#388 - Cartel Insider Exposes ‘Sasquatch’ Triple Murder You Won’t Believe | David Holthouse

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We'll talk about it. Cool. But just right before we started, we were talking about the Operation Odessa movie, which is one of the most insane documentaries ever. I was surprised because when I was doing some background research on you and I saw that, I was like, no shit. I'm like, that was one of my top 10 movies I've probably ever seen. So why don't you explain that one real quick for people? How did you get introduced to that one? Yeah. So Operation Odessa was directed by a really good friend of mine, a longtime colleague, Tiller Russell. And, uh, he'd been working on that story for about a year, trying to get access to this Russian gangster named, uh, Ludwig Feinberg, AKA Tarzan, because, um, Tiller and I had worked on a show together, uh, that actually, I think never actually made it to air that was on about, um, undercover agents. Okay. And there was this one undercover agent that we interviewed that was like the DEA's top Russian mob guy. And off camera, Tiller asked him, okay, like, what's the craziest case that you ever worked? And this guy was like, bar none, the first case I ever worked. And he told us the story of Operation Odessa, which was that this Russian mobster Tarzan got connected with a Colombian trafficker named Juan Almeida and a Cuban spy known by Tony Yester. And this is right after the fall of the Soviet Union. And Tarzan had connections in the former Soviet Union to get like surplus military hardware. Cause in like, you know, in Russia, right after the fall, like no one was minding this. And so like you could get motorcycles, military motorcycles, AK-47s, RPGs, whatever, right? All these like military generals and officers on down the line weren't getting paychecks. Okay. And so they started this, this trio, they, they connected at this, uh, strip club that Tarzan ran in Miami, uh, called Porky's cause he was a big fan of the movie. Okay. So he named a strip club Porky's and they started off, uh, moving like motorcycles, to the, uh, to a cartel in Columbia. Okay. To the Cali cartel. Yeah. And from there it went to the cartel, asked them if they could get like, uh, like a heavy military transport helicopter, which they could use to like move, like, you know, tons of coke with by hooking it up on a, you know, on a cable hook. And they brokered that deal successfully and like transported this massive Soviet, uh, military helicopter to Columbia using a transport plane. Holy shit. Yeah. And so after they pulled that off, the cartel was like, can you get us a submarine? Okay. And so that's the story of Operation Odessa. That's the, you know, that's the story of the film. And, uh, Wasn't there a famous scene in there or one of the parts I remember where they're sitting in a sauna and the dude's like, you want a nuke? Yeah. So, so the three, like the Tony Yester is like straight out of Scarface. He was a Cuban intelligence agent that Castro sent over. He was like, you want a nuke? Yeah. And so Tony Yester was a trained fighter pilot and trained intelligence agent that came over on the boat lift with the intention of getting involved in drug trafficking, which he did. But after a couple of years of sending money back, as he was ordered to, he was like, you know, I can be a spy and get my own thing going. So he kept funneling money back to Castro, but, uh, he also had a, you know, his side business going. And, um, yeah. And one of the senior referencing was he went to Russia with Tarzan, uh, while they were trying to broker the submarine deal. And, um, all the military guys, the Soviet military guys wanted, wanted them to go in a sauna because a lot of butt business is done there, you know, it's kind of a thing in Russia. Mm-hmm. And, uh, We all get naked and sweaty and do business. Exactly. You know, there's a thing like when you're naked, like you, you see one another as you really are. Right. And, and Tiller and I, the jumping around Tiller and I, when we were making Operation Odessa, we went to like a Russian mafia sauna in Moscow with Tarzan. It was like part of like, you know, building rapport with him. Like we had to do the thing with like the getting beat with the, you know, the evergreen branches and the, the whole, you know, fucking thing and drinking beer and eating shrimp. I still have the hat from that. It's on a place. You know, all these like mob guys. So anyway, but Tony, you know, Tony's Cuban and he's like, you know, as he told the story, he's like Tarzan, I'm from Cuba, man. I don't, I don't do this. Get naked with other guys thing, you know, and Tarzan, but Tarzan was in the sauna with the, with the Soviet, but former Soviet military officers. And he came out at one point and he's like, Tony, they're saying they can sell us a nuclear weapon. Should we buy a nuclear weapon? Tony's like, fuck no, man. No, we're here to buy a submarine. Like stop. No, no, no, no, no, no, stop with the nuclear weapon talk. Right. But, you know, my God. Yeah. But that actually shows you how crazy shit was, you know, in the Soviet union after the collapse, it was just like, anything goes, they were just trying to sell anything and everything that was left behind. Yeah, dude. So what year was that? When they were making no, when you were filming, when you were filming? Oh, I would say 2014, 2014. Yeah. How much time did you guys spend in Moscow? Uh, just about a week. What was it? What was it like? Man, it was sketchy. And, um, we were warned by that DEA agent before we went to Moscow. He was like, look, you guys should assume from the day one, when you land that you're under surveillance, that your hotel rooms are bugged. They're being watched constantly. Partly just because you're an American documentary crew, but also because of who you're there to talk to, you know, assume that they know what you're doing. And so we were like really cautious the first few days we were there, but we were really cautious the first few days we were there, but we were really cautious the first few days we were there, but we were really cautious. And so we were staying at we were there, but we were really cautious. And so we were staying at the Four Seasons. It just opened cautious. It just opened right off red square, like five the Four Seasons. It just opened right off red square, like five star hotel. And, uh, was it nice? right off red square, like five star hotel. It was awesome. It was like, star hotel. It was awesome. It was like, you know, heated floors. I mean, It was awesome. I mean, it was super, it was super Lux. Yeah. you know, heated floors. Yeah. And, um, compared to DC, it was super, it was super Lux. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we were thought we were And we, we were thought we were being careful with the footage. We being careful with the footage. We thought we were sending a copy of each thought we were sending a copy of each day's footage via FedEx back to LA. That day's footage via FedEx back to LA. That was one copy. The second copy we were was one copy. The second copy we were leaving in the hotel safe. And the third leaving in the hotel safe. And the third copy was with, uh, our line producer. copy was with, uh, our line producer. Okay. So we thought we had three copies of the footage and one was leaving the footage and one was leaving the country. And there were these Chechen country. And there were these Chechen secret police, you know, guards. They secret police, you know, guards. They were not so secret because they're, you were not so secret because they're, you know, they're pretty easy to spot and know, they're pretty easy to spot and they're all over the, the tourist area. they're all over the, the tourist area. Chechen secret police. Yeah, they got Chechen secret police. Yeah, they got beards. They got beards. They wear like beards. They got beards. They wear like kind of ill-fitting off the rack suits. kind of ill-fitting off the rack suits. They're all like super ripped. You know, they're under cover. They're You know, they're under cover. They're not in uniform, but like, you know who not in uniform, but like, you know who they are. they are. Is there any reason they're Is there any reason they're Chechen? Chechen? Putin likes Chechens. Okay. All right. They're just, it's Okay. All right. They're just, it's just a thing. Okay. All right. They're like a just a thing. Okay. All right. They're like a branch of the SFB, the former KGB, branch of the SFB, the former KGB, um, that are there to surveil, you know, um, that are there to surveil, you know, Westerners that are staying in these Westerners that are staying in these hotels. Okay. I mean, that's, that's how hotels. Okay. I mean, that's, that's how it was explained to me. it was explained to me. And they were always in the lobby. And so And they were always in the lobby. And so we had this like, kind of saying like, we had this like, kind of saying like, as long as the Chechens stay in the lobby, as long as the Chechens stay in the lobby, we're cool. we're cool. Um, but we got careless and it was like Um, but we got careless and it was like the third day we were there, I think, and the third day we were there, I think, and we got a, Tiller got a call from Tony we got a, Tiller got a call from Tony Yester, the Cuban spy who like, the Cuban spy who like, everyone we'd interviewed, FBI, FBI, DEA, everyone we'd interviewed, FBI, FBI, DEA, Department of Justice, whatever, they, Department of Justice, whatever, they, they told us there's no way you're going they told us there's no way you're going to get this guy to go on camera. We can't to get this guy to go on camera. We can't find him. He was on the FBI's 10 most find him. He was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list at the time. Nobody wanted list at the time. Nobody claimed to even know where he was in claimed to even know where he was in the world. Which guy are you talking about? the world. Tony Yester, the Cuban spy. Yeah, Tony Yester, the Cuban spy. Yeah, the guy that wouldn't go in the sauna. Okay. The guy that came over on the boat lift right and while we were in Moscow you know Tiller had been using every contact he could to try and get word to Tony that we wanted to talk to him and we got a call Tiller got a call from Tony Esther that said I hear you're in Russia you know interviewing the waiters why don't you come to Africa and interview the chef and we got really excited because we're like we got a line on this guy he didn't agree to do an interview but he agreed to talk to us. He's like, meet me in Johannesburg in 72 hours. And I'll talk to you guys. That's what he told Tiller. And so that night we were like in our hotel room and we fucked up and we were like in, uh, our line producers hotel room. And we were just talking openly about all this submarines, Cuban spies, DEA going to Africa, you know, cause we got so excited and we were careless. And the next day when Tiller and I met Tarzan in the hotel and we left the hotel and the Chechens got up out of the lobby and started to follow us. And they're just following us. And like Tarzan picked up on it right away. Tiller and I saw him. I mean, they weren't being subtle about it. Okay. As he's badass looking motherfuckers. They were making it obvious. Yeah. They were chasing, they were following you. Yeah. And so we got on the phone with the line producer and he's like, guys, we've got, he didn't even know that we've been followed. He's like, guys, we've got a problem. He's like that footage that we thought we were sending back to LA every day. It's still here at the hotel. And the hotel is saying that those copies of the footage and the copies we've been leaving the hotel safe are both like under the control of somebody, not us. Like the hotel can't give them to us. There was a problem with the paperwork supposedly sending them out. And there's powers that be that have interest in this footage and they have control. So now the only copy of the footage we have is, is, is in control of state. Yeah. We have one copy. And that's that the line producer has. And so we were just like, fuck it. We pulled, pulled the plug in the last day of interviews. And, and we basically just went to the airport in Moscow and got the first plane out, which was to London. But then we got out with the footage. No, no issues, but we were sweating it, dude. It's a bus ride from Moscow. It's a, you know, it's a good 30 minute, 40 minute ride. And, you know, we were on this bus with this fixer that we'd, that we'd hired to kind of smooth things out, you know, in Moscow, who we always kind of assumed that she was going to be the one that was going to be the one that was going to be the one that was probably working for the government. And she like popped a bottle of champagne on the way out there that she'd been saving for the end of the shoot. And we all like fucking ducked, man. We were, we were sketched out. We were sketched out. Yeah. No, but we got to the airport and you know, we were really sweating it all the way through security, but we got out with the one copy of the footage. Oh my God. That's fucking insane. So you went from there to London. Yeah. And then did you go meet him in Johannesburg after that? Yeah, we did. Yeah. From London to Joburg again, without the guy agreeing to do an interview. And then, um, you know, Tiller, Tiller met with him alone a couple of times and I was really sweating that because, you know, Tiller got in a car with this guy and was gone for a few hours and out of touch. And I was like, fuck, I don't know if, I don't know if Tiller's coming back. I was, I was really, really, really scared for him, but he did. And then, uh, Tiller and I went out to dinner with him that night and then Tiller met with him again alone and, uh, talked him into doing the interview. And, and, and the leverage that Tiller used, which was really smart was like, this is, this is your chance to tell your story for your kids. Like we picked up on that. This guy, Tony really regretted that he was not a part of his kids' lives because he was on the run. He was a fugitive. And so Tiller was like, look, this is your chance to tell your story. Your kids will see this. And you know, that's why he agreed to do it. Dude. It's I've heard so many stories over the past few years from a lot of people that have been in here that are reported on like the cartel cartel stuff that's been happening in South America and Mexico and everything. And the, the level of technology that they've been able to get their hands on over the years is just astonishing. Like the, not even just talking about weapons and stuff, but like the types of surveillance and spy espionage, um, like equipment and technology that they have, like tracking people's whereabouts, at all times and stuff that they're getting from, from they somehow get this stuff. They buy this from companies all over the world, from like Israel to from Israel to Europe, Africa, and they get it somehow. And, and they have like their own decoupled, like military intelligence. And I, I wouldn't be surprised if they got their hands on a nuke at one point, you know? I mean, well, they have unlimited funding, practically speaking, and they've got lots of ex-intelligence guys on their payroll. It's Mossad or, you know, CIA, Green Berets. I mean, they actively seek these guys out and bring them down there both to train their guys, but also because of the access to the kind of hardware that you're talking about. Yeah. Famously, I think Noriega was the guy, we had a dude on here recently who did a whole story on Noriega. And, uh, he was, he, he wrote this whole story, made this documentary. It was a documentary. I think it was documentary or was it a book? No, he wrote a book about, um, this guy who was an ex-Massad agent. Who was hired by Noriega and was like Noriega's right-hand man during like his whole run. And this dude, this dude was like in his late eighties, maybe early nineties when he was telling him all this stuff, just crazy stories, man. And, uh, yeah, man, it's, it's, it's frightening to think of like all of the, the military equipment and weapons and shit that those, that those basically cartels, rogue cartel militias have. And, you know, they don't have, there's no mutually assured destruction. And you're talking about cartels, like they could put a tactical nuke in the bed of a pickup truck in any country or state and you would, they would never know where it came from. Right. And, you know, Trump talking about going down, you know, sending 101st Airborne into Mexico or whatever to bang it out with the cartels. Yeah. I'm sure they could take him, but I think it may be more of a fight than, than he may be, uh, anticipating. And I mean, that shit, I mean, another doc that I worked on Tiller Russell with was called The Last Narc. It was about like CIA cocaine trafficking. I love that movie. And kind of the origin of it. The origins, the origin story of the, of the Mexican drug cartels. And, you know, back in those days, 80s, 90s, I mean, all the drug lords, they wanted to die old and rich. And the guys that are running the game in Mexico right now, they're all younger. Most of them are addicted to coke and or meth. And they just like, it's all about like clicks and views and going out in a blaze. It's just a completely different, yes. It's fucking nuts, man. And it's, it's terrifying. It's just like a, almost like a, a nihilistic death cult down there right now, but they have like, you know, heavily, heavily armed and it's just all about your social media and going out in a blaze of glory. Yeah, dude, I had this, this guy was showing me these TikTok videos of this guy. I think his name was El Mini Leak or something, who was one of the, I think he was one of the security guards for El Chapo's kids. Um, and yeah, he was just like, he had millions of TikTok views, posting videos of his shoe collection. His money, his golden AK-47s that he had, driving around in like lifted trucks and Lamborghinis or whatever. These guys are just, yeah, they're, they're super wealthy and they're like, in many cases, teenagers from what I understand. And they just like, they want to be fucking internet famous or something. It's so strange. They're influencers. They're influencers. Yeah, exactly. Narco influencers. 