Inside Black Markets, 9/11 & Cartel TAKEOVER | Mariana van Zeller • 462

Perustin pyöräilyvää teitä valmistavan ornotin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimme harjoittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknistä osaamista, voimme hallinnoida yrityksen taustajaristeelle mien ja frontendia sekä myydä verkossa, vaivatta, jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, se olisi mielestäni itse polkupyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meidän liiketoiminta me hoituu Shopify'ssa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu, Shopify piste.com sivustolla. [Musiikkia] -I don't know how you never get scared, don't what you do. -I sometimes get scared. -Sometimes? -Sometimes. -Do you show it on the outside or is it strictly internalized? -Oh, I certainly. -I got caught in a military coup, and he's here, and I was definitely very scared, and I showed it. I was visibly shaken the whole time. I was there. -Yeah, that wasn't that long ago, right? -No, that was two years ago, August, two years ago. -What happened there again? You were on the ground doing a different documentary, and then got. -It was an episode of traffic. From the beginning, first season of traffic, I started pitching that National Geographic Story on Niger, because I was, first of all, it's one of my favorite parts of the world. It's the Sahel region of Africa, the southern Sahara Desert region. It's been sort of the center of all sorts of trafficking, human trafficking, gold trafficking, guns, everything. You can think of. And gold trafficking is now fueling, which is the story we wanted to investigate there, is how gold trafficking is actually fueling terrorist organizations. And for the longest time, I kept telling National Geographic, it's such a good story. The United States has two big base military bases there. The biggest drone military base outside of the United States is in Niger. Nobody knows a lot about it. Wait, the biggest drone military base outside of the United States was in Agadez in Niger, which is right in the Sahel region. And this is because the U.S. is fighting against these terrorist organizations and trying to keep them to not grow bigger and more powerful and potentially all of these groups, the ultimate goal is to attack the U.S. So to prevent another 9/11. And I kept telling in Agio that this was such an amazing story and so relevant to us. And so I wanted to really sort of look at the gold mining and how the gold is actually trafficked and how it gets into the hands of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and Boko Haram. And I spent months putting on a plan and every time in Agio would say it was just too risky. This is one of the most dangerous places on Earth essentially. Again, you have all those terrorist groups right there. You have kidnappings, squads. You know, there were three, I believe, who was three U.S. soldiers who had been killed there a few years before. Oh, recently. Yeah. Soldiers that were there as part of this operation to fight against the terrorist groups. And eventually, if season 4 we finally convinced in Agio we have a plan. There was a president, a democratically elected president at the time that had good connections with the United States. The U.S. had soldiers there. We'd been training the local military and they had agreed the government, the Nigerian government had agreed to allow us into the country and to let us do our work and provide us a military convoy. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. So we'd go into this very remote region where all the mining is happening and where all the trafficking is happening to, very dangerous region, but we'd go with a military escort, which is not at all what I'm used to doing. I don't usually travel with security. But in this case, it was really the only way that I could ensure a way in and out safely out of that place. And so we did. And we spent, it was sort of a eight-hour journey out in the desert. This is complete desert, so there's no roads, right? And we had, it was two or three of our, two cars of ours and then four trucks with military soldiers on top, all heavily armed and trained. And it's, yeah, eight-hour journey every time we stopped for sort of a bathroom break or snacks or stretch your legs. The soldiers, you could see, they'd get out of their trucks and they sort of do a perimeter, armed perimeter around us. You know, binoculars on the whole deal to see if there's any cars coming. Again, having young terrorist groups and kidnapping squads. But we managed to make it safely. And it was amazing. It was sort of one of my favorite days I've ever had in my life, where we spent the day. We got inside one of the mines. And this is sort of their dug by hand and dynamite explosions. And you go-- dug by hand. Yeah, first there's, they explode it with dynamite. And then they start like basically digging it. And pull up an image of this D4. Oh, yeah. If you do knee-chair, gold mining. Yeah, I'm terrified to say the name of that country for obvious reasons. Yeah. To say the wrong way. Yeah. knee-chair. It's not Nigeria, which is how many people get it confused. Yeah. Yeah, sort of that. Yeah. Without, yeah. So one of those top left corner one, that's sort of what we went down. My team and myself. But this, the one we went was a hundred feet deep. And it gets really claustrophobic. I was going to say it's only that wide, but it's a hundred feet deep. Oh, yeah. And it is more or less that wide. And you went in that. Oh, yeah. My team and I, yeah, we did. And at one point, you have to go-- I sort of had to go with my butt on the ground and sort of slide down. Oh, hell no. And we get to the bottom. And it's a big wider. And there's a team of people that were like three or four miners picking at the wall, basically a hundred feet deep. Picking at the wall, trying to get the little pieces that have golden them to then carry them in huge bags up. But there's sort of no security procedures, right? These guys are doing this in flip flops, by the way. And they told us, we got there because it was an eight hour journey. We got there. I think it was like 3 p.m. And as we are filming at the bottom, they tell us, oh, by the way, we forgot to tell you. But at 4 p.m. is when the dynamite explosion start around us. And there's a high risk of this whole thing collapsing. So, you know, it took us about half hour, 30, 40 minutes to go down. And they said, so we have about 20 minutes to get out up carrying all the gear and everything. And it was the fastest we've ever gone up. We've ever moved in our lives. But we got up and within like two minutes after being out of the mine, we hear a huge explosion and all over. They're like basically opening up more mines and getting the gold out. So, it was an amazing day. And we ended up camping out in the desert. It was me, my whole team, the only woman surrounded by men, the soldiers and my team and the miners. And then eventually, we woke up the next morning. We ate goat. They cooked some goat for us the night before. We all had massive diarrhea during the night. But I was still on cloud nine because this is really, and I knew like how many people in the world have experienced this. And it's such, it's exactly the kind of work I like to do. Just a quick question on it. So, you had gotten the capture. Oh, yeah, we filmed it all. Yeah, we filmed it all. We filmed interviews with miners. They explained to us how the terrorist groups come over and they buy gold from them or sometimes don't even pay. They just sort of take the gold away from them. And that's how they're funding their operations in the region. Do you ever, first of all, like that? Do you ever have a gold besides just, you know, sunlight is a disinfectant. Get the word out there and then let hopefully good people do something with it to change it. Or do you ever actually go beyond that yourself? Like, hey, I want this story to be able to show X, Y, and Z because that'll literally force, I don't know, legislation or something like that. I think it's the same thing, right? It is shining a light, but hopefully by shining a light you're changing legislation. You're making the world better in some way, you know. It's a bit of a cliche, but it's sort of the cherry on top for every journalist, right? You do the stories. It's not a sacrifice to do the stories I do. I do it because I love it. And I think I'm very, very privileged to be able to sort of wander in the worlds that I do. I think there is a little bit sometimes those journalists that like to talk about the sacrifices and the danger they put themselves in. In order to be able to shine a light on these important subject matters. You'll never hear that from me because I know I'm very privileged. It's a luxury to do what I do, but of course it's the cherry on top always, if you can actually make some sort of change. And the fact, if your work can have an impact. And so for us, yeah, for me in this story particularly, was to explain to the world what the heck the United States is doing in this remote country in Africa. To understand why it is actually important to have military bases and American presence in places as remote as this. And so, yeah, so I was very happy that we finally were able to capture it after years and years of trying to convince national geographic to let us go. And then suddenly we did and we were able to film it all. It was amazing. And know that very few people in the world that have ever been able to get this on camera. So of course I was very happy. All in a day. All in a day. Next morning wake up head back to Agades, which is the town closest to where we were. And we arrive and we are out of service by the way. We don't there's no cell phone service. And we're arriving in Agades. And again, we have a two car convoy plus the trucks with the military. And our fixer who's a local journalist who's actually from Mali, but we couldn't find a journalist from New Year that wanted to do this story. with us, so we had to bring this guy from Mali who had done any stories in the region. No, we couldn't. Wow. But this guy had done stories in the region and came with us, amazing guy called Baba. And suddenly I hear Baba in the front car in the convoy in a walkie-talkie telling us something that sounded like there's no cook in Yame, Yame is the capital of Niger. And we're like, what? He's talking about a cook. He's talking about dinner. We're so confused. And then it's sort of after he repeated it several times, we realized there's a coup in Yame. So there's a coup, a military coup. They deposed the elected, democratically elected president, and the military had taken over the country. And the same guy is protecting you, or not them, but yes, the military work for him, and essentially what happened is that immediately we lose our military arrived, they dropped us off at the hotel, and they said, okay, the country is in this array right now. Goodbye and left us. And so we were abandoned, essentially, in a hotel that had been built in the 80s when Qaddafi visited Niger. So as you can imagine, very rundown. There was one security guy at the gate that spent most of the day sleeping, and yeah, in a region surrounded by a lot of danger. And we had to try to figure out how the hell are we, and they closed the airspace and water. So we had to figure out how are we going to get out of here. And then suddenly they started evacuations from the capital, but we couldn't get to the capital. It was too dangerous. Just three day drive. And everybody told us, absolutely, do not do that. I actually try to hire a human trafficker. Yes. It's like, well, I am an expert. Yes. We were interviewing this guy. And I was like, actually, brilliant plan if we pay you, will you smuggle us out of the country? And he said, absolutely not. We were Americans. I always say no. I always say no. He said, yeah, you can't pay me enough. You're high targets. You're Americans. Absolutely not. If you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is ready and included from day one. Shopify's checkout feature is particularly clutch. This is the critical moment where your first customer is ready to pay and Shopify checkout is going to help them finish their purchase as smooth as possible. So much so that when they come back, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. Money in your account. UX and UI are something that are a real pet peeve of mine. I like things simple so that literally my grandma could figure it out and Shopify's always had that box check. And because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business and the tools to do it. If you have your own business, you know how annoying it is to get bogged down in the minutia and waste time. Shopify takes care of so much that you're not going to have to worry about that and you can focus on the things that matter. Today, Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. From household names like Mattel and Jim Shark to small businesses, just getting started. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make one. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com/Julian that link is in my description below. Verustin Pyreiluva is the first to be released in 2013. It's a bit of a shock to me that it's a bit of a technical issue. It's a bit of a challenge to the front end and the front end. It's a bit of a challenge. If Shopify is a bit of a shock, it's a bit of a problem. It's a bit of a shock to me that it's a bit of a shock to me that it's a bit of a shock to me that it's a bit of a shock to me. And yeah, it was the beginning of a huge deal. So what you do, how long were you there? It's a good story. We got time. We were there for nine days. What happened is that there was a sort of the escalation of a possible war coming because the West African country surrounding Niger had said that if they didn't put the president back in power that they would attack, they would invade Niger to make sure the president was back. And the Wagner group in Russia and its allies were saying that if they did that, they would then invade. They would send Wagner, Wagner group in and it would start, it would start a war essentially. And again, we were with no protection on no way out. And so every day you'd see it was getting worse and situation was getting worse and worse. And it was particularly bad on day three when you'd see the French, the British, the Portuguese where I'm from, the Spanish, all getting evacuated. There were journalists, American journalists who were in Yamaha at the time, a couple of American journalists that I knew of because I was in touch with people that worked with them who were doing the same story but not in a place as remote as us. And they were being evacuated, but we had no more, we weren't. And this, it was an interesting reason why essentially the United States refused to call it a military coup because at the moment they did, they would have to remove all their military personnel. And they're, all the American personnel from the country and which would mean the loss of millions of dollars and have that in the country, right? And so they were trying and trying to negotiate to figure out a way how to get President Basum back in power and just take care of it themselves. And they just weren't able to. So it wasn't after, I think it was like a month later that they declared that a military coup and eventually had to do away with their bases and lose all the investment. But because we were Americans and we were very close, we were like two miles from this big military base. We actually went to the base and tried to contact them and talk to them that they said, I'm sorry, unless there's a war that breaks out or you're actually an active danger. Or, you know, you're kidnapped by ISIS, we are able to bring you into the base right now. And we kept explaining, you do understand that that might be too late, right? If you're not, we're seven Americans here, we need shelter and they refuse to. And then we had, with all the work that I do, we always obviously have insurance and have an evacuation company that works with us part of the insurance package. - An evacuation company. - Yeah. If shit hits the fan, there's always a place, a number, you call. - Is that like Mr. Walton? - And the company that I'll see you out of there. But not in our case, we call the evacuation company and we were recording all of this. And they basically didn't have a plan in place and weren't psyched on getting us out. I mean, no matter how many times we ask, okay, if the war starts, do you have an idea? All this is in the film, by the way, do you have an idea of where we should go or give us some pointers on what to do in this situation? And are you deploying people or is somebody coming together? I mean, we're paying you a lot of money for situations exactly like this. And they just didn't have an answer. We realized that they were completely useless. - I hope you got that money back. - We did not get that money back. And we ended up actually, actually insurance helped pay for what it was eventually our evacuation. We found another evacuation company, so my husband, who's also a journalist, and co-owns MacMedia with me and a couple of few other partners. MacMedia is a production company that makes traffic. He and my team in LA were 24 hours trying to figure out a way to get us out and eventually found another evacuation company with two pilots who were crazy enough to agree to get on a plane. - Hell yeah. - And fly to Tunisia, to Agadez, and come in the middle of the night to rescue us. And I know this is getting long, but this is the most part of the story. - You got me on the edge of my seat. - So they told us, we get the call, and it's this evacuation company, and they told us, okay, we've got two pilots, we've got a plane, which happens to be a G5, which is the most expensive private small plane out there, which is a little bit of a sort of a whiplash right after 10 days stuck in this, but we have a G5, these two pilots. They are coming at 4 a.m. middle of the night. They're going to land for 20 minutes, and they only have 20 minutes on the ground, so if you're not there, and if you're not in the plane, within those 20 minutes, they're going to leave without you, right? And the whole team in LA is tracking the flight map, you know, the whole thing is set up. We know we don't sleep. I remember receiving this news and, like, sort of starting to tear up, but not yet, because so much could go wrong, that we weren't sure if this was going to work or not. And eventually, meanwhile, we couldn't forget this detail. While we were stuck in trying to figure out a way out, I had also gone to the airport. I think it was like day two or three. I'd gone to the airport, to the local airport, very small little place. And I met the manager of the airport, a guy called Cater, and I started talking to him, and I asked Cater, "Do you have children?" And he said, "Yes," and showed me the photos, and I showed him a photo of my son, and I said, "Look, it's his birthday next Friday, and he's at camp." And usually, my husband and I have this tradition, where we pick him up from camp, it's his performance camp, and he does his performance. It also happens to be his birthday, and it's very important for me to be there. As you can imagine, traveling mother, I just, I need to be there this day. So if you hear of any planes taking it off or coming in, please let us know. And he started texting me every day and says, "Still nothing? I'm sorry." And then he found out that there was this plane coming, and he texted me and he said, "I've got here some notice of a plane coming. Is this for you?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't sure. I was afraid." Maybe he was working with the military and I said - Yes, but you know, yes, but don't let's not share it yet. And anyway, yet to the airport the next morning, having not slept at all, we were all so nervous. We had a plan in place. We had, actually we had our flag jackets with us in case there was shootings on our way to the airport, which is about 20 minutes away. We had a whole plan if we were shot at what to do and we get to the airport, the airplane is delayed at this point. So it's already, the sun is rising, it's like 5.30 AM. And we get there and there's a ton of military at the airport, which was not supposed to be the case. It was supposed to be empty. And the manager, Kader, said he would be there to ensure that we'd get out safely. But there was not supposed to be any military, but it was kind of like the Argo movie, right? - Yeah. - Ben Affleck, where we get there, and there it is. - Oh, thank you. - And the military is there and they have a huge problem with us, they don't want us to leave and they start creating problems. And they say we don't have the correct paperwork 'cause the plane was going to Dubai after we're showing them the visas, they're just creating problems, they just don't want us to leave. And eventually, they said, okay, you guys can leave, but the Mali and Guy can't. - Oh, you're fixer. - My fixer. And this is the moment I'm on the phone with my husband and I tell him, look, and we can start seeing the plane coming in. And I said, look, this guy, I'm the owner of the company, I'm the executive producer of the show, and I'll let everybody else leave, but I'm not leaving without Obama. So I'm staying behind. It was really hard for me. This was really, really hard. My husband had the most amazing reaction, which was, I would do the exact same thing if I was in your shoes, and as much as this hurts me, I know that's the right decision to make. And as we're having this really difficult conversation, my husband says, wait, wait, I can see the names of the pilots are Portuguese. I think there's a chance that there are Portuguese. Plain lands, the pilots start coming out. I run to the pilot, the first one that comes out, and I ask him, are you Portuguese? And he says, yes. So then in Portuguese, the military arrives, there around us, and in Portuguese, I tell him, look, we're, explain the situation, we're a general, Tim Tim of journalists, there's one guy who doesn't have the right paperwork, the visa, 'cause he has an African passport to go to Dubai, but my team in LA is taking care of it. And when we're on the flight, it's going to come through. And this is like him saying, yes to this, I knew you could risk his flight license, you know? And he says, and he thinks about it for a minute, and the military guy starts yelling at him, and saying, you can't take him, you can't take him. And the pilot turns again, says, no, no, no, I take full responsibility, he's on my flight, and he's coming in. So we are all allowed in the plane. I'm the last one, I'm coming, my whole team is inside. I'm the last one, just making sure everything's okay. I'm going in, and suddenly I hear my name being called. Mariana, and I look back, and it's Carter, the airport manager, who'd been trying very hard, and yelling, he'd actually been yelling at the military too, and telling them that they couldn't do this to us. And he says, Mariana, and I look back, and he says, say, happy birthday to your son. - Oh my God, yeah. - And that was the moment where I couldn't keep it together anymore. And we all went into the plane, and we all, I still get very emotional talking about it, but we all lost it, lost it. And yeah, I think it was obviously relief, it was a really tense situation, but also a lot of guilt, you know? Thinking that for us, it was really difficult nine days, but for people like Carter, the miners, the amazing people that I met there, it was very uncertain and shitty future, without democracy, and with terrorist organizations that are growing and committing horrific attacks, it was tough, and it was really hard. - Well, it's clear