And there's like a lot of passion involved in it.
00:50:15.000United health care, that is kind of crazy that you spend all that money on health care and you get fucking nothing, and then when you do have something, they deny your claim.
00:50:26.000And so they don't know where to turn, and so they they get involved with a bunch of people that are doing stupid shit and they light Starbucks on fire.
00:50:37.000The reality is a lot of these uh you know.
00:50:40.000I don't know about the funding part of it.
00:50:41.000So I've I've organized I've spoken to Antifa.
00:50:44.000We did I've done stories on uh on militias, was one of the stories we did this last season.
00:50:50.000And it was important for me when we did that story.
00:50:52.000I've been wanting to do there's uh rising militias, uh rising threat of militias everywhere in the world, but uh particularly here in the United States, and we also filmed in Brazil because it's a real problem uh there.
00:51:04.000And we uh I knew from the start that I didn't want to just do right wing militias, that it was important to also do left wing militia.
00:51:10.000So we spent time with a group that operates on the border, a right wing militia that operates on the border, and was basically trying to catch uh illegal immigrants.
00:51:20.000And then we also spend time at uh you know, just a few miles away from the that group, there was another group called the black cat rifle group that is a left-wing militia.
00:51:32.000And it is to me, what was so scary was that they existed because of the other side.
00:51:38.000Like they're of course they existed because the other side exists, right?
00:51:42.000And none of them understood that you know that that one would become stronger, the stronger the other would become.
00:51:52.000And that this was all going to end not well for any of us.
00:51:56.000And when I was asking the Black Cat Rifle Group, you know, when I was asking why they have a militia and why are they training?
00:52:03.000I mean, they were training with with guns and and you know, they look if you look at these guys, they actually look I mean, sp especially the guys at the border, uh which were the right-wing militia groups.
00:52:14.000If if I was an immigrant crossing the country illegally and I saw one of these guys, a hundred percent would think that this is the U.S. Army or border patrol and and I would be terrified, or I'd hand myself in and then but it's it's they're which by the way is not what that's the part that's not legal.
00:52:32.000You're not you you can train with your buddies, you can do all that, but you can't pretend to be and you can't look like you're part of the the military or law enforcement when you're not.
00:52:44.000And and these guys a hundred percent look like they were.
00:52:47.000Um I know I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this because every time we talk about I talk about militias, um I get flack for it.
00:53:14.000And so when I was talking to the right wing group, they said something when I started talking to left-wing group, they were giving me the exact same reasons.
00:53:26.000Do you not this is exactly the same thing that the other guy said.
00:53:29.000And they were like, yeah, we're we're here, we think in their com their uh point was that and they don't call themselves militias, by the way, the the left-wing group.
00:53:37.000But they and they didn't like the fact that I call them militias.
00:53:39.000But they were saying was that but this is basically a group who trains for what they think is go going to be an incoming possible civil war.
00:53:50.000And they said, look, uh minorities in this country are under attack a lot of times by these right wing militias, uh whether they are part of the LGBTQ community or they're um, You know, um black or Hispanic, they're under attack, and it's our job to train to make sure that we protect these people that are the most vulnerable in our society.
00:54:10.000And we have to arm up and train and be ready to fight and go after the other people if we have to.
00:54:18.000They said they only protect themselves.
00:54:20.000Um they only defend themselves, right?
00:54:22.000But that's the exact same thing that I think.
00:54:25.000That was my point was that um like people like Jimmy Kimmel talking about Antifa not existing, like that's not good for anybody.
00:54:31.000No, they are they are real and they are violent.
00:54:34.000And then people on the right that want to ignore these people that are trying to turn Texas into theocracy and put the Ten Commandments in every school.
00:54:43.000The great thing about Tallerico is that he went to seminary school.
00:54:49.000So he's a very religious person, and he does not want them to have the Ten Commandments in schools.
00:54:54.000He's like, you should not this is gonna create less Christians, it's gonna have more resistance to Christianity.
00:55:00.000And really, religion has no place in government.
00:55:03.000And also, why would you have that up but you don't have something from Hinduism, something from Buddhism, something from Is Islam, something from uh Judaism.
00:55:14.000Like you should it should be all religions.
00:55:16.000If you're gonna have a religious class, that's a different thing.
00:55:18.000But if you're gonna have a thing on the wall that everybody pays attention to that you have to look at every day because it's through your commandments and it's Christianity.
00:55:26.000Well then you're forcing Christianity on people, and that's very un-American.
00:55:31.000And I think that's the thing about being on a fucking team is that you feel like you have to defend your team and ignore the horrible thing that your team does and then only pay attention to the bad things the other team does.
00:56:19.000We're supp this is supposed to be 2025, right?
00:56:23.000We're supposed to have evolved to a point where we recognize that violence is one of the worst things that we ever have in our community in any way, shape, or form.
00:56:33.000Whether it's police violence or whether it's gang violence, any kind of violence is the worst thing that we can do to each other.
00:56:41.000We're supposed to be living together in harmony.
00:56:43.000There's a way at least to minimize that violence by never having violent rhetoric, by never encouraging violence.
00:56:51.000And we seem to have lost that somewhere along the line.
00:56:55.000I mean, violence and hate, you know, so much hate and talk about hate and hating the other side and hating anyone that doesn't stand by what I stand or what I believe in.
00:57:04.000It's just well look what happened when Charlie Kirk got murdered.
00:57:35.000I I watched it, I watched a lot of it online.
00:57:37.000I watched it through famous people and prominent people that were just condoning his assassination, if not celebrating it, by saying, you know, that he put hateful rhetoric out there in the world.
00:57:50.000The way they'll counter hateful rhetoric is love.
00:57:53.000You like you have to you you you you have to recognize that these people are wrong.
00:57:58.000They're coming from a wrong position and eloquently state the right position, which is what Martin Luther King Jr. did which is not what President Trump said at uh the memorial of Charlie Kirk.
00:58:26.000They tried to put him in jail, they try to make a fake Russia collusion thing they did for three years, a concerted effort that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that funded the Steel Dossier.
00:58:38.000Like try to uh put him he got convicted for thirty-four counts of felony that none of them were a felony.
00:58:45.000Uh It was misdemeanor booking bookkeeping errors because he was paying off a lady he had sex with you gotta be a nut to get through that and not have any feeling about it at all and just brush it off your shoulder.
00:59:15.000I don't agree with any of that like hating my enemies and going after my enemies I know you don't agree with the immigration raids either which I've heard you talk about in this podcast on the I am so hap f happy that you do talk about it because I do think it's an incredibly important issue.
00:59:29.000I mean I think it's one of those right-left things too right where people on the right are like focus on the moment I have no idea every time I post it about this and I get so much hate also like I get immediately people saying horrible things about immigrants and saying horrible things about me and I I get unfollowed immediately like people don't like it.
00:59:47.000The thing is they like do it the right way.
00:59:49.000Here's the problem with that you can't do it the right way.
00:59:52.000If you live in Mexico or you've in Guatemala and you're walking here and you're getting across the Rio Gran River and here's the other thing for the last four years during the Biden administration it was well known throughout the world that the borders were wide open.
01:00:06.000So an estimated who knows what is the total number put this into perplexity that's our sponsor perplexity how many people do they estimate came in illegally over the past four years during the Biden administration.
01:00:23.000But it's millions and millions of people right?
01:00:25.000So people knew that they can come across now they're here because somebody invited them right and then they were bust to these places and flown to these places and they were given EBD cards and some of them were given cell phones and now you can arrest them?
01:00:39.000Now you're gonna like swoop in and handcuff them fuck like this is crazy.
01:00:43.000You asked me to be here they don't know it's the same goddamn okay I have spent time on uh the trail of immigrants I was in the dare in the Southern Darien Gap where a lot of the immigrants were coming and I spoke to dozens of people who were doing the journey and um maybe I just got lucky or unlucky that I spoke to the majority of the people that I spoke to had, you know, a lot of them were from Haiti, from Venezuela, places that are completely torn off.