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My most recent show, it's out on a Canadian streamer called Crave, which they're best known for that gay hockey player show, Heated Rivalry, but they just about a month ago in February dropped Narco Mennonites, which is a three-part series on a Mennonite drug of reporting that series um i was in uh chihuahua uh chihuahua city and uh which is and and near where the where the mennonite cartel is based in mexico which is i've never heard of the mennonite cartel yeah most people haven't that's what made it such a fucking great story i'd never heard of it until i got onto it you know but uh but you know i was in where is chihuahua geographically on the mexican map it's up against texas okay okay oh so it's on the border no no it's uh chihuahua cities oh shit i don't want to fuck this up a few hours a few hours of the border okay but you know i was in uh jumping around geographically and topically i was in ukraine like a couple years ago and um i was far more scared and worried about my safety in chihuahua city than i was anywhere in ukraine i was there because the the people oh okay that's where it is yeah oh it's huge yeah and so where the mennonite cartel is based is a little town called quaktemuk which is about 45 minutes and a north of uh chihuahua city okay um yeah but but and part of it was like the people the people in chihuahua city like you could just feel the climate of fear and it's supposedly it's neutral territory like a lot of the like drug lords like their kids go to private schools in chihuahua city right you know it's supposed to be a place where like you know you're not supposed to take each other out but you could just you could just sense that things could jump off at any time and you could literally just like see the fear in in people's eyes just like the people on the streets there's just an atmosphere of um fear yeah that's the word fear and i didn't find that in kiev you know i i didn't find that that people were were uh just sort of like commonly terrified like we're in chihuahua city i was uh i was doing reporting for a project that i can't say a whole hell of a lot about it involves like um intelligence agencies and corruption in ukraine and like the u.s department of justice um using the power of politically motivated prosecutions of certain like alleged organized crime figures in ukraine i know i'm being vague but i kind of have to be because that's still in development but i was i was in kiev meeting with uh you know uh high former high-ranking ukrainian officials and politicians i guess i would say and that was another situation where i just assumed i was being surveilled the entire time i was there yeah yeah dude you're like a fucking cowboy you're nuts you're going to all the hottest hornet nests all around the world just like immersing immersing yourself into all this stuff you're you're uh you're you're one of the uh original immersionists there's not many more people like you left man well you know and i've i mean i yeah i i still i still consider myself to be a gonzo journalist even though my medium has changed for the most part from you know writing to to filmmaking but like that uh i first like became aware of your work with that deckhands really that was gonzo as fuck bro that's gonzo man when this is my favorite thing i probably ever did yeah i mean it's it's hard to define what gonzo journalism is but like you know it when you see it and that was fucking gonzo that's awesome dude yeah yeah we had so much fun doing that it was so like not even planned either just me and my buddy were just one day bored and we're like dude you know those fucking crazy crackheads we see hanging out in front of 7-eleven it's like we should just go film them see what they have to say we're like fuck it okay yeah the next thing we know we're just fucking sucked into the twilight zone with these guys and then we're like fuck it okay we're just fucking sucked into the twilight and it's crazy how like it's crazy how you can go into something like that just by like seeing an interesting looking person and going to talk to them and then getting sucked into this whole other universe of a story about like a corrupt corporate fucking system that is right in your backyard that connects to everything around like to washington dc you know right it was so insane and um like those people dude those those like those people that we met and that we like spent time around the fact that they've been living here in this town right under my nose my whole life and i never even knew about it that kind of blows my mind more than anything yeah but to do to do gonzo right you've got to be gonzo yourself i mean meaning that they picked up on something about you to where they trusted you to tell their stories yeah like the godfather of gonzo hunter thompson and that saying that like when the going gets weird the weird turns pro the weird when the going gets weird the weird turn pro and like you got to be weird you got to be friends yourself yeah to do gonzo journalism right and it's like you know a lot of the um a lot of the most important work like takes place like off camera or off the record like you know building relationships with people yeah but also they they recognize something in you as a gonzo journalist that makes you able to temporarily inhabit their world and get down with them yeah you got to get down and and you got to like live like them you know right when we were doing that we were i was like you know it'd be like one o'clock p.m 1 p.m i'd be sitting on a fucking rat infested island drinking vodka and mountain dew with these guys you know just like making sure my fuck i had no battery on my camera camera to get this footage yeah dude it's just um god man that was so much fun the hard thing about it is though it's like it's it's not that sustainable to be able to at least be able to do that but it's like it's it's not that sustainable to be able to do that but it's like it's it's not that sustainable to be able to do that but it's like it's it's hard for me it was like it was hard for me to find stuff like that you know like that was a for me that was like a like finding a diamond in a rough but for me to actually like go out and seek out those stories all the time i feel like i would go crazy yeah it could be hard on the soul too you know yeah it's a lot of darkness a lot of darkness bro yeah the last narc um what year was that that you got that that you guys did that well we were we were making it like 2018 to early 2020. okay and then it came out i think fall of 2020. and that's essentially the story of kiki camarena right yeah but it's really yes it's the story of kiki camarena who was a de agent who was uh kidnapped and tortured to death in mexico in 1985. and uh and they based a whole season of uh that netflix series on it right yeah they did the narcos was it called narcos yep yep they did um but in my opinion they pulled some punches on the cia of it all you know i'm convinced that kiki camarena was was killed because he stumbled across the cia's uh cocaine trafficking operation where they were moving coke from colombia to mexico the trampoline you know and then into the u.s and then using that money to illegally fund the contras in central america right i don't think kiki camarena knew um what he'd stumbled across you know i mean but it's clear like we were we were able to um you know get a hold of the actual transcripts of because when kiki was being tortured it was being recorded and we were able to get a hold of what i'm convinced are the legitimate transcripts of those um torture interrogation sessions and they were asking him questions that he clearly didn't have the answers to like he couldn't give them the information that they wanted uh because he didn't know it and i think he had just um he'd been really kind of uh laser focused on rafael carl cantero and i think uh kiki had been surveilling an airfield and had seen you know planes that were cia operative planes and he thought it was cartels yeah yeah yeah i don't i don't think that he knew what he i don't think he knew why he was being tortured to death he didn't give him the information that they wanted but it's clear from the questions they were asking that that's what they were they were getting at you know do you think you know who killed him well i mean i think he was i think it's oh it's an oversimplification to say that the cia killed kiki camarena i mean it's i think it's a mistake to think of the cia as this sort of like monolith yeah yeah i mean right but um i think a cia operative was involved let's put it that way you know a guy specifically a guy by the name of felix rodriguez who was the person who was who um now i don't think felix rodriguez actually tortured kiki camarena or actually murdered him i think it was just you know thugs the cartel thugs that did the actual torture and murder but uh felix rodriguez is one of those guys that i mean you think he was interrogating him maybe yeah i think he was directing it and and i think things got out of hand i mean carl cantero hated kiki camarena because camarena had taken out carl cantero's like biggest marijuana plantation you know and i i don't think that they plan to murder him i think they plan to interrogate him and so i want to be careful here i don't think that kiki camarena was was murdered on orders from felix rodriguez but i think felix rodriguez was involved in the abduction and interrogation of kiki camarena and then you know he was being held captive you know at a house that was controlled by the guadalajara cartel and i think that things just got out of hand and they took things too far with the torture and you know did you guys ever try to get a hold of felix oh yeah yeah he wouldn't do an interview really yeah we we we interviewed him did you yeah oh yeah i asked him about kiki what'd he say ah he he uh he kind of threw his hands up and like no no no no oh those morons no no no that's that's the wrong guy i was i was in miami i was uh i was in miami that day well i'll tell you this i mean we we did interview on the record you know three different um cartel you know you could call them sicario's enforcers you know guys that were around guys that did everything from you know carrying out hits to fetching cigarettes and booze for you know hooker parties right but guys that were around and the guys that were around you know that mansion while kiku's being held captive and their accounts were entirely consistent that felix rodriguez was was you know in and out of that mansion see if you can find the clip steve from the interview where i asked him about it let me be interesting to see so there so all the guys the who were the guys that you said that had consistent stories they were um they were they were you know they worked for uh they they each kind of they were all former uh police officers that had become i mean they may have still carried bad they did still carry badges yeah they'd gone to work for you know for the cartel yeah and they're you mean you know they're all on the record in the last narc like telling their stories i guess the idea is or the story goes he had a uh like a fake name or a pseudonym went back in that time yeah and then it wasn't felix they were calling him something else yeah yeah but whatever that name was uh he said that he didn't have that name yet i forgot what the name was you remember i can't i can't i know it's in the show but i can't yeah it's wrong yeah anyways he yeah he said a he goes he goes i have an alibi that i was in miami that day and b he goes i didn't get that suit in him yet i was uh what's he gonna i was a little nervous when i asked him right of course of course he's gonna say no but it was interesting when i was in there when i went to go meet him in miami he wouldn't come here we had to go to miami to interview him um like there was all these other cuban dudes around there all these like bay of pigs dudes um in this building this museum i guess this like um this cuban american anti-communist museum and um there was like posters and and books on the wall of like pictures of kennedy with like cross hairs on his forehead and and they all hated kennedy man that was crazy that was crazy to see like one guy pulled me aside look at my new book and he's showing me like the picture like the cover is literally kennedy with a bullseye on his forehead yeah well uh is this the clip yeah let's see what he actually says documentary out there about uh the dea agent in latin america or in mexico and uh there's people that in that documentary they accuse you of being tied to the murder of the dea agent yeah yeah yeah we've been aware of that yeah what is your what is your response to those people i know and that's absolutely like first of all i can prove was during that day and especially now i have uh since i knew that thing was happening i was taking notes to the thing that i do every day okay and now more in 1993 i started writing everything in detail what i do every day so you tell me that i did something um 1995 september 4 three o'clock in the afternoon i can tell you exactly where i was who do i met what i did what did i eat everything um when they claim the day i was supposed to be killing key camaraderie i have a phone call with the white house that's when they called me that day to tell me that general gorman wanted to talk to me and they gave me a phone number to call general gorman in panama who he's talking about they had a meeting with perry rifkin the director of immigration here in miami with pedro raboreto the mayor of the city of west miami because we had three nicaraguan contra fighters who have been very badly wounded one called el tigrito he had a bullet through his face here because all this thing was hanging down he destroyed his mandible and half of his of his phone everything and the other two were paralyzed and we were able to get through a friend of mine the hospital of of uh of recare on cuban which is now uh i guess he he owes a lot of time anyways he goes on a long tangent yeah well i mean look first of all he's talking about one day right and i don't think any of the um you know cartel sources that we interviewed necessarily put felix rodriguez there on the day that kiki was actually killed they basically just finished him off this went on right over several days right okay and they said that he was he was in and out he was tortured for several days you know i will say this about felix rodriguez first of all good on you for getting that interview that's that's great figured he's not got much time left no right right god i'd love to tell that guy's story you know but um when we were you know when we were trying to get an interview with felix rodriguez like i exchanged several letters with him and uh you know he wrote me like he obviously looked into who i was and uh looked into my background and you know i'm very open about the fact and done a lot of advocacy about it that i was sexually assaulted when i was seven years old and he wrote me a really like heartfelt letter about that you know expressing a lot of empathy for me and respect for the you know for for telling my story and trying to help other survivors and things and i really appreciated that so i well i i think you know i i'd bet the house that he was actually was at that mansion well while kiki was being tortured and that he knew kiki been picked up as they say in mexico picked up meaning kidnapped um you know i i still have a lot of respect for felix rodriguez yeah yeah that's wild man i didn't know about that so yeah he uh the story you're familiar with the story how he killed how he caught che guevara it's like uh that's insane man like and he wasn't the one who killed him either like he was just like went in and like had an interview with like just talked to him for a few minutes before they went out and executed him and then brought his body back i mean the amount of that that guy's seen like the amount of death especially when he's in vietnam yeah like mowing down people in vietnam like i've heard a lot of stories about dudes in vietnam and they come back like different if you ever shopped online chances are you've purchased from a store powered by shopify it's easy to spot their purple shop pay button and that's what we use for our merch store the purple button has all your payment and shipping info so you don't have to track down your card or hope your browser remembered your payment details there's a reason why so many businesses are using shopify and that's because they make it incredibly easy to run and manage your own business it's the business behind the business that really counts and that's where shopify excels with convenient tools and workplaces so if you're a shopify user and you're looking for a tool to help you with that then shopify excels with convenient tools and workflows shop pay has the best converting checkout on the planet meaning fewer abandoned carts and way more sales that's a game changer you can spread your brand's word with the built-in marketing and email tools don't want to build your own page shopify has hundreds of beautiful ready-to-go templates to express your brand and forget the code like daylight computer which is gorgeous so if you've got a product a dream and the drive to make it happen shopify is the platform to help you do it with ease because businesses that sell sell more with shopify see less carts abandoned and more sales go with shopify and their shop pay button sign up today for your one dollar per month trial at shopify.com danny jones all lowercase again that's s-h-o-p-i-f-y dot com slash danny jones shopify.com danny jones yeah i did um interviews for this for this show that that it was a development gig right uh 15 years ago one of my first gigs in documentary filmmaking where i just interviewed uh vietnam vets all day long for 10 to 12 hours a day for like for like two weeks and and really online too it's all online like trying to do casting for this this show the concept was it was going to follow one combat platoon all the way through the vietnam war as guys got killed and replaced and cycled out so it was a pretty good idea actually but it didn't get picked up but um but man the stories and just seeing the like different levels of trauma still like and how it manifested in these guys lives and then the special forces guys were like a breed apart just still just just ice in the veins like to this day cold like no you know comparing them to like the you know the guys that were drafted and there's grunts that were still just like haunted by everything they'd done like it was really remarkable comparing them to like the like sog guys you know there was like very few guys who like seeked it out you know like seeked out the war like there was guys who there's one guy named billy waugh who uh annie jacobson writes about him in this movie in this book that she did called surprise surprise kill vanish that during vietnam i guess he worked at the post office and he like would catch uh he would catch the bus from where he lived in texas to dc so he'd go sign up for the vietnam war like that's how bad he wanted to go to war and like sent him off to vietnam and i think like the first week he got shot in the foot or the leg