Danny Jones Podcast - #388 - Cartel Insider Exposes ‘Sasquatch’ Triple Murder You Won’t Believe | David Holthouse
Aired: 2026-04-17
Duration: 02:31:25


=== Operation Odessa Documentary (15:11) ===

[00:00:07]  All right, David.
[00:00:08]  Thanks for coming, man.
[00:00:09]  Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:00:10]  Incredibly huge fan of your work, bro.
[00:00:13]  I just watched the most recent one I watched was the Sasquatch movie, which is incredible.
[00:00:18]  We'll talk about it.
[00:00:19]  Cool.
[00:00:20]  But just right before we started, we were talking about the Operation Odessa movie, which is one of the most insane documentaries ever.
[00:00:27]  I was surprised because when I was doing some background research on you and I saw that, I was like, no shit.
[00:00:34]  I'm like, that was one of my top.
[00:00:36]  Top 10 movies I've probably ever seen.
[00:00:39]  So, why don't you explain that one real quick for people?
[00:00:42]  How did you get introduced to that one?
[00:00:44]  Yeah, so Operation Odessa was directed by a really good friend of mine, a longtime colleague, Tiller Russell.
[00:00:51]  And he'd been working on that story for about a year, trying to get access to this Russian gangster named Ludwig Feinberg, aka Tarzan, because Tiller and I had worked on a show together that actually, I think, never actually made it.
[00:01:06]  To air that was on about undercover agents.
[00:01:10]  Okay.
[00:01:11]  And there was this one undercover agent that we interviewed that was like the DEA's top Russian mob guy.
[00:01:17]  And off camera, Tiller asked him, okay, like, what's the craziest case that you ever worked?
[00:01:21]  And this guy was like, bar none, the first case I ever worked.
[00:01:25]  And he told us the story of Operation Odessa, which was that this Russian mobster, Tarzan, got connected with a Colombian trafficker named Juan Almeida and a Cuban spy.
[00:01:37]  Known by Tony Ester.
[00:01:38]  And this is right after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[00:01:41]  And Tarzan had connections in the former Soviet Union to get like surplus military hardware.
[00:01:46]  Because in like, you know, in Russia, right after the fall, like no one was mining the store.
[00:01:51]  And so like you could get motorcycles, military motorcycles, AK 47s, RPGs, whatever, right?
[00:01:58]  All these like military generals and officers on down the line weren't getting paychecks.
[00:02:03]  Okay.
[00:02:04]  And so they started this trio.
[00:02:06]  They connected at this strip club that Tarzan ran in Miami.
[00:02:12]  Called Porky's because he was a big fan of the movie.
[00:02:14]  Okay.
[00:02:15]  So he named his strip club Porky's.
[00:02:17]  And they started off moving like motorcycles to the, to a cartel in Colombia.
[00:02:24]  Okay.
[00:02:24]  To the Cali cartel.
[00:02:25]  Yeah.
[00:02:26]  And from there it went to the cartel, asked them if they could get like a heavy military transport helicopter, which they could use to like move like, you know, tons of coke with by hooking it up on a, you know, a cable hook.
[00:02:39]  Yeah.
[00:02:40]  And they brokered that deal successfully and like transported this massive, Soviet military helicopter to Colombia using a transport plane.
[00:02:50]  Holy shit.
[00:02:52]  And so after they pulled that off, the cartel was like, Can you get us a submarine?
[00:02:58]  Okay.
[00:02:58]  And so that's the story of Operation Odessa.
[00:03:01]  That's the story of the film.
[00:03:04]  And wasn't there a famous scene in there or one of the parts I remember where they're sitting in a sauna and the dude's like, You want a nuke?
[00:03:11]  Yeah.
[00:03:12]  So the three, like Tony Yester is like straight out of Scarface.
[00:03:17]  He was a Cuban intelligence agent.
[00:03:19]  That Castro sent over on the Mariel boat lift with the intention of getting into the cocaine trade to send drug proceeds back to the Castro regime in Cuba.
[00:03:29]  And so Tony Esther was a trained fighter pilot and trained intelligence agent that came over on the boat lift with the intention of getting involved in drug trafficking, which he did.
[00:03:40]  But after a couple of years of sending money back as he was ordered to, he was like, you know, I can be a spy and get my own thing going.
[00:03:47]  So he kept funneling money.
[00:03:49]  Back to Castro, but he also had his side business going.
[00:03:56]  And the scene you're referencing was he went to Russia with Tarzan while they were trying to broker the submarine deal.
[00:04:04]  And all the military guys, the Soviet military guys, wanted them to go in a sauna because a lot of business is done there.
[00:04:12]  It's kind of a thing in Russia.
[00:04:15]  We all get naked, sweaty, and do business.
[00:04:18]  Exactly.
[00:04:19]  There's a thing when you're naked, you see one another as you really are.
[00:04:24]  And Tiller and I, jumping around, Tiller and I, when we were making Operation Odessa, We went to like a Russian mafia sauna in Moscow with Tarzan.
[00:04:33]  It was like part of like, you know, building rapport with him.
[00:04:36]  Like we had to do the thing with like getting beat with the, you know, the evergreen branches and the whole, you know, fucking thing and drinking beer and eating shrimp.
[00:04:43]  I still have the hat from that sauna place, you know, all these like mob guys.
[00:04:48]  So anyway, but Tony, you know, Tony's Cuban and he's like, you know, as he told the story, he's like, Tarzan, I'm from Cuba, man.
[00:04:54]  I don't, I don't do this get naked with other guys thing, you know?
[00:04:58]  And Tarzan, but Tarzan was in the sauna with, The with the Soviet, but former Soviet military officers, and he came out at one point and he's like, Tony, they're saying they can sell us a nuclear weapon.
[00:05:08]  Should we buy a nuclear weapon?
[00:05:10]  Tony's like, Fuck no, man, no, we're here to buy a submarine.
[00:05:13]  Like, stop with the nuclear weapon talk, right?
[00:05:16]  But oh my God, yeah, but that just shows you how crazy shit was, you know, in the Soviet Union after the collapse.
[00:05:22]  It was just like, anything goes.
[00:05:23]  They were just trying to sell anything and everything that was left behind, yeah, dude.
[00:05:29]  So, what year was that?
[00:05:30]  When they were making.
[00:05:31]  No, when you were filming, when you were filming?
[00:05:33]  Oh, I would say 2014.
[00:05:36]  2014.
[00:05:37]  Yeah.
[00:05:39]  How much time did you guys spend in Moscow?
[00:05:42]  Just about a week.
[00:05:43]  Yeah.
[00:05:44]  What was it like?
[00:05:45]  Man, it was sketchy.
[00:05:46]  And we were warned by that DEA agent before we went to Moscow.
[00:05:51]  He was like, look, you guys should assume from day one when you land that you're under surveillance, that your hotel rooms are bugged, that you're being watched constantly.
[00:06:01]  Partly just because you're an American documentary crew, but also because of who you're there to talk to.
[00:06:06]  Assume that they know what you're doing.
[00:06:09]  And so we were really cautious the first few days we were there, but we were staying at the Four Seasons.
[00:06:15]  It just opened right off Red Square, like a five star hotel.
[00:06:20]  Was it nice?
[00:06:21]  It was fucking awesome.
[00:06:23]  It was like heated floors.
[00:06:25]  I mean, it was super luxe.
[00:06:29]  Compared to DC, how would you rate it?
[00:06:34]  And well above.
[00:06:39]  And so we were, you know, we'd interviewed Tarzan for a couple days, a couple days of all day interviews with him.
[00:06:45]  And we thought we were being careful with the footage.
[00:06:48]  We thought we were sending a copy of each day's footage via FedEx back to LA.
[00:06:53]  That was one copy.
[00:06:54]  The second copy we were leaving in the hotel safe.
[00:06:57]  And the third copy was with our line producer.
[00:07:00]  Okay.
[00:07:01]  So we thought we had three copies of the footage and one was leaving the country.
[00:07:04]  And there were these Chechen secret police.
[00:07:08]  You know, guards are not so secret because they're, you know, they're pretty easy to spot and they're all over the tourist area.
[00:07:14]  Chechen secret police.
[00:07:15]  Yeah, they got beards.
[00:07:16]  They got beards.
[00:07:17]  They wear like kind of ill fitting off the rack suits.
[00:07:20]  They're all like super ripped.
[00:07:22]  You know, they're undercover.
[00:07:23]  They're not in uniform, but like you know who they are.
[00:07:26]  Is there any reason they're Chechen?
[00:07:29]  Putin likes Chechens.
[00:07:32]  Okay.
[00:07:32]  All right.
[00:07:33]  They're just, it's just a thing.
[00:07:34]  Okay.
[00:07:35]  All right.
[00:07:36]  They're like a branch of the SFB, the former KGB.
[00:07:39]  That are there to surveil Westerners that are staying in these hotels.
[00:07:44]  Okay, I mean, that's how it was explained to me.
[00:07:47]  And they were always in the lobby.
[00:07:48]  And so we had this kind of saying as long as the Chechens stay in the lobby, we're cool.
[00:07:54]  And but we got careless, and it was like the third day we were there, I think.
[00:07:57]  And we got a tiller got a call from Tony Yester, the Cuban spy, who, like everyone we'd interviewed FBI, FBI, DEA, Department of Justice, whatever they told us there's no way you're going to get this guy to go on camera, we can't find him.
[00:08:11]  He was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list at the time.
[00:08:15]  Nobody claimed to even know where he was in the world.
[00:08:18]  Which guy are you talking about?
[00:08:19]  Tony Yester, Tony Yester, yeah, the guy that wouldn't go in the sauna, okay, the guy that came over on the boat lift, right?
[00:08:24]  And while we were in Moscow.
[00:08:26]  You know, Tiller had been using every contact he could to try and get word to Tony that we wanted to talk to him.
[00:08:32]  And we got a call, Tiller got a call from Tony Esther that said, I hear you're in Russia, you know, interviewing the waiters.
[00:08:39]  Why don't you come to Africa and interview the chef?
[00:08:43]  And we got really excited because we were like, we got a line on this guy.
[00:08:46]  He didn't agree to do an interview, but he agreed to talk to us.
[00:08:48]  He's like, meet me in Johannesburg in 72 hours and I'll talk to you guys.
[00:08:53]  That's what he told Tiller.
[00:08:55]  And so that night, we were like in our hotel room and we fucked up and we were like, In our line producer's hotel room.
[00:09:04]  And we were just talking openly about all this submarines, Cuban spies, DEA, going to Africa, you know, because we got so excited and we were careless.
[00:09:16]  And the next day, when Tiller and I met Tarzan in the hotel and we left the hotel, and the Chechens got up out of the lobby and started to follow us.
[00:09:26]  And they're just following us.
[00:09:27]  And like Tarzan picked up on it right away.
[00:09:29]  Tiller and I saw him.
[00:09:30]  I mean, they weren't being subtle about it.
[00:09:31]  Okay.
[00:09:32]  As he's badass looking, they were making it obvious.
[00:09:35]  They were chasing, they were following you.
[00:09:36]  Yeah.
[00:09:37]  And so we got on the phone with the line producer, and he's like, Guys, we've got, he didn't even know that we've been followed.
[00:09:43]  He's like, Guys, we've got a problem.
[00:09:44]  He's like, That footage that we thought we were sending back to LA every day, it's still here at the hotel.
[00:09:49]  And the hotel is saying that those copies of the footage and the copies we've been leaving the hotel safe are both like under the control of somebody, not us.
[00:09:59]  Like, the hotel can't give them to us.
[00:10:00]  There was a problem with the paperwork, supposedly sending them out.
[00:10:03]  And there's powers that be.
[00:10:05]  That have interest in this footage and they have control.
[00:10:09]  So now the only copy of the footage we have is in control of the state.
[00:10:13]  Yeah, we have one copy and that's that the line producer has.
[00:10:17]  And so we were just like, fuck it.
[00:10:18]  We pulled the plug on the last day of interviews and we basically just went to the airport in Moscow and got the first plane out, which was to London.
[00:10:27]  But we got no issues.
[00:10:29]  No issues.
[00:10:29]  But we were sweating it, dude.
[00:10:31]  It's a bus ride from Moscow.
[00:10:33]  It's a good 30 minute, 40 minute ride.
[00:10:36]  And we were on this bus with this fixer.
[00:10:40]  That we'd hired to kind of smooth things out in Moscow, who we always kind of assumed that she was probably working for the government.
[00:10:46]  And she like popped a bottle of champagne on the way out there that she'd been saving for the end of the shoot.
[00:10:51]  And we all like fucking ducked, man.
[00:10:53]  We were sketched out.
[00:10:55]  We were sketched out.
[00:10:56]  Yeah, no, but we got to the airport and we were really sweating it all the way through security, but we got out with the one copy of the footage.
[00:11:03]  Oh my God.
[00:11:06]  That's fucking insane.
[00:11:08]  So you went from there to London.
[00:11:09]  Yeah.
[00:11:10]  And then did you go meet him in Johannesburg after that?
[00:11:13]  Yeah, we did.
[00:11:14]  Went from London to Joburg again without the guy agreeing to do an interview.
[00:11:19]  And then, you know, Tiller met with him alone a couple times.
[00:11:24]  And I was really sweating that because, you know, Tiller got in a car with this guy and was gone for a few hours and out of touch.
[00:11:31]  And I was like, fuck, I don't know if Tiller's coming back.
[00:11:34]  I was really, really, really scared for him.
[00:11:37]  But he did.
[00:11:38]  And then Tiller and I went out to dinner with him that night.
[00:11:41]  And then Tiller met with him again alone and talked him into doing the interview.
[00:11:45]  And the leverage that Tiller used, which is really smart.
[00:11:48]  Was like, this is your chance to tell your story for your kids.
[00:11:51]  Like, we picked up on that this guy, Tony, really regretted that he was not a part of his kids' lives because he was on the run.
[00:11:58]  Yeah.
[00:11:58]  He was a fugitive.
[00:11:59]  Right.
[00:11:59]  And so Tiller was like, look, this is your chance to tell your story.
[00:12:02]  Your kids will see this.
[00:12:04]  And, you know, that's why he agreed to do it.
[00:12:07]  Dude, it's, I've heard so many stories over the past few years from a lot of people that have been in here that have reported on like the cartel stuff that's been happening in South America and Mexico and everything.
[00:12:19]  And the level of technology that they've been able to get their hands on over the years is just astonishing.
[00:12:26]  Like the, not even just talking about weapons and stuff, but like the types of surveillance and spy, espionage, like equipment and technology that they have, like tracking people's whereabouts at all times and stuff that they're getting from, they somehow get this stuff.
[00:12:45]  They buy this from companies all over the world, from like Israel to Europe, Africa, and they get it somehow.
[00:12:54]  And they have like their own decoupled, like military intelligence.
[00:13:00]  And I wouldn't be surprised if they got their hands on a nuke at one point, you know?
[00:13:05]  I mean, well, they have unlimited funding, practically speaking, and they've got lots of ex intelligence guys on their payroll, whether it's Mossad or, you know, CIA, Green Berets.
[00:13:15]  I mean, they actively seek these guys out and bring them down there, both to train their guys, but also because of the access to just the kind of hardware that you're talking about.
[00:13:23]  Yeah.
[00:13:23]  Famously, I think Noriega was the guy.
[00:13:25]  We had a dude on here recently who did a whole story on Noriega.
[00:13:29]  And he, Was he he wrote this whole story?
[00:13:33]  Made this documentary.
[00:13:34]  It was a documentary, I think it was a documentary, or was it a book?
[00:13:37]  No, he wrote a book about this guy who was an ex Mossad agent who was hired by Noriega and was like Noriega's right hand man during like his whole run.
[00:13:46]  And this dude, this dude was like in his late 80s, maybe early 90s when he was telling him all this stuff.
[00:13:51]  Just crazy stories, man.
[00:13:53]  And yeah, man, it's frightening to think of like all of the military equipment and weapons and shit that those that those.
[00:14:04]  Basically, they're cartels, rogue cartel militias have.
[00:14:07]  And, you know, they don't have, there's no mutually assured destruction when you're talking about cartels.
[00:14:13]  Like, they could put a tactical nuke in the bed of a pickup truck in any country or state and they would never know where it came from.
[00:14:20]  Right.
[00:14:20]  And, you know, Trump talking about going down, you know, sending the 101st Airborne into Mexico or whatever to bang it out with the cartels.
[00:14:28]  Yeah, I'm sure they could take him, but I think it may be more of a fight than he may be anticipating.
[00:14:33]  And, I mean, that shit, I mean, another doc that I worked on Tiller Russell with was called The Last Narp.
[00:14:37]  It was about like the CIA cocaine trafficking and kind of the origins, the origin story of the Mexican drug cartels.
[00:14:45]  And, you know, back in those days, 80s, 90s, I mean, all the drug lords, they wanted to die old and rich.
[00:14:51]  And the guys that are running the game in Mexico right now, they're all younger.
[00:14:55]  Most of them are addicted to coke andor meth.
[00:14:58]  And they just like, it's all about like clicks and views and going out in a blaze of, it's just they're completely different.
[00:15:05]  They're all off TikTok.
[00:15:06]  It's fucking nuts, man.
[00:15:08]  And it's terrifying.
[00:15:10]  It's just like a, it's like a, almost like a nihilistic death cult down there right now.
[00:15:14]  But they have like, you know, heavily, heavily armed.

=== TikTok Addicted Drug Lords (02:41) ===

[00:15:18]  And it's just all about your social media and going out in a blaze of glory.
[00:15:22]  Yeah, dude.
[00:15:23]  I had this, this guy was showing me these TikTok videos of this guy.
[00:15:26]  I think his name was Elmini Leak or something, who was one of the, I think he was one of the security guards for El Chapo's kids.
[00:15:35]  And yeah, he was just like, he had millions of TikTok views posting videos of his shoe collection, his money, his Golden AK 47s that he had driving around in like lifted trucks and Lamborghinis or whatever.
[00:15:48]  These guys are just, yeah, they're super wealthy and they're like, in many cases, teenagers, from what I understand.
[00:15:56]  And they just like, they want to be fucking internet famous or something.
[00:16:00]  Yeah.
[00:16:00]  It's so strange.
[00:16:01]  They're influencers.
[00:16:02]  They're influencers.
[00:16:03]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:04]  Narco influencers.
[00:16:07]  Amanita muscaria is the third most microdosed psychedelic in the United States, with 3 million people reportedly using it.
[00:16:14]  That's more than LSD or DMT.
[00:16:17]  But there is a wave of dangerous gas station fakes out there.
[00:16:20]  And who knows how many people were cheated out of the real deal?
[00:16:23]  Amentara is the complete opposite of those scams, and that's why I only trust Amentara.
[00:16:29]  I never would have even touched Amanita Miscaria if it weren't for Amentara.
[00:16:33]  They are the trusted Amanita supplier in the USA, totally legal, no synthetics, and 55,000 happy customers.
[00:16:40]  Small doses put you in a calm, focused flow state, and medium doses are more like a jolly alcohol alternative, great for sleep, dreams, and some people even call it nature's wine.
[00:16:50]  Lately, I've really enjoyed.
[00:16:51]  Taking the Amanita microdose capsules because they help me get into a creative flow state in the after hours when I'm not working, so I can sort of think outside the box and focus on more of the fun, creative tasks.
[00:17:06]  They're also great for staying in the moment when you're around family, your friends, and just trying to avoid work and worrying about the next day or the previous workday.
[00:17:17]  Imagine being in a stressful environment and not feeling triggered.
[00:17:20]  That's what Amanita can do for you.
[00:17:22]  They are the largest Amanita supplier in the US, totally legal.
[00:17:25]  Ethically sourced and lab tested.
[00:17:27]  They have the largest Amanita selection from oils to capsules to chocolates and the raw caps.
[00:17:33]  It's not just a store or a single product.
[00:17:35]  These guys are helping pave the way for a new legal medicinal psychoactive mushroom in the US, and I'm totally happy to be a part of it.
[00:17:42]  Go to amantara.comslash goslash DJ and use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order.
[00:17:49]  That's spelled A M E N T A R A dot comslash goslash DJ and use the code DJ22 for 22% off your first order.

