May 6, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:42:00
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I really enjoyed your three-part, what do you call it? | ||
| Docu-series, is that what you call it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Limited doc-series, yeah. | ||
| I watched it last night on Hulu. | ||
| I binge-watched it, and it's intense. | ||
| You know, I've been a fan of marijuana for a long time, so I know a lot of people who've lived up there and grown up there. | ||
| And for people who don't know, the docu-series is called Sasquatch, and you look at it on Hulu, you go, oh man, it's a Bigfoot documentary. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a lot scarier. | ||
| How did this come about? | ||
| Like, how did this project fall into your lap? | ||
| Well, the genesis of the project really goes back to the fall of 1993. I was visiting a buddy of mine who was working on a dope farm, and he kind of... | ||
| It was harvest season, which is like a particularly dangerous time of the year up there, but he kind of got me a hall pass with the guy that owned the farm and vouched for me for me to parachute in for about a week. | ||
| And something that didn't make it in the show is that I went up there to do like a heroic mushroom trip with this guy. | ||
| So the day before, the day that the ship went down, okay? | ||
| We took about an eighth of mushrooms each and went tripping around the redwoods. | ||
| Now, that didn't make it in the show. | ||
| But that night, as we were coming down, we were in the A-frame cabin that belonged to the guy that owned the farm. | ||
| And these two dudes showed up late at night, covered in mud, like splattered with mud, soaked. | ||
| Claiming that they'd just been to a nearby dope farm where they'd seen three bodies that were torn up, like mutilated. | ||
| And these guys were freaking out. | ||
| They seemed legitimately traumatized to me. | ||
| They were exuding this energy of terror and having just seen mutilated bodies to the point where... | ||
| I was just trying to shrink into the couch where I was. | ||
| I was really not happy to be in that room at that point. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
| I was 23 years old. | ||
| I was just getting going in journalism. | ||
| The owner of the farm kind of pulled them off to the side and they were having a conversation in the kitchen. | ||
| And when they were trying to keep their voices hushed, but these guys, they were so rattled. | ||
| Also, I didn't know the signs at the time, but now looking back, I'm like, they were on crystal. | ||
| They were tweaking, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so they were, like, their voices were going up and down in volume, but they were clearly saying that they'd just, like, seen these three bodies, and they'd seen, like, Sasquatch footprints at the murder scene. | ||
| And they knew it wasn't a rip-off, they were saying, because, you know, it was, all the weed had been harvested, but it was still there. | ||
| Like, some plants had been torn up and thrown around, right? | ||
| But the bud was still there. | ||
| Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weed, if it was a typical patch. | ||
| At one point, the guy was like, are you sure they're dead? | ||
| They were like, are you fucking not listening to us? | ||
| They were torn to pieces, man. | ||
| They're fucking dead. | ||
| And a Bigfoot killed these guys. | ||
| So, and he kind of like got him out of the farm and like sat down and was like, well, that was really fucking weird. | ||
| And we like had a laugh, you know? | ||
| But obviously that story stuck with me for the next quarter century. | ||
| And it was one that I kind of, I told it around like a ghost story around the campfire kind of thing a few times. | ||
| But then a friend of mine and a guy I collaborate with, Joshua Fay, who's the director of the series Sasquatch, We were just finishing up another project together, and he texted me out of the blue, and he'd become a fan of this podcast, Sasquatch Chronicles, right? | ||
| And he texted me, he's like, dude, if we could find some sort of true crime story wrapped up with a Sasquatch angle, like we'd really have something. | ||
| What is Sasquatch Chronicles? | ||
| I don't even listen to it. | ||
| I've never listened to it, but it's a podcast. | ||
| It's basically like people's reporting their Sasquatch encounters, okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so he sent me this text out of the blue, and I hit him right back. | ||
| I was like, I might have one. | ||
| So he's like, dude, can you look into that? | ||
| So the next step was to get a hold of... | ||
| Get a hold of a buddy that was working on the farm up there. | ||
| Get a hold of anybody I could find that worked in the dope game up in northern Mendocino County. | ||
| It was near a town called Branscombe that worked in that area at that time in the dope game. | ||
| I'd be like, did you ever hear a story like this? | ||
| Because our thinking was, you know, we can't do a series if it was just me hearing that story in that cabin that one night. | ||
| But it's the kind of story where you think, like, that probably spread beyond that one cabin, right? | ||
| Those guys didn't seem like the type that they were going to keep that to themselves. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, you know, after drawing a lot of blanks, we finally hit this one sort of information ecosystem sub-circle up there, if you will, where people had heard that story. | ||
| And they were like, yes, three guys did get killed, but there's more to it, right? | ||
| They were like, there's a story behind that, and it doesn't really involve a Sasquatch actually killing these guys. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn't seen it. | ||
| For anybody who hasn't seen it, it's well worth the three... | ||
| They're like 50 minutes or so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like an hour TV show length? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very intense. | ||
| And it also brings you to this weird realization that the war on drugs ruined this sort of utopian community up there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, at that time that I was up there, this was the time of like... | ||
| DEA's Operation Greensweep, where they had, like, they'd injected a lot of narcs into the scene, so they had a lot of undercover guys. | ||
| They also had, like, these sort of paramilitary squads out there in the woods looking for patches. | ||
| Or if they found one, you know, they'd set up on these guys, like, Rambo-style for days until somebody came to work the patch and then, you know, nail them. | ||
| So there were a lot of shooters. | ||
| I mean, it was, like, armored troop carriers, like, Parading down the main streets of these little towns up there. | ||
| I mean it was full-on. | ||
| I knew some people in the 90s who were growing up there and It was at the time where medical marijuana was legal. | ||
| So this is a little bit after the fact is like I think medical marijuana became legal in California was it like 94 or some shit and My friend Todd was one of the first people to go to jail for medical marijuana for growing. | ||
| And one of the weird things, shout out to Todd McCormick, one of the weird things is when he went to jail, they would not let him use the phrase medical marijuana. | ||
| Because they arrested him and they brought him to court and in court, federally, medical marijuana is not recognized. | ||
| So it was just horrible. | ||
| Were you in possession of a Schedule 1 drug? | ||
| Were you growing and distributing a Schedule 1 drug? | ||
| What year was it? | ||
| 96. So this was late 90s and I met quite a few people that were in that sort of circle of people who were growing and it's just like... | ||
| It was this weird sort of gray area where it was kind of legal but not legal federally so they could get busted. | ||
| And then like what happened with Todd, they got busted and you literally couldn't even bring up the phrase medical marijuana in court. | ||
| So you're just railroaded through the court system until you're sentenced and then you're sentenced for possession of a Schedule I substance. | ||
| And they just made examples out of everybody. | ||
