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So do not delay. Visit TRA.com or call 800-575-4908. That is once more 800-575-4908. Tax relief advocates real solutions for real people. You know, what if nobody shows up? I produce your calls and said, "Look, there's two guys in 45 minutes. You know, get here." That's where the rabbi showed up, the military, intelligence officer, Lieutenant from the Washington DC Metro Police Department, who is in charge of watercades, including the Presidents. Those were the second sting. Right. You leave the movie, which is supposed to paint you as basically the devil himself. You leave the movie thinking, "This movie is about as connected to reality as a Scooby-Doo animated cartoon." I mean, it's so crazy fictional. Are you going to sue them? Chris, thank you for being here. Michael, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for the pizza. That is identical to the pizza Jeff Socle brought to our stinghouse in Fairfield, Connecticut. Should I have some pizza during our interview? If you like. It didn't work out so well for Jeff, I think it'll be fine for you. So just to set the stage, Chris, only Hollywood could make a movie about a journalist exposing child sexual predators and have the journalist be the villain. I just saw the movie yesterday. Yeah. You're the bad guy. I don't understand the purpose of it. I mean, maybe I'm not sophisticated in the ways of Hollywood. I'm just a working reporter. I get that. But what is the purpose of it? I mean, you take something that has genuinely I think created awareness in a dialogue that didn't exist before. Obviously, there's a dark element of entertainment. There's a dark element of humor, and I lean into that. But at the end of the day, we're collaborating with law enforcement all over the country and have been for 22 years. We started not with law enforcement, but a grew there. Taking bad guys off the street. So when you look at the movie, as I did with my wife, we watched it in a theater in Times Square, New York City, walked out, interviewed movie goers. You know, we looked at each other and it was so over the top, so hypersensationalized, so dark, so twisted, a fever dream, as even the director has said it is, it was hard to be angry about it. So you go to see it. You hadn't seen it before it hit theaters. No. You didn't collaborate on it. You didn't help write it. It was not contacted. The first official word from A24 came on May 27th when they sent me a partial trailer and said, we hope you like it. We'd like you to support the film. We'd like to talk about advertising, buying ad time on your network, true blue, our streaming network. You know, take down predator series goes and your podcast platforms. And I said, well, it's a little strange. You didn't reach out before. Well, we didn't have to because it's a fictional story only loosely based on your real experience. And earlier on in January of this year, a colleague of mine in the podcast world who knew the director Lance Oppenheim well enough to reach out did so. Lance Oppenheim texts back and says, this studio is going to reach out. But it's basically a love letter to Chris Hansen. I'm a big fan of Chris Hansen. I said, after see the movie, if that's this director's love letter, I hate to see a poison pen letter from this guy. So your friend contacts them. They don't reach out to you initially. They try to sweet talk you. Then they try to sweet talk you a little bit more. And when you ask a basic question, which is you make a movie about me, why didn't you talk to me before this? They say, well, we didn't have to because it's a fictional account. Right. At what point? You know, one of the key takeaways from your interviews with the predators is that these guys are really, really stupid. And I have to wonder if the same thing applies to the movie makers are they really thought, did they think you were really really stupid or I think it speaks to the mindset of of some in Hollywood. They think that you're going to be so blown away that an actor of the quality of Robert Pattinson who's insanely popular right now would play Chris Hansen. And of course, that's flattering. And I have no issue with Robert Pattinson. He's an actor. He got paid to do a job. I don't think what he did is remotely reflective of why I am or what I do. It's so over the top and dark and vampire makeup. It's just crazy. But you have to wonder what what the motive is. I mean, these guys sitting around in a room engaging in mental masturbation about how genius they are. I know guys, guys, guys, guys. Let's take the predator series and let's turn it around and make people feel sorry for the predators. That's awesome. Yeah, let's do it. Isn't that basically every Hollywood movie for the last 20 years is, hey, what if the bad guy were really the good guy? So there's that also the idea that Hollywood would defend degenerate sexual behavior. That's not a man by its dog story. That's the sort of thing we've come to expect. When you were watching it, you see this over the top vampiric Robert Pattinson performance, a great performance of whatever that character was, albeit not Chris Hansen has no connection to the real Chris Hansen. So what are the movie goers watching the movie? What are the differences between that movie and real life? Well, everything. I mean, this movie is about as connected to reality as a Scooby-Doo animated cartoon movie. I mean, literally, there's nothing in that movie that happened the way it's portrayed, except for the use of my name and a couple key phrases. They have me in the movie with a dressing room in the predator stinghouse and I'm sitting there shirtless with a mirror that has light bulbs like a dressing room rehearsing my lines with the predator. I mean, it's so disconnected, so crazy fictional. And so I think that it's an insult to the thousands of men and women who go out and try to protect children from predators every day. There's no, they make fun of the police. They glorify and try to create weaponized empathy for two of the predators who are profiled, two guys who were trying to sexually exploit children, one of whom was an assistant district attorney who knew better, who had child pornography on his computer. And now we're supposed to feel sorry for the guy. Well, that wasn't in the movie. That part was not in the movie. No, of course not. This is the climax. And in all of the, even the pre-prime time criticism of Catch Predator and of you, that's always the episode that is the top of people's minds. There was this assistant DA and he was talking to the decoy and trying to approach a kid for sex. He doesn't show up to the stinghouse, so the cops roll in, your crew rolls in, and the guy kills himself. And that's this is portrayed as the climax of the movie. Nowhere is it mentioned in the movie or really even in the reporting that the guy had child pornography on his computer. That in itself is an act of violence. Well, the movie is based on article that appeared in Esquire written by a freelance writer who interviewed myself, my producer at the time. And it was clear in that interview that he had an agenda that he was out to show TV bad, you know, police bad in this situation. Predator should be alive today. Somehow that we pressured police to go to his house and arrest this guy. The truth of the the matter is this and we lay this out in the stories
at the time in both the episode about this guy, Bill Conrad. And even the next day after the suicide, I was on the today's show, completely transparent. This is what led to it. This is what happened. This is what's under investigation. We've been completely transparent about our methodology from day one and continue to be so with the current takedown episodes on True Blue. But this man, who's an assistant DA, was online, chatting with Decoys, posing as two different 13-year-old boys. The chats were sexual. In Texas, as in many states, that constitutes a felony. Now at the time, this is November of 2006, it's an election season in Texas. And they're running campaign commercials with law enforcement figures going in and busting predators and dragging them out of their darkened computer rooms. Because everybody's trying to save kids from predators. This has become a big issue in double spines. A phenomenon. So it doesn't show up. So now the police have a decision to make, a decision that I don't have a role in. They have to decide, do we wait and arrest them at the DA's office the next day, which would have been great TV. But they were concerned, apparently, about evidence being destroyed. So they went to his house. They sent a sergeant. They got a warrant, right? And a natural warrant. So they decided there was probable cause that crime was committed and they were going to arrest somebody worried that evidence was going to be destroyed. One of the sergeants in that department knew the assistant district attorney knocked on the door. He said, "Hey, you got to come out. We got to talk." It doesn't come out. They breached the door. They go in. He's got a laptop nearby. There's evidence that he was trying to get the hard drive out. And he said, "I'm not going to hurt you guys." Shoot themselves. And they had horrible tragic. Nobody wants to see this. But he made the decision to escape the consequences of his acts. Weeks and weeks later, after an independent investigation by the Texas Rangers, they find that there were images of child pornography on that hard drive. For which he knew, as a prosecutor, he could spend 10 years potentially in prison on each charge. Texas law. So we'll never know what really went on in his head. But you have to look at the totality of the circumstances. There's also the big criticism of that episode was, well, you shouldn't have gone to his house. And first of all, you. I wasn't running the show. Right. Yeah. You is referring to the cops. If you're looking for the perfect television scenario, you're watching being marched out of the DA's office on Monday morning. Right. But me, you know, that we're going to have a big rush. And the cops are, you know, heavy gun carrying militiamen. They're going to go in and get them. The decoy is singing show tunes. It's just insane. Yes. So one, none of the reporting in the movie doesn't make the point that the cops had good reason to go to the house. They have to get probable cause to get a warrant. Yes. So get them. And also he would have been harder to nab him if he deleted the child pornography for destroying evidence. Potentially, but they had copies of the chats, but you know, they wanted the computer. Yes. On top of that, you bring up the show tunes thing. What was the deal with the B story of this all made up? That was made up. That's not real. No. You didn't have a decoy singing show tunes in the to catch a predator dressing room. No. I mean, it's, it's, it's like I said, everything in that movie is fictional except the use of my name and a couple of catchphrases that I have used over the years. So then you ask a question, well, if it's fictional, and that was their intent to create a dark fictional fever dream of a movie, the director's interpretation of the internet's interpretation of the public image of the meme of me. So we're now five generations removed from reality. Bode Rear is hyper reality. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So if that's the intent, why do you have to use my name, image and likeness? Because ordinarily in this kind of a story, they would say, okay, any resemblance? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Charles Kansen, any resemblance to real figures are purely clueless. And they put a graphic up on the movie saying, this is fiction. I think in the beginning and the end. But you know, the reason they used my name, image and likeness is because it's got commercial value. I spent 45 years in this business creating a brand that has value. So they, they want to do a dark fictional piece, but they also want to exploit my brand for commercial gain. So they want it both ways is what's happened. So one, are you going to sue them? Could you sue them? I don't know. Lawyers are looking at what I didn't want to do, Michael, is turn this into the movie that Chris Hansen doesn't want you to see. Yeah. And so you've got to play the long game on something like this. And I've been in this business a long time, you know, doing high profile stories. And so I didn't get upset. I'm not furious when you're opposed headlines. I've never been. But we did decide myself and Sean Wreckett true blue and others involved lawyers included to make the best of it. And that is why we bought commercial ad time before every showing of this movie in America. So before people in, in 95% of the theaters in the country that show this film before they see the film, the last thing they see is me walking into a kitchen, telling everybody in the theater to have a seat because there's something they need to know. And that is this very important work continues every day on my streaming network true blue. Go to watch true blue.com. And you can see all the episodes, and new episode drops every Thursday. So we got ahead of it. And obviously there's some benefit to that for our platforms, our businesses, for the network, for my visibility, for the podcast, predators I've caught and have a seat with Chris Hansen. So, you know, we've definitely worked it to our advantage. But it still raises questions as to, you know, is that fair? And what is the motive behind it? You know, what's the value of it? Is it just entertainment? Is it a larger indictment of what Hollywood is? Because there are two reads. There's one which is the soft morick, you know, the first time a creative art student decides he's going to write a poem and he says, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to subvert expectations. Okay. So there's that. It could just be kind of weak saws, which is an impulse in Hollywood the last 20 years or they actually are more on the side of the predators. I should look at the industry. I mean, this is an industry. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole here. This is just a fact that this is an industry that was ruled for decades by one of the most prolific predators to walk the planet in Harvey Weinstein. That's just a fact. There is a monument to the casting couch in Hollywood right below the Hollywood sign at a shopping mall. People kind of forget this. Yes, Weinstein is a particular example. And he's so hideous that he reveals the rot of what it is in an evocative way. But this has been true from the beginning of Hollywood. Everybody would make jokes about that. So it is, it's Gamora by the sea. It's an industry run by sexual predators. That does color my view of what exactly is going on in the movie. However, can I make an argument that it doesn't present you in a bad light? Sure. So the argument is the movie to me as a biopsy. You're going to say it is a love letter in a weird way. It reminds me of that movie, "Vice about Dick Cheney." I don't know if you ever caught that. You know, I never saw it and I should take a look at it. So the vice is about Dick Cheney. It's this fever dream crazy thing. Dick Cheney breaks into Shakespearean soliloquies, breaking the fourth wall like it got really crazy stuff. And the whole point of the movie is to make him out to be an uber villain. And yet you leave the movie thinking, man, this guy is cool. It's kind of like American psycho Christian Bale. He's this villain, but he is the protagonist of the movie. I saw people tweeting about this online. You leave the movie thinking, Chris Hanson's got a lot of aura. You know, Chris Hanson. Well, in I understand that, and that, you know, it goes back to your initial question about are you suing? Well, lawyers are looking at it and I won't pull it out. I mean, that's why I wouldn't sign the NDA, the non-disclosure agreement that they wanted me to sign before seeing an early screening of the film. That's it. Now, people are saying, well, the NDA, that's standard for anyone to say. Now, I've been to a lot of screenings. Right. I usually don't have to sign an NDA. And was this a standard NDA? Not for Chris Hanson. No. Because it's specifically prohibits in paragraph five, any legal remedy being sought against A24, any employee of A24. So they want you to sign away. So I knew that they were going to want me to sign the NDA. They sent it to me in advance. So they were setting you up, though. Well, maybe, you know, I think they're protecting themselves. Yeah. I mean, if it's, if, why do you worry about it? You know, why would you make somebody whose name, image, and likeness, you stole, essentially, have to sign an NDA unless you're anxious about potential legal problems? Now, what, what, what A24 has said is that this is standard everybody has but I know that people saw the movie without signing it.
- Yeah, I know that David Osset, the director of a documentary called Predators in which I cooperated at some issues with it, but I did cooperate with an interview. - That was a doc last year. He saw the movie without signing an NDA. Now when I go to the A24 offices in New York, I know I'm not gonna sign the NDA, right? They're hoping I will, but I'm not going to. My lawyers have said, under no circumstances, do you sign anything and I wasn't gonna do it anyway. - There's a lot more to say first, they go to tecovas.com/noles. There's no outfit so good that it cannot be ruined by bad shoes, that's a fact. You can get everything else right, the jacket, the shirt, the jeans, and then you put on the wrong pair of shoes, you destroy the whole operation, you destroy your whole reputation. That is why tecovas are such an easy win. Their boots have timeless silhouettes, premium leather. They work with almost anything. Jeans, of course, buttoned down in jacket, great. Game day dinner, weekend tripped, done. And unlike a lot of good looking boots, tecovas are designed for broken income for it right out of the box. I love tecovas. It's the only pair of cowboy boots I could possibly pull off. I also love them a little more of a loafer guy. Their loafers are phenomenal. I've probably got more compliments on my tecovas loafers and any other loafers that I've ever worn and I've worn a lot of them. My wallet, I get compliments on my wallet. My beautiful alligator tecovas wallet. Right now, you can get all of it. 10% off at tecovas.com/noles. Get it at VLS when you sign up for email and texts. That's 10% off at t-e-c-o-v-a-s.com/noles. Get it at VLS. Tecovas.com/noles, he's signed for details. Tecovas, point your toes west. - So I roll in there with Joe Garner, who's my producing partner, co-author on a book deal. We just signed with Simon Schuster and a producer of one of my podcasts. And we meet the people from A24, lovely, polished, get coffee, coffee's good, they offer us chocolates. I can see the screening room, like I can see the graphic of that front door in the house here. And they say, "Oh yeah, we need that NDA." I said, "Well, I can't sign it." I said, "I'm not going to sign an NDA." And I'm sure you can understand why. And I'm thinking I can appeal to their common decency to let me see the movie anyway. Classic Hollywood common decency. - Yeah, exactly. - And I said, "Well, you can't see the movie, so you know, fine." I'll watch her when it comes out to the theater. And I'm a man, there's no threat, there's no hidden camera nonsense, I don't know that. It's just, you know what, you invited me here. - Yeah. - Kind enough to give me coffee. We had a nice chat, people taking pictures of me and, you know, folks who were walking by. And, fun. You know, tell your lawyers that I'm not going to sign it for the obvious reasons you wouldn't sign it. I know that other people have seen it without signing an NDA. And I tell them, I know, I have this from David Austin himself. And they're flunnished. And they said, "Well, what if we can work this out for later days?" I said, "Fine." I said, "I'll promise you that I'm not going to give away "the plot line." - Yes. - You know, I'm not going to ruin it. I get that. - No, your issue with the NDA was not about potential spoilers. It was about the-- - No, you can't sue us for signing your identity. - Right, so we go down the street to have coffee. Joe and I, and get another email. Here's the same NDA. Have your lawyers just, you know, adjust it to make it acceptable to you. I said, "You don't get it. "This isn't my lawyer's job, right? "This is your problem." - Yeah. - So I'm not signing an NDA unless it's just to say, I won't talk about the film until the film comes out. So they're back and forth. And the lawyer is getting involved from A24. And the lawyer says, "Well, that wasn't an official "A24 screening, the one that David Osset saw. "That was just, you know, editing room with the director "and David Osset said, "Well, give me that screening." - Yeah, I'll send the kid what he calls whatever you want. I'll do, let me do that. - And then the publicity person calls back says, "I just talked to Robert and Lance "and they're very concerned "and they want you to be happy with the movie." I said, "Well, then they should have started the discussion "in January when I first reached out to him." - I don't mean to flatter you, but there are a lot of people and we'll get to them in a second. There are a lot of people who try to copy what you did and they do on YouTube and everything. But they're just like guys. You have won 10 Emmy Awards, is that right? You've won a lot of journalism, like many journalism awards. Your whole job in the Predator series and all the successive series has been to poke through bogus ridiculous excuses by people who think that they can get one over on you. - That's like your whole job. - The best observation most articulately put, yes. - And they think, "Well, we're gonna get one over on you soon." - So you got the guy who's been an investigative reporter and enterprise reporter for 45 years and you're gonna get him to just sign it 'cause you're Hollywood. - Unbelievable. So from the beginning, you know it's a hit job. They know it's a hit job. They think you don't know it's a hit job. Then they know that you know it's a hit job. The movie comes out, okay. The theme that I keep returning to here in all of the story about the movie, about going to see the movie about your entire career is, how are these people this stupid? How does Hollywood behave this way? How does an assistant district attorney do something so painfully stupid? There are other people, they're not stupid people. I mean, they do stupid things, you're absolutely right. I mean, you can't call them smart things or not good things or bad things and they're stupid things, you're absolutely right. But they're not intellectually impaired people. Now some of them are, you know, we get some - Low right characters, you know, who might as well have the word predator tattooed across the forehead. We see that. But we also have situations like we had in San Francisco several weeks back where Ivy League educated lawyer shows up in the sting in the middle of the day. This guy manages a multi-hundred million dollar fund. He's married to the dean of a law school in San Francisco. He's got a seventh grader and here he is in the middle of the day after chatting with somebody who's posing as the father of a 13 and six year old, he shows up after a very graphic conversation to sexually exploit those two boys. Now this is a guy with a big education, a big job and yet he's twisted in a way that he's going to take part in this and I truly believe and based upon the chats that I saw and the criminal charges that followed that he was going to take part in this activity if it was provided for him. So St. Thomas Aquinas, when describing the motivations for sin and how sin relates to the intellect and the will, Thomas Aquinas makes this point that sin makes you stupid. This is part of the Catholic tradition. That sin darkens the intellect, that people who graduate from Ivy League schools and run big hedge funds and they probably have a 140, 150 IQ that they can do the stupidest things, man. - Right, and he did the same thing that