=== Chihuahua City Terror (02:56) ===

[00:17:59]  So, have you been down there recently looking into this stuff?
[00:18:02]  I was, yeah.
[00:18:04]  My most recent show, it's out on a Canadian streamer called Crave, which they're best known for that gay hockey player show, Heated Rivalry.
[00:18:13]  But they just, about a month ago in February, dropped Narco Mennonites, which is a three part series on a Mennonite drug cartel.
[00:18:21]  So, in the process of reporting that series, I was in Chihuahua, Chihuahua City, which is near where the Mennonite Cartel is based in Mexico, which is a very good part of the Mennonite cartel.
[00:18:37]  Yeah, most people haven't.
[00:18:38]  That's what made it such a great story.
[00:18:40]  I'd never heard of it until I got onto it, you know.
[00:18:44]  But, uh, but you know, I was in where is Chihuahua geographically on the Mexican map?
[00:18:49]  It's up against Texas.
[00:18:51]  Okay, oh, so it's on the border?
[00:18:53]  No, no, it's uh, Chihuahua cities.
[00:18:56]  Oh, I don't want to this up.
[00:18:57]  It's a few hours, a few hours, yeah, the border.
[00:18:59]  Okay, but you know, I was in uh, jumping around geographically and topically, I was in Ukraine like a couple years ago, and um.
[00:19:08]  I was far more scared and worried about my safety in Chihuahua City than I was anywhere in Ukraine.
[00:19:15]  I was there because the people.
[00:19:18]  Oh, okay.
[00:19:18]  That's where it is.
[00:19:19]  Yeah.
[00:19:19]  Oh, it's huge.
[00:19:20]  Yeah.
[00:19:21]  And so, where the Mennonite cartels base is a little town called Kwak Temuk, which is about 45 minutes north of Chihuahua City.
[00:19:30]  Okay.
[00:19:32]  Yeah.
[00:19:33]  But, and part of it was like the people, the people in Chihuahua City, like you could just feel the climate.
[00:19:40]  Of fear.
[00:19:40]  And it's supposedly neutral territory.
[00:19:42]  Like a lot of the drug lords, their kids go to private schools in Chihuahua City.
[00:19:46]  Right.
[00:19:47]  You know, it's supposed to be a place where, like, you know, you're not supposed to take each other out.
[00:19:53]  But you could just sense that things could jump off at any time.
[00:19:56]  And you could literally just, like, see the fear in people's eyes, just like the people on the streets.
[00:20:00]  There's just an atmosphere of fear.
[00:20:06]  Yeah, that's the word fear.
[00:20:09]  And I didn't find that in Kyiv.
[00:20:10]  You know, I didn't find that people were just sort of like commonly terrified like we're in Chihuahua City.
[00:20:17]  What were you doing in Kyiv?
[00:20:21]  I was doing reporting for a project that I can't say a whole hell of a lot about.
[00:20:25]  It involves intelligence agencies and corruption in Ukraine and the U.S. Department of Justice using the power of politically motivated prosecutions of certain alleged organized crime figures in Ukraine.
[00:20:42]  I know I'm being vague, but I kind of have to be because that's still in development.
[00:20:45]  But I was in Kyiv meeting with, you know, Former high ranking Ukrainian officials and politicians, I guess I would say.

=== Gonzo Journalism in Ukraine (02:45) ===

[00:20:56]  And that was another situation where I just assumed I was being surveilled the entire time I was there.
[00:21:01]  Yeah.
[00:21:02]  Yeah.
[00:21:02]  Dude, you're like a fucking cowboy, bro.
[00:21:06]  You're nuts.
[00:21:08]  You're going to all the hottest hornets' nests all around the world, just like immersing yourself into all this stuff.
[00:21:17]  You're one of the original immersionists.
[00:21:20]  There's not many more people like you left, man.
[00:21:22]  Well, you know, and I've, I mean, yeah, I still consider myself to be a gonzo journalist, even though my medium has changed for the most part from, you know, writing to filmmaking.
[00:21:33]  But like that, I first became aware of your work with that deckhands.
[00:21:39]  Really?
[00:21:39]  That was gonzo as fuck, bro.
[00:21:41]  That's gonzo, man.
[00:21:43]  That's my favorite thing I probably ever did.
[00:21:45]  Yeah.
[00:21:45]  I mean, it's hard to define what gonzo journalism is, but like you know it when you see it.
[00:21:51]  And that was fucking gonzo.
[00:21:54]  That's awesome, dude.
[00:21:55]  Yeah, we had so much fun doing that.
[00:21:57]  It was so like not even planned either.
[00:22:00]  Just me and my buddy were just one day bored and we're like, dude, you know, those fucking crazy crackheads we see hanging out in front of 7 Eleven?
[00:22:06]  It's like, we should just go film them, see what they have to say.
[00:22:09]  We're like, fuck it, okay.
[00:22:11]  Yeah.
[00:22:11]  The next thing we know, we're just fucking sucked into the twilight zone with these guys.
[00:22:17]  And it's crazy how, like, it's crazy how you can go into something like that just by like seeing an interesting looking person and going to talk to them and then.
[00:22:26]  Getting sucked into this whole other universe of a story about like a corrupt corporate fucking system that is right in your backyard that connects to everything around like to Washington DC, you know, right?
[00:22:42]  It was so insane.
[00:22:43]  And like those people, dude, those, those like those people that we met and that we like spent time around, the fact that they've been living here in this town right under my nose my whole life and I never even knew about it.
[00:22:57]  Kind of blows my mind more than anything.
[00:22:59]  Yeah, but to do gonzo right, you've got to be gonzo yourself.
[00:23:02]  I mean, meaning that they picked up on something about you to where they trusted you to tell their stories.
[00:23:09]  Yeah.
[00:23:09]  Like the godfather of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, had that saying that, like, when the going gets weird, the weird turns pro.
[00:23:14]  The weird, when the going gets weird, the weird turns pro.
[00:23:16]  And like, you've got to be weird.
[00:23:17]  You've got to be fringe yourself to do gonzo journalism right.
[00:23:21]  And it's like, you know, a lot of the most important work, like, takes place off camera or off the record, like, you know, building relationships with people.
[00:23:31]  But also, they recognize something in you as a gonzo journalist that makes you able to temporarily inhabit their world and get down with them.

=== CIA Operative and Cartel (10:45) ===

[00:23:41]  Yeah.
[00:23:42]  You got to get down and dirty, and you got to live like them, you know?
[00:23:47]  When we were doing that, I was like, you know, it'd be like 1 o'clock p.m., 1 p.m. I'd be sitting on a fucking rat infested island drinking vodka and Mountain Dew with these guys, you know, just like making sure my fucking battery on my camera to get this footage.
[00:24:03]  Yeah, dude.
[00:24:04]  It's just, God, man, that was so much fun.
[00:24:07]  The hard thing about it is, though, it's like, it's not that sustainable to be able to, at least for me, it was like, it was hard for me to find stuff like that, you know?
[00:24:17]  Like that was a, for me, that was like a, Like finding a diamond in a rough, but for me to actually go out and seek out those stories all the time, I feel like I would go crazy.
[00:24:31]  Yeah.
[00:24:32]  It could be hard on the soul, too.
[00:24:34]  You know, it's a lot of darkness.
[00:24:36]  A lot of darkness, bro.
[00:24:38]  Yeah.
[00:24:39]  The last NARC, what year was that that you guys did that?
[00:24:44]  Well, we were making it like 2018 to early 2020.
[00:24:49]  Okay.
[00:24:49]  And then it came out, I think, fall of 2020.
[00:24:53]  And that's essentially the story of Kiki Camarena.
[00:24:55]  Right.
[00:24:56]  Yeah.
[00:24:56]  But it's really, yes, it's the story of Kiki Camarena, who was a DE agent who was kidnapped and tortured to death in Mexico in 1985.
[00:25:06]  And they based a whole season of that Netflix series on it, right?
[00:25:10]  Yeah.
[00:25:11]  They did.
[00:25:11]  The Narcos.
[00:25:12]  Was it called Narcos?
[00:25:12]  Yep.
[00:25:13]  Yep.
[00:25:13]  They did.
[00:25:15]  But in my opinion, they pulled some punches on the CIA of it all.
[00:25:20]  You know, I'm convinced that Kiki Camarena was killed because he stumbled across.
[00:25:26]  The CIA's cocaine trafficking operation, where they were moving coke from Colombia to Mexico, the trampoline, you know, and then into the US, and then using that money to illegally fund the Contras in Central America.
[00:25:40]  Right.
[00:25:41]  I don't think Kiki Camarena knew what he'd stumbled across, you know.
[00:25:46]  I mean, but it's clear, like, we were able to, you know, get a hold of the actual transcripts of, because when Kiki was being tortured, it was being recorded.
[00:25:54]  And we were able to get a hold of what I'm convinced are the legitimate transcripts.
[00:25:59]  Of those torture and interrogation sessions.
[00:26:01]  And they were asking him questions that he clearly didn't have the answers to.
[00:26:05]  Like he couldn't give them the information that they wanted because he didn't know it.
[00:26:10]  And I think he had just been really kind of laser focused on Rafael Carl Quintero.
[00:26:17]  And I think Kiki had been surveilling an airfield and had seen, you know, planes that were CIA operative planes.
[00:26:28]  And he thought it was cartels.
[00:26:30]  Yeah.
[00:26:30]  Yeah.
[00:26:32]  Yeah, I don't think that he knew why he was being tortured to death.
[00:26:36]  He couldn't give them the information that they wanted.
[00:26:38]  But it's clear from the questions they were asking that that's what they were getting at.
[00:26:42]  Do you think you know who killed him?
[00:26:44]  Well, I mean, I think he was.
[00:26:47]  I think it's an oversimplification to say that the CIA killed Kiki Camarena.
[00:26:51]  I mean, I think it's a mistake to think of the CIA as this sort of like.
[00:26:55]  Monolith?
[00:26:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:57]  But I think a CIA operative was involved, let's put it that way.
[00:27:02]  You know, specifically a guy by the name of Felix Rodriguez, who, now I don't think Felix Rodriguez actually tortured Kiki Camarena or actually murdered him.
[00:27:11]  I think it was just, you know, thugs, cartel thugs that did the actual torture and murder.
[00:27:16]  But Felix Rodriguez is one of those guys that, I mean, you think he was interrogating him, maybe?
[00:27:20]  Yeah.
[00:27:21]  I think he was directing it.
[00:27:22]  And I think things got out of hand.
[00:27:24]  I mean, Carl Quintero fucking hated Kiki Camarena because Camarena had taken out Carl Quintero's, like, biggest marijuana plantation, you know?
[00:27:33]  I don't think that they plan to murder him.
[00:27:35]  I think they plan to interrogate him.
[00:27:36]  And so I want to be careful here.
[00:27:37]  I don't think that Kiki Camarena was murdered on orders from Felix Rodriguez, but I think Felix Rodriguez was involved in the abduction and interrogation of Kiki Camarena.
[00:27:47]  And then, you know, he was being held captive, you know, at a house that was controlled by the Guadalajara cartel.
[00:27:53]  And I think that things just got out of hand and they took things too far with the torture.
[00:27:58]  And, you know.
[00:27:59]  Did you guys ever try to get a hold of Felix?
[00:28:01]  Oh, yeah.
[00:28:02]  Yeah.
[00:28:02]  He wouldn't do an interview.
[00:28:03]  Really?
[00:28:04]  Yeah.
[00:28:05]  We interviewed him.
[00:28:06]  Did you?
[00:28:06]  Yeah.
[00:28:07]  Oh, shit.
[00:28:08]  I asked him about Kiki.
[00:28:09]  What'd he say?
[00:28:12]  He kind of threw his hands up and, like, no, no, no, no.
[00:28:15]  Oh, those fucking morons.
[00:28:17]  No, no, no.
[00:28:19]  That's the wrong guy.
[00:28:21]  I was in Miami.
[00:28:22]  I was in Miami that day.
[00:28:25]  Well, I'll tell you this.
[00:28:26]  I mean, we did interview on the record three different cartel, you could call them Sicarios, enforcers, guys that were around, guys that did everything from carrying out hits to fetching cigarettes and booze for.
[00:28:40]  You know, hooker parties, right?
[00:28:42]  But guys that were around, and the guys that were around, you know, that mansion while Kiku's being held captive, and their accounts were entirely consistent that Felix Rodriguez was, you know, in and out of that mansion.
[00:28:56]  See if you can find the clip, Steve, from the interview where I asked him about it.
[00:28:59]  It'll be interesting to see.
[00:29:01]  So, all the guys, who were the guys that you said that had consistent stories?
[00:29:07]  They were, you know, they worked for, they each kind of, they were all former police officers.
[00:29:12]  That had become, I mean, they may have still carried badges, they did still carry badges, but they'd gone to work for the cartel.
[00:29:20]  Yeah.
[00:29:21]  And they're all on the record in The Last Snark telling their stories.
[00:29:25]  I guess the idea is, or the story goes, he had a fake name or a pseudonym back in that time.
[00:29:33]  Yeah.
[00:29:33]  And it wasn't Felix, they were calling him something else.
[00:29:35]  Yeah.
[00:29:36]  Yeah.
[00:29:36]  But whatever that name was, he said that he didn't have that name yet.
[00:29:43]  I forget what the name was.
[00:29:44]  Do you remember?
[00:29:44]  I can't.
[00:29:46]  I can't.
[00:29:46]  I know it's in the show, but I can't.
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:49]  Yeah.
[00:29:49]  Anyways, he said, A, he goes, I have an alibi that I was in Miami that day.
[00:29:53]  And B, he goes, I didn't get that pseudonym yet.
[00:29:59]  I was a little nervous when I asked him.
[00:30:02]  Right.
[00:30:02]  Of course.
[00:30:02]  Of course he's going to say no.
[00:30:04]  But it was interesting when I was in there, when I went to go meet him in Miami, he wouldn't come here.
[00:30:07]  We had to go to Miami to interview him.
[00:30:10]  Like, there were all these other Cuban dudes around there, all these like Bay of Pigs dudes.
[00:30:16]  Um, in this building he owned this museum, I guess this like um, this Cuban American anti-communist museum, and um, there was like posters and and books on the wall of like pictures of Kennedy with like crosshairs on his forehead and and they all hated Kennedy man.
[00:30:38]  That was crazy, that was crazy to see.
[00:30:40]  Look, one guy pulled me aside.
[00:30:41]  He's like, look at my new book and he's showing me like the picture, like the cover is literally Kennedy with a bullseye in his forehead.
[00:30:47]  Yeah well uh, is this the Clip?
[00:30:50]  Yeah, play it.
[00:30:51]  Let's see what he actually says.
[00:30:53]  Documentary out there about the DEA agent in Latin America or in Mexico.
[00:30:59]  And there's people that in that documentary they accuse you of being tied to the murder of the DEA agent.
[00:31:06]  You're familiar with that?
[00:31:07]  Kiki Camarena.
[00:31:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:08]  We've been aware of that.
[00:31:09]  Yeah.
[00:31:11]  What is your response to those people?
[00:31:13]  No, no.
[00:31:15]  Absolutely lie.
[00:31:16]  First of all, I can prove where I was during that day.
[00:31:20]  And especially now.
[00:31:22]  I have, since I knew that thing was happening, I was taking note of the thing that I do every day.
[00:31:28]  Okay?
[00:31:29]  And now more.
[00:31:30]  In 1993, I started writing everything in detail, what I do every day.
[00:31:35]  So, you tell me that I did something in 1995, September 4, 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
[00:31:44]  I can tell you exactly where I was, who I met, what I did, what I did, everything.
[00:31:49]  When Kiki Camarera, when they claimed the day I was supposed to be killing Kiki Camarera, I have a phone call with the White House.
[00:31:56]  That's when they called me that day to tell me that General Gorman wanted to talk to me, and they gave me a phone number to call General Gorman in Panama.
[00:32:02]  I don't know who he's talking about.
[00:32:03]  That day I had a meeting with Perry Rifkin, the director of immigration here in Miami, with Pedro Reboredo.
[00:32:09]  The mayor of the city of West Miami.
[00:32:11]  We had three Nicaraguan Contra fighters who have been very badly wounded.
[00:32:17]  One called El Tigrito.
[00:32:18]  He had a bullet through his face here.
[00:32:21]  All this thing was hanging down.
[00:32:22]  He destroyed his mandibula and half of his thumb, everything.
[00:32:27]  And the other two were paralyzed.
[00:32:29]  And we were able to get through a friend of mine, the hospital of Recarey in Cuba, which is now, I guess, he owes a lot of trouble.
[00:32:38]  Anyways, he goes on a long tail.
[00:32:39]  Well, I mean, look, first of all, he's talking about one day.
[00:32:43]  Right.
[00:32:44]  And I don't think any of the, you know, cartel sources that we interviewed necessarily put Felix Rodriguez there on the day that Kiki was actually killed.
[00:32:54]  They basically just finished him off.
[00:32:56]  This went on over several days.
[00:32:58]  Right.
[00:32:58]  Okay.
[00:32:58]  And they said that he was in and out.
[00:33:00]  He was tortured for several days.
[00:33:01]  You know, I will say this about Felix Rodriguez.
[00:33:03]  First of all, good on you for getting that interview.
[00:33:05]  That's fucking straight shit.
[00:33:07]  Figured he's not got much time left.
[00:33:09]  Right.
[00:33:09]  Right.
[00:33:10]  God, I love to tell that guy's story, you know.
[00:33:12]  But when we were.
[00:33:14]  You know, when we were trying to get an interview with Felix Rodriguez, like I exchanged several letters with him.
[00:33:22]  And, you know, he wrote me, like, he obviously looked into who I was and looked into my background.
[00:33:29]  And, you know, I'm very open about the fact and done a lot of advocacy about it that I was sexually assaulted when I was seven years old.
[00:33:36]  And he wrote me a really heartfelt letter about that, you know, expressing a lot of empathy for me and respect for the, you know, for telling my story and trying to help other survivors and things.
[00:33:47]  And I really appreciated that.
[00:33:48]  So I, Well, I think, you know, I bet the house that he actually was at that mansion while Kiki was being tortured and that he knew Kiki had been picked up, as they say in Mexico, picked up, meaning kidnapped.
[00:34:03]  You know, I still have a lot of respect for Felix Rodriguez.
[00:34:06]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  That's wild, man.
[00:34:08]  I didn't know about that.
[00:34:09]  So, yeah, he, the story, you're familiar with the story of how he killed, how he caught Che Guevara.
[00:34:15]  It's like, that's insane, man.
[00:34:18]  Like, and he wasn't the one who killed him either.
[00:34:20]  Like, he was just like, went in and had an interview with.
[00:34:22]  Like, just talk to him for a few minutes before they went out and executed him and then brought his body back.

