00:01:49.000Well, it's, you're, you're preying on the, the saddest people.0.99
00:01:54.000That's what's really, it's like, it's one thing if you're scamming some psycho fucking fraud guy who's doing stock market bullshit, you know what I mean?0.99
00:02:08.000It's true, but I, I think one of the problems we have when we talk about scams is this idea that we think it's a certain type of more gullible person or more naive or perhaps more foolish.0.98
00:02:22.000And I think that is wrong because I think what these scammers are so good at doing is that they prey on emotions that we all share, you know, love and trust and sometimes greed as well.
00:02:36.000And the real reason or the main reason I wanted to do this film was because of that, because I'd come back and I'd.
00:02:43.000Tell friends and family stories about these victims because I've reported on scams before extensively.
00:02:49.000And it was always, but how could they do that?
00:02:52.000Why would you give money to a stranger?1.00
00:02:53.000I mean, how could they be so silly and so stupid?1.00
00:02:56.000And that really annoyed me because why are we focusing on the response of the victim instead of actually understanding the actions of the scammers themselves?1.00
00:03:05.000Because they are very, very good at what they do.
00:03:09.000So that was the idea behind okay, I'm going to place myself at the center of all scams.
00:03:13.000Super scam me and create a persona and put myself in dating websites and online platforms and see what happens.
00:05:09.000And then he started paying attention to her and interested in what her life was like.
00:05:12.000And tell me about you and what do you do and what are your interests?
00:05:16.000And then they talked for months and months.
00:05:19.000And he would remember things that happened in the early weeks.0.64
00:05:23.000And this is a woman who leads a very lonely life.
00:05:26.000There's There's the loneliness epidemic, who's sort of estranged from her husband, who doesn't really have anyone who's interested in her life, quite frankly, or sees her or understands her or wants to know about her.
00:05:38.000And finally, there was somebody who, even if he wasn't John Bon Jovi, it was somebody who cared.
00:06:31.000And some of them, I mean, they're a little robotic, but they could be real.
00:06:35.000And it's, hi, Leslie, good morning, how are you doing?
00:06:38.000My sunshine, my love, I'm curious about your life.
00:06:43.000And he would say to her, look, I am surrounded by people who are yes people, who are people who are with me a lot because of my money and fame.
00:06:52.000And I just really appreciate connecting with people who are outside the bubble, who are normal folks.
00:06:57.000And so it is kind of, it's not as insane as like John Bon Jovi showed up and said, hey, I want $1,000, right?
00:07:04.000But then, what happens, I think, in a lot of these scams is that once you're in, once you're committed to a relationship, once that has an impact on your life and has made your life better, it is very difficult to then come to the realization that this might not be real.
00:07:43.000Like every time you get a DM, every time you're love bombed, there's a dopamine rush there.
00:07:48.000And I think it's that idea that you get to a point where you start suspecting, okay, this doesn't sound real, but I've invested so much.
00:07:56.000The reality of my life is so sad compared to this that maybe I prefer to just go on.
00:08:01.000So there are actually a lot of romance scam victims that continue having these relationships even after they realize the person wasn't who they said they were.
00:08:20.000Yes, a little bit, which is one of the things that they talk actually about how AI, you know, the companionship of AI is one of the benefits or possible benefits of AI.
00:08:43.000iPads with fake people for companionship that you go to the coffee shop and you grab an iPad and you have a whole conversation with an AI agent.
00:11:29.000Do you know what that's interesting too in terms of scams?
00:11:32.000Because, as you saw in our film, the majority of the people we spoke to were women, but actually, men are as likely to fall victim to these scams as women, but they just have a lot more shame around it, so they're less likely to talk about it.
00:11:46.000So, we actually spoke to a lot of men, but they just don't want to be on camera because there's so much shame around this.0.90
00:11:52.000Yeah, no man wants to be a sucker.0.84
00:12:08.000Actually, this is another horrible thing.
00:12:10.000It's what I call there's a sort of double victimization, right?
00:12:13.000Because initially, not only do you, you know, your heart is broken, you lost all your money, but then you go back home or you go to your friends and you talk about this.1.00
00:12:21.000And the first response is, how stupid could you be?0.99
00:12:24.000It's the humiliation, it's the shame that comes with it, which they use it to their advantage, right?1.00
00:13:17.000So, it was a lot of phone calls with scammers.
00:13:21.000One of the most interesting conversations we had with Was with an Indian call center who told me that there was a bug in my Apple computer and he could fix it.0.98
00:15:37.000And I do know that there are people that get, they literally get kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centers through threat of death and torture.
00:17:09.000Myanmar and Cambodia were the two main spots.
00:17:12.000But now, because there's been a crackdown in both countries, Particularly in Cambodia, they're spreading to other places like Dubai and other places.
00:17:21.000But they still exist a lot in Myanmar.
00:17:26.000There's a large part of the country that is just controlled by different rebel groups.
00:17:30.000The government doesn't really have much control of that region.
00:17:34.000So the scam compounds and these, you know, a lot of them are Chinese criminal gangs that operate these scam compounds.0.73
00:17:41.000They're paying a fee, they're paying for the war, essentially.0.86
00:17:43.000They're giving money to the rebels in order to be able to work and You know, build these scam cities.
00:17:49.000But the scam city that I visited was like a mini Macau.
00:17:53.000It was these high rises, and it happened within a year or two.
00:17:56.000It went from flat, you know, regular forest jungle in Myanmar to skyscrapers, casinos.
00:18:06.000You know, one of the places I visited was in order to be able to talk to this scam compound, the guy who sort of runs the city, we had to wine and dine him.
00:20:41.000They built it up for business, for gambling, for tourists to come.
00:20:44.000Literally, they have go-kart tracks and they had pools with slides, a water park, and all that stuff.
00:20:53.000But no tourist in their right mind from anywhere in the world would want to go to this place in the world because, again, there's a war, it's poor, it's really difficult to access.
00:21:03.000We had to be smuggled into the country from Thailand.
00:21:06.000So obviously, that's all a front for what really brings in money, which is scams.