throughout your career, and what you've done, like you obviously have a huge heart, but I'm always amazed by that too, because you know, when you go to all these different places around the world doing the stories that you do, you're gonna meet people you love in the shittiest situations, and you're gonna have to leave at some point, this obviously was like a movie script that ended okay, like leaving, but like either way, you're gonna have to leave these places, and I've seen it with other friends of mine as well, I've covered some stories around the world, the saddest part is like, you'll meet someone who's just pure and great and was just born in the wrong place, and you have become friends of them, you'll leave, and then you find out a month later, they died, or their family was killed, and I know you've had that a ton in your career, it's like the fact that you're not, the fact that you're not like, I don't wanna overstate this, but like numb to that in some way at that point, really speaks to like how much you care about these stories too, because you've had to see it so many times. - Thank you, Julian, yeah, I really, of course, I do care, and I don't think I'd be doing this work if I was numb to it. I think I do it because I care, because yeah, and that's been, I think most people think that after, you know, almost 20 years covering black markets, doing stories about sex trafficking and drugs and guns, and all sort of the deepest darkest corners of the world that I would have very, sort of dark view of humanity, and it's really quite the opposite. - Quite the opposite, yeah. - Quite the opposite. The majority of times that people that I meet are people just like you and I, because of lack of opportunities, because of the, you know, horrific inequality that exists in the world, end up wrong side of law, exactly, you know? And I always say there's a line that I really love, which is the Wheel of History turns and where, and when you're born, decides whether you get lifted or smashed by it, you know? And it's so true for so many people out there. And that's what, you know, whether I'm interviewing a cocaine, a kid, a 16 year old kid who carries cocaine on his back, or a Jamaican scammer, when you actually find out about why they became, why they do what they do, it's really impossible not to see yourself in their situation, understand that if it was you, you'd probably be doing the same thing. - Yeah, there's a story I've told a few times on the podcast before that always hits me, but very similar kind of thing. My buddy Josh, from college, he grew up in the projects in the Bronx. And he was really lucky. He had two great parents, both at home. His mom was a teacher at one of the local schools right there. And, you know, that's something a lot of the kids there don't have. You know, they've a broken home, one parent in the household working three jobs just to pay the bills. And so he's a brilliant guy. And he was lucky enough when he was in middle school to kind of get into like one of the higher level programs like classes, which then when he was finishing eighth grade afforded him the opportunity to do a program where during the week he got to go to school like out in the suburbs in Connecticut. So he told me this story that always stuck with me years ago where he said his first. I guess he was like out there full time or staying with a family and then would come home on breaks. I think that's what it was. So he came home maybe with Thanksgiving break the first year ninth grade when he went to do that program. And he was walking back like towards his block and across the block. He saw a kid as a friend of his that he grew up with on the corner, you know, 14, 15 years old, clearly a part of the drug gang now. So he went over there, said what's up to him and his friend was like happy to see him but also like what are you doing here kind of thing. And they talked for a couple of minutes and his friend who obviously by the law is doing something wrong. His friend had the presence of mine to be like Josh, you don't belong here, you're doing a great job, you're representing all of us, walk across the street and do not walk back this way. And there are people who might see that same kid in a courtroom 15 years later on, you know, brought up on fucking 50 charges or whatever and he like throw them away forever. But I look at that and I'm not like, I never want to be misheard of be like, I'm an excuse all crime that happens but I look at that and I always try to ask myself, how does someone get there? Well, if they weren't born into a situation like me, they're living in the suburbs with two parents and they had X, Y and Z in their environment. Yeah, I'd probably get there too, you know, and you see that in every single story you've ever done like to an extreme. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I really do. I do think that empathy is such an important part of being a journalist but being a person in general, right? Particularly nowadays where they seem to be no space for a different opinion or nuance. And yeah, we seem to have forgotten the importance of understanding the wise, not just asking about the what's, what is happening but understanding why is this happening? Why does this person become a traffic or a scammer or a pirate, whatever it is or a drug dealer out that kid? Yeah, so that's a huge part of the work that I do. For sure. How do you not, when you see how widespread so many things are by the way in our own country too, we have a lot of problems and you've covered those stories but like when you go all over the world or all over America and you just see these underbellies that are once you pull on the weed, you realize how much bigger it is than you first thought, how do you not lose hope? You know what I mean? Like how do you not sit back and go, "God damn it, we're never gonna fix this stuff." Yeah, well because I do think that it's the systems that are broken and not the people, right? And that's really the crux for me. And with all my work, what I'm trying to always show is, that's why when people ask me, you know, we do the majority of our interviews with people with masks. We're very careful about not showing their identities or locations. We travel with a bag of masks and long street t-shirts and gloves and hats and anything I need to make sure I'm protecting these sources. The reason why is because I'm not trying to get any particular one person in trouble because the problem that, you know, that black market is going to continue existing whether this person is in prison or not. Again, it's not that these people are broken. It's the systems that are broken. And there's a lot of people actually profiting from these systems being broken as we all know. And so my end goal always is to sort of show how this system is broken and try to figure out, you know, by showing what's wrong with it, possibly starting a discussion on how we can fix it. You know, why is it that one of the stories we did for season one of traffic actually is still one of my favorite ones. It was about gun trafficking and how I think it's something like 90 percent of guns found at crime scenes in Mexico, which, as you know, has a huge problem with violence, thousands of people dead, thousands of people disappeared, and 90 percent of the guns found are American guns. So we talk a lot about the drugs and I've covered this extensively, obviously, I've been in fentanyl labs and meth super labs in the jungles of Cinaloa, cocaine labs, all of it. But we don't, I don't think we talk enough about how those drug trafficking organizations can only operate because of the guns that they bring from the United States, right? It's sure no. It doesn't, they don't operate an under-adjustice system. The justice is how much gun power you have. And so they need those guns in order to be able to continue doing their drug trafficking. And all of those guns come from the United States. So one of the stories we did was how easy is it to get guns in the United States? How did the cartels get it down to the US? Who's profiting from this? And again, it's the systems that are broken. And often, yeah, I think we forget. We forget that. August heat has a way of exposing exactly what's wrong with your mattress. If you're waking up sticky and overheated instead of rested, that's not just the weather. That's you. You need to go to the doctor, get your health check. I'm just kidding. It's your mattress. It's a big problem. Luckily, my friends at Ghostbed build cooling into every mattress from the ground up. Not a some pricey or upgrade tier either. It's just part of how they build every bed into their lineup. 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And right now, Ghostbed's Labor Day sale is going to take $250 off of mattress bundles while our listeners are also going to get an extra 10% off the top by using Code Julian at checkout. So head on over to Ghostbed.com/Julian, link my description below, and use promo code Julian at checkout. That's Ghostbed.com/Julian, promo code Julian. Some exclusions please. I'll see you later. So for that episode, you got to actually like do the process and see how it happens. Oh my god. It was one of my favorites because the access we got was insane. So we started. The first shoot we did was in close to downtown Los Angeles and we filmed with a woman they called Blondie, who was American. American citizen of Mexican descent. But who? She had blonde hair. She did. And La Guera, they called her, which is Blondie. And she basically was responsible. She had paid really good money to carry guns from the United States. So we went to this guy's house also in undisclosed location in LA. And we saw it was incredible. We saw a room full of AK-47s, AR-15s, clocks, the whole thing. And many of them, by the way, that he told us he'd bought from the LAPD guns that the LAPD confiscates. This is an R-film. LAPD confiscates and then they buy them back from LAPD. Like they just walk into the LAPD and be like here's a hundred. No, they have contacts within corrupt LAPD that gave them guns. Yeah. It was, yeah, it was sort of a reveal. I mean, I've heard this before, but to get it to capture it on camera. And he showed us which one and showed us sort of there was one in particular that looked super professional. It had a scope. I believe it was in our AR-15 that he said he had gotten from some Marines in San Diego. So it was all crazy. And then we saw him putting those guns into the trunk of this woman, the Blondie's car. And then we weren't able to follow her as she crossed into Mexico, but we met her the next day in Mexico already and saw the exact same guns being given to the buyer in Mexico. It drove right across the border. And actually we filmed at the border a couple of days later and saw as much control as there is on what's coming north. There's no control as what's going south that nobody stops cars, there's no, no rarely does a car get stopped, a car heading south and we saw it and we filmed it actually. So she just drove across with a car loaded with AK-47s and other guns sold it to this one guy. That one guy then we filmed him selling his guns and then we ended up on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that was also incredible with a guy. We went on a tourist boat to this island where one of the biggest arms dealer was going to agree to be interviewed. I'd met him the night before, by the way, without cameras. And he was not, you know, some people you meet and they warm up to you immediately. Others, not like that. And this guy was not warm and fuzzy whatsoever. He was questioning whether I was the DA or I was actually a journalist. I was showing him my Instagram page and some of my previous work and he was like, that doesn't mean bullshit, that doesn't mean shit to me. Like how I still, you could have made that on your way here. I mean, shit all to me. But we have really good connections in the cartel world. I work with a Mexican journalist who has incredible connections and he'd sort of been told by his boss that he needed to give us this interview. So he reluctantly agreed to meet us the next day in this island and we get there. So you even went after he was like all over you. Yeah. And he told me, like, if you show up tomorrow and you're being trails and even if you're not, if you are, in fact, a journalist, but who knows, line four, something might be trailing you, you know, like they did for El Chapo and Sean Penn Middle Java. You're dead either way. Like I don't care. I don't care. And you're like getting on that boat. Yeah. That's why it's so different. You're built different. And the next morning, we show up on the island. And then there he was. And he was like, he had some of the guns with him. He was selling it to a guy there. He was selling us how he sells. In one point, he sold a hundred AK-47s to a member of the CJ and G. Oh, that's nice. He was fighting against the, the, you know, the cartel at the time. There was, it was, this was, you know, before the chapitos got arrested. So there was a huge fight between the two and before Adventure was killed. So huge in fighting between the two cartels. And, and he was, you know, making tons of money, just selling guns to both sides, by the way. And then he told us like, you were being watched. All around us, you see these mountains around us. Like this is, yeah, you're being watched right now. So we're making sure. And I asked him, I said last night, you didn't believe me, but you agreed to meet me here now. Do you believe me now? He was like, no, but you're being watched. And whatever happens, if you betray us, you're dead. And you weren't in this situation, you're not scared a little bit. No, I, you know, she's like, I was good. I think most times, you're sort of a fight inside my brain between curiosity and fear and curiosity always wins. And sometimes that's great. Sometimes that's not. But in this situation, it was good because we got incredible access. And yeah, and then we followed the trail of drugs, the guns are all the way to Cinaloa and filmed more crazy shit. So it's an incredible episode. I highly recommend it. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's also like, people are really cynical about this too when you literally see something exposed, like Operation Fast and Furious, which we've talked about. It's like the government is literally paying for it. And there's another guy who maybe at some point will come on the podcast of Jesus a few times over the years, but, you know, basically this dude, I got connected to him through someone else I know. And he kind of scares me. Nice guy. But, you know, he said, he's not in the CIA, but, you know, he's been in the CIA for 50 years and the way he got in was the way I understand is he was like a bartender or something like that in California dating one of the Felix Ariano brothers and nieces. And the CIA started watching them and they're like, "No, we like this guy." So they show up and they're like, "Hey, we're CIA. We think you'd make a great knock." Whatever that is, obviously, he didn't know at the time. You know, we want you to go down to Mexico and do this. He's like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm not. Listen, I'm not a narc." They're like, like, "We don't want you to rat on them. Or you can't even know we want you to work with them." Be inside them. Do everything that they do. Go where they go. Like, where are jobs not to stop them? And when I hear stuff like this, and then I have a guy like Matt Hedger sitting there whose job it was to do that as well in CIA, I'm like, you know, do they really want to stop these organizations? Do they want to stop the gun running like that? Or is there some sort of calculation that like, "Hey, this, I'm talking about like the U.S. government here. This is the cost. This is the cost of freedom right here." And, you know, these guns got to go across. This terror has to exist in other places, but we'll control it from the inside and use it to our benefit for the worst terror around the world. Like, am I crazy to think that that might be a little bit of the calculation? I don't know. I think that there's a lot that we don't know. I think that for example, I mean, we all know because of recent reporting, something that no one knew about, until recently, which is that this CIA is apparently operating inside Mexico. We, I mean, this was never disclosed. It was the car bombing and close to the Mexico City Airport recently, which has been reported was fully happened and was done by the CIA or planned and done by the CIA. There were the two CIA operatives that died in Cielo after coming from visiting one of those super meth labs that I visited in the past as well. And so there's a lot more involvements of the American government. I don't think they're not trying, I don't think they're trying to stop the guns flowing south because that's not in their interest. I do, and I think they should be because ultimately that violence comes back to us. But I do think there have been multiple administrations trying to stop the flow of drugs to the United States. I just think that it's not being done the way that it should, I think it's been it, I mean, it's not me, everybody's. No, it's another failure, right? Millions of billions of dollars lost on this drug war that has had zero consequence whatsoever on American lives. We, in fact, are seeing more and more people die every year. I mean, last year, actually, there was a first time there was a, I think it's a 17% decrease in fentanyl overdoses, but there's something much worse coming out now called niitazines. I trank dope. I've also done a story for season five, but even, I mean, trank dope is terrible because it's the tranquilizer mixed with fentanyl and it's create these wounds which we filmed in Kensington, Pennsylvania, these wounds that look like it's like open wounds and people, it's just horrific, but there's a new version and a new sort of synthetic opiate called niitazines that people are a niitazine, yeah. And they're still not enough laws against it, so now the cartel is sort of really doubling down on these new synthetic drugs because it's not as dangerous for them to make them as it is fentanyl because anyone that's making fentanyl right now has a target on their own backs. Is this a similar thing to fentanyl where they're getting precursors from other places. Oh, this is also coming from China. That's nice. Yeah. I believe so. Yeah, I'm quite sure. Yes, I was just thinking because I haven't done a story on niitazines, but I was recently. Night disease. Night disease. And IT, AZ, and E. Okay. It's funny. So I've been reporting, covering the opiate crisis since the very beginning. The first story I ever did on this was in 2008 and it was about oxycotton in Florida. Oh, you were early early early. Yeah, early early. Good for you. Nobody knew what oxycotton was at the time. I mean, if you were a doctor, you didn't or terminally ill-cancer patient, but you didn't realize what this, what was happening. And it was, we were working at the time at current TV, which is augura salivision station and had read a little article in Miami Herald about how all these pain clinics in South Florida were being inundated with like lines of people out the door that were coming from Appalachia, West Virginia, Kentucky. I mean, as far out as even California, people coming to buy drugs there. And why is it? Why are they coming from so far away to buy drugs from this pain clinic? These clinics had security guards out front. They had surveillance cameras. I mean, not your traditional pain clinic, right? And so we started investigating this and we did a talk about it called the oxycotton express, which sort of we made lots of contact sources and then eventually our sources in law enforcement and on the street started telling me that hey, there's something now that they're harder to get oxycotton. They're getting into heroin. It was the boom of heroin that we also filmed. And then I did one of the first stories ever on fentanyl, even before fentanyl was known too. This was before Prince died of a fentanyl overdose. He was in 2004, 15. Wow. Yeah, also right at the beginning, I went to my, I was working at fusion another TV station at the time. I went to my editor and I told him, hey, I want to do a story about this new drug hitting the streets called fentanyl. He said, what? Nobody's heard about this. How did you first hear about it? Because I have a really good contact in law enforcement and on the street. And they've been telling me, there's this new thing. And it started also as a drug for terminal cancer patients, much like oxycotton. But it's being abused on the street now. And so I started trying to convince my editor that this was an important story. He eventually agreed. When our story came out, I think he about in March, the year before had been the first year ever that one state, it was New Hampshire, the only state where there were more deaths from fentanyl than heroin. And at that time, it was just one state. Again, nobody had heard about fentanyl. But I traveled to Mexico to Sinaloa and interviewed a member of the Sinaloa Cartel showing us he had a kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl at the time of using pure fentanyl. They would mix heroin with fentanyl. And he told us how they had hired the Sinaloa Cartel had hired a chemist in Colombia. They paid him, I think it was like $40 or $50,000 to teach them how to make fentanyl using Chinese precursors. And I remember at one point the marine show up and the guy, there's like this one kilo of heroin and the mix with fentanyl right next to me. And the marine show up and the guy takes off. And then I'm like sitting there. There's a shot of me with the one key heroin being like, with the black of the marine show up here. I am with this. What do I do now? That's what he pull out the Instagram be like journalists. Yeah, I'm sorry. Press, press, press. I promise I have nothing to do with this. And but that was right the beginning. And it was sort of the best 50k dollars that you know that the cartel has ever spent. And they were that and that's why the Sinaloa Cartel were sort of the big the ones who really started the whole fentanyl trade. I mean they were very early on because they realized that Americans were abusing pharmaceutical fentanyl. Right. And they were like, Oh, we can make this in our labs. And we don't heroin is made, as you know, it's it comes from puppies. You have to depend on the seasons and how that season does and all that cultivation. And and this shit we can make it in a lab with some chemicals. I cost nothing coming from China. So we're going to make it. And yeah, you ever read Ben Westau's book fentanyl ink on this? Yeah. I wrote a great book about it. I had him in here a couple of months back. But he like fell into this story. He explained on the podcast how he did it. But he would he had been working on something else and then found out about the drug and started researching it and it turned into this book. And he's like, he was like a music reporter. Like a music and culture reporter. He's like, Oh, I guess I should look at this. Yeah. Fucking flew to China himself. Yeah. And just like set up a meeting. It was kind of hilarious how it happened with the precursor creators. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, so I'll take like $50,000 worth. Wow. Walks right out as if he could do it. Like they took him into the intersect them and he's like, this is government funded. Yeah. It's sanctioned. Yeah. It's the word. It's government sanctioned. And he saw the scale of it. And what's always struck me though, I understand why China would do that and stuff. They're over there. It's like a reverse opium war makes sense. But you know, it's dark obviously. But the quartels. Obviously, these are very vicious people. They are still business guys though. And like when you look at marijuana and then cocaine, you know, especially with cocaine, which was a huge moneymaker for them and continues to be, it's a party drug. You know, it's something people abuse in the clubs and stuff like that all throughout the United States. Rich people will even do it. You know, but with fentanyl, it kills people. And to me, it's like the huge investment they made in like, let's push this because a bunch of people in America are addicted to it. It feels to me like that put an extra target on their back. Like I'm curious what the calculation was there for them to do that besides like a quick get rich thing. I don't think they thought that far. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think they realized it a little too late, particularly the chap. those El Chapo sons, and that's why they were, I went, so I've done three stories on fentanyl, and the last one was about trancdope, which is essentially fentanyl mixed with tranquilizer. But we went to Sinaloa and saw how all the chemists were now prohibited from making fentanyl. Because the chapitas realized that as much money as they were making from this, there was a huge target on their backs, and soon or later the West was going to catch them, and they did. And so they prohibited all chemists from making. And for these guys, you know, the chemists, it's their livelihood. So a few of them had been killed. They'd been hung in bridges. There was signs that with photos of the guys, the chemists that had, you know, gone against the rule of the cartel, and we interviewed one chemist. It was an incredible interview with a guy who had a fentanyl lab under his house. He happened to have a house that was built right above one of those sort of drain, what do you call those storm drains, the gigantic storm drains. And so he took us, we went in a ladder down to this storm drain, and he showed us exactly where he used to have his lab, and he was making tons of fentanyl. And then the cartel came, they two hitmen, and pointed a gun and told them that you are not, you are prohibited from making fentanyl any longer, and if you do, you were coming back and killing you. And he stopped, and he was like, it sucks. I don't know what else to do. And he was scared. He was super scared. You could see the whole time he was like shaking, telling us this story. So I didn't touch with him. Through my, through some sources, and through, I have an incredible journalist that is a guy who's an incredible guy, worked with him for many, many years. I've reported more from Cinaloa than anywhere else in the world, and yeah, me and him. I mean, we've been around the first time I ever got access to a fentanyl lab. I was there with myself, a cameraman, Miguel, and I've been trying for years. And then finally, we got the call, and the cartel told us, okay, we'll pick you guys up in the middle of the night. We're going to blindfold you. We're going to take you to an undisclosed location, no cell phones, but we'll be able, you'll be able to film inside a lab. And I called my husband super excited, telling him, hey, I got this. And his first response was just make sure they film you as you're being blindfolded. Like, this is why I love you. Production first, safety later. And so I'm talking about, wow. When you talk with a guy like that, though, did I would imagine you got to, you spoke with him about his background, where he's from, his childhood. What was his story? What was his environment when he was coming out? Because obviously, he's a smart guy. He's a chemist. He had to be educated, right? Yeah. So that time when they said they were coming up, pick us up in the morning, I actually didn't happen. They never did. But a couple of years later, for another episode we did for traffic, we went inside, really smart guy. I mean, really smart guy. He owned a pharmacy in town. He had a few other businesses that he didn't want to tell us about on camera. And, and he really knew his shit. I mean, he was really a chemist. But I've been, I've been in someone camera, but not the other businesses. Yeah. Well, he was afraid it was too identifiable. But, but he really knew his shit. And we are, you know, a fentanyl lab is very different from a cocaine lab and a meth lab. You, you know, the level of protection is intense. We went with full hazmat suits. We had a mask that we had to have training to how to use this mask to make sure it had to be fitted to our face. We brought, we had an expert come to our office in LA and fit every single one of our team's faces for this mask. It was, I hated every step of it because I, I always say safety fourth. Look good. Sound good. Look good. Safety fourth. That's our two models of joke. And, and so, which is why I hated this whole process of taking these masks and hazmat suits, but it was really the only way. But we get there. We were finally inside. We're here with the car to breathe. And this guy has one of those, like, COVID masks on and like a bandana across his head or neck. And that's pretty much it. And these gloves. And then when I ask him, like, I mean, this is very, very dangerous. Like, how do you, oh, because a lot of these labs actually explode. It's very, very dangerous. I mean, you, if you do one thing wrong, these labs explode all the time. Yeah, all the time. Yeah, people die in these labs all the time. Some are from explosion, some are from just touching and overdosing, obviously, of mishandling of the drugs and overdosing. And I'm talking about fentanylabs, meth labs actually tend to explode much more than fentanylabs. But in general, drug labs, illicit drug labs tend to not be the safest work environment. And, and, and I ask him, like, how do you know once it's, how do you know it's done? And he said that you feel it in your skin and your heart starts palpitating more. And that's how he knows that fentanyl is good, that it's, that it's done and it's good quality. And I have said this before and people say, well, that's bullshit because fentanyl is an opianid, it's a downer, it's not an upper. Yes, but the symptoms of an overdose is that the heart slows, slows down, right? But his explanation, I actually now can't even remember his explanation was, but there was a reason, oh, I know why. When you start, when you start feeling the effects of the chemical precursor chemicals that I used in fentanyl, your heart actually, and if you're exposed to it the way that he is, your heart actually starts palpitating faster. And that's what he explained to us. We filmed it all. And, and, again, nope, he had no protection. And yeah, and he told us he runs a business in town. He's been a chemist all his life. He was approached by the cartel. And in his situation, you know, they offer him good money. But in a lot of cases, it's, it's not a, will you do it or not? You have to do it. You either do it or your family is at risk or you or you are will kill you. So that I was going to ask about, if you talked about the morality question. And actually, can I ask Joe a question? Joe, is there some way that you can research what the, what fentanyl would, I just want to make sure that I get this right. But what sort of exposure to fentanyl precursors and fentanyl in a fentanyl lab, what it does to your, to your body? All right, let's get this. I just want to make sure that I have this right. So you're saying because something he's wearing suits and stuff, but because he's actually making it something in him is at least exposed to it enough that he can get that. Yeah, because he didn't have the hazmat suits like we, oh, he didn't have the full suit. No, no, no. Okay. And we can actually even pull up that clip before we work from our traffic. Okay, Joe can find that. No problem. Exposure to fentanyl or it's immediate chemical precursors like NPP and ANPP triggers a life-threatening shutdown of the body's central nervous system. These chemicals are up to 50 to 100 times stronger in heroin. So it could be a profound respiratory depression, extreme sedation, muscle rigidity, cardiovascular changes, blood pressure and heart rate drops significantly leading to poor circulation. So can we, can you ask if it's possible that your heart beats faster? Because if it's a small exposure or something like that, I guess, right? Or just, yeah, that, yeah, or that would, that triggers the heart beating faster. And we can also watch the clip and hear him explaining it to us. Well, let's see, he just asked it. Yes, small exposure can trigger rapid heart palpitations. Performacologically, it is almost always caused by an adrenaline response or panic attack rather than the chemical. No, this is interesting, though, because I was going to ask you about this. One of the things that was happening, and I think still happens, maybe my law enforcement friends in the comments can help us with that. But like, you know, there would be cops who would have these overdoses. And I put it in air quotes when they'd have, they'd just be in the room with it or whatever. And yes, sometimes that did happen because it's obviously incredibly potent. There were other times where I believe I read this where they determined that it was actually a psychological effect. I've heard about this as well. Because they had been warned about it, you know? So it could be also like, maybe, I don't know, pure spec here, but maybe when he's making it, he knows he's getting close or whatever. Or it could be that he actually told me his heart slow down and in my mind, his heart spits exactly what you're saying. So we should actually, at some point, watch that clip. Yeah, it says Joe's getting the clip right now. Just before he pulls it up, it says right here, even the adrenaline and panic response, most common when someone believes or realizes they've been exposed to a deadly substance, like fentanyl, the brain's fighter flight system instantly kicks in. The surge of adrenaline causes me physical symptoms that are often mistaken for chemicals direct effects. I get this another not to this extent, but to like other random things where I'm like, oh, did I just take like three ibuprofen instead of two, you know, or something like that? And then I'm like, right, or me and the crew where I get. Yeah, you and a crew. Yeah, I'm sitting here worried about it. But all right, Joe's got the clip right here. So keep it not full screen because this is Nat Geo. Deaf. Yeah, that's perfect. And we'll watch it. And if you guys get a skip in the episode right now, it's because it was copyrighted, but we'll watch it right here. So you see the mask that we've fitted to our faces. Yeah, it all has man seat. Olen Shannon Maldonado. Käsintecht ja artesani tuotteita myven jaui lahjakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistä me tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittava työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify piste komsi vustolla. Täällä on varaston suunnitteluja. Tämä on seuraavaksi huomioon. It was a regular disease, physical disease, which it is, by the way, but if it was like leprosy, for example, and we'd see people on the streets of Kensington, like that, we wouldn't allow it, right? But because we believe that this is their choice and they're choosing to do this, which is false. Nobody chooses to be homeless and to have gigantic open wounds and to, you know, constantly having to be revived by Narcan, nobody chooses this life. And so unless, until we realize that this is a public health crisis and sort of treat it as that, we're never going to be able to solve this problem. I don't think we've been serious enough about it, and we're going after, yes, we're going after the cartels and our chapel's sons and Mayo and all these people and that's great and we should, but we should equally put as much money if not more into curing the source of the problem. I agree. And that is addiction. I agree and I think there has to be a real concerted effort on it and also an understanding like you just said of people of the level of compassion like, hey, someone else had a different life than me, maybe one time, they made a choice to do one thing and at a low moment or something like that and then spiral into other stuff. That could be you too. What's the whole quote? We're all like 10 bad decisions away from being homeless or something. And not only that, I mean, it could be a bad decision. It could have been doctor prescribed, which is so many cases, a large percentage of people on the streets out there were prescribed by doctors. So we don't know, instead of judging them, let's understand that it could be us at any moment. Yeah. We have to figure it out. This is perfect, too, because I had wanted to come back to this. You mentioned this earlier and how early you were on the opioid crisis in America, which was a legalized cartel within our own borders that caused that when you look at the saculars and then obviously people across pharma who jumped in on this, if you will, but like making a documentary in 2008, I'm just thinking of the timeline in my head of when this started to explode quietly without like people sharing it all over the internet. You know, it wasn't that long before that and it didn't go mainstream if people realized and holy shit, this is like a legalized problem until the 2010s. So how did you, I think you started to say this earlier, but just like the full background, what was the first time where you realized, besides like seeing the people show up to the pharmacies in Florida and coming in like what made you realize it was completely widespread to do like a whole documentary on it? Was it just that or? Yeah. I mean, started by just seeing the activity, the people from all over the country coming to these pan clinics in Florida, then actually looking at the numbers and finding out that 90% 90 of the top 100 oxycotten prescribers were in Florida from the whole country, 90 of the top 100 prescribers in the whole country were in Florida. Goddamn it, Florida. And seeing, oh my, it's the, it's, it's, it's, it's having for journalists. I take my passport there. It's a different country. It's, it's a crazy place. It's my husband's favorite place on earth is Florida because he's a journalist like me. We've worked together on a lot of stories there, but it's, yeah, it's like a, it's heaven for journalists because it's just, every corner, there's a story like, yeah, where's the wind? All right. There's one. It's the bus. Yeah. So it was like starting to look at that and then, and then, and then actually heading down there. And it was a, I remember walking into a pan clinic. I had a secret camera on me, one of those button cameras. And my husband's in the car with a camera but filming me from inside the car. And I go into this pan clinic and I asked the receptionist, I tell her I have a little bit of back pain. Could I see somebody? And how easy is it to get prescribed oxycotton and she, oh yeah, and she actually was one of mention oxy, what can I be prescribed? And she said, well, you have to go and do an MRI, which we have in the back of our pan clinic and then you'll come back with it and then the doctor can prescribe you oxy. It was the holy Trinity in Florida at the time was oxy, Xanax and a muscle relaxer. And that's was sort of the holy grail of drugs. That's why all the people were coming. I mean, it was mainly the oxycotton, but you mixed it with the others. And then interviewing another, another, we interviewed another mother, which she had two sons and she lost both sons to oxycotton and we went to her house and she showed us the pills that her son had been prescribed by one of these pan clinic doctors. And we're talking about 300, 400, 500 pills in boxes for a one month supply of drugs for a kid who didn't have any physical conditions whatsoever, but had become addicted to drugs and it was, he was doctor shopping. So he's going from pan clinic to pan clinic. He passed away and the other, her, the younger son was still alive and we filmed with him, get called Todd. And he should, I mean, he was, he, he allowed us to film him as he snorted oxycotton and this is all over our film like he behind his mother's back, which was sort of a difficult decision for us, but he was willing to show us how he does it, how he procures it. And then it was a year later, he passed away as well. Yeah. In the same documentary where you're talking to the mom, yeah, who's lost the one son. He lost about one son. Yeah, the other son. You have to adhere to journalistic standards and not tell her about the fact that you're also. We told her, she knew that he was using drugs and she was trying to keep him safe. And we asked her if we could spend time with him alone and while we were spending time with him alone, he took out a tin foil and was smoking in front of us and we later told her. Because he could die. Okay. And then we actually screened, it was one of the rare cases where we screened the documentary for her before it was released for her and Todd. So he still saw it while he was alive and then he died, but they saw the documentary because I wanted to make sure, you know, that that she was okay with it because it was obviously about something very private. Here's the part I still don't understand. I can see some of these scammy clinics in like Florida or whatever, but I always think back to the third time I broke my rest. I was in college. This is like 2013 and I had to get surgery when I get a metal plate and all that. So I'm paying or whatever. And the college doctor gave me a prescription for Vicodin. I shit you not. It was three canisters out there. I never took a single one of them. Now would be honest, whenever I've had four surgeries before, whenever I've done those surgeries, there's like 48 hours afterwards where you take like whatever it's Vicodin, usually I think I always throw it away at 48 hours just to be safe. For whatever reason, whatever that feeling is that people like, I don't like it, but I could imagine that maybe other people do and then they get addicted. I think the stats have backed me up. But I remember looking at this and I never took it. So I actually later, I put it in funny story, I put it in my backpack, forgot about it. And so I went to fly to Florida six months later with my mom and we go to security. And I had accidentally taken some bagel knives through security a couple years before, which was a funny story. So she's like, are there any surprises in your backpack? I'm like, no. And I go through the backpack and I get to this pocket and I reach in and they all exploded open. So it was a giant white powder. And I had to go like in front of the security lady and like dump the white powder and the trash can. She's like, shit, you know what I mean? But anyway, I didn't take any of it, but I remember thinking about that and I'm like, why did he just give me 90 pills for a broken wrist? And why is, why does that guy have a medical license? Like shouldn't there be some kind of onus on the doctor knowing what the fuck they're subscribing or prescribing you? Yeah. And I think the vast majority of doctors who overprescribe these pills, it was pain management. It's a sort of an expertise within itself. It's a, it's like, and a lot of these doctors that are treating pain aren't pain management and experts. So, and you had the secular family, you had Purdue farmer telling people that this was safe, right? And they were ads out there and they were pushing these on doctors and telling them that the biggest plague that Americans suffer is suffering itself. And we had to figure out, it's pain and we had to figure out how to deal with pain because American doctors weren't good at dealing with pain until they really pushed this idea. And a lot of doctors decided that there was the doctorly thing to do. The right thing to do was to treat people and treat their pain. But there was also, as we all know, a lot of very, very dirty doctors out there. We interviewed a kid who is at the time doing the oxy thing in Florida and his doctor was a gynecologist. And he was going through gynecologist, he was a boy and he was going to gynecologist who was no BGYN, and she was the one who prescribed him oxy cotton. Now, how does she have a medical license? No. Yeah. That's no sense. Not one single, I don't think a single one of these doctors has seen a day in prison. Our doc, the one, the oxy cotton express actually focuses on this one pain clinic in South Florida called American Pain that was run by these two twins. My husband did a feature talk about it called American Pain. It's on HBO. You should watch it. It's really good. But it was basically focused on these two twins who ran, they used to have a, they used to sell illegal steroids, basically, and then a friend of them told them, what are you guys doing? You can be selling oxy cotton. You can make it much more money. So they set up these pain clinics all throughout South Florida. And we're making-- I mean, they had $40 million or something like stash underneath the mother's mattress. It was like insane amounts. They were like going on helicopters, having sex with stripper. It was like crazy, a display of wealth. They were making so much money. And my husband and I had spent time in Kentucky filming this with a sheriff who was finding these pill bottles next to dead bodies over those bodies that said American pain. So we knew this was a pain clinic once we went back to Florida. We really wanted to film outside this pain clinic. And we get there. And we're on the other side of this sort of big road. Because we know that these guys are-- they're known to be sort of aggressive and not like cameras outside. We know how there's like two security guys outside, surveillance cameras. And as soon as we take out the camera, the car comes around, stops right next to us, two cars. And it's the twins. And they start threatening us. And they say, what the fuck are you guys doing here? Get the shit. Get the fuck out of our place. Get the fucking cameras out of our face. What are you doing? And we're like, OK, it's time to go. And we start driving out. And we had planned this so we could film right before we're supposed to fly out. So we have a rental car. And we're driving towards the airport down 9.95. And I start-- I realize that we're out of gas. And we have like a tiny bit of gas left. And they're following us down 9.95. And we stop at the gas station following us. And we stop at the gas station. And they stop right behind us and they get out of the car. And they come right to the window. And I'm at this point a little scared. And I decide this is a terrible idea. So I continue driving. And then on 9.95, we had interviewed a share-- someone from the shares department and I called her and I said, hey, we're being followed by the guys from American pain. And she said, hung up the phone and call 911 right now. You do not want to mess with these guys. There was an active DEA and FBI investigation to these guys at the time. Over their names? The George Brothers. The George Brothers? Yeah, the George Brothers. It's a little old right now. Yeah. Oh, sorry, guys, and people. Yeah. Yeah. If you pull up American pain, which is my husband's documentary, you'll see them. I think they're-- So when you were making this, though, in 2007-2008, came out in 2008, so you were making it in 2007? The fair to say. How close to the Holy Grail did-- you know, I'll read this for the last time. Chris and Jeff George are identical twin brothers who operated the largest network of illegal pill male clinics in the United States from 2007 and 2010 based out of South Florida. They're cash only. That's how you know. They're cash-only clinics trafficked over 20 million doses of oxycodone, fueling the American opioid crisis, operating out of strip malls and former bank buildings. The