and like he literally almost died like he was crawling back to the helicopter like to get out of there like crawling over dead bodies his foot got like smashed into a million pieces and then he got sent home i needed to do the rehab forever and they were like you got whatever you got the purple heart you're good and he wanted to go back like he just he he kept going back like did all they went to the hospital tried to get like more surgeries done to make his foot better and like they were like no no you can't go back you're literally disabled and he's like no i'm not i can run faster than you and like they eventually just sent him back and this was when he was in his 20s and he stayed in the military until like his late 80s he was deploying to the middle east like in his 80s for the cia to go track osama bin laden like this is one of the dudes that was every fiber of his being was drawn to this you know yeah that's him but most most people i feel like most people that i've talked to on the show are people that you know since the if you're talking about like the wars in iraq and afghanistan they went to those wars they weren't like that they just signed up for those wars because they didn't really have any better options yeah you know it was like oh i could go to college or i could go to this or i could sign up for this war you know this sounds exciting let me try this and then they go do that and they come back and they're like well it's a range of reactions i mean i mean some of them then go you know work as contractors then yeah you know some of them get hooked on it some of them get hooked on it yeah but some of them don't some of them spiral out of control after that after they get back you know and they get like i mean just what was the what's the status of the war you know it's like oh i could go to college or i could go to this or i could sign up for this war you know this sounds exciting let me try this and then they go do that and they come back and they go do that like how many veterans kill themselves every day it's fucking staggering you know and i've tried i tried to get traction several times that with a documentary on just that i mean if you look at like you compare like almost take any any combat unit that saw heavy action in iraq and afghanistan and compare their casualty rate when they were in country to the casualty rate of guys that have either died of overdoses accidents or suicide since they got back and and across the board it's comparable and in a lot of cases like if you take a a unit more guys got back from like misadventure or drugs or eating a bullet then then got killed in in the middle east yeah you know it's and it's fucked up our government's done a terrible job of like helping these guys out yeah you know yeah it's fucked up man and like now that's like everyone's kind of aware i feel like i mean i don't know i'm young but um it feels to me like more than any time in my life that everyone's kind of like more aware of all like the government lying you know i think it's probably a lot to do with like technology and social media and podcasts yeah there's way more access to information and it's like the emperor has no clothes now and like you even have veterans from the iraq war in afghanistan that are like what the fuck were we doing like this was all for what and uh how do you justify any more wars it's like we're living in this this hyper normalization like when the soviet union you know um adam curtis the bbc documentary filmmaker he he does um he does these crazy documentaries where he basically compiles um footage like historical footage and he lays them out in a storyline with um his voiceover and he kind of like tells the story and there's i highly recommend the great historical um like storytelling and one of them is called hyper normalization and like it explains how during the soviet union before it fell during the 70s and 80s everyone who lived there was aware how the their government and their economy and their society was failing but there's nothing they could do about it and they were just trying to pretend as long as they could that nothing was wrong and eventually it all just collapsed but they were basically just like living in a fake reality and they all knew about it like the like the government knew that they were going to be able to do something about it and they were going to be able to do something about it and they were going to be able to do something about it and they knew and they knew the government knew that they knew that nothing was real and everything was on the brink of collapse and that's kind of like what i feel like we're living in right now yeah i was about to say so kind of like america right now yeah man it's fucking scary dude one more thing about felix rodriguez if i could because i don't want to leave that thread hanging because he's basically he called me out and uh on your show is like one of the thing i would say like what motivation would these three cartel gunmen have to lie right now i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know versus what would motivation felix rodriguez had to lie but also you know think about that totally okay and uh the second is felix rodriguez is a classic uh case study in what is the cia like was felix rodriguez a cia agent no was he taking action on behalf of the cia at least a faction within the cia right i mean there's all kinds of like factions within the cia and a lot of times one hand doesn't know what the other is doing he was he was was he not he was an operative i mean he was like a paramilitary guy right yeah yeah yeah but he wasn't like recruited out of american university to join the cia right right right i mean but he was a cia asset or cia operative so that's where it gets like there's a there's a lot of tentacles coming out of the cia and so it's like it gets tricky when you start saying things like the cia killed kiki camarena it's like well you know i don't think william casey like put a hit on a dea agent right but like shit just went south yeah exactly yeah there's so many people that are employed by the cia it's insane and it's just it's like the same thing with kennedy like people like to say oh the cia killed kennedy but it's like you know there was probably less than a handful of people that actually knew what was going on you know like if you could track all the cables and all the stuff like that there was there was probably i would say less than 10 people if i was to guess that actually knew what was going on and um you know that's a lot of people that actually knew what was going on that's another thing that's another like that's another thing that they they never will have to fess up to but like if you if you polled all of americans today and asked them like do you think lee harvey oswald did it or do you think the cia did it i bet you like a 90 of people would say they think the cia did it but it's like is that gonna change shit no no nothing's gonna change who was the mk ultra guy that went in and like spent time with jack ruby in prison that's that that was when i finally tumbled where i was like wait what yeah when i josh jolly west yes yes jolly west dude he was everywhere yeah he was attached to everything charles manson uh kennedy with jack ruby um he was even meeting with stanley kubrick and edgar is edgar casey or no it was um yeah i think it was stanley kubrick and edgar casey when stanley kubrick was filming 2001 space odyssey over in the uk yeah look at this this is on the set of 2001 space odyssey and that's stanley kubrick in the front and it's fucking jolly west in the back yep what the fuck this guy was everywhere so the sasquatch movie how did you get involved in this one is this this is not this was not very recent this was at least four years ago five years ago four years ago yeah it came out yeah um i'd made a i'd made a couple shows with this uh filmmaker named josh rofe and uh he he was a big fan of this uh podcast the sasquatch chronicles and he was you know one day he was just kicking around ideas he was like man if we could just find like a a true crime story that had a sasquatch angle and like i immediately like tumbled back to this memory from like 1993 when i uh uh kind of visited a i was hanging out you know on a weed plantation the emerald triangle and there's a lot of people who are like i don't know i don't know what's this story going around about how like you know three dudes have been killed on this uh backwoods weed plot by a sasquatch and it was just being like you know it was just like a a legend basically maybe right or story a rumor and um so i was like well you know why don't we like try and track that story that was going around in mendocino and humboldt county in the fall of 1993 try and follow that back to its source and see what we find out so that's how that project got going so you but you were there at like the start of this this whole movie like this was this all started out like when you were in your early 20s in 1993 sitting in this log cabin yeah yeah yeah in the middle of the wood the redwoods yeah yeah really and these tweakers come in saying they just fucking saw some guys get chopped up and it was the yeah yeah they claimed that they had just been at the at the you know scene of this crime and that like there was bodies that were mutilated there was like bigfoot footprints and they were like legit terrified and uh i was on mushrooms i was coming down but i was still tripping you know and i was just like they their energy was so fucking uh panicked and um i hadn't had a lot of experience with crystal meth by that that point in my life you know that i really recognized like that that was also an element in in their behavior right so i just kind of tried to sink into the couch you know but i kind of just like took it in and it it stuck with me and then when we um you know i when i told joshua fey about that instance he was like well let's just start making some calls and see if like anybody else heard that story and so that was really the genesis of it it's like and we and we did that on camera like just calling like every connection i could find you know that was involved in the weed trade in the emerald triangle in the 90s be like hey did you ever hear this story you know and it was like a lot of like dead ends and then finally we started to hit on people that were like yeah i remember that i remember hearing that like yeah like three dudes got got killed and the word was that that somehow a sasquatch had had uh had killed him and then it extended from there that there was like this supposedly this sort of like tribe of sasquatch that were you know like like the as the farms were pushing further and further up into the woods off-road like there was like people were having encounters with these pissed-off sasquatch they were like hucking rocks adam and stuff and like bluff charging them and so it was like it was like it was like you know like it was like you know And so it kind of like got all wrapped into this one, urban legend about like that that the dope growers had infringed upon this sasquatch turf if you will and that the three dudes that got killed like they they set up a plot and they were like camping on it and you know that's what led to them being killed of course that's we did track down i think the um uh the the true story of of who killed those guys and why but i don't want to spoil it for anybody that hasn't seen the show yeah yeah um dude that was like scaring the shit out of me watching it just the way that that just the way that whole landscape is laid out you know where you're meeting these confidential sources on the top of these giant wooded mountains that have you have no cell phone signal yeah nothing like that like did were you not terrified uh i i kind of get into this zone when i'm reporting like that where i'm where i'm able to kind of just uh disassociate i think yeah you know and um and then but then i get an adrenaline dump after and that's when i get sketched out but yeah especially the there's this one road one mountain spy rock and there's this road spy rock road that's like like to this day like the police will not go there unless they're rolling deep meaning like unless they're going with like basically swat team force like this you know it's it's it's really um yeah there was there was one scene uh that i think for the most part didn't make it into the show and i had um i went up spy rock by myself most of the time um i had like a uh an ex-cop that would kind of be along with me in an under you know undercover but kind of like watching my back basically but in this instance i was by myself and uh wound up on this uh dope farm that was run by these like two women they were both heroin addicts and then they had a bunch of pit bulls and one of the women uh told me this story about um and i and i had a like a hidden camera and i was wearing a wire okay and was rolling which makes your nerves yes now i one of them not the one that's telling me the story i'm about to relay but the other one had become a contact and like i had interviewed her a couple times on camera she knew i was making this story in a movie you know i think she probably would have covered for me if they'd figured out that i that i that i had a camera or recording device hopefully but didn't come to that but but her friend told me the story about you know how these um how these uh black guys from los angeles had come up make a big deal and how she and um some biker friends of hers had uh just killed these guys and took their money instead of selling the dope and they buried them on her property and she's telling me all this on camera and one of her and one of the guys had she and she told this story like it's funny how one of the guys as he was waiting to be murdered basically had pissed himself and after they buried his body one of her pit bulls had smelled the urine or something and gone and dug up his shoe and brought it back to her cabin and dropped it and she was telling this story like it was hilarious and her friends laughing and i'm having to force myself to laugh like this is the funniest fucking thing i've heard too you know but the reason that we couldn't use it is because she was dropping the n-bomb and describing these guys and um like hulu wouldn't wouldn't air that footage just because even if the even if we bleeped that they were like they still know what she's saying and so like that that just that one word is so radioactive right that we can't even use this footage it was fucking you know it's hard one footage but that was uh that was probably in in the entire experience of making sasquatch that probably the time that i was uh the most sort of sphincter puckered you were by yourself i was by myself oh yeah because i've been in that situation before where you know you're just getting gold yeah but like i've always had somebody with me where i'm like looking at him like can you fucking believe this shit is real like i can't wait to fucking get this shit down the hard drive right right but like oh my god being alone dude especially not like you're hiding the camera so like you're terrified if they discover it like you don't know what the fuck's gonna happen these people are like self-admitted murderers yeah yeah i mean it was when i was in a watch and then i also had a camera that's in like a key fob so i had to kind of keep my keys out and you know kind of work the angle on it yeah you know and i had you know i had a rifle in the trunk of my car but i was like i was always uh very aware of how many steps away from that trunk i was and it was yeah it was um it was sketchy man and i and but the only way that i was going to get that access was to go by myself right you know and this was this this was this was somebody that supposedly had you know information about that triple homicide back in 1993 so yeah i i was completely unaware until watching that film that that part of california was like that that it was it's just like this twilight zone where people can get away with it seems like just people can get away with murder like it's nothing there and especially these people that are like living off the grid yeah and i don't do they have electricity up there some don't some live totally off the grid you know and it's but like i mean there's still like some like just kind of classic hippies up there that are that are i really love my favorite guy was the guy who reminded me of captain hook from uh the movie hook with robin williams dustin hoffman uh-huh he's got like the hook eyebrows the hippie guy yeah like leathery skin yeah he was awesome ghost dance i don't remember his name he was on the right side of the frame yeah like a bookshelf behind him yeah yeah yeah yeah he uh yeah he was a great source he was um he grew weed for the hell's angels like back in the day oh really their weed master and he still has a lot of a lot of juice in there and it's pretty well protected and that's why he felt comfortable going on camera yeah you're talking about you were like i think we found the killer he's like oh really he's like he used to be my neighbor i get you his number yeah yeah yeah so do you think that that so that guy that you talked to do you think he was the killer that you you complete you never said his name once on the film on the film you bleeped his name yeah um no no i don't you don't i think i think he probably knew something about it but i don't think he was actually involved yeah because it's very weird how when you i mean it was like first of all the way you just so bluntly asked him straight up yeah like do you know so you're telling me you didn't murder three people he's straight and he's like he's like i don't know what you're talking about click and then hangs up yeah seemed pretty guilty to me yeah yeah like i said i think it well it depends on what you mean by the murder do i do i think he actually carried it out no no he's involved yeah yeah yeah yeah you know and it's funny that um it's it's like biker slang kind of played into it and that like the story was is that like these three guys had like somehow abused some dude's daughter but like right in the outlaw biker world daughter can mean like just kind of a young woman under your protection too you know and so that's where like things got a little uh vague i guess interesting you know it's like the story was yeah this guy's daughter had been uh you know by these three guys you know that was one version of it right yeah that's so it was so also so weird how you would get all these people telling you this story or i don't know if it was one source or two sources that told you that story yeah and like you talked to the guy named bigfoot bigfoot jacobs or whatever his name was and uh bigfoot gary bigfoot gary's like i never even had a daughter in 93 yeah and that's