00:21:41.000Construction is there's a lot of unemployed people.
00:21:45.000People in the country, so that's not that difficult.
00:21:48.000Funding all comes from, a lot of it is from these Chinese criminal gangs who operate in the case of where I visited, it was a company called Yatai International.
00:21:58.000The head of Yatai International was a Chinese man who was living in Myanmar running this compound.
00:22:02.000He was eventually actually picked up by the authorities in Thailand.
00:22:06.000So the guy I spoke to was his number two.
00:22:08.000And he was trying to say that the guy was in prison because he was openly talking about corruption in China or something like that, which was not the case.
00:22:18.000But, yeah, and it's billions of dollars.
00:22:20.000I can't remember exactly, but there was.
00:22:52.000So it says from his bed, he said he sought work as a security guard in China but was tricked and apparently kidnapped, transported to Cambodia, and then sold into one of the country's many fortified scam compound facilities where workers labor around the clock to extract money from people online.
00:23:07.000When he resisted, Lee was beaten and tortured and then passed from one scam operator to another.
00:23:12.000He claimed his captors finally began to drain large quantities of his blood seven times in half a year.
00:23:19.000In the hospital, he pointed weakly at an infusion bag above his head that was the size of Each extraction, he said, in online articles, journalists began to describe his case as that of a blood slave.
00:23:31.000So, they're taking his blood for blood doping or for blood transfusions for other people?
00:25:18.000I mean, that's not a good response to start with.
00:25:19.000But even if that's the case, they're enslaved.
00:25:23.000But also, these people are scamming Americans.
00:25:25.000Last year, this is a crazy, this blew my mind.
00:25:30.000Just, I think, two months ago or something, the Consumer Federation of America issued their latest report, which was looking at scams last year.
00:25:38.000And Americans apparently lost, not apparently, they've estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year.
00:26:23.000It comes from the Chinese expression that means sort of fattening the pig.0.98
00:26:28.000So you fatten the pig, so you give a lot of love to your victim, or you pretend they're going to get a lot of money, you build their confidence and trust, and then you slaughter them.
00:26:38.000Basically, you take away all their money.
00:26:58.000At some point, the scammer encourages a target to shift the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform like WhatsApp or Telegram.
00:27:06.000They invest time in understanding the person's financial situation, family dynamics, and work to build a deep emotional connection.
00:27:13.000Scammers often spend weeks building these relationships.
00:27:17.000Then they introduce investment opportunities.
00:27:20.000They drop subtle hints about a once in a lifetime investment opportunity early in the relationship.
00:27:25.000They show pictures of a lavish lifestyle or talk about expensive purchases and experiences.
00:27:30.000Once scammers have gained pig butchering targets' trust, they introduce an exclusive investment opportunity, often claiming they've achieved significant financial success through it.
00:27:40.000Then they establish credibility, make the scam seem real.
00:27:43.000Scammers share fake screenshots and trading platform dashboards, stories of friends or an uncle who knows how it all works and made massive profits, along with professional looking documents and websites.
00:28:14.000Remember, there was that story of that banker, the CEO of a bank in Kansas that ultimately went bankrupt because he had stolen $400 million from the bank.
00:29:12.000And then he just got in too deep where they kept saying that in order to get the millions he had just made out, you know, months into this investment scam, they said that he has to pay a fee and it's like a tax, but you have to pay a 10% tax.
00:29:29.000And so at that point, you're so in, you've Lost so much money that, okay, if I only pay this 10% tax or if I only pay this fee.
00:29:35.000So he kept doing that, but then he started actually using money from his customers.1.00
00:29:39.000How the fuck does a guy who works in banking get sucked into something that stupid?1.00
00:30:09.000There was an incredible Reuters investigation done last year where they got a hold of internal Meta documents from Meta.
00:30:17.000And in the Meta documents, internal Meta documents, they estimated inside Meta, the worker, the different departments estimated that there were 15 billion ads every single day.
00:30:33.000That the users of their platforms, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, were exposed to around an estimated 15 billion scam ads every single day.
00:30:41.000Scams that were higher risk, that displayed clear signs of being fraudulent.
00:30:49.000They also estimated that they were, that year, they projected that they would make $16 billion.
00:30:57.000This is in 2024, I believe, or 2023, I'm not sure.
00:31:07.000That's 10% of their full profit at that time.
00:31:12.000So they're making a ton of money from this.
00:31:14.000And then this is where it gets really worrisome to me.
00:31:17.000Because of their personalized ad system, if a person clicks on a scam, you know those ads that you have like Elon Musk holding a thing and saying investment opportunity, and then you click it and you want to see what it is, or there's tons of these.
00:31:32.000I mean, there's gazillions of these out there.
00:31:34.000If you click it, you are more likely to be fed more of these ads.
00:31:38.000So it starts with just maybe you're exposed to one, and then suddenly in the next day, you're exposed to 100 of these scams, right?
00:31:50.000And then this is, I think, even the crazier part is that if you report these as scams, which a lot of users do, I think it's 100,000 reports every single week, if they have a 95 or over certainty meta, if their system sees that there's a 95% certainty or over that these are scams, they remove them.
00:32:12.000If there's less than 95%, let's say 94%, what they do is they give you a penalty fee.
00:32:18.000So you have to pay more, but they allow you to stay.
00:33:11.000They talk about how there are other companies out there that are doing a better job, but they are afraid of what that might mean.
00:33:16.000Aaron Ross Powell, Jamie put this into our AI sponsor, Perplexity.
00:33:19.000It says, Yes, Reuters reported that Meta charged some suspected scam advertisers higher advertising rates rather than banning them outright.
00:33:28.000A system described internally as penalty bids.
00:33:52.000What do you have to do to get off that platform?0.99
00:33:56.000Meta's automated systems would ban the advertiser at 95% confidence of fraud.
00:34:01.000Below that threshold, but still judged likely to be a scammer, the advertiser could remain but would have to pay more to win ad auctions and get ads shown.
00:34:11.000This wasn't simply a surcharge on every ad someone reported as suspicious.
