Joe Rogan interviews Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster on their undercover work exposing Florida’s pill addiction crisis—over 100 daily overdoses, pain clinics outnumbering McDonald’s, and a $5.5B pharmaceutical settlement—while questioning systemic failures like "doctor shopping" and comparing it to Portugal’s decriminalization success. They also reveal how easily guns were obtained in Arizona (no ID for an AK-47 or Smith & Wesson 500), the brutal tactics of Houston pimps, and legalized animal cruelty in factory farms, debating ethics from humane slaughter to synthetic meat. Rogan’s firsthand experiences—sleeping under LA bridges with van Zeller, critiquing survival show fakeness, and testing bizarre stunts like donkey semen—highlight the gap between media spectacle and real-world systemic breakdowns. [Automatically generated summary]
I know I've been super busy, and I've been down to one a week over the last couple of weeks, but almost out of the woods with this new TV show, so shit will get normal any second now.
This week, today...
We have Mariana Van Zeller and Darren Foster.
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So, with me today are Darren Foster and Mariana Von Zeller, and I first found out about Mariana from the show on Vanguard, the OxyContin Express, which I remember watching it in my house and thinking, this is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.
I couldn't believe that all the things you were telling me about the whole system of pain management centers and how it's set up in Florida was true.
And the statistics on how many people are addicted to OxyContin, how many prescriptions are being given out for OxyContin in Florida is just absolutely bananas.
And I watched it and I said, this is so far beyond out of control that it's amazing that I'm just hearing about it now from a documentary on current TV, which is like, you know, not the most widely viewed channel.
I mean, I felt like this should be on every channel on the front page of every newspaper.
There's a hijacking going on down there.
They've hijacked the legal system somehow or another and absolutely willfully Put these things into position in order to extract money and do it at the expense of all these people being addicted.
I mean, how did you find out about this and how did you go about doing that piece?
I mean, it was exactly the same for us, the same surprise that we got when we started looking into this story.
We found a little news clipping on one newspaper about some deaths in Florida because of prescription drugs and there were more pain clinics around than McDonald's.
And we thought, wow, this is really interesting.
We should investigate this.
And we started looking into it, and then we found out that there were seven people every day dying from prescription pill abuse, that all over the U.S. there are more people dying from a prescription pill overdose than heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy combined, that just last year it surpassed car accidents to become the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States.
So this was a story that we're just going to turn our heads away from.
You know, the most insane thing was that we spoke to local journalists who had sort of covered this story a little bit.
And they told us, look, you'll go by pain clinics here and you'll see lines of people and out of state cars parked outside and literally lines of people.
I mean, very long lines around the corner of people waiting to get into these pain clinics to get these prescription drugs.
And we thought, okay, this is the kind of thing that you hear about.
We'll never be able to film or witness ourselves.
And then it was easy.
I mean, as soon as we left the airport, went straight to this one street that we knew had a lot of pain clinics, and there it was.
The parking lot's full of out-of-state plates.
I mean, people driving all the way from Kentucky, Ohio, as far off as Massachusetts down to Florida to buy their pills.
And they pack their cars with people, and then they bring them back and sell them for five, ten times the price that they buy them in Florida.
When we tried to film one of the lines, we knew there was this one pain clinic that a lot of people liked going to because it was super easy to get drugs.
Basically, you just go in and out and get whatever you wanted.
And we started filming outside and we set our tripod and we were across the street on the other side of this sort of...
It wasn't a freeway.
It was sort of a big street.
And as soon as we started filming, these guys came out and they started chasing us.
And they asked us what we were doing and we said we were just filming out here.
And they started chasing us and we ran out of gas because every time we tried to stop and get gas in our car, we were running low.
They would get out of the car, and it was just me, Darren, and our other producer, Sarissa.
And I was freaked out.
The night before, I'd been watching The Sopranos, and I really felt like I was a part of The Sopranos.
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I felt, "Oh my God." Wow.
We traveled all around the world, been to war zones, and we're going to be killed right here in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because we were filming a pain clinic.
They were busted by the DEA. They were later indicted.
But in the indictment, they found that they had made like $40 million in two years off these pain clinics.
And they're in jail for like 17 years now because I think one of them was even convicted of hiring someone to take out somebody else or something like that.
So we ran out of gas, and we had just interviewed some law enforcement there, and he was calling 911. I was calling the contact that we had for law enforcement there and saying, please help us.
But we stopped, and then the other guy stopped behind us, and they didn't come out of the car, because I think they realized that we were calling 911, but they just stayed there, and it was just to intimidate us.
So they stayed there, and then they made the story up to the police that we had been stalking them, that they had an ex-girlfriend that was stalking them, so they thought that we were stalking the ex-girlfriend or something like that.
It means that now doctors, they have a database in place basically that they are supposed to check to see if a customer is coming or a client is coming to get more drugs.
They don't want your medical records to be accessible to the government, basically.
And so people that are very, I guess, worried about our privacy, which maybe we...
Think about differently now with the whole NSA scandal, but I mean like, you know, people are definitely, that's the resistance to doing the prescription monitoring programs in a lot of places.
But most states have them these days.
Florida was one of the biggest states that didn't have one for a long time.
But now with obviously so many people dying of this and this sort of bad reputation the state was getting, they decided to do something.
Crack down a little bit, but it's still happening.
And two years after we did the OxyContin Express, we actually were filming a story about heroin abuse in Massachusetts and how because of the OxyContin epidemic, a lot of kids...
Then went on to do heroin for whatever reason because Oxy was getting more expensive or it was harder to get their hands on Oxy.
So then they started shooting up heroin because the effects are sort of the same on the body except it's a street drug.
So in many ways it's extremely dangerous as well.
And so we actually went to a guy's house who was selling heroin.
Heroin, and he said, dude, I'm selling heroin, but what I really like to sell is pills.
Me and my friends all go down to Florida and get a bunch of these and we make much more money.
Our profit margin is much higher by selling pills than it is selling heroin.
2013, it's really shocking to me that that hasn't been addressed.
You're not seeing people talk about that in the mainstream media.
The president never fields questions on the prescription pill problem in this country and why is this happening?
Have you investigated what factors are involved here?
Are there dirty doctors?
Are they in cahoots with the pharmacy companies?
How is it possible that there's...
They did a thing on Montana...
Recently, in the Montana, the Billings Daily Gazette or something like that, one of the Billings Daily newspapers, where they said that out of one million people in Montana, 240,000 new prescriptions had been written.
One of the things that definitely drew us to that story and to the follow-up stories that we've done subsequently is the fact that, you know, we spend billions of dollars every year fighting a war on drugs, trying to prevent drugs coming into this country.
But meanwhile, it's, you know, the drugs that are being made in this country that are causing the biggest, you know...
Problems in terms of life's loss and stuff like that.
In the past, I mean, this aired three years ago already, and I still get, weekly, I get emails or Facebook messages or people reaching out because they've been somewhat, they've watched this, and somehow they've been affected by drugs, by prescription drugs.