George Brothers created what they called the Disneyland of pain clinics, pulling in over $40 million in cash. They catered not just to local Floridians, but heavily to thousands of customers who traveled thousands of miles or rented buses from Appalachian States like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio to get highly addictive pain pills. The operation required cash upfront relied on corrupt doctors and generated more than $500 million in pain pills. How long did they-- what was the sentences there, Steve? Just back to that page real quick. Sorry for down right there. Yes, so they were caught, discovered $4.5 million in cash stash in the attic of the twins' mother. Yeah, OK, $4.5. They were making-- they made $500 million yet. OK, so Christopher, the pill male kingpin, pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy and served 11 years in prison. The brother was set free after serving roughly 13 years behind bars, so they're both out now. And you see it mentions, they're massive drug enterprise with a community detail in the award-winning CNN documentary American pain. There you go. And you interviewed both of them for the doc. And this is the funny story. So they're following us down on '95. I'm on the phone. The woman tells me, call 911 right now. This is actually seriously dangerous. We call 911 and tell them, we're being followed by these gigantic, big-looking guys threatening us. And as I'm on the phone with 911, our car runs out, the car runs out of gas. And I veer off to the side and I just stop the car. But they have no idea what's happening. They didn't put two and two together that we had stopped at the gas station because we needed gas and we ran out of gas. They just thought, what the fuck are these people doing? So they just stop behind us and they don't get out of the car because at this point, they're trying to figure out what is happening here. And within minutes, actually, police shows up. And they come and they ask us questions and they ask them questions. They come up with an excuse that they thought I was a psycho ex-girlfriend. Oh, shit. Obviously. I tell the police what had just happened. And then it turns out that during this time, this whole our whole filming, because I later also called them and got them on the phone. And all of this made it into their trial. The tapes, because the police had a wire on them the whole time. So they heard them talking about us, our investigation, this annoying journalist that we're looking into their business. And then when they were imprisoned, my husband sends them a letter. And he's saying he really wanted to do this documentary on the rise and fall of the twin brothers. And we discuss, like, should I say what that I directed the oxygotten express or should I not? And he decides not to. And so he writes a letter. I think it was to Chris. And Chris writes back and says, at the end, he says, by the way, say hi to your wife. He knew full well who he was. But he said he agreed. And he ended up doing the dog about these guys. And it's fascinating. And none of the doctors did any time in prison, or not enough time, at least. Yeah, it's also crazy, because it's just another thematic thing here in the 21st century, where we've seen such a split of elite members of society and everyone else. And I wouldn't call doctors living in the billionaire class or anything like that by any stretch. I don't want to exaggerate this. But when you see it, they're living well. They're rich. They're taking advantage of people, taking advantage of breaking their oath of what they did. And they're laughing about it and probably all fucking strippers and doing whatever they do, because they're scumbags. And yet, then they get no justice. It's like it's a two-tiered kind of system, because I know the dude that gets caught slinging on the corner with the wrong amount of kilos is doing 25 years on a Tuesday at 1205 pm when the judge gets back from lunch and says, all right, yeah, it's 10 to 24 and seven months. Sorry, next case, I can understand. I mean, can understand. I'm a part of the people that are just like, what the fuck? Why is this like this? And the FBI actually did an amazing job in this case. I interviewed for the podcast on the Hidden Third, which I haven't explained at some point. I should explain what the Hidden Third means. Why am I the Hidden Third? It's the elicit underbelly of the world. It is. I love that name. Good. It's estimated at 35% of the global economy are black and gray markets. It's what economists call the Hidden Third. And it's what I specialize in where I spend most of my time. And I think it was my second episode of the Hidden Third podcast, which is the podcast that I now do. Link down below as well. Exactly. We can also collab this too, so people can hit the-- We can literally hit next to the title and subscribe to Marianna's channel, as well. That's great. Sure. And yeah, we interviewed Kurt McKenzie, who's the FBI agent in charge of the operation in Florida. In Florida to bring these guys down. And he still talks about how the biggest frustrations not being able to get particularly one doctor that he really wanted to get was responsible for a lot of deaths. And they tried so hard through their investigation to prove that she knew that she was responsible for these deaths and they were never able to get in prison. Well, that person's going to have to answer for it at some point themselves. They've got to live with themselves. It's crazy. But all the way back when you did this, were you able to get all the way there to like the sacklers, or was it still a little too early to know the real full story there? So at this point, it's-- I mean, we knew Purdue Pharma was a big thing and was a big part of this whole thing. But our story was more on the oxyclinic express. So it was more how the pain clinics are leading to overdoses and how it's all connected to Appalachia. So we actually followed the oxyclinic express from one place to the other. We did actually talk about Purdue Pharma, where we weren't-- I mean, we were exposing it. We weren't investigating-- I mean, it was an investigation. But it was more of an expose of this crazy situation that very few Americans knew about. And meanwhile, I think in Florida at the time, seven Americans a week or a day-- sorry, a day we're already dying-- let alone everybody outside of the state. Again, this was the early ages of the-- what became the opioid crisis, the biggest drug epidemic in America's history. But then we did, when I did my first fentanyl story, we went after this one pharmaceutical company that was-- it was called Inces Pharmaceutical Base in Arizona, run by a guy called Capore, John Capore. Was this the titrations one where they made the song? Oh, yeah, exactly. They made the song, making fun, and saying they want people more people. And we got an amazing woman, whistleblower, who agreed to talk to us to her own risk. And she explained exactly how she was one who was responsible for making phone calls to the insurance. companies and lied to the insurance companies and tell them that the doctor prescribing pills to this woman that this patient was in fact a had cancer when they didn't because they, you know, because it was a, you could only prescribe fentanyl to terminally ill cancer patients and so they lied consistently and these medications were very expensive, this fentanyl that was called subsets and it was very expensive. So you had, yeah, it was a spray and you had all these companies, these insurance companies basically paying out and people dying from these drugs and this was where the cartel came in, they were very smart and they realized, wait, they were abusing these drugs, they're having to go through hoops and loops or whatever the expression is, I fuck up all my American expression through hoops, right? Through hoops. Yeah, you read through hoops. I was going to let either one go. It was fine. Through hoops to get these drugs when we can be supplying them right here and putting them out on the streets for people to use them without having to go to the doctor and they were very smart. But this guy John Kapoor, we started investigating as him, we reached out and told him we want to interview you or anyone in your company and this was before obviously he was taken down and he threatened us and he sent us a sea send assist and said if our story came out, he would put all his resources into suing the shit out of us and we went ahead and they heard it and a few years later, we actually tried to go to his house, he lives in a very mansion and a gay community, we tried to film outside his house and everything. And of course, he was the only pharmaceutical exec ever spent time in prison. He's out now I believe that he did a few years in prison. You know what? He said he was going to throw all the lawyers at you and everything. Does he ever see the show of the wire? Yeah, my favorite. The best show ever made. I always think it's number two behind the sopranos but I think the show is so good, it's like a documentary. It's because it's created by a journalist. Literally. Yeah, David Simon, shout out David Simon. We love to talk to you sometime by the way. But you know, there's many great lines in that show but one, it's probably come up five, six different times on the podcast is when Omar Little is testifying in the second season with the lawyer who represents all the drug king pins and knows it and the guy is like, so this is what you do. Mr. Little, you just run around and you shoot people you don't like and he goes just like you and the guy goes, what? And he goes, I got a shotgun, you got a briefcase all in the game though. And these guys like the capors of the world, they got lawyers with briefcases, they got money, they can throw the court system at you to fuck you into 40 million hearings until you go away. And they look at the dude who walks down the street with two secarios in an armed guard and doesn't speak a word of English and they look at them like below them. No, you're the same person. You are the same exact thing. One has a gun, the other has a courtroom, sometimes they have both by the way. And it's just this mental thing to where it even led to the family like the sack. There's no one there went to jail. They had to pay like some record finer whatever they could afford that. But they still have wings named after them in some colleges, I believe, unless all that's been taken down now as it should. It's like, I mean, they still living free and at the backs of so much suffering, right? So many and people have died in this country. And the fact, I think it was the daughter was recently quoted as saying something that she still doesn't see any responsibility whatsoever. Yeah, one of the daughters that I was reading about recently, I mean, not even admitting that they obviously played a gigantic role in the creation of this epidemic. It's horrible. Do you ever sit back, you know, go 30,000 feet in the air and just kind of look at it and say like, start to take away the idea that like maybe some of this, I don't know who or from where or how or even why. But like some of this is just kind of planned out. Like they, it's not just the Sackler family really wanted to be rich. It was allowed to happen at so many different layers for so long to wear the, you know, the horse left the barn. And you couldn't just put it back in and everything. Do you ever wonder if it's like on purpose for some reason, some of these things? I don't, I think it's money. It's all about money. It's all and it doesn't matter how, you know, no matter if you've got billions, you want more billions. And it's all about money. And as a journalist, you know, when you're investigating these stories, it's follow the money. It's the best way to get there. And the power of money is, is really dangerous. Not only for the Sacklers, but I recently, we did a story for the last season of traffic, which is about, it's called Cartel USA. Season five? Season five? Season five, yeah. The presence of the cartel here in the United States, which we don't talk about often enough. And we spoke to cartel members here and spent time with law enforcement when they were investigating the cartel and actually went to a place in Georgia, really remote little town where there had been a horrific crime scene. This woman was brought into this essentially Airbnb. And this is how they found out. This woman that there's a cartel leader who believed she was an Uber driver, but a trafficker, a dealer on the side. She would traffic drugs for the cartel on the side, as well as being an Uber driver. And this cartel leader believed she was stealing from him. So they brought her into this house in the woods that happened to be an Airbnb and that happened to have cameras outside. So the owner of the Airbnb meanwhile gets notifications any time anywhere and gets in and out. And so he was watching one of these videos and sees a woman being brought in in the arms like with her head covered and he was like, what's happening? So then and he sees this actually a few weeks later after this has happened. Anyway, the cartel brings this woman in and they torture her. They end up killing her using a chainsaw. They cut off her her fingers. It's just one of those horrific crimes. They clean every the crime scene off out really, really well. The police only finds out because the Airbnb guy sees the videos and sees what's happening here. Contact the police. The police heads there. They start looking into it. They see no evidence whatsoever. And then one of the police officers has this idea like why don't we see what's under the drain? So they take open the drain. They put that chemical that or the light or whatever it is that shows when there's blood there and there's massive amounts of blood and there's bones there and there's everything. So then they eventually arrest the people. But this is in a small town fucking Georgia, you know, in middle America and the least places that you'd think. So that got me thinking we should really do an investigation figure out how massive is it where they're operating from because it's not big city. It's actually small town America. How are they moving money? And how violent are they? And how and what was surprising to me in that reporting was finding out the corruption side of it because we know that they're here. We know that there's drugs. We know that they're guns. We know that they're death. There's death. But I don't think we know enough about the corruption and how they've corrupted politicians and law enforcement all throughout the country. So that's when when you talk about this big idea that we're allowing this, I think it's more in terms of the corruption side of it, right? That we allow this because we're making or because law enforcement or politicians at some point are making money from this. It's not this big idea that we want people dead. And it's more how much if I'm making money from this, I'll turn a blind eye. Yeah, I always do think that there could be people though who see some of these other people operating and they know human nature, they know they just want money or whatever and they're like, all right, we won't stop that. It's not the worst thing ever. And that will never, unfortunately, cynically, we'll never know the answer to that. But it's just I know part of it is we live in the internet age. So we have an unprecedented access to information around the world anecdotally and widespread, regardless of what it is. And so we're aware of a lot more than we would have been 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. But it does feel like especially looking at it from the lens of America, we're living through such a chaotic moment at every level where there's just, I don't know how to describe it, but almost like the way our civilization has been set up here is tearing at the seams in different ways, whether it be we're being ravaged by drug crises, whether it be, you know, the average American 50, almost 50% of people don't have $500 or more in their savings account, you know, or obviously political unrest. Wars happen in all over the world that, you know, somehow could be interconnected as well. It's like, you know, I'm an optimist, but I look at this sometimes and I'm like, this is, this is a bit of a, you know, kettle waiting to explode here. And I really hope like the world's going to be a better place for my kids when I have them. You know, do you worry about that sometimes? Like, oh, shit, maybe this experiment's going the wrong way? I'm an optimist too. And I keep thinking about like, we are far better now than we were as, you know, better living conditions than we were decades ago, right? Less people are dying at birth. There are more women rights. There are more, you know, in general, we're pulling people more out of poverty. You know, quality is still massive in the world. Don't get me wrong. I know that. But I think in general, we're better off than we were. Let's say 50, 100 years ago, I mean, you we talk about. Again, voting rights and civil liberties and I think we're going in the right direction. What worries me most nowadays is politics and the division that exists in where everything has become politicized and again where there is just no space for nuance and difference of opinion and once you have this division and you can't get people to agree on easy things, simple things like, you know, the better schooling, better infrastructure, how are you going to fight fentanyl, easy things, right? I mean, not easy, but things that we should all agree upon. When we can't get people that are supposed to be in power for this to sit down across from each other and try to make America better, that's what really, really worries me. And it's, I see it's getting worse and worse. I mean, you know, I go on podcasts like yours and, you know, I'm a journalist so I always try, it's part of what I do even as a human being. I always try to see all sides and try to understand and give people, understand the why people decide to do what they do or they think, how they think. So that's very part of, a lot part of what I do. But there are some issues that are more passionate about that I really have strong opinions on. And as soon as I disclose those opinions, it is, it's like, you know, I receive death threats. It's like, oh, yeah, I've received death threats. I've said like you, you should be dead or you should go back, you're a bitch and you should go back to your country. I mean, name calling all of it. And yeah, and that's, that's, that's where it gets, I think, really dangerous. I agree. Yeah, that division and that hate. And not allowing, yeah, for, for conversation and debate and understanding of it, why does a person think the way they do and let's try to unpack this and see if we can get to some sort of understanding. Yeah, and I think that unfortunately our politicians are heavily responsible for this level of. I agree. And they're motivated to keep that going because it's also what keeps them in business. Yeah. And you're right, it's, it's like, I do love that free speech has a bigger public square than ever, but there's, you know, it can be painful sometimes because one of the unprecedented things in history, obviously, we deal with now and you're alluding to it right there is that people can sign up behind faceless accounts online, whether it be an email or Twitter account or whatever and no consequences. I'm sure you get this as well. Sure. I was actually just talking with, with a friend of mine today who just got, he's had to like, he literally had like a couple death threats for something he said on some other show. And I'm just like, what are we doing here? I can't even say anything bad or anything like that. It's just people, you know, I think people are pissed off at so many things that like they have to find their blood sport. Yeah. And I think they've made their blood sport the politics. I also think though, like, you know, I could listen to some of the economic plans that like Hassan Piker has because he's, he's literally, he's a self described like socialist and be like, yeah, I, I don't think that works as well at all. In fact, I think it's been proven over and over again, but I think his right to say that loudly and proudly in the public square so that it can be hashed out in debate supersedes everything. Yeah. And there's just not enough people right now, I think that, that think that way and something about us being at the 250th right at the moment is kind of symbolic too, because that is one. The founders didn't all agree on everything like that, some massive fights, but like this is one thing most of them, they force all this like, hey, you've got to let it air out. And I don't know, it seems like a good moment to maybe take a lesson from that for sure. Yeah, I agree. I'll give you an example of the kind of hate. Sure. Better than anyone. But I had a guest on the podcast, a guy who a big fan of the show reached out to me, had never been on the podcast before, but reached out to me with a story about trafficking Marijuana that was okay. But then while talking to him before the podcast, he told me how his 12-year-old daughter had been groomed by a man online. And he'd found the phone that she was not supposed to have. He didn't allow her to have a phone, she was 12 years old, but he found a phone, walks into a room one day, she's taking nude photos of herself, that whole story, right, she was 12 years old. And then he goes and becomes obviously obsessed, takes the phone away from her, and starts communicating with the predator as if he's the daughter and wants to meet him face to face. And he researched the lawn, tried to figure out what I'm going to do, and wants to do sort of a citizen's arrest. So he calls his best friend and they're going to go there and have a meeting with this guy, pretend it's the daughter going to meet him and do a citizen's arrest, call the police, and have him arrested. And he's telling me all the story and then, which is a good story, because it's at the level of what he had to go through. And he says that after he obviously became so involved in fighting predators that he joined some of these YouTube groups that are, you know, to catch a predator type groups, right? And in my discussion with him, I was saying how I find some of these groups out there doing great work, necessary work. I am not the type, the journalism that I do, the work that I do is never, I don't like gotcha journalism, I don't go, you know, I spend months or years trying to get people to open up to me. Like I said, I'm not trying to get one particular, if I can expose a problem and the broken system to me, it's much more impactful than going after this one guy. Of course, there's a line, if there's human harm or animal harm being done, I will obviously call the police, but generally, you know, I'm exposing the problem. And so I was explaining to him was that some of these groups have grown so fast, and many of them are doing it for clicks, because, and they're being sponsored, like they're getting paid money to then get these people who might or might not be predators, for sure a ton of them, maybe the majority of them are, is are, but that's why we have line enforcement. And that why we have a system of law that is supposed to deal with them. And are they perfect? No, are they doing a good job? Not even, because unfortunately, even the predator that this father, that abused this father's daughter, 12-year-old daughter, ended up doing a less than a year in prison and in that shot, not be the case. But I was showing how these groups can also have a negative impact and how they can be dangerous. And particularly talking about this one case of this guy wanted to be an internet famous and decided he was going to go out there and went into