=== Vietnam War Interviews (09:49) ===

[00:34:28]  Fucking, I mean, the amount of shit that that guy's seen, like the amount of death, especially when he's in Vietnam, like mowing down people in Vietnam.
[00:34:38]  Like, I've heard a lot of stories about dudes in Vietnam and they come back like different.
[00:34:43]  If you ever shopped online, chances are you purchased from a store powered by Shopify.
[00:34:48]  It's easy to spot their purple shop pay button.
[00:34:51]  And that's what we use for our merch store.
[00:34:52]  The purple button has all your payment and shipping info, so you don't have to track down your card or hope your browser remembered your payment details.
[00:34:59]  There's a reason why so many businesses are using Shopify, and that's because they make it incredibly easy to run and manage your own business.
[00:35:05]  It's the business behind the business that really counts, and that's where Shopify excels with convenient tools and workflows.
[00:35:11]  ShopPay has the best converting checkout on the planet, meaning fewer abandoned carts and way more sales.
[00:35:17]  That's a game changer.
[00:35:18]  You can spread your brand's word with the built in marketing and email tools.
[00:35:21]  Don't want to build your own page?
[00:35:23]  Shopify has hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates.
[00:35:26]  To express your brand and forget the code, like Daylight Computer, which is gorgeous.
[00:35:30]  So, if you've got a product, a dream, and the drive to make it happen, Shopify is the platform to help you do it with ease.
[00:35:36]  Because businesses that sell, sell more with Shopify.
[00:35:39]  See less carts abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their ShopPay button.
[00:35:45]  Sign up today for your $1 per month trial at shopify.comslash Danny Jones, all lowercase.
[00:35:52]  Again, that's S H O P I F Y dot comslash Danny Jones.
[00:35:57]  Shopify.comslash Danny Jones.
[00:36:00]  Yeah, I did interviews for this.
[00:36:01]  For this show, that it was a development gig where I, 15 years ago, one of my first gigs in documentary filmmaking, where I just interviewed Vietnam vets all day long for 10 to 12 hours a day for like two weeks, man.
[00:36:16]  Really?
[00:36:17]  Online, too.
[00:36:17]  It was all online, like trying to do casting for this show.
[00:36:21]  The concept was it was going to follow one combat platoon all the way through the Vietnam War as guys got killed and replaced and cycled out.
[00:36:27]  So it was a pretty good idea, actually.
[00:36:28]  But it didn't get picked up.
[00:36:30]  But man, the fucking stories and just seeing the like, Different levels of trauma, still like, and how it manifested in these guys' lives.
[00:36:38]  And then the special forces guys were like a breed apart, just still just fucking ice in the veins, like to this day, cold, like no, you know, comparing them to like the, you know, the guys that were drafted and just grunts that were still just like haunted by everything they'd seen and done.
[00:36:53]  Like it was really remarkable comparing them to like the, like, SOG guys, you know?
[00:36:57]  There was like very few guys who was like seeked it out, you know, like seeked out the war.
[00:37:04]  Like there was guys who, there's one guy named Billy Waugh.
[00:37:08]  Who Annie Jacobson writes about him in this book that she did called Surprise Kill Vanish.
[00:37:14]  That during Vietnam, I guess he worked at the post office and he would catch the bus from where he lived in Texas to DC so he could go sign up for the Vietnam War.
[00:37:25]  That's how bad he wanted to go to war.
[00:37:27]  And sent him off to Vietnam.
[00:37:30]  And I think the first week he got shot in the foot or the leg.
[00:37:35]  And he literally almost died.
[00:37:36]  He was crawling back to the helicopter to get out of there, crawling over dead bodies.
[00:37:40]  His foot got.
[00:37:41]  Like smashed into a million pieces.
[00:37:44]  And then he got sent home and he had to do the rehab forever and they were like you got whatever, you got the purple heart, you're good.
[00:37:50]  And he wanted to go back like he, just he.
[00:37:53]  He kept going back like did all, like went to the hospital, tried to get like more surgeries done and make his foot better, and like they were like no no, you can't go back, you're literally disabled.
[00:38:02]  And he's like, no, i'm not, I can run faster than you.
[00:38:05]  And like they eventually just sent him back.
[00:38:07]  And this was when he was in his 20s and he stayed in the military until, like his late 80s, He was deploying to the Middle East, like in his 80s, for the CIA to go track Osama Bin Laden.
[00:38:20]  Like, this is one of the dudes that was every fiber of his being was drawn to this, you know?
[00:38:27]  Yeah, that's him.
[00:38:29]  But most people, I feel like, most people that I've talked to on the show are people that, you know, since the, if you're talking about like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they went to those wars.
[00:38:43]  They weren't like that.
[00:38:45]  They just signed up for those wars because.
[00:38:47]  They didn't really have any better options.
[00:38:49]  Yeah.
[00:38:50]  You know, it was like, oh, I could go to college or I could go to this or I could sign up for this war.
[00:38:56]  You know, this sounds exciting.
[00:38:57]  Let me try this.
[00:38:58]  And then they go do that and they come back and they're like, well, it's a range of reactions.
[00:39:03]  I mean, I mean, some of them then go, you know, work as contractors, then mercenaries.
[00:39:08]  You know, some of them get hooked on it.
[00:39:09]  Some of them get hooked on it.
[00:39:11]  Yeah.
[00:39:11]  But some of them don't.
[00:39:13]  Some of them spiral out of control after that, after they get back, you know, and then get like, I mean, just what was the what's the stat like how many veterans kill themselves every day?
[00:39:22]  It's fucking staggering, you know.
[00:39:23]  I've tried to get traction several times with a documentary on just that.
[00:39:27]  I mean, if you look at, like, you compare almost any combat unit that saw heavy action in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare their casualty rate when they were in country to the casualty rate of guys that have either died of overdoses, accidents, or suicide since they got back.
[00:39:43]  And across the board, it's comparable.
[00:39:46]  And in a lot of cases, like, if you take a unit, more guys have died since they got back from like misadventure or drugs or eating a bullet.
[00:39:55]  Than got killed in the Middle East.
[00:39:57]  Yeah.
[00:39:57]  You know, it's fucked up.
[00:39:59]  Our government's done a terrible job of like helping these guys out.
[00:40:02]  Yeah.
[00:40:03]  You know?
[00:40:05]  Yeah, it's fucked up, man.
[00:40:06]  And like now that it's like everyone's kind of aware, I feel like, I mean, I don't know, I'm young, but it feels to me like more than any time in my life that everyone's kind of like more aware of all like the government lying.
[00:40:18]  You know, I think it's probably a lot to do with like technology and social media and podcasts.
[00:40:22]  There's way more access to information and it's like, The emperor has no clothes now.
[00:40:27]  And like, you even have veterans from the Iraq war and Afghanistan that are like, what the fuck were we doing?
[00:40:33]  Like, this was all for what?
[00:40:36]  And how do you justify any more wars?
[00:40:38]  It's like we're living in this hyper normalization, like when the Soviet Union, you know, Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary filmmaker.
[00:40:49]  He does these crazy documentaries where he basically compiles footage, like historical footage.
[00:40:57]  And he lays them out in a storyline with his voiceover, and he kind of like tells the story.
[00:41:03]  And I highly recommend the great historical storytelling.
[00:41:08]  And one of them is called Hyper Normalization.
[00:41:12]  And it explains how during the Soviet Union, before it fell during the 70s and 80s, how everyone who lived there was aware how their government and their economy and their society was failing.
[00:41:29]  But there's nothing they could do about it.
[00:41:33]  And they were just trying to pretend as long as they could that nothing was wrong.
[00:41:42]  And eventually it all just collapsed.
[00:41:44]  But they were basically just like living in a fake reality and they all knew about it.
[00:41:48]  Like the government knew that they knew.
[00:41:51]  And they knew the government knew that they knew that nothing was real and everything was on the brink of collapse.
[00:41:57]  And that's kind of like what I feel like we're living in right now.
[00:42:00]  Yeah.
[00:42:01]  I was about to say.
[00:42:02]  So kind of like America right now.
[00:42:04]  Yeah, man.
[00:42:05]  It's fucking scary, dude.
[00:42:07]  One more thing about Felix Rodriguez, if I could, because I don't want to leave that thread hanging because he's basically, he called me out on your show.
[00:42:14]  It's like one of the things I would say, like, what motivation would these three cartel gunmen have to lie versus what motivation would Felix Rodriguez have to lie?
[00:42:23]  But also, you know, think about that.
[00:42:24]  Totally.
[00:42:25]  Okay.
[00:42:26]  And the second is Felix Rodriguez is a classic case study in what is the CIA?
[00:42:32]  Like, was Felix Rodriguez a CIA agent?
[00:42:35]  No.
[00:42:35]  Was he taking action on behalf of the CIA?
[00:42:37]  No.
[00:42:38]  At least a faction within the CIA, right?
[00:42:40]  I mean, there's all kinds of like factions within the CIA, and a lot of times one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.
[00:42:46]  He was, he was, what was he not?
[00:42:47]  He was an operative.
[00:42:48]  I mean, he was like a paramilitary guy, right?
[00:42:51]  Yeah, yeah, but he wasn't like recruited out of American University to join the CIA.
[00:42:55]  Right, right, right.
[00:42:56]  You know what I mean?
[00:42:56]  But he was a CIA asset or CIA operative.
[00:43:00]  So that's where it gets like there's a lot of tentacles coming out of the CIA.
[00:43:03]  And so it's like, it gets tricky when you start saying things like the CIA killed Kiki Camarena.
[00:43:08]  It's like, well, I don't think William Casey put a hit on a DEA agent.
[00:43:12]  Right.
[00:43:13]  But shit just went south.
[00:43:15]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:43:16]  Yeah, there are so many people that are employed by the CIA.
[00:43:18]  It's insane.
[00:43:19]  And it's like the same thing with Kennedy.
[00:43:22]  Like people like to say, oh, the CIA killed Kennedy.
[00:43:26]  But it's like, you know, there was probably less than a handful of people that actually knew what was going on, you know?
[00:43:34]  Like if you could track all the cables and all the stuff like that, there was probably, I would say, less than 10 people, if I was to guess, that actually knew what was going on.
[00:43:47]  And, you know, That's another thing.
[00:43:52]  That's another thing that they never will have to fess up to.
[00:43:55]  But if you polled all of Americans today and asked them, do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it or do you think the CIA did it?
[00:44:02]  I bet you 90% of people would say they think the CIA did it.
[00:44:06]  But it's like, is that going to change shit?
[00:44:09]  No.
[00:44:10]  Nothing's going to change.
[00:44:11]  Who was the MKUltra guy that went in and spent time with Jack Ruby in prison?

=== Lee Harvey Oswald Conspiracy (14:19) ===

[00:44:16]  That was when I finally tumbled, where I was like, wait, what?
[00:44:19]  Yeah, Jolly West.
[00:44:20]  Yes, yes.
[00:44:22]  Jolly West, dude.
[00:44:23]  He was.
[00:44:23]  Everywhere.
[00:44:24]  Yeah, he was attached to everything, Charles Manson Kennedy, with Jack Ruby.
[00:44:34]  He was even meeting with Stanley Kubrick and Edgar.
[00:44:38]  Is Edgar Cayce or no?
[00:44:40]  It was.
[00:44:42]  Yeah, I think it was Stanley Kubrick and Edgar Cayce when Stanley Kubrick was filming 2001 Space Odyssey over in the UK.
[00:44:51]  Yeah, look at this, this is on the set of 2001 Space Odyssey and that's Stanley Kubrick in the front and it's fucking Jolly West in the back.
[00:44:57]  Yep, What the fuck?
[00:44:59]  This guy was everywhere.
[00:45:03]  So, the Sasquatch movie, how did you get involved in this one?
[00:45:09]  Is this, this is not, this was not very recent.
[00:45:12]  This was at least four years ago, five years ago?
[00:45:14]  Four years ago.
[00:45:14]  Yeah, it came out.
[00:45:16]  Yeah.
[00:45:18]  I'd made a couple of shows with this filmmaker named Josh Rofay, and he was a big fan of this podcast, The Sasquatch Chronicles, and he was, You know, one day he was just kicking around ideas.
[00:45:31]  He was like, Man, if we could just find like a true crime story that had a Sasquatch angle.
[00:45:37]  And like, I immediately tumbled back to this memory from like 1993 when I kind of visited a.
[00:45:46]  I was hanging out, you know, on a weed plantation, the Emerald Triangle.
[00:45:49]  And there's this story going around about how like, you know, three dudes had been killed on this backwoods weed plot by a Sasquatch.
[00:45:58]  And it was just being like, you know, it was just like a legend, basically, maybe, right?
[00:46:03]  Or, a story, a rumor.
[00:46:05]  And so I was like, well, you know, why don't we like try and track that story that was going around in Mendocino and Humboldt County in the fall of 1993, try and follow that back to its source and see what we find out.
[00:46:17]  So that's how that project got going.
[00:46:19]  So you, but you were there at like the start of this whole movie.
[00:46:24]  Like this was all, this all started out like when you were in your early 20s in 1993, sitting in this log cabin.
[00:46:31]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:31]  In the middle of the woods, the redwoods.
[00:46:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:34]  And these tweakers come in saying they just fucking saw some guys get chopped up.
[00:46:37]  And it was the Bigfoot footprints.
[00:46:38]  They claimed that they had just been at the scene of this crime and that there were bodies that were mutilated.
[00:46:45]  There were Bigfoot footprints, and they were legit terrified.
[00:46:49]  And I was on mushrooms.
[00:46:52]  I was coming down, but I was still tripping.
[00:46:56]  And I was just like, their energy was so fucking panicked.
[00:47:01]  And I hadn't had a lot of experience with crystal meth at that point in my life that I really recognized that that was also an element in their behavior.
[00:47:11]  Right.
[00:47:12]  So I just kind of tried to sink into the couch, you know, but I kind of just like took it in and it stuck with me.
[00:47:18]  And then when we, you know, I told Joshua Fay about that instance, he was like, well, let's just start making some calls and see if like anybody else heard that story.
[00:47:32]  And so that was really the genesis of it.
[00:47:33]  It's like, and we did that on camera, like just calling like every connection I could find, you know, that was involved in the weed trade and the Emerald Triangle in the 90s and be like, hey, did you ever hear this story?
[00:47:44]  You know, and it was like a lot of like dead ends.
[00:47:46]  And then finally we started to hit on people that were like, Yeah, I remember that.
[00:47:49]  I remember hearing that.
[00:47:50]  Like, yeah, like three dudes got killed.
[00:47:53]  And the word was that somehow a Sasquatch had killed him.
[00:47:59]  And then it extended from there that there was like this supposedly this sort of like tribe of Sasquatch that were, you know, like as the farms were pushing further and further up into the woods off the road, like there was like people were having encounters with these pissed off Sasquatch that were like hucking rocks at them and stuff and like bluff charging them.
[00:48:19]  And so it kind of like got all wrapped into this one urban legend about like that the dope growers had infringed upon this Sasquatch turf, if you will, and that the three dudes that got killed, like they set up a plot and they were like camping on it.
[00:48:36]  And, you know, that's what led to them being killed.
[00:48:40]  Of course, that's we did track down, I think, the true story of who killed those guys and why, but I don't want to spoil it for anybody that hasn't seen the show.
[00:48:50]  Yeah.
[00:48:51]  Yeah.
[00:48:52]  Dude, that was like scaring the shit out of me watching it.
[00:48:56]  Just the way that, that, just the way that whole landscape is laid out, you know, where you're meeting these confidential sources on the top of these giant wooded mountains that have, you have no cell phone signal.
[00:49:08]  Yeah.
[00:49:09]  Nothing like that.
[00:49:10]  Like, were you not terrified?
[00:49:16]  I, I kind of get into this zone when I'm reporting like that where I'm, where I'm able to kind of just, Disassociate, I think.
[00:49:26]  Yeah.
[00:49:27]  You know, and then, but then I get an adrenaline dump after, and that's when I get sketched out.
[00:49:32]  But yeah, especially there's this one road, one mountain, Spyrock, and there's this road, Spyrock Road, that's like to this day, like the police will not go there unless they're rolling deep, meaning like unless they're going with like basically SWAT team force.
[00:49:47]  Like this, you know, it's really, yeah, there was one scene that I think for the most part didn't make it into the show.
[00:49:58]  And I had, I went up Spy Rock by myself.
[00:50:00]  Most of the time, I had like an ex cop that would kind of be along with me in an undercover, but kind of like watching my back basically.
[00:50:10]  But in this instance, I was by myself and wound up on this dope farm that was run by these like two women, both heroin addicts.
[00:50:20]  And they had a bunch of pit bulls.
[00:50:24]  And one of the women told me the story about, and I had a, Like a hidden camera, and I was wearing a wire, okay, and was rolling.
[00:50:34]  Which makes your nerves even more.
[00:50:36]  Now, one of them, not the one that's telling me the story I'm about to relay, but the other one had become a contact.
[00:50:42]  And like I had interviewed her a couple times on camera.
[00:50:45]  She knew I was making a movie.
[00:50:47]  You know, I think she probably would have covered for me if they'd figured out that I had a camera or recording device, hopefully, but didn't come to that.
[00:50:55]  But her friend told me the story about, you know, how these.
[00:51:00]  How these black guys from Los Angeles had come up, make a big deal, and how she and some biker friends of hers had just killed these guys and took their money instead of selling them the dope and they buried them on her property.
[00:51:16]  And she's telling me all this on camera.
[00:51:19]  And one of the guys had, and she told this story like it's funny, how one of the guys, as he was waiting to be murdered, basically had pissed himself.
[00:51:28]  And after they buried his body, one of her pitfalls.
[00:51:30]  Bowls had smelled the urine or something and gone and dug up his shoe and brought it back to her cabin and dropped it.
[00:51:37]  And she was telling this story like it was hilarious, and her friends laughing.
[00:51:40]  I'm having to force myself to laugh like this is the funniest fucking thing I've heard too, you know.
[00:51:46]  But the reason that we couldn't use it is because she was dropping the N bomb and describing these guys.
[00:51:51]  And, um, like Hulu wouldn't air that footage just because even if we bleeped that they were like, they still know what she's saying, and so like that, that just that one word.
[00:52:04]  Is so radioactive, right?
[00:52:06]  That we can't even use this footage.
[00:52:07]  It was fucking, you know, it was hard won footage.
[00:52:10]  But that was, that was probably in the entire experience of making Sasquatch, that was probably the time that I was the most sort of sphincter puckered.
[00:52:20]  You were by yourself?
[00:52:21]  I was by myself.
[00:52:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:52:23]  Because I've been in that situation before where you know you're just getting gold.
[00:52:27]  Yeah.
[00:52:28]  But like I've always had somebody with me where I'm like looking at him like, can you fucking believe this shit is real?
[00:52:33]  Like, I can't wait to fucking get this shit on the hard drive.
[00:52:35]  Right.
[00:52:37]  Right.
[00:52:37]  But like, oh my God, being alone, dude, especially not like you're hiding the camera.
[00:52:45]  So, like, you're terrified if they discover it.
[00:52:48]  Like, you don't know what the fuck's going to happen.
[00:52:50]  These people are like self admitted murderers.
[00:52:53]  Yeah.
[00:52:54]  Yeah.
[00:52:54]  I mean, it was one I was in a watch, and then I also had a camera that's in like a key fob.
[00:52:59]  So I had to kind of keep my keys out and, you know, kind of work the angle on it.
[00:53:04]  Yeah.
[00:53:05]  You know, and I had, you know, I had a rifle in the The trunk of my car, but I was like, I was always very aware of how many steps away from that trunk I was.
[00:53:15]  And it was, yeah, it was sketchy, man.
[00:53:19]  And I, but the only way that I was going to get that access was to go by myself.
[00:53:24]  Right.
[00:53:24]  You know, and this was this, this was this was somebody that supposedly had, you know, information about that triple homicide back in 1993.
[00:53:33]  So, yeah, I was completely unaware until watching that film that.
[00:53:40]  That part of California was like that.
[00:53:42]  That it was, it's just like this twilight zone where people can get away with it.
[00:53:47]  It seems like just people can get away with murder like it's nothing there.
[00:53:52]  And especially these people that are like living off the grid.
[00:53:54]  Yeah.
[00:53:55]  And I don't, do they have electricity up there?
[00:53:58]  Some don't.
[00:53:59]  Some live totally off the grid.
[00:54:00]  You know, and it's, but like, I mean, there's still like some like just kind of classic hippies up there that are, that are.
[00:54:08]  I really love, my favorite guy was the guy who reminded me of Captain Hook from the movie Hook.
[00:54:14]  With Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman.
[00:54:16]  He's got like the hook eyebrows, the hippie guy, like leathery skin.
[00:54:19]  Yeah.
[00:54:20]  He was awesome.
[00:54:20]  Ghost Dance?
[00:54:22]  I don't remember his name.
[00:54:23]  He was on the right side of the frame.
[00:54:25]  Yeah.
[00:54:25]  Like a bookshelf behind him.
[00:54:26]  Yeah.
[00:54:30]  He was a great source.
[00:54:31]  He was, he grew weed for the Hells Angels like back in the day.
[00:54:35]  Oh, really?
[00:54:36]  Their weed master.
[00:54:36]  And he still has a lot of juice in there and it was pretty well protected.
[00:54:40]  And that's why he felt comfortable going on camera and talking about it.
[00:54:44]  You were like, I think we found the killer.
[00:54:46]  He's like, oh, really?
[00:54:47]  He's like, He used to be my neighbor.
[00:54:48]  I could use number.
[00:54:51]  Yeah.
[00:54:52]  Yeah.
[00:54:54]  So, do you think that that guy that you talked to, do you think he was the killer?
[00:54:59]  That you completely never said his name once on the film.
[00:55:02]  You bleep his name out of the film.
[00:55:05]  No.
[00:55:06]  No, I don't.
[00:55:07]  You don't?
[00:55:08]  I think he probably knew something about it, but I don't think he was actually involved.
[00:55:11]  Yeah, because it was very weird how when you, I mean, it was like, first of all, the way you just so bluntly asked him straight up, like, do you know?
[00:55:21]  So, you're telling me you didn't murder three people?
[00:55:24]  He's like, I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:55:26]  Click and then hangs up.
[00:55:27]  He seemed pretty guilty to me.
[00:55:29]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Like I said, I think it, well, it depends on what you mean by the murder.
[00:55:33]  Do I think he actually carried it out?
[00:55:35]  No.
[00:55:35]  Do I think he's involved?
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:38]  Yeah.
[00:55:40]  You know, and it's funny that it's like biker slang kind of like played into it.
[00:55:46]  And that like the story was that like these three guys had like somehow abused some dude's daughter.
[00:55:51]  But like in the outlaw biker world, daughter can mean like just kind of a young woman under your protection.
[00:55:59]  Too, you know, and so that's where things got a little vague, I guess.
[00:56:06]  Interesting.
[00:56:07]  You know, it's like the story was yeah, this guy's daughter had been, you know, by these three guys.
[00:56:12]  You know, that was one version of it.
[00:56:14]  Right.
[00:56:15]  Yeah, that's so, it was so, also so weird how you would get all these people telling you this story.
[00:56:21]  Or I don't know if it was one source or two sources that told you that story.
[00:56:24]  Yeah.
[00:56:24]  And like you talked to the guy named Bigfoot, Bigfoot Jacobs or whatever his name was.
[00:56:28]  And Bigfoot Gary.
[00:56:30]  Bigfoot Gary.
[00:56:30]  He's like, I never even had a daughter in 93.
[00:56:33]  Yeah.
[00:56:34]  And that's where people make this shit up.
[00:56:36]  But that's where that's what I mean is it's like he may not have had a biological daughter, but like if there was a young woman that was not romantically involved with him, but it was kind of like a foster kid in a way, which is kind of common in that world, you know, like splintered families and like sort of taken under his wing, she would be known as his daughter, even though she's not his biological daughter or adopted daughter, even.
[00:56:58]  It's just like a young woman that's sort of like part of his tribe.
[00:57:02]  Okay.
[00:57:03]  Did you ever meet him face to face, Bigfoot Gary?
[00:57:06]  No.
[00:57:07]  No.
[00:57:07]  No, we tried, like, even, you know, one of the guys that I made that show with, you know, went so far as to kind of like stake out this gas station that we knew he got coffee at every morning.
[00:57:16]  And he just happened not to show up a couple mornings.
[00:57:19]  And then, like, the second or third day that Zach was there, he got made and kind of like run off.
[00:57:26]  So we pulled out all the stops to try him.
[00:57:28]  But I did finally get him on the fucking phone.
[00:57:30]  Yeah, that was nuts.
[00:57:32]  Yeah.
[00:57:33]  Yeah.
[00:57:34]  And some of those biker gang dudes, like some of the Hells Angels dudes, have like protection from the FBI.
[00:57:40]  Like some of them work with the FBI, right?
[00:57:42]  Yeah.
[00:57:43]  Yeah, of course.
[00:57:43]  So I wonder, I wonder, like, how many of them are, like, just protected or, like, well, I think that's true in any organized crime.
[00:57:50]  There's informants, right?
[00:57:51]  Yeah, in any organized crime, you know, there's guys that are, yeah, just that informants.
[00:57:58]  I mean, look at Whitey Bolger, right?
[00:57:59]  I mean, yeah.
[00:58:02]  Yeah, that's another scary thing.
[00:58:03]  Like, these guys, like, you're not just some, like, undocumented migrant that's out there farming stuff.
[00:58:08]  Like, you're, like, a legitimate, like, documentary filmmaker.
[00:58:13]  American citizen doing this stuff.
[00:58:14]  So it's like, on one hand, you think you're safe because of that.
[00:58:18]  But on the other hand, you don't know like maybe these guys have like a get out of jail free card, you know?
[00:58:25]  Right.
[00:58:26]  Right.
[00:58:26]  And I didn't trust the cops, you know, in that part of the world.
[00:58:30]  I mean, it's just, you've got to, you've got to like witness and experience the Emerald Triangle to understand it.