a checkout clerk at Best Buy did. - Yes, right, because that's who came in next. - Yes, and by the way, there are checkout clerks at Best Buy who maybe they don't have the 150 SuperHedge Fund or IQ. Maybe they've got an average IQ and that guy would never do any such thing. That guy would never, it wouldn't even cross his mind. So then I'm curious from your 45 years of journalism and 22 years doing this kind of journalism. How does a guy go from graduating from Harvard or whatever, forget about Harvard, they're all predators and degenerates, but you know from some other like reputable school, how do you go from that to being in a kitchen over a pizza talking to Chris Hansen? - I wish I could give you a precise articulate answer. I can narrow it down to some areas for you Michael. I think some of these guys are hardwired as predators. They're the guy who would be at the mall, at the movie theater, the unmarried little league coach, the bad teacher. We have 50 million kids a year we have inappropriate sexualized contacts from school employees in this country. I mean, it's a big problem. But what about these other guys, right? I don't know why they're wired this way, but there's a group who are wired this way. And then there are the younger guys who are socially inept and they get caught up in the fantasy. - Yeah. - Right? And then there's this middle ground of guys like the lawyer in San Francisco, the doctor in Michigan, the police officer in Maryland, a little league coach, the Catholic school teacher, all of these cases we've seen in the last month in current investigations. What makes them do it? And I think part of the answer to that is the proliferation of child sexual abuse of material on the internet. And I think there's a curiosity in the minds of some of these guys. I can't tell you why. But I know that psychiatrists who study this, who go on into the federal prison system and talk to guys who have nothing to lose, they're not getting out. We'll tell you that there is very definitely a connection between viewing CSAM, child porn, and defending in this way. And that's why I get so upset when I see cases that recently a judge ruled that AI generated child porn was okay if somebody was viewing it in their home and didn't take it out of the home. Well, what's the difference between, you know, there's no child there, but it's still the image.
of a child. Yes. Right. And it's still going to feed their fantasy for only so long until they get to the point where they need to knock on the door of one of our sting houses or to meet a child who's available in real life. This highlights a couple major errors, I think, that people make in liberal, modern society. One of which is that the only thing that matters is consent. As long as consent is. Well, we see that. You know, I come face to face with these guys every month without doing a sting. Every single month, there's at least one and sometimes two or three. I mean, sadly, our production schedule is so far ahead of True Blue, I mean, we've got episodes for the next year already. Yes. And we're still producing, right? So it's out there, I think, in the beginning, you know, we would go to one of two chat rooms in one platform. We had chat rooms in AOL and Yahoo, in Myspace, and all the activity was there. Well, today, it's so diffuse and so spread out that it's harder than ever to detect these guys, but there's more activity than ever before. Right. And that's why we've conducted investigations in places like Roblox, the wildly popular gaming platform. It's a game. It's a kid's game. And the characters look like little LEGO characters. But think about the argument they're making. Not just the predators, but even the kind of liberal politician types who say, "Oh, it's okay. If the kiddie porn is AI, it's no big deal." What they're viewing morality through is just basically a kind of basic liberal premise, which is that, well, if you don't hurt another person, it's no big deal. But one of the problems with child pornography or any kind of vice is not just what it does to the victim, it's what it does to you. And then this is this other error that they make, which is that they think, like Freud, they think, "Well, if you blow off a little steam, if you're one of these predators and you go look at child sexual abuse material, you're going to blow off a little steam, you're going to be less likely." Maybe once or twice, but ultimately that high that these guys get from this, wherever it comes from, is not going to be met by viewing child porn and going off in a corner and masturbating someplace. Not to be overly graphic about it, but they're not going to go bake some cookies. That's what they do when they look at it. And so these guys are so twisted that they get to the point where it doesn't work for them anymore. Yes. And so then what do they do? Well, they find a child. Where do they go? They go where the children are. Where are the children? Various chat rooms, gaming platforms, like Roblox. I mean, in the course of the Roblox investigation, and there are thousands and thousands of cases across the country, across the world, where men go on their poses. Children and try to meet kids for sex. I mean, it happens on a daily basis. And the company has said that it has put in security measures, and it has. Many of them have workarons, and it continues to be an issue. But during the course of this investigation, which we turned into a documentary called Dangerous Games, which people can see out on True Blue, a woman reaches out to me from Texas. She reaches out on TikTok. Now, I got to be the only 67-year-old guy in America who's got 1.2 million TikTok dollars, but it's a place where I harvest intelligence and story ideas. And she reaches out with a video saying, I need to find Chris Hansen, his team. I've got a situation in my house. My husband, I caught my husband, grooming a child on Roblox. Now, she's already got kids. And so I immediately reach out, contact her. We go down there. She's her view. Now, she's estranged at this point from the husband. She shares with me the texting, the messaging on the Roblox platform, her husband conducted with a child in California. A real child. A real child. Not a decent one. Not a decent one. A real child. I take those tags, and I confront the husband as he leaves his workplace in a dark parking salon one night in Holland, Texas, and he gives me his excuses. And I read the tags and he drives off. Then the estranged wife does her own investigation. She reports us to police as investigation. She finds the mom of the child who was targeted and the child hooks them up with the Holland's in PD. They get the statement and they prosecute the guy. I can't get to Texas for the arrest. She gets it on her cell phone and sends me the video. So within the larger documentary, we have this very organic story that's told that I got because she heard that I was working with a young man named Schlepp, who was an activist, who himself was victimized on Roblox and now does his own stings. Okay. This is how sometimes the new world of journalism works. And I'm so blessed to have the ability to get in there and mind this stuff and to work with young people who understand it and can teach me about it so I can understand it as well. This is a very important point in defending the whole endeavor because the arguments against it are, well, okay, it's just fantasy, right? You say, well, no, no, it's bad for the person who's doing it. You say, okay, well, no, they're blowing off a little steam. You say, no, no, no, look, we've known since Aristotle. People develop these habits and eventually that high they're going to, it's not going to be enough. They're going to have to go further. Okay. I get all that. But then one of the chief criticisms of to catch a predator all the way up to True Blue is, well, you know what? These guys wouldn't do it. Right. You were not getting the opportunity, right? Yes. But you were not on Roblox getting that husband. No. No. And look, in the stings which are carefully done, this isn't entrapment. These guys have multiple outs. You want to talk about feeling sorry and we can talk about that and whether I have empathy or sympathy for some of the predators, that's a fear game, it's a fear conversation. But you know what? It's really easy not to get caught in one of these stings. Very simple. And you want to know how? Don't try to sexually exploit children. Don't do it. Right. Don't do it. And you'll never get caught. Don't drink and drive and you'll never get a DDoI. Yeah. But I wonder when you say, okay, there's a connection between child sex abuse material and trying to molest a kid. There it is. Obviously there is. There's no question. But then my question is, well, how do you start looking for child sexual abuse material? Well, there are organizations like the Child Rescue Coalition and others, law enforcement, who go out every day to do this work and it's hard work. Yeah. I mean, somebody's got to look at this. I've never seen it and I never want to see it and I think it would damage me. I mean, I've seen a lot of dark stuff and I've survived relatively undamaged. But I don't think I could survive seeing it. I mean, it's been described to me and it's very disturbing dark, the darkest, most disturbing material I can potentially think of. Yeah. Right? Worse than a homicide scene, worse than a mass murder, worse than a car wreck, worse than anything you can possibly imagine, right, would be what people do to children in these photographs in these videos. But so how does a person either, you know, they're born that way. Some people are born gay, some are born lesbian, some are born pedophile. That is an actual argument that some sociologists admit. Well, I think some predators are born that way. I mean, I think that's a third of these cases are people who are just for whatever reason wired that way. That's the first most dangerous group. What about the other two thirds who, like my question is how does a guy say for the first time? You know what? I think I'm going to go look up some child pornography. I wish I knew my, I mean, I wish I knew. I think that there's a curiosity. I think for whatever reason they go look at it, they like it. They pursue it. There's a whole world out there that didn't exist 25, 30 years ago. That is available to people who want to go see it, and it's not just the dark web. It's on the, because the dark web is the, you have to get a special browser and think, but you're saying it's on the, like you can find it on, yeah, you can, you can find it. And there's technology. The traction I mentioned earlier, the child rescue coalition, they work with law enforcement all around the country. They have technology and they can put up a map and they'll put up dots where child porn is being traded in real time. And we work with them on some of these projects and we've got something coming up that I think is going to be quite stunning to see by what, and they go bust the people as it's happening. There's a lot more to say. First, they'll go to goodrangers.com/noles. People talk about politics as if it's some abstract thing happening in Washington. Then you go grocery shopping, suddenly trade agriculture, domestic industry prices and supply chains. Feel a lot less abstract when you're standing at the meat case, trying to feed your family. The biggest policy debates in the country come down to a few very ordinary questions. What does dinner cost? Where was it produced? Who am I supporting when I buy it? One of those questions is remarkably easy to answer. Where does your meat come from with good ranchers? The answer is America. I just adore good ranchers. Obviously the stakes best you're going to get, the Wagyu burgers, best you're going to get. But did you know? They also make chicken, which is the best you're going to get. Pork chops now, the meat sticks are so good. They partner with more than 100 local American farmers and ranches. They deliver the meat straight to your door at the best prices from the best people. It's just phenomenal. I cannot recommend.