| Yeah, and people now, they don't know. | ||
| They don't know like- We're good to go. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, how crazy is that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put in prison for life on kingpin sentencing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They were drug kingpins. | ||
| Well, you know, and isn't some of that part of the 1994 crime bill? | ||
| Like, some of that is those people that got three strikes and they got busted growing three times and then they're in jail for the rest of their life. | ||
| Well, and the first two could have been possession. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so dark, man. | ||
| And when you show these guys who were the cops, and you show them today, and they're kind of proud of it, and they're talking about how fun it was to bus these people, and I guess they just didn't understand what the documentary was going to be about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that... | ||
| Yeah, you know, we approached them saying, hey, we're doing a documentary about, like, the federal... | ||
| Yeah, that involves, like, federal law enforcement, anti-marijuana interdiction in Mendocito. | ||
| So they were happy to talk about them. | ||
| These guys, they were like California Highway Patrol guys that a couple weekends a year would get to go play Army up there. | ||
| It was so sad. | ||
| Again, I don't want to give away too much of it, but some of the families that were... | ||
| A lot of people don't feel like city life and modern life, and even modern life back then in the 1970s and 80s or whatever it was, is for them. | ||
| They don't want to live like this. | ||
| They don't want to be... | ||
| Jammed up on top of everybody with everybody stressed out and they would rather live close to nature. | ||
| And when you had that family on that didn't even have electricity, you know, their kids went to the school, they had an oil lamp and an outhouse. | ||
| Off the grid. | ||
| And they were talking about how living like that after a while it started to heal them. | ||
| Like they started literally feeling better. | ||
| You know, I don't live like that, but I think it's better if you do. | ||
| I mean, I think we're in this weird stage as human beings where our bodies are designed to live the way people lived thousands of years ago. | ||
| Because it takes so long for your genes to change. | ||
| You know, I think there's like certain reward systems that are built into being a human being. | ||
| Like you take a dog outside. | ||
| Dogs go outside and all of a sudden they perk up, they start moving around, they hear things, they smell things, they run around, they become alive, right? | ||
| Because dogs are supposed to be outside. | ||
| It's like it's natural for them. | ||
| It perks up all of their natural reward systems and all the little bells and whistles that go off in their little doggy heads. | ||
| That's the same thing with people, man. | ||
| There's something that happens to people when we go outside. | ||
| You know, you smell nature and you go around and you see butterflies and you You see trees. | ||
| You feel better. | ||
| You feel better. | ||
| And these people that were living like that, man, part of that film, part of your series is, you know, I'm watching this and I'm like, wow, that's cool that they figured it out. | ||
| And then they got together and they really started kind of homesteading. | ||
| It was kind of lawless. | ||
| And kind of dangerous, but also there's a lot of freedom there and you see them playing guitar and all that shit and then the fucking laws change, you know? | ||
| They come down on these people and you see these cops. | ||
| I don't think those cops are bad people. | ||
| I think they're just clueless. | ||
| I just don't think they understand. | ||
| I just think they were in that cop culture. | ||
| Of like, these are bad people, these are hippies, these are the other, and they were dehumanized. | ||
| There's a lot of dark things about this series that you put together. | ||
| It's really good, by the way. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| At the end of it, I was like, fuck! | ||
| I shut the TV off and I just sat on the couch for like five minutes, shaking my head. | ||
| Because there's a lot of documentaries like that where... | ||
| At the end of it, you go, God, what have humans done? | ||
| What have we done? | ||
| And that's one of them. | ||
| It's like, what have we done to this place? | ||
| It seems like it could have been amazing. | ||
| And then it turned into this crime-riddled, murderous hellhole. | ||
| You know, the growing scene up there, it started in the late 60s, early 70s, and it was people looking to get off the grid, get back to the land, and they were growing dope to fund that way of life. | ||
| Growing dope wasn't priority one. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But then, with the war on drugs coming down hard, it, like, drove the price of black market weed up so high that the culture up there started to shift. | ||
| I mean, you still have those sort of back-to-the-land types that are growing weed up there that lead a really sort of positive life. | ||
| But in the 80s, when they started to get three, four, five grand a pound for weed on the East Coast for Northern California, you know, primo bud, It brought in a new element up there, and it wasn't like back to the land hippies anymore. | ||
| It started to bring in a real pretty hardcore criminal element that were drawn there by the opportunity for a quick profit. | ||
| And they're still there. | ||
| And it's like the culture up there, at least part of the equation up there, took a pretty dark turn. | ||
| Who was the older hippie? | ||
| Wasn't it Ghost Rider? | ||
| Ghost Dance. | ||
| Ghost Dance. | ||
| That guy was really interesting. | ||
| But one of the things that scared the shit out of me, he was saying that once it became legal, it got more violent up there. | ||
| And how does that happen? | ||
| Because it's just more money? | ||
| Well, what happened was, like, corporations come in. | ||
| So you've got corporate, you've got, you know, McGonja being grown down around, you know, Death Valley or down around, like, Palm Desert out there in the desert in California. | ||
| They've got these, like, death stars of weed. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's growing it? | ||
| Who's doing that? | ||
| Corporations. | ||
| Like, literally multinational corporations growing massive amounts of weed hydroponically. | ||
| And, like, they're... | ||
| And it's driven the price down. | ||
| So it's really hard to make a living growing especially legal weed up there because by the time you factor in all the permitting costs, all the zoning hassles, all the bureaucracy basically of growing legal weed, if you're a small-time operator, unless you've got sort of a boutique, what they call sun-grown, naturally grown weed that you can charge a lot for, Yeah. | ||
| harvest right so it's it's it's driven a lot of them back to the black market and competitions fierce and when the price is low like no they're not bringing in as much cash every harvest and times are hard man it's Those towns up there, it feels like the mill closed. | ||
| That's what those towns feel like now compared to the early 90s when I was up there. | ||
| They're not as flush anymore. | ||
| Times are hard. | ||
| There's a gentleman named John Norris. | ||
| He's a game warden. | ||
| That's how he started his career out. | ||
| He is a guy who loved the outdoors and liked to fish and hunt. | ||
| He felt like, hey, that'd be a great job. | ||
| I'd be out there in nature all the time. | ||
| And early on in his career, they started finding these creeks that had run dry, and they couldn't figure out what was going on. | ||
| And, you know, it was really fucking up the trout population. | ||
| So they had to track these creeks down and see maybe it got dammed up, maybe a farmer is using it for... | ||
| Well, they found these grow-ops that were being put in there by the cartels. | ||
| And they turned from a game warden operation where they were checking like fishing and hunting licenses to a paramilitary anti-cartel organization where they had guns and dogs and bulletproof vests. | ||
| They were in shootouts. | ||