01:01:08.000No economic opportunities whatever whatsoever violence, extreme violence these are the stories that I know are happening.
01:01:16.000And I I have a good friend his name's Jacob Soboroff he's a reporter for MSNBC and he's been covering immigration raids from the beginning.
01:01:24.000And one of the stories he did and it's like I I love that I'm talking about this because this has become really important for me.
01:01:31.000Because I'm I live in LA and I I'm affected by this on many levels.
01:01:36.000Also you have an accent I'm I'm an immigrant so I might get great I know they might pull you over ask for your papers.
01:01:46.000But uh this the one of the stories he covered and I think exemplifies what's happening to me right now is the Estella and Nori this is a mother and a daughter from Guatemala.
01:01:57.000The daughter was born in Guatemala with her mother and her mother was gang raped in the small town she's from a small impoverished town in rural Guatemala she was gang raped and the next day and her daughter watched her being gang raped and she was fuel violently beaten up she had blood all over her face they broke her bones it was horrible with her daughter who was young at the time watching and the next day she decided she had family members in U.S. and she decided this is it.
01:02:22.000I can't live here and I have to take my daughter to a place that's safer.
01:02:26.000Her daughter was traumatized by the way by now took bro they came they came to the U.S. Um they immediately went and asked for asylum which by the way most people don't know this but it is completely legal to become to come to the United States whatever way you enter, even if you enter illegally it is legal to come to the US and ask for asylum.
01:02:45.000That is not coming to the U.S. entering without papers and then asking for asylum is legal.
01:02:52.000So even when people say yes but do it le y you can't do it illegally you're wrong.
01:02:56.000It is legal to do so coming in with no papers and the requirements to uh require to repeat persecution you have to you have to be a victim of persecution whether it's you know uh cartels yeah violence uh rape uh uh political what what are the five things.
01:03:15.000It's like Jamie, can you look this up?
01:03:17.000It's political, uh religious, um political, religious.
01:03:22.000There's like five reasons why people can be persecuted.
01:03:27.000And um so they came to the US, they immediately started applying for asylum, and there's eleven million cases backlogged right now of people asking for asylum.
01:03:40.000Race, religion, race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership in a particular social group.
01:04:21.000I think that number is highly exaggerated.
01:04:24.000Well, this says um in addition to these uh apprehens apprehensions and encounters, officials reported an estimated two million gataways, individuals who are detected crossing the border illegally but evaded capture.
01:04:37.000Combining these figures suggest roughly twelve point eight million total unauthorized border crossings or attempts during the Biden administration.
01:04:49.000Here's another thing that people keep talking about is how many people um Obama deported.
01:04:54.000But I think that's not I think they're saying it incorrectly.
01:04:58.000Because I think when they say that Obama deported three million people, they always use this like as an as an aha against Trump deportations.
01:05:25.000I even worse than going to the Home Depot is the case of Histella and Nori, where they were going to check in on their procedures at the courthouse.
01:05:33.000And when they went to check on how their asylum case was going, they were detained.
01:05:37.000They had been living here for several years.
01:05:40.000The daughter is now is a star athlete, uh amazing student.
01:06:08.000And the daughter is stays in Guatemala and there's footage of her holding the coffin until it's buried and her wanting to be with her mother.
01:07:55.000No, I know a lot of friends who became American citizens, and it's it was a long, grueling process, and they had to prove that they were exceptional.
01:08:02.000That there was a reason for them to be here.
01:08:04.000A lot of them were comedians and entertainers.
01:09:32.000Uh state hearing Minnesota director, elections, Paul Linnell testify that non citizens holding driver's licenses under the 2023 driver's licenses for all law can register to vote and cast ballots by affirming eligibility as the ID verifies identity but not citizenship.
01:09:50.000Secretary of State Steve Simon noted that such voting is illegal and rare, with post-election adults identifying discrepancies for prosecution, including 59, just 59 potential cases in 2024 that they, um.
01:10:08.000The testimony has prompted Republican demands for voter role audits and reforms concite uh coinciding with federal lawsuit against Minnesota for incomplete registration data.
01:10:19.000So at the very least, this is opening up the door for people that are non-citizens to vote.
01:10:24.000And it seems like they're confirming that non-citizens with this driver's license can vote.
01:10:31.000That that it can be that it can be consequence of it.
01:11:26.000Like the mother and like so many of these stories, like the father of the three military American so m guys went and served for our country and the father was deported.
01:11:35.000These are, you know, horrible stories of human beings.
01:11:38.000And a lot of times the people that are traumatized are American citizens.
01:11:41.000They are the kids, they're pulling away their family members, their mothers, their fathers, and it's American kids who are being traumatized.
01:11:49.000And you're showing to the world that you don't care, that you just want to achieve a result and you want to achieve result that is gonna leave a a terrible feeling for anybody with a heart that that looks at that store in that case, and then they're gonna associate the United States government more and more with tyranny, more and more with fascism, more and more with you know what you're you think you're just enforcing a law because these people broke a law.
01:12:15.000But that there's uh there's still human beings that have been a part of these communities.
01:12:19.000The law is just some shit people wrote down.
01:12:52.000I read about this recently because it's something that so many people it's you often used by the right, how these people are here and they don't pay taxes.
01:12:58.000That is actually not it's millions of dollars a year that undocumented immigrants pay.
01:13:17.000But I think there's a way also that they figured out that people are here while they're going through asylum procedures or trying to get their green card that they can't.
01:13:24.000But there's still a lot of people that are from 2016 says 11.6 billion.
01:15:56.000But I do believe that once people are here and they've completely integrated into society, it seems pretty foolish to just snatch them up and send them to countries that they don't even know anymore.
01:16:07.000How about this guy in Maryland that this uh a Brago Garcia guy that they keep they're trying to send them to Africa?
01:16:34.000I I'm happy you use your platform to talk about this.
01:16:38.000Because I I rarely do I get an issue that I'm like this passionate about and that I see so much injustice that I feel like I need I need to talk about this.
01:16:46.000There's no heart to you have to have a heart.
01:17:05.000Like these people are like c coming here because this is a way better option than where they live.
01:17:11.000Wouldn't it be better if those people were doing that work and making a livable wage?
01:17:16.000And wouldn't it be better if these greedy corporations weren't just able to hire illegal people and pay them under the table a tiny amount of what they really should be getting as a normal human being.
01:17:37.000Like get rid of all the parasites and all the criminals and all the predators that are destroying people's lives, all the people robbing people.
01:18:34.000It's just you gotta figure out how to do it with a heart.
01:18:37.000You can't just snatch a hardworking father away from his children that he brought over here from another country just because he wants them to be able to live and not get killed in the streets.
01:18:49.000And this guy probably works 14 hours a fucking day, sees them, kisses them on the head before he goes to sleep, crashes, gets up in the morning and does it again.
01:19:00.000It's like you gotta you gotta find the pathway for good people.
01:19:04.000And like you can't tell me you don't want we don't have enough resources for that.
01:19:07.000Because you see about the amount of money that goes through USA or went through USA, the amount of money that goes to fucking weapons manufacturers.
01:19:15.000You you we don't have enough money to sort out who's a good person and who's a bad person and find some sort of a pathway.
01:19:23.000I'm not saying keep the border open, but the people that are here, let's root out the fucking terrorists, let's figure out who's the bad people.
01:19:31.000Some definitely bad people got through.
01:19:34.000After that, let's you know, it's fucking break bread.
01:19:44.000If you come over here and you bust ass for twenty-five fucking years and you're a part of a uh the American community, and then all of a sudden you don't have the right paperwork, so they're gonna send you a country that you don't even remember.
01:19:57.000Because you know, you came over here when you're fifteen, like you barely know how to speak Spanish anymore.