good ranchers highly enough. October is a great month's start, go to goodranchors.com/noals, CanadaVVLS, get $50 off plus free meat with every order when you start a plan. You can even build your own box, starting as low as $129 bucks, and it's goodranchors.com/noals, CanadaVVLS, $50 off plus free meat with every order, goodranchors.com, American Meat, delivered. I wonder, my intuition on, so you say about a third of these guys, there's just something real deep in them that it would be very hard to get rewired. So then you say, okay, the majority of the people, two thirds are not like that. So then my suspicion is having a Catholic view of sin and human nature, which is not like totally depraved, but it's pretty wounded. My view of it is, when I look at those guys, I say, well, they're but for the grace of God go I. Whether I'm talking about the worst criminals, or whether I'm talking about a guy, but I don't know how you, I just don't know how you abuse a child in that way. Yeah, and I can't understand, and I've talked to, as I mentioned, hundreds of these guys, and I have this question over and over again. What makes you think this is okay? And I very rarely get the truth out of these guys. It's why I just came here to help the child. That wasn't good. That wasn't good. I wasn't going to do anything, and to which I said, well, couldn't you call 911? Couldn't you call child family services? We had a guy in Alabama once who actually had the share of cell phone number in his phone. I said, you couldn't call the sheriff. I didn't think of that. Well, I know you didn't think about that, because you were thinking about exploiting a child of all the Chris Hanson episodes I've ever seen, which are many on all the, you know, NBC to Trubleau. The excuse, the most ridiculous one is, well, I came here to help the child. I knew what this was. I knew it was a sting, and I was here to tell that child. Stop talking about me. We have chats where people will say, potential predators will say, this sounds like a Chris Hanson sting. I don't want to meet Chris Hanson. I don't want to meet Sheriff Gritty Judd. I don't want to meet Sheriff Chris Wantson. I don't want to meet this or that. And they show up anyway. You know, the decoy plays it off says, I don't know who that is, who's that, or, you know, but there's the time to say, okay, this is a bad thing for me to be doing. But that's okay. That's what I mean. Stop it. Don't continue the chat. They know, at a certain level, intellectually, they know, this is a sting. This is not how children behave. This is not normal. This is totally, this is deeply immoral. This is all these things. And yet they do it anyway. And so I guess my point on the sort of just about any human being of that of that two-thirds group, just about any human being could commit any number of the greatest sins imaginable under the right circumstances. It makes me wonder, okay, if, if what they had to do, they show up to the kid with the pizza in the kitchen with Chris Hanson. Before that, had they not looked at child pornography, they probably wouldn't have gotten here. Had they, I think in a number of cases, you're exactly right. Well, so then you ask yourself, okay, how'd they start looking at child pornography? I bet a lot of them were looking at normal pornography. If they hadn't looked at it, didn't do it any more for them. I think that's a real track for some of these guys. So that's what I wonder. I just think, okay, if, and there's, you know, look at Port and Hub, look at all these different sites. I mean, it's not hard to go find porn if that's what you're looking at. Yeah, one would say is the entire internet is statistically the entire internet. And so I just think when we, you've been doing this a very, very long time, you've talked to a pretty more of these people than just about anybody has. If you see these patterns emerge all the time, shouldn't we try to, if you want to protect kids, shouldn't you try to cut the problem off a few steps before they're shut down? I think so. I think that's valid. So, so how do you go about doing that? You know, and I spend time thinking about this too, airplane rides and, you know, what's the bigger picture here? What is my duty to give some thought to this or to work with organizations who, who address this? But I can tell you that I occasionally get an email, sometimes anonymously, sometimes with the name attached to the, to the podcast email. And occasionally somebody will say, I have this propensity. I have an attraction towards inappropriately younger males or females. I go to a therapist, I keep it in check. I don't act out on it. You need to know that. Don't report me to the police because I haven't done anything. But you need to work that into your equation. And I'm, what do you say to that guy? Well, I try to get them on the podcast, you know, because I think it would be a very interesting, important, maybe frightening in some ways, discovery discussion. So I know that people understand they have the problems. Some subsection of this group understands they have a problem and deals with it. Yeah. And I can't tell you, I mean, I don't know if you can ever quantify how many people that is or who's out there, who slips up. I mean, have you such an individually specific crime, I think, it's hard to, you know, put everybody in their proper category. Yes. I mean, when I would watch the show as a teenager in my early 20s, I'd think, okay, yeah, get him, you know, I had the reaction that most people had. Then I had kids. And it really does shift your perspective, not in kind, but in degree. I mean, you want to rip these guys heads off. I've never had a guy email me and say, hey, I'm a pedophile, but I keep it in check. But I got a related email once years ago. The guy said he has pedophile obsessive compulsive disorder that his intrusive thought was not an attraction to children. It was the fear that he would be attracted to children. I don't know if you've ever come across this strange, but to your point where you say, this is such a bizarre kind of crime. It's hard to put these people exactly in one box or another. I got that one. I didn't know how to respond. I said, you know, I don't talk to a psychologist or a priest or something. Like, I don't really know what to do with that. But it, there's a reason that to catch a predator became a national and global phenomenon. There's something about the age in which we live that this kind of crime seems particularly relevant. Well, I think it's because it's happening. I think that going back to the very beginning, it was an area that interested me. But how do we do that story in a way that takes the viewer inside the commission of the crime? I mean, look, these crime stories are whether it's a murder mystery on one of the main stream networks or whether it's something that we do into the streaming world. These stories are as old as the Bible. It's good versus evil. People like to see that. My theory on all of this is that I like to take my viewer on a journey of discovery. They where they see things they wouldn't normally see, hear things they wouldn't normally hear. And what the predator series has done from the beginning is take people inside the commission of a felony in real time from the chat to the showing up to sometimes in a reaction with an onsite decoy. I mean, you see these guys cuddle up and go and for a hug. They're ready to go. And then they see them being confronted by me. And then you see them being arrested by law enforcement. And we follow up in the predators I've caught podcasts with what happens to them once they go to trial. Did you ever have the fear that speaking of getting a little too close, that one of these guys would just pull out a gun and shoot you? Well, we have a lot of security, you know, in place. And I think we've made it absolutely as safe as it can possibly be. And look, one of the reasons why this franchise has been so popular is because of the edgy nature of it. It's not without risk. We adjust our security based upon, you know, each individual and the environment we're in. We have a lot of built-in stuff that people don't see. But yeah, we've had guys bring guns in. We've had, we've never seen somebody try to use the gun. We've seen it in his race band and had him take it away. We've had situations like recently with the lieutenant from the Washington DC Metro Police Department, who was in charge of dignitary protection, motorcades, including the presidents, shows up to me to 15-year-old boy after 30 days of chatting and sending photos of himself from his police office and his police vehicle. You know, there was fear that he might be carrying a gun and not only arms, but also arm himself. Yeah. And so we have a different protocol for that. In those cases, law enforcement takes control of the situation in a controlled environment and it's secured before I even get a chance to talk to him. He showed up to me to 15-year-old boy in his cop car? Not in his cop car, but he sent pictures of himself and his cop car in uniform to this 15-year-old boy. He talked about taking him to Europe and Italy and all the things we're going to do together and describing his job in dignitary protection, which is exactly what he did. He was a lieutenant. And you know, when somebody comes in from another country, you know, he knew the details of that motorcade movement. He knows the daily motorcade movement of the president. And so this adds another element to it, which is if you have somebody like that and say he doesn't get caught in our staying, he gets caught in a