| Wild shit. | ||
| But he said because marijuana became legal, when it became legal in California, growing it illegally was a misdemeanor. | ||
| So they grew all of their illegal weed for the rest of the country out of California in the national forests, in the parklands, and they would just go to public land and hike in many miles. | ||
| These guys are super industrious. | ||
| Many miles of hiking in with... | ||
| Fucking hoses and tubes and PVC pipes and all the fertilizer all the shit that they needed they go deep into the forest with this stuff and Super super toxic pesticides yep, and that stuff is in the weed and so people are buying weed that's infested with this toxic pesticide and Yeah, I was just on one of those farms last June. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Mexican operation. | ||
| Yeah, it was just that. | ||
| And looking at the chemicals they were using, I mean, it's pretty high-impact marijuana growers. | ||
| How did you get involved in that? | ||
| It was in the part of making Sasquatch, just trying to... | ||
| Grow up? | ||
| Well, I had somebody that introduced me. | ||
| You know, a friend of a friend kind of thing. | ||
| How weird was that? | ||
| It was pretty weird. | ||
| It was pretty far back up in the woods. | ||
| How far in? | ||
| Probably about three and a half miles. | ||
| So off a beaten road, right? | ||
| You're like a dirt road. | ||
| Yeah, ATVs and then on foot. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| There's no GPS. There's no cell coverage. | ||
| I didn't even know where I was, really. | ||
| Well, it's gloomy up there, too. | ||
| I've been to Mendocino. | ||
| Mendocino? | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| Mendocino, yeah. | ||
| Mendocino. | ||
| Mendo. | ||
| Why did it sound wrong? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been up there before, and it just was really rainy, and it's interesting. | ||
| It rains a lot. | ||
| In those woods, the way that the light filters down through the redwood canopy, it's really spooky. | ||
| It's really cool, but it's kind of spooky. | ||
| Well, you feel like you could get lost in there and no one would ever find you. | ||
| Man, I'm from Alaska, and I'll tell you, I know big country, and that's big country. | ||
| It's serious, serious woods. | ||
| It's different woods, right? | ||
| Because Alaska has a lot of open areas. | ||
| There's a lot of... | ||
| A lot of tundra. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of... | ||
| I mean, Alaska obviously has some dense shit, like Prince of Wales and stuff like that. | ||
| When you're up in that Redwoods, the Redwoods area, fuck, that's dense. | ||
| I went to Pacific Northwest, me and my friend Duncan, we went to talk to Sasquatch Hunters up there for this sci-fi show I did back in the day, and it was real weird, man. | ||
| These people swear they saw Bigfoot. | ||
| You know, like you're talking to them and some of them seem crazy and some of them seem... | ||
| There's this one lady to this day, man. | ||
| Her story and like the way she was saying it, like she did not seem like she was lying. | ||
| You know, she really did believe that she saw something. | ||
| My take is... | ||
| There's black bears up there, and black bears walk on foot. | ||
| And sometimes, I mean, the woods are so dense, it's like, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips. | ||
| Like, you can't see shit through the woods. | ||
| It's like looking, trying to look through. | ||
| So if you saw something stand up and walk through those Q-tips, and it was a bear that was walking on its hind legs, which they do all the time, and then your brain starts playing tricks on you, you would absolutely believe that there's a giant gorilla up there in the woods. | ||
| Especially if you just catch a glimpse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're freaking out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Sasquatch made a lot more sense to me after I spent time up in northern Mendocino County, like back in those woods, like off trail in the woods. | ||
| I was like, Sasquatch makes sense to me now. | ||
| This seems like a place where a Sasquatch, you know, would hang out. | ||
| You had that Jeff Meldrum guy on for briefly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jeff Meldrum, I had him on the podcast. | ||
| He told me he would cut his finger off to find out if Sasquatch was real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| He goes, yeah, my pinky. | ||
| I'm like, man, I don't know about that. | ||
| I mean, I met a lot of people in the course of making this show that I went into it expecting just, like, these people are fucking idiots, you know? | ||
| But I met a lot of Squatchers that they convinced me, like, that they're convinced that they're telling me the truth. | ||
| Bobo? | ||
| Yeah, Bobo. | ||
| Bobo being one of the squatchers. | ||
| Bobo gave me a hat that says out squatching. | ||
| Yeah, he's on that show Finding Bigfoot. | ||
| I don't know if they still do that anymore, but that show. | ||
| They never found him. | ||
| Crazy, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| They've got nine seasons. | ||
| There's all these people that are pissed off at us for calling the show Sasquatch or it not being a real Sasquatch show. | ||
| A lot of the negative reviews that we get online are people like, this show isn't about Sasquatch. | ||
| You didn't find Sasquatch. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You'll stick with that show for three fucking seasons and they never find him and you can't give me three episodes? | ||
| I think it's a lot more than three seasons. | ||
| How many seasons has Finding Bigfoot been on for? | ||
| And it's always the same shit. | ||
| Like, did you hear that? | ||
| Cut to commercial. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Night vision, and they're knocking on trees, listening for things knocking back. | ||
| It's nine episodes, but also a video game. | ||
| You mean nine seasons? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I was looking at 100 episodes, yeah. | ||
| 100 episodes of Finding Bigfoot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 100 episodes. | ||
| They're looking for him in, like, fucking parking lot, too, by season 7. They're in fucking Waffle Houses. | ||
| Where's Bigfoot? | ||
| Actually, 12 seasons. | ||
| 12? | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It says 9, now it says 12. Well, you probably found an old listing. | ||
| They probably keep going. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Look, that Survivor, there's a big business in that. | ||
| Les Stroud, he went looking for Bigfoot for a long time. | ||
| He apparently had a weird encounter in Alaska that he thinks might have been a Bigfoot. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| They used to be real. | ||
| Do you ever look into the whole history of what they think a Sasquatch is? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's called the Gigantopithecus. | ||
| Gigantopithecus absolutely existed during the same time human beings existed. | ||
| It's a bipedal hominid or bipedal ape-like creature that is somewhere between 8 and 10 feet tall. | ||
| And the way they found it, there was an anthropologist, I believe, was in an apothecary shop I want to say in like the 1920s or 1930s in China, and he found a tooth, a primate tooth, that was enormous. | ||
| And he was like, where did you get this? | ||
| And they took him to the place, and he found some other bones, and he found some jaw bones that indicated it was bipedal, I guess, bipedal animals, the way they carry their body up straight, the jaw is structured differently, or something along those lines, right? | ||
| And so they know that this thing existed and there's depictions of what it looked like next to a human being. | ||
| And this is what they think it looked like. | ||
| Go to that one in the lower left-hand corner because that's the one that's the freakiest. | ||
| They think that that was a real thing that lived alongside people. | ||
| Well, they know it was a real thing. | ||
| They absolutely have bones. | ||
| They don't have full skeleton, though. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| But just fucking imagine. | ||