where that's where the shit up but that's where that's what i mean is it's like he may have had a biological daughter but like if there was a young woman that was not romantically involved with him but it was kind of like a young woman that was not romantically involved with him but it was kind of like a foster kid in a way which is kind of common in that world you know like splintered families and like sort of taken under his wing she would be known as his daughter even though she's not his biological daughter or adopted daughter even it's just like a young woman that's sort of like part of his tribe okay did you ever meet him face to face bigfoot gary no no no we tried like even you know one of the guys that i made that show with you know went so far as to kind of like stake out this uh this gas station that we knew he got caught in and he was like oh my god i'm out every morning and he just happened not to show up a couple mornings and then like the second or third day uh that zach was there he got made and kind of like run off so we we pulled out all the stops to try but i did finally get him on the fucking phone yeah that was nuts yeah yeah and some of those biker gang dudes like some of the hell's angels dudes have like protection from the fbi like some of them work with the fbi right yeah yeah of course so i wonder i wonder like how many of them are in the fbi and how many of them are in the fbi and how many of them are in the fbi and are like just protected or like well i think that's true in any there's some formants right in any organized crime you know there there's guys that are yeah just that informants i mean look at whitey boulder right i mean yeah for example that's another scary thing like these guys like you're not just some like undocumented migrant that's out there farming stuff like you're like a legitimate like documentary filmmaker american citizen doing this stuff so it's like on one hand you think you're safe because of that but on the other hand you don't know like maybe these guys have like a get out of jail free call right you know right right and i didn't trust the cops you know in that part of the world i mean it's just you gotta you gotta like witness and experience the emerald triangle to understand it it's like you know there's a couple state parks with the redwoods there and you know people go there camping with their family once you get outside that part of that world it is like it's outlaw country you know it just is i mean it's like you got the the kids the trimigrants that come from all over the world they're like every harvest season you know a lot of them just disappear every year and it's been going on for decades i mean there's so the missing person's rate in that part of the world is so high it's crazy yeah and you know they're just buried in the redwoods right yeah i'm sure the i'm sure this what if you when you bury somebody in that soil like just that with the environment it's in just like eats it up like all the bugs and insects and stuff in the soil probably just soaks it all up and dissolves into nothing yeah like i said that one woman was just laughing about you know two or three bodies being buried yeah that's insane yeah it's like another world right in our own backyard like right in this country yeah and she was like she was i remember she was banging heroin and she also like got right in front of you oh yeah and she had like a uh a handle of captain morgan's and she and she wanted me to drive her into town to get a pint of ice cream and so we just and so we drove down spy rock i bought her a pint of ice cream and a handle of captain morgan's and drove back up and after she like shot up heroin she was just pouring the captain morgan's into the ice cream and just like eating it you know whoa like as i'm interviewing her whoa that's crazy yeah the warmth is already driving us out of hibernation this year and it only took one day at the fair for me to realize that festival time is also hydration time that's why i keep liquid ivs hydration multiplier with me at all times whether it's a three-day festival exploring farmers markets or a 12-hour flight to a destination wedding liquid iv is superior hydration than water alone and right now you can get 20 off your first order by using the code danny at checkout whether it's my kids soccer practice or a day on the golf course i always keep liquid iv handy it's super simple you can do 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didn't spend the night in the woods you you went to like the towns yeah every night yeah but like does it have like any effect on your psyche when you spend that much time kind of like in a different part of the world sort of disconnecting disconnected from regular society and you're like out with surrounded by all these misfits oh yeah without a doubt i mean every assignment like that where you're like basically embedding in a criminal subculture you have to you have to um you know first you have to like develop some contacts and gain people's trust right but you have to start mirroring you have to start making yourself making yourself seem part of that world so you like try and pick up as much of the you know slang as you can quickly um um adjust the way you dress just the way you act your mannerisms like um and and sort of give yourself over to that mindset and that does that does uh exact the toll yeah you know every time i mean i've been doing this for 30 plus years now my risk tolerance is lower than it used to be you know when i was in my 20s early 30s i would take what seemed to me to be now like crazy fucking risks but like sasquatch was definitely risky for sure i mean i've been doing this for i mean but to answer your question i mean those those little towns that are just like first of all they're just riddled with meth i mean just riddled with meth and oxy you know and so you just got like fucking junkie zombies wandering all over the place you got to be careful at all the gas stations that there's not like a little chip reader on the thing to steal your credit card because they often are there's like cheap little pieces of shit hardware to like steal your credit card numbers you got to peel them off before you get gas and uh yeah it's just what is it about that part of the world that enables that behavior is it the woods i think a lot of it's the remoteness you know and also like legalization hit that part of the world hard you know i mean it's just like it's a lot harder to make money growing weed than it used to be and when times are hard like violence ticks up and so you know it's like with the with the legalization with like big corporations coming in like putting up these like death stars of like hydroponic weed down around like palm springs or wherever it's a lot harder for those like backwoods black market farmers even if they're still selling on the black market to make money and so competitions fierce and competition that part of world equals violence you know and like a lot of a lot of a lot of them have gone from growing to becoming rippers you know just stealing shit stealing plants stealing money it's just things that are rough is it still like that today i assume it is i haven't been back up there since you know 2021. but yeah i assume it is i heard that there were cart like literal cartels doing operations up there now like the going into the woods and and doing all their grows now because i guess it's a misdemeanor now yeah i mean and that was that was that also played into the to the sasquatch story is that it was like you know the cartels were you know mexican cartels started to move in on the emerald triangle in the late 80s and by the early 90s you know when this story about the sasquatch killing three guys circulated i mean the cartels were definitely making a lot of money to move there you know but speaking of cartels like one of the craziest stories in the weed world for me is like these chinese cartels that are growing weed on um like you know uh native land you know around like new mexico and arizona and shit like these you know about this no yeah it's like these chinese chinese organized crime have these like huge weed growing setups you know on uh reservations basically that's that's a story that i haven't been able to get into yet yeah yeah it's been it's been it's been covered that's i'm not i'm not you know it's been in weed of all drugs yeah yeah still in new mexico new mexico arizona yeah four corners region does it seem like a great place to grow weed well it's all indoors right they're not yeah yeah you don't really hear much about chinese organized crime anymore do you i've heard a lot of i've heard about like how they've been involved in mexico um like with the fishing stuff offshore in mexico and also um buying up mines and stuff and mining lithium in mexico and hiring the cartels as like security for their operations that they're doing down there um as well as like bringing fentanyl into mexico but um yeah beyond that and then buying up buying up real estate and stuff in the u.s i don't you don't you don't really hear much about that it's bananas yeah they're growing weed you know but the um can i talk about the narco mennonites series yeah yeah yeah so the um all of all that weed was like that the mennonites started moving for the mexican cartels in the 80s was all like outdoor weed you know from the from the what they call a golden triangle right like mennonites basically migrated from canada to mexico about a hundred years ago a few thousand of them and they just happened to settle in this town uh cuauhtemoc which is like the closest population center to where in the 1960s like mexican opium poppy farmers and marijuana farmers started to plant their crops and so somehow in the 80s like you know the the first first cartel the guadalajara cartel got the bright idea of starting to use mennonites to run dope for them in the u.s right thinking like because the mennonites they um they had these special visas that enabled them to uh you know transit the u.s to canada to visit relatives and so um the border guards you know in mexico the u.s and canada they just see a carload of mennonites driving maybe with a you know truckload of furniture and they think like no problem just waving one through and a lot of time that furniture was packed with packed with weed but outdoor weed like you know what we used to call brick weed right uh-huh not as good right right and then in the 90s when when bc bud started to come online you know especially in canada kind of pushed the mennonites out of the weed business and they started you know shifting to to harder drugs and coke specifically yeah and that's what they're doing now mainly now they're into everything man a lot of what they're doing now is is laundering money for the cartels because you know this town in mexico cuauhtemoc it's like every business practically every business is mennonite owned they do do a lot of farming but uh they do a lot of you know what our sources in law enforcement mexico told us is that you know yeah they're still running dope but a lot of what they do is is launder money for the cartels now. - Huh. - And the Mennonites, they've been really smart about like keeping their finger in the wind and kind of like never getting too big and being very careful about when and how they shift their allegiances with all the cartels wars going on in mexico over the decades yeah so they're always like careful about who they're they're sort of loyal to interesting yeah yeah it seems like the uh the the heads the leaders of all the cartels they never seem to have to pay the price for anything it's always like the low level pawns are the ones that are getting murdered and shipped around and they're the ones that get the blunt end of the stick there there's um i have this friend who's a a lawyer a criminal lawyer right down the street from here and one of his first cases he ever got he was a public defender for it and it was a cuban guy or not a cuban guy he was a um colombian dude a ship captain cargo ship captain who got hijacked by a cartel on the way from colombia to florida and halfway through on a halfway through the trip the cartel boarded his ship put a gun to his head and said if you don't take all our coke into into tampa we're gonna kill you and your whole family so of course he took the coke in he went in and got like you know they were trying to give him like double life sentences and my my lawyer buddy ended up getting him off scot-free like this is he had no this this guy was like fresh out of law school and uh the other guy had zero money and uh you know he was just trying to do this to make a name for himself and help the guy let the guy live in his house for a couple months when they were fighting the case and um you know now you know he's been involved with more and more of these cartel cases in mexico and south america and like the the heads of the cartels are trying to hire him for and like flying him down to mexico city to meet at the ritz-carlton and like and he you know the way he explains it to me it's like those are the people it's like the low-level poor fishermen boat captains or whatever those are the guys that are lining the prisons this like those are the guys getting arrested and killed and it's like it's never the dudes who are at the top of the pyramid who are who are making the real money you know those guys are either just they have too much money and too much security to get caught or they're working with the feds yeah every once in a while the government of mexico though it seems decides to give one of these guys up like the i can't remember the dude's name but the guy that was the head of the jalisco new generation cartel just got killed like a couple weeks ago yeah you know which now all hell is breaking loose down in mexico because of that so for the most part i didn't follow that story but you know i think every once in a while like the the mexican government decides okay we got to appease the us and give one of these guys up i think that they they know you know where they are at all times i think you know the same thing happened i think with with chapo guzman el chapo yeah yeah crazy story about chapel like that same guy tony ester that was in um operation odessa yeah after chapo escaped from prison the second time tony ester called up um tiller russell and i and was basically like it it took a while because he's got a heavy cuban accent and he was calling i presume from africa and he was also talking sort of in code but once we figured out what he was saying he was saying that like chapo wanted to do an interview and he could line up this interview and tiller and i talked about it for like a couple days and we were just like it just felt too dicey and so we didn't do it and then sean penn wound up getting it for rolling stone like choppa was just determined to like tell his story you know no way i know i know we're still kicking our own asses over it that's so crazy dude yeah i heard that he's still calling shots from inside prison i'm sure even in supermax yeah yeah and his son just set up that that guy that was one of the you know ogs and i mean it's just chaos down there right now who did his son set up oh i'm blanking on that name too but he like told the guy that they were going to go look at um a real estate investment like just south of the u.s border and wound up like landing in new mexico and then um and then the guy got arrested it just happened like a year and a half or so ago oh oh are you are you talking about um yeah why am i blanking on this guy's name too the guy who was basically the boss of the sinaloa cartel right mayo el mayo yeah el mayo thank you yeah it was el mayo's son i think yeah that's and el mayo is another guy like it's like no one you know no one paid attention to that guy forever when he was like the old dude behind the scenes and el choppa was really kind of like the poster boy you know he was kind of just like one of the one of the henchmen to start out with and then just became like the most famous or notorious for whatever reason yeah i mean that's the same guys that we interviewed for the last snark we're telling stories about choppa back in the day and he was just like a low-level thug right he was just like a homicidal maniac right you know it's just you know why why just use one bullet when you can use 70 kind of guy yeah yeah i mean like the theme of all these stories is just like desperation and it's just like i mean it's just like it's just like desperation drives like the most violence out of anything like people who are the most destitute who have absolutely nothing to lose will do like the worst most heinous things to feed themselves or their families you know and it's like whether you're talking about drug smuggling and cartels or like poaching animals in africa like the dudes that are that are killing these endangered animals like these elephants and in africa these people are just trying to feed their families look at these guys they're getting blown up in all these boat strikes i mean these aren't drug lords right you know these are guys just trying to feed their families oh you're talking about the recent venezuela thing all of all those all those like boats that that that we've been blowing up yeah you know the last six to eight months yeah it's all just like guys are probably like part-time fishermen yes yeah those are poor those are poor people those people aren't calling any shows those people aren't making any difference first of all those boats that they're driving with the motors that they have on there those guys can't make it halfway to cuba let alone the united states with those motors like what are you talking about they're bringing drugs to the u.s like a 50 horsepower evan route yeah yeah right right yeah the the the story they told us about that being about drugs was just like a joke i don't think anyone bought that it's a house of cars you know whether they're narco terrorists right come on yeah no man it's a it's a house of cards at this point man it really is but like so so going back to the beginning of like what got you into this stuff in the very very beginning like what was the the first project that you worked on that got you into this type of journalism this type of filmmaking that's a good question i mean i it's really started in college some some buddies of mine and i started a newspaper university california santa cruz called the fish rap and um you know we were all about hunter s thompson you know and so we all like were practicing our you know our version of gonzo journalism um i'd say the first like big story though that i did was my first job out of college was for the anchorage daily news that's my hometown newspaper i grew up in anchorage and um a couple of street gangs from southern california were