foreign honeypot deal, where now he's compromised by a foreign government. What does he give up to keep this from being exposed? - And what if Russian, you know, FSP agents find out about this, they would never do that. Our foreign adversaries would never try to sexually interact with our party. - You know what I'm saying? It's what they, you go to China that's the first thing they do to you. - Yeah, of course. - They send a woman to your room. - If you don't like the woman, then they send a man to your room. I mean, China's notorious for this kind of thing. - Right. This, the stupidity of it all, brings me back to that point you alluded to earlier, which is, yeah, look, you know, you can ask me if I have any empathy for them or pity for them or anything. So do you have any empathy for them or something? - Well, you know, sometimes, Michael, when a guy shows up who's 21, 22, you know, you think maybe the guy's made a mistake, maybe he thought, okay, she's 15, and it's only six years apart and redemption and second chances and, you know, maybe. But then you go back over the video and you see how this legally age man tried to exploit and physically make contact with somebody who's 14 or 15. And then you go through the chats again and realize what he was talking about was making a porn film with this girl, you know, making a porn video. And then he's taken away, but they search his backpack and then in the bottom of the backpack, they find a loaded 38 pistol. And you start to think, well, okay, well, if we're not here, and this happens in a real scenario, which we know it does, and ultimately he would likely have found that if he hadn't gotten caught in our stay. What does he do with that gun when the girl doesn't want to do what he wants to do? Is halfway through what he wants to do in his second thoughts or goes through with it and then wants to call the police 'cause he realizes he's been exploited? What happens then? What does he do with that gun? What does he do with the video? And then suddenly you have a whole lot less sympathy or empathy for that person. Of all the people you've ever interviewed, you know, done stings on, is there one or two do any come to mind where you say, you know, I really do feel bad for that guy. Or no. Not really. I mean, really, I'm just being honest with you. I mean, not really. I've heard from some who have led exemplary lives since being caught. I've heard from some who just led quiet lives. I've heard from some or about some who've been dusted up over and over again. Wasn't there one guy who showed up to you like two days in a row? Yeah, a couple times. And then we have, we have that, but we also have guys who are chatting in a sting, but don't show up. And even though sometimes law enforcement will go arrest them, they'll do a roundup after the sting and get all the guys who broke the law online, but didn't show up. But sometimes, you know, they can't find them or, you know, they move on to other investigations. But we've had guys show up in one, two stings chatting, but not physically at the stinghouse. And then the third time they finally worked up the nerve to go fulfill their fantasy and I know it. And I have the ability to get the chance from those earlier investigations. So we can really go through it. And that's where you see the progression of these guys sometimes. What do you think of the guys who try to copy what you do? There are a lot of these guys. I've interviewed at least one of them, but there are a bunch of these guys on YouTube on TikTok who say they're gonna go hunt petos and they bring a camera and they live stream it. And they're just, they're the younger Chris Hanson. So they say. - Well, I think that, you know, access to YouTube and digital media has been in some ways the great democratization of journalism or content creation, right? And I think that people who have done podcasts with content like this have sometimes crowdsolved the solution to crime. So I think that's beneficial. I think when you get to the predator catching thing, I think anytime a bad guy is identified and taking off the street before they can harm a child, I think that's a good thing. Having said all that, and this is the part that always gets me in trouble and will get me hate on eggs, is that some of these content creators come from the prankster world, right? That's their mindset. They were YouTube pranksters who decided, ah, look what Chris Hanson is doing. Look what the police and sheriffs are doing around the country. Look at the guys saying, I can do that. Well, the reality is not everybody does it well. And not all of those cases get prosecuted. And sometimes some of these individuals, not all, create dangerous situations for law enforcement. Sometimes they bring cases to law enforcement that are prosecuted. Sometimes that happens. I can predict without fear of contradiction that most law enforcement agencies, most DA's offices around the country aren't big fans of this sort of thing because they become difficult to prosecute. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there trying to do good things, parents who care, all that stuff. But generally speaking, a lot of these guys, and I see some of the content, I don't dwell upon it, I don't follow it, I'm not going to collaborate. And it makes a mad that I won't join in this world of superhero predator countries. I mean, I'm very comfortable with what I do. I know how we do it. I trust the people with whom we are. And so we're going to keep doing it. But I don't need the collaboration with some of these folks. Yeah, it's also, you're kind of the OG. I mean, it's kind of like Elvis playing around with the garage band. It's not going to happen as well. There's no need for it. I mean, we have more work than we can handle now. I don't need to-- So then help, because another distinction, these guys were pranksters, a lot of them on youths. Some, some. And you are this journalist. So you covered all these stories. You won all of these accolades. You were at front and center during 9/11. Just today, one of the big stories that you were front and center during. What got you into this line of work, which has now dominated your career for over 20 years? Well, we've always done other stuff. Even at the height of the initial predator series, it was just one of the things I did at the network. It's one of the things I do now. Obviously, it gets the most attention for all the reasons we know. But it started with an interest in exposing this kind of activity. We had heard anecdotal stories about kids getting harmed by predators, by adults online. And so how do you get in it? How do you do the story? We did in Cambodia where we infiltrated a brothel where five and six-year-olds are being sold to Western Europeans and Americans for say, how do we pose this to us? We got into it. We infiltrated it. All how do we do it in this world? And about the time that I was thinking about all that, a friend of mine who was a reporter in Detroit said, have you heard of this group perverted justice? Which was an online watchdog group. They would put decoys out in these various platforms, chat rooms, and poses children. And if an adult made the first contact and made the initial conversation about sex, they would pose these guys on their website, pervertedjustice.com. Sometimes law enforcement would get involved. Sometimes they wouldn't. And I thought, well, if we could use these guys as decoys perverted justice and wire a house with hidden cameras and microphones, it could be compelling. So we did it. They agreed. We agreed. We found a house in Beth Page Long Island. We rented it for two and a half days. Wired it. That our hidden camera guys come in. And they went to work chatting. And I'm driving out there. And I'm thinking, what if nobody shows up? What if I've just blown tens of thousands of dollars in that wish money? Well, I produced your calls and said, look, there's two guys in 45 minutes. Get here. Traffic clears, I get there. And in two and a half days, 17 guys surfaced, including a New York City firefighter. Now, no law enforcement in those days. One of the guys was prosecuted after the fact. But the rest of the guys were in the wind, which made an unfulfilling to the viewer. And you got to start asking questions about social responsibility. We did it again outside Washington, DC. And that's where the rabbi showed up. The military, intelligence officer, a teacher, a doctor, all these guys. Those were the second and second sting. Right. I mean, rabbi one is really famous in infamous interaction. I thought that one came much later. That was that early. He was prosecuted after the fact by the FBI and US Attorney's Office. And the Fairfax Virginia Police Department made a bunch of those cases. The military prosecuted one of the guys. But by the third investigation, which we did with the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, it became very clear that we needed to figure out a way to collaborate with law enforcement. So OK, those were the early days of the career. You've kept it up, obviously. You recently, somewhat recently, sat down with this big YouTuber, Weirdo, that I had never even heard of. He was my associate producer, Jacob, who's a complete freak. And he consumes everything on the internet. And he is so-- Jacob is not alone, by the way. Yeah. This guy's very popular. He's very popular. What's his name? EDP 445. And EDP is a sexual eat that blank. Got it. OK. And 445 is his way.