00:37:38.000When we were making Onit, when we were making AlphaBrain, the nootropic memory enhancing formula, we used third party testing and we were finding stuff in the batch that was not supposed to be in there.
00:37:51.000And it's because they make all this stuff in one bin and they don't clean it.
00:37:57.000Wait, you took it to the lab when it got here to check it and test it?
00:38:26.000And so when we would get it, what you do is you send the ingredient list.
00:38:32.000Like, this is what they're supposed to do.
00:38:33.000They're supposed to add this, that, that, and this, and this is what your formula is.
00:38:37.000And then we would get it back, and then we would send it to a third party to have it tested, and we'd find things in it that were not supposed to be in there.
00:42:11.000Actual counterfeits, products falsely presented as a legitimate brand, have been documented.
00:42:17.000Examples include counterfeit Algin products, counterfeit now supplements, that's another good company, and allegations involving counterfeit.
00:45:08.000Playing video games with his friends at the same time, talking to this girl on Facebook, and said to his friend, Hey, I'm talking to this girl.
00:45:16.000I'm going to hang out and I'll talk to you later or something.
00:45:20.000I don't know, an hour later or something, the dad's in the living room.
00:45:22.000It's like 11 p.m., and he hears a loud noise, runs to the bathroom.
00:45:39.000They had an email address from the person that was contacting Gavin.
00:45:45.000Facebook took down that profile of this fake girl.
00:45:51.000A few weeks later, they had just buried their son.
00:45:53.000They started being contacted by family members, started being contacted by somebody who said they had those photos of Gavin and they would release them unless they gave them money.
00:46:05.000And he went and looked at the profile.
00:46:08.000It was a different profile, but the email address was the same.
00:46:12.000So basically, Facebook had taken down that particular profile, but had allowed the same email address to create other profiles.
00:46:29.000The representative became very involved in creating laws.0.99
00:46:33.000One of them is called, I think, Take It Down or something, that just passed recently under the Trump administration.
00:46:39.000But he's basically become sort of the voice of regulation for these platforms.
00:46:45.000And then there's another incredible one.
00:46:47.000I can't remember the name of the legislators behind it, but it's called the Safe Platforms Act.
00:46:55.000Where they're actually trying to make it easy for people to report, to make sure that these platforms are taking these ads and fake profiles down, and that is also putting the accountability on them.
00:47:09.000So if something happens, if you lose money, if your kid dies, that there is some accountability on these platforms because if they are making money from it, they should also be held responsible, right?
00:48:33.000I mean, this is what my friend Brigham from Ways to Well is trying to push through this current administration.
00:48:39.000And there's a lot of resistance to that, of course, because the pharmaceutical drug companies all want to own the peptides and sell them, just like they do with GLP 1s, which is also a peptide.
00:50:27.000Reuters' central finding Meta developed a playbook to delay mandatory advertiser identity checks while making scam ads harder for regulators to find in its public ad library.
00:50:39.000The investigation draws on internal documents and describes both genuine scam removal and efforts to manage the appearance of the problem, not simply solve it.
00:50:54.000So, Leslie, the woman who was talking to John Bon Jovi, you know what she does every day now?
00:50:59.000She goes on Facebook and she tries to tell people that are liking these fake celebrity profiles, that are commenting on them, be careful, this is a scam.
00:52:21.000The early days of AOL, my friend Barry Crimmins, Barry Crimmins was a great comic.
00:52:28.000From Boston, who was like very socially conscious, very politically active, just a genius guy.
00:52:36.000And he was sexually assaulted when he was young and found a whole network of people that were on AOL that were trading pedophile pornography and they were trading child pornography and grooming people online.
00:53:53.000I don't know exactly what they did, but this was one of the first examples of that, like where these companies should have been aware of this.
00:54:12.000And again, it is this idea of the shame around it and the belief that everybody that falls, For a scam is foolish and naive that the onus is put on the victims.
00:54:21.000I understand, but I mean, even AOL, I mean, they had to be dragged to get rid of this stuff.
00:54:26.000It wasn't simple as like they let them know, oh my God, we're on this right now.
00:54:30.000We're going to block this because it's serious.
00:55:42.000The summary I got from Perplexity said in here that there is evidence of notes being prepared for Zuckerberg, but they don't have any evidence necessarily that he had personal knowledge of what was on those notes or the.
00:55:59.000It says briefing notes prepared for Mark Zuckerberg about the cross border displacement of scams, but could not establish whether he saw them or received the briefing.
00:56:09.000The article, therefore, does not establish his personal knowledge of those notes.
00:57:09.000And this is why we need good journalism, good investigative journalism to find the stuff, the truth that people have a problem with.
00:57:16.000Yeah, you have to hold them to the fire because they have obligations to their shareholders and they'll do really shitty things in order to keep making sure that the profits keep rolling in because they have to justify their position and they're trying to make their way up the corporate ladder.
00:57:29.000That's what's weird about the corporations is that there's this diffusion of responsibility thing that happens when you're a part.
00:57:56.000Boy, is he a piece of shit, but we did it.1.00
00:57:58.000You know, I don't know if you ever heard the.1.00
00:58:01.000There's an audio recording of Hillary Clinton talking about this guy that she had helped get off that was, I think he was a child molester.
00:58:12.000They were talking about how she thought he did it.
00:59:40.000It says, when I was a 27 year old attorney doing legal aid work at the University of Arkansas, where I taught at Fayetteville, Arkansas, I was appointed by the local judge to represent a criminal defendant accused of rape.
00:59:51.000I asked to be relieved of that responsibility, but I was not.
00:59:54.000And I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did.
01:00:02.000Yeah, but it's, I think, a little different in terms of the lawyers, because if you believe in the Constitution, you believe everybody has a right to a lawyer, right?
01:00:38.000Again, I'm just saying that this is a part of being a defense attorney, but these situations come up where your morals and your ethics have to be abandoned in order to pursue your career.
01:00:50.000True, but I do think that there is a profit part of meta that doesn't apply to when you're a lawyer, right?