this man's house, who was supposedly a predator and beat the crap out of this man and hit him repeatedly and he ended up in the hospital. And again, there hasn't been due process in this case. We have no idea if he is in fact, I mean there's a reason why we need evidence, actual evidence. And so that's what, that's all I was saying. I was called a predator, they said check her computer right now, she's a predator lover. I mean, all of it. Like I got so much hate and this wasn't just one or two comments. It was the vast majority of the comments that I got on the clips that we put out for that episode were like that. That's because people don't listen to the context of what you're saying. You are not saying what they're accusing you of at all. In fact, I'll join you and get in hate right now. I love the work that like Chris Hansen has done. I've had him sitting in that chair since they did this at the beginning, like there is a whole process they go through to do this correctly and bring in law enforcement and catch real predators. And you are 100% right that yes, while there are other YouTubers and stuff who are doing those things and doing it like on the internet now and doing it well and those guys should be commended. There are other ones who are just jumping in on it to try to get the quick clicks and like, yes, let me just throw out random numbers, maybe five out of 10 times they do it. They're getting a full-blown actual predator and like great. But then what if they fuck up because they're not doing any of the leg work and then they beat up innocent people or something like that, you know, no, we know this isn't. We know it's happening. You're not saying like, hey, you know, let's get one of the guys who's guilty off, you're saying like, do it the right way. And so yeah, like people, you got to, yeah, I know, you have to just, you got to let people, you got to let people, like you explain things and we don't do that on the internet. Everything's out of context. All the time, like all the time, we will have a clip that we go to make from a podcast. It was three hours long. And I'll look at it. And this is like my bread and butter. It's the reason my show exists. Like I've just done more edits of that than fucking, I can never remember. And I'll look at a clip that Danny Gonzalez or our editor and I'll put together. And I'll say, you know, Danny, this is a great clip. This would do a couple million and grow the account or whatever and like, by the side of context, we can't do it. And it happens all the time. And then sometimes you miss one and you're like, fuck, man, they even took that one out of context. But like, I've always tried to be conscious of that. You can't be perfect. But it's sad. You have to be because people will just hear depending on what it is, either at the best version of what you're saying or the worst version of what you're saying. Frankly, the truth is in here. It's just like, you know, know, what's what's the context of what you're saying? But that's, that's crazy. You can't, yeah, you know, you can't let that bother you, you're handling that the right way. But that's nuts, 12 years old. Yeah, 12 years old. She was being, I mean, I'm, you know, sadly, I'm not surprised, but he's actually a great guy. You should have him on your podcast. He has a fascinating story, but then sort of the way he handled it all and how open he is about his own failures, how he feels he failed his daughter. And not only he failed his daughter that allowed this to happen, which he feels, even though obviously he's not responsible for it. I mean, it was obviously was out of his control, but how he felt he dealt with it once it happened and how he was angry at her instead of trying to, again, understand and be an actual father and an example of understanding instead of, you know, blaming her. Right. Of course. His whole, he was so open. Yeah, he's very in touch with his feelings and emotions. He was a great guy. Yeah, I'd love to check that out. I'm sure there's a lot of people on your guest list. I'd be like, yeah, let's talk to them. But you know, it absolutely, which by the way, if there's people who want to talk to 100% we'll, we'll hook that up. But you know, it also goes back to like even the reaction, like as a father with that too. I'm sure you're familiar with the Kane Velasquez story. The UFC guy. No, tell me. That's not. You'll probably remember this was like maybe four or five years ago now, but Kane Velasquez famous fighter found out I believe it was his son was being abused by at the daycare. They were leaving him at by I want to say it's been a while, but I want to say it was the son of the owner of the daycare who was, you know, like a 35 year old guy and they found out, you know, he was doing that and, you know, to quote Dana White at the time who said this, he said, you know, a lot of us myself included always say if someone ever did blank to my kid, I would blank and he goes, well, Kane did that because Kane got in the car and chased the guy down and well, he wasn't a good shot. Luckily for him, I guess, but he missed, but he tried to and in all seriousness though, I looked at that and I'm like, he did the thing that every father says they would do. And I understand like you're not supposed to take the law on your own hands, but then he, you know, he ended up serving a year in prison or something like that, but I'm like, man, I'm not a father yet, but if that were my kid, like, of course, that would be my inclination to go do that. And do you know what was amazing that this father told me and why I met I taught when I say you so in tune, he said, very smart man. He said the first thought he had was I'm going to go and kill this guy, but the second thought was if I kill the guy, I'll end up in prison and I will no longer be able to be a father to my 12-year-old daughter, like I need to. And he he said something that I, you know, there's I'm sure you have those two like these quotes in these interviews episodes that stay with you right for me was with violence is a young person's a young man's response to an adult problem and and he realized that there was not the way he wanted to go about it. He wanted to see this man in prison for the rest of his life that unfortunately did not happen. Violence is a young man's response to the adult problem. The adult problem was something like that. Good for him. I butcher other people's sayings as much as I can. No, but that was really yeah if it was somehow better than that than he was really spitting because that's good. It's it's hard though. It's hard, you know, one of the quotes I say this all the time, but like people love throwing around the whole phrase, if I were blank, then I would blank about the most serious types of things and you don't fucking know. You don't know how you respond you really don't until you're in those situations. Yeah, the house is on fire. I totally go up to the second floor. If the dog was in there, then the house catches on fire and you're standing out there frozen. No idea. You know, but that's the thing like with Kane, you could say like, all right, you know, it was a reactionary kind of thing, but like he found out about it and he got in his car and he went for it. And you know, he's he's he's hailed online as as a hero in a lot of ways and emotionally like I feel that, you know, I would have liked to think if I was his friend, I would have calmed him down and said, hold on, we're gonna do this the right way or whatever, but I don't know that anyone was there. I think he kind of found out about it and got in the fucking car. You know, it's it's one of those strange things. But I think we've also seen, you know, you've covered human trafficking throughout your career. You've literally had a show called that, but you know, I think there's been more than ever an understanding in this country of just how widespread the problem is here. Oh my god. We're like, what my friend Caterina Salts was telling me, we're like the largest America has. There's more there's more sex trafficking here in America. Like more women Americans are sex. We think of sex trafficking. We think international. We think that maybe it's like foreign women being brought in or this happens in other countries, but it's actually here right here. Yeah, I've covered this extensively. Sex trafficking extensively. Yeah. Yeah, if I remember correctly, I've had cut on my show a bunch. I pretty sure the first episode she was over in here, she said you were a huge influence of her. I'm right about that, but I'm pretty sure she said that. Thank you. She's like 24, 25. She's been on the ground in Mexico for four years. That's awesome. In scene stories. That's great. A story she did last year that she got so much shit for when she reported it and then she was 100% right. Was she broke the story about the CJNG replacing some of their income losses with the border being a little tighter by kidnapping young pregnant women 16, 17, 18, 19 years old taking them to trap houses, performing a legal C-sections, leaving them on the side of the road to die and then taking the babies and selling them across border. And everyone's like she's full of shit. She has no idea what she's talking about. Two weeks later, La Diabla was arrested for this very thing. She's that was the name of the woman. CJNG. But like again, the part of the story that I feel like people continue to ignore is like whatever the final product was, whether it was a live child that they were trafficking or a dead child, they're trafficking because they killed them. It was being bought in America. Right. Like we have to look in the mirror. Oh my yeah. I mean, the biggest problem for Mexico is that they are neighbors with the biggest consumers in the world, right, of drugs in this case, or in that case. Yeah, I have never heard about that, but that's crazy. Yeah. I know one thing I know CJNG was replacing the drug money, fentanyl money with was scams. They got really into the scam business. Scamming Americans. Yeah. Really big. I don't think we've talked about this. Really big. What happened there? They realized that there's a massive, there's a lot of money you can make from, they were, I mean all sorts of scams, as you know, now we're living in the age of scams. I think it's Warren Buffett who says that scam and fraud are the fastest growing business in the world. And that's where we should all be putting our money on because it is, it's crazy. It's like fast getting to the levels of drug trafficking in terms of profits. And I've reported extensively on this, but the one that CJNG was getting involved in, the type of scam was the time share scams. You've heard about these. That was a lot of it with CJNG. Really? Yeah. They had, and they were working with a lot of Americans, you know, who spoke obviously English fluently, living here or living in Mexico. And I got contacted so much. I got tons of messages from people. I even got contacted by a kid who worked inside because he thought he was going to get a legal job and then realized he was paid to scam people and he left. And he was trying to figure out a way to get me inside. It didn't work out at the time. But yeah, it's insane. And yeah, it's, they call many times older Americans who either own time shares and tell them that they want out of their time share, I'm going to buy your time share for this amount. But in order for me to pay you that, you have to pay a small fee first. And then you pay $10,000, let's say, and then you need to pay the Mexican taxes. So that's $10,000 more. And, you know, suddenly you were $150,000 out and you're still want to believe that there's somebody on the other side of the line that is eventually going to buy your time share. Or they sell you one entirely fake time share. So it's like a double site of it. It's crazy. It's so creative. They're so creative. They find a way. Yeah. So my, I wanted to tell you about this, my latest story for an NGO, which is not traffic, because we're not doing that anymore. So you have your own company and you're working, the production company goes in and makes content for an NGO still. Exactly. The production company, you do series and documentaries. We're also started, starting to work in the scripted world as well. But we pitched them, I pitched them a story last year that they really liked. And so it's going to where we filmed it and it's airing in September. It's called super scam me. And it's where I say yes to every single scam that comes my way, every email, every phone call, we create a persona for me, called Mary's El. That's my older, little older version of myself. We did a whole makeover, like brown long hair. Oh wow. So I see you. We filmed everything. And we put photos of me all throughout social media. And we created a fake person. Basically Mary's El on dating websites and everything. And I start connecting with scammers, either from people with texting or emailing, but eventually also I start having a romantic relationship with one four star general in Syria. America and forced our general in Syria. That's who he said he was. And it is the wildest journalistic experiment of my life. So cat, fish, and scamming all at once. On both ends. You were so good. It was wild. It was so good. It's coming out in September and I'm so excited. When you went once they put everything on for the first time and you saw yourself in the mirror, did you believe it? Were you like, I just so pass. You know, I actually thought I looked too much like myself, but everybody else around me said I looked totally different. So I guess it passed. Nobody I was never recognized. We actually debated putting my real face, but obviously we were afraid they would realize we just, you know, photo search and realize I'm a journalist. But it just meant that everywhere I went for several months, I just had to have the the whole disguise with me the whole time. I was filming everything I was in the car. I was I had at one point I was talking to three bat brat pits, two George Clooney's several canneries. It was the best. I was getting videos from a draft from a George Clooney saying good morning. Very well. Oh my god. Oh, we are so fucked. Was it AI? I like totally. Yeah, but like when I say was it AI, like, could you tell to the naked eye it was completely. Some are really good. And we explore that in the doc. I mean, we show it all and some of it wasn't very good. But some of it was really good and it's only getting better. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really it's a really scary world out there. When it comes to scams, it's it's only going to get worse. And I I've become sort of a 911 call for people who've been scammed around the country just because I've reported so much on it. And so weekly I get messages from people. I actually just went. I can't say this because it will spoil the end of the film. But one of the characters in Super Scammy is a woman who thought she was talking to a celebrity for the longest time and gave was about to lose her house, gave her all her money to this celebrity. And I can't say but there's a great twist at the end. Okay. So we'll have to tune in on that. Yeah. What made you so you grew up in Portugal your whole childhood or when did you come to America for the Columbia University's journalism school in 2001. How old were you? 9/11. I was 24, 25, just 125. So you spent the first 25 years of your life effectively in Portugal? I did. But I started I did college in Portugal. And I started applying to grad school to journalism. Columbia University as soon as I got out of university. I didn't get in the first year. I didn't get in the second year. The third year I flew to New York and I knocked on the Dean's door and I introduced myself. And I told him why I wanted to be a journalist in that year. I was accepted. Oh, that's cool. That taught me sort of my first first big lesson, determination, persistance, whatever things you need as a journalist. And I think as a human being in general. And then I was there a month into my program in 9/11 happened. And I was the only Portuguese journalist in Manhattan at the time. So I ended up doing the all the live reporting for the biggest Portuguese television station. Where were you? Midtown. They sent me to the rooftop of this Midtown building. I was surrounded by international journalists, correspondents. Many of them were my heroes that I'd watched growing up on television, you know. And I was a very inexperienced. I'd never done a live story in my life. Wait, how did you get hold on a minute? You're one, you're one month into your program as a student. And I get a call in the morning when 9/11 happened. The twin towers had just fallen. I was fast asleep because I've been working really hard on an assignment the night before. And my phone, both my cell phone and my landline start ringing. And I'm ignoring both. And eventually I can't. So I pick up the phone. And the first person that calls me is my television station that I'd worked at in Portugal. Okay. Because I wasn't accepted to grad school. I see where we're working there. Yeah, I was working there. I was working at a travel show, by the way. I was going to places like the Maldives and asking the honeymooners if this was their idea of paradise. It was so embarrassing. You've got a long way to start. I'm like here on your sandals vacation. How's it going? Yeah. So then they called me and they said, Hey, we have no one in Manhattan. I know you don't really know how to do this. Well, we need you to go to knit down to this building and do the life coverage. On the other line, I had my mom crying and yelling and begging for me not to leave the house. Where did you live in Manhattan? Were you up by Columbia? I was at 76 and Broadway. Okay. See up there a little bit. But like you could look out your window and see the smoke and everything at that point. I couldn't see the smoke because I wasn't that high up. I was in a tiny little studio. But I could I turned on the TV immediately. And so I think I turned on the TV. The second era had just collapsed. And yeah, my mom's begging me not to leave the house. And I'm explaining to her that I have to and I get there as fast as I can. Remember very well. I was wearing like a not white nylon top that looked horrific on television. I don't actually do not think it is. We've tried 911. We've tried. I've tried. If it's out there, people find it at the time. People find it if it's there. But you go to the top of this building. I go to the top. I have this really heavy light blue eyeshadow, which was in at the time. But again, that looks good. And I'm extremely nervous. I'm shaking. I'm having a full-on panic attack. My heart's beating really fast. Sweaty hands. I'm having a hard time speaking. And I'm about to go online with the biggest Portuguese anchor, you know, like the give me one that you buy. The Pierce Morgan. No, the night we use the nightly news. What's your guy's name? The dude on David Mirr? And David Mirr. Sorry. The David Mirr of television. And without this time at this, everybody in Portugal sits down to watch the nightly news. Oh yeah. This is pre-inert like in that way. Exactly. And so it was big. My whole family was assembled. And so I was very, very nervous. And then I go live. I explain what's happening. I managed to put two words together. I'm so proud of myself. I'm sort of patting myself in the back. And I, this I've spoken about this so many times. And I always get emotional. But yeah, the moment you walk out, and you see the first signs of people holding posteries and photos of their loved ones and not knowing if they died or not. Yeah, that was basically the moment that obviously had a huge impact on so many people's lives. And the moment that for me, I realized the type of journalism I wanted to do was try to understand the why things like this happened. So a year after I moved to Syria, and I started reporting on these sort of sub-worlds and underworlds. Yeah, it was the beginning of it all. So when you are rushed to get up there, woken up in the morning, and then you're up on the rooftop, obviously, you know, you're being seen by, I guess, the whole country of Portugal basically reporting on it. And so you're kind of in it. But then when you come downstairs at, when you're done, that's when the gravity actually hit you for the first time. Exactly. It's when I walk out to the streets of New York, because I've been rushing to get there. And it wasn't immediate, right? People didn't go out with posters immediately. I remember they were, were you in the city at the time? No, I was from South Jersey. I remember it very well. Yeah, there were people lining up in front of hospitals wanting to give blood, donating blood for the possible. They were still hoping that there were injured people instead of deaths. You know, injured people that never arrived because of vast majority of them had died. And so, yeah, when I walked out, I'd spend two, three hours up on the rooftop of this building. And when I walked out is when you started seeing. It was, yeah, like people holding posters, holding just photos. And, you know, not knowing where their fathers or children were. Yeah, it was, it was a, yeah, I think it was a horrible moment for all of us. And, yeah, it was, I remember going home that day and being on sort of a weird high and low, right? And, and deciding, yeah, I really want to, this was great, awesome experience being able to witness history and communicate it, but realizing that I really wanted to understand the why and be as close to the action as possible and, yeah, then move to Syria and, and did the first story about foreign fighters crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans, the first ever story done. I want to come back to that in a second, but just taking a step back before 9/11. And then so obviously, you ended up going to Columbia Journalism School and you wanted to be in that world as a kid. But if I'm understanding you correctly, you hadn't thought of like, you just wanted to be a journalist, you hadn't thought of what types of stories, specifically you wanted to cover. And then this event happens and you're like, I want to cover the things that change the world, the underbelly, that kind of stuff. Yeah, the underbelly, yeah, that's exactly it. I actually, I also hadn't had much exposure to documentaries growing up. I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know you could be a journalist and make documentaries. So I thought the only job I could possibly have was sort of as a night we used producer. I didn't even think I was ever going to be on camera because I'm not American. And I thought there wasn't, you know, I don't, I speak very well, but I, you know, you can tell I'm not American. And I just, not really. You have really lost your accent. Like, it's, I got to be like this to hear that you were ever somewhere else. Thank you. But yeah, but I, I, I fuck up expressions all the time. I think people can tell, and so I just never even thought I was going to be on camera. And that was not my aspiration, I just thought I'm going to, but I know it's nightly news because that's what I had to watch with my family. That's why I wanted to be a journalist, was watching the nightly news every night with my family in Portugal and seeing these people on television talk about the most, everything that's going out in the world and I was generally a very curious person, always loved traveling and thought, okay, this is what I want to do. And so that, that was the idea. And then, yeah, then 9/11 happened, I had started knowing more about documentaries through Colombia, having more exposure to long-form journalism. And then, yeah, when that happened, realizing, wow, this totally changes my paradigm. And, you know, yes, it was great. I went up there and I spoke for a few minutes