01:21:34.000The money that we're using in trying in these raids, like let's figure out how to stem the the immigration.
01:21:40.000Let's try to figure out how to, you know, stop the consumption of drugs so that there's less violence in those countries.
01:21:45.000Stop the flow of guns so there's less killings and gangs.
01:21:49.000You know, it's it's like it's a a cycle of destruction that we're enabling them and and then we go and catch them and we're all really started with moving manufacturing overseas as well.
01:22:00.000Once we took all the manufacturing out of America and then we moved manufacturing overseas or over to other countries across national lines.
01:22:07.000Now all of a sudden you can get things made way cheaper.
01:22:10.000But then you create all this poverty, and then what happens with poverty?
01:22:13.000People fall into drugs because they have massive despair.
01:22:16.000You know, and then the pharmacy of drugs.
01:22:17.000Well, you brilliantly documented with that with the Oxycontin Express that that piece was how I found out about you, but also how I found out about that problem, which was so insane, where you could tell people if they're not aware of how it all started.
01:22:44.000So I found out that uh reading the newspaper, my husband and I were working together at the time, and we found out that there were all these people who were going to Florida just to buy pills.
01:22:54.000So there was these pain clinics, these pill mills as they were called.
01:22:58.000Um they were distributing it but the the numbers were crazy.
01:23:02.000Ninety of the top 100 uh doctors prescribed prescribing oxycotton were in Flor Florida.
01:23:36.000So that was part of the story that we did, Oxycotton Express, where I went undercover into one of these pain clinics, and I asked the receptionist.
01:23:43.000Um I said, I have a little bit of a back pain.
01:23:46.000Uh, what do I need to do if I want to get some bills?
01:23:48.000And she said, Oh, what would you like?
01:23:50.000And uh, we can give you oxycotton, we can give you some benzos, we can give you what's called the South Florida cocktail, which raised essentially muscle relaxants, benzos, and oxycotton.
01:24:02.000She didn't say it, but that's what it became known as is the South Florida cocktail.
01:24:05.000But she said we can give you this, this, and this.
01:24:06.000It's the holy trinity trin trinity, right?
01:24:09.000And all you need to do is you go to the back of the clinic and there's a place there where you can get an MRI.
01:24:14.000And then you come back to us, and an MRI is a ridiculous thing because you can read anything into Namurai.
01:24:20.000Like any all of us have backs have a spine and whatever comes out results in the memorial that you could the doctor can pretend to look at it and say, Oh, yeah, yeah, I can see why you're having back pain or neck pain, and I'm gonna give you this.
01:24:34.000But the problem is that the doctors weren't even looking at the MRIs.
01:25:03.000So my husband did a documentary about it about the rise and fall of these twin brothers.
01:25:07.000They started by stelling steroids, and then somebody told him, like, dude, why are you doing what are you doing stelling selling steroids or you could make making so much more money selling oxy cotton?
01:25:56.000I mean, so much so that they were stashing it in bags and putting it in the attic, their mother's house's attic and stuff.
01:26:02.000There was like insane amounts of money.
01:26:04.000And people would come in from all over the country, mainly from Appalachia, and they would come in, drive down, and they would get to these clinics and they would say, I want, you know, see a doctor for less than three minutes.
01:26:14.000The doctor had a rubber stamp to stamp the prescription to make it fast.
01:26:18.000So they'd see you three minutes, okay, next one, and stamp it.
01:26:21.000There were people passing out in these pain clinics on the in the lobby.
01:26:26.000So when I went inside the the the talked to the receptionist, and then I went outside and I bummed a cigarette out of somebody and I explained, hey, I s pretended I had secret cameras, they didn't know I was filming, and I started saying, What do you what are you doing here?
01:26:38.000And he's like, Oh yeah, I came from Kentucky and uh I this is one of the best clinics.
01:26:42.000I can get all my pills here, and then I go back and you know, we sell them and we can still use the pills we want.
01:26:48.000It's feeding our addiction, and we go out and we sell them for ten times what we're paying here.
01:27:16.000We'd kept it to the last day for safety reasons.
01:27:19.000And we're outside, and it's me and my husband, he's filming it, and suddenly, within minutes, a car comes across and these two guy big guys start yelling at us and threatening us.
01:27:32.000So we get back in the car and we're saying, no, we're just filming this is public property, we can film.
01:27:36.000It's like, get the fuck out of here, where you guys filming.
01:28:09.000And we stop the car and decide, I'm calling 911, by the way.
01:28:13.000And uh I called an F uh uh a sheriff's department person I interviewed the day before, and I told her what was happening, and she said, call 911 immediately.
01:28:21.000These are not people you want to be messing with.
01:28:23.000So I call 911, and eventually I stop on the side of the road, they stop next to us because they're dumbfounded.
01:29:23.000They were dirty, dirty, horrible doctors that knew they were people dying, and they couldn't give a shit because they were making millions of dollars.
01:29:30.000They also I think something happens when you see a bunch of people die.
01:29:33.000There's a lot of doctors that are I think uh they get very calloused to the idea of death.
01:29:40.000And especially if it's the idea not not good doctors.
01:29:43.000There's great doctors out there, obviously, but there's sociopaths that become doctors and become even more sociopathic once they realize they can make money off of it.
01:29:52.000And that that whole Florida pain pill scene was a classic example of that, because there's only one way you would have a system like this.
01:30:02.000You'd have a system like this if you want it to be corrupt.
01:30:05.000I mean, it's just designed to be corrupt.
01:30:55.000Yeah, I know that after Peter Berg's Netflix series, painkiller came out, that they put a halt on because they were supposed to pay an enormous settlement, like six billion.
01:31:06.000Not really enormous compared to their profit.
01:31:52.000I mean, they're not directly uh uh you know guilty of all those deaths, but they created the problem of the opiate crisis, the biggest drug epidemic in America's history.
01:32:01.000And they're paying buying their way out with a you know a profit of the uh drop in the bucket of the process of the case.
01:32:20.000He was living in a small town in New Hampshire.
01:32:22.000And uh apparently they had taken the this guy would not approve it, and then they got him in a hotel for a weekend and the pharmaceutical drug companies.
01:32:32.000And no one knows what happened in the hotel, no one knows what they did what kind of deal they made or what happened, but when they got out, he approved it.
01:33:44.000You know, we've we when we investigated fentanyl, they started it started as a drug for termile cancer patients.
01:33:50.000And we went after this one company called Subsys, where the guy, the the the head of that company called John Kapoor, was the first, and I believe only until this day, head of a pharmaceutical company to be charged and go to jail.
01:34:03.000And we had a whistleblower in our investigation, this was before he was arrested and found out and charged.
01:34:08.000We had a whistleblower telling us that s the company in cis pharmaceuticals, subsist was the thing.
01:34:13.000Incis pharmaceutical was the name of the company, that they were doing exactly the same that Purdue Pharma did back in the day, which was they in their case they were actually bribing doctors, they were taking these doctors all to like travel experiences around the world and paying them to prescribe their medication.
01:34:29.000So you'd call and and you'd go to the doctor and say I have a headache, oh, you should be taking sepsis.
01:34:34.000It's a great fentanyl to fentanyl, it's going to cure your your your headache.
01:34:39.000And then the people at the company hired by INSES, they had their insurance department would call insurance and say, Oh, this person um you need to approve this medication for this person because they have cancer.
01:34:53.000They were lying to insurance because it was only approved insurance would only pay, and these were very expensive drugs if it was for cancer patients.
01:35:01.000And this so this whistleblower basically opened up the Pandora's box and told us all about this.
01:35:07.000And then there was a big investigation into it, and it was the first and only, I believe, pharmaceutical company owner that ever went to the prison for it.
01:35:17.000So it's like it keeps repeating itself.
01:35:18.000Aaron Ross Powell Well, it's just evil, right?
01:35:20.000It's just evil finds a way to manifest itself through any business if you got people that are incentivized by money rather than doing the right thing.