| So that thing, what's really crazy is that thing lived in Asia, right? | ||
| So like many things, including human beings, they believe came across the Bering Land Bridge. | ||
| And they think that if it did that, well, where would it wind up? | ||
| Well, it would wind up in the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| So at one point in time, it's very possible that that thing was around human beings and we have stories of this thing. | ||
| Most likely extinct. | ||
| Most, most, most likely extinct. | ||
| But they think that human beings encounter... | ||
| I think the bones that they found were 100,000 years old. | ||
| That would explain all the legends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That go back way beyond white people claiming to see. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Native Americans have many, many names for, you know, different tribes have many names for this man that lives in the woods. | ||
| But then again, you kind of covered that in your series, that there's, like, a part of it is just wild people that, like, live in the woods. | ||
| Like, we're kind of scared of people that get away from the pack and live off on their own, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those people that live up in this area, Mendocino, just growing weed out in the woods. | ||
| It's kind of, it's like, there's two, I had two modes of operating up there, and there's different, like there's in town, okay, and then there's on the mountain. | ||
| And on the mountain up there, it's not just a physical location, it's also like a state of mind. | ||
| And there's growers that have gone up the mountain and never come down, basically. | ||
| They very rarely come to town. | ||
| And they get kind of feral. | ||
| They definitely take on that sort of wild man kind of thing that you're talking about. | ||
| And not to give away too much of your documentary, your series, but there's probably been a lot of fucking murders up there. | ||
| Well, the number of reported missing persons cases in northern Mendocino and Humboldt counties is the highest in the country by far, by a factor of 3x, right? | ||
| Like three times higher than the closest county. | ||
| But that's just the number of people that go missing up there and get reported. | ||
| Any crook up there will tell you that most of the murders up there are never reported to the cops. | ||
| People just disappear. | ||
| And a lot of people that get killed up there, their families, if they have families, don't really know exactly where they are. | ||
| So, there's a lot of bodies in those woods, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I think the saddest one was that young Mexican girl who was talking about her uncle. | ||
| You know, that was rough. | ||
| I mean, you know, you... | ||
| Sort of get into the fact that a lot of these folks, they go up there because it's an opportunity for them to make some money. | ||
| And they know it's dangerous. | ||
| And so this was kind of covered in the thing that this guy was aware, his family was aware that he was doing something dangerous, but for him it was an opportunity to make some money. | ||
| And the thing is, they're not even making a lot of money. | ||
| They're not the ones making a lot of money. | ||
| The cartels are making a lot of money. | ||
| They're making a little. | ||
| But they're risking their lives. | ||
| Yeah, they get paid, you know, 10 to 20 grand to sit on a patch for four to six months and bring in the harvest. | ||
| And part of that is they have to guard the patch once the bud's ready. | ||
| And that's dangerous work, man. | ||
| There's rip crews out there. | ||
| So, you know, they give these guys a rifle that they may or may not really know how to use. | ||
| And they're like, you know, if this patch gets ripped off, like, it's your ass. | ||
| Like, you're going in the dirt if you lose this harvest. | ||
| How long did you work on this for? | ||
| Often on two years. | ||
| That's a deep, heavy subject to be living with for a couple of years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I tend to gravitate towards deep, heavy subjects. | ||
| No, you do. | ||
| But yeah, it's not a light-hearted Bigfoot show. | ||
| If you go into that expecting to be entertained on that level, you're not going to get what you're looking for. | ||
| Now, going into it, did you ever really think that it was Bigfoot that killed people? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| I always thought it was people that killed people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, the question is, was somebody stage a murder scene to make it look like Bigfoot did it? | ||
| And that, I think, maybe happened. | ||
| One of the things that made us think that we ought to show was, A, finding other people up there that had heard this story. | ||
| But B, figuring out that there's a long tradition up there of faking Bigfoot evidence in order to terrorize people, especially people that aren't from the United States. | ||
| Like there's these trimagrants. | ||
| Like trimagrants are people that are like temporary seasonal workers that like trim buds and package buds. | ||
| And a lot of them come from South America or Mexico or Europe. | ||
| And going back all the way to the 80s, like growers would use these Bigfoot footprints on stilts and stamp them around their patches. | ||
| And then like tear up trees and shit and like take the trimagrants from foreign countries out right after they'd hire them and be like, there's a violent, like aggressive Sasquatch in the area. | ||
| You don't want to leave the farm. | ||
| The point to that being, the less traffic you have on and off your farm... | ||
| Like, the lower profile you can keep, the less likely you are to get busted. | ||
| So they don't want these, like, backpacker kids from Europe or South America or wherever. | ||
| It'll be like going into town all the time, right? | ||
| So they would fake this Sasquatch shit to, like, keep them on the farm. | ||
| And you hear that, and you're like, the idea that somebody would take that to the next step and stage a triple homicide to make it look like a Sasquatch, it's like, okay, like, the leap is starting to get a little bit more manageable there. | ||
| Yeah, fuck. | ||
| It's a sad story. | ||
| Not just because of all the murders, but because of the way the laws have changed the way these people have to live. | ||
| You know, when you go into detail about how these hippies started packing, and they started going into the woods with rifles, and became real aware, and the hanging of the fish hooks on the Fishing line like all that shit was it's it was very disturbing to me like surprisingly so like I've watched a lot of true crime sort of documentaries and you know they're all creepy but there's something extra disturbing about this because it seemed like I These | ||
| war on drug laws and the attitude that people had taken ruined a whole culture. | ||
| It changed everything about the way these people were living, and it changed what it meant to grow marijuana up there. | ||
| You weren't... | ||
| One of the good people providing a good thing that people love and that people appreciate. | ||
| No, you're risking your fucking life to feed your kids. | ||
| And when the one guy was talking about how if you got busted, you had no money for the year. | ||
| You have no money for diapers. | ||
| No money for groceries. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And part of it was, you know, again, good people grow in weed for what I would call the right reasons. | ||
| They've always been up there. | ||
| They're still up there. | ||
| They have to take precautionary measures. | ||
| They tend to form their own sort of enclaves up there. | ||
| And yeah, they may have weapons, but they're not like the, you know, the meth-addled Purely profit-driven black market growers and cartel operatives that kind of came in and took over large parts of that scene. | ||
| I just want to draw that distinction because some people have the stereotype that it's all back to the land hippies and some people have the stereotype that it's all toothless meth heads that are crazed and only out for the quick buck. | ||
| It's both, right? | ||
| They both exist. | ||
| They don't necessarily coexist peacefully. | ||