=== Outlaw Country Hydration (03:21) ===

[00:58:35]  It's like, you know, there's a couple state parks with the Redwoods there and, you know, people go there camping with their family.
[00:58:42]  Once you get outside that part of that world, it is like, it's outlaw country.
[00:58:46]  You know, it just is.
[00:58:48]  I mean, it's like you got the kids, the trimmigrants that come from all over the world there, like every harvest season, you know, and a lot of them just disappear every year.
[00:58:58]  And it's been going on for decades.
[00:58:59]  I mean, there's so, the missing persons rate in that part of the world is so high.
[00:59:04]  It's crazy.
[00:59:05]  And you know they're just buried in the redwoods.
[00:59:08]  Right.
[00:59:09]  Yeah, I'm sure when you bury somebody in that soil, like just with the environment it's in, just like eats it up.
[00:59:17]  Like all the bugs and insects and stuff in the soil probably just.
[00:59:21]  Soaks it all up and dissolves into nothing.
[00:59:23]  Yeah.
[00:59:23]  Like I said, that one woman was just laughing about, you know, two or three bodies being buried on the property.
[00:59:29]  Yeah.
[00:59:32]  It's like another world right in our own backyard, like right in this country.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:37]  And she was like, she was, I remember she was banging heroin and she also got right in front of you.
[00:59:41]  Oh, yeah.
[00:59:42]  And she had like a handle of Captain Morgan's and she wanted me to drive her into town to get a pint of ice cream.
[00:59:50]  And so we drove down Spy Rock.
[00:59:51]  I bought her a pint of ice cream.
[00:59:53]  And a handle of Captain Morgan's and drove back up.
[00:59:55]  And after she like shot up heroin, she was just pouring the Captain Morgan's into the ice cream and just like eating it.
[01:00:00]  Whoa.
[01:00:01]  Like as I'm interviewing her.
[01:00:03]  Whoa, that's crazy.
[01:00:06]  Yeah.
[01:00:06]  The warmth is already driving us out of hibernation this year.
[01:00:10]  And it only took one day at the fair for me to realize that festival time is also hydration time.
[01:00:16]  That's why I keep Liquid IV's hydration multiplier with me at all times.
[01:00:20]  Whether it's a three day festival, exploring farmers markets, or a 12 hour flight to a destination wedding, Liquid IV is superior hydration.
[01:00:27]  Than water alone.
[01:00:28]  And right now you can get 20% off your first order by using the code DANI at checkout.
[01:00:32]  Whether it's my kids' soccer practice or a day on the golf course, I always keep Liquid IV handy.
[01:00:37]  It's super simple, you can do it anywhere.
[01:00:39]  All you do is tear it, pour it, mix it with your water, and you're good to go.
[01:00:42]  One stick with 16 ounces of water hydrates faster than water alone.
[01:00:46]  It's powered by LIV Hydra Science with an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins, and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration.
[01:00:56]  You're getting three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drinks plus eight vitamins and nutrients in.
[01:01:00]  Every stick.
[01:01:01]  They've always got great flavors, and the kiddos love the popsicle firecracker flavor.
[01:01:05]  So it feels more like a treat instead of a chore to stay hydrated.
[01:01:08]  So if you've got long days ahead this summer, this stuff makes a huge difference.
[01:01:12]  Soak up unforgettable memories with on the go hydration from Liquid IV.
[01:01:16]  Tear, pour, live more.
[01:01:18]  Go to liquidiv.com and get 20% off your first purchase by using the code DANNY at checkout.
[01:01:24]  That's 20% off your first purchase by using the code DANNY at liquidiv.com.
[01:01:31]  When you're in those woods, like, Obviously, you didn't spend the night in the woods.
[01:01:36]  You went to like the towns every night.
[01:01:38]  Yeah.
[01:01:39]  But like, does it have like any effect on your psyche when you spend that much time kind of like in a different part of the world, sort of disconnected from regular society and you're like out with surrounded by all these misfits?

=== New Mexico Mining Cartels (15:19) ===

[01:01:57]  Oh, yeah.
[01:01:57]  Without a doubt.
[01:01:58]  I mean, every assignment like that where you're like basically embedding in a criminal subculture, you have to, you have to, you know, first you have to like develop some contacts and gain people's trust.
[01:02:07]  Right.
[01:02:07]  But you have to start mirroring.
[01:02:09]  You have to start making yourself, making yourself seem part of that world.
[01:02:14]  So you like try and pick up as much of the like, you know, slang as you can quickly, adjust the way you dress, adjust the way you act, your mannerisms, like, and, and sort of give yourself over to that mindset.
[01:02:28]  And that does, that does exact a toll.
[01:02:33]  Yeah.
[01:02:33]  Every time.
[01:02:34]  I mean, I've been doing this for 30 plus years now.
[01:02:36]  My risk tolerance is lower than it used to be.
[01:02:39]  You know, when I was in my 20s, early 30s, I would take what seemed to me to be now like crazy fucking risks.
[01:02:44]  But like Sasquatch was definitely risky for sure.
[01:02:49]  I mean, but to answer your question, I mean, those little towns that are just like, first of all, they're just riddled with meth.
[01:02:55]  I mean, just riddled with meth and oxy, you know?
[01:02:59]  And so you just got like fucking junky zombies wandering all over the place.
[01:03:04]  You got to be careful at all the gas stations that there's not like a little chip reader on the thing to steal your credit card because there often are.
[01:03:10]  There's like cheap little pieces of shit hardware to like steal your credit card numbers.
[01:03:14]  You got to peel them off before you get gas.
[01:03:17]  And, uh, yeah, it just what is it about that part of the world that enables that behavior?
[01:03:23]  Is it the woods?
[01:03:26]  I think a lot of it's the remoteness, you know, and also like legalization hit that part of the world hard, you know.
[01:03:33]  I mean, it's just like it's a lot harder to make money growing weed than it used to be.
[01:03:38]  And when times are hard, like violence ticks up.
[01:03:41]  And so, you know, it's like with the legalization, with like big corporations coming in, like putting up these like death stars of like hydroponic weed down around like.
[01:03:49]  Palm Springs or wherever, it's a lot harder for those like backwoods black market farmers, even if they're still selling on the black market to make money.
[01:03:57]  And so competition's fierce and competition in that part of the world equals violence, you know, and like a lot of a lot of a lot of them have gone from growing to becoming rippers, you know, just stealing shit, stealing plants, stealing money.
[01:04:10]  It's just things that are rough.
[01:04:13]  Is it still like that today?
[01:04:15]  I assume it is.
[01:04:16]  I haven't been back up there since, you know, 2021, but.
[01:04:20]  I assume it is.
[01:04:21]  I heard that there were literal cartels doing operations up there now, like going into the woods and doing all their grows now because I guess it's a misdemeanor now.
[01:04:30]  Yeah.
[01:04:31]  I mean, and that also played into the Sasquatch story is that it was like, you know, that cartels were, you know, Mexican cartels started to move in on the Emerald Triangle in the late 80s.
[01:04:41]  And by the early 90s, you know, when this story about the Sasquatch killing three guys circulated, I mean, the cartels were definitely making a move there.
[01:04:51]  Speaking of cartels, one of the craziest stories in the weed world for me is these Chinese cartels that are growing weed on native land around New Mexico and Arizona and shit.
[01:05:02]  Do you know about this?
[01:05:03]  No.
[01:05:04]  Yeah, it's like these Chinese organized crime have these huge weed growing setups on reservations, basically.
[01:05:12]  That's a story that I haven't been able to get into yet.
[01:05:16]  It's been covered.
[01:05:19]  Weed of all drugs.
[01:05:21]  Yeah.
[01:05:22]  Still.
[01:05:24]  In New Mexico.
[01:05:25]  New Mexico, Arizona.
[01:05:26]  Yeah, Four Corners region.
[01:05:28]  Does this seem like a great place to grow weed?
[01:05:31]  Well, it's all indoors, right?
[01:05:32]  They're not busy.
[01:05:33]  Yeah.
[01:05:34]  Yeah.
[01:05:35]  You don't really hear much about Chinese organized crime anymore, do you?
[01:05:40]  I've heard a lot of, I've heard about like how they've been involved in Mexico, like with the fishing stuff offshore in Mexico and also buying up mines and stuff and mining lithium in Mexico and hiring the cartels as like security.
[01:05:57]  For their operations that they're doing down there, um, as well as like bringing fentanyl into Mexico, but um, yeah, beyond that, and then buying up real estate and stuff in the U.S., you don't really hear much about that.
[01:06:14]  It's bananas, yeah, they're growing weed, you know.
[01:06:18]  But they, um, could talk about the narco menonites series, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:23]  So, the um, all of all that weed was like that the menonites started moving for the Mexican cartels in the 80s was all like outdoor weed.
[01:06:32]  From what they call a golden triangle, right?
[01:06:35]  Mennonites basically migrated from Canada to Mexico about 100 years ago, a few thousand of them.
[01:06:41]  And they just happened to settle in this town, Cuauhtémoc, which is like the closest population center to where in the 1960s, like Mexican opium poppy farmers and marijuana farmers started to plant their crops.
[01:06:57]  And so somehow in the 80s, like, you know, the first cartel, the Guadalajara cartel, got the bright idea of starting to use Mennonites to run dope for them in the U.S., right?
[01:07:08]  Thinking like, Because the Mennonites, they had these special visas that enabled them to transit the US to Canada to visit relatives.
[01:07:18]  And so the border guards in Mexico, the US, and Canada, they just see a carload of Mennonites driving, maybe with a truckload of furniture.
[01:07:26]  And they think, well, no problem.
[01:07:28]  They just wave them on through.
[01:07:29]  And a lot of time that furniture was packed with weed, but outdoor weed, what we used to call brick weed, right?
[01:07:36]  Uh huh.
[01:07:37]  Not as good.
[01:07:38]  Right, right.
[01:07:39]  And then in the 90s, when BC Bud started to come online, You know, especially in Canada, kind of pushed the Mennonites out of the weed business and they started, you know, shifting to harder drugs and Coke specifically.
[01:07:51]  Yeah.
[01:07:52]  And that's what they're doing now?
[01:07:53]  Mainly, now they're into everything, man.
[01:07:55]  A lot of what they're doing now is laundering money for the cartels because, you know, this town in Mexico, Cuauhtémoc, it's like every business, practically every business is Mennonite owned.
[01:08:06]  They do do a lot of farming, but they do a lot of, you know, what our sources in law enforcement in Mexico told us is that, you know, yeah, they're still running dope, but.
[01:08:16]  A lot of what they do is launder money for the cartels now.
[01:08:20]  Huh.
[01:08:21]  And the Mennonites, they've been really smart about like keeping their finger in the wind and kind of like never getting too big and being very careful about when and how they shift their allegiances with all the cartels' wars going on in Mexico over the decades.
[01:08:36]  So they're always like careful about who they're sort of loyal to.
[01:08:42]  Interesting.
[01:08:43]  Yeah.
[01:08:44]  Yeah.
[01:08:44]  It seems like the heads, the leaders of all the cartels, they never seem to have to.
[01:08:48]  Pay the price for anything.
[01:08:49]  It's always like the low level pawns are the ones that are getting murdered and shipped around and they're the ones that get the blunt end of the stick.
[01:09:00]  There there's um.
[01:09:02]  I have this friend who's a a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, right down the street from here and one of his first cases he ever got he was a public defender for it and it was a Cuban guy, or not a Cuban guy.
[01:09:15]  He was a um Colombian dude, a ship captain, cargo ship captain who got hijacked By a cartel on the way from Columbia to Florida.
[01:09:27]  And halfway through the trip, the cartel boarded his ship, put a gun to his head, and said, If you don't take all our coke into Tampa, we're going to kill you and your whole family.
[01:09:42]  So, of course, he took the coke in, went in, and got like, you know, they were trying to give him like double life sentences.
[01:09:49]  And my lawyer buddy ended up getting him off scot free.
[01:09:52]  Like, this guy was like, Fresh out of law school, and the other guy had zero money.
[01:10:00]  And, you know, he was just trying to do this to make a name for himself and help the guy, let the guy live in his house for a couple months when they were fighting the case.
[01:10:08]  And, you know, now, you know, he's been involved with more and more of these cartel cases in Mexico and South America.
[01:10:16]  And, like, the heads of the cartels are trying to hire him for shit and, like, flying him down to Mexico City to meet at the Ritz Carlton and, like, And the way he explains it to me, it's like those are the people.
[01:10:28]  It's like the low level, poor fishermen, boat captains, or whatever.
[01:10:33]  Those are the guys that are lining the prisons.
[01:10:36]  Those are the guys getting arrested and killed.
[01:10:37]  And it's never the dudes who are at the top of the pyramid who are making the real money.
[01:10:44]  Those guys are either just, they have too much money and too much security to get caught, or they're working with the feds.
[01:10:52]  Yeah.
[01:10:52]  Every once in a while, the government in Mexico, though, it seems, decides to give one of these guys up.
[01:10:56]  I can't remember the dude's name, but the guy that was the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel just got killed a couple weeks ago.
[01:11:03]  Yeah.
[01:11:03]  Which now all hell is breaking loose down in Mexico because of that.
[01:11:07]  So, for the most part, I didn't follow that story.
[01:11:10]  But, you know, I think every once in a while, like the Mexican government decides, okay, we got to appease the U.S. and give one of these guys up.
[01:11:16]  I think that they know, you know, where they are at all times.
[01:11:20]  I think, you know, the same thing happened, I think, with Chapo Guzman.
[01:11:24]  El Chapo, yeah.
[01:11:25]  Yeah.
[01:11:25]  Crazy story about Chapo.
[01:11:26]  Like that same guy, Tony Ester, that was in Operation Odessa.
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:31]  After Chapo escaped from prison the second time, Tony Ester called up Tiller Russell and I and was basically like, It took a while because he's got a heavy Cuban accent and he was calling, I presume, from Africa.
[01:11:45]  And he was also talking sort of in code.
[01:11:47]  But once we figured out what he was saying, he was saying that like Chapo wanted to do an interview and he could line up this interview.
[01:11:54]  And Tiller and I talked about it for like a couple of days and we were just like, fuck, it just felt too dicey.
[01:12:00]  And so we didn't do it.
[01:12:01]  And then Sean Penn wound up getting it for Rolling Stone.
[01:12:04]  Like Chapo was just determined to like tell his story.
[01:12:06]  No way.
[01:12:08]  He'd seen opportunities for you guys.
[01:12:10]  I know.
[01:12:10]  I know, we're still kicking our own asses over it.
[01:12:13]  Oh, that's so crazy, dude.
[01:12:17]  I heard that he's still calling shots from inside prison.
[01:12:19]  I'm sure, even in Supermax.
[01:12:21]  Yeah.
[01:12:23]  And his son just set up that guy that was one of the OGs.
[01:12:27]  And I mean, it's just fucking chaos down there right now.
[01:12:30]  Who did his son set up?
[01:12:31]  Oh, shit, I'm blanking on that name, too.
[01:12:33]  But he told the guy that they were going to go look at a real estate investment just south of the US border and wound up landing in New Mexico.
[01:12:43]  And then the guy got arrested.
[01:12:45]  This happened like a year and a half or so ago.
[01:12:48]  Oh, oh, are you talking about?
[01:12:52]  Yeah, why am I blanking on this guy's name, too?
[01:12:54]  The guy who was basically the boss of the Sinaloa cartel, right?
[01:12:58]  Mayo, El Mayo.
[01:12:59]  Yeah, El Mayo.
[01:12:59]  Thank you.
[01:13:00]  Yeah.
[01:13:00]  It was El Mayo's son, I think.
[01:13:04]  Yeah, that's.
[01:13:05]  And El Mayo's another guy.
[01:13:06]  Like, it's like no one, you know, no one paid attention to that guy forever when he was like the old dude behind the scenes.
[01:13:12]  And El Chapa was really kind of like the poster boy.
[01:13:15]  You know, he was kind of just like one of the.
[01:13:18]  One of the henchmen to start out with, and then just became like the most famous or notorious for whatever reason.
[01:13:24]  Yeah, I mean, the same guys that we interviewed for The Last Snark were telling stories about Chapo back in the day, and he was just like a low level thug.
[01:13:31]  Right.
[01:13:31]  He was just like a homicidal maniac.
[01:13:33]  Right.
[01:13:36]  You know, why just use one bullet when you can use 70 kind of guy?
[01:13:40]  Yeah.
[01:13:41]  Yeah, I mean, like the theme of all these stories is just like desperation drives like the most violence out of it.
[01:13:48]  Like people who are the most destitute.
[01:13:51]  Who have absolutely nothing to lose will do like the worst, most heinous things to feed themselves or their families, you know?
[01:13:58]  And it's like whether you're talking about drug smuggling and cartels or like poaching animals in Africa, like the dudes that are killing these endangered animals, like these elephants and shit in Africa, these people are just trying to feed their families.
[01:14:13]  Yeah.
[01:14:13]  Look at these fucking guys that are getting blown up in all these boat strikes.
[01:14:16]  I mean, these aren't drug lords, you know?
[01:14:18]  These are guys just trying to feed their families.
[01:14:20]  Oh, you're talking about the recent Venezuela thing?
[01:14:23]  All those, all those like boats that, That we've been blowing up.
[01:14:26]  Yeah.
[01:14:26]  You know, the last six to eight months.
[01:14:28]  I mean, it's all just like guys that are probably like part time fishermen.
[01:14:31]  Yes.
[01:14:32]  Yeah, those are fucking poor.
[01:14:34]  Those are poor people.
[01:14:35]  Those people aren't calling any shots.
[01:14:36]  Those people aren't making any difference.
[01:14:38]  First of all, those boats that they're driving with the motors that they have on there, those guys can't make it halfway to Cuba, let alone the United States with those motors.
[01:14:47]  Like, what are you talking about?
[01:14:49]  They're bringing drugs to the US.
[01:14:51]  Like a 50 horsepower Evan Rude.
[01:14:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:14:53]  Right, right.
[01:14:54]  Yeah.
[01:14:56]  The story they told us about that being about drugs was just like a joke.
[01:15:00]  I don't think anyone bought that.
[01:15:03]  It's a house of cars.
[01:15:05]  They're narco terrorists.
[01:15:06]  Right.
[01:15:07]  Come on.
[01:15:08]  Yeah.
[01:15:08]  No, man.
[01:15:10]  It's a house of cards at this point, man.
[01:15:13]  It really is.
[01:15:14]  But, like, so going back to the beginning of, like, what got you into this stuff in the very, very beginning?
[01:15:22]  Like, what was the first project that you worked on that got you into this type of journalism, this type of filmmaking?
[01:15:29]  That's a good question.
[01:15:30]  I mean, it really started in college.
[01:15:32]  Some buddies of mine and I started a newspaper at the University of California, Santa Cruz called The Fish Wrap.
[01:15:38]  And, you know, we were all about Hunter S. Thompson, you know, and so we all like were practicing our, you know, our version of gonzo journalism.
[01:15:50]  I'd say the first like big story though that I did was my first job out of college was for the Anchorage Daily News.
[01:15:56]  That's my hometown newspaper.
[01:15:58]  I grew up in Anchorage.
[01:15:59]  And a couple of street gangs from Southern California were making inroads in Anchorage at the time.
[01:16:06]  And I did a, you know, big, it was like my first big, like front page story.
[01:16:11]  It was called a question of gangs.
[01:16:14]  And, but it was when I realized that I really had a knack for kind of embedding with criminals.
[01:16:23]  Yeah.
[01:16:24]  That I could get criminals to open up to me where they might not, you know, be as candid or as accepting of the presence of other reporters.
[01:16:32]  Right.
[01:16:32]  And so that's when I think the final switch clicked for me there.
[01:16:37]  And then pretty quickly after that, you know, I bounced from mainstream daily paper to a chain of alternative weeklies in the 90s that.
[01:16:44]  At the time, it was New Times that then became Village Voice Media.
[01:16:48]  And, you know, then I just started writing like long form gonzo shit and just went all in, you know, embedding with gutter punks and street gangs and tweakers.
[01:17:00]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  Yeah.
[01:17:01]  Didn't you embed with a bunch of meth addicts or something?
[01:17:05]  Yeah.
[01:17:06]  I did that a couple of times.
[01:17:06]  I did one story in Phoenix, but then I think the one you're probably talking about was I was working for a paper in Denver called The Westward and I stayed up for 72 hours.