01:35:30.000And evil finds a way to go, listen, we can just uh fudge the books.
01:36:03.000And they're detached from it because they're not like seeing the pe purple person die in front of them.
01:36:08.000They're not seeing some child trying to wake their father up and realize their father is cold and dead because he had an overdose in the middle of the night and no one's taking them to school because their dad's dead.
01:36:18.000You know, like they don't they don't see any of that.
01:36:20.000They're they're, you know, sipping scotch in some fucking country club somewhere and driving around in a Mercedes and they're just looking at the amount of numbers that they made from that.
01:36:30.000I remember interviewing a woman, we did a story about fake pharmaceuticals and why I think it's 20 million Americans that can't afford their pharmaceuticals, so they go to places like Mexico and online to Indian pharmaceutical companies or fake and buy medication that sometimes works, but a lot of times is counterfeit and is bad and actually can kill you.
01:36:48.000And I remember interviewing the sort of the head of this big lobby, one of the biggest DC lobby groups for pharmaceutical companies, and asking her, and she was very happy to be on the show because we were talking about counterfeit, right?
01:37:00.000And she thought she was going to be able to just talk about how bad for counterfeit medications are and how important it is it to buy the real medications from real pharmacies.
01:37:09.000And I was asking her, but y but what does it say about the pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare system in this country when 20 million Americans can't afford their life-saving medications?
01:37:56.000It's like how can you how can you represent the pharmaceutical companies?
01:38:00.000Know that one of the biggest problems we have in this country is that people cannot afford these medications and not have spent one single minute with a person who has a hard time affording these medications, right?
01:38:54.000You could not profit at all from the pharmaceutical drug industry for ten years after you're done being a regulator.
01:39:00.000Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I I agree with you and I know that it's a huge conflict of interest, and we've seen how bad that can be and prejudicial how bad it could be.
01:39:08.000But I also um I try to put myself if that I've spent my whole whole entire career, um, you know, with ambition and trying to do good, and then I end up at the FDA and I have a chance to do something good, and then I yeah, whatever happens, I lose my job, or right?
01:39:24.000Then what you realize like, oh, this whole system's fucked.
01:39:27.000Let me just hop on over to Galaxo Smith Crowd.
01:39:30.000I'm just trying to figure out like what's I want to get a house in the suburbs.
01:39:34.000I know, I know, but I I try to see with it see look at it through other eyes and see like, okay, we have to figure out what these people are going to do because what do you do after if you can't work for ten years?
01:39:44.000This is what they've lived all their lives working in, right?
01:39:46.000Sort of, but I think it's incentivized.
01:39:48.000I think that they're they are making laws and pushing things specifically at the behest of the pharmaceutical drug industry, knowing that there's a golden parachute awaiting them.
01:39:59.000I think a lot of people, and I've interviewed the head of the the uh the uh CDC the it was a a while back we did a story about um anyway, I've interviewed some of these government officials uh that work at the FDA and um I don't think all of them work are there with better.
01:40:21.000But a lot of the ones that do know it's available and the shocking number of people that leave those positions of being a regulator and go over to work for the pharmaceutical drug.
01:40:31.000I mean, that's a kind of crazy conflict of interest.
01:40:35.000If you've been passing laws and winking at people and shaking hands and playing golf with them, and then you make it easy for them, and then all of a sudden you work for them?
01:40:44.000And you're making a million and a half a year.
01:41:51.000And um that's you know you're not getting that on TV on for the most part.
01:41:55.000You know, it's only it has to be on a show like yours, but like on TV news, you're you're not getting that kind of I mean not that kind of investigative journalism that you do as applied to everything.
01:42:05.000But there's a lot of conflicts of interest.
01:42:07.000So a lot of people that don't want you investigating certain things, you know, don't want you investigate waste and fraud in government and that's the role of journalism, yeah.
01:42:18.000And their job is to go out and w which I know, but which is why, you know, it's so troublesome that we live at a time where people don't believe in journalists and think that all journalists are either fake or they're lying, and that's a real problem because it's a real problem for all of us.
01:42:35.000But the one solution to that um I think is a mainstream journalism has to change its way.
01:42:41.000They you can't just be working as a propaganda arm for the Republican or the Democratic Party, which is what Fox News does and which is what you know, MSNBC does.
01:42:53.000They they were they're st they stick within the lines, right?
01:42:56.000And you also it opens the door for independent journalists, which I think is the most promising part of it.
01:43:03.000The people that come through that you know you can count on because they always tell the truth about stuff.
01:43:07.000And then they develop a reputation like guys like Gren Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibee, those type of Michael Shellenberger, those type of people that work for mainstream organizations and then realize these are this I'm being constrained and this is not real journalism, this is not what I signed up for.
01:43:22.000Like Matt Taibi, I trust that guy just with everything.
01:44:25.000We need someone who has a very compelling voice that preaches nonviolence and someone who resonates with people because he's a powerful speaker, or she's a powerful speaker who has this message.
01:46:03.000The thing is the people on the left don't know.
01:46:05.000It's more decentralized, is what I mean.
01:46:07.000They want to ignore it because they're the tough guys of the left.
01:46:09.000They're the people that are gonna go out and do the dirty work that needs to be done.
01:46:12.000The same way that people would look at like some right-wing militias if they're a right wing, uh a few extremists, but hey, they keep those left-wing people on their toes.
01:46:20.000Like Yeah, we need we need more independent journalists, I think you're right, going back to the independent journalist.
01:46:28.000It's it's partly why I've uh now started this podcast on YouTube, is because I know it's a place that I can keep doing if it grows, and I hope it will, doing the kind of reporting that I do that I don't have to depend on a Disney or uh as much as I thank Disney and National Notre Graphic for having me all these years, it is really important to be able to do independent journalism and not be uh limited and st and and and be told what you can and cannot do.
01:46:54.000It is crucial for the health and and survival of our democracy.
01:47:03.000Unfortunately, because of social media, you can kind of suss out who's legit and who's just a propagandist.
01:47:09.000You know, it's a really interesting I agree.
01:47:11.000Yeah, because now like if you're a person who's uh an independent journalist, but it seems fishy that you always talk about one issue all the time and then all of a sudden someone finds out, oh look, this guy gets funding from this organization.
01:47:25.000And this organization is run by this guy, and this guy supports, you know, he's from Russia or whatever it is.
01:47:31.000Or just by perpetrating perpetuating these lies, I will keep my fan base, even if I know that is a lie.
01:47:38.000It's not I don't even think it's like they're being paid to say this.
01:47:41.000I think that they get they get their audience and their followers and paid that way.
01:47:46.000They're also probably not the most nuanced thinkers.
01:47:49.000Oh, they're definitely not the most nuanced thing.
01:47:51.000But yeah, but it makes them money to not be.
01:47:54.000I had a friend who briefly worked on a right wing show, and one of the things that the host told him was, hey man, you gotta stay and defend the party.
01:48:04.000Like whatever the party says, like whatever you gotta go with that and get them on your side.
01:48:22.000But this is the world that we're living in now.
01:48:25.000Where it's like people decide that they're gonna only adhere to one ideology and you don't realize how malleable humans are.
01:48:32.000It's so easy to form a group and have everybody like get a part of it and have an ideology and it could be positive or it could be negative.
01:48:41.000And if it's negative and everybody's on board with it, then you got Hamas.
01:48:46.000Or then you've got, you know, whatever.
01:48:48.000Whatever organization it is you've got the you know fill it out.
01:48:53.000I think it's a comfortable it's a much more comfortable way of living to believe that there's bad people and then you're the good part.
01:49:01.000And there's that other side and you're on this side.
01:49:13.000Like you're the thing that you're trying to which is interesting we we did a story about assassins and uh we interviewed an assassin in America and an assassin in uh South Africa which has the highest rates of assassins and that is exactly what they said when they justified what they do.