01:06:16.000As concerns grow regarding future dangers of unregulated AI, it's also important to highlight the harms it is enabling right now, said Emily Peterson Kasson, Director of Competition and Marketing Fairness at the Consumer Federation of America.
01:06:31.000Fraudulent content and scams supercharged by AI are taking over social media platforms and costing us billions.
01:07:29.000I put myself on dating websites and on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all of those platforms.
01:07:36.000And I started commenting on some of these celebrity profiles, fake, knowing they were fake, but I just wanted to see what happened.
01:07:43.000And I went to the bathroom and I came down.
01:07:46.000And as soon as I opened my phone, I had already dozens of these messages.
01:07:50.000At one point, I actually continued talking to them.
01:07:53.000So at one point, I was talking to three Keanu Reeves, two Brad Pitts, several George Clooney's.
01:08:01.000And I had a sort of a relationship with the one George Clooney, who was the more believable of the bunch and who sent me a video that I showed in Super Scam Me, where yes, it's not perfect, but.
01:08:13.000If you really want to believe it in his case, I mean, he was saying good morning, Mary Zell.
01:08:18.000Well, also, if you are older and you have bad vision, yeah, and you're not very sophisticated in the ways of the internet, exactly, you don't know what AI means, you don't know like a robotic, yeah, it was plausible.
01:08:31.000And Leslie's videos from John Bon Jovi looked very real.
01:08:34.000I saw them, they did look real, and that was a year ago.
01:08:38.000I mean, now you don't even need to, you know, you can pretend you're anyone, you can create anything on AI, it's crazy.
01:10:11.000But he was using, yeah, the fake photos from an actual guy.
01:10:15.000And then when I reached out to the real guy, it was a guy called Sam Havelock, and I said, hey, I've been having essentially what I thought was a several month relationship with you, but it turns out it wasn't you.
01:11:26.000He thought he was going to be a target because, again, he's a four star general and he needs my help and he needs money to pay for his trip back to the US because they're not regular commercial flights.
01:11:38.000He needs like $17,000, I think it was.
01:11:42.000And we were trying to figure out okay, now we need to figure out how to find this guy and confront him.
01:12:15.000You were supposed to have sent me this money, and I'm trying to keep him in the relationship because I need to string him along, right?
01:12:22.000So I'm constantly saying, Hey, I'm actually at the hospital pretending that Mary Zell is at the hospital, and this is happening, and telling him that I have appendicitis.
01:12:31.000And then he's like, Okay, send me a photo.
01:12:33.000So I had to get my husband to run back home, get me the wig, get me the fake nose and the glasses, and send him lots of photos of fake Mary Zell from the hospital with a catheter in my arm and pretending like this is real.
01:12:50.000And I don't think it was as advanced, but it was like the fastest and easiest way to keep stringing this guy along because I was tricking him as well, right?
01:12:58.000Using his tactics to string him along.
01:13:01.000And then it was after a while, got out of the hospital, and he finally gave me that address that led me to Houston to that woman.
01:13:34.000So she starts receiving, and she told us this, it was crazy, tens of thousands of dollars in checks and money boxes, boxes of cash that she then launders through her or puts the money, deposits into her accounts, transfers to crypto.
01:13:49.000She never thought about just stealing the money because he stole all the money from her.
01:13:53.000So I asked her that as I'm interviewing her, she receives a message from him because he's supposed to have received the money too.
01:16:00.000And yeah, and I think a lot of it is the platforms allowing it, profiting from it, the banks as well, these dating websites as well.
01:16:09.000And our government not doing a lot enough.
01:16:11.000But I do think we have to sort of really try to figure out how to address the loneliness epidemic because a lot of these romance scams start because of that.
01:17:13.000On us to sort of reach out to our elderly and make sure they're okay, but I think partly is also the government should be doing more to address this.
01:17:20.000Well, it's not even just elderly, it's young people.
01:19:14.000Because the idea of it doesn't even seem attractive to me.
01:19:16.000I think most people that want to talk to an online person don't want to do it in a public place.
01:19:20.000They would rather do it at home alone and pretend.
01:19:24.000And then also, they're all probably on a bunch of psych medications, so they probably believe it's a real person or can justify it or, you know, just they're so numb.
01:19:33.000They can just, that's who they talk to now.
01:19:57.000There's a consumer electronics show that was in Vegas recently, and they had an AI assistant, and it was a hot Asian lady with big boobs.1.00
01:20:49.000See if you can find that because I was reading this article about it yesterday.
01:20:53.000They've, I forget where they've done this, but these scientists have taken human tissue and encased like a robotic finger in this human tissue.
01:21:41.000And it just, if you think about what that is now and then think about like what even the concept of AI was when the Terminator came out, just add a few decades to what this is.
01:21:52.000And you have all sorts of nightmare scenarios.
01:21:56.000Real physical bodies that are made out of human skin.0.99
01:26:48.000If you think that the rabbit hole is bad as it is already, then if you actually start living with, Sort of the rabbit hole next to you, you know, talking about all this stuff.
01:26:57.000If you start living with a Hitler or a Charles Manson, right?
01:27:00.000Or somebody with like a, yeah, with more conspiracy theorists or more of whatever, right?
01:27:09.000You can then, if you think, yeah, if you think rabbit holes are bad, you just wait until this happens and you're living with this.1.00
01:27:15.000Well, not only that, we know that bots manipulate people's perceptions of things and the bots manipulate narratives and they unleash bots on any social issue or any.
01:28:26.000You have an LLM that has taken the entire.
01:28:32.000Volume of human discourse in films and movies and social interactions and articles and stories and novels and books and taking all of that and it's applying that to human psychology in real time.
01:31:44.000El Señor del Sombrero, the man with the hat, because in this photo he's not with it, but he usually always wore one of those rancher hats, like a Setsun, but the summer Setsuns, that's what he wore.0.56
01:32:17.000That's one of the only photos that exists of El Mayo.
01:32:20.000He was interviewed by this journalist from Proceso, Julio Scherer, I think his name is.
01:32:25.000Yeah, Julio Scherer, it's written there.