=== Embedded with Skinheads (15:00) ===

[01:17:17]  With some tweakers, but they weren't like, I don't know.
[01:17:21]  I don't want to say yuppie tweakers.
[01:17:23]  What were they?
[01:17:23]  They had dough.
[01:17:24]  They had jobs and they had money.
[01:17:26]  They had money to afford really, really pure crystal meth called shabu, like really pure.
[01:17:32]  It came in a crystal statue that you just kind of shave little curls off of and smoke.
[01:17:39]  Really?
[01:17:39]  Yeah.
[01:17:40]  It's really popular in Hawaii, I guess.
[01:17:43]  These are like upper class dudes?
[01:17:44]  Yeah.
[01:17:45]  Yeah, definitely.
[01:17:46]  Definitely like, You know, I was going far back enough.
[01:17:49]  I think I could say, like, somebody that owned a flower shop and a clothing store, you know, DJs, you know, that kind of thing.
[01:17:56]  People that had lives other than crystal meth.
[01:17:58]  Right.
[01:17:59]  But they would get together, you know, once a month and, like, you know, go at it hard for two to three days.
[01:18:09]  Wow.
[01:18:10]  And so, but I didn't try it.
[01:18:12]  I didn't.
[01:18:14]  I have done crystal, but not.
[01:18:17]  For that story.
[01:18:18]  That story, I was taking modafinil, which is like an anti narcolepsy drug.
[01:18:24]  Oh, yeah.
[01:18:24]  It will keep you awake.
[01:18:26]  Yeah.
[01:18:27]  It's like pro vigil.
[01:18:28]  Yeah.
[01:18:29]  Same stuff.
[01:18:29]  Same stuff.
[01:18:30]  And, you know, but if it's, I was definitely starting to like kind of brown out, you know, around hours.
[01:18:37]  Yeah, I was going to say, like that many hours, I would have like taken a little headache.
[01:18:41]  I still have my notebook from that story and it's hilarious because the notes start off like really kind of lucid, you know, and you can just, and I keep doing timestamps and like by the end, it's just like hours are passing between the times I did notes and some of them are just gibberish, you know, but it kind of like, I was really worried about it.
[01:18:59]  I was like, fuck, I think I didn't get the story because I just was not, I was not like, Cogent there at the end, but it kind of worked in a way that even in the writing of the story, it's like written in a timeline format.
[01:19:13]  It just gets more kind of scattered and kind of feels like it's going off the rails, which was the experience of embedding with them for that time, too.
[01:19:23]  They started to go off the rails.
[01:19:24]  What kind of stuff did you ask them?
[01:19:27]  Were you just hanging out and just being a fly on the wall?
[01:19:29]  Yeah, 100%.
[01:19:31]  Just observing, participant observer.
[01:19:33]  And how did you go about doing that?
[01:19:34]  Like, yo, you guys like math?
[01:19:36]  Can I hang out and like?
[01:19:37]  I knew about it.
[01:19:37]  I mean, I, I, yeah, I knew them before I knew that they did this.
[01:19:41]  I kind of knew them from the, and it was like a ritual for them, semi ritualized, I'd say.
[01:19:45]  I mean, they did it once a month.
[01:19:47]  It was like planned out.
[01:19:48]  They would clear their calendars, you know, they would all pull their money to buy this really good shit.
[01:19:54]  And there's one guy's house that was kind of the mothership for the operation.
[01:19:57]  They would go out to clubs and after-hour spots and stuff and come back and smoke there.
[01:20:03]  And then, but, but when the, the, the time I was with them, they decided about, Hour 36 or so to like get on a charter flight to Vegas.
[01:20:12]  So we all went from Denver to Vegas, you know.
[01:20:16]  Oh, fucking.
[01:20:18]  And like it was summer.
[01:20:19]  It was just like, oh, it was so bad, dude.
[01:20:22]  It was so bad.
[01:20:22]  It was so rough.
[01:20:23]  Just like the Vegas Strip, like pounding sun, you know, you're just like dehydrated and just, yeah.
[01:20:29]  Oh, it sounds like fucking hell, dude.
[01:20:31]  Yeah, it was.
[01:20:32]  Yeah.
[01:20:33]  Yeah.
[01:20:34]  And you also embedded with like some skinheads.
[01:20:39]  Yeah.
[01:20:39]  I did quite a bit of that, actually.
[01:20:41]  I, uh, You know, at least half a dozen times, probably went undercover as a neo Nazi skinhead.
[01:20:48]  And so, to be clear, like with the Shabu smokers, they knew I was a journalist.
[01:20:53]  I was there as a journalist.
[01:20:55]  A lot of the reporting I've done on like neo Nazi organizations, white nationalist organizations, that was done undercover.
[01:21:02]  I think that's pretty much the only time I've worked undercover was when I was undercover.
[01:21:06]  Were they undercover?
[01:21:07]  No idea that you're a journalist.
[01:21:09]  No, I was posing as a fellow neo Nazi.
[01:21:12]  And why would you do it that way?
[01:21:14]  Do you think they wouldn't be open to you reporting?
[01:21:16]  Reporting on what they're doing?
[01:21:18]  No, no.
[01:21:19]  They have a very strict policy.
[01:21:22]  If you're contacted by the media, the only thing you say is, I have nothing to say.
[01:21:26]  That's it.
[01:21:27]  I mean, they don't really do interviews sometimes, right?
[01:21:30]  But they're real hardcore hate groups.
[01:21:34]  They're not media friendly.
[01:21:36]  Yeah.
[01:21:38]  So where did you first go?
[01:21:39]  Denver.
[01:21:40]  Also, Denver.
[01:21:40]  This was in Denver.
[01:21:41]  Yeah.
[01:21:44]  There was an investigator for the Anti Defamation League.
[01:21:47]  That got a hold of me and let me know that there was this event coming up called the Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest.
[01:21:52]  And was like, basically, if you want, I will give you kind of a crash course and how to infiltrate.
[01:21:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:00]  And so, like, I spent, I think I only had like a couple weeks.
[01:22:03]  I had hair like even longer than I do now, shaved it, of course, down to just a one buzz cut.
[01:22:09]  And just spent like a couple weeks just like learning how to dress, how to walk, the music, the slang, you know, the history of that culture.
[01:22:21]  You listen to Screwdriver?
[01:22:22]  Yeah, of course.
[01:22:24]  Yeah.
[01:22:24]  Listen, a bunch of Max Resist, you know, all the hate rock bands.
[01:22:29]  And, you know, and went on a cover.
[01:22:33]  But it got fucked up because, like, the Antifa had found out where the event was going to be.
[01:22:40]  And they showed up in force in a way that, like, shut it down.
[01:22:44]  It was originally going to be at this venue called the Aztec Theater in Denver.
[01:22:48]  And, like, the owners, like, figured out because Antifa showed up what was going on.
[01:22:51]  And they, like, told the skinheads, like, this isn't happening here because it was clearly going to be a.
[01:22:56]  A brawl, yeah, and so, um, it just so then they were suspicious about who was like letting Antifa know, you know, what where their location was, and so like their security and their security was being run by these guys called the Hammer Skins.
[01:23:09]  The Hammer Skins are like a they well, they were and I believe still are like a national skinhead organization.
[01:23:16]  Their symbol is the crossed hammers from Pink Floyd, the wall, those red and black hammers, anyway.
[01:23:22]  And so, they were running security, and like nobody, nobody knew me, I didn't have an inn, you know, and I also didn't have any tattoos.
[01:23:29]  Right.
[01:23:29]  And both of those things came out.
[01:23:30]  Did you get one just for the.
[01:23:31]  I did after that.
[01:23:33]  I actually, after that story came out, I got a hold of the organizers because I think I wanted to get a quote from them from the story and did and was like, hey, that guy, you know, David from Alaska, that was me.
[01:23:44]  I'm not really a skinhead.
[01:23:45]  I'm a reporter.
[01:23:45]  I'm doing a story.
[01:23:46]  And I think they actually did, contrary to what I just told you, give me a couple quotes about the event because they knew I'd gotten in.
[01:23:53]  And they were like, yeah, we knew there was something off about you.
[01:23:57]  We didn't think you were a cop.
[01:23:59]  But like you weren't reading right, and I was like, Well, what was it?
[01:24:02]  And they were like, Well, you didn't have any tattoos, you know.
[01:24:04]  Like, were they mad?
[01:24:06]  They weren't mad, they were actually kind of like impressed.
[01:24:09]  Why, dude, you've got some balls, you know.
[01:24:12]  Like, you know, you would have gotten curb stomped if we'd figured it out, right?
[01:24:16]  You know, and I was like, Well, are you gonna come after me now?
[01:24:19]  And they're like, No, um, and I, you know, I think I treated them fairly in the story, like, I didn't ridicule them, you know.
[01:24:25]  What did you learn about them?
[01:24:28]  Well, I'll answer that by saying what I've learned about.
[01:24:32]  Skinheads more broadly, not just from that one story, is that a lot of skinheads grow up in the movement.
[01:24:38]  I'll just say neo Nazis, okay?
[01:24:41]  A lot of them grow up in the movement, but a lot of them are just like island of lost children that are just looking for a place to fucking belong.
[01:24:49]  And it's like they took a wrong turn at the Renaissance Fair or something, you know?
[01:24:53]  And they wound up like, because there is something like very seductive about that feeling of intense community based on your racial identity.
[01:25:06]  Okay.
[01:25:07]  Like there is something like reassuring or empowering about being part of a skinhead set.
[01:25:17]  And I also found out that when I, one of the things I did before I went to the actual Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest is I just went out in Denver dressed out as a skinhead by myself.
[01:25:27]  And I like, I realized like people were fucking intimidated.
[01:25:30]  You know, I'm not a small guy, but just walking into bars dressed, fully kitted out, bomber jacket, Dark Martins.
[01:25:39]  You know, the whole thing, white power shirt, like I could see people were like, fuck.
[01:25:44]  And the reason they were is not, is because they, I was representing them that I'm part of something a lot bigger than just me.
[01:25:49]  And if you fuck with me, you're fucking with me and, you know, presumably my whole, my whole crew.
[01:25:55]  And, you know, and so I think if you're like somebody that doesn't, you know, have a lot going on in your life and you're like looking for an identity, there's something very attractive about that.
[01:26:07]  What did I learn about him?
[01:26:08]  I learned that even then, and this is like the early 2000s, like that subculture is a lot broader.
[01:26:14]  And better funded and organized than most people understand.
[01:26:18]  When I say that culture, I don't just mean skinheads.
[01:26:19]  I mean more broadly, like the white supremacist kind of underworld.
[01:26:23]  It's funded.
[01:26:25]  Well, that they've got dough.
[01:26:28]  Okay.
[01:26:29]  You know, like, like rich parents, you mean, or they're, they're, they have careers.
[01:26:34]  They're kind of living two lives.
[01:26:37]  Or they, this is kind of like baked in, is this baked into every part of their life or do they kind of hide it from some people?
[01:26:41]  And I think it varies a lot.
[01:26:43]  But when I say that they're funded, yeah, let me, that, um, like, like a lot of it's merchandise sales.
[01:26:50]  And also they, they, they smuggle a lot of shit to Europe.
[01:26:53]  And make a lot of money that way because, like, stuff because of the First Amendment.
[01:26:56]  Ukraine has a lot of Nazis, right?
[01:27:00]  Russia does for sure.
[01:27:01]  Really?
[01:27:02]  Yeah.
[01:27:03]  But in Europe, in France, for example, Germany, like, hate rock, like, symbols, the shirts, the flags, all that shit's banned.
[01:27:11]  You know, it's illegal.
[01:27:11]  Right.
[01:27:12]  So you can smuggle that shit over there and make, you know, a good amount of money.
[01:27:16]  Whoa.
[01:27:17]  Stuff that's cheap here because it's protected by the First Amendment.
[01:27:20]  Yeah.
[01:27:22]  This dude, have you heard of that guy named Daryl Davis, the black dude who befriended the Nazis?
[01:27:27]  Yeah.
[01:27:28]  Yeah, when I was talking to him, he was saying that the first time he ever discovered racism, because he grew up, he said, overseas, like he was going to school overseas.
[01:27:39]  And he would come back here and he was doing some Boy Scout thing, like doing some march, some public march, and some dude threw a fucking rock at his head.
[01:27:46]  And he went home and he was asking his mom questions about it.
[01:27:50]  And his mom was explaining to him why they did it.
[01:27:52]  And that was his first encounter.
[01:27:55]  He was maybe 10 years old of racism.
[01:27:57]  He had no concept of it whatsoever.
[01:28:01]  You know, that's what got him so interested in the KKK and all that.
[01:28:05]  And like, went out and started going to bars, trying to meet these KKK members, and ended up befriending a bunch of them, getting them to leave the clan for good.
[01:28:15]  And like, I think he said the biggest common denominator between all of them was that none of them had been outside the zip code they were born in.
[01:28:26]  Like, they were all born and raised in this little town, and none of them had left the country, let alone their fucking zip code.
[01:28:33]  So I thought that kind of.
[01:28:35]  Made sense to me.
[01:28:36]  You know, if you're surrounded your whole life by this like certain ideology or people that have one way of viewing the world, you're never exposed to any alternative view of anything, then maybe that's just what happens to you.
[01:28:52]  Yeah.
[01:28:54]  I think white nationalist groups now, I mean, this is more than 20 years ago that we're talking that I was doing this shit.
[01:28:58]  I mean, it's changed a lot.
[01:29:00]  I mean, those groups are a lot more online based now than they were, you know, in the early 2000s, and they're a lot more overt, they're less underground.
[01:29:09]  And I think they feel a lot more comfortable with publicly representing that ideology.
[01:29:14]  Yeah, I've never run into it in the real world before.
[01:29:17]  I've never run into anything like that.
[01:29:19]  I know there's like a lot of clan around.
[01:29:21]  Like there's like little pockets of Florida where you can find like the clan, like where they, there's bars and stuff they go to.
[01:29:27]  And I'm sure they do fucking meetings in the woods somewhere around here.
[01:29:30]  But like, yeah, I don't know.
[01:29:32]  I just never, I mean, I'm not, I'm not out searching for it either.
[01:29:36]  But yeah, it's like for me, you only, I only hear about it like on message boards and things like that.
[01:29:42]  But it's, it's just wild to hear this.
[01:29:43]  They're like still doing their thing, you know.
[01:29:48]  Well, the tightest spot I got in, I got in a couple, but one of them was at an event in Arizona called Aryan Fest.
[01:29:57]  And there's always traditionally been a lot of tension between like neo Nazis and the Klan, you know.
[01:30:05]  But this was like a sort of a pan white supremacist gathering.
[01:30:09]  So there were, there were.
[01:30:09]  What's the diff?
[01:30:10]  What's the, why is there a rift between them?
[01:30:12]  They don't like punk.
[01:30:15]  I think this like skinheads, like it's part of its regional.
[01:30:18]  Yeah.
[01:30:18]  But I think like the skinheads, like kind of regard like the clan as like, you know, they had their day and they fucked it up.
[01:30:24]  Yeah.
[01:30:24]  And just kind of look at them as like, there's also an age difference.
[01:30:28]  Like generally, like, you know, skinheads are younger, right?
[01:30:32]  Yeah.
[01:30:32]  Or neo Nazi guys.
[01:30:35]  But there was a clavern there at Aryan Fest, and one of the clan guys just called me out, you know, and I think I had one of those like disposable Kodak cameras I was taking photos with, you know, which was okay.
[01:30:49]  I wasn't the only one taking photos.
[01:30:50]  Yeah.
[01:30:51]  And I think I just took one photo too many or something.
[01:30:53]  And he called me out and accused me of being like from the anti defamation league.
[01:30:58]  And I had to just get right in his fucking face.
[01:31:01]  I mean, it was just one of those things where like I knew if I just pretended to ignore it, you know, because he was kind of making comments off the side of his mouth at me.
[01:31:08]  That your ADL guy?
[01:31:10]  Yeah.
[01:31:10]  Yeah.
[01:31:11]  I took a photo and he was like, oh, I guess we'll see that on the ADL website next week or something like that.
[01:31:16]  Yeah.
[01:31:16]  You know, and I knew that if I just pretended like I didn't hear it or I tried to like laugh it off or something, That wouldn't be right.
[01:31:26]  That would be suspicious.
[01:31:27]  That's not what a real dude would do.
[01:31:28]  I just had to get right up in his fucking face and just call him out and call the Klan a bunch of fucking posers, a bunch of sheetheads and shit.
[01:31:37]  Fucking sheethead, you know.
[01:31:38]  Don't ask, yeah.
[01:31:42]  Be like.
[01:31:44]  I mean, did you find anything, were you able to find any humanity in those guys?
[01:31:50]  Was there any sort of soft spot you could find for them or you kind of understood them from any kind of.
[01:31:58]  Perspective or where you felt bad for them, or like you could understand.
[01:32:03]  I didn't know so much with the skinheads, but there was like an organization called the National Socialist Movement, and they were like, you know, straight up brown shirts, swastika armbands, like dressing like they were from the Nazis.
[01:32:16]  Like they were Nazis.