01:49:28.000Which is the worst of the worst crime, right?
01:49:30.000You're taking away somebody's life but that is their justification was that they were killing bad people.
01:49:34.000And so they're you know God was on their side and they were killing bad people.
01:49:58.000That was his quote is the craziest quote from a guy that killed fifty million people in his lifetime or responsible at least indirectly to fifty plus million people dying.
01:50:09.000But imagine that I'm on you know God must have sent me you must be terrible if God sent me I mean when you bring God to the equation right but that's how crazy people could rationalize evil that like I'm working for God to just destroy this whole village.
01:50:26.000I'm gonna kill a million people in this village and stack their bodies up in the center.
01:50:30.000That's what Genghis Khan did he said well God must have uh really hated you.
01:50:51.000And you know you you wear your outfits like maybe you have blue hair, you got an American flag t shirt you know and everybody hates everybody.
01:50:58.000Right and then they're on social media talking about stuff with so many opinions with with no actual knowledge.
01:51:04.000Like not once having spent time actually on the ground looking at any of these issues, right?
01:51:09.000They talk about these immigrant raid immigration raids or drugs coming across but not one not one single one of these people that have all these opinions have actually spent a fucking day reporting on it on the I saw one of the um conversations with Tom Holman where they were saying that seventy percent of the people that they catch coming across let me say this seventy percent of the people that they catch and send back are criminals.
01:51:35.000Bullshit even if it was true why don't you get that down to a hundred percent like why don't you like figure out who's not a criminal and then you'll have everybody on your side like if you're only deporting gang members no one would be complaining.
01:51:50.000If you're only going after known gang members and getting them only going after known scammers, criminals whatever anybody's doing then you'd have everybody on your side.
01:52:04.000Imagine if that applied to most things like if most people who are accused of a crime 30% of them were in the 70% were guilty the thirty percent were innocent three out of ten and everyone's getting fucking snatched up and mass.
01:52:17.000But you know that that number is not correct.
01:52:19.000It's actually forty percent that have some sort of uh criminal history criminal history but a lot of times nonviolent it can be a misdemeanor it can be actually a prop parking ticket.
01:52:28.000And only seven percent of the people being Deported have been are have have criminal uh have c have been charged with criminal violence.
01:53:14.000They think that they were moving people into this country politically to get these people eventually a pathway to citizenship, and then they would have lifelong voters.
01:53:22.000And this is what this is the allegations of why they were moving people to luxury hotels in New York City and paying them and and doing it in Chicago as well, where the people that were poor that were living in Chicago were like, hey, we're not getting these resources.
01:53:36.000Like why are you giving these resources to people that just came here from another country?
01:53:40.000This is obviously before all the ice raids, which have completely changed public opinion.
01:53:45.000So that's where it gets really fucked up because there's people that probably would have been willing to vote Republican again because they didn't like what the Democrats were doing because essentially they had a dead man who was pretending to be president and then they just had some people running the government from behind the scenes, we're not really sure who that was, and that doesn't seem right.
01:55:19.000If you're you feel powerless and voiceless and you see someone doing something that you don't agree with, and then you have this Twitter account and you just like fuck that guy.
01:55:52.000I mean, I I love it and I use it and I use it as a tool from the work that I do 100%.
01:55:57.000But uh but I I I I've you I'm a very optimistic person, and I always thought, you know, there's there's a reason you know, there's great ways of using social media like you do.
01:56:08.000But uh with with young people nowadays and young people it's very challenging.
01:56:33.000But the point is at least more information is available now than ever before, which just makes it very difficult for governments to pull off stuff that they were trying to pull off before.
01:56:43.000It makes it very difficult for people to get get scammed, like they were getting scammed in the past.
01:56:51.000It's just it's it's just there's gonna be a bunch of people that get duped, no matter what.
01:56:56.000And there's gonna be a bunch of people that get kidnapped by social media, meaning that their attention span and their focus, their life becomes a part of that thing.
01:57:06.000But I think this is a new and emerging aspect of society that we will navigate and that we will learn from the failures.
01:57:15.000And it will cost a lot of people their happiness and prosperity.
01:57:18.000A lot of people will get wrapped up in that shit and it will fuck them up and that's net negative, right?
01:57:23.000But I think we'll learn from it like you don't want to get bit by the rattlesnake.
01:57:28.000Well we'll realize through all these other people's mistakes where the pitfalls are so we'll have to develop more robust ways of thinking about things and more resilience.
01:57:44.000And then this communication with people all over the world net positive, I think, ultimately.
01:57:50.000The real problem is the real the challenging aspect of it is a lot of people you're communicating with aren't real.
01:57:55.000And that's that's a giant problem now.
01:57:57.000China was busted using Chat GPT to promulgate they're using it to um they were going into Reddit forums and uh they're using it on social media and they they're pr they were pretending to be people and they were arguing about stuff.
01:58:12.000And you know you could just give it a prompt like from the position of a white supremacist, say why all Mexicans should be to create division.
01:58:18.000Uh-huh to create division I know in this country.
01:58:20.000I know and so that's a giant percentage of all social media discourse.
01:58:24.000So I don't necessarily think you should be going back and forth with people.
01:58:28.000But I think as a source of information and news and alternative perspectives and boots on the ground people like hey I'm reporting live from Gaza look what they just did to this Air Party.
01:58:37.000And it was what we thought was going to happen when the Arab Spring happened you know because everybody has a phone and finally we were able to film these amazing magnetic revolutions but I think that promise is sort of waited a little bit I I have to point out one thing you said how scams are not as prevalent these days.
01:58:53.000I shouldn't have said that that's not what I meant really I meant um the government that it's very it's more difficult for government government in the golden age of scams.
01:59:11.000The dude that owned my phone number before me this dude Raymond was a moron and Raymond Raymond you fucking idiot did you sign up for everything pitch?
01:59:20.000Because this guy like every day like hey Raymond your loan's been approved.
01:59:27.000So really fun I'm going to come on your podcast next year once I'm done with this project but I'm working on a really fun project for National Geographic which is where I say yes to every single scam that comes my way.
01:59:38.000Oh boy and it's been the craziest wildest journey of the thing I I just can tell you that I've been I have romantic relationships with people.
01:59:50.000Ah damn I spend a lot of time on my burner phone with people love bombing me.
01:59:57.000But it's not it's a fake persona like I I put a wig and glasses and you use your own picture.
02:00:13.000But um but I will talk it's it's really fascinating.
02:00:17.000But also to talk about scams which I can talk about a lot is uh we are living in the golden age of scams.
02:00:24.000Uh I think it was Baron Buffett that said fraud and scams are the number one industry growth industry of our time.
02:00:31.000And one of the stories we did which is so sad and I hate to bring it down back to a b uh sad topic but is that we I didn't know this before starting to report on it which a lot of times you think you know these scammers, these guys that are texting and emailing you and calling you that these are you know people in West Africa or you know wherever but like loan operators.
02:00:53.000Well we did a story about these scam factories.
02:00:58.000It's these compounds in places like Cambodia and Myanmar in Asia where they are it's basically factories with sometimes with thousands and thousands of people forced labor.
02:01:09.000So these are mostly people from India, sometimes Brazil, other Asian countries, the Philippines is a big place, where they respond to ads to work in what they think are legitimate businesses, to work in online companies and whatnot.
02:01:23.000And they are they pay for their expenses to travel to these places to Cambodia and Myanmar.
02:01:28.000In Myanmar, they're operating out of this area that's that's an ongoing civil war and is ruled by these militias and they get in there and they as soon as they get in, they take away their passports and they're trapped and they're forced to scam.
02:01:41.000So they spend 24-7 scamming Americans and European people.
02:02:15.000Um across the river um and uh spent time in this town that was basically built by these this Chinese gang that was all with the money of scamming Americans and uh they were trying to build like a mini Macau and the guy that ran the the the company is called Yatai International and he took us on a tour of this mini Macau and it was so surreal.