You know, their son has died, their husband is addicted, and they reach out because this documentary has made an impact on them, and they want to let us know, which is fantastic.
You know, as a journalist, that's the best kind of gift you can get.
I mean, unfortunately, that's the way it starts with so many people, is that they're an injury.
And that's why you see, like, in a lot of places where the problem is, is that it's around places that have, like, a lot of workplace injuries, like Appalachia, where people work the mines and stuff like that.
Yeah, and so unfortunately, it's like that is where you're finding these lower-income people or middle-class people who work factory jobs and have to move things, manual labor-type jobs, and it just seems like they have no hope.
Once they get caught up in that, it's so hard to get out from under the grip of that monster, and they don't have...
They can't afford to take a month off and go to Malibu to some clinic where they're going to feed them green tea and rub their feet.
They're doomed.
You can get stuck and the amount of willpower required to pull yourself out of that mud is insane.
Did you know, this is a statistic that somebody put on my message board, a dude named Evil Homer, thanks Evil Homer, that last year five pharmaceutical companies were agreed to pay $5.5 billion to resolve the U.S. Department of Justice allegations of fraudulent marketing practices including the promotion of medications for uses that they were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Insane.
I mean, if you go back and look at the numbers that they've been paying, like Pfizer in 2009 was fine, $2.3 billion.
There's so many of them.
There's GlaxoSmithKline, $3 billion.
And it's not that pharmaceutical drugs haven't...
We've done great things.
There's amazing applications for pharmaceutical drugs that have changed people's lives for the better.
It's just so unfortunate that it's the bottom line over morality, over humanity.
The bottom line being ones and zeros, collect as many as you can above humanity.
And it's not necessary.
It's like there's plenty of valid applications for drugs.
But if you want to control the entire world and you want to be like the king of the planet and have all the gold, the best way to do it is to be like, fuck people.
Just treat them as little vampire sucklings and take as much blood as you can while keeping them alive for as long as you can until they eventually run out of money or blood and then move on to the next one.
We spoke to a doctor, he was a rehab doctor, and he told us something really interesting.
I think it was the end of the 90s that the medical community got together and they decided that the best thing to do to treat pain was to really go at it aggressively and have the lowest possible tolerance to pain.
So if there was any chance that the patient would feel any sort of pain, just treat it aggressively by giving them a lot of drugs.
And he says there was a total shift In the end of the 90s, wasn't it Darren?
The end of the 90s I believe it was.
And that's when pain pills started being dispensed much more liberally.
And I think at the time they didn't really realize what this, you know, the addictive side of this and what this could do.
Like, everyone's known that from the time I was a kid, I knew that people had problems with Quaaludes.
You would hear about that all the time.
I didn't even know what a Quaalude was.
You know, but I remember people always on Ludes.
The guy's got a problem with Ludes.
So of course they knew.
They're full of shit.
They must have bowed down to pressure from the pharmaceutical companies.
There must have been someone who cut a deal and said, listen, if you guys just prescribe a little more, do you know how much money we can all make?
And we'll give you a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
People say, well, that doesn't happen.
Well, here's one thing that definitely does happen.
My wife, her mom is a nurse, and her mom was working at this clinic, and she would tell us about the drug reps and all the things the drug reps would do for the company.
They'd take the whole company out to dinner, to a really nice restaurant.
Nurses are on very reasonable salaries.
They can't afford a really expensive restaurant or a really fine restaurant.
They would take everybody out, buy them all the drinks, order anything on the menu, lobster and steak and this and that.
And they did it on a regular basis.
They gave them trips and all sorts of other things.
And they made everybody really eager to prescribe these drugs.
Well, I mean, like, for us, I mean, you know, great local reporting is what drew us to the story, so there are great reports, but for some reason, yeah, some...
Yeah, people on the scene, and, like, that's, you know, where we got the lead to this story, and so, yeah, why it doesn't get better national attention is definitely a question that we should all be asking, yeah.
We got an undercover camera and went into one of these.
And it was, I think, the first pain clinic we went into.
And I just asked the receptionist, so I have a back pain.
What can I get?
And she said, oh, they'll be able to prescribe you OxyContin.
And she listed the...
Long list of drugs.
And you just need to go get an MRI. And basically what this is, is that an MRI can show anything and you can point to something and say that that's what's hurting you.
And doctors just need to see something that they can then say, look, I looked at the MRI and it looked like she had That it was legitimate back pain, and that's all they need.
And so we went out the door to get this MRI, and we stopped and started talking to these guys that had come down from West Virginia and Kentucky, and they were telling us, you know, we traveled down there here because it's just so easy to get these drugs.
And we just say we have a back pain, but of course we don't have anything.
We just want to take a lot of these drugs back home with us.
Look, if you can't do anything about it and you just accept that going in, you have to.
You can't look at it and say, oh, that poor child growing up because then you'll get all sad.
But if you can treat it as a comedy and pretend they're not real and treat it as like if you're watching a Coen Brothers movie, a big part of that documentary is pills.
It's really confusing to have it all exposed in one piece like yours and just all of a sudden be like, what?
That's out there?
It was a real paradigm shifting moment for me and it was the thing that really got me paying attention to pills in general.
And then I started reading all these other bizarre stories.
I don't know if you ever heard about the man who was awarded the equivalent of $600,000 American dollars because he was on a Parkinson's drug called Requip.
This was by GlaxoSmithKline.
They had this Parkinson's drug and it turned him into a gambling and gay sex addict.
He was a straight man, and he took this pill, and it was Parkinson's drug, so apparently it has some psychoactive properties, does something to the way the mind works, and all he wanted to do was have gay sex and gamble.
It's an accusation backed up by at least some science.
I mean, I don't know what they use to show that there's some sort of a chemical correlation between his activities and this drug, but they pulled the drug off the market.
So the interesting thing is that when all these pain pills started being produced, such as OxyContin, they were really easy to manipulate so that you can use them.
They have this time release device.
So that when you take a pill, they will have an effect on your body, but over time.
And that was really easy to manipulate so that you would take it and it would immediately have all the effect at once, which is what an addict ultimately wants.
So then they were heavily criticized for that.
So then they came up with A pill that wasn't so easy to manipulate.
But then, you know, that was easy.
They found a way around that too.
Addicts found a way around that too.
And you just go online and you search how to manipulate the new oxys and you put them.
There were ways.
I remember addicts telling us that you just put them in a microwave and do all this certain kind of things.
And I'm not going to say here because I'm not trying to get people to do it, but that there are ways to manipulate everything.
So...
Even when they try to play it safe, there's always a way around it for an addict.
This one spot in the world, like Brazil, the rainforest, where there's so much promise as far as new healing, new plants that can do all sorts of great things.
There's so many different wonder cures have been found in the rainforest.
They're always looking for the rainforest to come up with new medications for all sorts of things.
And there's the good side of the pharmaceutical companies.