=== Machine Gun Swami Gurus (16:14) ===

[01:32:17]  Yeah.
[01:32:18]  And I just remember at some of their rallies, like running into these kids that were just like, seemed to have no idea what the fuck they were doing there, what this group was really about, and just seemed like total lost souls.
[01:32:27]  You know, they'd just somehow gotten wrapped up into this.
[01:32:30]  Or you just want to like kind of take them under your wing and just get them out of this shit.
[01:32:33]  Yeah.
[01:32:34]  So I did have some empathy for them.
[01:32:36]  You know, but most of the skinheads, like, I mean, but in the skinhead movement, like, it's really easy to become a leader.
[01:32:45]  Like, if you've got like, you know, decently high IQ and some organizational skills, you can become a big shot in that movement pretty easily.
[01:32:52]  The same way, like, if you're just a mediocre musician, if you start making hate rock or white power punk, like, all of a sudden you've got a fan base, right?
[01:33:01]  You can actually sell records or, you know, Now, downloads, right?
[01:33:06]  And have a fan base and like tour the world, you know, and have groupies and the whole fucking rock experience.
[01:33:12]  Point being, like with some of the leaders, I was always wondering, like, how much do they actually like believe this shit?
[01:33:16]  How much of it is just like power for power's sake?
[01:33:19]  And they saw that this was a way to get people to like follow them.
[01:33:24]  Right.
[01:33:24]  And then the other people just trying to fit into a crowd, you know, being misfits and just trying to find someone else, trying to find a place to fit in.
[01:33:31]  Yeah.
[01:33:32]  You know, it's like prison.
[01:33:34]  You know, in prisons, you're, you know, people, You have to join one of the clubs, right?
[01:33:39]  You have to either be with the blacks, you could be with the skinheads, you could be with the, or like the one group you never want to be a part of is the chomos who everyone fucking tries to kill all the time.
[01:33:50]  And it's like, it's like Lord of the Flies, you know?
[01:33:56]  Hold that thought.
[01:33:56]  I got to get pee real quick.
[01:33:57]  Cool.
[01:33:57]  We'll be right back, Nate.
[01:33:58]  Man, I hit this point recently where I just felt off.
[01:34:02]  Same lifestyle, same workout schedule, same diet, but after 2 p.m., I was just dragging.
[01:34:07]  One of my guests said it sounded like a testosterone issue and suggested this natural pill, which led me to Mars Men.
[01:34:14]  It's designed to support your body's natural testosterone function without synthetics or needles, just ingredients like Tonkat Oli, Shila G, zinc, and boron.
[01:34:24]  I instantly noticed more consistent energy, better workouts, and clearer focus.
[01:34:29]  Not a spike, but feeling normal again.
[01:34:31]  It's made in the US, third party tested, and it comes with a 90 day money back guarantee.
[01:34:36]  And for a limited time, our listeners can get a whopping 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts at mengotomars.com.
[01:34:46]  That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out.
[01:34:53]  And it's now on Amazon.
[01:34:54]  After you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them.
[01:34:56]  And please support the show by telling them we sent you.
[01:35:00]  Locked and loaded for the Lord.
[01:35:02]  Reverend Moon, who died in 2012, his church split apart and two of his sons established the new congregation.
[01:35:09]  And their followers are eagerly awaiting the end times and they are armed.
[01:35:14]  It's called the Sanctuary Church.
[01:35:18]  Um,.
[01:35:19]  Here's their members.
[01:35:20]  This is what their members look like, bro.
[01:35:22]  They look, look, I mean, look, that lady looks happy.
[01:35:26]  Like, that's how they go to church.
[01:35:29]  Where is this?
[01:35:30]  This is in Pennsylvania.
[01:35:33]  Dude, we might need to go investigate them.
[01:35:36]  We should sign up.
[01:35:37]  Attendees hold rifles.
[01:35:43]  And this is their blessing ceremony.
[01:35:46]  Look at that, dude.
[01:35:48]  Like, how do you end up there?
[01:35:50]  You know, like how do you get recruited to go to that?
[01:35:52]  That's what I want to know.
[01:35:54]  Like, how do you come up, like, meet somebody and get convinced that this would be a great idea to go here every other, every once a week with your fucking AR 15 and await the end times?
[01:36:12]  It's wild to me.
[01:36:14]  It's wild to me.
[01:36:15]  You know, this right here, where we are right now, is like the hub of Scientology.
[01:36:19]  This is like, this town is where Scientology all started.
[01:36:21]  Right.
[01:36:22]  Down the road, right?
[01:36:22]  Yeah, the church is like right down the street from here.
[01:36:24]  Yeah, the dude who created L. Ron Hubbard had this ship that was parked right out there when he was alive, and that's how he tried to escape and tried to avoid all the tax evasion.
[01:36:34]  This is one of their e meters, this is what they use to do like technological exorcisms on people.
[01:36:39]  They would, are you familiar with Scientology at all?
[01:36:42]  Yes, I've seen the South Park episode, that's all you need to know.
[01:36:47]  No, I am.
[01:36:48]  Yeah, yeah, a guy I worked with at the New Times in Phoenix, Tony Ortega.
[01:36:54]  He's done a lot of investigative reporting on the.
[01:36:56]  How do I know that name?
[01:36:57]  He's done a lot of like reporting on Scientology.
[01:37:00]  And like every few years, man, I get a call from somebody presenting themselves as like a private investigator or a filmmaker or something.
[01:37:09]  And they're trying to dig up dirt on him.
[01:37:11]  And they find me because they just know that I worked with him, you know, in the 90s at a paper in Phoenix.
[01:37:16]  It's crazy.
[01:37:17]  They're still out to get him.
[01:37:19]  Yeah.
[01:37:20]  Tony Ortega.
[01:37:21]  Yeah, I definitely know that name.
[01:37:24]  The Scientologists are, they're, they're, uh, They're ruthless with like the amount of intimidation and stalking they'll do, yeah.
[01:37:31]  That's what they're doing to him, yeah.
[01:37:32]  They're always just trying to dig up any, you know, any dirt I have him on the day.
[01:37:35]  So I just try and like mislead him, yeah.
[01:37:39]  I mean, you hear of all like the crazy, sinister, evil cults that have bubbled up in America over the years.
[01:37:46]  Scientology is the one that was able to get away with the most.
[01:37:49]  They were able to get away with being tax exempt by attacking the IRS and having all their members sue the file lawsuits against the IRS and eventually having them cave and like.
[01:37:59]  You know, I hear their membership is dwindling, but like, dude, you walk up, you drive up and down the streets around here, they're everywhere.
[01:38:06]  There's young people that are still in it that walk up and down the streets, part of the Sea Org.
[01:38:10]  The sea orgs, like the faction of it, who are like the workers who basically get paid nothing.
[01:38:15]  They basically have to work for free, clean toilets, and try to recruit people and do these auditing sessions on people.
[01:38:22]  And it's just like, God, you're these like this the other day.
[01:38:26]  I was driving by and this girl, she looked like she was maybe 21 years old, you know.
[01:38:31]  And I just wondered, like, how did you end up here?
[01:38:34]  Can you spot them?
[01:38:35]  Like, you can spot them for sure.
[01:38:37]  Yeah.
[01:38:37]  How do you spot them?
[01:38:38]  They wear this certain outfit, they wear this, like, this, um, A vest that's like this color, this like maroon color, with like a white long sleeve button up collar dress shirt with this maroon vest they wear.
[01:38:52]  Sometimes it's like a royal blue vest and they all walk together and they look like robots.
[01:39:01]  One of my friends.
[01:39:02]  So, like, another weird thing is like there's a bunch of big companies around here.
[01:39:07]  Like, all of the big Scientologists around here are very wealthy.
[01:39:14]  Most of the wealthy people.
[01:39:15]  in this area are Scientologists for some reason.
[01:39:19]  They're all super rich, like the high level ones.
[01:39:22]  And they own like a lot of big businesses around here.
[01:39:25]  And one of my friends worked for one of the businesses that was owned by Scientologists.
[01:39:29]  And me and him were getting lunch one day and I was like, dude, I'm like, I'm like, this town is infested with Scientologists, right?
[01:39:37]  I'm like, I'm sure a lot of them are nice people, whatever.
[01:39:39]  Like they don't bother anybody, but like, how do you, how do you note?
[01:39:43]  Can you tell like who is and who isn't?
[01:39:44]  And he's like, oh, yeah.
[01:39:45]  He's like, I can tell you.
[01:39:46]  I know exactly.
[01:39:47]  It's easy for me to spot a Scientologist anywhere.
[01:39:49]  I'm like, are there any here with us in this fucking restaurant we're in?
[01:39:53]  He's like, yeah.
[01:39:54]  It's like, there's one right in this room right now.
[01:39:56]  I'm like, what?
[01:39:57]  How do you know?
[01:39:58]  Like, there was no one dressed weird.
[01:39:59]  Like, everyone was dressed pretty normal.
[01:40:01]  He's like, you just look into their eyes and it's just, it's like a robotic vibe you'll get from them.
[01:40:08]  And I looked around and sure as shit, I could spot him.
[01:40:11]  I'm like, is it that guy?
[01:40:12]  He's like, yep, that's the guy.
[01:40:13]  And you could just tell, like, there was something about the guy, the way the guy carried himself, and like the look in his eyes was just like, robotic and um, I you know one of somebody told me that one of the reasons they think that they were able to maintain for so long is because they never became a sex cult, like they were never.
[01:40:33]  They were never associated with any like sexual abuse or anything like that.
[01:40:36]  You know, and I it makes me wonder, like was that on purpose?
[01:40:40]  Like was there an executive decision made like early on?
[01:40:42]  Like we're never going to do any kind of like sexual depravity or like sexually assault people, like every other cult does right, so maybe that's, maybe that's why they were able to Get by for so long.
[01:40:54]  But apparently, their numbers are dwindling.
[01:40:56]  Apparently, it's dying a slow death.
[01:40:59]  It's crazy that also, like, L. Ron Hubbard was best friends with Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley and all these people from back in the day, all these occultists.
[01:41:13]  It's bonkers, man.
[01:41:14]  You know, I did a series like a couple of years ago.
[01:41:17]  It was on Peacock called Krishna's that was about the Hare Krishna.
[01:41:20]  It was about organized crime within the Hare Krishna movement.
[01:41:24]  You know, and I spent a lot of time with Hare Krishna's, and I gotta say, like, they did not have that, like, you know, robotic vibe at all.
[01:41:35]  Like, some of the happiest, most well adjusted people I've ever met are Krishna devotees.
[01:41:40]  What is that?
[01:41:41]  Can you explain what that group is?
[01:41:43]  Yeah, so it started in the U.S.
[01:41:46]  I mean, their sort of spiritual tradition is like ancient, it like far predates Christianity, goes back to the Vedas, like the oldest religious texts in the world known.
[01:41:57]  But it came to the US with this, I guess you could say, guru from India, Prabhupada, who came in, and his timing was perfect.
[01:42:04]  Like, came over in the mid 60s, you know, just at the time as the, he just surfed the wave of the counter culture, like, perfectly.
[01:42:11]  Like, had, like, you know, wow, you know, kind of events, I guess you could say, in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
[01:42:19]  And, like, like, George Harrison of the Beatles got super into it and stuff.
[01:42:23]  He, like, sent over a group of devotees to London to, like, recruit the Beatles in the movement.
[01:42:28]  But, you know, I went into it, like, thinking, like, are the Hari Christians really a cult?
[01:42:33]  I came away thinking, like, No, but there was this one when Prabhupada, the founder of what we call the Hare Krishnas in the US, when he died, he appointed all male, some of his top disciples, to carry on the movement.
[01:42:50]  And one of them was this guy named Keith Hamm, but his Christian name was Kirtanananda.
[01:42:55]  And he started this commune in the mountains of West Virginia that's still there called New Vrindavan.
[01:43:02]  Vrindavan is a city in India that's the birthplace of.
[01:43:06]  Krishna in that mythology or belief system.
[01:43:08]  Yeah.
[01:43:09]  And he started this commune in West Virginia called New Vrindavan.
[01:43:14]  And speaking of the sex stuff, I mean, that's what took him down.
[01:43:17]  So he was like abusing the kids, you know, in the commune.
[01:43:21]  That's what eventually, you know, got him dethroned.
[01:43:27]  Is that him?
[01:43:28]  Yeah, that's him.
[01:43:29]  He looks white.
[01:43:31]  Yeah, he is.
[01:43:32]  Oh, he is.
[01:43:32]  Yeah.
[01:43:33]  Yeah.
[01:43:33]  All the guys that carried it, like, Prabhupada was Indian, but all of his devotees that carried on the movement after he died were white guys, Americans.
[01:43:45]  I think maybe one Canadian.
[01:43:47]  Anyway, this guy's like Keith Hamm or Kirtanananda.
[01:43:50]  In Vrindavan, in India, there's this, his tomb is there, and he still has devout followers of Kirtananda that live around his tomb.
[01:44:03]  There's these big buildings that look kind of half finished.
[01:44:05]  And I went to Vrindavan to film for this series.
[01:44:10]  And got access to Kirtan Ananda's tomb and was like interviewing the guy that kind of keeps it.
[01:44:15]  And, you know, there's candles and pictures and shit.
[01:44:18]  And I kind of asked one question too many.
[01:44:20]  And all of a sudden, like, all these like devotees of Kirtan Ananda started coming out of this building.
[01:44:24]  And I was just there with like one camera guy and me and our like, you know, interpreter.
[01:44:29]  And the interpreter was like, it's time to go now.
[01:44:30]  It's time to go now.
[01:44:31]  Like, you get the fuck out of there.
[01:44:33]  Whoa.
[01:44:34]  Yeah.
[01:44:34]  Cause he's a real like controversial figure.
[01:44:37]  He's kind of like officially excommunicated by the.
[01:44:40]  By the Hare Krishnas, but still has kind of adherence within the movement.
[01:44:46]  So, what do the Hare Krishnas believe?
[01:44:48]  Like, what is their primary belief?
[01:44:49]  Like, what sets them apart?
[01:44:50]  Well, they believe in reincarnation, karma, you know, akin to Hindu.
[01:44:58]  You know, I'm not a religious scholar, so I don't want to like misrepresent their belief system.
[01:45:02]  But yeah, they definitely believe in like the cycle of reincarnation.
[01:45:07]  And they believe in dancing a lot.
[01:45:12]  Dancing.
[01:45:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:45:13]  I mean, the Hare Krishna is like the old, like, you know, like that comedy in the 80s, like airplane or whatever.
[01:45:19]  Like, there was the running joke about the Krishnas in the airports.
[01:45:22]  You used to see them in airports in the U.S. a lot.
[01:45:24]  Like, in the 80s, they'd be like selling flowers and books and shit.
[01:45:27]  Or you'd see them like in Venice Beach in California.
[01:45:29]  Like, they call them kirtans and they're like sort of like dancing, drumming ceremonies, chanting.
[01:45:35]  Yeah.
[01:45:36]  Wow.
[01:45:38]  And what?
[01:45:38]  And so, so, so you just like discovered one day you, you, you became aware of them and you went.
[01:45:44]  And when you embedded with them, you didn't have to, like, you were an owner.
[01:45:47]  I stayed.
[01:45:48]  I stayed at the commune at New Vrindavan in West Virginia.
[01:45:51]  I mean, where a lot of, like, evil shit went down, like, in the 80s and early 90s.
[01:45:55]  Like this guy, Kirtan Ananda, he had, you know, basically this Vietnam vet that was like his enforcer that would just kill people on his orders, like people that started to challenge his authority, you know?
[01:46:11]  And he wasn't the only like guru that went bad.
[01:46:13]  There was another one guy who became known as the machine gun swami who was like into like, you know, running guns and shit.
[01:46:21]  Like some of these guys really went to the dark side because they had all that power.
[01:46:24]  Because, like, if you're a guru, you're basically like a direct conduit to the divine.
[01:46:30]  And so you had these, you know.
[01:46:32]  I mean, I think Prabhupada was like really in a jam.
[01:46:34]  He'd started this movement that had grown very big, very fast in the US.
[01:46:41]  And then he died, or you know, on his deathbed, he kind of like appointed these guys to carry it on, but they were all just like young dudes in their 20s.
[01:46:47]  And then all of a sudden they're gurus, you know.
[01:46:49]  And some of them kind of carried it on in a righteous way.
[01:46:52]  And some of them, you know, went to the dark side.
[01:46:54]  All that power went to their head.
[01:46:57]  And how did the sexual abuse part get involved?
[01:46:59]  Like, how about you turn it on to a I mean, you know, and so he was, you know, and the, you know, the Hare Krishna is like, as a movement, have had problems akin to the Catholic Church.
[01:47:13]  Although I'd say, like, unlike the Catholic Church, they sort of confronted it head on, you know, a decade or so ago.
[01:47:20]  But Kirtan Ananda was one of the worst examples of like child abuse within that, you know, religion.
[01:47:25]  And he just had, he had, you know, several hundred, I think, yeah, several hundred like followers that lived on this isolated, Lived in this isolated commune up in the mountains in West Virginia.
[01:47:37]  The closest city is Pittsburgh, but it's like kind of, it's out there, man.
[01:47:41]  You know, it's, it's, especially in the 80s, they were really kind of cut off.
[01:47:45]  And it was a place that, you know, if you were a fuck up in a Krishna temple in Los Angeles or Denver, wherever, they would send you to New Vrindavan.
[01:47:55]  So Kirtananda could kind of like whip you into shape.
[01:47:57]  So it was also kind of like a lot of like difficult personalities, I guess you could say, were sort of funneled to him.
[01:48:04]  Yeah.
[01:48:05]  You know, it was, it was in some ways, it was kind of a dumping ground for the movement.
[01:48:09]  Um, and but to this day, there's this temple there, uh, that's just like it looks like a like a like the Taj Mahal or something.
[01:48:17]  I mean, it's incredible.
[01:48:17]  You're just driving on these winding roads in West Virginia, and uh, there's just this this palace, this like tribute to Prabhupada that's there that was like basically built by the devotees, and it's incredible.

=== Reality Show Boom Era (06:23) ===

[01:48:31]  Whoa, yeah, is this one of your most recent movies?
[01:48:34]  Yeah, yeah, it's on Peacock, it's called Krishna's.
[01:48:36]  Yeah, it came out a couple years ago.
[01:48:40]  How long do you typically spend on these projects?
[01:48:43]  A little over a year.
[01:48:44]  A little over a year.
[01:48:45]  Yeah, sometimes I'm working on more than one at a time.
[01:48:47]  You know, I'm always usually making one and then trying to figure out what's next, you know, trying to sell the next thing.
[01:48:52]  But like, yeah.
[01:48:53]  Yeah.
[01:48:54]  So sometimes I'm working on two at once.
[01:48:56]  But in terms of one project, it's, I'd say it nets out at about a year to a year and a half.
[01:49:01]  How involved do you get with like the editing and stuff?
[01:49:04]  Very.
[01:49:05]  Yeah.
[01:49:05]  Very much.
[01:49:06]  Yeah.
[01:49:06]  I have a really old school method.
[01:49:07]  I mean, I take all the like interviews, all the archival material we have, and I actually write what's called a radio script, which is a really like, Kind of frankly, antiquated method of doing things.
[01:49:17]  And I have to have editors that are like, will work with me on that because I don't like to work on machines.
[01:49:21]  I like to work with paper.
[01:49:24]  Okay.
[01:49:24]  Like, even sometimes pen and paper.
[01:49:26]  And I just think that I'm just, I'm not exactly a Luddite, but let's just say, you know, I prefer to write at least on screen when I'm creating.
[01:49:34]  And so I write a script and then give it to the editors and be like, okay, take this part of the interview and then this piece of archival and this B roll and then like actually give them a script and then we collaborate and, you know, mix it up and stuff like that.
[01:49:44]  Yeah.
[01:49:45]  Yeah, for me, like, for when I was filming Deck Hands, I remember it sat on my hard drive for probably two years before I ever touched it.
[01:49:54]  Cause I was like kind of scared to go watch it again.
[01:49:57]  Cause I knew it was on the hard drives and I like, I like the experience was so overwhelming.
[01:50:03]  I was just like, you know, I don't like for me, it was just the, the, the idea of attacking all of that footage and trying to mold it into something just was so daunting.
[01:50:16]  And I was like, I'm a ferocious procrastinator.
[01:50:21]  And I just, you know, I didn't want to fucking dive into it.
[01:50:25]  A, because it was so dark.
[01:50:26]  I was like, I don't really want to go back into that.
[01:50:29]  And like, B, I knew it was going to be such a big project to like actually try to tackle and wrangle into something that made sense and that was cohesive.
[01:50:38]  So, like, when I finally started, like, when I first started like putting it together, you know, you kind of like, oh, okay, this is kind of cool.
[01:50:47]  And then I started to piece more stuff together, piece more pieces together.
[01:50:51]  And then I like, I kind of like, I realized, okay, I'm missing a lot of, I'm missing a lot of transitions here.
[01:50:57]  I got like a lot of cool, like little pocket stories, but now I got to fucking go back all these years later and like, I got to fill in these gaps to make this make sense, you know, and like to actually tell the story.
[01:51:08]  So like, that was the kind of way, the kind of like the way I did it.
[01:51:12]  And for me, like the music was a huge part of it too.
[01:51:16]  Like the mute, like it was kind of like a music, it was kind of like a creepy music video.
[01:51:21]  Like, there was no narration, it was like it was more of kind of like the music playing in with like the scenery and the ambiance of it, kind of just like made you feel a certain way, you know?
[01:51:33]  Yeah, yeah, it was just kind of like a dystopian music video in my mind, which I like enjoyed doing.
[01:51:39]  I used to like doing music videos when I was younger.
[01:51:43]  On deck ends, did you have collaborators, or did you just like cut that yourself?
[01:51:45]  I did it all myself, everything myself.
[01:51:47]  Yeah, that's one of the things I like about um making docs is like it's a collaborative, like team effort.
[01:51:53]  I mean, when I was doing just Gonzo print journalism.
[01:51:55]  I mean, every once in a while I'd be paired with a photographer on assignment, but for the most part, it was just like a total lone wolf, you know?
[01:52:01]  Yeah.
[01:52:02]  And I really like working with crews, like in the field, you know, camera crews, and working with the editors.
[01:52:07]  I mean, I do write those scripts, but then I like sitting in the editing bay with an editor and just like kicking ideas around, actually moving shit around and stuff.
[01:52:14]  It's like, it's a very satisfying creative process.
[01:52:16]  Yeah.
[01:52:17]  Yeah.
[01:52:18]  It was just like the part of it for me was just like jumping from, you know, in the middle of that, like being on a boat with a bunch of dudes, like, Doing blow and like watching their porno collection.
[01:52:30]  I think going home and having dinner with my family that night, it's just like, God, how am I going to do this forever?
[01:52:36]  Like, it's fucking crazy, you know?
[01:52:39]  And it was like, it was really, it was really like, it felt good to be able to accomplish that task.
[01:52:51]  But I don't know.
[01:52:52]  I guess I just wasn't cut out.
[01:52:53]  Like, what's the next thing going to be?
[01:52:55]  Like, how am I going to go find and sustain this?
[01:52:58]  You know, forever because I came from the world of like before I started doing that kind of stuff, like on YouTube, I was kind of like trying to do what you're doing now.
[01:53:07]  I was trying to like do like documentaries and like real documentaries, you know, and like sell them to like networks or whatever.
[01:53:14]  This was kind of like before streaming.
[01:53:15]  I started doing that like in the boom of like the reality show type thing when like Duck Dynasty and like Pawn Stars were becoming big shows, like the reality craze, and like trying to do shit that I thought was cool.
[01:53:29]  And like, I was never able to get anything off the ground.
[01:53:33]  And, um, like that's when I started like just digging into like my archives.
[01:53:37]  And it's like, I'm just going to throw all this shit on YouTube and just see what happens.
[01:53:41]  And, you know, that's when shit started to stick because, like, I got a really bad taste in my mouth from, like, working with those production companies and, like, trying to, like, deal with, like, you know, shopping it to networks and to streamers like that.
[01:53:57]  It was, like, I was, like, constantly riding this emotional roller coaster of, like, my fate was in somebody else's hands, you know?
[01:54:03]  Yeah.
[01:54:04]  And you just got to get used to fucking people telling you that it's, like, right at the finish line and then they just kick your fucking teeth in.
[01:54:10]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:54:11]  Over and over again.
[01:54:12]  I felt like I was just getting put on a shelf with a bunch of other stuff.
[01:54:15]  Yeah.
[01:54:15]  You know, and like they're just, they're, they're intentionally the parasites that are in that business.
[01:54:22]  They're, they intentionally try to play on your emotions to keep you strung along, you know, and in that little shopping agreement that they have you locked into.
[01:54:30]  Yeah.
[01:54:30]  Yeah.
[01:54:31]  I mean, I'm fortunate in that I'm always trying.
[01:54:33]  I mean, I'm always trying to develop my own ideas, but I'm fortunate in that like if somebody has like a gonzo idea, they'll, they'll come to me.
[01:54:41]  Like with narco menonites, There's this filmmaker, Sherry Finbo, who's Canadian, but she lives in Australia.
[01:54:48]  And she'd figured out this story and had sold it.
[01:54:51]  And she was like, hey, you know, I've sold this story to Crave, the streamer in Canada.