01:32:27.000Julio Scherer Garcia was one of the only journalists ever to interview El Mayo.
01:32:30.000And then his daughter interviewed El Mayo many years later.
01:32:34.000El Mayo contacted her and said, I interviewed her, your dad interviewed me, I really liked him, he passed away, I'd like you to come back and interview me.
01:32:43.000Because he wanted to show, he trusted this one journalist and he wanted to show he was sort of a ghost figure, but I think he wanted to show that he was a human being, that he had, you know, that people portrayed him as responsible for all the violence.
01:32:58.000And I think he wanted, you know, he wanted a little sort of, I don't know, a little understanding from people, I think.
01:33:29.000Greasing the palms, oiling the hands of a lot of politicians.
01:33:34.000So the governor of Sinaloa was basically working for the cartel.
01:33:39.000The mayor, the former mayor, Of Sinaloa was very, like all big positions, important positions, but not just in Sinaloa, outside of Sinaloa.
01:33:46.000But the story about what happened is what led Darren to want to do this doc, which is so good.
01:33:51.000Which was this is the most met once El Chapo is come extradited to the US, El Mayo is the most wanted man.
01:34:28.000So that is the sort of the Shakespearean saga of it all.
01:34:32.000It was the son of El Chapo, Joaquin Guzman, who tricked him.
01:34:38.000They had this partnership, the El Mayos and the Chapos, forever since I think it was since El Chapo left prison.
01:34:45.000The first time they had this partnership that they would build this cartel and they would share the profits, and each of them had sort of this specialty that they would run.
01:34:53.000And Joaquin Guzman, who happens to be also his godson, called him and said, We're having a problem.
01:35:33.000He's immediately, they kill the bodyguards.
01:35:35.000He's immediately handcuffed and blindfolded and put on a plane.
01:35:39.000And Joaquin Guzman, El Chapo's son, himself personally, basically hand delivers him like a box of pizza to the American authorities.
01:35:49.000Because he wanted to basically give something for lesser time for his brother who had just been caught, Ovidio Guzman, and for his dad who's in prison.
01:35:59.000And he wanted to sort of give himself in and hope that it would help if he brought somebody important.
01:37:06.000There are many people involved as well.
01:37:08.000But unlike El Chapo, who pled not guilty, he decided to plead guilty and he's now facing life in prison.
01:37:16.000He is charged, sentenced to life in prison in the U.S.
01:37:19.000But his son, El Chapo's sons, and El Mayo's son, who had been apprehended many years ago, have all gotten these cooperation agreements.0.86
01:37:29.000So, what a lot of people who are sort of critics of this tactic are saying is that it seems what's happening is that these narco traffickers.0.67
01:37:39.000That were responsible for a lot of deaths in the United States because of drugs are now, through these cooperation agreements, coming to the United States for these sort of paradise retirements.
01:37:54.000Because they're doing a lot less time in prison than they would have.
01:37:58.000And we're allowing this because it's the only way to get to other people.
01:38:05.000But these people are not being held responsible for what they did.
01:38:09.000It's a tactic that I think a lot of people have a problem with.
01:38:52.000This is the big question mark, and the documentary raises that as well.
01:38:57.000Is that the American government is saying that they had no say in this?
01:39:00.000It wasn't their idea, it wasn't their decision, and that they weren't actually involved in any of this.
01:39:04.000That they were alerted, that there was a high profile person coming on that plane, and so they were there at the airport ready, but that they weren't involved in negotiating this with El Chapo San, Joaquin Guzman.
01:39:17.000A lot of people don't believe that, and a lot of people.
01:39:19.000Think that there was obviously a lot of negotiating behind doors that happened in order to bring him in.
01:39:28.000And the government of Mexico wasn't happy with any of this.0.88
01:39:31.000The negotiation was if you bring El Mayo in, we will reduce, you know, we'll put you in prison probably, but we will reduce your sentence.0.88
01:39:38.000We'll reduce the sentence of your brother, Ovidio Guzman, and we will do something to make your dad's life better in prison.0.88
01:39:45.000So why wasn't the government of Mexico happy?
01:39:48.000Because they believed that there was interference in their own country, that they basically kidnapped.
01:39:54.000A Mexican member without their knowledge.0.50
01:40:00.000I mean, even with El Chapo, it was with obviously the cooperation and full support of the American government, but it was Mexican military that caught him.
01:40:10.000And then they, the government, extradited him to the United States because they realized they couldn't keep him in prison.
01:40:38.000Right, but the problem is that the government is insanely corrupt.
01:40:42.000It is, but I think Claudia Chinbaun, who's the president of Mexico, would say that because previous governments were corrupt, that doesn't mean that this is okay or that I am corrupt.
01:41:23.000We detailed the amount of assassinations that were during the last election, and there was something like 35 different people were assassinated.
01:42:36.000And in a lot of situations, I've interviewed.0.83
01:42:39.000Corrupt policemen and federal agents, and a lot of times, I mean, not so much with the federal agents, but definitely with the local policemen.
01:42:48.000What they say is, it's not even about the money they pay you.0.96
01:42:51.000It's the fact that if we don't do it, they will kill me or kill my family.
01:43:12.000And I did a story for the last season of Trafficked, which is about Cartel USA, which is the cartel's presence here in the United States.
01:43:20.000Not only sort of distribution of drugs, as we all know, the violence that accompanies the cartel or drug trafficking in general, but also the corruption.
01:43:28.000And I'll never forget interviewing this guy from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and him and an investigator in that investigation as well.
01:43:48.000And they're corrupting politicians, they're corrupting agents, they're corrupting Border Patrol because just the amount of money is so large that when we're talking about millions of dollars that they can just hand out, it's very hard not to be corruptible.
01:44:14.000A peer reviewed study recorded nearly 500 assassinations of politicians in Mexico during the 2000 to 2021, primarily affecting incumbent mayors, former mayors, candidates for municipal positions.
01:45:11.000Tell the people the story about that because it's so insane that they confiscated these guns and then the cops had confiscated them.
01:45:18.000This guy somehow had access to them, throws them in his trunk and just drives across to Mexico and sells them to the cartels.