making inroads in anchorage at the time and i did a you know big it was like my first big like front page story um it was called a question of gangs and uh but i it was when i realized that i that i really had a knack for um kind of embedding with uh with criminals yeah that i could get criminals to open up to me where they might not you know be as candid or as accepting of the presence of other reporters right and um so that's when i i think the the final the switch clicked for me there and then pretty quickly after that you know i i bounced from mainstream daily daily paper to a chain of alternative weeklies in the 90s that at the time was new times that then became village voice media and um you know then i just started writing like long form gonzo and just went all in you know embedding with gutter punks and street gangs and tweakers yeah yeah didn't you embed with a bunch of meth addicts or something yeah i uh i did a couple times i did one story in phoenix but then i think the one you're probably talking about was i worked for a paper in denver called the westward and i i uh stayed up for 72 hours with um with some tweakers but they weren't like i don't know i don't want to say yuppie tweakers what were they they had they had dough they had jobs and they had they had money they had money to afford you know really really um pure crystal meth called shabu you know like really like pure came like in a in a crystal statue that you just kind of like shave little curls off of and really smoke yeah yeah it's really um popular in hawaii i guess these are like upper class dudes yeah yeah definitely definitely like you know i was just going far back enough they could say like somebody that owned a flower shop and a clothing store um you know djs you know that kind of thing people that had lives other than crystal meth right but they would uh get together you know um once a month and like you know go at it hard for two to three days wow and so but i i didn't try it i didn't i have done i have done crystal but not and uh for that story that story i was i was taking a modafinil uh which is like a anti-narcolepsy drug oh yeah it will keep you awake yeah it's like pro vigil yeah same stuff okay same stuff yeah and um you know but but if it's i was i was definitely starting to like kind of brown out you know around hour 50 yeah i was gonna say like that many hours i would have like taken a little head i still have my notebook from that story and it's hilarious because the notes the notes start off like really kind of lucid you know and you can just and i'm and i keep i kept doing time stamps and like by the end it's just like hours are passing between the times i did notes and they're and some of them are just gibberish you know but uh it kind of like i was really worried about it uh i was like fuck i think i didn't get the story because i just was not i was not like cogent there at the end but it kind of it kind of worked in a way that even even in the writing of the story it's it's like written in a timeline format it just gets more kind of scattered and kind of feels like it's going off the rails which was the experience of you know embedding with them for that time too they they started to go off the rails what is you what kind of stuff did you ask them were you just were you just hanging out and just like being a fly on the wall yeah 100 just yep just observing participant observer and how did you go about doing that like yo you guys like math can i hang out and like i knew about it i mean i i oh you were okay yeah i knew him before i knew that they did this i kind of knew him from and it was like a ritual for them semi-ritualized i'd say i mean they did it once a month it was it's like planned out they would clear their calendars you know they would all pull their money to buy this really good shit and um there's one guy's house that was kind of the mothership for the operation they would go out to clubs and after-hour spots and stuff and come back and uh smoke there and then put put the the the time i was with them they decided about hour 36 or so to like get on a charter flight to vegas so we all went from denver to vegas you know oh my god and like it was summer it was just like oh it's so bad dude that was so bad it was so rough just like the vegas strip like pounding sun you know you're just like dehydrated and just yeah oh it sounds like fucking hell that was yeah yeah and you also embedded with like some skinheads yeah i did quite a bit of that actually i uh um just you know at least half a dozen times probably went undercover um as a neo-nazi skinhead and so to be clear like with the with the with the shabu smokers they knew i was a journalist i was there as a journalist a lot of the reporting i've done on like neo-nazi organizations um white nationalist organizations that was done undercover i think that's pretty much the only time i've worked undercover was when i would have no idea that you're a journalist no i was posing as a fellow neo-nazi and why why would you do it that way what do you think they wouldn't be open to you reporting on what they're doing no no they they have a very strict policy you know if anybody if you're contacted by the media the only thing you say is i have nothing to say that's it i mean they don't really do interviews sometimes right but like the real hardcore like you know hate groups they're not they're not media friendly yeah yeah so where so where did you first go and denver also denver this was in denver yeah it was a um there was a investigator for the anti-defamation league that got a hold of me and let me know that there was this event coming up called the rocky mountain heritage fest and was like basically like if you want i will um give you kind of a crash course and how to infiltrate yeah yeah and so like i i spent i think i only had like a couple weeks i had hair like even longer than i do now shaved it of course down to just a one buzz cut and just spent like a couple weeks just like learning how to dress um how to walk the music the the slang you know the history of the of that culture listen to screwdriver yeah of course yeah listen bunch of max resist you know all the hate rock bands and um you know and and when i recover it but it got it got fucked up because like this uh like the antifa had found out where the where the event was going to be and they showed up in force and in a way that like shut it down it was like it was originally going to be at this uh venue called the aztec theater in denver and like the owners like figured out because antifa showed up what was going on and they like told the skinheads like this isn't happening here because it was clearly going to be a a brawl yeah and so um it just so then they were suspicious about who was like letting antifa know you know what where their location was and so like their security and their security was being run by these guys called the hammer skins and the hammer skins they're like a they well they were and i believe still are like a national skinhead organization their symbol is the crossed hammers from pink floyd the wall those red and black hammers anyway and so they were running security and like nobody nobody knew me i didn't have an in you know and i also i didn't have any tattoos right and both of those things i did after after that i actually after that story came out i got a hold of the organizers because i think i wanted to get a quote from them from the story and did and was like hey um that guy you know david from alaska that was me i'm not really a skinhead i'm a rock star i'm not really a rock star i'm not really a rock star reporter i'm doing a story and i think i they actually did contrary to what i just told you uh give me a couple quotes about the event because they knew they knew i'd gotten in and um they were like yeah we we knew there was something off about you we didn't think you were a cop but like you weren't reading right and i was like well what was it and they were like well you didn't have any tattoos you know like were they mad they weren't mad they weren't mad they were actually kind of like impressed wow like dude you've got some balls you know like you know you would have gotten curb out right you know and i was like well are you gonna come after me now they're like no um and i you know i think i treated him fairly in the story like i didn't ridicule him you know what did you learn about him well i i'll answer that by saying what i've learned about skinheads more broadly not just from that one story is that a lot of skinheads grow up in the movement or i'll just say neo-nazis okay a lot of them grow up in the movement um but a lot of them are just like island lost children that are just looking for a place to fucking belong and it's like they they took a wrong turn at the renaissance fair or something you know and they wound up like because there is something like very um seductive about that feeling of uh intense community based on your racial identity okay like there is something like uh reassuring or empowering about being part of a skinhead set and i also found out that when i one of the things i did before i went to the actual rocky mountain heritage fest is i just went out in denver dressed out as a skinhead by myself and i like i realized like people were fucking intimidated you know i'm not a small guy but just walking into bars dressed you know fully kitted out bomber jacket dark martins you know the whole thing white power shirt like i could see people were like fuck and the reason they were is not they i was representing them that i'm part of something a lot bigger than just me and if you fuck with me you're fucking with me and you know presumably my whole my whole crew and um you know and so i think if you're like somebody that doesn't you know have a lot going on in your life and you're like looking for an identity there's something very attractive about that what did i learn about him i learned that even then and this is like the early 2000s like that subculture is a lot broader and better funded and organized than than most people understand when i when i say that culture i don't just mean skinheads i mean more broadly like the white supremacist kind of underworld it's funded well that they've got dough okay you know like like rich parents you mean or they're they're they have careers they're kind of living two lives or they this is kind of like baked is this baked into every part of their life or do they kind of hide it from some people and i think it varies a lot but when i say that um like like a lot of its merchandise sales and also they they they smuggle a lot of shit to europe and make a lot of money that way because like stuff because of the first amendment crane has a lot of nazis right russia russia does for sure really yeah but in europe in france for example germany like hate rock like symbols the shirts the flags all that shit's banned you know it's illegal right so you can smuggle that shit over there and make a good amount of money whoa stuff that's cheap here because it's protected by the first amendment yeah this dude have you heard that that guy named daryl davis the black dude yeah who befriended the nazis yeah yeah when i was talking to him he was he was saying that um you know the first time he ever discovered racism because he grew up he said overseas like he was uh going to school overseas and like he would come back here and he was like doing this some boy scout thing like doing some like march some public march and some dude threw a fucking rock in his head and uh he went home and he was like asking his mom questions about it and his mom was explaining to him why they did it and that was his first encounter like in his he was maybe 10 years old of racism like he had no concept of it whatsoever and um you know that's what got him so interested in the kkk and all that and like went out and started like going to bars trying to meet these kkk members and um ended up befriending a bunch of them getting them to leave the clan for good and like i think he said the biggest common denominator um between all of them was that none of them had been outside the zip code they were born in like they were all born and raised in this little town and none of them had left the country let alone their fucking zip code which i thought that that kind of made sense to me you know if you're if you're surrounded your whole life by this like certain ideology or people that have one way of viewing the world you're never exposed to any alternative view of anything then maybe maybe that's just what happens to you yeah i think white nationalist groups now i mean this is more than 20 years ago that we're talking that i was doing this shit i mean it's changed a lot i mean those those groups they're a lot more online based now than they were you know in the early 2000s and they're a lot more overt they're they're they're less underground you know i think they feel a lot more comfortable with publicly representing that ideology yeah i've never run into it in the real world before i'm never running anything like that i know there's like a clan around like there's like little pockets of florida where you can find like the clan like where they there's bars and stuff they go to and i'm sure they do fucking meetings in the woods somewhere around here but like yeah i don't know i just never i mean i'm not i'm not out searching for it either but um yeah it's like for me you only i only hear about it like on message boards and things like that but it's it's just wild to hear that they're like still doing their thing you know well the tightest spot i've ever been to is like a place where you can find people i got in i got in a couple but one of them was um at an event in uh in arizona called arian fest and there's always traditionally been a lot of a lot of tension between like neo-nazis and the clan you know but this was a this was like a sort of a pan white supremacist gathering so there were there were what's the why is there a rift between them they don't like punk i think there's like skinheads like it's part of its regional yeah but i think like the skinheads like kind of regard like the clan is like you know they had their day and they fucked it up yeah and um just kind of look at them as like there's also an age difference like generally like you know skinheads are younger right yeah or neo-nazi guys um but there was uh there was a there was a clavern there at at arian fest and one of the clan guys just he just called me out you know and i think i had one of those like disposable kodak cameras i was taking photos with you know which was okay i wasn't the only one taking photos yeah and i think i just took one photo too many or something and he called me out and accused me of being like from the anti-defamation league and um i had to just get right in his fucking face i mean it's just one of those things where like i knew if i just pretended to ignore it you know because he was kind of making comments off the side of his mouth at me that your adl yeah yeah i took i took a photo and he was like oh i guess we'll see that on the anti on the adl website next week or something like that yeah yeah you know and i knew that if i just pretended like i didn't hear it or or i tried to like laugh it off or something that that would that's not that wouldn't be right that would like be suspicious that's not what a real i just had to get right up in his fucking face you know and just and just call him out and call a clan a bunch of fucking posers a bunch of sheet heads and shit you know fucking sheet head you know like don't you know ask yeah you're like god we did i mean did you find anything any any were you able to find any humanity in those guys like was there was there any sort of like any soft spot you could find for them or like you kind of understood them from a from any kind of perspective or where you felt bad for them or like you could see you could understand not so much with the skinheads but there was like an organization called the national socialist movement and and they were like you know straight up brown shirts swastika armbands like dressing like they were from like they were nazis and i just remember at some of their rallies like running into these kids that just like seemed to have no idea what the fuck they were doing there what this group was really about and just seemed like total lost souls you know they've just somehow gotten wrapped up into this or you just wanted to like kind of take them under your wing and just get them out of this shit yeah so i did have some empathy for them you know but most of the skinheads like i mean but in the skinhead movement like it's really easy to become a leader like if you've got like you know decently high iq and some organizational skills you can become a big shot in that movement pretty easily in the same way like if you're just a mediocre musician if you start making hate rock or white power punk like all of a sudden you've got a fan base right you can actually sell records or you know now downloads right and have a fan base and like tour the world you know and have groupies and the whole fucking rock experience point being like with some of the leaders i was always wondering like how much do they actually like believe this shit how much of it is just like power for power's sake and they saw that this is a way to get people to like follow them right and then the other people just trying to fit into a crowd you know being misfits and just trying to find someone else just trying to find a place to fit in yeah you know it's like prison you know in prisons you're you know you people you have to join one of the clubs right you have to either you could be with the blacks you could be with the skinheads you could be with the or like the the one group you never want to be a part of is the chomos who everyone fucking tries to kill all the time and it's like uh it's like lord of the flies you know um hold that thought i gotta get p real quick we'll be right back man i hit this point recently where i just felt off same lifestyle same workout schedule same diet but after 2 p.m i was just dragging one of my guests said it sounded like a testosterone issue and suggested this natural pill which led me to mars men it's designed 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they are armed it's called the sanctuary church um here's here's their members this is what their members look like bro they look look i mean look that lady looks happy like that's how they go to church where is this this is in pennsylvania dude we might need to go investigate them we should sign up attendees hold rifles and this is the this is their blessing ceremony look at that dude like how do you end up there you know like how do you get recruited to go to that that's what i