=== Epstein Files Intelligence (06:47) ===

[01:54:55]  It sounds like something you might be interested in.
[01:54:56]  I was like, what is it?
[01:54:57]  And she's like, it's about a Mennonite drug cartel.
[01:54:59]  And I was like, bingo, you know, I'm in.
[01:55:02]  Right.
[01:55:02]  Same thing with the Krishnas.
[01:55:04]  Like, I didn't have to sell that show.
[01:55:05]  A production company had sold that show to Peacock and then they, you know, wanted somebody to make it.
[01:55:09]  And they were like, well, this seems like something Holt House might be interested in.
[01:55:13]  So, I've gotten to that place, which is good, but I know it's, you know, I can't tell you how many times the last couple of years, especially with all of this like consolidation going on in the industry.
[01:55:23]  Yeah.
[01:55:24]  Everybody's nervous as fuck about AI.
[01:55:25]  Yeah.
[01:55:26]  You know, most recently, everyone's like wondering, like, this Ellison deal is going to go through, you know, when Netflix was in a bidding war with them and that dust still hasn't settled.
[01:55:35]  Like, people just aren't buying a lot of stuff right now.
[01:55:38]  It's a tough time.
[01:55:38]  So I'm fortunate to be in that place where people are coming to me with shows that they've already sold and they just need help making them.
[01:55:45]  So you don't have to.
[01:55:46]  Necessarily go kicking down doors and shaking people down.
[01:55:49]  You're still doing the hustle all the time.
[01:55:50]  Are you?
[01:55:50]  You're still trying to find stuff yourself.
[01:55:52]  Yeah.
[01:55:52]  How do you do that?
[01:55:54]  You're just like, do you have like a network of people you're constantly talking to?
[01:55:57]  Yeah.
[01:55:58]  I do have a good network of, you know, my secret to my success has been working both sides of the street, meaning cops and crooks.
[01:56:05]  So I've got really good sources among law enforcement and really good sources on the other side of things, you know?
[01:56:12]  So I'm always talking to them about stories.
[01:56:14]  And a lot of it's just, you know, just fucking reading everything I can every day.
[01:56:18]  Yeah.
[01:56:19]  You know, about what's going on in the world right now, but also like, you know, that library of books you have outside this room, you know, shit like that.
[01:56:25]  Just constantly digging through.
[01:56:27]  Yeah.
[01:56:27]  Turning over rocks, just looking under rocks.
[01:56:30]  Exactly.
[01:56:31]  Yeah.
[01:56:31]  It's usually like the most interesting shit is the shit that's not being reported on by anyone.
[01:56:35]  Stuff that you're not going to find in the news, you know?
[01:56:37]  Right.
[01:56:37]  Stuff more like the stuff you find behind the fucking 7 Eleven.
[01:56:40]  Yeah.
[01:56:41]  Yeah, man.
[01:56:41]  The whole, the fucking, like, some of the stuff that's going on right now is just, it seems like, it just seems like supernatural.
[01:56:51]  shit like bubbling up into reality where it's like you don't even know what's real, especially with like what gets reported on with like mainstream news and like this whole thing about the this Epstein files thing.
[01:57:02]  I don't know how much you paid attention to that.
[01:57:05]  Oh, I pay a lot of attention.
[01:57:06]  But it's like it's it's one of the most insane things to me is that that stuff can be made public and and admitted to by the DOJ and like nobody cares.
[01:57:19]  It seems like nobody cares other than a few journalists.
[01:57:23]  It's really disheartening.
[01:57:24]  I think part of it's everybody's attention is so, you know, discombobulated.
[01:57:29]  Like it just seems like there's so much to try and pay attention to right now.
[01:57:33]  But that story is fucking crazy.
[01:57:35]  Man, it just seems clear to me that he was some kind of Israeli intelligence agent and was gathering blackmail material.
[01:57:44]  I mean, he was both a pimp, but he was also running honey traps.
[01:57:49]  I mean, it's not even conspiracy theory.
[01:57:52]  It just seems like that's been reported.
[01:57:54]  I mean, the dots are right there, big, giant, 24 point dots to connect.
[01:57:59]  Yeah.
[01:58:00]  And all of these crazy QAnon Pizzagate people are being vindicated.
[01:58:05]  The people who we were all making fun of a few years ago.
[01:58:08]  Well, they didn't have it exactly right.
[01:58:10]  They had it pretty damn close.
[01:58:14]  I mean, it wasn't in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C., but it was fucking everywhere else.
[01:58:19]  Yeah.
[01:58:20]  The guy should have gone and shut up Epstein's mansion in New York.
[01:58:23]  Right.
[01:58:23]  Yeah.
[01:58:25]  Yeah.
[01:58:25]  It's crazy.
[01:58:26]  And, like, you know, we've all heard the stories of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.
[01:58:31]  And here it is, plain as day, in declassified emails.
[01:58:35]  Like, the guy is talking to the Rothschilds.
[01:58:37]  And now they're doing these subpoenas on all these people, like this Les Wexner guy who owns Victoria's Secret.
[01:58:43]  They subpoena or they did a deposition of him.
[01:58:45]  They did a deposition of Bill Clinton, deposition of Hillary Clinton, and they're all talking about, yes, the Rothschilds.
[01:58:51]  He worked for the Rothschilds.
[01:58:54]  And like before all this came out, like the consensus seemed to be, at least from my view, that like what you said, he seemed to be like an intelligence agent who worked for multiple different intelligence factions, like probably the MI6, the Mossad, and the CIA.
[01:59:12]  But from what it seems like with these files is that they worked for him.
[01:59:16]  You know, like these people were like, he was a like, there was that layer of intelligence that's kind of above the politicians that run countries, right?
[01:59:27]  So you have like us politicians, intelligence, and then you have this Epstein, Rothschild, Rockefeller layer that's like behind the curtain doing all these crazy arms deals and like funding civil wars in Sierra Leone and like profiting off war, selling arms, trilateral commission stuff.
[01:59:52]  It's like ripped open a veil in reality that I don't think people are ready to accept that that's real.
[02:00:04]  But they've made it public.
[02:00:07]  Yeah.
[02:00:08]  I don't mean to say that he was just working with Mossad.
[02:00:11]  I mean, there's also links between Epstein and the FSB.
[02:00:15]  I mean, there's emails where he was trying to get to Putin through an FSB agent.
[02:00:20]  Right.
[02:00:20]  I mean, so I think that he had I think he had his.
[02:00:26]  I was about to make a bad comparison that I won't.
[02:00:28]  He definitely had the most.
[02:00:29]  He had the biggest connection to the Mossad, for sure, because he had the guy, the former head of it, the former prime minister, like at his house every day.
[02:00:36]  What drives me crazy, though, is it's in this hyper partisan environment that we're in that it's like both sides are taking what they want from the Epstein files.
[02:00:45]  You know, oh, it's all.
[02:00:46]  Oh, Bill Clinton.
[02:00:47]  It's all about Bill Clinton.
[02:00:48]  Right, right, right.
[02:00:49]  Oh, no, it's all about Trump.
[02:00:50]  Well, it's fucking both of them.
[02:00:51]  Exactly.
[02:00:53]  And it's just.
[02:00:53]  This is the most.
[02:00:54]  It's not either or.
[02:00:55]  It's both and.
[02:00:56]  Yeah.
[02:00:57]  It's the most bipartisan.
[02:00:58]  Bipartisan story probably of my lifetime.
[02:01:01]  Everyone is implicated in this stuff.
[02:01:03]  It's not left or right.
[02:01:05]  It's not Republican, Democrat, left, right.
[02:01:08]  It's us versus the layer above us.
[02:01:11]  It's a vertical fight, not a horizontal fight, right?
[02:01:14]  And it's like, yeah, man.
[02:01:18]  The more you pay attention to it, the more it just drives you crazy.
[02:01:22]  And like the code words, the code words like jerky, like trafficking people, and in like allegedly, it looks like, depending on how you want to interpret the code words they were using, that they were fucking eating people.
[02:01:35]  Like, what?
[02:01:36]  And where are all the videos?
[02:01:38]  Right.
[02:01:38]  You know?
[02:01:40]  Yeah, he had cameras everywhere.

=== Bigfoot Sightings Mystery (15:41) ===

[02:01:42]  Where the fuck are they?
[02:01:45]  And what did they, like, if the FBI's had all this shit for so long, like, what did they make of it?
[02:01:51]  Like, what did, I'm sure they have to have some sort of analysis of what those code words meant.
[02:01:56]  Right?
[02:01:56]  Like, I'm sure they had to come to some conclusion, but they didn't.
[02:02:01]  Instead, they're just like trying to fucking hide everything and start wars to distract us from it.
[02:02:08]  Or, you know, I don't know, man.
[02:02:11]  It's a lot to digest.
[02:02:13]  Going back to the Sasquatch film, it seemed like a lot of the people in that area, in the Mendocino area, there was like this overwhelming sort of like belief in the supernatural.
[02:02:27]  With those people, not just with the Bigfoot stuff, but it just seemed like that was kind of like a.
[02:02:34]  Yeah, I know, I know what you're saying.
[02:02:37]  And it makes a lot more sense if you've been there.
[02:02:42]  Okay.
[02:02:42]  Meaning that, yes, the people there are much more willing to entertain the possibility of the paranormal and cryptids than like your quote unquote average American.
[02:02:53]  Yeah.
[02:02:54]  And part of that may be.
[02:02:58]  The level to which psychedelics permeated that culture.
[02:03:02]  But there's also just something about those like ancient forests that lend themselves to giving credence to possibilities that maybe don't make sense in suburbia.
[02:03:15]  Meaning that, like, there was one time I was hiking by myself in the Redwoods, just kind of trying to get my head around the story.
[02:03:22]  And I stopped and looked around.
[02:03:24]  I was like, fuck, like Sasquatch makes a lot more sense when you're actually here.
[02:03:29]  I mean, I wouldn't have been surprised if a fucking brontosaurus had just started walking by me, you know, in those forests because they just feel so like ancient and spooky and magical.
[02:03:39]  Yeah.
[02:03:41]  You got to feel it.
[02:03:41]  Like you got to experience it.
[02:03:43]  I've heard people explain something similar to me.
[02:03:46]  Like this dude, Paul Rosalie, who's been on the show, he's been spent most of his life in the Amazon.
[02:03:53]  And he explains that like when you're there and you're like disconnected from modern technological society and You're kind of like just walking barefoot on the dirt, and you have like all the insects, insect noises around you, like the birds and the monkeys, and all those noises.
[02:04:10]  He's like, he's like, it almost kind of like removes a layer between you and like something else that you can't really explain.
[02:04:21]  Like, almost like it unlocks like a buried ancient sensory ability that we may have had.
[02:04:27]  Right.
[02:04:27]  Your senses are definitely heightened.
[02:04:29]  Yeah.
[02:04:31]  And you're like more in, you're in tune with something else.
[02:04:35]  You can feel that current.
[02:04:38]  Yeah.
[02:04:39]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[02:04:40]  Yeah.
[02:04:40]  I think the same is true in those redwood forests and in a lot of other places where you can really feel that current.
[02:04:47]  Yeah.
[02:04:48]  I mean, it makes sense that, like, being, like, living in a fucking city surrounded by, stacked on top of where you're in an apartment building, stacked on top of people and there's traffic and, and, like, all these, like, crazy sounds and pollution.
[02:05:06]  It's like you're kind of like a, Like a killer whale in a tank at SeaWorld.
[02:05:12]  Right.
[02:05:12]  You know?
[02:05:13]  Right.
[02:05:14]  Right.
[02:05:14]  But also, in the Emerald Triangle, man, it's self selective, right?
[02:05:17]  These are people, for the most part, that have either grown up there.
[02:05:21]  So they are the descendants of people that made a deliberate choice to get away from that, to get away from the orca tank at SeaWorld.
[02:05:27]  Yeah.
[02:05:28]  Or they've made that choice for themselves as adults and have moved there, you know, in recent years, one of the two.
[02:05:33]  Meaning those people by nature are going to be more open to those possibilities, both because of their personalities.
[02:05:38]  And then you add on that the environment in which they're steeped in their daily lives.
[02:05:43]  And you get a lot more openness to the possibilities of the paranormal.
[02:05:47]  Right.
[02:05:49]  And so, okay, but you grew up in Alaska and Anchorage.
[02:05:54]  Yeah.
[02:05:54]  And then you moved to Santa Cruz.
[02:05:57]  Is that what you said?
[02:05:57]  Yeah, I went to college in Santa Cruz, California.
[02:05:59]  Yeah.
[02:06:00]  And that's pretty close to Mendocino, right?
[02:06:02]  Oh, it's a few hours away.
[02:06:03]  I mean, it's Bay Area.
[02:06:04]  So it's probably about three hours or so.
[02:06:07]  Yeah.
[02:06:08]  Yeah.
[02:06:09]  Mendocino is way up, way far north, man.
[02:06:12]  Yeah, it is way fucking way.
[02:06:14]  I mean, they would tell me these stories about like harvest season, you know, people driving like RVs packed with weed down to the Bay Area to sell it, you know, and it was just like.
[02:06:23]  Fucking running the gauntlet of cops, you know, it's just like nerve wracking.
[02:06:27]  And some of them were just fucking idiots about it.
[02:06:29]  I mean, they'd look like there's pictures of some of the vehicles.
[02:06:32]  I mean, the people that got busted, I mean, they just look like deadheads or something.
[02:06:36]  I mean, they might as well have a sign that said, pull me over, like driving a beat to shit like Winnebago, like painted with, you know, psychedelic Eye of Horus and shit.
[02:06:44]  It's like, you know, come on.
[02:06:46]  Like the guys that got away with it is like the most nondescript vehicle you can imagine.
[02:06:50]  You make multiple runs packed in a hidden compartment in the trunk.
[02:06:53]  You know, change the vehicles, like be smart about it.
[02:06:57]  Yeah.
[02:06:58]  Yeah, there's, uh, yeah, there's, I mean, so many wild stories that come out of that part of the country, too.
[02:07:04]  Like, there's, you know, there's a ton of UFO abduction stories that come out of that part of the world, too, or that part of the country, too.
[02:07:11]  You know, where you have people, like, I wonder, like, how, you know, where you explain, like, walking through the woods by yourself, you said you wouldn't be surprised if you saw a brontosaurus walk by.
[02:07:21]  Like, I wonder what sort of, like, Psychological connection there is between that and like people seeing flying saucers or think they got abducted by a UFO or something.
[02:07:31]  You know, like I wonder what that unlocks in the psyche that could be going on.
[02:07:36]  That's not like real, you know, nuts and bolts, you know, like just like Bigfoot may not be some biological thing.
[02:07:43]  Maybe it's just some like psychological phenomenon that is conducive to being in that environment.
[02:07:50]  Maybe the UFO thing has like a similar connection.
[02:07:53]  Maybe, maybe there's portals around there, right?
[02:07:56]  I mean, some of the stuff that made.
[02:07:58]  I don't know if it made the most sense, but I thought that was most interesting was people that lived in that area that believe that, like, there are interdimensional portals in the woods around there, and that that explains the Sasquatch sightings.
[02:08:10]  That Sasquatch is like an interdimensional being or messenger that sort of like flits back and forth between our reality and a parallel universe in the metaverse.
[02:08:19]  Whoa.
[02:08:22]  Okay.
[02:08:22]  That's like a commonly held belief up there.
[02:08:25]  Just really.
[02:08:25]  Yeah.
[02:08:27]  Yeah.
[02:08:28]  What do those people say about, like, Do they have any belief in that or are they not into that?
[02:08:35]  I didn't talk to him about UFOs.
[02:08:37]  I was just really just focused on the.
[02:08:38]  Because I saw that in your documentary, you're talking to the guy in the first episode where you're asking about Sasquatch.
[02:08:45]  He starts talking about UFOs.
[02:08:46]  You're like, what?
[02:08:50]  Yeah, I do remember that.
[02:08:51]  I was on the phone with him.
[02:08:53]  Yeah.
[02:08:55]  You know, I saw a UFO.
[02:08:56]  You did?
[02:08:57]  I saw the Phoenix Lights.
[02:08:58]  What?
[02:08:59]  Almost 30 years ago.
[02:09:00]  Yeah.
[02:09:01]  The um, one of the that, and the more time that went by after I saw that craft, and it did not like really after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[02:09:13]  Because I always like, I believe that what I saw was probably a military, um, sort of airship, giant airship that had a cloaking device of some kind, stealth cloaking device that had fritzed out, and they were testing it.
[02:09:27]  I was like, I don't think that was a fucking alien space, really.
[02:09:29]  But then after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we didn't deploy anything like that.
[02:09:34]  Then I really started to think, well, maybe that was something else.
[02:09:36]  You know, the 30th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights just passed, like March 13th, I think.
[02:09:43]  Yeah.
[02:09:43]  But I mean, that was, you know, probably know that was like one of the biggest UFO sightings, you know, ever documented.
[02:09:49]  Fuck, I wish we had these cameras and everyone had had a camera in their pocket on that night.
[02:09:54]  There were some photos.
[02:09:55]  There is footage.
[02:09:56]  There is footage.
[02:09:57]  It was all at VHS, you know, and I just wish there had been a lot more angles, a lot more footage of it.
[02:10:01]  And so that's, yeah.
[02:10:04]  So people saw two different things, right?
[02:10:05]  They saw this array of lights.
[02:10:07]  And then in the East Valley, like over around Tempe or Mesa, where I was, a lot of people saw what I saw, which was a much bigger single craft.
[02:10:17]  Like the V shaped craft?
[02:10:19]  Huge.
[02:10:21]  Yeah, I saw the V shaped craft, but it also seemed like it changed shape to me into something that was like a lot even bigger than just that V shape, like that stealth bomber shaped thing.
[02:10:35]  It seemed like it was changing shapes as it was flying.
[02:10:40]  And you don't think it was alien?
[02:10:42]  Well, the more time has gone by that we haven't, that military technology has not been revealed to be military technology, the more I question what it was.
[02:10:52]  But I know what I fucking saw.
[02:10:53]  And, you know, I remember like the governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, saw it, but he had a press conference about it because people were freaking the fuck out because like thousands of people had seen two, at least two different UFOs or two different UFO phenomena.
[02:11:11]  And he had to where the governor had held a press conference about it, but he had like somebody dressed up in like, A silver, like, alien spacesuit came out and kind of like mocking it, even though he had seen it himself.
[02:11:22]  Yeah, that's he actually came out and apologized for that.
[02:11:25]  Yeah, he did.
[02:11:26]  Yeah, did you wait?
[02:11:28]  So, when you saw it, what time was it?
[02:11:31]  Was it like was it nighttime?
[02:11:33]  I don't remember.
[02:11:34]  I want to say it wasn't super late though, right?
[02:11:36]  No, it wasn't super late.
[02:11:37]  Now, were you able to see like other than the lights, were you able to see like an outline of anything?
[02:11:41]  Definitely, definitely.
[02:11:42]  And that's what I'm saying is that I saw I did not see the like sort of scattered array of lights that seemed to be smaller craft, and also remember that like.
[02:11:51]  That same night, the military went up and dropped a bunch of flares.
[02:11:57]  Okay.
[02:11:58]  And then initially, that was like one of the explanations for it.
[02:12:00]  So, why did the military go up and like drop a bunch of flares if not to like provide some kind of cover story, not a cover story, but an explanation for what people were seeing?
[02:12:11]  In other words, people started to see the lights.
[02:12:13]  And then around the same time, the military went up and dropped a bunch of bright, burning flares in the sky.
[02:12:19]  So, people saw a lot of stuff in the sky that night.
[02:12:21]  What I saw was this I saw the A large craft with a V shaped lights on it.
[02:12:29]  And then at one point, those lights went out, and it seemed to me as if the shape of that craft changed and elongated and got larger.
[02:12:43]  Like it was morphing.
[02:12:45]  Okay.
[02:12:46]  And at that point, it was dark.
[02:12:48]  The lights went out, but it was at low altitude.
[02:12:51]  A lot of people said that they saw it and it was really high up.
[02:12:53]  What I saw over Tempe was.
[02:12:56]  Low altitude, like close, noiseless, and almost like you could make out the shape by it blocking out, you know, light in the sky.
[02:13:07]  You could just see a dark shape above it and went on, you know, several minutes.
[02:13:11]  It was not like a fleeting thing and it was slow moving.
[02:13:16]  I think there were photos or videos of somebody who was like up on a mountaintop, like really, really close to it.
[02:13:23]  Do you remember I was talking about that, Steve?
[02:13:25]  Is that with David?
[02:13:28]  No, not with Morehouse.
[02:13:29]  Morehouse came in and he was saying that it was definitely military stuff.
[02:13:35]  He was saying that it was a balloon.
[02:13:37]  But if it morphed shape, that wouldn't make sense.
[02:13:39]  No, it was not a fucking balloon and it wasn't flares.
[02:13:42]  Yeah.
[02:13:43]  Yeah.
[02:13:44]  I, you know, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it was definitely an extraterrestrial craft, but I know what I fucking saw.
[02:13:50]  And it's like these explanations that it was like a balloon or that it was all these flares that the military dropped.
[02:13:59]  There's just, there's, No way that that conforms with what I saw.
[02:14:03]  And I know what I saw.
[02:14:05]  So, I mean, I was asked to come to like a 30th anniversary event, you know, this year, and I didn't do it.
[02:14:13]  And here I am talking about it on your show because I don't want to be that guy, you know?
[02:14:17]  But it's like, oh, that Project Blue Book shit about like, you know, deliberately setting it up so that people that recount these kinds of experiences or things that they saw that they're mocked, ridiculed, you know, it's done a good job because here I'm still, I'm nervous right now.
[02:14:31]  Like, Telling you about it because, like, I'm gonna be like the Phoenix Lights UFO guy now, you know.
[02:14:37]  But I, yeah, that's weird, right?
[02:14:39]  I just keep coming back to it.
[02:14:40]  I believe what I see and I saw it.
[02:14:43]  Yeah, I mean, the fact that they had a whole project to discredit people and to like, just so disinfo, like, if it's nothing, then why would you go to that much effort to do that?
[02:14:52]  Exactly.
[02:14:53]  Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's one of those topics that just gets like, you know, there's so many different layers to it and so many people that talk about it all the time.
[02:15:04]  It's just like, God, you get kind of like burnt out on it.
[02:15:06]  It's like, I don't want to fucking hear anymore about this shit, you know?
[02:15:09]  It's like, let me know when you figure it out.
[02:15:13]  It's like too much to pay attention to.
[02:15:17]  Well, I feel it's like, I mean, the link between the Epstein files and UFOs is that it's all right there out in front of us.
[02:15:23]  It feels like right now it's like happening in real time.
[02:15:25]  The evidence is right there.
[02:15:27]  And it's just almost like the idea of this like one top, you know, tenth of percent.
[02:15:36]  Of people running the world, right?
[02:15:38]  That the curtain got peeled back on that over here.
[02:15:41]  And then here, it's like, it just seems like the evidence of these unexplained and unexplainable aircraft, it's all out in the open right now.
[02:15:51]  It's just overwhelming, I think.
[02:15:53]  Right.
[02:15:53]  I think it's on purpose.
[02:15:57]  You know?
[02:15:58]  That's spooky.
[02:15:59]  Right.
[02:16:00]  Well, I mean, it's like because of the internet and there's so much shit available on the internet, we have so much access to everything.
[02:16:06]  They could, They could hide the real shit in there with a bunch of other bullshit and nobody would know the difference, right?
[02:16:11]  It's like some sort of like weird limited hangout where it's like some people could know, think they know the truth.
[02:16:17]  Like you could have the good shit mixed in with all the bullshit and like it doesn't matter to you because no one's gonna ever know which one's real and which one isn't.
[02:16:27]  It's like trying to pick a needle out of a haystack.
[02:16:29]  Right.
[02:16:29]  Cause we're just flooded.
[02:16:30]  Yeah.
[02:16:31]  And I'm sure there's a lot.
[02:16:31]  I'm sure like, dude, like some of the craziest stories you've ever heard about UFOs, they could very well just be real.
[02:16:38]  And to us, like rational thinkers, like, you're like, no, of course that's like the craziest thing is never going to be the real thing.
[02:16:44]  But like, if you're on, if you put the shoe on the other foot, like, you know, maybe it's some sort of like weird fucking psyop.
[02:16:52]  Who knows?
[02:16:54]  Who knows, man?
[02:16:55]  One of my teachers at UC Santa Cruz was Frank Drake, who was one of the founders of SETI.
[02:17:00]  And he came up with the Drake equation, which is like a way to punch in different variables to estimate the number of other intelligent species just in our galaxy.
[02:17:11]  And the way he broke it down is like, of course, of course.
[02:17:14]  There has to be probably hundreds of thousands of highly developed technological beings just in our galaxy.