The fact that pharmaceutical companies are creating things that are helping keep your grandpa around for longer and keep people healthy.
It's such a double-edged sword.
And like I said, for me, I'm so torn because I don't think that I would want to be in a neighborhood where they're selling heroin, but I don't think that anybody should be able to tell anybody else they can't buy heroin.
But then you get into that area of the addictive properties of it, and that's where it gets sketchy.
That's where it gets like, well, if you're going to do anything as a community to try to stop something like that, Boy, there's not a lot of ways you can convince people to not do things.
It's very difficult.
And it gets real weird when you're trying to convince someone to not do something that has a really good chance of ruining your life.
Yeah, I know you talk a lot about drugs, and I don't know if you've looked into the Portuguese experience.
I'm from Portugal, and Portugal is basically one of the biggest experiments in drug policy in the world, and it's been going on for 10 years, and it's actually quite a success rate.
And what they did is they did decriminalize drugs.
They didn't legalize them, they decriminalized them, meaning that if you're caught with, I think it's one gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of marijuana, if it's anything, if it's that or less, You don't go to jail as you do in other countries and what they do is they send you to a drug rehab commission and to a group of doctors that know what they're talking about that want to find out if this is the first time you're trying drugs and why are you doing them and they try to address the problem as a disease and not as a crime
and it's had actually great success rate and you know much less people are going to rehab centers much less people are dying so it's definitely being looked at as a way to go in terms of drug policy.
Well, that's a beautiful idea also in terms of human nature because it's human nature to not want to be controlled.
There's many, many examples.
And if you have children, you know that one of the best ways to get a kid to want to do something is to tell them they can't do it.
It's a natural human tendency to try to resist.
And when you tell them they can do whatever they want and you'll be there to help them, you're honestly better off.
We would like to think that the established laws that we have in this country are set up to protect people, but they're clearly not.
When you're dealing with these numbers, especially outside of Florida, like I told you about Billings, Montana newspaper talking about 240,000 different prescriptions for that stuff in Montana alone.
It's obviously not the case.
It's not that anybody is trying to look out for anybody.
It's just simply a matter of a crazy system where it's become this, there's this weird sort of method that you can do to skirt logical thinking and extract money from humans.
And you can do it in this really immoral, horrible way by getting them addicted to these things.
And the fact that doctors are in on it, that's the weirdest aspect of it.
That these people who supposedly had dedicated their lives to helping people and that's what their whole career was supposed to be, improving the health of people, keeping people alive.
And then somewhere along the line, in the whole storm of student loans and getting sued for malpractice and all this different shit, somewhere along the line, a bunch of them just crack and they just go, let's just make some money.
We spoke to some addicts in Florida whose doctor, the doctor that prescribed them the drugs, and this was a kid, actually a boy, a man, a 25-year-old kid, was a gynecologist.
So he was going to a gynecologist to get his meds.
I understand what you say, that a person should be able to get whatever they want if they're adults and they can make up their own minds, but they should also be able to know what they're getting.
That's many times a problem.
Again, the injury is a big problem.
The big reason why people get into prescription drugs is because they're prescribed this by their doctor and there aren't enough warnings as to how addictive this stuff can be.
We spoke to one kid who was also a star athlete in college, and he was featured in the second documentary we did about this issue.
And he was in the hospital for five days, and he left the hospital he was already addicted to pills and never left, and now he's doing heroin.
So this is, you know, you know a story, I know a story, so just imagine how many stories there are out there, just people that get injured and get addicted.
And there are fantastic people out there, a lot of moms, actually mothers who've lost kids who are leading the way and trying to raise awareness and pass legislation.
I definitely think that more needs to be done.
Doctors need to prescribe this, know what they're prescribing, and people need to know more about what they're being prescribed and the addictiveness of it.
So we look into sort of bath salts and spice and K2 and all that stuff.
And the show is basically Darren, who's my producing partner and my husband and myself, we go around America exploring and infiltrating these subcultures, some of the U.S.'s most controversial subcultures and everything from sex trafficking to unregulated and illegal guns to the first episode, which is about synthetic drugs.
In the entrance of all fairness, he says that it was all troll and then he was just joking about the drug part.
But the reality is he had a laboratory set up in his backyard in Belize, like a real legit laboratory.
And inside that laboratory...
I don't know what he was actually doing, but he made a post under a pseudonym on this drug forum describing his freebasing of basalts.
He did some work with...
I don't know what the technical aspects of his transformation of the basalts into something else, but he had claimed that it made you this incredibly hypersexual person, and he was trying to market it as like a...
He was trying to come up with a drug that would turn women into like nymphomaniacs, essentially.
It would change you, make you very, very, very aroused.
He described it on his post as clawing your genitals and freaking out and masturbating all day.
He had these really detailed depictions of the chemical transformation of these drugs.
And clearly had this massive laboratory, not massive, but really high-end, high-tech laboratory, set up in his crazy fucking jungle house, and this guy was cooking bath salts back there.
So he had these, you know, young jungle girls, like 20 years old or however they were, like I think his girlfriend was 20, and he was like, you know, had all these pictures of these different girls and he was getting hooked up on bath salts.
Crazy dude!
We had him on the podcast when he was actually on the run.
Some of the names of these bath salts are just insane.
We were able to actually acquire some just at smoke shops here in Southern California.
One was called Scooby-Doo.
The other one was called Sexy Zombie.
And we went into a smoke shop and bought this stuff.
And then we were actually, so our first episode, we actually filmed some, we featured some, a marine who's addicted to, or who was at the time addicted to bath salts.
So they're made in labs, but they have the same sort of effects on your body as cocaine or meth.
But it's made in labs, so there's nothing natural about it.
It's entirely made with chemicals, most of which come from China and India.
And you can order them, and then you have a garage, and there are these kids.
This is how it started off, with these kids putting all these chemicals together.
You have it all on the internet, step by step, on how to make it pretty easy.
Thank you.
although they're super expensive compared to regular bath salts, and they made these spice and K2.
And these were drugs that were sold over-the-counter, smoke shops.
I mean, we were able to buy them at shell stations, gas stations, and they're sold all over the country.
And it's really hard to go after these drugs because as soon as the government comes out and prohibits one compound, they immediately, you know, China and India have already all these other chemicals ready to ship, So they just need to change a little compound, and it's a new drug, and it's legal all of a sudden.
Yeah, it might be a little crazy, but most of these bath salts and synthetic marijuana are being put together by some yahoos in their garage.
So that's where the problem comes in, is that you don't know what you're getting, and you don't know if they're mixing it correctly.
You get these things called hot spots, where one portion of the batch will have 30 times the amount of the product, compared to another part that might have just been missed.
So you never know what you're getting, and obviously when you have a 19, 20-year-old kid who's just looking to make some money mixing it together, he's not probably doing the best science.
And that's why they're so popular that we heard, that they're so popular in places where drug testing is mandatory, such as military or rehab communities or even bullfighting.