want to know like how do you how do you come up like meet somebody and get convinced that this would be a great idea to go here every other every once a week with your fucking ar-15 and await the end times it's wild to me it's wild to me you know this right here where we are right now is like the hub of scientology this is like this town is where scientology all started right it's just down the road right yeah the church is like right down the street from here yeah the dude who created l ron hubbard had this ship that was parked right out there when he was alive well that's how he tried to escape and tried to avoid all the tax evasion shit this is this is one of their e-meters this is what they use to do like technological exorcisms on people they went are you familiar with scientology at all yes i've seen the south park episode that's all you need to know no i yeah i am yeah yeah a guy i worked with at the new times in phoenix tony tony ortega he's done a lot of investigative reporting on why do i know that name he's done a lot of like reporting on scientology and like every few years man i get a call from somebody presenting themselves as like a private investigator or a filmmaker or something and they're trying to dig up dirt on him and they find me because they just know that i worked with him you know in the in the 90s at a paper in phoenix it's crazy they're still out to get him yeah tony ortega yeah i definitely know that name um the scientologists are they're they're uh they're ruthless with like the amount of intimidation and stalking they'll do yeah that's what they're doing to him yeah i was just trying to dig up any you know any dirt i have him on the day so i just try and like fucking mislead them yeah i mean you you hear of all like the crazy sinister evil cults that have bubbled up in america over the years and scientology is the one that was able to get away with the most they were able to get away with being tax exempt by attacking the irs and having all their members sue the file lawsuits against the irs and eventually having them cave and like you know i hear their membership is dwindling but like dude you walk up you drive up and down the streets around here they're everywhere there's young people that are still in it that walk up and down the streets part of the c-org the c-orgs like the faction of it who are like the workers who basically they get paid nothing they work for free clean toilets and try to recruit people and do these auditing sessions on people and it's just like god you're these like this the other day i was driving by and this girl she looked like she was maybe 21 years old you know and i just wondered like how did you end up here can you spot them like you can spot them for sure yeah they spot them they wear this certain outfit they wear this like this um a vest that's like this color this like maroon color with like a white a white long sleeve button-up collar dress shirt with this maroon vest they wear sometimes it's a it's like royal blue vest and they all walk together and uh they look like robots one of my one of my um one of my friends so like another weird thing is like there's a bunch of big companies around here like all of the all of the big scientologists around here are very well most of the wealthy people in this area are scientists scientologists for some reason they're they're all super rich like the high level ones and um they own like a lot of big businesses around here and one of my friends worked for one of the businesses that was owned by scientologists and i was me and him were getting lunch one day and i was like dude i'm like i'm like this town is infested with science with scientologists right i'm like i'm sure a lot of them are nice people whatever like they don't bother anybody but like how do you how do you note can you tell like who is and who isn't he's like oh yeah he's like i can tell you i know exactly who he is and he's like oh yeah he's like i it's easy for me to spot a scientologist anywhere i'm like are there any here with us in this fucking restaurant we're in he's like yeah it's like there's one right in this room right now i'm like what how do you know like there was no one dressed weird like everyone's dressed pretty normal he's like you just look into their eyes and it's just it's like a robotic vibe you'll get from them and i looked around and and sure shit i could spot him like is it that guy he's like yep that's the guy and you could just tell like there was something about the the guy the way the guy looked at himself and like the look in his eyes was just like robotic and um i you know one of somebody told me that one of the reasons they think that they were able to maintain for so long is because they never became a sex cult like they were never they were never associated with any like sexual abuse or anything like that you know and it makes me wonder like was that on purpose like was there an executive decision made like early on like we're never gonna do any kind of like sexual depravity or like sexually assault people like I'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure like sexual assault people like every other cult does right so maybe that's maybe that's why they were able to get by for so long but apparently their numbers are dwindling apparently like it's dying a slow death it's crazy that also like L Ron Hubbard was best friends with Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley and all these people from back in the day all these occultists it's bonkers man you know I did a series like a couple years ago um it was on Peacock called Krishna's that was about the Hare Krishna it was about organized crime within the Hare Krishna movement you know and I spent a lot of time with with Hare Krishna's and um I gotta say like they did not have that like you know robotic vibe really at all like some of the like happiest most well-adjusted people I've ever met or Krishna devotees what is that can you explain what that what that group is yeah so so uh it started in the what that group is yeah so so uh it started in the u i mean i mean their their sort of spiritual tradition is like ancient and like far predates christianity it goes back to the vedas like the oldest religious texts in the world known and uh but it came to the us with this um i guess you could say guru from india prabhupad who came in his timing was perfect he like came over in the mid 60s and you know just at the time as the he just surfed the wave of the counter culture like perfectly like had like you know wow you know kind of um events i guess you could say in golden gate park in san francisco and like like the george harrison the beatles got super into it and stuff he like sent over a group of devotees to london to like recruit the beatles in the movement but um but you know i i went into it like thinking like are the hari christians really a cult i came away thinking like no but there was this one um when prabhupada the founder of the what we call the hari krishnas in the us when he died he like appointed um all males some of his like top disciples to be to to carry on the movement and one of them was this guy named keith ham but his his christian name was kirtan ananda and he uh started this commune in the mountains of west virginia that's still there uh called new vrindavan vrindavan's a city in india that's you know the birthplace of krishna in that mythology or belief system yeah started this uh uh commune in in west virginia called new vrindavan and it and speaking the sex stuff i mean that's what took him down because he was like abusing the kids you know in the in the commune that's what eventually you know got him dethroned is that him yeah that's him he looks white yeah yeah he is yeah oh he is yeah yeah all the all the guys that carried like uh prabhupad was was uh indian but um all of his uh devotees that carried on the movement after after he died uh were white guys americans i think maybe one canadian anyway this guy is like uh keith ham or kirtan ananda in vrindavan in india there's this um there's the his tomb is there and he still has uh like devout followers of kirtan ananda that like live around his tomb there's these like big buildings that look kind of half finished and i went to i went to vrindavan to you know to film for this series and got access to to kirtan ananda's tomb and was like interviewing the guy that kind of keeps it you know there's candles and pictures and and i kind of asked one question too many and all of a sudden like all these like devotees of kirtananda started coming out of this building and i was just there with like one camera guy and me and our like you know interpreter and the interpreter was like it's time to go now time to go now like you get the out of there whoa yeah because he's real like controversial figure he's kind of like officially excommunicated by the by the hari krishnas but still has kind of adherence within the movement so what do the hari krishnas believe like what is their primary belief like what sets them apart well they believe in reincarnation karma you know um akin to hindu you know i'm not a religious scholar so i don't want to like misrepresent their belief system but yeah they definitely believe in like the cycle of reincarnation and um they believe in dancing a lot dancing yeah yeah i mean the heart christians you know the old like you know uh like that comedy in the 80s like airplane or whatever like there was the running joke about the the christians in the airports used to see them in the airports in the u.s a lot like in the 80s they'd be like selling flowers and books and or you'd see them like in venice beach in california like they call them kirtans and they're like sort of like dancing drumming ceremonies chanting yeah wow and what and so so so you just like discovered one day you you you became aware of them and you went and when you when you embedded with them you didn't have to like you were i stayed i stayed at the at the commune at new vrindavan in west virginia i mean where a lot of like evil went down like in the 80s and early 90s like this guy um kirtan ananda uh he had you know basically this vietnam vet that was like his enforcer that would just kill people on his way well he was a on his lawyers like people that started to challenge his authority you know and he wasn't the only like guru that went bad there was there was another one the guy who became known as the machine gun swami who was like into like you know running guns and like some of these guys really went to the dark side because they had all that power because like if you're a you know if you're a guru you're basically like a direct conduit to the divine and so you had these you know i mean i think prabhupad was like really in a in a jam he'd started this movement that had grown very big very fast in the us and then he died or you know on his deathbed he kind of like appointed these guys to carry it on but they were all just like young dudes in their 20s and then all of a sudden they're gurus you know and some of them kind of carried it on in a in a righteous way and some of them you know went to the dark side all that power went to their head and how did the sexual abuse park get involved like kirtan ananda was a file i mean you know and so he was you know you know that uh the hari krishna is like as as a movement have had problems akin to the catholic church although i'd say like unlike the catholic church they sort of confronted it head-on you know a decade or so ago uh but kirtan ananda was one of the worst examples of like child abuse within that you know religion and he just had he had you know several hundred i think yeah several hundred like followers that lived on this isolated lived in this isolated commune up in up in the mountains in west virginia the closest city is pittsburgh but it's like kind of it's out there man you know it's it's especially in the 80s they were really kind of cut off and it was a place that um you know if you were a up in a in a krishna temple in los angeles or denver wherever they would send you to new vrindavan so kirtanana could kind of like whip you into shape so it was also kind of like a lot of like uh difficult personalities i guess you could say were sort of funneled to him yeah you know it was a it was in some ways it was kind of a dumping ground for the movement um and but to this day there's this temple there uh that's just like it looks like a like a like the taj mahal or something it's incredible you're just driving on these winding roads in west virginia and there's just this this palace this like tribute to Prabhupada that's there that was like basically built by the devotees and it's incredible whoa yeah is this one of your most recent movies yeah yeah it's on Peacock it's called Krishna's yeah it came out a couple years ago how long how long do you typically spend on these projects a little over a year a little over yeah sometimes I'm working on more than one at a time you know I'm always usually making one and then trying to figure out what's next you know trying to sell the next thing but like yeah yeah so sometimes I'm working on two to two at once but in terms of one project it's I would say it nets out at about a year to year and a half how involved do you get with like the editing and stuff very yeah very much yeah I have a really old school method I mean I take all the like interviews all the archival material we have and I actually write what's called a radio script which is a really like kind of frankly antiquated method of doing things and I have to have editors that are like will work with me on that because I don't like to work on machines I like to work with paper okay like even sometimes pen and paper I just think that I'm just I'm not exactly a luddite but let's just say you know I prefer to write at least on screen when I'm creating and so I write a script and then give it to the editors and be like okay take this part of the interview and then this piece of archival and this b-roll and then like actually give them a script and then we collaborate and you know mix it up and stuff like that yeah yeah for me like like for when I was filming Deckhands I remember it sat on my heart drives for probably two years before I ever touched it because I was like kind of scared to go watch it again so I knew it was on the hard drives and I like our like the experience was so overwhelming I was just like you know I don't like for me it was just the the the idea of attacking all of that footage and trying to mold it into something that just was so daunting and I was like I'm a I'm a ferocious procrastinator mm-hmm and uh I just you know I didn't want to dive into it a because it was so dark I was like I don't really want to go back into that and like B I knew it was going to be such a big project to like actually try to tackle and wrangle into something that made sense and that was cohesive so like when I finally start like when I first started like putting it together you know you kind of like like oh okay this is kind of cool and then I started to piece more stuff together piece more pieces together and then I like I kind of like I realized okay I'm missing a lot of I'm missing a lot of transitions here I got like a lot of cool like little pocket stories but now I gotta go back all these years later and like I gotta fill in these gaps to make this make sense you know like to actually tell the story so like that was the kind of way the kind of like the way I did and for me like the music was a huge part of it too like the mute like it was kind of like a it was kind of like a like a creepy music video like there was no narration it was like it was more of kind of like the music playing in with like the scenery and the ambiance of it kind of just like made you feel a certain way you know yeah yeah it was just kind of like a dystopian music video in my mind which I I like enjoyed doing I used to like doing music videos when I was younger on Deckhands did you have collaborators or did you just like cut that yourself I did it all myself everything myself yeah that's one of the things I like about um making Docs is like it's a it's a collaborative like team effort I mean when I was doing just gonzo print journalism I mean every once in a while I'd be paired with a photographer on assignment but for the most part is like total lone wolf you know yeah and I really like working with crews like in the field you know yeah camera crews and work with the editors I mean I do write those scripts but then I I like sitting in the editing Bay with a with an editor and just like kicking ideas around and actually moving around and stuff it's like it's very satisfying creative process yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it was just like the part of it for me was just like jumping from you know in the middle of that like being on a boat with a bunch of dudes like doing blow and like watching their porno collection I think going home and having dinner with my family that night just like like God am I gonna do this forever like it's it's crazy you know and and uh it was like it was really it was it was really like felt good to be able to like to accomplish that task but I don't know I guess I just like wasn't cut out like what what's the next thing going to be like how am I going to go find and sustain this you know forever because I came from the I came from like a world of like before I started doing that kind of stuff like on YouTube I was kind of like trying to do what you're doing now I was trying to like do like documentaries and like real documentaries you know and like sell them to like networks or whatever this was kind of like before streaming I started doing that kind of like networks or whatever this was kind of like before streaming I started doing that like in the boom of like the reality show type thing when that can or not I'm sorry when like uh Duck Dynasty and like Pawn Stars were becoming big shows like the reality craze and like trying to do that I thought was cool and like I was never able to get anything off the ground and um like that's when I started like just digging into like my archives and it's like I'm just gonna throw all this on YouTube and see what happens and uh you know that's when when started to stick because like I got a really bad taste in my mouth from like working with those production companies and like trying to like deal with like you know shopping it to networks and to streamers like that it was like I was like constantly riding this emotional roller coaster of like like my fate was in somebody else's hands you know yeah and you just got to get used to people telling you that it's like right at the finish line and then they just kick your in exactly over and over again I felt like I was just getting put on a shelf with a bunch