=== Fossil Fuel Energy Transition (13:10) ===

[02:17:24]  Just in the Milky Way.
[02:17:26]  And it's very convincing.
[02:17:27]  So I'm convinced that that's true.
[02:17:29]  Yeah.
[02:17:29]  You know?
[02:17:31]  Yeah, I think it's probably, if it is anything, it could potentially be like a former breakaway civilization of human beings, maybe that like lives underwater or like was a part of a.
[02:17:45]  They were maybe humans once and they like evolved in a weird way for some reason.
[02:17:50]  Like they developed some crazy technology, been trying to avoid some sort of fucking catastrophe that happened on Earth.
[02:17:55]  Maybe they went underground or underwater.
[02:17:57]  And like they're so fit.
[02:17:58]  And everyone else got wiped out, but they were so advanced technologically.
[02:18:03]  Everyone else got reset, but they stayed the same.
[02:18:04]  They were like some breakaway or whatever.
[02:18:06]  And they hid somewhere on Earth.
[02:18:07]  And like maybe now they're like popping up in random places and we don't know what it is.
[02:18:11]  I'll tell you what, if you were like, we're an extraterrestrial life form and you wanted to come check us out, what better place to hide than the ocean?
[02:18:20]  Right.
[02:18:20]  Yeah.
[02:18:20]  We've explored more of the surface of Mars than we have of our own oceans.
[02:18:23]  Yeah.
[02:18:24]  It's insane.
[02:18:27]  Yeah.
[02:18:28]  It's bonkers, dude.
[02:18:29]  And the, and the, The fact that, like, all those occultists and people that were hanging out with L. Ron Hubbard and the fucking Nazis that we recruited to come over here and work on the atomic bomb, they were the same ones that were like fascinated with all this UFO stuff.
[02:18:43]  You know, that was right in the time that Roswell happened.
[02:18:48]  Yeah.
[02:18:49]  That's another layer that I don't know.
[02:18:52]  I don't know if humanity can handle that one being exposed, but who knows?
[02:18:57]  I didn't think they'd be able to handle this Epstein shit, but apparently, uh, People just can ignore it and just go about their day.
[02:19:03]  It's just a massive state of denial.
[02:19:05]  Yeah, I think so.
[02:19:07]  Or refusal to confront it and what it indicates.
[02:19:11]  Speaking about the Epstein files.
[02:19:13]  Yeah.
[02:19:13]  How many projects are you working on now?
[02:19:15]  Or do you have one in particular?
[02:19:17]  I know we mentioned the Ukraine one, but do you have anything big you're planning on doing or that you could talk about?
[02:19:25]  Yeah, I'm working on a couple of projects right now.
[02:19:28]  One of them is basically on energy.
[02:19:31]  And focusing on like California's energy policy, which is like, you know, California is at the vanguard of trying to move towards quote unquote net zero in the United States, right?
[02:19:45]  And so California has essentially passed a lot of rules and regulations to try and shut down its domestic oil production in California.
[02:19:53]  There's a lot of fucking oil in California, right?
[02:19:56]  And so you think, like, okay, well, California is shutting down all this oil product.
[02:20:00]  The government of California is making it so hard for these oil companies to do business.
[02:20:04]  It must mean that California is using a lot less oil.
[02:20:06]  Well, that's not the case at all.
[02:20:07]  California is still burning as much oil as it ever has.
[02:20:09]  And so I started with that question.
[02:20:11]  I was like, okay, well, what are the ramifications of that?
[02:20:13]  And like California is importing a lot of oil.
[02:20:18]  And the single greatest source of imported oil for California is Iraq.
[02:20:21]  What?
[02:20:22]  Iraq.
[02:20:23]  40% of California's imported oil comes from Iraq right now.
[02:20:27]  And so people have this perception of California being like kind of at the vanguard of the green movement in the United States.
[02:20:32]  You know, it's a massive economy, it's now the fifth.
[02:20:34]  Biggest economy in the world, California is, right?
[02:20:37]  And so I'm just kind of like digging into that and being like, okay, what are the like national security implications of California relying so much on oil from the Middle East?
[02:20:46]  And is it really better for the environment to be trucking this oil from overseas on these tankers that burn this really dirty fuel?
[02:20:54]  Yeah, not only are they still burning the same amount of fuel, but now they're actually paying these tankers to burn more fuel just to get it there.
[02:21:01]  Correct.
[02:21:02]  Correct.
[02:21:03]  So I'm still kind of feeling my way.
[02:21:06]  I partnered up with this great director named AJ Carter on this, and it's all independently financed so that we have editorial control, total editorial control of this story.
[02:21:18]  And that'll probably come out like later this year or early next, I would say.
[02:21:22]  You know, but it's crazy that we started making this film, you know, a few months ago and we were talking with like all these energy experts and national security experts about the Strait of Hormuz, you know.
[02:21:33]  Really?
[02:21:34]  They were presenting it as like this theoretical risk.
[02:21:37]  Like, what if war broke out in the Middle East and all this oil that California is depending on is somehow cut off?
[02:21:44]  It's going to be a real big fucking problem for California.
[02:21:47]  And then it happened, dude.
[02:21:49]  Like, So, is California the most fucked state because of this war?
[02:21:54]  Gas, gas, there was this USC professor who last year came out with this study and he predicted the possibility of gasoline rising to $8 a gallon in California at the pump because these big oil refineries in California are shutting down because the government's been so hostile to the industry that they just kind of like threw in the towel.
[02:22:16]  And he was saying, like, you know, something goes wrong, some X factor gets introduced to this, gas could skyrocket to $8 a gallon in California.
[02:22:25]  And he was fucking ridiculed by Governor Newsom, right?
[02:22:29]  His name was Michael Machet, he's a business professor at USC.
[02:22:32]  And within a few days of the war in Iran starting, there were gas stations in Southern California that were posting prices of $8.20 a gallon.
[02:22:41]  So he was totally vindicated.
[02:22:43]  And so this idea that he put out there that was like, you know, seemed ludicrous or that was ridiculed by the governor and in the media was totally proven right.
[02:22:53]  So that's just like, you know, I really like stories that sort of like challenge conventional wisdom.
[02:22:57]  Yeah.
[02:22:58]  You know, or challenge like the prevailing accepted truth, I guess.
[02:23:03]  You know, and in this case, the accepted truth is that like shutting down the oil industry in California must be good for the environment and good for the country.
[02:23:11]  And I'm not so convinced that that's true.
[02:23:14]  Yeah, that's a fucking, that whole topic is a maze to try to navigate because there's so many, like, it's so, it's so, uh, political, there's so much political baggage that comes along with it.
[02:23:30]  You know, and like it's really hard to know what's really going on with that shit.
[02:23:37]  Because, like, I mean, right, that's crazy.
[02:23:39]  Like, right when you start this thing, you have the whole Venezuela thing happen.
[02:23:42]  Yes.
[02:23:42]  Where we apparently went over there to get all their oil.
[02:23:45]  And then, which actually kind of makes sense now.
[02:23:48]  Now that we did the Iran war, it would kind of make sense that we would want to go get Venezuela first.
[02:23:56]  Right.
[02:23:56]  So it's maybe that was part of the plan the whole time.
[02:23:59]  And now that you have the Venezuela or the Iran thing happening and choking off.
[02:24:04]  All of that oil, like how does that affect?
[02:24:09]  How does that affect?
[02:24:10]  I mean, I first of all, I had no idea that different states could import oil from different countries.
[02:24:17]  Yeah, I didn't know that was how it worked.
[02:24:19]  Well, it works.
[02:24:19]  That's the way it works in California.
[02:24:20]  California is only California's situation because, um, they don't have an interstate pipeline, uh, they have in state pipelines, but they don't have an interest.
[02:24:29]  In other words, California can't just like buy a bunch of oil, you know, from Texas, yeah, for example.
[02:24:35]  All right, and so.
[02:24:37]  California could entirely like produce and refine its own oil just in California, but there were policy decisions made not to do that.
[02:24:45]  But at the same time, because we don't have with existing technology, we don't have the technology to replace fossil fuels right now.
[02:24:53]  We just don't.
[02:24:54]  Yeah.
[02:24:54]  Okay.
[02:24:55]  Not all the windmills and solar panels can't do it?
[02:24:57]  No.
[02:24:58]  There's no way.
[02:24:59]  I mean, there's so many of them.
[02:25:01]  I know.
[02:25:01]  Death Valley is crazy.
[02:25:02]  The amount of like solar panels that we'd have to have to like even come close, and that's it.
[02:25:06]  And solar, You know, wind and sun, right?
[02:25:10]  Solar, they only replace like electricity.
[02:25:14]  In other words, you can't manufacture steel with solar power.
[02:25:18]  You could do it with nuclear, but you can't like solar and wind power, like that only can address basically like our electricity needs.
[02:25:26]  In other words, about 30% of our energy consumption.
[02:25:29]  Believe me, I wish I hadn't learned a lot of the shit that I've learned in the making of this, you know, documentary because it's fucking terrifying because it's like, The technology, this whole idea of like just stop oil, it's like completely unrealistic.
[02:25:44]  This idea that we could just like flip a switch, if we just had the political willpower, we could just stop using fossil fuels and switch to renewables is, frankly, it's a fantasy.
[02:25:54]  That's what I'm finding.
[02:25:55]  Yeah.
[02:25:55]  And that's scary.
[02:25:58]  You were of the opposite belief before you started this.
[02:26:01]  You thought it might have been possible.
[02:26:02]  Yeah.
[02:26:03]  Yeah, I was.
[02:26:04]  I always thought that, you know, I always thought that nuclear power might need to be a part of the equation, but I didn't understand just how completely reliant.
[02:26:11]  Our world is upon fossil fuels right now.
[02:26:18]  I wonder what, how much have you learned about the nuclear power possibility?
[02:26:23]  Like, how much of a reality do you think that could be?
[02:26:27]  I think that, in my opinion, like that's the answer.
[02:26:31]  If we accept that climate change is like, you know, is a serious threat, like assuming that that's true, then I think that it and all of the above energy approach is the only answer and that nuclear has to be a big part of that equation.
[02:26:44]  I mean, what else?
[02:26:45]  Again, because solar and wind can only address electricity.
[02:26:49]  It doesn't address transportation or manufacturing, which is what most of the energy is used for.
[02:26:58]  And what frustrates me is I see some of the same voices that 50 years ago in California were pressuring the government in California to put a moratorium on nuclear power in California.
[02:27:09]  Some of those same voices today are like the just stop oil, just leave it in the ground.
[02:27:13]  We can just flip a switch and go to net zero.
[02:27:18]  It's a fallacy.
[02:27:22]  It's a comforting idea, but it's completely divorced from reality, in my opinion.
[02:27:28]  Because, like, look, especially with AI coming online right now and the energy demands of that, you start factoring that in.
[02:27:37]  The amount of energy that's derived from fossil fuels now compared to the 1970s, like, we're using just a little bit more in terms of percentage.
[02:27:47]  In other words, there is no energy transition going on.
[02:27:51]  The idea that there's an energy transition.
[02:27:53]  Away from fossil fuels, there really isn't.
[02:27:57]  But we're using way more energy, right?
[02:28:00]  Yes, true.
[02:28:01]  But I'm saying, as a percentage of the amount of energy we're using, sure, we're using more renewables, but as a percentage of the total energy we're using worldwide, fossil fuels, it's now about like 86%.
[02:28:13]  Like in the 70s, it was about like 83, 84%.
[02:28:16]  So it's slightly more now than it was 50 years ago.
[02:28:19]  Right.
[02:28:19]  And then with the onset of AI and all this stuff, I mean, it's going to be exponentially growing.
[02:28:25]  It's not just going to be a steady rate.
[02:28:27]  This is going to be an exponential growth as technology and AI and fucking quantum computers start to become a thing.
[02:28:35]  Like, how much energy is that shit going to take?
[02:28:37]  Right.
[02:28:38]  That's crazy.
[02:28:39]  Then you think about all the plants on Taiwan that we depend on to manufacture all the chips and everything.
[02:28:44]  They need that natural gas from the Middle East that's now choked off.
[02:28:49]  They run on natural gas.
[02:28:50]  So, what happens if they can't make those chips?
[02:28:53]  What happens like six, eight, 12 weeks from now?
[02:28:55]  Right, right.
[02:28:57]  Okay.
[02:28:57]  We're just now starting to feel the impacts of this.
[02:29:00]  And right now, it's just the price at the pump.
[02:29:02]  Well, our whole economy is based off oil, right?
[02:29:05]  That's where we got the petrodollar, right?
[02:29:07]  It's all based on that's.
[02:29:08]  Propping up our currency as being the world currency is because of the oil that comes out of the Middle East.
[02:29:15]  And all those countries over there that export all that oil, the deal they made was to only take US dollars so they could invest it in all these other companies and a lot of them AI companies that are basically like doing a circle and fueling our economy in return.
[02:29:31]  So, not only are they choking off all that oil and raising all the gas prices and creating all this destabilization in the energy sector, but they're also like going to fucking, I wonder what it's going to do to.
[02:29:41]  The fucking American economy in general, you know, like our stock market and all that stuff.
[02:29:48]  Everything's going to get more expensive.
[02:29:50]  Yeah.
[02:29:50]  Not just gas, you know.
[02:29:53]  Yeah.
[02:29:54]  Oh, right.
[02:29:54]  Because the petroleum is used to make most things, right?
[02:29:57]  Plastics, or they use that to make plastic.
[02:29:59]  These headphones.
[02:30:00]  Yeah.
[02:30:01]  Our phones, you know, the chairs we're sitting in.
[02:30:04]  Yeah.
[02:30:05]  The remote control that you use to turn on the TV, the TV itself.
[02:30:08]  Yeah.
[02:30:10]  It's everywhere.
[02:30:11]  God, dude.
[02:30:14]  Well, bro.
[02:30:14]  Fertilizer, you know?
[02:30:15]  Oh, yeah.
[02:30:16]  Everything, man.
[02:30:17]  I mean, like, yeah, I don't know.
[02:30:21]  I don't know what's going on, dude.
[02:30:23]  I'm trying to make heads.
[02:30:24]  I can't make heads or tails of what the fuck's going on in this world right now.
[02:30:26]  It's just.
[02:30:27]  So at least you're trying.
[02:30:28]  I'm trying.
[02:30:29]  I'm trying.
[02:30:30]  The more I learn, the more confused I get.

=== Oil Documentary Coming Soon (00:50) ===

[02:30:34]  But, bro, thank you for doing this, man.
[02:30:36]  Appreciate it.
[02:30:37]  This has been fucking phenomenal.
[02:30:42]  Where can I tell people to go to.
[02:30:45]  We just link to your movies, or do you have like a website or anything people can get to?
[02:30:48]  Yeah, I do have a website that has links.
[02:30:50]  And then the latest show, Narco Mennonites, is on Crave right now, which you can watch if you're in Canada.
[02:30:55]  But I think it'll be available in the US like real soon.
[02:30:58]  Okay, cool.
[02:30:59]  And when is the plan with that Ukrainian one or the oil one too?
[02:31:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:31:04]  I'd say the oil documentary would be out like later this year, maybe early next.
[02:31:08]  Okay.
[02:31:08]  Yeah, it's going to be a feature doc, not a series.
[02:31:11]  Okay, okay, cool.
[02:31:13]  Fantastic, bro.
[02:31:14]  Well, thanks again, dude.
[02:31:15]  Thank you.
[02:31:15]  This has been awesome.
[02:31:16]  We have Patreon questions.
[02:31:18]  We do.
[02:31:19]  All right.
[02:31:19]  We got people on our Patreon that ask you specific questions.
[02:31:22]  So we'll do that separately.
[02:31:23]  That's it for the podcast.
[02:31:24]  Good night, everybody.