02:02:39.000It was like these aquaparks with no one in the aquapark and these luxury casinos.
02:02:44.000We ended the night so crazy in uh we were trying this guy said he would give us an interview but first we had to do the tour.
02:02:52.000So and the interview would happen the next day.
02:02:54.000So we ended a night this was actually not filmed in a karaoke that was a massive room where every single the whole every wall and the ceiling was all a screen it was like the future.
02:03:07.000And this is in a war torn area of a country that's incredibly poor and they've built this place with millions and billions of dollars from from profits of scamming.
02:03:17.000And we ended the night with this guy who's basically the head of this criminal Chinese gang running these scams in this karaoke singing Celine Dion and Whitney Houston and being poured whiskey and whatever high-end uh uh brand we wanted you were getting drunk with them?
02:03:39.000I spent the whole night singing Whitney Houston the videos are so embarrassing because I cannot sing to my life.
02:03:47.000But I was like we need to get this guy on tape so I'm just gonna do whatever.
02:03:53.000And then the next day we interviewed him and uh and it was just fucking crazy.
02:03:57.000And we ended our last day I mean we interviewed a Chinese dude so sad like 21 year old who was caught trying to escape and was chased out of the building he ran out of a third floor broke both his legs one at the hip practically died was actually saved by an onlooker who took him to the hospital and then moved to Thailand where I met him he was in a wheelchair told us about beatings.
02:04:24.000We spoke to another Indian kid also who was for like they had a water hose on his body for he was forced to stand for 24 hours um and then electrocuted and I mean the videos out of these places were insane like people with uh horrific wounds and people c dying and killed and yeah and just forced to be forced and I'm to scam forced to fucking scam into scamming.
02:04:48.000And then we interviewed a girl called Angel who was raped repeatedly by her bosses and she's sort of the face model.
02:04:56.000So a lot of times after speaking to these what they think are romantic relationships for a long time, they want to see people's faces.
02:05:02.000So this is the girl that then they put a fake of AI face on top of her but it has to be a girl because of the manurisms and the voice and they have this girl who actually speaks English and she would talk to victims of scams and pretend that she was the wonderful woman that they'd been dating for months and and convince them to put their money into this crypto business that was fake and uh and take millions out of these victims.
02:05:29.000So this woman starts crying and telling me how she knows she's doing something awful but and how she's raped and how she doesn't want to be doing and uh at the end she says I just want your I said yes to doing this even though it's incredibly dangerous but I accepted doing this because I just want a message for the victims in America the people that I've spoken to that I don't that I'm sorry.
02:05:51.000I just want to apologize for all the harm that I've caused and she's like in two years but I have no way out I mean these are heart wrenching heart wrenching stories.
02:06:00.000And the last day we were there to um there's this amazing organization called Acts of Mercy, religious based organization that is working to try to get these people out.
02:06:12.000And a lot of these bosses actually if you can pay for ransom, you can pay $10,000 to save a person from there.
02:06:19.000So because if you're a bad scammer, if you're there and you're horrible and you're you know, if you're sad and depressed and you're not doing your job, it's better for these bosses if you just get paid $10,000 to let this person go.
02:06:32.000So there was this case of this the Filipino woman who uh the boss had agreed to twelve thousand dollar uh payment to release her.
02:06:41.000But it's really dangerous for there's this negotiator that goes and sort of tries to get her out of this compound.
02:06:48.000But he has to come with the money and he has to be able to pay the crime boss, but he also has to pay the militias to get him in.
02:06:55.000And we were with this group, Acts of Mercy, and another guy, filming them as they're on the phone negotiating her release and they're on the phone with her.
02:07:04.000She's inside the scam center, and she's like, Where do I go?
02:07:17.000If they see me with a phone, because it's a confiscated phone, they're gonna beat me and they're gonna put me in the dark room where I'm beaten and you know tortured for for days.
02:07:26.000And the and and uh Amy, the woman on this side is telling her, Believe us, there's somebody waiting for you.
02:08:07.000It started as a domestic scam in China actually.
02:08:10.000And the uh pig butchering because the idea is that you fatten the pig, which is your victim, and then you kill them at the end, right?
02:08:17.000And and uh which that's why it's called pig butchering.
02:08:21.000But the idea is that you meet somebody online and it's usually a beautiful girl or man, and um and you create you start a relationship with that person.
02:09:05.000One of the one we're trying to get is that we're getting several different kinds of scams, like Indian call centers and all all of the different schemes.
02:09:12.000But eventually they start saying, Look, we are leave living, and so you're curious, like, how do you like how are you making so much money?
02:09:18.000It's like, oh yeah, I've been investing in crypto and you know, I can't really tell you much about it now.
02:09:23.000So they they c last it can last months.
02:09:25.000And at some point they're like, okay, I've built a relationship.
02:10:01.000It was a story in the New York Times and then it got reported everywhere.
02:10:04.000I was trying to get this guy to talk to me because the story is fascinating.
02:10:07.000So this guy, amazing member of the community, small town in Kansas, the local bank that was started by the farmers decades a decades ago, it's where all the farm community was put would put their money, would trust this bank.
02:10:22.000Well, it turns out that this guy, the head of this bank that everybody trusted, outstanding member of the community, was stole uh millions of dollars from the bank and the bank went bankrupt.
02:10:34.000And he was stealing the money because he was being scammed by a pig butchering scam.
02:10:39.000And it started with him putting his own money.
02:10:42.000And then they kept on saying that in order to release the funds and all the mil millions that he'd made from his initial investment, he would put in more and more money.
02:10:50.000I think he ended up putting in what something like that.
02:10:54.000Forty-seven million from from the customer accounts to scammers depleting the bank's holdings.
02:10:59.000When a state banking regulator uncovered this fraud, it closed the bank and called the FBI.
02:11:58.000And the crazy thing is that you could be a dumbass and be a smart person if greed gets involved.
02:12:04.000Greed is like for greed I think greed for shady people it's almost it's kind of fascinating Because it you gotta know at one point in time this is not smart.
02:12:22.000But the greed is like, but what if it is?
02:12:26.000I think it's the acceptance that you have lost all that money.
02:12:31.000And that must weigh so heavily on you.
02:12:34.000If you have you know, if you're about to foreclose your home, if you'd sent all the money from your kids' college funds, if you're yeah, but even the banker.
02:12:45.000I mean, but even the banker, he sent all his initially it was a big thing.
02:12:50.000I I I don't think I think he got to a point that he was swindled and made to believe that if you give more money, he would can't he would get the money that he initially invested back.
02:13:04.000And he would be able to put back the 45 million that he gave he stole from his customers.
02:13:10.000I think the realization, and this is something that I know from talking to so many scammed scamming victims, the it's not so much about wanting to make that money, it's the realization that you've been talking to somebody that's not real and that you have been so swindled and you know I don't want to use the word dumb because I think all of us can fall victims to these scams.
02:13:34.000But that the the acceptance of that is really difficult.
02:13:37.000So you just want to keep on believing it.
02:13:39.000You just pay whatever you need to pay so the dream stays alive.
02:13:43.000There's a Carl Sagan quote about that, that it's easier to convince a person.
02:14:00.000I I feel that with this experiment I'm doing right now.
02:14:03.000I mean, even though I know I'm being swindled, but there's something about once you're deep in that relationship, it's it's yeah, it's it it does something funny to you.
02:14:16.000And if you you're involved in something that may or may not yield money or may or may not yield some sort of romantic relationship or may or may not yield 100% a drug deal.
02:14:25.000Or a celebrity scam, which is huge these days.
02:14:28.000If you're talking if you think you're talking to, you know, Brad Pitt.
02:14:42.000And it's not fair to scam those people.
02:14:47.000Some scams like we tolerate, like televists.
02:14:52.000We feel uh we're we're like, look, if you really believe that guy with the private jet and the Bentley, that guy, you need send him money because God wants you to send him money, you're on your own.