| They tend to have their own areas of operation. | ||
| Why do you think it got more violent? | ||
| Money. | ||
| Money. | ||
| Just the price of weed. | ||
| And what drove up the price of weed? | ||
| The war on drugs. | ||
| And quality got better. | ||
| I mean, frankly, they started spending more money growing it and perfecting the art and were able to command a higher and higher price for it. | ||
| It was interesting, the one guy was talking about how tomatoes taste better up there, the herbs are better, like everything's better. | ||
| It's just there's something about the soil and the fact that it's just so rich and full of life because of all the rain. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, in my opinion, I'm biased. | ||
| Like, the best weed in the world comes from the Mananuska Valley in Alaska, Mananuska Thunderfuck. | ||
| Yeah, Mananuska Thunderfuck, best outdoor-grown weed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Hands down, always has been, always will be. | ||
| Nobody will ever beat it. | ||
| In my opinion, Matanuska Thunderfuck. | ||
| And the Matanuska Valley was this huge, there was a huge glacier there at last Ice Age. | ||
| And it receded, and it carved out this valley, and you combine it, and the thing is, the secret ingredient of Alaska is like the sunlight in the summer. | ||
| You know, 22, 23 hours of sunlight. | ||
| So you get a really fat harvest. | ||
| You're looking at Guinness Book of World Records, like every world record, like cabbage or, you know, Whatever. | ||
| Squash is from the Mat-Su Valley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| And the same applies to weed. | ||
| But point being, there is really something to, you know, that the soil in certain parts of the world yields particularly potent and tasty weed. | ||
| Well, it makes sense that if a glacier receded, it would probably leave behind a lot of minerals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really rich, growing soil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, what does it look like up there? | ||
| Matanuska. | ||
| Matanuska Valley, yeah. | ||
| What's that near? | ||
| It's near the city of Anchorage. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Go back to that other picture. | ||
| Look how fucking pretty that is. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Alaska is an interesting place. | ||
| I've only been a couple of times, but I remember one time we performed in Anchorage and me and my friend Ari went fishing for salmon and hung out. | ||
| I'm like, man, people are hardier here. | ||
| They're a little bit more capable because they realize it gets so cold. | ||
| You know, and there's bears and shit and moose everywhere. | ||
| It's like, it's a weird way to live. | ||
| It's a different way to live. | ||
| It's the first time I ever saw an eagle, like a golden eagle, or a bald eagle, rather. | ||
| I'm like, wow, it's a real fucking eagle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will say, growing up in Anchorage gives you kind of a twisted take on bald eagles, though. | ||
| They're like dump birds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Isn't that weird? | ||
| Because they're scavengers, you know? | ||
| They're scavengers as well as predators. | ||
| So, like, you'd see eagles on the, you know, on the dumps or the trash dumps up there. | ||
| And I've seen seagulls kick a bald eagle's ass, too, so I have a different perception. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've seen, don't fuck with seagulls, man, especially if a salmon's involved. | ||
| Dead salmon or somebody who's got a salmon, oh, man, you don't want to fuck around with those seagulls up there. | ||
| Seagulls are more ruthless than bald eagles? | ||
| They will kick a bald eagle's ass every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Oh, my God, we need to change our national bird. | ||
| So, kids from Alaska have a different take on America's national symbol, yeah. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| I've talked to people up there and they were like, they're like fucking pigeons, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's how they thought about them. | ||
| They're like, get out of here. | ||
| That's to your earlier point about Alaskans, spend more time outside. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is more conducive to mental health, I think. | ||
| That's why, like, camping or backpacking is calming, like, or living off the grid in any way. | ||
| It's just like, you have to spend so much time and attention on just, like, the basic things of life. | ||
| That you don't have all this extra mental space to worry about all the shit that we really don't need to be worrying about so much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're just like maintaining shelter, getting food, making the fire, tending to all these basic things. | ||
| Have you ever seen the Vice series, Hindmo's Arctic Adventure? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It's Vice Guide to Travel did this thing where they get this guy who looks like... | ||
| The guy who's a reporter looks like a computer programmer. | ||
| This kid probably hasn't spent a lot of time in the woods or at least doesn't look like he has. | ||
| And he goes up to this rare part of the Arctic where this one man has been there since like, I want to say the 1970s, living up there. | ||
| And he has a permit to keep this cabin because he's sort of grandfathered in. | ||
| But once he's gone, like no one's living up there. | ||
| And so he's got this very small log cabin that he lives in up there. | ||
| And all this guy does is fish and hunt caribou. | ||
| And lives completely off the grid. | ||
| And occasionally they come by and they drop off barrels of important goods. | ||
| Toothpaste, shit like that. | ||
| Things that he could use. | ||
| And this guy's not dumb. | ||
| He's a very smart guy. | ||
| And really interesting to hear talk. | ||
| The way he's talking about is mirroring what I'm saying is that he believes that people are supposed to live like this. | ||
| And that, you know, he's always happy. | ||
| He's not depressed. | ||
| He's challenged. | ||
| He's challenged every day because, you know, he's got to find caribou. | ||
| And if he can't find a caribou, then he has a real concern about running out of food. | ||
| And they did a show on television about him for a while and his whole family. | ||
| Once you see the show, it gets all sort of Finding Bigfoot-y, where it's kind of hokey, whereas the Vice series is really good. | ||
| The Vice series is not like that at all. | ||
| The Vice series is just him out there living, and you kind of get a sense of what this guy's day-to-day existence is. | ||
| He never heard of 9-11. | ||
| He didn't know it happened. | ||
| He saw it from a photograph. | ||
| Someone showed him a photograph of the planes hitting the tower. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find it. | ||
| You should check it out. | ||
| Everybody should check it out. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Again, I don't want to live like that. | ||
| I'm not saying you should live like that, but there's something about it that's uniquely fitting for human beings. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Surviving Alone in Alaska? | ||
| Is this it? | ||
| Oh yeah, there's the guy. | ||
| How do you say his name? | ||
| Heinemow? | ||
| Hymo. | ||
| H-E-I-M-O. Hymo Korth. | ||
| And he lives up there with his wife and it's really sad too because that's all he does is drives fish and has frozen caribou outside. | ||
| And during the documentary, their camp gets attacked by a grizzly bear and he has to run out and kill it. | ||
| And he talked about how he and his wife, he lives with this woman up there that is, I guess we say Inuit or Eskimo, whatever you would say. | ||
| They say Eskimo sometimes. | ||
| It's like, you don't want to be offensive, but they say you should say it. | ||
| Yeah, my wife's half Inuit. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Is it different in Canada than it is in Alaska? | ||
| They had a child, and the child drowned. | ||
| A baby. | ||
| Tipped over in the canoe and drowned. | ||