and I explained to our viewers what was happening around me, but I'm not really, you know, contributing much to the story in a way that I thought was at least important to me. So you wanted to be able to go tell the stories rather than actually point to them already happen to understand, okay? So how did you, you said you went to Syria a year later? It was? It was a year after I graduated. So I graduated from Colombia in 2002, made 2002. The documentary I had done that, I ended up doing a documentary class, I did a documentary about children, asylum seekers in this country, it won the best documentary at Colombia that year. And through, because it won the best documentary, I got an internship at the documentary production company in London. So I moved to London, I was there for several months, I ended up producing some documentaries with this company, which were my ideas, which I was psyched about. Is this the kind of stuff that ends up on BBC? Yeah, it was on Channel 4. I think the first one we did was BBC, then another one on Channel 4 and this company worked with all of those. I was paid only when my story had these got picked, so it was great, they got picked, I got to do stories. And then I decided that the war in Iraq was happening. I knew that the Middle East was going to be the center of stories for a long time. And so I just picked up, moved to Syria, enrolled in University of Damascus, started selling carpets because I needed to make money. Wait, you enrolled into the University of Damascus? Because I'm an Arabic. Oh, wow. Mm-hmm. Very cool. And would buy, would go around the old town in Damascus and buy these beautiful carpets. I would put them in like FedEx boxes and ship them to my mom. She would have these tea parties, would sell them for twice that price, sending back the money. And that's how I survived in Syria. And it was through that that I became friends with a Syrian guy called Tarak, who was living in Damascus at the time, spoke English. Well, we became really good friends and he was telling me that how all his friends from his little border town in Syria, border with Iraq, were crossing into Iraq to fight against the Americans. And this was at the time that President Bush was hailing the invasion as a success. That Saddam Hussein had been toppled. The Iraqis had received the Americans with open arms. Mission accomplished. Right. And this is not what I was hearing. These are people from other countries coming in and fighting against the Americans and why isn't this on the news? And so I convinced my husband now, boyfriend at the time who had met at Columbia University Daran, came to visit me in Syria. And he was a print journalist at the time he didn't want to be a TV journalist. And I told him about the story and we said we have to go and do the story. It's crazy, right? Tarak thinks we might be able to talk to some of his friends who had gone and fought the Americans. If we actually get access to these guys and hear their story, this, I mean, it could reverberate around the world, right? And what were they fighting under? What did Tarak say they were fighting under? Like what emblem? Al Qaeda was a they were a sects Al Qaeda was present in the area. They weren't paid by Al Qaeda or they were members of Al Qaeda, but they were heavily influenced by Al Qaeda. And there was more the calling they, we ended up traveling there, basically we bought a little camcorder on the border with Lebanon, partly from the money of the carpets that I was selling. And we traveled up there. We couldn't tell anyone that we were journalists. You're not allowed to be freelance journalists. Yeah, they don't like it there. They don't like it. Free press is not popular out there. And so we traveled with Tarak to his hometown. We get there and super conservative. No women on the streets, the few women we saw are fully covered, like really the rest of Syria is not like this, but this area is incredibly conservative. And we knew that there was a lot of big presence of Al Qaeda in this region, even though the Assad regime, who was, by the way, against obviously Al Qaeda. And they were, because they're not Sunnis, it's very complicated. The politics and religion are very complicated. But they refused to admit that Al Qaeda was operating in Syria and they kept on telling the American government that that was not the case. And that there were no foreign fighters or Syrian fighters crossing to fight. And they kept on saying that. So we knew that what we were doing was dangerous. Not only with the Mughabarat, which is the secret police, if they find out, it wouldn't be good. And we were operating in Al Qaeda territory, which also wouldn't be good. So we went. I'm sorry to cut you off. I just want to clarify the fighters that were going into fight the Americans. Were they fighting like under al-Zakawiz leadership or just- No, no. So this was purely a bunch, a group of friends who got together, ideologues, and were training pumping iron in the garage, and within the middle of the night crossed the desert, dressed as civilians, crossed the desert into Iraq. Once they arrived in Iraq, they had other groups of friends that were there too. They were, and they would look like Iraqis, right? They didn't look out of- and they were fully armed and would shoot at Americans. And then they would come back. The ones who were killed were hailed as martyrs, and there were posters of them and we filmed this. There were posters of the martyr, Syrian martyrs, all over this little town. And the ones who came back were the biggest heroes in town. And so we ended up interviewing three of these guys who'd gone and come back. And they explained everything how they did it, why they did it, their tactics. You went into mosques where I was the only woman ever to have stepped foot into this mosque that was only men were allowed and saw seven-year-old kids reciting the Quran by heart, but also reciting all these chants against America and death to America. But all this under the guise that we were friends, we were foreign friends of Tarak, and we were there to learn more about Islam and their religion. And through it, we eventually met the foreign fighters and convinced them there were Tarak some of his best friends and convinced them to tell us about their story and we filmed it all. And brought it back. And what did you think at the time? I know your journalist, your cover in the story, but this is not that long after 9/11, which you saw with your own two eyes, is before we know what a disaster Iraq actually turned into and all that. And you go to this place, oh, of course, yeah, I have some for you right here. For me, so no, I haven't. Sorry, I didn't even see that empty. But you go to this place and it's still pretty fresh and everything and you see, like you said, even young kids being pulled into this to be anti-American, going over to fight American soldiers to kill them, obviously, like you have to cover the story, but are you thinking to yourself, like, oh, boy, we have an unfixable cultural problem here or? Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that I remember thinking is obviously these guys have to be monsters, right? They have to be the worst of the worst. They're killing Americans, you know, America is there to whether I agreed whether America should not go to Iraq. I didn't. I think it was a huge mistake. I think we all know. You know, it was a huge mistake. But there was America suffered this horrific attack and this is their way of going in. There should not be an Iraq, but I also don't think I'm not going to agree with these guys' tactics of killing Americans, right? So I was ready to see these like cold-hearted killers. And when I got there, what I found instead, I always give the example of this one guy that we spent most time with. He was sort of the class clown, you know, we've all had it, right? The guy in class was always making jokes. He loved kids and was always like the kind of guy that he walks in town, again, small towns for everybody knows each other. He'd walk around and he'd always be followed by these kids. And he'd pick the kids up and bring them up in the year. You know, those guys that he's met, they've all met them, right? Human. Exactly. Human. And I will never forget when we did his interview, we went up to this mountain because everything had to be sort of secretive. And he gets down on his knees to me and he starts singing the song from Titanic. The heart will go on. Yes. My heart will go on by Celine Dion. And this guy, this guy who doesn't speak a word of English, and yet has memorized in his mind an idea of what the English word sounded, but he knows it by heart. He sings the song from beginning to end on his knees in English, bad English, to me. Kind of like the Ken Lee lady. Yeah. Ken Lee. Yeah. Exactly. And so yeah, his favorite film was Titanic. He cried every time he watched it. He was the class clown. He was relatable in so many ways that I wasn't expecting it. And they brought us into their house and showed us videos of America's wars around the world and how, you know, a lot of these videos were obviously propaganda. A lot of these videos didn't contextualize it, but it was what they were seeing as Muslim people being killed all around the world. And in their minds, what was being sold to them, the messaging being sold to them was that Americans hated them and wanted all of their children to die and suffer. And so it was their responsibility as men. to protect the women and children, to protect their families. And so it was very black and white to them in a way that's very dangerous. So this sort of system had created these monstrous effects, right? But these guys at the center of the Warrant Monsters themselves, and that was for me very revealing. Do I agree with what they were doing, 100% not? We condoned their acts, absolutely not. But it isn't important to understand how they became the people that they are, and why they were doing it. Yeah, it is. And this is the part that really breaks my heart. Is that we came back with those tapes. We smuggle the tapes out of Syria. Again, all of this. We smuggled them. We had a third person who was a Scottish guy called Mike who's working with us, also a journalist. So it was myself, Darren and Mike. Mike, he, the amazing guy, was a student, Varabic in Damascus at the time, he was a friend of mine, and so we decided. And he was the one who had camera experience. My husband at the time was a printer and a list. Darren's story ended up airing, actually. He wrote a story that was the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle magazine. And Mike, we decided this was how we're going to smuggle these tapes out. Darren and I would go to Lebanon first, because it's a two-hour drive from Damascus. Beirut is the capital of Lebanon, so we'll get there first. As we cross the border, we'll notice immediately if our names are out there. If we're stopped and searched, then we'll call Mike and tell him to lose the tapes and leave the country without the tapes, because they're on us, right? But if we were able to go across the border, then it's because nobody, we're on nobody's radar. And so that's what we did. We got to be rude. We called him. We said, "Nobody checked us. You're good. He got on a bus. He hid the tapes. I can't remember where, but the tape trip was supposed to take two hours, four hours past, and Mike is still not there. And Darren and I are waiting where the bus is supposed to arrive, and we're thinking what the heck did we just do? We just got our friend killed or imprisoned, and we're worried out of our minds. And then finally, the bus arrived. Mike comes out. We're hugging, crying, like such a moment of relief. We managed then fly with the tapes back to London. We put this story together with the production company that it worked with. Ron McCullough was the boss of the company at the time, amazing BBC journalist. And we put together this fucking amazing story, like the first time ever, and we sit down with these, you know, fighters, and they're explaining, it's access like no other. No one had seen this shit. And we start pitching it to American broadcasters. And then we get on a phone with some pretty heavy hitters, and I was 25 years old and they're on the phone with me and asking me, how do you know they're saying the truth? You know, and I'm shaking, well, because they have no incentive for lying. Like, they can actually, they're putting their lives at risk by telling us what happened. And because there's plenty of evidence in the town of the people that have been killed and the families that are grieving and the posters everywhere. And then we get the most depressing callback where basically they told us, and again, I'm not going to reveal the names, but it's people that, if I mentioned their names, you would know, saying I'm sorry, but it's been decided pretty high up in organization that it's too soon to give voice to the enemy. And then Americans aren't ready to, you know, to hear the other side. And so I never hear it in the United States, it ended up hearing on Channel 4 in the UK. And they had the steering ambassador interviewed. He called me a blonde dumb girl who doesn't know what she's talking about. But it ear in the UK, and I'm very, very proud of the work that we did, and I'm heartbroken until this day that we weren't able to wear it back down here. But this was my first story as a freelance journalist. That's amazing. Do you have those tapes? We do. We have those tapes. You never thought about releasing them? No? So, yeah, we'd have to be careful with protecting the identity of the folks who spoke to us. We could do that. We could do that. You got to put that out because it's like that is basically like a time capsule. Yeah, it is. What you captured there. Yeah. And like, I hindsight is 2020, I get it that like the time there was so much that was still unknown. And now, obviously, it's age well in the sense that it's like, yeah, there were a lot of issues here that we weren't told about. But it's kind of at the core of that old phrase that can be taken the wrong way sometimes. But they say there'll be like one man's terrorist, there's another man's freedom fighter. And it's like my journalistic ideas, like you let people decide. You tell the story, you do it without opinion, you talk to just what you do it. And then put it out there and people at home can listen to it and be like, yeah, your name. And go about their lives. And that's how I like to do the podcast too, but that's, you know, yeah, I think about this a lot now. And I talk, you know, I always talk with my special forces guys about it who are over there on my military guys when they're on the podcast. It's like, you know, I was just, I just had another one in here recently and I said, you were going door to door in Iraq, you're doing your job. What people in suits and DC decided to tell the generals we have to do and, you know, everywhere is dangerous. And you got to go in there with guns and everything. But do you understand why when, you know, a father's a threat and he might actually be a threat and his seven year old kid's tied up on the floor and watching you beat up daddy to understand why maybe 11 years later, he's blown up buildings and all of them to a man are like completely, completely, it's downstream effects. And now you see like things that are going on in Gaza and things that are going on in Lebanon. And I understand, you know, we always got to watch the sources and videos to go online, especially in today's day and age. But like you see some of these videos and you see those guttural calls from kids that I'm sorry, there's no faking that is what it is. And, you know, their little brother and little sister and mom and dad just got fucking blown up by a scud missiles. So one guy could die. And like I always say this, I'm not going to condone it when that kid blows up a grocery store in 10 years. But it was like that. That's why it was like music to my ears, what you were saying earlier, where you were talking about how do people get there? Don't empathize with the act, but empathize with the how did they get there so we can prevent that in the future. And sometimes it feels like things that you were capturing 23 years ago, we are still making the same mistakes maybe exponentially now to this day. Yeah. 100%. I mean, I think censoring the news is never a good idea. 100% and that's what happened back then. Thinking you should always operate under the impression that, you know, I think sometimes as new makers, news makers or journalists, we come from a place of believing that Americans are ignorant and that should never be the case because that is not the case. And so we give people the news and we allow them to deal with it and, you know, again censoring the news in order to be, to try to protect people is never a good idea. 100%. And it backfires every time. The cover up is always worse, right? Yes. And they never learn that lesson. They never learn that lesson. We're watching it over and over again, you know, and like sometimes it's worse when it was already like horrifically bad, you know, and it's just, it's crazy. But that's also such a hard, you do all that work. You literally like risk your life to do it. You tell the story. You bring it back. You're quite literally doing your job and then they're like, yeah, we're not going to run it. You know, but obviously, you know, we look at where your career ended up going. It didn't deter you or anything like that. Did you have a low moment after that where you like, what the fuck are we even doing here? We did. Yeah. My husband, I mean, yeah, Darren and I were, yeah, and Ron McCullough, who was the head of this production company, he'd been a journalist for decades for the BBC and he couldn't believe it. We were all in shock. We couldn't believe that this was actually happening. But I was happy that it actually ended up airing somewhere, right? I remember perfectly well. We were paid 5,000 pounds for that story, which for me and Darren was so much money and we used that money to buy tickets to go to Brazil because I speak Portuguese and I thought, where is it? Okay. Now, we were going to start because he ended up actually filming a lot of it. We picked up a camera and Darren started filming so we realized we really wanted to work together and he was going to leave print journalism and just start working on stories with me. So it's, what was he filming? Like just the whole process of this? Yeah, the interviews. The interviews we did. It was Mike and Darren ended up filming and I ended up being the person on camera, again, not by choice, but it ended up not, neither of them wanted to be on camera and then so I ended up being the one doing the interviews and reporting and it all sort of fell that way. And then, yeah, and then we were 5,000 pounds, what are we going to do with so much money, which, by the way, is like $7,000. So what are we going to do with all this money? Again, freelance journalists. It's an enormous amount of money for us. What's our next move? Let's move to Brazil because we knew it was a place that was full of great idea, story ideas, stories. And I speak the language I have an advantage and I think it's like British and American kind of like Portuguese and Brazilian accent, yeah, exactly like that. And so we did. Our first day there, open up the newspaper, local newspaper, and there's a story about this massive diamond mine, one of the biggest diamond mines in the world that's in the Amazon on tribal land where this is. Indians basically ended up torturing and killing 30 white miners that had come in to mine their land. And there was a huge case in Brazil going on, and the federal police was all over it. So we ended up doing that. That was our second story. We did it for CBC in Canada and for frontline worlds, PBS. And each of them gave us a little bit more money. With that money, we bought a actual semi-professional camera, and we kept on building from there and there. And then, current TV started, which was all-gore TV station. And they were looking for digital correspondence, people who knew how to edit and film and tell a story. And both Darren and I applied separately, and they called us both in the fluid to San Francisco. And we told them, actually, we're a boyfriend and girlfriend, we weren't married yet. And they hired us to go around the world. And the next seven years of our lives, we're spent traveling all around the world, doing stories from beginning to end, he would film, direct and write, and I would edit and be the correspondent. And we complement each other very well, and then we had my son, our son, he's actually our son. And that's when we decided it probably wasn't such a great idea for us to travel so much together. So we started a production company, and now we direct documentaries, I do my series, but we're very involved in each other's jobs and work. All right, I want to ask about those seven years, but to go back for one second, that story in Brazil is interesting to me. So I spent some time down in the Peruvian Amazon, I'm wildly fascinated by it. It's amazing. It's on my favorite places on earth, the Amazon in general, yeah. You feel like a speck. Yeah. You're like, wow. Yes. You know, the little kid in me was like, very excited. But. Were you doing Alewaska? I did, do Alewaska, down there. Of course, that's why everybody was. Well, that wasn't why I went, but it was like, went in Rome, you know, because, you know, you can go do it with the fucking shaman in Chinatown and probably get, you know, co-clased with whatever. Yeah. Or with a fake shaman into the canyon. Yeah, we got the, we got the, we got the, we got the real deal down there. But it's such a cool place, but there is so much going on there because it's the literal real world, heart of darkness, you know, the governments in these various countries that make up what is the Amazon rainforest. Yeah. So far into there. And then there's no laws and, you know, shit happens, but this was a situation where it was a gold mine. So it's accessible. A diamond mine. Yeah. A diamond mine. I'm sorry. Yeah. So it's accessible by roads to get there. Yeah. So they have people that don't live in the Amazon working in there and you said it was 30 of them. I mean, it wasn't accessible by roads. You'd still have to hike in. But there were. Oh, so they didn't even have roads going to it. No. No. And we went, we visited some of these mines. So we ended up camping out with the federal police for weeks and weeks on end and sleeping in hammocks. It was amazing. I loved it. I loved it. Again, only woman surrounded by men. It was so fun. There's some very good looking federal police in Brazil, too. Is that right or what? I don't dare and feel about that. Hey, he's okay. He's allowed to tell me when he finds ladies pretty, too. It's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and we eventually actually get access to the tribal land, the Synthalaga, the Whitebelts, as they're known, this tribe is called. And I mean, we got an interview with the head, the leader of the tribal land. We witnessed the craziest fucking shit. The federal police shows up one day and there's, it's like sensitive, right there. They're trying to investigate this case and find out if these Indians had killed, these Indians had killed these miners and it like they'd decapitated them. They cut off their penises. It was like brutal, brutal shit and killed 30 people. And the federal police is investigating and we go in, but they're doing it. They have to do it in a sort of diplomatic way. They're going in. The head of the federal police in the Amazon region at the time was this kind of like a John Wayne character, amazing guy. And he goes in with this team and I, we're with him, we're following him and we arrive and this, the Synthalaga have organized this massive like ceremony to receive us. And the ceremony involves having a live cow in front that day with a bow and arrow kill with bow and arrows, kill in front of us. And it is the craziest, we don't know that this is happening, none of this has been explained to us. And we are filming in front of the federal police as they are arriving, right? And then we turn the cameras and we start filming the tribal guys receiving the federal police. And then we just see them picking up the bows and arrows and started shooting and we are thinking that they're shooting at us or the federal police behind us. We're like, what the fuck is going on? And then we turn it. It is just like cow. And then the cow dies and then everybody's eating the cow. And then we all have to drink this thing that is fermented saliva. It's fucking dark. Yeah. They have a drink that they spit into and it ferments something and then you're supposed to drink it. We had to. All of it was bananas. And yeah, it was my first sort of story in the Amazon and I've gone back again and again because it's I think the most fascinating place on earth. So I was just kind of misunderstanding that they killed these dirty guys because they were also involved in the diamond business. Oh, the, oh, the tribe was, they were making a lot of money from that and there was a misunderstanding on the share ability of the profits and then they went and killed all these people, yeah. Unfortunate. Yeah. But then they stayed in the business, I guess. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They had landing strips. They had planes coming in to traffic. Oh, this was like a real, with a kind of tribe. Oh, yeah. They weren't like those are magical planes from the sky, like some of the other tribes. No, but all of this had happened. What was fascinating, all the change had happened in the last 10, 20 years. I remember interviewing this tribal leader and him explaining, we, we, like before we didn't even have electricity, we didn't know, yeah, we would see these things. We didn't know what they were and within 20, 30 years now we have soccer. He was so excited that they had a soccer field in their land. They had a landing strip. Can you believe how rich we are? You know, it was like, you know, like, now what about those spike tits, don't we roll back there real fast? Yeah. What a misunderstanding. Yeah, it was fun. So then you get this job and the next seven years, you're going all over, but when you have your kid, obviously you guys split up. So that's one at a time in that way. Totally understandable. But we had the best seven years. It was really fun. I mean, we talked crazy stories. You've done a ton of shows, so you were doing your first like feature shows during this time period. What were those called at the time? The current TV was a show called Vanguard, it's what people say was vice before vice when I hate that designation, but you hate that designation because it was different. But the idea was we had five or six correspondents going around the world and telling these sort of foreign stories in a non-traditional way, right? So, you know, I went back to the Amazon and did lots of stories. I did stories on the Iran border about the candle mountains, about the Kurdish guerrilla fighters, and I did stories about the Sri Lanka war. And I mean, we traveled all around and did great stories. But it wasn't done in the traditional way that you'd see on the news. You know, I wasn't, it was just the delivery was different. It was very sort of guerrilla journalism, me and my husband, little cameras, much sort of lighter equipment, much more mobile. It was, remember when my boss at the time was also a correspondent on the show, but was also the head of Vanguard, that department was, is Laura Ling. And she was detained. Laura Ling? Laura Ling. She's Lisa Ling's sister. She was detained in North Korea for several months in prison, captured and detained. And she was doing a story about trafficking, human trafficking on the border, but she was in China and had gone to the river that separates the two and was captured by North Korean military and detained. And she was imprisoned her and another American woman for months on end. It was horrible. Did she cross or did they come across in the Chinese territory? So that's what's debatable. She was definitely caught on Chinese territory already on the Chinese side of the bank or the river bank. But she had gone, I believe the river was frozen and she got right to the center where she might have taken a step into North Korea to show perhaps how easy it is to cross and how nobody kind of stops you. And then they heard a whistle. They start being chased. It was her, a cameraman and another woman who was a translator, she's Korean. And they start being chased and then the Korean woman falls, Laura stops to help her up and they both get detained. And the cameraman manages to escape and they spent months in a North Korean prison and it was horrible. It was Bill Clinton actually who went to North Korea and helped them release them. Oh, I remember this story. Can we pull that up actually? So yeah, yes. just pre-Dennis Rodman ambassador shipdays. But so what was it like? How do they describe North Korean prison at the time? - She wrote an amazing book about it. And her sister, it's a story of the two sisters, 'cause Lisa, as a journalist, she had been on the view. She was a well-known journalist. She still is, she's an amazing journalist. I really admire her. Was here doing, from her side trying to do everything to get her sister out. And then it's from Lisa, Laura's perspective of being in prison. And yeah, like trying to find humanity and even the guards, some were more human and nicer than others. Like, she talks about sort of the meditation or the stuff that she had to do in prison to stay positive and how hard it was, all of it. And then the amazing thing, we were very close friends. And I wrote her a lot of, she was allowed to receive mail, so. - In North Korea. - Yeah, and through diplomatic channels, I think it was Switzerland at that time, it was a diplomatic channel that they were using. But she was able to get mail. We'd all write letters all the time. And then I was there, we were there. That myself, Darren, my husband were tasked with filming her arrival on the plane with Bill Clinton, and we filmed her. She was amazing. She came out and gave this speech where beautiful speech, super articulate, where, you know, she's not, she's just spent several months thinking she's going to be killed. And she comes out and gives this incredible speech, thanking Clinton and Al Gore, who's heavily involved in getting her out as well. And she's amazing. And then a few months later, it was just three months later, I called her and I said, "Hey, Laura, I have huge news." And she said, "You are kidding me, huge news for you too." And we organized, let's meet, then it was, she was coming to my house. We're on the driveway of my house. And she's running to me, and I'm running to her, and we both realize that we're going to say the same thing that we're both pregnant. We're both pregnant. And then a thing she decided when she was in captivity, that her biggest regret was not having a child. And it was this emotional game. It was this really beautiful moment where we're hugging each other and, yeah. And then, yeah, but then having kids kind of changed our lives in different ways. But I love Laura, she's amazing. - Yeah, how did it change my mind? - Change it so much for you. Obviously, everyone I talk to is like, when you have a child, your whole world, you changes, but like you were doing all these really heavy human stories long before as well. You understood probably better than most people in the service, like how precious and fragile life and freedom are. But then you have your own son and you're bringing him into this world that has a lot of good and a lot of bad, like did that shift your perspective in one direction or the other from protection or more like opportunity standpoint? - It didn't prevent me. A lot of people ask if I wanted to stop traveling as much or putting myself in such risky situations after having a child, that was not the effect that being a mother had on me. What happened is that it became much softer and more empathetic. I've always been an empathetic person. But now when I was interviewing the mothers who've lost loved ones or who are out there and in Mexico digging holes, looking for their missing children, that hits differently for me, right? And so it just made me sort of softer and feel like the responsibility to tell these stories right is even more important in many ways. It is the biggest guilt that I have as a mother, traveling and spending so much time away from your child on traffic these last six years. Each story, we do 10 episodes a year, two weeks per story. So it's a lot of time on the road. A lot of time plus domestic shoots and so half of my time is on the road. And yeah, I definitely live with the guilt of spending all that time away from my son. Thankfully, I remember this mother describing her son when asked if she was the mother of the, an Israeli kid who was killed in a music festival. And they were interviewing her and asked her to describe her son who just died. And she says, "How can I describe him? "He was the perfect son for me." And that is often how I describe my son too, is that he is the perfect child for me because he has been able to deal with the fact that his mother travels all the time and still be proud of me and still be a really amazing, level-headed, smart, emotionally very mature person. We have this really special connection. I tell him about all my stories. I tell him when I'm sad, I tell him about the things I'm worried about. He has the same relationship when he first girlfriend, he ever had all his first, he shares them with me. And it's been, you know, the biggest privilege of my life. - That's so cool. And now at 16, obviously, you were just saying, like you get to share all the stories with him and everything. And now he's got to understand the gravity. - Yeah, and fortunately, I started sharing them perhaps a little too early. - That's all right. You got to read these, you know. - He's the marching traffic to do like that. - He's gone. - There they are going across the border. There you go. That's wild. You're a friend that we pulled this up. This is what you were talking about in 2009, 2009 imprisonment of American Journalist by North Korea. On March 17th. - You know, Unileigh, the other journalist, yeah. - 2009 North Koreans solders to teen two American journalists, Unileigh and Laura Ling, who were working for the American-based independent television station current TV at the Truman River on the China North Korean border. It is contested whether the film crew entered North Korea, like you were saying. North Korean leader Kim Yong, the second part in the two on August 5th, 2009, the day after the former US President Bill Clinton arrived in country on a publicly unannounced visit. That's kind of sad. He got that dog in him for that one. We give Clinton a lot of shit. Correctly so, but that's just unannounced fucking visit to North Korea. That's pretty hard, right? - Yeah, it was amazing. - I mean, you've never been in North Korea yourself? - No. - Are you tempted? - Oh my god, yes. Absolutely, I'd love to. As a journalist, if you tell me there's a place I can't go, that's absolutely where you want to go. - Yeah, we have. - But you see a mention of her sister too, Lisa Ling, special correspondent for the Oprah Winfrey show. She had actually been in North Korea and didn't disclose she was a journalist. So that whole story is fascinating. - Yeah, we've had a couple. So my buddy Wally is a professional ping-pong player and he ended up going there for like six days. - Oh wow. - And doing ping-pong diplomacy awesome, dude. And like he had video there from the tournament where the whole crowd was booing him. And then at the end of the match against the North Korean, who was great at ping-pong, he hugged the guy unexpectedly and then we were like, oh, I guess we clapped now. And it was like, there's a video of it on YouTube. I don't know if we can pull that up deep. It's a little nondescript. But it's so cool 'cause it's like sports can pull the farthest places together in a small way. But his experience, even in those five, six days of like having the handler and getting out of the country when he's like, oh shit, this is getting hot. And the way you gotta get in to China, it is. - But he had to cut it short. He left before he was supposed to fly. - Yeah, he was gonna try and remember, this is back in episode 147. But he. - Oh, good memory. He. - You remember all the numbers for holy shit. - I had a day. - Oh, well, yeah. - Are you with, it's. - What's happening with your head? - I have a photograph of memory which helps. It's like audio-visual. But what's funny is recently, the last few months, we've been, we added a show on the weekend where it's like us reacting to news and stuff. And it fucks up my photographic memory since like episode 381 because there's like, I know which ones we did on like every three and then sometimes four, we would do like four and two. But then like some of the guests float in and I'm like, no, it was Clint 419 or was he 416? All right, Clint was 419. But it's like kind of weird, how do I do that? - What am I? - Yeah, this is it. You're probably. - Oh, you don't know yet, right? - We put out 452, a joke, Kent. This is a little bit evergreen, so this might be a few weeks. Probably gonna be like 460 or something like that. But yeah, this is Wally right here. Great dude, and this was the game he was playing in North Korea. They let him set up like a, like I guess his cell, his iPhone to film this. Yeah, we play it real fast. - It's so cool. - It's pretty cool. - They're also, I'm always going the way. I'll fast down, but watch. It's so serious. And then Wally, he goes to see his fans. - Big of fans. - He'll never meet you again. - But then he pull in the mask. - He didn't know what to do. But Wally talks about, like it happens fast, and he's like, he could feel him, like. - Oh wow. - Did you have him on the podcast? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Did you, oh yeah, that was it, XXXX. And did you have them because you saw this clip or how did they end up here? - So he had been connected. I think Tyler Sherman knew him. And then he connected me with Wally. And that was when I was still in my parents house in South Jersey, and he came down. And we just, we just vibed. And he really, his story is amazing. Like he really, he had a really interesting life and then found his way into ping pong. - So fun. - I think he was also in that Marty Supreme movie, I believe. - Was he really? - Yeah, I'm working, I just watched the first 45 minutes last night, it was really good. So far, but-- - You haven't finished? - I haven't finished yet. - How do you start not finish that movie? - Because I was watching. It's amazing. - I so got it. - It's amazing. - I loved it, I loved it. - How do people didn't like it? I loved it. - I think it's incredible so far. But Wally, like, he'll go in and he'll take a, he carries around like an iPhone 14, and he plays ping pong with the iPhone 14. and just beats people. But yeah, for 14 bigger than the rest, or why the-- - It's whatever the smaller version of it was, and it's like all cracked and shit, but he plays with it, and it's like, dude, dude, dude. But he did amazing, in my opinion, diplomacy there, like a small little-- - Absolutely, yeah. - But then we had in Lee Seung, is that, did I get the last name right on that deep? So we had him in for six hours last year, it was two episodes. And his father, he and his family, defected from North Korea, out of China, when his father was stationed there, his father was about to be named the minister of tourism. - Oh, wow. - He was high up. And he was so cool, because he didn't exaggerate things. He talked about where everything was, and we got the picture, like it's dystopian, you know? But he wasn't like, it was very matter of fact, as he went through it. But man, like, wait, deep and I were sitting here, and he left, and we were like, god damn, we're really glad we live in America. When you hear stuff like that, which I'm sure you've had that thought a million times in your life. - Absolutely, we won the lottery. That's what I say all the time. We did, he defected to, he went to China first. - To the United, well, he was in China, and they defected to the United States. They defected, they started, they worked with South Korean intelligence. They got into South Korea. The North Koreans found out about it. They arrested their existing family there, like the grandmother and stuff. When we're pumping videos into South Korea, like we're gonna go grandma, it's awful, awful shit. And then eventually, you know, he and his mother and father, and I believe it's, I wanna say sister, got to the United States, and, you know, he works on it. Here, there's not, as you know, there's not a ton of, a ton of defectors in the United States, he's one of the few, but really cool guy. - That's great. - Yeah, you guys. - Speak English fluently, he's been here for a minute. - Yeah, yeah, speaks great. I mean, we had him for six hours, I thought he did great, you know? - Maybe I'll have him out. - Yeah, actually, yeah, I should hook you. He would 100% do that. He'd be a great guest for you. But yeah, I mean, what kind of, is there like a particular story you would wanna do there? Is it more just like, I wanna see this for myself and just capture a lot of this? - I love to see it for myself. Yeah, I mean, there's also a lot of, one story we were looking at doing in that region at some point was the sex trafficking. There's a lot of sex trafficking women, women who are trying to escape and then get sort of caught up in these, by these traffickers who told them they were gonna bring them to safety, but then actually enslave them and force them to become prostitutes. And so that's happening a lot. And we were trying to figure out a way that we could do the story. But in order to understand why people are fleeing and so desperate, you'd really have to go to the country to see what the conditions are. - 100%. - And even if you're given, which the majority of foreigners when they go to North Korea, they're given the dog and pony show. Even that is telling, right, of the situation. If you're, this is what they allow you to see, but as you can tell, every second of my day is being monitored. So what are they hiding? It's not good. - Yeah. It's also strange that this is a country that operates that way and like they have nuclear weapons. - Yeah. - Yeah, that's not who you want to. It's kind of scary. - Yeah, that power, you know. - But it's like, you know, to places like this, you wanna say like, fuck you or you know, go after 'em and take 'em out, but the reality is, it's this strange game. I mean, you see Bill Clinton go there. He didn't go there with a gun. He went there saying, can I bring these people home? It's a strange diplomatic game. You gotta play even though in the West, we obviously totally disagree with how they have the country set up. And people do suffer there. It's a tough part about it. It's like you can't just evade everywhere. - The breakdown of talks is always when things get worse, right? Maintaining some sort of a diplomatic channel. In that case, it was actually, I think it was, yeah, Kim Jong-un already, who had said that the only way that he would release these two American journalists is, because Al Gore had said that he would go to the country 'cause he was also the owner of the television station. But they said that's not big enough for us. We want to form a precedent. So that's why Bill Clinton was the one who said, okay, I'll go. - Optics. - Yeah. - Optics. - Yeah. - Optics, yeah. - That's one of those. So after you did the Vanguard show, what was the show you did after that? - So then after Vanguard, I worked for Explorer or National Geographic for a couple of years. And then I was hired to go to Fusion, which was ABC News, Univision Network that they started. And I was the sort of lead investigative journalist there for a couple of years. And then, Nat Geo was starting, restarting Explorer again. They called me to start doing works. I went back to Explorer and then I kept on doing stories that were related to black markets. And eventually, the president of Nat Geo basically decided that they wanted to do a show around my reporting. So that's how traffic came about. Now, how do you, there's so many different stories in the hidden third to go through in the world. What is it that draws you to a story and says, I gotta do that one right now? Or is it different every time? - It's usually stories that I think are relevant to an American viewer, because that's who we're trying to, I mean, it's a global show, Nat Geo is watched all over the world. But ultimately, we're paid for by an American organization. And it's important that Americans watch this and sort of, there's some relatability. Access is very important. And that's usually the hardest part, right? We can want to do a story about anything, but unless we actually get access, we can't tell the story. So that's usually what takes the longest, which is why the coup story was also the military, goal trafficking story was difficult. The organ trafficking, for several seasons, we're trying to do an organ trafficking story, ended up doing it was really, really hard. I mean, we had to do reshoots. We had to go back to Mexico several times. We went to Colombia. - Did you do reshoots for that? - Reshoots us in, we had to travel back to those places, 'cause usually we get a two week window to film, right? But in many stories, that access falls through or somebody doesn't show up. And then you still don't have a story. If I'm doing a story about organ trafficking, but I've never interviewed anyone, the whole show is about access. So I have to interview, have to figure out a way to interview somebody whose response was trafficking organs. And also trying to figure out, we also wanted to talk, in that case specifically, we also wanted to talk to a doctor, who's involved in organ trafficking, and a patient who's received one of these black market organs. So all of that was complicated. And it took months and many trips back to Colombia and Mexico until we eventually got all the folks that we needed to interview to tell the story. Now that's a really dark industry right there, and it's far bigger than a lot of us realize. But first of all, what were the specifics of that story? Who was doing it? Who was the end buyer? And again, I asked us on every story, how do you not sit there in disgust watching this? 