of other stuff yeah you know and like they're just they're they're intentionally the the parasites that are in that business they're they intentionally try to play on your emotions to keep you strung along you know and in that little shopping agreement that they have you locked into yeah yeah I mean I'm fortunate in that I'm always trying I mean I'm always trying to develop my own ideas but I'm fortunate in that like if somebody has like a gonzo idea they'll come to me like with narco-menonites is this uh filmmaker Sherry finbo uh who's a Canadian but she lives in Australia and she'd figured out this story and had sold it and she was like hey you know I've sold this story to crave the streamer in Canada it sounds like something you might be interested in I was like what is it she's like it's about a Mennonite drug cartel and I was like bingo you know I'm in right same thing with the with the Krishna's like I didn't have to sell that show a production company had sold that show to Hancock and then they you know wanted somebody to make it and they were like well this just seems like um something whole house might be interested in so I've gotten to that place which is good but I know it's it's you know I can't tell you how many times the last couple years especially with all of this like consolidation going on in the industry yeah everybody's nervous as about AI yeah you know and most recently everyone's like wondering like this Ellison deal is going to go through you know when Netflix was in a bidding war with them and that dust still hasn't settled like people just aren't buying a lot of stuff right now it's it's it's a tough time so I'm fortunate to be in that place where people are coming to me with shows that they've already sold and they just need help making them so you don't have to necessarily go kicking down doors and shaking I'm still doing the hustle all the time are you all the time you're still trying to find stuff yourself yeah how do you do that you're just like you have like a network of people you're constantly talking to yeah I do have I I do have a good network of you know my secret to my success has been working both sides of the street meaning cops and crooks so I've got yeah really good uh sources among law enforcement and really good sources on the other side of things you know so I'm always talking to them about stories and a lot of it's just you know just reading reading everything I can every day yeah you know about what's going on in the world right now but also like you know that library of books you have outside this room you know like that just just constantly digging through uh turning over rocks just looking under rocks exactly yeah it's usually like the most interesting is the that's not being reported on by anyone stuff that you're not going to find in the news you know right stuff more like the stuff you find behind the 7-Eleven yeah yeah man the whole the the like some of the stuff that's going on right now is just it seems like it just seems like supernatural like bubbling up into reality where it's like you don't even know what's real especially with like what gets reported on with like mainstream news and like this whole thing about the this Epstein Files thing I don't know how much you paid attention to that well I paid a lot to enter but it's like it's it's one of the most insane things to me is that that stuff can be made public and and admitted to by the DOJ and like nobody cares it seems like nobody cares other than a few journalists it's really disheartening I think part of it's everybody's attention is so you know discombobulated like it just seems like there's there's there's so much to try and pay attention to right now but that story is crazy I mean it just seems clear to me that that he was and some kind of Israeli intelligence agent and was you know gathering blackmail material I mean he was both both a pimp but he was also you know running honey traps I mean it's it's not even it's not even conspiracy there it just seems like that's been reported I mean yeah the dots are right there big giant 24-point dots to connect yeah and all of these crazy QAnon pizza gate people are being vindicated the people who we were all making fun of a few years ago they didn't have it exactly right they had it pretty damn close I mean it wasn't in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington DC but it was everywhere else yeah the guy should have gone and shut up uh Epstein's Mansion in work right yeah yeah it's crazy and like you know we've all we've all heard like heard the stories of like the rockefellers and the rothschilds and here it is plain as day in declassified emails like the guys talking to the rothschilds and now they're doing these subpoenas on all these people like this les wexner guy who owns victoria's secret and they subpoena or they did a deposition of him they did a deposition of bill clinton deposition of hillary clinton and they're all talking about yes the rothschilds he worked for the rothschilds and like before all this came out like the consensus seemed to be at least from my view that like what you said he seemed to be like an intelligence agent who worked for multiple different intelligence factions like um probably uh the mi6 the mossad and the cia but from what it seems like with these files is that they worked for him you know like these people were like he was a like there was that that layer of intelligence that's kind of above the politicians that run countries right so you have like us politicians intelligence and then you have this epstein rothschild uh rockefeller lair that's like behind the curtain doing all these crazy arms deals and like funding civil wars in sierra leone and like profiting off war selling arms try bilateral commission stuff it's like it's like ripped open a veil in reality that i don't think i don't think people are are ready to accept that that's real but they've fucking they've made it public yeah i don't mean to say that he was just that he was just working with massad i mean there's also links between epstein and fsb i mean there's emails where he was like you know trying to get to putin through an fsb right you know i mean so i think that he had uh i think he had his uh i was about to make a bad comparison that i won't he definitely had the most he had the biggest connection to the massad for sure because he had the guy the former head of the former prime minister like at his house every day what drives me crazy though is it's in the in this like hyper partisan environment that we're in that it's like both sides are taking what they want from the epstein files you know oh it's all oh bill clinton it's all about bill clinton right right right oh no it's all about like trump well it's fucking both of them okay exactly and this is this is the most it's not either or it's both and yeah it's the most bi bipartisan story probably of my lifetime there everyone is implicated in this stuff it's not left or right it's it's not republican democrat left right it's us versus the layer above us it's a it's a vertical fight not a horizontal fight right and it's like yeah man like the the more you pay attention to the attention to it like the more it just drives you crazy check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today auto parts check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today o'reilly you re welcome to our shop at o'reillyveriscan.com and like the code words the code words like jerky like trafficking people and in like allegedly it looks like depending on how you want to interpret the code words they were using that they were fucking eating people like what and where all the videos right you know yeah he had cameras everywhere where the fuck are they and what did they like if the fbi's had all this shit for so long like what did they make of it like what did i'm sure they have to have some sort of analysis of what those code words meant right like i'm sure they had to come to some conclusion but they didn't instead they're just like trying to fucking hide everything and start wars to distract us from it or you know i don't know man it's a lot to digest going back to the the sasquatch film it seemed like a lot of the people in uh in that area in the mendocino area there was like this overwhelming sort of like belief in the supernatural with those people not just with the bigfoot stuff but it just seemed like that was kind of like a yeah i know i know what i know what you're saying and and it's it makes a lot more sense if you've been there okay meaning that yes uh the people there are much more willing to entertain the people there are much more willing to entertain the possibility of the paranormal and encrypted than like your quote-unquote average american yeah and part of that may be um the level to which psychedelics permeated that culture but there's also just something about those like ancient forests that that lend themselves to giving credence to possibilities that that maybe don't make sense in in suburbia meaning that like there was one time i was hiking i was hiking by myself um in the redwoods just kind of trying to get my head around the story and i stopped and looked around i was like fuck like sasquatch makes a lot more sense like when you're actually here i mean i wouldn't have been surprised if a fucking brontosaurus had just started walking by me you know in those forests because they just feel so like ancient and spooky and magical yeah i've got to feel it like you've got to experience it i've heard people explain something similar to me uh like um this dude paul rosalie who's been on the show and he's been on the show for like six months and he's been on the show he's been spent most of his life in the amazon and he explains that like when you're there and you're like disconnected from modern technological society and you're kind of like just walking barefoot on the dirt and you have like all the insects insect noises around you like the birds and the the monkeys and all those noises he's like he's like it almost kind of like removes a layer between you and like something else that you can't really explain like almost like it unlocks like a buried ancient sensory ability that we may have had right your senses are definitely heightened yeah and you're like more in you're in tuned you're in tune with something else you can feel that current yeah yeah that makes sense yeah i think the same is true in those redwood forests and in a lot of other you know places where you can really feel that current yeah i mean it makes sense that like being like living in a fucking a city surrounded by stacked on top of where you're in a in an apartment building stacked on top of people and there's traffic and and like all these like crazy sounds and pollution it's like you're kind of like a like a killer whale in a tank at sea world right you know right right well also like in the emerald triangle man self-selective right these are people for the most part that have either grown up there so they are the descendants of people that made a deliberate choice to get away from that to get away from the orca tank at sea world yeah or they've they've made that choice for themselves as adults and have moved there you know in recent years one of the two meaning those people by nature are going to be more open to those possibilities both because of their personalities and then you add on that the environment in which they're steeped in their daily lives and you get a lot more openness to the possibilities of the paranormal right and so okay but you you grew up in alaska and anchorage yeah and then you moved to to santa cruz is that what you said yeah i went to college in santa cruz california yeah and that's pretty close to mendocino right oh it's a few hours away i mean it's bay area so it's it's probably about three hours or so yeah yeah that's the mendocino is way up way it's just far north man yeah it is way fucking yeah i mean they were telling me stories about like harvest season you know people driving like rvs packed with wheat and they were like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna be down to the bay area to sell it you know and it was just like fucking running the gauntlet of cops you know it's just like it's nerve-wracking and some of them were just fucking idiots about it i mean they they they'd look like there's pictures of some of the vehicles i mean the people that got busted i mean they just look like deadheads or something i mean they might as well had a sign that said pull me over like driving a beat to shit like winnebago like painted with you know psychedelic eye of horus and shit it's like you know come on like the guys that got away with the vehicle you can imagine you make multiple runs packed in a hidden compartment in the trunk you know change the vehicles like be smart about it yeah yeah there's uh yeah there's i mean so many wild stories that come out of that part of that part of the country too like there's like you know there's a ton of ufo abduction stories that come out of that part of the world too or that part of the country too you know where you have people like i wonder like how you know where you explain like walking through the woods by yourself you said you you would and be surprised if you saw a brontosaurus walk by. Like I wonder, what sort of like psychological connection there is between that and like people seeing flying saucers or think they got abducted by a UFO or something you know like I wonder like what what that unlocks in the psyche that could be going on that's not like real you know nuts and bolts you know like just like just like Bigfoot may not be some biological thing maybe it's just some like psychological phenomenon that is conducive to being in that to living in that environment maybe that maybe the UFO thing has like a similar connection maybe maybe there's a port there's portals around there right I mean some of the stuff that made I don't know if it made the most sense but I thought that was most interesting was people that lived in that area that believe that like there there are interdimensional portals in the woods around there and that that explains the Sasquatch sightings that Sasquatch is like an interdimensional being or messenger that sort of like flits back and forth between our reality and a parallel universe in the metaverse whoa okay that's like a commonly held belief up there just really yeah yeah what are those what are those people say about like UFOs do they have like any belief in that or are they not into that I didn't talk to them about UFOs I was just really just focused on the because I saw that there was in your documentary there's you're talking to the guy in the first episode where like you're asking about Sasquatch he starts talking about UFOs you're like what yeah right yeah I do remember that I was on the phone with him yeah um you know I saw a UFO you did I saw the Phoenix lights what almost 30 years ago yeah that was the um one of the that and the more time that went by after I saw that craft and it did not like really after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because I always like I believe that what I saw was probably a military sort of airship giant airship that had a cloaking device of some kind stealth cloaking device that had fritzed out and they were testing it I was like I don't think that was a fucking alien space really but then after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and we didn't deploy anything like that then I really started to think well maybe that was something else you know the the the 30th anniversary of the Phoenix lights just just passed like right March 13th I think yeah but I mean that was you know probably know that was like one of the biggest UFO sightings you know the first time that I saw it and I was like I wish we had uh these cameras and everyone had a camera in their pocket on that night there were some photos there is there is footage there is footage we saw at VHS you know and I just wish there'd been a lot more angles a lot more footage of it and so that's yeah so people saw two different things right they saw this array of lights and then in the East Valley like over around Tempe or Mesa where I was um a lot of people saw what I saw which was a much bigger um single craft like the v-shaped craft which is huge I yeah I saw the v-shaped craft but it also seemed like it changed shape to me into something that was like um a lot even bigger than just than just that that v-shape like that stealth bomber shape thing it seemed like it was changing shapes as it was flying and you don't think it was alien well the more time has gone by that we haven't that military technology has not been revealed to be military technology the more the more I question what it was but I know what I saw and you know I've and I remember like the governor of Arizona Fife Symington saw it but he had a press conference about it because people were freaking the out because like thousands of people had seen two at least two different UFOs or two different UFO phenomenon and he had to where the governor had held a press conference about it but he had like somebody dressed up in like a silver like alien space suit to come out and kind of like mocking it mocking it even though he had seen it himself yeah that he actually came out and apologized for that he did yeah did you wait so when you saw it what time was it was it like was it it was nighttime I don't remember I want to say it wasn't super late though right it wasn't super late now were you able to see like other than the lights were able to see like an outline definitely definitely and that's what I'm saying is that I saw I did not see the like sort of scattered array of lights that seemed to be smaller craft and also remember that like that same night the military went up and dropped a bunch of flares okay and then initially that was like one of the explanations for it so why did the military go up and like drop a bunch of flares if not to like provide some kind of cover not a cover story but an explanation for what people were seeing in other words people started to see the lights and then around the same time the military went up and dropped a bunch of bright burning flares in the sky so people saw a lot of stuff in the sky that night what I saw was this I saw the uh a large craft with the v-shaped lights on it and then at one point those lights went out and it seemed to me as if the shape of that craft uh changed and uh elongated and got larger like it was morphing okay and and at that point it was dark there were the lights went out but it was at low altitude a lot of people said that they saw it and was really high up what I saw over Tempe was low altitude like close noiseless um and almost like you could make out the shape uh