| They visit the place where the kid died. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| It's really fucking sad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's heavy, you know, but that's life up there. | ||
| It's life and death. | ||
| They're all intertwined in a way that's not when you live in a city and you buy your shit from a grocery store. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's still a lot of people living like that up in Alaska. | ||
| I mean, there's cities, too. | ||
| I mean, I'm from Anchorage. | ||
| You know, it's a city. | ||
| Even when, like, my parents moved there in the 70s with me when I was just a little kid. | ||
| It was like, yeah, we had, like, powdered milk instead of milk, but there's still stores and shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But there still are a lot of people that live an off-the-grid life up in Alaska. | ||
| But it's like we couldn't all do that because there's too fucking many of us now, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that the problem with people? | ||
| Just too fucking many of us? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hate to say it, but yeah. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| It's a problem, right? | ||
| It's like, how do we manage that? | ||
| How do we manage that and keep our humanity? | ||
| Leave it up to nature. | ||
| She'll take care of it sooner or later. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| She'll take care of it for us. | ||
| Don't say that. | ||
| Well, we can take care of it ourselves or Gaia's gonna take care of it. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what's scary for people, right? | ||
| Because we kind of know we're running this weird... | ||
| Like... | ||
| You know, we have like a... | ||
| We're running on credit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| We're buying a lot of things on credit. | ||
| We don't really have a job. | ||
| It's what it's like. | ||
| It's like, oh boy, the bill's coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woohoo! | |
| Woohoo! | ||
| So just spend more. | ||
| Just spend more. | ||
| I had a guy on who was trying to explain that. | ||
| He wrote a book about how America needs to have a billion people on it. | ||
| We need a billion people in America to compete with the rest of the world. | ||
| And I was like, I don't understand how this makes any sense. | ||
| Like, everybody thinks there's too many people. | ||
| He was saying to compete with the way the rest of the world operates, we need even more people. | ||
| It wasn't a good argument, but it was a weird conversation because smart guy, and this is his perspective. | ||
| And I was like, I don't think it's good for people to live like that. | ||
| Moving from Los Angeles to Austin, just having less people here is way more relaxing. | ||
| It's way better. | ||
| Where do you live now? | ||
| Northern New Mexico. | ||
| Oh, same shit. | ||
| Even fewer people. | ||
| Yeah, even fewer people. | ||
| Now, when you were doing this, was anything surprising to you about filming this thing? | ||
| I was surprised. | ||
| Well, as I mentioned before, I was surprised at how seriously I took the people that actually believe in Sasquatch. | ||
| Even though that's not the main thread of the show, we did think it was important to interview some Squatchers to get their opinion on whether or not it seemed plausible to them that a Sasquatch would kill three guys on a weed farm. | ||
| I was surprised by my reaction to people that believe in Bigfoot and would tell me about their encounters. | ||
| I didn't dismiss them and I didn't have an inclination to ridicule them, which is what I expected I would have going in. | ||
| To answer your question more fully, I think that I was surprised by just how dangerous a place Northern Mendocino County is. | ||
| Like, I have pushed my luck in reporting stories, you know, more than a few times over the years. | ||
| It's a dangerous place to be under any circumstances. | ||
| That place being like the backwoods of Northern Mendocino dope country, right? | ||
| But to be up there like asking questions about unsolved homicides, you have to tread pretty carefully. | ||
| And I knew from my experience in the early 90s up there that You know, there's an element of danger up there. | ||
| But it's only gotten worse, I think, to that guy Ghost Dance, his point. | ||
| Since the early 90s to now, it's only gotten more dangerous once you're sort of off the beaten path up there. | ||
| Yeah, you were very bold in the way you approached people and the kind of questions that you asked and how you went about trying. | ||
| Like, did you ever think like, fuck, what am I doing? | ||
| Like, I am gonna get myself killed up here. | ||
| My main fear was always that I was gonna get too close to finding out the truth about The murder at the heart of the story? | ||
| Or another murder? | ||
| Because one of the things that you find out pretty quickly is you go up there trying to investigate an unsolved triple homicide. | ||
| You get on the path of several, several different unsolved triple homicides from the early 90s, right? | ||
| So my concern was always that I was going to get too close to the killer or killers, and they were going to set me up. | ||
| And they would set me up by saying, basically, here's some key information relayed through a You know, a middleman, right? | ||
| There's some key information, but you've got to come up the mountain to get it. | ||
| And they would use that to set me up. | ||
| And so I was always afraid I was going to be in a situation where I was going to be face-to-face with one of the murderers and not know it. | ||
| And walk right into a trap, right? | ||
| But there were some of those backwoods farms that I was on where it was just... | ||
| I mean, a lot of times when... | ||
| In pursuing, like, dangerous stories, there's, like, two kinds of danger. | ||
| There's the danger that you're in because you're a reporter, but there's also just the danger of, like, you just put yourself in dangerous environments. | ||
| There's a danger to anybody, no matter what they're doing. | ||
| So, like, if you're embedded with a street gang and reporting a story on a street gang, and somebody does a drive-by in one of their safe houses, and you're in that safe house, it's like they're not shooting at you because you're a reporter. | ||
| You're just there, right? | ||
| And so there was that element of danger, just being up there knocking around In Northern Mendocino County at all, it's just a dangerous place. | ||
| But to be up there, like, yeah, asking questions about unsolved, unreported murders, there were a few times where I was like, I don't know if I'm getting off this mountain this day, right? | ||
| Really? | ||
| A few times? | ||
| Two times. | ||
| There's two times where I thought maybe I'd walked into something I wasn't going to walk out of. | ||
| And one was, the last trip I made up there was in June of last year, June 2020. And a source said that there was somebody up on this one particular mountain, Iron Peak, which is where the murders supposedly took place in 1993, that had some information for me. | ||
| But I could only meet this person by going up the mountain. | ||
| And on the drive up to this location, this farm, The woman I was riding with was telling me stories about, as we're going up the road, it's like, oh, there's a body buried there. | ||
| There's a body buried there. | ||
| There's a body buried there. | ||
| There's a lot of bodies, like, along this road. | ||
| And we get to her spot, which is just like, you know, a couple trailers and some ATVs and shit. | ||
| It kind of reminded me of some Alaska spreads, actually. | ||
| And we're just kind of, like, shooting this shit before she's going to take me to meet this guy. | ||
| And she tells me this story about these, like... | ||
| Two guys that had come up from L.A. recently to make a big buy. | ||
| The deal went south somehow, and these guys got killed. | ||
| And they knew they were going to be killed long enough, like they knew they were going to be executed. | ||
| And one of the guys, like, pissed himself in terror. | ||
| And they shot him, and they buried him on her property. | ||
| And a couple days later, one of her pit bulls, because there's pit bulls running around all over the place, pit bulls everywhere up there. | ||