So during COVID when I was first experimenting with YouTube and things and one of my co-collaborators had me do a piece on EDP and we interviewed some people involved in the case. So this guy was a wildly popular YouTuber who was a Philadelphia Eagles fan and he would just run his mouth. Big guy talked about food, talked about all kinds of crazy things and sports. And so people latched onto this and he became very popular. Well then there were rumors about him having inappropriate conversations with underage followers, 13, 14 old girls and somebody caught him in a chat either on Discord or someplace similar having one of these chats and apparently the girl came forward and this came to the attention of one of the you know prankster YouTuber guys and they confronted him and it was a big uproar. The case couldn't be prosecuted but he was shamed. So I got a call from a film producer director named Mike Klum and he was doing a big documentary in EDP 445 and he wanted me to actually do the interview with him and as part of the documentary and then I would take the interview and put it on my platform after the documentary came on. So they put this all together. He agrees to sit down and in Vegas a few years ago we walked into this very theatric, beautifully lighted set and I go at him for an hour, a full hour and he admits to everything. So now this documentary comes out. My interview with him comes out and I have a seat with Chris Hansen podcast and YouTube channel the same name and now law enforcement is reopening the case because he's admitted he's confessed essentially to these crimes in the interview with me. So I think there's at least the potential of him now being prosecuted because he agreed to sit down with me as part of this larger documentary and the piece that aired on my podcast. Why did he talk to you? And it's actually a bigger question than just EDP. Right. Why do any of these people, the smart legal thing for them to do is to the minute they see them, there should be that guy Shay Pol in the water just run out the door, right? They don't have to speak to you and yet they do. Even when they know what's going on. Well, EDP 445 agreed to participate in the documentary knowing that I was going to do this interview with him. So he bought into it, he fell on a sword. Even crazier. That's even crazier. Right. Get off his chest, facing health problems. Maybe he wants to go to prison and wrap up his life there where he gets medical attention, gets three squares a day and you know lives his life out. Maybe that's it. The other predators, that's a good question. I would like to think I have wit and guile. It has a reporter to get people to talk to me that other people maybe don't have that skill. But I think sometimes they're anxious and they want to explain themselves. Sometimes they come up with an excuse going into this and thinking that they can talk their way out of it. Some people honestly get fan voyage. I mean, I've had situations where they told the detectives to pound sand and I walk in and they say, oh, it's Chris Hanson and they tell me the whole story. This is, this is happening. I mean, there are people who are at least for a minute excited to see me. Imagine the psychology of the pedophile to catch a predator fan. Chris Hanson, true blue. We had a guy in Livingston, Paris, Louisiana who drove two hours to the stinghouse and while he was driving was watching take down episodes on his tablet to pass the time of the drive. I mean, hi, you helped me to understand that. You're the investigative journalist. I'm but a humble cigar salesman and podcaster. This psychology, that seems significant to me. It seems that there is something meaningful going on in their minds that is that part of the thrill is that is the breaking of the taboo and the risk of getting caught are those. I think they're able to compartmentalize that what they're doing isn't that bad, right? I'm not the guy in the sting. This is something different because I'm just going over there to check it out. I'm not really going to have sex with her. Well, maybe I will. Maybe I won't. Let's see how this plays out. If she wants to, she's mature for an age. I mean, they think about all this as they're driving over sometimes. Sometimes they just don't see the criminality of it. They're just going over there to, as one guy said, bust a nod. I mean, I'm actually going to happen tonight, son. Yeah. It's like the compartmentalization bit is so astute because this seems to be a feature of our whole political order is that we compartmentalize. Look, I'm one guy at home and you better stay out of my bedroom and I'm one guy at work and I'm another person in my family life and I'm another person in my political life and whatever. We compartmentalize in a way that earlier generations simply did not. And we've lost the sense of the near occasion of sin, you know, to bring it back to that Catholic view of sin. We have this, Catholics think about sin a lot and we think about sin so much that actually opening yourself up to a situation in which you might sin is itself a sin, right, the near occasion of sin. And so I wonder with these guys if it's just, if they really do believe, when they go, first of all, they say, well, what I'm doing is different from what those guys are doing. Right. And two, I'm just going to, I'm just going to go look at the kid. Yeah, I'm just, but I'm, but they might actually believe, well, I'm not necessarily. Well, it may start out as, you know, I came over here to have a discussion with her, but I just don't buy that. I mean, who does that? Right? I mean, in what real world scenario does somebody conduct their own sting operation? And we had a guy who was an activist in Florida show up and give me that whole story about, you know, he was just there to say, well, what about this chat? When you told the mother, you wanted to do this with the daughter and you wanted to, after you did it with the daughter, you wanted the mother to join in. It was all part of your sting. Right. And if you're such an activist with connections to law enforcement, couldn't you have called somebody? Yeah. Tell them this is going on at this hotel. We had a guy as an interesting story. He was just sentenced a month ago. He was a TSA security guy, worked at one of the airports in North Carolina. And he was driving down to Florida and was chatting with different people on different sites looking to sexually hook up. He was married, newly married, and he was going to a family birthday party. And he hits us up and the scenario was a father or a stepfather guardian selling the girl for sex, girls 14, 15 years old in a hotel. So he pulls up, he goes in, he gives the father money, the undercover detective gives him the hotel room key, he goes in, sees the outside decoy, they take him down. Screaming, crying, high pitch, you know, this is a setup, this isn't driving, it went on forever. So now it's my turn to try to talk to him. Get those cameras out of my face, I'm like a dog, I'm like, I'm going to have sympathy for that, right? So I'm right in there. And the whole thing plays out and goes through the system, he goes through three different lawyers. And in Florida, because of the way this went down, he got charged with human trafficking. And if you're convicted in Florida of human trafficking, it's a mandatory life sentence. Wow. So in the process of this, his family apparently had some money for defense. In the process of this, they offer him a plea deal, 15 years, 37 years old, you get out, clean up your life, move on. Well, he doesn't take it. He goes to trial. And his third attorney, who comes up from Miami, decides he's going to call me to the stand, which rarely happens because there's no need for it. They have the chats, they have the, I provide the video. They have the footage. Yeah, we give them. We don't hide around with it. We give it to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor gives it to the defense in discovery. It's all out there, very transparent, as is every part of this is. But he's going to call me to the stand, so remotely, because I'm off actually on another stang. And he's going to be fancy with me. Isn't it true that you make money for every predator that comes in? No, we don't. They said they find us. We don't find them. Aren't you friends with the sheriff? I've known the sheriff for a long time, 42 years, to be exact. But we don't go to each other's house for Christmas or Easter. But I said, yeah, just like I'm friends with a lot of criminal defencillaries, aren't we country? I've been doing this a long time. It was, well, but you must make more money with the more predators you catch. I said, I would love to have a sting, sir, where nobody shows up. I'd love to do a cooking show. Yeah. And I'd like to go hang out with the fine folks at Blackburns Barbecue, right there at Eagle Lake in Polk County, Florida. Oh, you wouldn't know where that is because you're here for Miami.
go further questions. Case goes to the jury. The jury's out 20 minutes, convicted on all charges. Now, this guy has to do mandatory life in prison in Florida. Could have taken the 15 year deal. Is that not part of the mania? This is the theme that I just can't help but return to. It's just, okay, wow, man, you got it. You hit one the jackpot, 15 years. You won the jackpot. This is the best you could possibly know for. And we've seen it in Florida. Just put it on red 23. I'm just going to keep taking risk after risk after risk. You're being accused of something where there's a lot of proof, a lot of evidence. You showed up. All of which is on camera. On my cameras and on law enforcement cameras, you know, they don't depend just on us for the camera. In some cases, they're on cameras. Is there any, is there any sting or any program or any episode or any guy where you had a second thought where you regretted it, where you felt something was improper? Because this is, this is the thesis of the movie is you, you know, that's why it's such an offensive piece of fiction to me. And you don't hear anywhere, anybody affiliated with this film who wants to give a portion of the proceeds to the National Center for Missing Exploded Children, Child USA Child Rescue Coalition, the National Center for Victims of Crime, none of that. It's just a purely selfish money-making Hollywood endeavor. And if they cared at all about victims and survivors, they would at least make an attempt to make it look like they were doing something, something positive would come out of it. But you don't even see that. You don't see the actors talking about that. You don't see the director talking about that. You don't see the A24 talking about that. You don't see the writer of the original Esquire hit piece talking about that or the screenwriter with whom he worked. There's none of that. And maybe that's not their responsibility. But I think it says something about who they are, what they do, and how they do it. But if the thesis of the film is that you compromised your journalistic responsibility, which is a major theme of the movie, then surely they, the filmmakers, would have to consider their own ethical responsibility. Right. They don't subject. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Do you fight on the journalistic side? Forget about the perps and all that kind of stuff. Do you take any of that criticism to heart? Do you understand the criticism? And I understand, you know, when the Pointer Institute and they sit in their tower of scarlet-jade journalism, and they think that we work too closely with law enforcement. And I would answer that criticism with, it's the only socially responsible way to proceed. Yeah. Would they ever say, "Well, don't do it." So, well, that's not an option for me. You know, the thing is that they act like I didn't come up through traditional journalism. I mean, I've been a reporter on air and before that radio and a minute in print for many years, 45 years now. And I wore button-down white shirts with, you know, reptiles to go cover the state capital in Michigan. I mean, I, you know, I came up that way, old school, you know, well before we could even conceive of how a computer would help us to be journalists. I mean, they weren't even in newsrooms. We had typewriters when I started. And so I get it, but we have to evolve. Yeah. We have to be enterprising. And, you know, people talk about investigative reporting. I mean, it is that, but it's also enterprise reporting. It's like, how do you take the viewer inside the crime? And if you're not going to innovate, then you're going to end up like some of the newspapers that have gone out of business. And I'm not saying that we you know, give up our ethics, certainly not. I think a lot of ethics questions. And when we evaluate all the time, how we do things, in both the takedown predator episodes and Trublu and the documentaries we work on, we have these open discussions all the time to make sure that we're doing the right thing. But, you know, we do have freedom to do it the way we think is the right way to do it. And that's what the streaming world has allowed us to do. I mean, imagine after having worked for the man, you know, for so many years, and I'm grateful for that opportunity because I wouldn't have had the brand to do what I'm doing today. But we own the content, we own the distribution of the content. We have relationships with folks like Fox News come here, have a chat. So we're very blessed because we have the best of all world. Right. Right. And it does seem to me that the the ethical complaints all kind of break down a little bit to your point. They say, well, you worked too closely with law enforcement. Would you prefer that we didn't work with law enforcement? Okay. You know what? So, so we're never going to evolve. Right. In