We were in Arizona and interviewed people from the bullfighting community, and this is really popular there because it's so hard to test these drugs.
So they can just take them and know that nobody's going to ever find out.
And even after the autopsy or whatever they did, you know, they, uh, How long before the pharmaceutical companies realize how much money is in bath salts and just say, listen, what we need to do is set up some labs in Mexico or Peru or whatever, churn out our own bath salts, launch them over the border with catapults, have people pick them up, sit in trucks.
Well, there's an article that came out today actually about how the DEA had just busted and is really concerned about synthetic drugs because it is becoming quite a big problem here in the United States and how they're finding out that actually it is...
they said that it was...
They're finding some connections of how it's funding terrorism in the Middle East.
It's funny how everything ends up funding terrorism in the Middle East.
You know, but there are some really sad stories that we, you know, we interview the father of a kid who took bath salts for the first time because a friend gave it to him.
And the kid went totally wild, came into his parents' house and slit his throat in front of his parents and died five days later.
There's some great organizations out there, support group organizations.
You know, again, a lot of them are being led by women, by mothers, which I think is phenomenal.
And they're really trying to raise awareness and pass legislation to make these bills harder to get and to stop these, you know, crazy doctors from overprescribing.
But it's, you know, there is a way.
And I do love the...
Whenever I speak to some of these mothers, it's really refreshing to see these women who are so strong and wanting to fight for this.
But, you know, like this series, as we did in the Oshkahn piece that we started with, you know, we did a lot of undercover filming.
And, you know, our sort of approach to that is that we're not looking to get any individual in trouble.
We're not trying to do any gotcha kind of journalism and bust any individual.
We're just trying to shed light on an issue.
And so I think...
You know, if we were targeting a specific individual, you know, there might be a little bit of blowback, whether rightly or wrong, whether we were doing it that way.
But I think, you know, the fact that we're just trying to shed light on an issue, and the only way that we can do that is with undercover cameras, you sort of, you know, mute the blowback a little bit because it's just enlightening for most people to see what goes on when people don't know the camera's rolling, you know?
Yeah, so I think that will be our time to stop as well.
But I do get nervous every time.
I just re-watched for the 10th time the first episode of this series that is airing on Wednesday night at 10pm.
And it made me really nervous just to watch some of the stuff because we did go undercover and filmed a lot of things, filmed a lot of people selling drugs.
We filmed people taking drugs and a lot of it was filmed undercover and it makes me nervous for sure.
But it was an issue that we thought was an important issue, not enough people know about it.
And we basically transformed ourselves into the bad guys, into criminals trying to get guns, just to see how easy it would be for a criminal to get their hands on guns in Arizona.
And in the space of about two, three days, we were able to get three handguns, one of which is the most powerful handgun, a Smith & Wesson 500 Magnum.
I know I now am an expert on guns.
I knew nothing about guns before this.
And we were able to get an AK-47 and a .50 caliber, which is the most powerful guns in the world.
Out of the AK-47, we got out of a Taco Bell parking lot.
We went online, backpage.com, looked for AK-47, and within 45 minutes, we had bought an AK-47 out of these guys.
And congratulations on handling it that way, because that's, I think, the right way to do it.
And it's also, obviously, this person is a part of a much greater issue.
And to turn it on, to make it about one person, it's like, it's the tendency to do in this country, like to victimize or to criminalize this one person or whatever, you know, focus on this one person when it's really what's going on is the issue, right?
Do you know what's so interesting, though, is that right after we bought that AK-47, I think it was the first assault rifle that we bought in Arizona, and we'd been nervous whether we'd invested money to go there, are we going to be able to buy these guns?
So to sort of celebrate our purchase, we went into the bar right next to Taco Bell, and we ordered three beers, myself, Darren, and the other producer, Alex, and because Alex didn't have his ID with him, they didn't sell him a beer.
Maybe we should switch it over to a lower stream or something like that.
Try that.
Try that.
See if that helps.
We'll fix it for you, folks.
The gun issue is really a creepy one in this country.
And it's also, in my opinion, connected to the pharmaceutical issue.
And the reason being is that there's this massive connection between the things that people are afraid of I think the latest statistic was more than 90% of all school shooters Uh,
either are on antidepressants when they do it or are recovering from antidepressants when they do it.
And that's one of those things that makes you wonder, like, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I remember when the reports came out hearing about the Bushmaster, that he had a Bushmaster, and I remember clearly having seen it in the gun shows, and we almost bought one.
I mean, this is just sort of a technicality here, but what kind of gun he used.
He obviously shot a bunch of people.
That's what's important, is that someone can get this tool.
And really, that's what it is.
It's an inanimate tool.
And a person can get it and go do these things.
And these things happen very rarely.
And when they happen, there's this massive reaction.
And the reaction is almost always to try to take guns away.
And that's what gets like the real nutters crazy.
They're like, "You ain't gonna take my guns.
I'm gonna climb my gold, cold dead fingers from my gun." And it's almost like it's one of the strangest debates in our culture.
Because it's not a gun that's killing all these people.
It's a person who's doing something that is horrific and impossible to stop.
It's a person that's doing something.
So if they didn't have a gun, who knows what they would do?
Would they try to do it with a car?
Would they just plow over a bunch of people in the road?
Would they make a bomb?
The idea is that this tool makes it easier for them to do it, but the reality is the gun's not doing shit on its own.
And the real issue, in my mind, has always been a person able to do something like that.
How does that happen?
And why is that...
Sort of brushed away.
Yeah, everyone just wants to talk about gun control and then it gets up this debate and Humans are so wacky that when there's a debate there's two sides screaming at each other and nothing gets done You know you have the Ted Nugent side that stockpile in ammo because they think Obama's gonna, you know turn the whole country into communist Russia and
And then, you know, you've got the other side that want the, you know, that say, fuck hunters, you should just kill hunters, no one should have a gun, you know, get your meat from a supermarket, this is bullshit, we need to, we need to evolve, you know, there's that argument as well.
In my opinion, it's a mental health issue.
And just the fact that guns exist.
Look, guns are crazy.
The idea that you could just point at something and make it disappear.
But there's so many guns.
There's so many gun owners.
And it's so rare, if you look at it statistically, that something like this happens.
If you look at how many human beings we have in this country, it's like 300 million.
And how many shootings like this happen where someone indiscriminately just starts whacking people around them?
It's kind of strange that it's so rare because there's so many fucking nuts.
So many fucking crazy people in this country.
It's almost, we're like blessed that these things don't happen on a regular basis.
It's about having the right to bear arms, to have arms, and what should be the limits on that, and then pills, which actually, you know, it's a much more of a gray area debate.
And even if there is gun laws, I guess you could punish people harder for selling you an AK-47 in a parking lot, but the fact that you could just do it, Anybody who wants to stop background checks from owning guns is an asshole.
And they ask for ID if you want to get a beer to make sure you're over 21. So why not ask for your ID or get a background check if you want to buy a dangerous weapon?