| One of the pit bulls went and dug up the guy's piss-soaked boot and came running back into camp with it and dropped it like dogs do. | ||
| Like, look what I found. | ||
| And she's telling me this story like it's the height of hilarity. | ||
| She and all of her friends and stuff are cackling and laughing and shit. | ||
| And I'm laughing along with them on the outside because that's what I got to do to be like I belong there or present like I belong. | ||
| But on the inside, I'm like, fuck. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Have I pushed this too far? | ||
| I mean, I always had a Ruger Mini 30 in the trunk of my car. | ||
| I was always like, how many paces to my car? | ||
| And always making sure that I was within short sprinting distance of that. | ||
| But even so, I just felt... | ||
| And there were a couple of... | ||
| Josh Raffae, the director of the series, there were a couple of times where I always sort of relied on him as sort of my ground control. | ||
| I'd be like, this is what I'm about to do. | ||
| You know, what's our... | ||
| Get in with me on the sort of risk analysis to this. | ||
| And there were a couple times where he was like, dude, no. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| And I didn't. | ||
| But then late in the game... | ||
| Yeah, late in the game, though, there were a couple times where he was like, don't do it. | ||
| And I went ahead and went up there to kind of meet with the source anyway. | ||
| And obviously, I got away with it, but... | ||
| Now, when you're talking about this area, how far away is it from civilization? | ||
| And how hard is it to get into there? | ||
| It's an enormous area, right? | ||
| Yeah, enormous. | ||
| So it's basically like you have all these little towns like Garberville, Laytonville, Branscombe. | ||
| There are a few hundred people in the town. | ||
| And that's town. | ||
| And then from town, there's dirt roads with names that start going up in the hills, maybe... | ||
| Maybe 5, maybe 20 to 25 miles. | ||
| But then off of those dirt roads, you start having spikes of smaller, more gnarly roads and smaller, narrower roads. | ||
| Pretty quickly, you'd need to have a truck or be riding on an ATV to be navigating them at all. | ||
| And then eventually those roads narrow to paths. | ||
| And then the paths take you back to people's properties. | ||
| And there's lots of gates. | ||
| There's gates. | ||
| Once you move off the first public road onto private roads, and usually the private roads are shared between property owners, they gate them. | ||
| And one reason for that is, I mean, it's security, but it's also like the more gates you have, the more chance you have for law enforcement to fuck up their search warrant. | ||
| So if they haven't gotten the search warrant perfectly dialed and they don't have a warrant to be entering every stage of the private property... | ||
| You know, no evidence, no case. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So there's lots of gates. | ||
| Every new sort of branch of roads, there's a gate, right? | ||
| And, yeah, I mean, within about 10 to 15 minutes of leaving town, you're... | ||
| You're out there, man. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, like, the cell phone stops working. | ||
| You might be able to get a text out, maybe. | ||
| You're off the map, literally, you know. | ||
| Did you bring a sat phone? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because I just... | ||
| That would have been... | ||
| That would have read as suspicious to me in some way. | ||
| But a Ruger doesn't? | ||
| No. | ||
| Everybody's got guns up there, man. | ||
| Everybody's got guns. | ||
| If they searched my car and found a Ruger, I think that they would think that was normal. | ||
| But if they found a sat phone, that would seem a little fucking odd. | ||
| Even though they knew what I was doing. | ||
| They knew I was making a documentary. | ||
| I wasn't undercover posing as a buyer or something. | ||
| Some shit like that. | ||
| For the most part. | ||
| When you're talking about that lady whose dogs found the piss-soaked boot... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And how they thought it was funny. | ||
| Isn't it odd how human beings sort of adapt to the culture that's around them? | ||
| If you're around a culture of growers that are really accustomed to people being murdered and drug deals going south and a lot of hippies packing some serious weapons, you kind of get used to that. | ||
| That's your reality. | ||
| That's your life. | ||
| You know, and it's interesting you say that because this particular woman, she was literally born into that culture and raised in it up there. | ||
| How old was she when you met her? | ||
| Probably my 40s-ish. | ||
| So she had just been there forever. | ||
| Yeah, sort of like second generation. | ||
| Born in the 70s or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking weird, man. | ||
| It's weird, the whole culture of the growers that you highlighted in this. | ||
| I kind of met these people in LA, but I've never been up there. | ||
| It makes me kind of want to go up there, but kind of not. | ||
| Well, most people, they don't know... | ||
| They don't know where the weed comes from. | ||
| And there was this, when I went to University of California, Santa Cruz in like late 80s, early 90s, and I did a story on this guy that was at NARC, and he was saying, that's one of the points he made that stuck with me. | ||
| He was like, you know, you got kids on the campus here, you're like smoking your Northern California, like KGB, killer green bud, right? | ||
| And you guys have no fucking idea what's going on up there. | ||
| You think it's just a bunch of utopian growers just living in peace and harmony and growing this great organic weed that they ship down to you kids here in Santa Cruz so you can enjoy yourselves. | ||
| He's like, there's as much violence associated with the weed game up there as there is the coke game in southern Florida. | ||
| I've only been to Mendocino on the coast. | ||
| I went up there on the coast with my family, and we stayed up there for a couple days, and it was nice. | ||
| Nice restaurants, beautiful view of the ocean and shit. | ||
| But just even driving through the woods, just seeing those redwoods. | ||
| And we went to the redwood, the one that you could drive through, that whole deal. | ||
| There's something about the woods that gives you this feeling like, man, you could just vanish here. | ||
| You could just go away. | ||
| No one would give a fuck. | ||
| No one would find out. | ||
| No one would find you. | ||
| It would take too long. | ||
| There's not enough people to comb these woods to find you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so many places they put a body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I guess that's what they feel too. | ||
| It's just, it's a culture that just doesn't get highlighted. | ||
| You know, you talk about, you know, everyone knows what it's like on the border. | ||
| You know, you hear what it's like on the border at Juarez. | ||
| You hear what it's like in various parts of this country that are dangerous, whether it's the south side of Chicago or what have you. | ||
| No one's thinking about Northern California forest grow-ups in the mountains as being this terrifying, crime-ridden, murderous area. | ||
| Yeah, because it's weed. | ||
| They don't associate it with weed, right? | ||
| But how do you fix that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is what it is, right? | |
| How do you fix that? | ||
| I mean, obviously legalizing weed didn't really, like, fix it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Do you think it's because it was too late? | ||
| I think there's still such a market for black market weed. | ||
| As long as there's a market for black market weed, there's gonna be black market grows. | ||
| That was the thing that John Norris was telling me, that I think he said somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the illegal weed that's sold in the United States, that's sold in states where it's illegal, is grown in public land in Northern California. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| And they might be growing it legally, but then it's diverted to black market in states, like you said, where it's not legal. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| He was saying it was illegal weed. | ||