01:45:24.000So the story was about gun trafficking, how basically.0.61
01:45:29.000I think it's 70 something percent of the guns found in Mexico in crime scenes are American guns, so American guns are responsible for the violence in Mexico.
01:45:39.000And we wanted to show what's called the Iron River, the flow of guns from the US, Los Angeles all the way, or California all the way to Sinaloa.0.80
01:45:49.000We met in the middle of the night a guy who was in his sort of warehouse, undisclosed location in Los Angeles, and he had a room full of guns.
01:45:57.000He had AK 47s, he had, look, it was, Similar to an AR 15.
01:46:04.000And he said he gets most of his guns, a few that he pointed out he had bought from LAPD, guns that had been confiscated, and he paid, I think it was like $700 for an AK or something like that.
01:46:26.000I'm very bad with names of guns, but it was a similar gun to an AR 15 that had a scope and it's used by the Marines.
01:46:35.000And all the gun people are going to get really mad that I'm not going to say the exact name, but basically, he told me that it was sold by a Marine who was selling him these guns.
01:46:46.000And then he packed them into a trunk of a car, and a woman, because they're more unsuspecting, drove the guns down to Mexico.
01:46:55.000This was crazy she crossed, there was nobody stopped her car, nobody checked her car, because going south, there's barely any border control.
01:47:09.000The middle man guy is taking the guns out.
01:47:11.000I see another guy come in and immediately buy one of the guns.
01:47:15.000And then, yeah, we follow the whole supply of guns all the way to Sinaloa and spent the last few days there in Sinaloa, these sicarios from the Sinaloa cartel shooting guns and also showing us they had these bunkers built under these houses in the Sierra Madres mountains of Sinaloa, which are very much cartel territory.
01:47:36.000Like the military, you know, the authorities don't really go there.
01:47:42.000We went to one of them, and it was full of every single gun, weapons, and ammunition that they were saving for a potential war with a rival cartel.
01:47:53.000And I think a few weeks later, they were actually used in the Culiacanazo.
01:47:59.000When the authorities, the Mexican authorities, got Ovidio Guzman, they arrested Ovidio Guzman, who's one of El Chapo's sons, and the cartel.
01:48:52.000It was found that the ATF was allowing the flow of guns or some guns across the border to Mexico because they were trying to track it and find out where they were ending up so they could build a bigger case.
01:49:07.000That recently, that very same situation happened with fentanyl in D.W.S. You haven't heard this story?
01:49:12.000So in New Mexico, the DEA, there was a whistleblower that came out and spoke to the AP, an amazing AP investigation, where a whistleblower came out and said basically that the DEA in New Mexico was allowing.
01:49:26.000Millions of pills of fentanyl to go out on the streets in order to build bigger cases.
01:49:33.000And they would watch, they would be there doing surveillance and watching the distribution of these pills.
01:49:39.000And of course, they know that some of these pills ended up killing people.
01:49:42.000The whistleblower talks about this one particular case of a kid, months old kid, who sort of picked something from the floor and because of exposure ended up dying.
01:49:50.000And he kept on telling his superiors, This is not okay.
01:49:54.000I know you guys are trying to build bigger cases, but people are dying.
01:49:58.000And then they Did not, they didn't do much.
01:50:02.000It went, became a whistleblower complaint.
01:50:10.000And there was at the time sort of a standard that if you have, if the safety of people is at risk when you're allowing these cases to bill, then you should stop distributing, allowing for the distribution of fentanyl.
01:50:25.000This was in place, which is why the whistleblower decided this is also illegal.
01:50:29.000What we're doing is against the regulations, essentially.
01:50:31.000But when this was Went up to the top and they started looking at it.
01:50:36.000They not only decided not to do anything, this was before the whistleblower spoke to the journalists and before this became public, right?
01:50:42.000Not only did they decide not to do this, but they decided to change the regulations so that it's not that idea of security for civilians is not needed anymore.
01:50:55.000This is a PBS article about the Justice Department watchdog.
01:51:01.000See, the department rewrote those rules in 2024 to afford.
01:51:05.000To afford law enforcement far more discretion in whether to take action to prevent fentanyl tracking, citing the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.0.99
01:51:48.000So it was, to me, this is sort of the new, fast, and furious in terms of.
01:51:53.000Two additional DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico have come forward in recent weeks, including one who said his colleagues were there failed to seize 350,000 fentanyl pills that they learned about during the very first call they intercepted in a 2024 wiretap.
01:52:08.000Shipment was part of an investigation that resulted in the largest fentanyl seizure in DEA history.
01:52:13.000Court records show agents had the opportunity to seize thousands of fentanyl pills, but allowed trafficking to continue for months as they investigated.
01:52:21.000And crazy, the campaign the DEA had at this time was one pill can kill you.
01:54:16.000But the difference is that they did it very differently.
01:54:19.000So what Portugal did, And this is important is that two years before they decriminalized drugs, they started creating rehab facilities and treatment centers for people with addiction.
01:54:30.000Two years before, before they even decriminalized.
01:54:32.000So when they fully decriminalized it, those places, those rehab centers, treatment centers were in place already.
01:54:40.000Plus, there's universal health care, which I believe is a very, very good thing.
01:54:44.000What happened in Oregon is that only a year after they decriminalized the drugs did they actually start investing.
01:54:51.000And putting some of the money in the treatment centers.
01:54:55.000In Portugal, if you're caught with up to 10 day supply of drugs, even if it's heroin, you would then, that's the decriminalization part of it all, you would go to a sort of a panel with a legal person that represents the government essentially, and two social workers or mental health workers or addiction specialists, and they would tell you, okay, you can either.
01:55:21.000Essentially, go to prison or suffer some sort of punitive action, or you can go to rehab, to a treatment center.
01:55:28.000And the vast majority of people decided they want to go to a treatment center.
01:56:35.000However, recently they have decided to allocate much more of the money again towards killing the fishermen at sea and fighting the war on drugs.