order to come story. So you have us not do this. That's it. And we had that discussion internally. I mean, there were producers at NBC with whom I worked on other stories who said you should cool it on the predator stuff. I think enough is enough. I said, why is it enough is enough? Why? Because you don't like it. Because it's not you're not involved in it. Well, I don't I wouldn't want to be involved in that. Well, why? It's different. It's new. It scares you. You got to go talk to these guys. Look, this was a taboo subject. Yeah. Then nobody wanted to talk about it. A few people wanted to talk about it. Did they give an answer as to why they wanted you to cool it? Just because it was it was it was different. They saw it as unseemly. Yeah. Because it was popular. I mean, I wonder if too many people want to talk about it. I know. I'm not saying I agreed with it. Yeah. I'm just saying that those conversations would be hand from time to time. And in fact, you know, there was a period of time where we didn't do it. I mean, NBC you know, we did it for about four years on date line for to catch a predator. They continued for years after that to recot them and expand them. Yeah. And update them for MSNBC. Before was MSDNC. Yeah. MSLSD. Yeah. MSLSD. And then, you know, I picked it up independently and for a little bit in the middle. And then four years ago, we started up again a true boom. Yeah. There's also the social context for some of the people who raise objections to it. There is a social context stuff for many decades now. We have seen a consistent trend of liberalizing weird sex stuff and trying to normalize aberrant sexual behaviors up to and including the sexualization of children at the highest levels of government at, you know, when it comes to the trans kids issue, for instance, in the popular culture, all sorts of, then that movie moon, was it moonlight or whatever about like having sex with a teenager. It wasn't, and it won the Oscar a few years ago. I mean, there's really, it's consistent. And so, I do wonder if some of the objection was that because this was showing the dark side of the sexual revolution and some of the technological developments. And then, I guess I have to ask you about your opinion of the underage sex stuff in the news for the last 5-10 years that the Epstein stuff, the various theories about pedophile rings and all, does that, I actually haven't seen you talk that much about it. Well, we've had a number of the Epstein survivors on my have a see with Christiansen podcast and I've done some reporting on it. I mean, the reality of the Epstein case is it took, you know, Julie Kay Brown and folks of the Miami Herald to stay on it as a local news story, which speaks to the importance of local news. And these people were threatened by Epstein and his people. They were followed. They were, in some cases, there was legal action and they stayed with it. And the US attorney in the Southern District of New York, when he was indicted in 2019, said as much that, you know, without the Miami Herald reporting, this case doesn't happen. I mean, I remember looking at the Epstein case in about 2015, 2016 and thinking, okay, if all this is going on and obviously he had that sweetheart deal where he pleaded in Florida and his lawyers and he tried to frame this as yet as bad as illegal, but it wasn't child sexual abuse. It was, you know, hiring girls who were 16, 17, 17. It was unseemly, but it wasn't illegal. It was prostitution, but it wasn't always prostitution. You know, they came up with a thinly veiled distinction to protect themselves. You know, engineered by high power lawyers and bought off on by prosecutors inappropriately in my opinion. But the police chief down there pushed and pushed and pushed. The survivors finally were emboldened enough to push and push and push and the truth came out, which was Epstein rang a pedophile ring and was grooming women, exploiting women from a very young age until there were adults and there were hundreds of them and he was a bad guy and he involved a lot of other powerful people, some of whom we have not identified yet or don't know about yet, but he, you talk about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This guy is, you know, not only guilty,
He was homemade sin, but he's the devil incarnate. And I remember in 1516 trying to figure out, okay, well, how do I, if we could do a sting with him, you know, if we could get into that world or into the mansion on the Upper East Side, or, you know, how do we do this? And it was so well protected by layers of security that, you know, I kind of just got busy with other stories. Yeah. And it doesn't mean it's not a big story. It's a huge story. And again, I've given a voice to a lot of the survivors. And we'll always in that case. And I don't think we've gotten all the information and evidence that we need to get. But it was the Miami-Herald and local news, who stayed on that and made that case. Right. Yeah. My take on it to your point on the security was always, for a long time, all these audiences, all these podcasts that say, we're on the brink of the dirty, the biggest secret with Epstein and we're going to break up in the old story. And I said, I don't buy that for a second. This story really took place in the mid-2000s and before. If you think that there is some evidence that has survived for 20 years, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. If there was evidence that ain't there now. And so my take on it was either Epstein is who they say he is, which is this corrupt finance story. Which I believe. Yeah. I mean, look at the money he's thrown around. I mean, you know, interlock and music camp in Northern Michigan, you think that your child would be safe there. But apparently he was giving money and kind of corrupt kids and teachers and have inappropriate influence there. But, you know, either he's that guy or he's something else. You know, he's some James Bond super spy, triple age and whatever. In either of those cases, I suspect we know everything we're ever going to know about Jeffrey Epstein, you know, I just either way, I don't think there's any new evidence that's going to emerge. And it's, look, that's a, it's a big story, it's a big sensational story, it grabs a lot of headlines. But then I think, well, hold on. It was cracked by local journalists. And I think if the, if the story is the sexual exploitation of children, there are, there are a lot of guys who aren't Jeffrey Epstein, who aren't powerful, who aren't rich, whatever. And those guys are shown up to your setup house. And some are rich and powerful, who are shown up. Right, right, right. That, so what comes next? Obviously, this movie is coming out. There was the documentary last year. You've got True Blue. You've got, you know, this development, this evolution of the predator project. What now, you know, or you've already gotten Robert Pattinson to play. Yeah. Well, we, I cooperated in a documentary that was in the words before we even knew about the movie called "I'm Chris Hanson," so that's coming out very soon, which is, which is more of a personal profile of me. We just signed a book deal with Simon and Schuster for Chris Hanson thriller series with a fictional character. See, it's, I find it somewhat ironic that when I write a thriller series, I have a fictional character, but when Hollywood does it, they exploit my name for a fictional movie. It's just, you know, life-imitating Aaron, I suppose, but, but so I'm excited about that. So that's underway, and, you know, we've got a bunch of new documentaries underway at True Blue. We just finished one on "Sexstortion," and, you know, I sat across four sets of parents who lost kids to suicide, good kids, good students, good athletes, good parents, and they got caught up in these extortion plots, you know, victims of criminals sometimes a half-world away in Nigeria who poses young girls, attractive girls, they get the boys to send, you know, explicit photos or racie photos, they use it against them. And these kids at 15, 16 years old, sometimes 17, can't see their way out of it and think that they're going to be embarrassed, and their online presence is going to be corrupted. And they sadly commit suicide. And this has become somewhat of an epidemic in our country, and so my message to parents is that, you know, they should obviously watch the documentary, but you need to create an off ramp for children. You almost have to approach this as if kids will be the target of exploitation. Yeah. And so when it happens, not if it happens, but when it happens, you got to come talk to me as your parent, and together we'll stop it, prevent it, and figure out a healthy path forward, because if these kids had just stayed alive for 20 more minutes, 30 more minutes, a half a day, they'd be, they wouldn't have committed suicide. Right, right. There's a state lawmaker, Brendan Guffy in South Carolina, happened to his son, and he's literally going to bed and the son passes him, unbeknownst to him, he's got his dad's pistol and goes in the bathroom and kills himself because of this non-event, because what grandma's going to see her junk? Grandma saw you being born and changed your diaper, right? But in the moment, it's the biggest crisis, you've let your parents down, you've let your coaches down, you've let your girlfriend down, you've let your grandma down, they're going to put it on Facebook, and these con artists are experts doing this. But now, you know, and you just see in the documentary, this extortion documentary, you know, the FBI actually would overmade a arrest in Nigeria, brought culprits back and there's servant time in federal prison here in the United States in the Michigan case. This is one of the most horrifying crimes, and it doesn't get a lot to play. This one, especially father of four kids, is one of the most horrifying crimes I can imagine, which is, you know, you kid. And you don't see it coming. Again, the no bad kids profiled in this documentary, track stars, athletes, great students, there should all be, you know, getting ready to graduate from college about now. And we spent a couple of years putting this together, and people let us into their lives. And, you know, obviously true blues is a streamer to which you can subscribe. We have a YouTube channel where we put free content up, but we made this extortion documentary free on the platform to everybody at watchtrueblue.com to get it, because it's that important for people to see. Especially when you think about these kids, but even for the purps and the predator takedowns, is the answer just take away everybody's phone? Is it that simple? Unplug when we have wife. I always get anxious when parents say that, because the kid's going to find a way to get on it, right? It's like she's got boys, and they're interested in shooting a pellet gun or a BB gun or a toy gun. They're going to chew their cheese sandwich in the shape of a gun. Right. Right. So, again, I'm not promoting guns. I'm not promoting violence or knives or, I mean, we walked around our neighborhood in Michigan with BB guns and bows and arrows. I was saying that was particularly good. We also played jarts, which was dangerous, long darts, but we all survived. But the point is that kids will find a way to do what they want to do. We're going to get on the internet at Starbucks, on a friend's phone, you know, they're going to do it. So, given that, what do you do? You've got to give them the off ramp. I mean, I preach this over and over again. When my kids are coming up, it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, you know. So, you've got to have the discussion, you've got to tell them, look, you know, it's going to happen. I hope it doesn't, but it could. And it probably will. So let's talk about it. No, I mean, you think, especially with these young people, there was this story in the news, what, just a couple of weeks ago, the Cornell 7, and you hear, you know, this is a, we don't go blue on this show too often, but to describe this story, I had to invent new euphemisms because you had this girl show up to a frat house. She is going to hook up with this guy. The guy asks if he can bring another guy in, which is, I don't know a lot of frat guys who, in my day, would have wanted to do that. Then there are these other guys, then the girl seems to be fine with it. Then she gets upset because she wasn't invited to a party the next week. Then she later alleges she was raped. But then text messages come out where she says it was all consensual. And it's, the whole thing is, there are even more lower details about different arrangements and configurations. And anyway, the whole thing is so depraved where you start to ask yourself, are the kids just, clearly they just saw this on the internet? I wonder, I wonder if kids aren't getting desensitized and becoming over-sexualized. In other words, what passed for exciting in 1980 is now seen as so old-fashioned and boring that they had to ratchet this up. Yeah, you have a faucet poster in your bedroom, I mean, and I had one. And that was great. It was glorious. All the poor I needed, it wasn't even pornographic. In the Victorian era, I was born in 1959, right? So, greasy pictures to us meant that you had to sneak down the street to Bobby West's garage where his dad kept playboys, which weren't even pornography by today's standard, in a box, and you had to secretly carry them to the woods to look at them and then somehow get them back to the box. But today, I just think that the kids have gotten, young people have gotten desensitized, and so now they're looking for excitement at different levels. I mean, storing ketamine off of somebody's private parts, I mean, when did that become a thing? Yeah. And maybe I'm just disconnected from it.