02:15:27.000There's thousands of books that are like ancient books, I don't know, thousands, but a lot, written about the very specific details of astrology.
02:15:38.000Like in terms of like where the constellations are, what time of the day it is, where you know where the earth is in relationship to Mars.
02:17:44.000I'm very skeptical about everything, but astrology I've always kind of believed into.
02:17:48.000I mean, it's it's the idea that you know, where the sun and the stars they have an effect on on tides and currents and why wouldn't that all have an effect?
02:17:57.000I mean, I know nothing about it, but why wouldn't it have an effect of on you when you're born and when and where and the time.
02:18:03.000Right, and it's probably a part of nature's natural order too, to create a bunch of different kinds of people.
02:18:22.000I'm not you know, I don't know enough about it to but um I'm open to it because I think there's a lot of information that was lost.
02:18:30.000I think there's a lot of information that we would dismiss, you know, from ancient civilizations that we dismiss that I think I think the problem is that these ancient civilizations collapsed and like with the burning of the library of Alexandria, you're left with very little.
02:18:47.000Like you a lot a lot of like very important information is missing.
02:18:51.000And so then you gotta kind of like go, well, that seems like bullshit.
02:19:17.000Hal Putoff, who's um he was uh running uh some various programs for the United States government.
02:19:24.000Uh specifically I had him on though to not talk about remote viewing to talk about UFOs.
02:19:29.000And uh he was actually brought on board during um Herbert Walker Bush's administration.
02:19:35.000They um well well he was working for the government at the time, but they brought him on as one of the scientists that they they'd got a group of people from various disciplines and they said we're gonna compile a list of pros and cons in terms of the impact of society of disclosure of alien life.
02:19:56.000And this is what they were telling him.
02:19:58.000We have recovered crashed UFOs and we are doing back engineering programs on them.
02:21:10.000Where there's like trying to unite us all together, and his speech was imagine if we were all faced with an alien threat from another world, how quickly we would unite together.
02:21:46.000Because this is all people talk about.
02:21:47.000Like even us, like you know, there's so much interesting stuff to talk about, and yet we've spent time talking about politics because we're talking about the fascinating aspects of c politics as it affects human civilization and discourse.
02:22:01.000Yes, but we also like the division and the right and the left and being careful with what you say because what if the other side did this and that?
02:22:09.000It it's it's now in every single home in every single conversation people have, and it it's just it didn't used to be like that.
02:22:19.000Like government was there, it existed, it's supposed to work well.
02:22:23.000If it's not, hopefully there are good journalists out there exposing what's not working out well, but it should not be the discourse all the time about whether you're right wing, you're left wing, whether you're with us or or not or against us.
02:22:36.000And and it it it it just taints everything and and takes too much space.
02:22:43.000I think for c other conversations with much more important that we should be having, whether it's about AI, whether it's about social media, whether it's about aliens, they're much bigger problems that are coming in our future, and we shouldn't be so sort of tunnel focused on whether we're you know, whether what we're saying is approved by the right or the left or whether this or that.
02:23:05.000It's just an amazing waste of mental resources.
02:23:08.000And it's also a way for very uninteresting people to attach themselves to a worthy cause.
02:23:14.000People that have nothing else going on in their life and all of a sudden it's this whatever issue it is, whatever it issue it is, that's their whole identity.
02:23:28.000It's not doing what you really want to do, not having the relationships you really want to have, the friendships you really and instead you're involved in this fucking stupid cause.
02:24:24.000Yes, so I didn't go to ground zero, but I went to midtown to the rooftop of this building where everybody was doing sort of the s satellite life feed, so you had journalists from all over the world.
02:25:49.000And they said, we need you to go to Midtown and do the we have no Portuguese journalists in Manhattan.
02:25:54.000They're all our journalists are in DC or they are outside of Manhattan, Manhattan had been locked down.
02:25:58.000You need to go down and do the live reporting for us of what's happening.
02:26:02.000And on and suddenly my cell phone started ringing, and it was my mother who was crying and begging me not to leave the house.
02:26:09.000And uh and I was I had to explain to her mom, this is like my dream is to become a journalist as part of my job, and I I have to go.
02:26:16.000Anyway, an hour later, I was at the rooftop of this building surrounded by all these journalist heroes of mine that I grew up watching on live television and shaking, I was so so nervous.
02:26:26.000Um I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to put to words together.
02:26:47.000We're just walking down to the streets and uh it's every time I talk about this, but and seeing the first um people looking for their loved ones, right?
02:26:58.000And it's like the posters with the faces of the husbands and the children and not knowing where they were.
02:27:05.000And that moment totally changed my life because it was okay.
02:27:11.000It was a moment that I yeah, first of all, realization like what the fuck?
02:27:16.000This is not about you, and this is about something so much bigger that's happening where so many people are affected by this.
02:27:24.000And it was a moment also that I realized that the kind of journalism that I wanted to do was um try to understand why this sort of evil happens in the world and how do things like this exist.
02:27:37.000And uh a year after I graduated from Columbia, I moved to the Middle East and I enrolled in the University of Damascus in Syria to learn Arabic and to try to um do my I did my first story as a freelance journalist about the jihadis who were crossing to Iraq to fight against the Americans.
02:27:53.000That was the first story I ever did as a freelance journalist.
02:27:56.000And uh and so yeah, so I was I was there on 9-11 and uh um remember after reporting and going, you know, to school and going up to my building and meeting strangers on the streets and everybody was just like looking at each other and hugging each other.
02:28:15.000And there was like so much love and support.
02:28:28.000Which is yeah, which is me against you, you know, which is so sad.
02:28:32.000Well, for just that one brief moment I realized like for that during that time when everybody had that American flag on their car and they were driving around with it.
02:29:13.000And like, yes, let's actually unite to do some good and to try to solve problems instead of, you know, dividing to try to figure out, you know, how to hate more another person.
02:30:01.000Like actually try to understand why these migrants are coming to this country, why these you know people are carrying drugs on their backs and excruciating difficult work and dangerous work.
02:30:29.000Well, it's it's hard for people to have empathy too.
02:30:31.000Some people, especially as they're just tired all the time and exhausted and they're unhealthy and their life sucks, and they just want other people like fuck and they don't see those people.
02:32:02.000Well, that's not necessarily patriotism.
02:32:05.000That's just being an intolerant asshole.
02:32:07.000But I think that the real problem with Los Angeles is the government and the fact that they want to ignore the rampant fraud and the fact that everything is so overregulated, it's impossible to get permits for things, so industry's leaving.
02:32:36.000But it's about how if you're he's a Democrat, as you know.
02:32:40.000Um but how Democrats have to figure out how to make the system work or and and and and how to build things and how to and not do what you were saying, create all these limits and these problems for like building houses in the palisades and also the problem is that Democrats are the Democrats of 2025, not the Democrats of 1994.
02:33:00.000If you go back to the Democrats and Bill Clinton was president, it was a totally different thing.
02:33:05.000Like Bill Clinton's if you hear him talk, he sounds like a populist that is uh like going after criminals.
02:33:14.000Like it's so it's like that's what everybody can get aboard with.
02:33:16.000It's like that's the the real problem is these ideologies shift with special interests and money and funding and propaganda and then they become something unrecognizable.
02:33:27.000They become something that supports war.
02:33:29.000That becomes something that suppresses free speech.
02:33:32.000They become something that was like entirely in direct opposition to what it would have been in nineteen eighty five.
02:33:38.000It's like of course not all but this is the same problem because it's like if you decide I'm a right winger, you're supposed to take in all of that.
02:33:50.000You're supposed to like like w that guy said to my friend like you gotta support the party.
02:34:26.000You know and then you see other countries that have like six, seven the majority of European countries.
02:34:32.000The Netherlands that have multiple parties and you know obviously there's division but there's nothing like the division that exists in the US right now.