by it blocking out you know light in the sky you could just see a dark shape of it and went on you know several minutes it was not like a fleeting thing and it was slow moving I think there was photos or videos I think there was photos or videos there were photos or videos videos of somebody who was like up on a mountaintop like really really close to it remember do you remember I was talking about that Steve is that with uh David no not with Morehouse Morehouse came in and he was a uh he was saying that it was definitely military stuff he was saying that it was a balloon but if it morphed shape that wouldn't make sense no it was not a balloon and it wasn't flares yeah yeah I I you know I I I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that it was definitely an extraterrestrial craft but I know what I saw and it's it's like the these explanations that it was like a you know a balloon or that it was it was all these flares that the military dropped there's just there's no way that that conforms with what I saw and I know what I saw so I mean I was asked to come to like a 30th anniversary event uh you know this year and I didn't do it and here I am talking about it on your show because I don't want to be that guy you know but it's like oh that project Blue Book about like you know uh deliberately setting it up so that people that recount these kinds of experiences or things that they saw that they're mocked ridiculed you know it's done a good job because here I'm still I'm nervous right now like telling you about it because like I'm gonna oh I'm gonna be the like the Phoenix lights UFO guy now you know but I yeah that's weird right I just keep coming back to it I I I believe what I see and I saw it yeah I mean the fact that they had a whole project to discredit people and to like right why so disinfo like if it's if it's nothing then why would you go to that effort to do that exactly yeah yeah it's a it's one of those topics that just gets like you know there's so many different layers to it and so many people that talk about it all the time it's just like God you get kind of like burnt out on it it's like I don't want to hear anymore about this you know it's like let me know when you figure it out it's like too much to pay attention to um well I feel it's like I mean the link between the Epstein files and UFOs is is that it's all right there out in front of us it feels like right now it's like happening in real time the evidence is right there and it's just almost like the idea of this like one top you know tenth of a percent of people running the world right that the curtain got peeled back on that over here and then here it's like it just seems like the evidence of these unexplained and unexplainable uh aircraft it's all out in the open right now and it's just overwhelming right I think it's on purpose you know that's spooky right well I mean it's like because of the internet and there's so because there's so much shit available on the internet we have so much access to everything they could they could hide the real shit in there with a bunch of other bullshit and nobody would know the difference right it's like some sort of like weird limited hangout where it's like some people could know think they know the truth like you could have uh the good shit mixed in with all the bullshit and like it doesn't matter to you because no one's gonna ever know which one's real and which one isn't it's like trying to pick a needle out of a haystack right because we're just flooded yeah and I'm sure there's a lot I'm sure like dude like some of the craziest stories you've ever heard about UFOs they could very well just be real and to us like rational thinkers like you're like no of course that's like the craziest thing is never going to be the real thing but like if you're on if you put the shoe on the other foot like you know maybe it's some sort of like weird fucking psyop who knows who knows man you know one of my teachers at UC Santa Cruz was was Frank Drake who was one of the founders of SETI and he came up with the the Drake equation which is like a way to like you know punch in different variables to estimate the number of other intelligent species just in our galaxy you know and the way he broke down is like of course of course there has to be probably hundreds of thousands of people who are like you know who are like you know who are like you know who are of highly developed technological beings. just in our just in the milky way you know and it's very convincing so i'm convinced that that's true yeah you know yeah i i think it's probably if it is anything it could potentially be like a a former breakaway civilization of human beings maybe that like lives underwater or like was a part of a they were maybe humans once and they like evolved in a weird way for some reason like they developed some crazy technology been trying to avoid some sort of fucking catastrophe that happened on earth maybe they went underground or underwater and like they're so fit and everyone else got wiped out but they were so advanced technologically everyone else got reset but they stayed the same they were like some breakaway or whatever they hid somewhere on earth and like maybe now they're like popping up in random places and we don't know what it is i'll tell you what if you were like if you were extraterrestrial life form and you wanted to come check us out what better place to hide than the ocean you right yeah we've explored more the surface of mars and we have our own oceans yeah it's insane yeah it's bonkers dude and the and the the fact that like all those occultists and people that were hanging out with l ron hubbard and the fucking nazis that we recruited to come over here and work on the atomic bomb they were the same ones that were like fascinated with all this ufo stuff you know that was right in the time that roswell happened yeah that's another layer that uh i don't know i don't know if humanity can handle that one being exposed but who knows i didn't think they'd be able to hand i didn't i didn't think people would be able to handle this epstein shit but apparently uh people just uh can ignore it and just go about their day it's just a massive state of denial yeah i think so refusal to confront it and what it indicates speaking about the you know about the epstein files yeah how many projects are you working on now or do you do you have like one in particular i know we mentioned the ukraine one but like um do you have anything like big you're planning on doing or that you can talk about yeah i'm working on a couple projects right now one of them is on um basically on on energy and and focusing on like california's energy policy um which is like you know california is is at the vanguard of trying to move towards quote-unquote net zero in the united states right and so california has essentially passed a lot of uh rules and regulations to try and shut down its domestic oil production in california there's a lot of fucking oil in california yeah right and so you think like okay well california is shutting down all this oil the government of california is making it so hard for these oil companies to do business it must mean that california is using a lot less oil but that's not the case at all california's still burning as much oil as it ever has and so i started with that question i was like okay well what are the ramifications of that and like california is importing um a lot of oil and and the single greatest source of imported oil for california is iraq what iraq forty percent of california's imported oil comes from iraq right now so people have this perception of california being like kind of at the vanguard of the green movement in the united states you know it's a massive economy it's now the fifth biggest economy in the world california is right and so i'm just kind of like digging into that and being like okay what are the like national security implications of california relying so much on oil from the middle east and is it really better for the environment to be trucking this oil from you know overseas on these tankers that burn this really dirty fuel yeah not only are they still burning the same amount of fuel but now they're actually paying this tankers to burn more fuel just to get it there correct correct so i'm still kind of feeling my way you know i've partnered up with this uh great director named aj carter on this and we're um you know it's all like independently financed so that we have um editorial control total editorial control of this story and that'll probably come out like later this year or early next i would say you know but it's crazy that we started making this film you know a few months ago and we were talking with like all these energy experts and national security experts about the straight of hormuz you know really they were presenting it as like this theoretical risk like what if war broke out in the middle east and all this oil that california is depending on is somehow has been cut off it's going to be a real big problem for california and then it happened dude like so is california the most state they're good because of this i mean look gas gas there was there was this usc professor who last year came out with this study and he predicted the possibility of gasoline rising to eight dollars a gallon in california at the pump because these big oil refineries in california are shutting down because the government's been so hostile to to the industry that they just kind of like threw in the towel and uh he was saying like you know something goes wrong some x factor gets introduced to this gas could skyrocket to eight dollars a gallon in california and he was ridiculed by governor newsom right his name is michael machay he's a business professor at usc and within a few days of of the war in iran starting there were gas stations in southern california that were posting prices of eight dollars and twenty cents a gallon so he was totally vindicated and so this idea that he put out there that was like you know seemed ludicrous or that was ridiculed uh by the governor in the media was totally proven right so that's just like you know i really like stories that sort of like challenge conventional wisdom yeah you know or challenge like the prevailing um accepted truth i guess you know and in this case the accepted truth is that like shutting down the oil industry in california must be good for the environment and good for the country and i'm not so convinced that that's true yeah that's a that whole topic is a maze to try to navigate because there's so many like it's so it's so uh politic there's so much political baggage that comes along with it you know and like it's really hard to know what's what the what's really going on with that because like i mean right that's crazy like right when you start this thing you have the whole venezuela thing happen yes where we apparently went over there to get all their all their oil and then which actually kind of makes sense now now that we did the iran war it would kind of make sense that we would want to go get venezuela first right so it's maybe that was part of the plan the whole time and now that you have the venezuela or the iran thing happening and choking off all of that oil like how does that affect how does that affect i mean i first of all i had no idea that different states could import oil from different countries yeah i didn't know that was how it worked well it works that's the way it works in california california only california situation because um they don't have an interstate pipeline uh they have in-state pipelines but they don't have an interest in other words california can't just like buy a bunch of oil you know from texas yeah for example all right and so california could entirely like produce and refine its own oil just in california but there were policy decisions made not to do that but at the same time because that we don't have with existing technology we don't have the technology to replace fossil fuels right now we just don't yeah okay all the windmills and solar panels can't do it no there's no way there's so many of them i know death valley is crazy the amount of like solar panels that we'd have to have to like even come close and that's it and solar you know wind and sun right solar they only replace like electricity in other words you can't like you can't manufacture steel with with solar power you could do with nuclear but you can't like solar and wind power like that only can address basically like our electricity needs in other words about 30 percent of our energy consumption believe me i wish i hadn't learned a lot of the that i've learned in the making of this you know documentary because it's terrifying because it's like the technology this this whole idea of like just stop oil it's like completely unrealistic this idea that we could just like flip a switch if we just had the political willpower we could just stop using fossil fuels and switch to renewables is it's frankly it's a fantasy that's what i'm finding yeah and that's scary you're you were of the opposite belief before you started this you thought it might have been possible yeah yeah i was i always thought that you know i always thought that nuclear power might need to be a part of the equation but i didn't understand just how completely reliant our world is upon fossil fuels right now um i wonder what what how much have you learned about the nuclear power possibility like like how how um how much of a reality do you think that could be i think that in my my opinion like that's the answer if if we accept it like climate change and you know we're not going to be able to we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it accept that like climate change is like a you know is a is a serious threat like assuming that that's true then i think that it and all of the above energy approach is the only answer and that nuclear has to be a big part of that equation i mean what else again because solar and wind can only address like you know electricity it doesn't address like transportation or manufacturing okay which is what most of the energy is used for yeah so and then what frustrates me is i see some of the same voices that 50 percent of the world is talking about and they're all talking about the 50 years ago in California, you know, we're pressuring the government in California to put a moratorium on nuclear power in California. Some of those same voices today are like the, just stop oil, just leave it in the ground. We can just, you know, flip a switch and go to net zero. You know, it's a fallacy. It's a, you know, it's a comforting thing uh idea but it's completely divorced from reality in my opinion you know because like look even with especially with ai coming online right now and the energy demands of that you know you start factoring that in the the amount of energy that's derived from fossil fuels now compared to the 1970s like we're using just a little bit more in terms of percentage in other words there is there is no energy transition going on the idea that there's an energy transition away from fossil fuels there really isn't but we're using way more energy right yes true but i'm saying as a percentage of the amount of energy we're using sure we're using more renewables but as a percentage of the total energy we're using worldwide fossil fuels it's now about like 86 percent like in the 70s it was about like 83 84 percent so it's slightly more now right right than it was 50 years ago right and then with the with the onset of ai and all this stuff i mean it's going to be exponentially growing like it's not just going to be it's not going to be a steady rate like this is going to be an exponential growth as technology and ai and quantum computers start to become a thing like how much energy is that going to take right that's crazy then you think about all the all the plants on taiwan that we depend on to manufacture all the chips and everything they need that natural gas from the middle east that's now choking off they run on natural gas so what happens if they can't make those chips what happens like six eight twelve weeks from now right right okay we're just now starting to feel the impacts of this and right now it's just the price of the punk but well our whole our whole economy is based off oil right that's what that where we got the whole world the petrodollar right is all based on that's propping up the our currency as being the world currency is because of the oil that comes out of the middle east and those all those countries over there that actually have a lot of oil and they're actually exporting all that oil the deal they made was to only take us dollars so they could invest it in all these other companies and a lot of them ai companies that are basically like doing a circle and fueling our economy in return so like not only are they choking off all that oil and raising all the gas prices and creating all this destabilization in the energy sector but they're also like gonna fucking i wonder what it's gonna do to the fucking american economy in general you know like our stock market and and all that stuff everything's gonna get more expensive yeah not just gas you know yeah all right because the the petroleum is used to make most things right plastics or they use that to make plastic these headphones yeah our phones you know the chairs were sitting in yeah the remote control they used to turn on the tv the tv itself yeah it's it's everywhere god dude well bro fertilizer you know oh yeah everything man i mean like yeah i don't know i don't know what's going on dude i'm just i'm trying to make heads i can't make heads or tails of what the fuck's going on in this world right now it's just at least you're trying i'm trying i'm trying the more i learn the more confused i get uh but bro thank you for doing this man appreciate it this has been thank you this has been fucking phenomenal um we uh where can i tell people to go to we just link to your movies or do you have like a website or anything people yeah i do have a website that has links and then uh the latest show narco mennonites is on crave right now which you can watch if you're in canada but i i think it'll be available in the u.s like real soon okay cool and when is uh what's the plan with that ukrainian one or the oil one too yeah yeah i'd say that the oil documentary would be out like later this year maybe early next okay yeah it's gonna be a feature doc not a series okay okay cool fantastic bro well thanks again dude thank you this has been awesome uh we have patreon questions we do all right we got we got people on our patreon that ask you specific questions so we'll do that separately that's it for the podcast good night everybody check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today auto parts