But it was just one of those things that, like, this extreme reaction that people have to the gun issue.
When the reality is, and I'm not in the Ted Nugent camp, but the reality is when you look at the actual numbers of people with guns and the small amount of times that these things happen, it's really not a gun issue.
And, you know, there were guys that are obviously very pro-gun and would disagree with anybody who says that there should be any limits on gun ownership or anything like that.
But at the same time, a lot of the guys we were speaking to were very serious about the safety that went into owning a gun.
There's a responsibility there that if you own something, just like if you own...
Drive a car.
There's a responsibility to know how to drive a car and to educate yourself.
So the NRA, they offer these pistol classes and they teach you how to unload, load, and how to do everything safely.
I think it's not mandatory for gun owners, but I think anybody that wants to own a gun should certainly take a class on how to handle a weapon.
It's one that seems to be lingering in our transition from this primal alpha male monkey thing that we used to be to whatever we're becoming as we become more and more educated and more and more Aware of the consequences of our actions and more and more hopefully enlightened.
We still have this thing where you can just press a button and people explode.
And anybody can get one in the parking lot after being online in 45 minutes.
We're so strange.
I mean, people are so goddamn strange.
And if you really look at it that way, if you were an objective observer, You know, from another planet that's sent here to report back on Earth.
Boy, what a fucking story you would have.
You'd have to sit them down and you'd have to go, okay.
Journalists are driving into trees on 90 miles an hour, not leaving skid marks.
When you guys saw that, did you get scared?
Thinking about the business that you're in.
We're talking about Michael Hastings, who's a journalist for the Rolling Stone magazine, and he was involved in exactly what you're not involved in.
He was involved in singling out individuals and going after them, and he did Did it to a very powerful general and wrote some piece in Rolling Stone that got the guy fired and repeatedly told people that people had told him they were going to kill him.
And then one day his car going 100 miles an hour in Hollywood slammed directly into a pole or a tree and killed him.
It burst into flames.
No skid marks at all.
You know, you think, well, that's crazy.
Then, this guy who was involved in security for President Clinton and Bush said that you can hack into a car now.
Richard Clarke.
Yeah, and that today it's possible to hack into a modern car and control the steering, control the acceleration, control the brakes, and then it's very possible you could remote control a car and make someone accelerate and slam into a tree and make the car explode.
I think it would be foolish of me with my zero understanding of the mechanics of modern automobiles, zero understanding of the computer equipment that runs them.
There's several others as well who have studied the mechanisms behind the possibilities of remote controlling various things, hacking into them, you know.
The guy just drives, he's about to release this crazy story, tells everyone that the FBI is looking into him and interviewing all of his friends, and then right into a tree.
Boom!
And the car explodes and he dies.
And now the story is just going to slowly disappear.
You know, Kim Kardashian will get pregnant from some other dude in a couple of months.
Kanye West will be on the outs.
And everybody will forget about Michael Hastings.
You know, a few people try to talk about it on the line.
And other folks will go, Oh God, are you still talking about Michael Hastings?
I think also a thing to take into consideration is that we live in an age of extreme transparency.
And anybody who does something that evil, it seems like it's almost impossible to completely cover things up.
And if it's not impossible now, I feel like it will be in a few years.
I feel like any sort of record of something of that magnitude, there's going to be a way that that's going to come to light in some sort of a WikiLeaks type scenario.
There's that famous Orson Welles quote that history is a race between education and catastrophe.
And I think if you look at the trends, education seems to kind of always be winning.
And I think part of that is that ultimately what's good for the entire race triumphs over what's good for the few.
And I think even what's good for the few in terms of bad for the entire race is bad for the few because I think there's a thing called karma and I think that's real.
And I think that the effect that you have on your environment is a very tangible thing.
The way people react to you is a very physical, real, measurable thing and that comes from being a piece of shit.
If you're a piece of shit and you do horrible things, it's very difficult to feel warm and fuzzy and enjoy love and happiness and have friends and I think that ultimately technology most likely will be the tool that balances all that out because I think that with technology comes this transparency.
With this transparency, you get to see the actions of these few.
In a different light than we got to see, like whether it was in the 60s or the 70s or when Eisenhower warned of the – when he left office and he was warning about the military-industrial complex.
That was just a film that was on television for one brief moment in a time where there was no VCRs.
So it's like how much impact is that even going to have then?
Whereas now, many, many years later, over half a century later, That film is being played over and over again on the internet as an example of how this is probably an issue that's been around secretly behind the curtain for a long time.
But now every day there's some new thing.
Every day there's some new piece of information.
Every day there's some new story.
Whether it's Edward Snowden or whether it's someone else releasing something else or some people getting arrested for something that you can't believe is real.
It's almost impossible to cover that stuff up these days.
And it's almost like we weren't designed for that.
We're designed for what's happening in the tribe.
Who are those guys with swords coming over the hill?
Hey, we got to get the fuck out of here.
That's what we're sort of designed for.
We're dealing with the same genetics, essentially, that people had 10,000 years ago.
And there was no communication back then.
There was nothing.
And now it's on your phone.
I was at a restaurant the other day with a buddy of mine, and I'm like, I'm a fucking junkie.
I can't put this goddamn phone down.
I have to keep checking this stupid phone.
I'm such an asshole.
What's going on on Twitter?
It's so bad, but it's this...
What's happening is I keep getting information, and I'll go, and I'll see something, and ooh, and maybe I'll see nothing, and I'll look more, and I'll see nothing, and I'll look more, and then ooh, a new post by someone I follow or something crazy is happening.
Especially when it's a married couple, and we're in the same sort of business, and we're always, we're journalists, and we're always looking for information, but I find that it's almost like a ping pong ball for us.
I'm looking at the phone, and he's really mad at me because we're having dinner, and I'm looking at the phone, and then I put it down, and then he's looking at the phone, and I'm getting really mad at him.
I was at a restaurant the other day, and I watched four people, and none of them talked, and they all stayed on their phone the entire time they were sitting there eating together.
Yeah, but then you look at them, you're like, oh, these people, and five minutes later, you're the one checking your phone, and they're looking at you saying the same thing.
And one of the episodes, we were talking about the convergence, the human...
To machine convergence and then the idea that one day we will be some sort of a combination of people and technology.
And he was essentially making the argument that it's already happened and that it's just we're slowly accepting it but that technology is in pacemakers and in hearing aids and we are so attached to our phones that It could be argued that if you have a certain number of people that constantly carry phones with them, the argument could be that you're already a part of that.
You just haven't figured out a way to put it in your body.
So the way before they had hearing aids, those dudes used to carry those horns.
What?
And they'd lean forward.
You remember those?
You'd see them in the old Three Stooges movies and shit.
But our issue is not with people looking at our stuff.
Our issues are with assholes looking at our stuff or people using our information against us.
That's what we're really concerned with.