But I was in a fraternity and my son was in a fraternity, two of them. And none of that was going on. No. No, the hardest drug I've ever been attracted to as a cigar and it did not involve anybody of appendages. But, you know, what if they are smoking weed, all right, you know, you can debate the merits of that. Academy? No, Academy. I wonder when did that become a thing? I mean, I know it is in Hollywood, you know, the poor, you know, Matthew Perry in that whole situation. But I mean, what is being allowed in this fraternity house and again, take the legal aspect out of it, which can be debated. But where's the morality in this? I mean, who thought if the allegations are true, who thought it was okay to have seven guys come in and out of that room? And why is that exciting? Why does anybody even think that that's acceptable? And why do we even need a monitor at a party to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen? I mean, why is it happening in the first place? It's because they're all bored and secluded in, in upstate New York, you know, remember Cornell and also, we're a side problem, you know, and what does it say about that school? What does it say about school age kids today? But that's what I mean. It's the whole thing is disturbing and then you've got, for instance, and I'm having somebody come on my podcast and talk about it later this week, the lawyer, the plaintiff's lawyer for the survivor victim, in this case, files a complaint that names one of the perpetrators, but puts the address of another person who has the same name of the perpetrator who's actually a sergeant in the Marines, and this guy and his family are getting hate and threats of violence, and the guy is not quick to amend the complaint to put the right person in there. So what is it? You know, if you're going to accuse somebody of this and I will always take the side of the victim, the survivor, that's how I do as long as it really is as long as victim. But you got to be really careful when you level these complaints and you got to be right and double check things, so for this guy to go out and have the wrong information in the complaint that triggers hate to a guy who did nothing wrong and is serving our country in the Marines, I mean, there's something wrong with that. It's also, I kind of, I think of the frat guys, forget about the legality or what happened or the girl changing her story. I think about how bizarre it is in much the same way as I think about the perpetrators that you're talking to a time, which is in my single days, in my wayward youth, if a girl came up to me at a party and said, "Hey, I want to hang out with you at this party." It wouldn't be the first thought on my mind, or the second or third or 500th, probably the 10 billionth thought on my mind would be inviting another family. Yeah, let's get that guy over here too. So what even makes you think of that? And let's be point about the desensitization that these kids. No, this is. Have going on? If one of the knocks on the whole Predator series, which is an undercurrent of the movie, but has been recurrent for decades now, is, "Well, you know, this is sensationalist, this isn't hard journalism, this isn't a big story." I think, first of all, it's pretty hard journalism when you've got the props walking in. But two, it seems to me that the desensitization and the debauchery, particularly when it comes to sexual culture, is one of the driving issues in the country for decades. I mean, it was decisive, especially when you look at the trans issue, that was decisive in 2024. It was one of the top issues because it showed up in the polls in common sense. So it was. It's why the Republican candidates campaigned on it all over the country. It's. We've redefined marriages as a result. We've had major, major. Bill Clinton tried to pass two laws against online porn with bipartisan support. The courts shut them down on it. In other words, the subject matter that you have taken on for a lot of your time over the last 20 years seems to be a lot more important than, I don't know, insider trading or something. Well, I agree. And that's why we continue to do it. You know? I mean, there comes a point in a career where you can say, "Okay, I already did it. Set it aside. We'll do something else." But what's your responsibility? Obviously, you have the infrastructure to do it, you have the relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country and the world to do it. Shouldn't you, me, continue to do this to ensure that the discussion, the dialogue, the awareness continues to follow the crime as it evolves as it has over the years, to expand the franchise, to cover areas where you haven't worked before, which is what we're doing. Yeah, there's an entertainment portion of this, no question. There's a darkly humorous part of this, which we've talked about, I understand it. There is the collision of right versus wrong, evil versus good. That's a part of it. Maybe traditionally, that has not been an integral part of journalism. But go back several years. Optance and Claire went into the meatpacking business, exposed what was going on there. Now, he was very liberal, socialist. But Teddy Roosevelt, who was president, looked past that to see that he had exposed something that was very important and implemented, measures into law to make the system safer and better. I remember being 18 years old, 17, 18 years old, with my uncle in Chicago at a saloon where reporters and pressmen from the Chicago sometimes would go. And around 77, 78, they did a series called the Mirage Tavern. And the newspaper reporters, with permission from the newspaper, opened a tavern. And they had cameras, such as they existed in those days, hidden cameras, recording all the inspectors, all the people coming in to hit them up for bribes. And the Chicago sometimes did like a 20-part investigative series blown the lid off the corruption of the city of Chicago. And it was the Mirage Tavern. And I was fascinated by this story. And my uncle, Charlie, was a character, he operated the cranes that built Sears Tower and John Hancock building. I mean, it was just a true Chicago character. I loved him. I loved him did that. And he'd take me to the saloon, and I listened to these guys talk about this. And to go back and read those stories today, it's a great reminder that we didn't invent investigative journalism, and it's really not that radical to use hidden cameras. Well, that's my question. Did you change journalism? Did you innovate? I don't know if I changed journalism. I think there's a lot of good journalism going on out there using hidden cameras. And sometimes it's citizen journalism. I think about my fellow James O'Keefe, Nick Shirley, they've got a lot of attention for these. They're not doing. Well, weirdly, it does sometimes involve sex stuff because James O'Keefe lures these guys in. I don't know any dates. Yeah, yeah. But they're usually on other issues and political issues. But they, you know, the whole gig is undercover camera investigations. I think as long as your pain-stakingly transparent as we have been from the very beginning, continuing through the investigations we do today, I think it's fair game. And I think it's our responsibility to take people inside the story, inside the commission of the crime, to hear things I wouldn't normally hear, to experience things I wouldn't experience, to take them along on this journey of discovery. I mean, that's what separates me from a lot of other people in this business. And I'm proud of that at the end of the day and I'll put my body of work up against anybody else's predator and everything else. If the movie is waiting for Chris Hansen to make an apology, big May at Colpa. Not happening. I sleep very well at night. I sleep very well. If I'm up, you know, and unable to sleep, it's because I'm working through a script or an idea or a passage in the book, or I had one extra cup of espresso that day, but it's not because of any regret for anything I've done professionally ever in my entire career. Chris Hansen. We didn't even have the pizza. I know. I regret that. I think we'd let it go cold. That's bad. Put in the microwave. We'll get a bit of pizza too. And identical to the pizza in the predator segment we discussed. You know, I initially thought. Chris, you did a good job with that. I said, this would be really funny to have Chris here and then I'm saying. But then I realized, wait a second. If I'm sitting across from Chris Hansen, there's a pizza. You're in the bad chair. I'm in the bad chair. I don't need to. All right. Before it gets any worse, Chris, thank you for being here. Michael, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Wonderful to be with all. 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