'Cause as I understand it, there's a lot of this industry around the world where they quite literally take a very alive, healthy person and just kill them and take their organs. - Yes, that happens. I always approach all these stories, particularly this one, because it has been so sort of Hollywood-dised. In a way, there's a lot of myth around it. The way we told the story is I had the number, I can't remember, it was like 70 Americans die every month waiting for an organ. It was like a crazy number. A crazy amount of people needlessly die while waiting for an organ. And so there is definitely demand there, right? And we know that there is a lot of people that are willing to sell their organs, particularly organs that you can live without. And so, and we know there is a black market for it. Is it as, I mean, it's more than we know it exists, but I also am very afraid of doing a story like this and then I was having this idea that it's massive and it's everywhere and it's happening. And people are found in bathtub bloody. That's just not the case, but it is happening. And so much so that we ended up interviewing several people involved in the business. So the victims from the people that we interviewed are a lot of time migrants. People who are crossing, trying to make their way to the United States that are very easy prey. If they die, nobody will notice. And either migrants have then become donors, willing donors, or migrants that are killed, they remove their organs and then they have buyers. A lot of the times buyers are people who can afford it. So often rich buyers. And what I'm really happy that we got in one of my favorite interviews in that story was we interviewed an American buyer who went down to Teijuana to get an organ, which I cannot remember what organ it was right now, which I should. But like I said, we've done so many of these stories. But he was explaining to me how he got it, how much he paid for it, how difficult it was, why he decided to do it. And I remember asking him, do you realize that there is a, do you know where yours came from? He said, I don't and I prefer not to know. And I said, do you realize that it is possible that somebody was there? murdered in order for you to get this organ. And what he told me was that it is very easy for you to be sitting there and asking me this question with judgment. But if it was your son, what would you do? Yeah. It was one of those moments that's exactly what I sort of always look out, look after, want to happen on our show. Like these sort of bigger questions that we're all confronted with, where we all should be confronted with, right? My man, Remi Adelaque, who's a Navy SEAL, did a lot of work on this in his post-career from things he saw in the SEALs. And he actually, he's an actor, writer, director among many other things as well. And he made a, I want to say, it was a 35 minute short film called The Unsomething. We looked that up, Remi Adelaque, untouchable or un, I forget what it was called, but it shows in reverse and the unexpected, the unexpected, it shows in reverse and organ traffic and how it happens. So the, the film starts in a Mexican hospital with an American couple. And then the doctor walks out and says, your son's going to live. And then it goes the next thing that happened before that all the way back to the beginning. And it was based on something he'd actually seen in his career with the Navy SEALs. And it's, it's scary, but poses that exact question. It's like two parents that wanted to save their kid and they could pay to do it. So they came down to Mexico to do it. And it's like, man, because they don't have to watch it happen. Yeah, they don't have to watch it. That's why he said, I prefer not to know. He doesn't want to know. Right. But in his case, he was, but yeah, it like to me, it was immediately, yeah, well, what would I do? My son was dying. And all I needed was, you know, to go down across the border into Mexico. And it was there and it was available. And it was something that would save him. And I could live for the rest, you know, he wouldn't have to die tomorrow. Like, what would I do? What would you do? Yeah, I prefer to think that I wouldn't do it. Right. It's the worst part of the zero, some game part of life, you know? Yeah. Someone has to lose. Someone has to die for some of that. It's so bad. Yeah. But you've done a lot of work too on the border. And like the trafficking that happens from like the literal coyotes and like the migrant crisis and stuff like that. The first question I have is like, have we seen, I've heard about some improvements with that mathematically, just with some numbers over the past year, less people crossing the border. Less people crossing the border. Yeah. But like, that's a extremely widespread problem still. It is massive. And we spent time with a guy called King Coyote. King Coyote. Yeah. Because he's responsible for huge amounts. He calls himself the king of migrants coming to the United States. And he set up a huge operation. I mean, it took us months to get this guy to agree to talk to us. And eventually we met in a very remote area in southern Mexico. And he gave us an incredible interview. I mean, he described his operation as essentially like a company. It works like a company. It has an HR department where, you know, you have to keep your customers happy because it's only by keeping them happier. You're going to get repeat clients, right? He had a marketing department that put out there and figured out ways to promote his services by saying that, you know, they were safe. They, you know, you paid, he was charging $10,000 per migrant. And he would bring them from southern Mexico, sometimes even from places like Guatemala, all the way to the United States for $10,000. And he would do it safely. And there would be none of the stories that we hear that happen to these migrants. That's how he promoted his work. And he also had a legal department, which is a legal department, which consisted of lawyers, most of them in the United States, American lawyers, that were constantly reading the news and analyzing the changes in law and by state federally to try to figure out when was a good time to cross, when not to cross, where to go, where not to go, all that stuff. So it was like a full-on company, right? And he was making millions of dollars a week from this. And, you know, what's sad, and we spend time with him. We also spend time on the streets of southern Mexico in a place called Tapatula, which was one of the first things I ever did for current TV for the American television station, was actually about the death train. You've heard about the death train. It's a cargo train that goes from southern Mexico to the northern Mexico. And it people, desperate migrants, bore this train or hop onto this train. They fall off the train, they lose arms and limbs. And Darren and I was a first story we did for current TV. We went down there. We spent, we actually went on the freight train ourselves, filmed a group of migrants, a woman, Maria, we'll never forget her, and four women that she was traveling with. And a kid who we met in a amputee shelter, he had lost his arm, his name is Guillermo from Honduras, had lost his arm. And the day that we're filming Maria on going on the freight train, we see Guillermo coming and jumping on the train. He's going to try it one more time with this little brother, even though he'd lost his own arm. So this is, this should tell you enough about how desperate the situation is in their home country, that they're trying so desperately to make it to the United States, right? Maria had kids that she couldn't feed. She was desperate, she's new, that there was a high risk of her being raped and possibly killed on the road. But she was like, I have to do this for my children. I cannot afford to feed them. I have to figure out a way to get to America. And so the, so Tapa Chula back to this story on King Coyote. We traveled back to Tapa Chula and the death train is no longer operating. So now what we saw instead, this was a year and a half, two years ago, was hundreds and hundreds of people on the public main large square, hundreds of hundreds of Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians, people from Brazilians, from all over the world, that couldn't afford paying King Coyote the $10,000. So there's stuck. Stuck in the situation where if in order to be able to leave, they have to pay the local authorities money. So they actually pay border patrol and police, Mexican police. They have to pay them in order to be to leave. But then at every checkpoint, they would have to pay and they can't afford it. They can't pay King Coyote. They can't go back to their countries. And the whole system is profiting from them, right? The police, the local governments, the border patrol, the King Coyotes of this world, they're all profiting from this. No one wants them to leave because they can make a lot of money from these people, right? So it's an exploitation. We're essentially exploiting the most vulnerable people in the world. And then you have politicians in America that are doing the exact same thing, right? Exploiting them and exploiting this issue and calling these people the worst scum of the world, people who want to come to America to to denigrate this land and to, you know, create violence and kill. And that is just not the case for 90 percent or 99 percent of the migrants that I have encountered. That's right. That I have encountered. And I have spent a lot of time with these people. And yes, are there bad people, horrible people also trying to come across? There are. Where are the majority of drug trafficking happening? Not in the deserts where these migrants come across. It's happening at legal ports of entry. That's where the vast majority of drugs come across legal port of entry. By the way, moved in by American citizens, not by immigrants, by American citizens. So it's on all sides this issue and these people that are the most vulnerable, the most, you know, definitely the people that didn't win the lottery. And there are fleeing poverty and persecution and violence and that all they're trying to do is to protect their loved ones and their children. Where 100 percent, I would do the exact same thing as if I was in their shoes. Yes. The incentives are also built that way to do that. And that's the thing. When you see like the extremes of this issue, on one end, you have the people who are like, you know, they'll demonize a lot of these people when they're just, there's no other option for them and they're just trying and they're being taken advantage of and a lot of them become indentured service servants when they come here, which is crazy, you know, or way worse, by the way, sex trafficking victims absolutely. Or don't live, you know, like horrible things. And then on the other end of the spectrum, the people who are like, open up the whole border, just let them across with open arms. I'm like, well, do you care about the downstream effects of the trafficking and the and the mass crime that you're allowing to happen to these people? If you care about them so much, and they don't. And it just that stuff makes me lose hope in politicians because I'm like, you're ignoring this and you're ignoring this, but you're the people legislating us. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. And you just see that yeah, again, everybody is just exploiting this issue and they're getting getting votes and getting into office on the back of this issue. Well, actually not wanting to, you know, create a better system and allow, figure out, quote us for people to come here. This economy will, our economy will collapse without immigrants. We need them. Let's figure out how, you know, how to not only exploit them, but treat them fairly and humanly as all human beings should be treated. That's right. There has to be a way to fix a legal system so that it's not, that's the other thing. Like they make it 40 billion hoops and, and also economically infeasible. Yeah, there's 11, the backlog is like 11 million cases. Right. People waiting to get status in America and asylum seeking. So what do you think they're going to do? Of course, they're going to come across the border. Of course. Like you have to fix the root of the system first and then yes, take care of Native American people as well to be able to be like, all right, well, if we have problems at home and people aren't getting jobs, let's fix that first cool. But like it doesn't need to be this really toxic kind of conversation that happens. I agree with you there. Inhumane, the way that many of these people that we depend on for our own economic well-being, and then we treat it so inhumanely, I can go on and on about this. It's, yeah, I know you thought I feel very passionate about because I've spent so much time on the ground actually reporting on it. I also saw a documentary where you went to Ukraine, I think this was a couple years ago. The circusy one. Yeah. Was it the babies? Yeah, the babies just getting sold and stuff. People forget this war's not been going on for four and a half years, it's older than World War II in America was, coming up on another year, it'll be older than World War II for what Europe was, like it's nuts and the, the Caterina was actually just their Covernor story about how a bunch of cartel mercenaries are on the ground fighting in Ukraine, like this is insane that we, because we're also funding it, that we still allow this to happen. And like, first of all, how did you get a hold of that story in the first place? Yeah, so it's really fascinating story. So the Ukraine before the war was sort of a leading country in circusy. Circusy, you know, lots of parents can't give birth naturally, so they, you pay for a surrogate to carry your child. Sometimes, genetically, it's your child. Sometimes it's not even, there's no genetics, but a lot of times it is genetically your child, but you just the mother can't carry it. And so they hire a surrogate. In the United States, it is possible. You can do that, but it costs upwards of $150,000. So too expensive. So there are other countries in the world that have popped up. It's not legal. It's in the majority of countries, but some countries it is, and it's safe. Ukraine was one of those places. When the war broke out, there were a lot of American parents who had Ukrainian surrogates carrying their babies. And so the story was about what happens in that situation, how do you, what do you do then? How can you bring this baby to safety in the middle of a war? But also, when this happens in a place like Ukraine, where it was actually totally safe to do it and legal, how then there are other places where it's not legal and not safe, that pop up to fill that vacuum. And so Kenya, we travel to Kenya, which had become at the time sort of the new place that parents from all over the world were going to, or people from all over the world were going to gay couples as well, very popular gay couple surrogacy. We're going to try to have surrogacy in a way that they could afford. But yeah, so we went, we followed this amazing couple from the Bay Area, who for years wanted to have kids. She couldn't carry a child, had a wonderful Ukrainian woman carrying her child, and we follow them into the war as they go and meet their baby for the first, the baby is born that morning. We're on hold on the Polish side with the couple, they're so nervous, and we got where that woman, the surrogate, had just delivered the baby. So we worries about to deliver the baby, so we make our way into Ukraine, and we film them, and we're with them when they meet their baby for the first time. And it was incredibly emotional and beautiful. And you understand why surrogacy is important, and we're so happy that it exists because it allows parents to be parents and all of that. And then we, later, we're in Kenya, and we're seeing like massive exploitation of women who are often, you know, poor women who have their own kids, who can't figure out how to feed them, and who, you know, fall into this surrogacy network, trafficking network essentially, and they're paid almost nothing. There's these really sort of bad doctors and bad folks involved in all of it. And I remember one story that stuck with me was a woman who's carrying this baby. She told her family she had kids of her own. She told her family that she was going to go to Dubai to do sort of housework. And I would send money, but in fact, she was in a small apartment confined in Nairobi, Kenya, wasn't allowed out as, you know, her belly is growing, and she's growing this baby inside her. And then it's delivery day, and she wakes up at the hospital without the baby, and everyone has disappeared without the money. She wasn't paid a cent, and she was abandoned and drugged, and it was awful. And there were stories like this again and again, so that was our investigation. I haven't even been doing this a long time, and like, you know, you have to report on it, and it's all an individual here. It's just a part of a bigger story, but like, are you ever tempted to save some of these people? Oh yeah, all the time. You know, we did a story about this scam factories in Myanmar, where these people are forced to scam Americans. I don't know if you've heard about the pig butchering scams. The pig butchering scam? It's sort of a crypto romance scam combined. You're online, you make a friend, you think it's your friend, you might fall in love with this person, this person convinces you that there's a lot of money to be done in crypto, convinces you to put all your savings into this account. The account isn't a real crypto account. Basically, they drown you of all your money, drain you of all your money. But a lot of these scams are being made in these factories. Essentially, these huge compounds housing hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people in totality, it's hundreds of thousands of people that come from all over the world. India plays as far off as Brazil, China, Kenya, Africa, all over, and they're brought into, they're lured into these compounds. But by people tell them they're going to get a job in IT or a job in, you know, online. And when they get there, they take away their passports and force them to scam. And if they don't scam, Americans usually, they're beaten, they're tortured, they're killed, it's really, really awful. So we spent time trying to get access to these compounds. We got access to scam city with all of these, a lot of these scam centers and spent time with a group, an American group and a local group, amazing people who are on the ground trying to actively rescue people inside. And some of these compounds allow for what's called sort of ransom money. If you give $15,000, I'll allow this woman from the Philippines to go home to her family, but you first have to figure out how to get me $15,000. And so we were there and we were watching them save all these people coming across the border and saving them and negotiating with the time bosses. And yeah, I mean, the biggest question for us was, you know, fuck, how can we start making money, lots of money and rescue all these people? But at the same time, it's hard, right? You're basically paying these crime bosses, which ultimately is not what you want to do either. Yeah. Yeah, there's all these moments where you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can't imagine the right things again. I can't imagine, but like again, someone's got to go in there. I know you were saying earlier, like, you know, I'm talking about being brave and all that, but like the places you go, it takes incredible bravery, not just to go there and do them, but to tell the stories because there's a lot about like your shows over the years where you were breaking ground on things that really hadn't been talked about at least like on the mainstream and people at home, my fucking parents or something could see it and be like, oh, wow, I never knew that existed. Like, that's a really special thing. I would, you gotta feel the gravity of that a little bit. You've been doing it for so long. Yeah, I'm very lucky. Like I said, it's very, very fortunate. Yeah, it's privilege of a lifetime. I love my job so much and I can't believe I've been able to do all of this stuff that I've done and I hope to continue doing it. Well, I could talk to you all day, but we've already been on for about three hours and 15 minutes. So there's one thing I did want to ask you about at least this time before I get you out of here, which is, you know, like on your podcast, what you're now doing, which again, subscribe via literally on the title right there. Great stuff. That was how I found out you were doing a podcast. I saw a bunch of your clips in my feed, so that's good to say. But you, you've covered a bit of the Epstein story as well. And I'm curious what it's like for you to cover something that is happening at such a rich elite level in this country and internationally to be clear. But, you know, from, you know, very wealthy people in this country who are involved in something like that, when you've covered a lot of the same kind of story where it's like not to downplay it at all, but more in a place you might expect it, like a war-torn country or things like that or where people are desperately trying to get across borders, yet at home where we're supposed to be the example for things we have people that are supposedly highly respected. Huge air quotes there in our society, taking a part in something so sick. Does that change your perspective on things a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I haven't covered it the way I've covered other subject matters, but I did have Lisa Phillips, who you've had on your podcast as well, and I had her on mine. So my extents of covering it has been reading everything that's out there and interviewing her. So I don't consider myself an expert, but I think it's back to the follow the money, right? It's the fucked up world we live in, which if you're rich enough and powerful enough, and you can do anything in the world, and and there's complete impunity. And that was to me the most shocking how the fuck is it possible that this guy who already, we knew what he was doing for years before, how the fuck was he still out there? How was he allowed to continue doing this? How did he not do, why was he not in prison for the rest of his life? And also, I have not sure if you've spoken to the journalists that first did, there was a journalist, a British journalist, I can't remember her name now, unfortunately, but she did, if you can pull it up, Joe, actually, she did a story for Vanity Fair. It's a great, it's a fucking-- - Fick your word. - Yeah, pick your word. - Oh, sorry. - It's the fucking Vanity Fair story. And where she has all the goods, she has the farmer's sisters who are risking their lives to tell the story, to go out there publicly openly because they believe it's important to save other people's lives. And yet, you know what, you have enough money and power in this country and anything can go away. And that, to me, is the biggest and most depressing lesson of that whole story. - Yeah, and no one's been prosecuted here at that level for it, which is really sick. - And the files are still not out. I mean, have all the files are still not out. That whole bullshit that they gave us. Yeah. - I hope this is a moment, I've been saying this over and over again, I'll keep saying it because I think it's worth repeating. But I hope this is a moment where people really start to realize some of the battle here for, you know, having a better country in the future for the next generations is realizing the fight is up versus down rather than left versus right on a lot of things. - Oh, 100%. It is absolutely, it's what I keep hammering about. It's inequality. It's not about bad people and good people. Black versus white, good versus bad. It's inequality. It's the lack of opportunities that some people have and the complete impunity and power that people with money have these days in the world, around the world. Well said. Well, we're gonna have to do this again. I can talk to you all day. You've had a hell of a career. So thank you so much for coming in to do it and congrats on having like your own company with this as well and expanding to the podcast. That's great. So you have more things you said you're working on with Nat Geo as well that are gonna be coming. So we'll talk about that. - But I have my podcast, and that's my number one focus right now. - Hit and third, hit the subscribe down below. But thank you so much for doing this. - Thanks Julian who had a blast. - All right, everybody else you know what it is. Give it a try, get back to me. Peace. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. Thank you.