And I wonder if you could extrapolate this sort of – This thing that we're going through with technology where there's this massive curve and it's spinning and spinning faster and faster until this exponential growth,
if it was possible to somehow or another encourage that in human behavior as well as with technology, if technology could be used by By in aiding in this sort of like connection with people and aiding in emphasizing empathy and emphasizing camaraderie and friendship and love.
If that could be like seen as like a more worthwhile ethic.
A more worthwhile state of consciousness and behavior.
Because I think there's repercussions that people experience now when they do something terrible to someone on the internet where there's a flood of people who will go after them now that no one ever had before.
Did you ever see there was a video where Anonymous released this video of this girl who was throwing puppies into a river?
Because people know what the fuck's going on, and they're not going to tolerate it.
If everyone knows that something like that happened, someone did a horrible thing, wouldn't that lessen the occurrences of these things?
If there were repercussions, the masses had access.
The problem is, of course, that we don't think of that loss of privacy in that way.
We think of a loss of privacy in Big Brother.
We think of the NSA's listening to all your phone calls and copying all your emails.
It sounds very Orwellian and dangerous and scary, and that this is an erosion of privacy.
It seems inevitable.
And if it's not inevitable in the sense that the government gets it, I think they might get a hold of it first.
But it seems like everybody's going to get it.
That's where it's going.
It's all moving to this area of no boundaries.
It's very weird, but if you look at how life has changed since the internet, you know, when did we get it, like 90-ish, 94-ish, when it really took hold?
And then it goes on iTunes and at least a half a million will download each individual episode from either that or Stitcher or just the raw MP3. Like this is a crazy shift in the way things were done just 20 years from now.
And then you think about Facebook, you think about Twitter, you could take a picture of something, you put it online and then this guy retweets it and that guy retweets it.
And if it's something, especially if it's something big or a story big, it could get retweeted by millions.
And then before you know it, it becomes a news story and then before you know it, It becomes something that the whole country knows about.
And it's almost instantaneous.
I look at that and I say, how is it possible that that's not going to continue to go in that same direction?
And I really do think it's going to be beneficial.
I think there's going to be pitfalls for sure as we sort of figure out our way and how to navigate this new world that we live in.
Pardon the phrase.
But I ultimately think that it's going to be beneficial.
And meanwhile, and he kept on insisting for me to go into the car with him and Darren across the street.
I couldn't see where I was at and thought that I had gotten into the car with him and was sort of cursing me and saying, is she crazy?
What is she doing?
And then I hadn't gotten into the car.
And he kept on saying, why don't you come into the car with me?
And I just gave excuses that I didn't feel very comfortable yet, but I was really looking forward to working with him because I wanted to know more information about how these whole rings, prostitution rings work here in the United States.
And it's really, really sad.
Many times teenage girls who, you know, are at a shopping mall and they're approached by this guy who says, you're beautiful, you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, I'll give you everything you need in the world, come with me, travel with me.
You know, sometimes these girls are for whatever reason, they don't have good relationships with their parents or they come from a bad background and they accept and they go travel around America with these guys and very soon after they become, you know, they're sex slaves and they're sold out for, you know, $200 a night.
One of the operations, these sort of undercover operations we did was in Charlotte, which is a big place for sex trafficking because there are all these interstates.
This is North Carolina, all these interstates that meet there.
So we went out with this religious group because religious groups are out there doing a lot of outreach for sex trafficking.
And we went out with this religious group that goes out every night or many weeks, many nights a week to look for women to try to recruit them, take them out of these rings, out of prostitution essentially.
And it was me and this other woman who works in this organization.
And we went out again with a secret camera, Darren again filming from the car.
And we saw a girl who seemed to be sort of lost.
She had just gotten out of the car.
Her jeans were ripped.
And we called her and started asking, are you okay?
And she said, no, I'm not okay.
A guy just beat me and I'm not feeling well.
And as we're talking to this girl, suddenly it's as if we had...
crazy sex trafficking ecosystem.
And all these pimps come out of the woodworks, out of the bushes, literally in the middle of Charlotte, in the main prostitution street and come out and start circling us.
And they don't know we're watching because Darren's in the car watching them and start seeing these two pimps sort of circling us to find out why we were talking to their girl.
And that's when they came out and started calling us and then we left.
But it's really interesting and it's happening all around the United States.
Just from out of the top of my head, I wouldn't think, you know, obviously one of the big things, the reason why these rings exist, it's because it's illegal to be a prostitute.
So the prostitutes feel safer.
If they want to sell themselves, they feel safer having somebody who looks after them and who essentially at the end of the day takes away all their money.
It's sort of the same issue that exists in the drug world where if you make things illegal, then you sort of create this atmosphere where only the outlaws profit.
And I know that in Amsterdam where drugs are pretty much legal or at least tolerated as far as marijuana and many drugs, They have a very low rate of addiction and very low rate of AIDS. They have legalized prostitution.
I would wonder how much of this type of thing, of sex slavery, is mitigated by that.
Most places in Nevada, right, where it's legal, and I think that's the argument that a lot of the brothel owners make, is that we can make it safe, we can make it, you know, the girls attested, the girls...
Are there under their own volition and, you know, they get to keep their money as opposed to have the money taken away.
I was really nervous going in, not only because I was filming undercover and that is always nerve-wracking, but also because I was trying to apply for a job just to show sort of what this is like, what this sex trafficking underworld is like.
Not that I was going to work as a prostitute, but just to be able to get into these massage parlors and see how easy it is to get a job.
And I was nervous that they were going to turn me down and say, I'm sorry, you're too old or too fat or too this or too that.
What we were looking into was the guys that go undercover into factory farms and film abusive animals on factory farms, and then they turn it into campaigns to I try to get people to stop eating meat or to sort of improve conditions for factory farm animals and stuff like that.
So there's this sort of whole very successful campaign by animal rights groups in the last decade or so that have used the undercover camera and so we figured since we're doing a show about undercover filming, Let's see if we can hook up with these guys and see what their world is like.
So we hooked up with this one guy who's been doing it for like 10 years, and he remains anonymous.
It goes by a fake name in the show, but his old Life has just been penetrating these farms and capturing pictures of abuse on film and stuff like that.
He's completely against the eating consumption of animal meat.
And he still, every day, he goes to work when he goes undercover and he has to kill these animals just to be able to record what happens inside these factory farms.
And then there's legislation that is being passed right now in several states to try to stop, to prohibit what these guys are doing by filming undercover.
When they see those videos, even a meteor, they watch those videos of people like, I saw one of this abuse that was going on with these cows, where this guy was hitting a cow with a crowbar.
They're so horrific.
And again, another thing is being exposed by technology.
So this is part of the training, is that you have to be able to make people feel either very comfortable with you, so they give you information that you need, that you want to get for your undercover filming, Or very uncomfortable with you so that you feel the need to either leave so you can film or intimidated to a point that you will release any information you give without actually resorting to violence, obviously.
So it was really an interesting little practice that we had with him.