02:34:42.000It's well that's the negative aspect of social media I believe.
02:34:46.000I believe it's ramping up people and it's it's pushing the divide even further.
02:34:51.000But what I'm hoping is that this is a growing pain and that we'll sort through this and and under but we need nonviolent leaders that are very intelligent that also make sense to both people which I do think is possible.
02:35:06.000Both groups both ideologically captured sides which I do think is possible.
02:35:11.000Because in the middle is where we all live in the middle is where I live we all want safety we all want education we all want fairness we all want to make sure that no one's polluting and good access to resources and a chance to make a life for yourself and pursue your dreams.
02:35:29.000That's what we all want all that other stuff is just dividing points.
02:35:33.000One of the things I had Rep Luna on the podcast we were talking about something and she said they don't want to fix this issue because they can fund their campaign with it.
02:35:43.000Aaron Ross Powell of course I mean that's immigration to what isn't that crazy that politicians will fail to resolve an issue on purpose because they want to raise funds by campaigning on this issue.
02:35:56.000It is disgusting yeah but it's so gross that is un American that's that's truly evil truly evil yeah and when she said I was like oh I didn't think of that.
02:36:06.000But I kind of did but I didn't want to believe it.
02:36:08.000And then coming out of someone's mouth who works in government I'm like oh fuck.
02:36:19.000And then that problem goes away then you don't have a platform to stand on.
02:36:23.000So a lot of times you don't want to solve that problem.
02:36:27.000And I think in many ways that's what immigration has been because it is not possible that we have the broken immigration system that we have we have the backlog of people trying to become to get papers like who can't we don't have a a a way for people want to come to this country legally to come to this country legally it's you know and and and it's been decades and decades of this and we haven't been able to figure out how to solve this problem it has to be because it benefits all politicians.
02:36:54.000That this is hasn't been solved, right?
02:36:56.000Well another very high level politician told me once I can't remember if he said on the podcast I don't want to say his name but that he had a conversation with a man who is a CEO of a large corporation and said he was very opposed to um tightening up the border because he needs the illegal immigrants for the workforce.
02:37:16.000Like yo like so that's part of it too.
02:37:34.000Which is a problem also now with the raids is that a lot of violence is happening, you know.
02:37:38.000Even if it's rapes or domestic abuse and people are just even if they're going through this, they're not gonna call the police because they're afraid of being deported.
02:38:05.000It's difficult not to get cynical, right?
02:38:06.000And I I actually it's to me it's always heartbreaking when you hear people saying that they don't vote or they don't really like they're not into politics.
02:38:13.000They don't they don't care about what's happening because politicians are all the same and they don't they're completely disengaged, and to me that's heartbreaking.
02:38:50.000I don't think Taller Rico's trying to run for president.
02:38:53.000So outside of him, who who really makes sense?
02:38:55.000Well you got a bunch of people that are just politicians, politics as usual.
02:39:00.000And then once they get inside, you have a bunch of cowards on the Republican side that even when they're seeing this stuff happening, even though we know that they don't agree with it.
02:39:10.000They aren't they're too afraid to t to speak out.
02:40:53.000What is it about he's the guy who went after the pill mills in Florida who was doing his investigation at the same time as I was doing.
02:40:58.000And then Fabian Alamar is a great guy.
02:41:00.000And he he's a for Oh, this is a former skater, did nine years in prison.
02:41:04.000Uh two he he was sentenced to seven years in prison for kidnapping and beating the shit out of this guy who supposedly he was on math high very high on crack, actually, very high on crack.
02:41:14.000Anyway, he beat the shit out of this guy who supposedly allegedly had raped his sister, but beat the shit kept him in a trunk, beat the shit out of him, was arrested for seven years and then did two more years because he c he almost killed a child molester in prison.
02:41:29.000Um is now an actor on the Mayans, has an incredible life story.
02:41:33.000He was brought up by gangs, his family member were all gang members, they're all their time in prison, but has done an whole one eighty is now involved in an until it was that show with the guy the bikers.
02:42:33.000It turns out that his translator, who is also his best friend, because Otani is Japanese and doesn't speak fluent or doesn't speak English.
02:42:40.000So he has a translator who's also his best friend in the US, was with him 24-7, had a gambling problem.
02:42:46.000And the bookie in this gambling problem was a guy called Matt Boyer, fascinating guy.
02:42:50.000Grew up in Orange County and built it.
02:42:53.000And and by I mean, making millions of dollars as a b as an illegal bookie, flying private jets, like betting insane amounts of money himself.
02:43:02.000He's also an a uh gambling addict, but was like had high, you know, athletes from all over and important and celebrities, basically placing bets with him instead of placing them online, they placed them with him.
02:43:17.000And it was found out just before he was about to sign for the Dodgers, the Otani, that while they were investigating a casino in Vegas, they came across this bookie, and with through this bookie they found out that Otani's translator and possibly they thought initially maybe Otani was illegally betting.
02:43:38.000This is a guy that stands to make millions for the Dodgers for all the companies that he sponsors.
02:43:45.000And uh it turns out that Otani was not the one betting, that it was his translator.
02:43:51.000Matt Boyer, who's at the center of the scandal, believes that Otani knew that he had a that his friend and translator had a betting sc uh gambling problem.
02:44:02.000Um but um he came out and said he had no idea.
02:44:06.000And uh, you know, nobody wanted this problem on their hands for the amount of money that you you could lose.
02:44:12.000And uh and so they basically the guy came out saying initially he said that Otani knew, the translator said Otani knew, and then he came out and said actually Yotani had no idea and I lied, and now he's also in prison.
02:44:25.000But Matt Boyer is now serving uh I believe it's uh seven or something months in prison.
02:45:16.000And Matt talks about like this guy, I would text said he would like he'd be down on a place and he says, let's double that, let's triple that.
02:45:23.000He was always sort of chasing that dopamine hype.
02:46:11.000It's but I I've been around a lot of those people.
02:46:13.000You know, um when I was in my early 20s, I spent a lot of time in pool halls.
02:46:17.000And I was around a lot of gambling addicts, and I was just fascinated by it.
02:46:20.000People that would go from the track to the pool hall.
02:46:23.000So they would go to the racetrack all day, gamble on the races, and then go to you know, maybe off-track betting, Bet there, and then they go to the pool hall, bet there, try to get a poker game, bet there, try to go to Atlantic City on the weekend, bet there, yeah.
02:46:38.000Just full-on gambling junkies, their whole life revolved around gambling.
02:47:27.000Here's the th because I don't have a gambling problem.
02:47:29.000So if like I I agree that you the problem is not that you're making money from the betting, but then knowing that gambling is a problem and that there is addiction, then you should be able, you have to, it is your responsibility to set aside some money to try to figure out how to address the problem of addiction and gambling.
02:47:46.000Yeah, but I don't think there has been an established solution for gambling addiction.
02:47:51.000I think some people are gonna fall by the wayside and they've always been that way.
02:47:56.000It's like I'm not a gambling addict, but like say if there's a boxing match and like it's Terrence Crawford versus Canelo Alvarez, I'm like, I think Terrence Crawford's gonna beat the odds.
02:48:23.000Uh but I don't have a problem with gambling.
02:48:28.000You know, so it's not I think it should be legal, just like I think alcohol should be legal.
02:48:33.000I think you should be able to go to a store and buy alcohol.
02:48:35.000You know, I think most drugs should be legal.
02:48:38.000I think the real problem is the fact that they're illegal, which means you're getting them from cartels, you know.
02:48:43.000And but then there's a dilemma of how do you change that?
02:48:47.000Like would you just rip off the band-aid and make everything legal and then you become Portland for a few years, the whole country's fucked, and how many people die of overdoses because of that?
02:49:20.000It's on YouTube on uh youtube.com slash Mariana Van Zeller, and we've got two episodes already that premiere this week, and it's a weekly podcast.