01:56:44.000And they're now taking money away from rehab facilities, from Medicare, from fentanyl test strips, which I think are incredibly important, from grants for naloxone, which is incredibly important, life saving medication.
01:57:00.000And they're removing those grants and spending billions of dollars in these covert operations in Ecuador and the Pacific and going after, I think.
01:57:46.000And a lot of these people that get these pills.
01:57:48.000And they don't know that they have fentanyl in them.
01:57:51.000A lot of these people, like perhaps someone is taking anti anxiety medication and you get a counterfeit anti anxiety medication that has fentanyl in it.1.00
01:58:51.000But also, American citizens that drive it across.
01:58:52.000A lot of the apprehensions in a large percentage is American citizens.
01:58:55.000You know, Michael Douglas, one of the ways he made his money when his dad gave him $10,000 when he became of age, like this is all you're going to get.
01:59:04.000The way he paid his way through college is he sold marijuana and he brought it over.
02:01:14.000He told me my uncle basically just hired a Colombian chemist to come here and teach us how to make fentanyl.
02:01:22.000We paid him $40,000 and now we're making fentanyl.
02:01:26.000And he showed me it was a one kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl because at the beginning they mixed it with heroin.
02:01:33.000And it was right at the beginning, as you can see.
02:01:35.000And then to where we're now, no more heroin, it's all fentanyl.
02:01:39.000Well, we met because of your work on the Oxycontin Express following the opioid crisis.
02:01:45.000I remember watching that, just being stunned.
02:01:49.000Because that to me, and for people who don't know that story, the way they were operating it was Florida had these pain management centers, and you would go to a pain management center, and all they were really doing was writing you prescriptions for opiates.
02:02:06.000So you could just go from one pain management center to the next one, and all you had to do was say, I have a backache, my back hurts, I had a back operation, I have a herniated disc, and they would just hook you up with pills.
02:02:18.000And so these people would go to dozens of these places, get bags of pills, and then drive them north.
02:02:24.000And it just started this addiction chain that went all the way into Kentucky and Ohio, and that's the Oxycontin Express.
02:02:32.000I just couldn't believe that was real.
02:02:35.000And the courage that you and your husband had to do that investigation and to put yourself out there like that and be the face of it, and you cost those people billions, billions of dollars.
02:02:47.000If it had not been for you and your investigation, who knows how long.
02:02:51.000That whole loophole would have continued.
02:02:59.000I went inside one of these clinics with a secret camera, filmed inside, and then we were actually filming outside one of the biggest pain clinics there called American Pain.
02:03:09.000My husband actually ended up doing a documentary about it.
02:03:11.000It's these twin brothers, the George brothers, who ran the biggest prescription pill operation in American history.
02:03:19.000They were like the Pablo Escobar of the United States in terms of pills.
02:03:23.000And we were filming outside their clinic because we went to Kentucky and saw how a lot of the bottles next to overdose bodies were coming from this one clinic, American Pain.
02:03:32.000So we decided next time in Florida, we're going to film outside.
02:03:35.000And within minutes, we were accosted by these guys, the brothers, who chased us down 995.
02:03:43.000I contacted one of the sheriff's department people that I'd spoken to the day before, and I told her, hey, we're being followed by the American Pain guys.
02:04:17.000I think they were just confused what's happening.
02:04:19.000Because I'd called 911, they showed up and they gave an excuse that they thought I was a crazy ex girlfriend.
02:04:25.000And it turns out that the FBI and the DEA already had wiretaps on them at the time.
02:04:30.000Our story and our investigation made it into the wiretaps because they were openly talking about this how these journalists were messing around where they shouldn't.
02:04:38.000And they ended up going to federal prison.
02:04:40.000And my husband did the whole story about the rise and fall of these brothers and interviewed them while they were in prison and after when they were released.
02:05:41.000And after that series was released, apparently they were reviewing because they had the Sackler family had like gotten some sort of a fine.
02:05:51.000But one of the reasons why they were willing to give the money was it was going to give them some kind of immunity.
02:06:00.000And so there was talk after that documentary.
02:06:03.000I wonder what happened to that immunity was going to be.
02:06:36.000It's so good, and it's really accurate, and it really shows you how they had these beautiful girls go to these clinics and sell this and tell people.
02:06:57.000Following the legal block, a new national opioid settlement was reached in January of 2025.
02:07:02.000Under this revised agreement, Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers agreed to pay $7.4 billion, but significantly, the deal stripped the Sackler family of future civil immunity, meaning they can still face individual lawsuits.
02:07:26.000Imagine how many people lost their dad, lost their wife, lost their family members.
02:07:32.000How many people's lives were destroyed but lived?
02:07:35.000How many people got addicted, lost everything but survived and now live in abject poverty because they were drug addicts, because they were told that this stuff wasn't addictive?
02:09:29.000I don't, when talking about, you know, I've spoken to you about this a lot, but when I spend so much of my time talking to the traffickers and the scammers and all the people that we consider the bad guys, right?
02:09:43.000And more often than not, they are the consequence of broken systems, right?
02:09:51.000The crushing inequality that exists in the world, again, going back to the 10% living under the poverty line, lack of education, lack of job opportunities, growing up in shitty countries without opportunities and options.
02:10:07.000And that is, I think, what's, I don't think, I know, it's leading a lot of people to work in these black markets and to become traffickers and scammers and all of that.
02:10:16.000And I think that, you know, Our tendency is to let's go after them and imprison them and make sure we're using the full might and power of this country and resources to go after these people instead of actually looking at the root cause, whether that's the consumption of drugs, the demand for drugs, or the people that are providing those drugs.
02:10:37.000If we use some of that money instead of enforcement in actually working on the demand or helping, help me out.
02:10:52.000Slower the demand, lower the demand, sorry.
02:10:55.000That's what happens when you talk for so long.
02:10:57.000If you help them lower the demand, if you work on lowering the demand and you actually, in terms of the people that are operating in these systems, address the reality of the situation, which is inequality and lack of opportunities, I think you'll do a much better job.