It seems to me that that's another one of those things where it's sort of a diffusion of responsibility thing when there's so many people that want meat, so many people that want food, and if you could figure out how to stuff them into smaller packages, you could extract more ones and zeros.
I mean, that's just that these guys that do the undercover filming, they obviously have an agenda, which is they want people to become vegan, but they're very sympathetic to the workers who sort of toil on their conditions that can at times be pretty stressful, and that's what sort of causes them to lash out many times.
And then the sort of agriculture industry obviously just sees this as a pretty big threat, these guys coming in and filming undercover in their farms.
Their argument is that they're capturing these anomalies.
This doesn't happen every day and they're using it to sort of amplify their issue.
That was probably the most surprising thing we did.
We went to a slaughterhouse.
But it was at a humane ranch.
It was a certified humane ranch.
And we saw the whole process.
We saw them tagging a baby calf.
A baby calf that was just born within the last 24 hours.
Marianna got to tag the calf's ear.
And then we saw the other end of the process where...
What is it, 18 months later or something like that, they're slaughtered and they led us onto the floor of the slaughterhouse and they said, you know, we have an open door policy because, you know, we want to be sort of as transparent as possible, you know, about how this food is, you know, raised and how it's slaughtered and, you know,
I've been eating meat all my life and I've never once seen a cow slaughtered and I thought it was a really eye-opening experience, you know, to be able to sort of consume thousands and thousands of meals and, you know, not know exactly where you're We're so disconnected from where our food comes from.
I'm not a vegetarian either, but I certainly am not a fan of human cruelty.
And I think that's the real issue.
These animals do not live forever, and the reality is that they're There's quite a few realities when it comes to being a vegan.
One of them is, if you do decide that no one's going to eat meat anymore, and we make a law and the whole world has to let all their animals go, they're going to keep fucking, and they're going to keep making baby animals, and then you've got a real problem.
Because what are you going to do then?
Are you going to castrate the males?
Are you going to sterilize them in some way?
Are you going to reintroduce predators into the environment?
There's some guy at National Geographic right now doing a story on, like, urban wildlife.
And he recently released a picture of...
I think it was a bobcat.
I don't think it was a mountain lion, but it was a bobcat.
And it's like caught by one of those trigger cams.
And it's like at night and the whole background of downtown LA. It was basically taken by the observatory where, you know, there are millions of little children running around.
unidentified
But the Griffith Observatory is hardly L.A. It's pretty rural.
I don't know where they have, but I do know that they're capable of doing things now where they can reproduce cells and they can reproduce certain types of tissue.
Like Kurzweil was telling me about this woman who had something wrong with her esophagus.
So they built an esophagus out of biodegradable material, used stem cells.
And you use the biodegradable material as a scaffolding.
The stem cells built a brand new esophagus, and the operator and her installed the new one, and now she's fine.
And that's like they're making parts for humans.
So it just seems to make sense that they're going to make meat.
And it seems to me that the real thing about killing an animal and eating an animal is the fact that it's not just that it's alive, because vegetables are alive as well.
It's the fact that it's alive and it can move and feel pain.
But if you take away the whole feel pain part, and it can't think, and just headless chickens, like you gotta, you know, you have some new sort of a way to make the heart beat without a brain.
Just really fucking stupid headless chickens.
Vegans still wouldn't go for it because they don't eat eggs.
And I have chickens, and the chickens lay an egg every day, and you can eat the eggs and no one gets hurt.
But yeah, we had people over this weekend, and we gave them some fresh eggs.
They taste delicious, too.
Because we give the chickens vegetables.
We buy vegetables.
I make kale shakes pretty much every morning, and it's cucumbers, and kale, and celery, and fruit, and stuff like that.
So a lot of times, you have leftover stuff, leftover kale, and we feed them that, and then we feed them chicken feed, and they wander around the lawn, and they basically eat anything they find.
They try to eat your house.
They're stupid as shit.
They peck at your house.
They're like, hmm, maybe this house is edible.
They're just checking everything for food.
But they've become like our pets.
They're not chickens that we're eating.
We're just getting eggs out of them.
But it's amazing how much you get out of them.
They give you food.
And that food is based entirely on food that you give them.
So it's this process.
It's like a natural, healthy cycle.
And nobody gets hurt.
They're happy when they see you.
There's no cruelty involved.
So for me, it's like I just started doing this really recently where we started growing our own vegetables and raising our own chickens.
And not as like a doom-day prepper sort of a thing, but just as like, let's see what this is like.
Well, I've actually – we've actually sat down – our family sat down with a couple other families that we really like.
And we actually started talking about doing that.
And we've decided to make some, have some meetings, have some dinners, where we meet and discuss the idea.
And look at like various locations, whether or not it'd be feasible with, you know, all the people that are, they all have sort of alternative entertainment type jobs, like comedians and writers and stuff like that.
And so we're all just singing like, What an awesome community that would be.
To live in a place where you're in a town, where there's a good town, like a healthy place with a city that's close by, but set up an establishment where you could grow your own food.
So you don't have to worry, like, is this organic?
Are these grass-raised?
Is this farm healthy and clean?
It's your own farm.
And it wouldn't be hard to do.
And if you think about how much money you spend on food every year, It seems to me that if you have quite a few people hiring some really competent, nice people to run a farm for you, well, people would appreciate a good job where they work for nice people and everybody's ethical about the whole situation and how everything's done and fair, and you set up a nice little community farm.
Well, it seems like you're going to need some money for sure.
You need some money to set up almost anything, but the real problem would be you'd have to You'd have to get permits to build houses, or you'd have to buy a bunch of houses together, which is even more ridiculous.
How are you going to pull that off?
That would be hard.
But I just think that ultimately that seems like it would be the ideal situation to get all of your food that way.
Not all of it.
I mean, you still go to the supermarket and buy mayonnaise and some shit you don't want to sit around making yourself, but...
How beautiful would it be to not worry?
Like, okay, the power goes out.
Well, guess what?
We have power.
Okay, the supermarkets are empty.
We have a farm.
We get all of our food from this area.
Then you just have to worry about the other people.
We did one about homeless youth where we actually spent a lot of time with young people who are homeless here in Los Angeles and we spent a couple of nights sleeping under the bridge.
Yeah, I mean, you live in LA, you know, it's like, you know, driving downtown or Hollywood and you see all these homeless, you know, kids and sometimes adults.
So Skid Row is the largest homeless community in the nation.
It's, I mean, thousands and thousands of homeless people.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, it's sleeping on the streets in tents.
And, you know, they've tried various times to clean it up.
But it's, you know...
There's a lot of issues there.
It's like, where are you going to house them?
There's a lot of housing, and there is a lot of shelters down there, but not enough to sort of meet the demand of how many homeless people are actually down there.
And so if you go down there, day or night, you'll see hundreds, if not thousands of people walking in the streets with their carts, and it's just another side of the city that...
You know, it's actually right next to the Arch District downtown, and so it's sort of, you've run across it here and there if you're living in L.A., but it's definitely an eye-opening experience to walk down there because there's a whole ecosystem down there that sort of It caters to – caters is probably not the right word,
but that supports the homeless down there from clinics and shelters and stuff like that to obviously drug dealers and gangs that sort of run the territory down there.
Because, as the activists who we follow down there told us, you know, it's not just the homeless community.
It's probably the largest concentration of addicts in the country as well.
Because most people, obviously, if you're living on the streets, you're either dealing with the mental health issue or some sort of addiction or both.
And the idea is that if you're sort of above 35 and you're homeless, you're on Skid Row.
If you're under 35 and you're homeless, you're in Hollywood.
And that's even more sort of surprising because you think of Hollywood, you think of the Walk of Fame, right?
You think of all the stars.
Celebrities.
And then, you know, for us who live here in LA and we drive by Hollywood every day and you see all those homeless kids every day and you know that they're sleeping out on the streets.
And this, again, because of mental health issues or addiction or just because they come from broke down families and have nowhere to sleep, which was some of the cases of the people that we filmed.
And so we decided it was, you know, sort of important if we were really going to dive deeper into this issue to spend the night with them, with two of the people that we were filming.
And the reason why that show was created was because Les Stroud wouldn't play ball with producers and set up fake shots.
They wanted to like, oh, Les stumbled upon this dead animal.
This is how you, you know, fix this dead animal so you could eat it.
This is how you cure meat or cut it up.
Bear Grylls does all that stuff.
So he's like, you know, he would do it.
He would fudge shit.
And Les Stroud said the only way to do this is to do it real.
So he like...
We'll starve.
He'll be out there for five days with no food and really freaking out and not knowing whether or not he's going to get out of there and trying to figure out how to alert the crew and how to start a fire when it's raining out.
All that stuff is real.
When you watch that show, he deals 100% real, which is so fascinating.
When the people found out about the other show, the Barrel Grill show, they were like, get the fuck out.
Several athletes have thought that it's a good thing to do.
That somehow or another you get vitamins that pass through your body and then you recycle them into your urine and that your urine is sterile and it's not nothing to worry about and there's actually antibodies in your urine.
It's very controversial.
But I had done it to see if there's anything to it.
Like when I was sick, I drank my own pee a couple times and I don't know whether it helped me or not.
One of the things about Fear Factor is, especially during the first season, if we aired people eating things, it had to be something that people ate in other countries.
So, like, insects are very common.
People in poor countries eat insects all the time.
In fact, insects are probably eaten more than livestock in a lot of countries.
So that was an easy one.
We could prove that.
And then in New Zealand, they started selling shots of horse semen at bars.
Like, it was a novelty.
And people would, you know, mosey up to the bar and buy a shot of horse semen.
And apparently they said it gave them energy and all sorts of crazy things were attributed to it.
Not only that, how about the contestants at least had a shot at winning some money, but we had PAs drink it, and they only did it because it was part of their job.
Whenever we did a stunt on Fear Factor, there was several times where we'd look at a stunt, whether it was a physical task or whether it was someone eating something.
We had to figure out what's the correct amount and whether or not physically a task could be completed.
So the physical aspect was handled by stuntmen, first of all, who would look at it and say, well, you shouldn't do it that way because I don't think a guy could do that.
And if he does do that, he's probably going to hurt himself in this way or that way.
And then with the eating thing, it's really the only way to find out.
You've got to, like, how many bugs can a person eat?
Hmm, let's see.
Okay, we'll try to get a PA to eat 10. And then the PA would have, like, 10 minutes to eat 10 bugs.
And they'd be, like, three bugs in, just hurling.
And you're like, okay, this is too much.
Let's cut it down to five.
You know, we'd have to make it some sort of a reasonable amount.
So you'd have to have more than one PA because you want to have a control group.
So we went to do the story on the cambo frog looking for the pharmaceutical promise of the Amazon.
And we went in with two herpetologists.
These are guys who study poisonous amphibians and snakes.
And they go out every month.
They go out for a week at a time and they go deep, deep, deep into the Amazon.
I mean, they take a canoe deep inside where there's nothing around.
And they said that after much haggling, they decided that they were going to take these two gringos along with them, me and Darren.
And we are camped out in the middle of nowhere.
There's nothing.
We bought a couple of hammocks.
We hung them as soon as we got there.
And then at night, they go out with these lights, with these headlamps to look for the most dangerous and most venomous snakes and frogs there are in the world in the middle of the Amazon.
It was a crazy, crazy experience.
But for some reason, because we were filming it, we were on this high of filming this documentary and how cool it would be if we found the most dangerous thing in the world.
For us, we didn't feel scared and we thought it was great.
We were filming all this crazy stuff.
We got back to the hammocks at night and I'm sleeping on the edge because they decided they wanted to give me a little privacy.
So it was a sort of like little wooden camp thing.
No walls, no roof, nothing.
Just these hammocks.
And I was on the last hammock right on the edge.
And in the middle of the night, I woke up.
Nobody told me that in the Amazon it gets really cold at night, so we had nothing to protect us.
And we had these mosquito nets.
In the middle of the night, I woke up because I was freezing, and then I heard...
And we've been talking about all these stories.
They've been telling us all these stories on the onsa.
They call it the onsa there, and how it's the most dangerous animal in the Amazon.
And suddenly I start hearing it, breathing right next to my head.
And it was breathing, and it was breathing really hard, and I could smell it.
I could smell it.
A big, hairy, scary creature breathing right next to me.
And I had one of those.
You know when you have those dreams and you try to scream and nothing comes out?
That happened to me.
I panicked and I was trying to call out for Darren or for the other guys and nothing came out.
I was literally frozen, panicked.
And Darren woke up with my breathing because I was...
Breathing really heavily and really scared.
And he asked me, are you okay?
And I was able to get out just, no!
And Darren comes up to me and I told him I was about to be attacked by an ulcer, by a jaguar.
And we went around the camp with the lights just so I could see that there was nothing there.
Morning after, wake up.
I look at my bag and it was full of hair.
Full of hair.
And I said, I told you, I knew it, I knew it.
And I told the scientists that were with us, you know, I saw, I know it was a jaguar.
It was right next to me.
And then we looked around and there was a freaking stray dog that had come from like an Indian reservation close by.
unidentified
And it had been the stray dog.
So it would have been a much cooler story if it was a jaguar.
A lot of things, but you know, ultimately we were afraid of all these things, and actually Darren has a fascination for snakes, so he wasn't as scared as I was, but what got us was several months after we came back, I had this little thing growing on my finger that I thought it was just a bug, and then I decided I had to get it checked out because it was growing and growing,
and suddenly pus was coming out of it, so I thought it was maybe skin cancer, and I went to a dermatologist in a Turns out I got a flesh-eating parasite that I caught in Brazil that only exists in a few parts of the world, so they didn't have the treatment here.
CDC, the Center for Disease Control, had to make a special treatment for me that had a nurse come to my house, and it was pretty scary.