02:11:25.000Right, but how do you curb the demand of something that is always like drugs have always been a part of our society, and there's legal drugs that are a part of our society, like alcohol, and then there's drugs that have always been a part of our society that aren't legal but are in demand, like cocaine.
02:11:41.000But let's talk about the opioid crisis, right?
02:11:45.000What President Trump is doing and saying he's doing is he's fighting the war on Sentinel, right?
02:11:49.000By going after these boats in the Pacific and these, you know, fishing boats in Ecuador and closing the border.0.79
02:11:56.000And closing the border, which is fantastic.
02:11:59.000And not allowing criminals in, criminals.
02:12:03.000But what he's doing at the same time now, unfortunately, is after calling this a public health crisis, which I'm so happy he did, is he's also removing money, I just said this before, removing money from grants for test strips and Narcan and from the treatment centers that actually can curb demand.
02:12:22.000What people need is access to methadone clinics, to treatment centers and rehab centers that aren't scams.
02:12:29.000I've reported on scam rehab centers as well.
02:12:32.000That are actually incentivized to treat people.
02:12:35.000Because without that, we can go, as long as there is demand, there is going to be a supply.
02:12:42.000I mean, one of the things that, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I went to the White House with former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard.
02:12:54.000They're a part of this IBAGANE initiative.
02:12:57.000And that's one thing that I was really happy that Trump listened to and that he's willing to do that and he's pushing this through.1.00
02:13:03.000Ibogaine is one of the most effective treatments for people that have addictions because it doesn't just rewire the way your brain associates drugs and it explains to you what is causing you to have this problem.
02:13:16.000Like, what is this emotional connection that you have to this?
02:13:21.000What are the problems that you have in your past?
02:13:24.000Like, it gives you a very bizarre and very intrusive overview of your life that apparently is super uncomfortable and it's not recreational in any way, shape, or form.
02:13:34.000No one's going to do Ibogaine for funsies.
02:13:37.000It's something that people only do when you're on your last leg and you're trying to figure out how to survive.
02:13:43.000But it's helped so many soldiers, so many people with PTSD, and so many people with brain trauma.
02:13:50.000It's helped people with traumatic brain injuries, it's neuroregenerative, it does some weird stuff.
02:13:56.000And I'm really hoping that with this, it will eventually become profitable for them to have Ibogaine clinics.
02:14:06.000So it's something that they'll say, well, instead of profiting off of these people being addicted to drugs, Some people are going to be profiting off of people being completely cured of these problems.
02:14:17.000And so, this could in turn change the way people interact with drugs, change, and it also opens the door for other potential psychedelic therapy uses.
02:14:33.000So, MAPS has done fantastic work with MDMA and soldiers who have PTSD.
02:14:39.000And apparently, I mean, it's one of the best, most effective treatments for just.
02:14:46.000Coming to grips with the horrors of what you've seen, the horrors of war, seeing your friends blown up, and just being involved in combat missions.
02:14:57.000And one of the most effective things that MAPS has ever found is this MDMA usage, and they're pushing this through.
02:15:02.000So there's been many people that are working really hard to try to establish legitimate uses for psychedelic drugs that, I mean, I don't think we should put drugs into all one banner because drugs are meth.
02:15:19.000Fentanyl drugs are the but drugs are also psilocybin, which is shown to have an incredible relief for people that are dying of cancer, people that end of life anxiety.
02:15:32.000There's Larry Hagman, remember him from Dallas?
02:15:46.000Larry Hagman was on CNN once and they were talking to him and he was talking, they were asking him about death and he said, I really don't have a fear of death because.
02:15:54.000I took LSD once and I had this incredibly beautiful experience, and it relieved me of my fear of death.
02:16:00.000You know, like that's one of the things that is a positive thing about.
02:17:08.000And credit to Dan Patrick for also funding that and pushing it through.0.99
02:17:14.000Although I think he does some really ridiculous shit when it comes to THC.0.97
02:17:18.000But the pushing this through, one of the best aspects of this is generally psychedelic drugs are thought of as a left wing hippie thing.0.99
02:17:28.000And we're seeing it being embraced in the military community because we realize so many of these people.
02:17:34.000Have sacrificed everything to go over there.
02:18:37.000It's a crazy substance that is here that can help human beings.0.99
02:18:42.000And it's being thought of as a drug, and it's Schedule I, which is crazy because Schedule I has no legitimate medical use, and clearly it does.
02:21:09.000And then you march out through the jungle with them when they deliver the cocaine.
02:21:12.000Fast because, yeah, I mean, from the place where they're actually mixing it all, we had to get out of there fast because the locals had seen cameras and we had to, remember, we had to run out of the jungle without a light in the middle of the night in the Amazon.
02:21:29.000And then, yeah, and then we filmed with the kids.
02:21:32.000That was a Called, he was the backpacker dude who had to haul dozens of kilos of cocaine in his back days in, days out, in the middle of the night.
02:21:44.000Really dangerous work, seen many of his friends being killed.
02:21:47.000And I asked him, Why do you do this kind of work?
02:21:49.000He said, I always wanted to go to college.
02:22:24.000And it, you know, the thing about people in Mexico will tell you that this problem exists because of the demand for these drugs in the United States.
02:22:41.000Start investing a lot of money in treatment centers in access to drugs like ibogaine and buprenorphine and methadone.
02:22:50.000And just there's, yeah, if you even if even if it's just like 10% of the money that you spend on enforcement, let's put that on actually treating the demand side of it.
02:23:13.000You know, I talked to this guy once who's a drug addict, and one of the saddest things he said to me is, Drugs are the only thing that make me happy.
02:23:22.000Because if I don't have drugs, what do I have?
02:23:24.000It's a little bit like scams, actually, in a way, right?
02:23:26.000It's like scams, like having this person that I talk to is the only thing that keeps me happy.
02:23:30.000So the real work should be done on fortifying human beings and make them a viable part of society with real community and love and teach people how to live like that.
02:23:43.000What's ailing us is that we're all broken, which is why we need drugs.
02:23:47.000And then, if we fail and misstep, which we all will eventually, there is a system there to hold us and help us, and a government that is interested in protecting us.