| He was saying cartel-grown weed is a lot of it, and that's why he was talking about the chemicals they're using. | ||
| When you were there in that grow-op, like, what shit were they using? | ||
| Man, I don't even know, but it was like they had barrels of this stuff that, like, didn't look right. | ||
| I mean, it was slapped with, you know, the warning symbols and shit. | ||
| Skulls and crossbones and shit. | ||
| Yeah, it didn't look like stuff that you would want to be ingesting in your body in any form. | ||
| And, you know, they do. | ||
| They divert creeks up there. | ||
| I mean, you learn pretty quickly. | ||
| You see, like, PVC piping off of a creek. | ||
| Like, you don't follow that, you know. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| They're diverting water up there. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, they fuck with the watersheds and poison the earth up there. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Do you think it would change if they made it legal federally? | ||
| Because it would still be such a primo grow spot. | ||
| I think it would. | ||
| I mean, I think that's it right there, is that there's still places in the country where weed's illegal. | ||
| But the black market grows up there, they might switch to manufacturing meth then. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the people I met up there... | ||
| They're just fucking outlaws. | ||
| They're either outlaws and they're never going to not be outlaws. | ||
| And so they're never going to do the, like, get permits and jump through the bureaucratic hoops to grow legal weed because it's just contrary to being a fucking outlaw. | ||
| Or a lot of them, and or, a lot of them are... | ||
| Dope addicts. | ||
| They're addicted to meth and or heroin. | ||
| And growing weed on a relatively small scale is just a way to fund that way of life, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where they really only have to work their ass off for a few months every year to bring in the harvest. | ||
| So, I don't see them changing their ways no matter, you know, what's going on with federal marijuana policy. | ||
| Not those people. | ||
| And it's not like new people are going to move in either, right? | ||
| It's not very hospitable. | ||
| No, the corporations that are moving into the weed business, they're not moving into Northern California. | ||
| They're moving into the desert where they can use solar to power their Death Stars of weed. | ||
| Isn't that where Tyson's place is? | ||
| Isn't Tyson's Ranch in Palm Desert? | ||
| I believe it is. | ||
| Mike Tyson, baddest man on the planet, became a fucking weed grower. | ||
| He's high all the time. | ||
| He said he was high when he fought Roy Jones Jr. Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Is it out there? | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| It's El Segundo. | ||
| El Segundo? | ||
| That's nowhere near that. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| What's El Segundo near? | ||
| The airport. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where the ranch is? | ||
| This article says, when it opens in El Segundo, California, Tyson Ranch is going to feature a luxury hotel, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But that doesn't make sense. | ||
| I don't know if that's where he's growing, though. | ||
| I feel like he was saying to us that he was growing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I remember looking that up, too. | ||
| But it says the location is El Segundo. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's like a resort thing that they're doing. | ||
| He's going to have a resort in a concert area where people are going to do concerts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Ever seen his podcast? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hot Boxing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Have you been on it? | ||
| No. | ||
| You should be on it. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| I'll make that connection. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, I think that would be an awesome thing. | ||
| You and Mike Tyson, you talking about where this fucking weed comes from. | ||
| And if he can watch the documentary, it'd be even better. | ||
| When you put together a thing like this, and then you wrap it up, it's done, and you step away from it, what does that feel like for you? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| When it's good, it's always a sense of relief, you know, that it's finished. | ||
| Because it's always... | ||
| It's tough to let it go, all right? | ||
| Because it's like... | ||
| I definitely come from the school, whether it's journalism or docs, it's like there's really no such thing as a finished story. | ||
| It's only a deadline. | ||
| Like, eventually somebody just takes it away from you, in my opinion. | ||
| Like, whether it's your editor or whether it's like... | ||
| You know, Hulu or Disney Corp. | ||
| Eventually, you're going to be like, give me that. | ||
| We've got to release it to the public. | ||
| For me, there's always more tinkering to do. | ||
| There's always something else to try out. | ||
| Somebody has to take it away from me, has to take the story away from me. | ||
| Once it's taken away, there's a sense of relief. | ||
| Like, okay, it's gone. | ||
| They've got it, and it's going to be released to the world, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| But I can't... | ||
| The same way I... For a long time, I couldn't read stories that I wrote in the 90s or the 2000s when I was like a gonzo print journalist because all I could see were flaws. | ||
| And now enough time has gone by that I can look back at those stories and sort of enjoy them and read them for what they are, like most people experience them. | ||
| But the same... | ||
| Docs that I'm involved in making, I can't watch them because all I see are flaws, frankly. | ||
| All I see is like, ah, if we just had a little more time. | ||
| I think that's a good sign. | ||
| That's a sign that you care about what you're doing and that you're not a ridiculous narcissist. | ||
| Because I'm always really skeptical of people that really enjoy their work. | ||
| Everyone I know, particularly really funny comics, they fucking hate watching themselves. | ||
| The editing process, when a comic does a special, it's the most brutal thing. | ||
| You're watching yourself, you're like, Oh, shut the fuck up! | ||
| Like, probably this misconception that most comedians love to hear themselves talk. | ||
| Like, they don't want to hear that shit. | ||
| They don't want to watch themselves. | ||
| They don't want to watch themselves like the way other people. | ||
| And it's actually an important part of the process of getting better. | ||
| Like, to see what part of you is annoying. | ||
| And what part of you is like, maybe I could do this better, or maybe I could do this better. | ||
| And listening to yourself and watching yourself, it's fucking hard. | ||
| So like you putting together a documentary and always feeling like, I think that's a good time. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| I'll take it as that. | ||
| But Sasquatch is different because this is the first time that I've been on the other side of the camera. | ||
| Like most of the docs that I work on, I'm not like an on-camera character in the show, which I very much am in Sasquatch. | ||
| Why did you switch it up like that? | ||
| You know, that's the director. | ||
| That's the director, Josh. | ||
| I think he kind of rope-a-doped me. | ||
| I think it was his intention from the jump to sort of, like, get me on the other side of the camera in this show. | ||
| And obviously, you know, it worked out. | ||
| It seems like the reception of the show is pretty positive. | ||
| He saw some potential there that I didn't. | ||
| I was very dubious. | ||
| I was like, dude, really? | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| You want to have me be an on-camera character in this? | ||
| And he just sort of gradually got me more and more comfortable with the process and with that role in the project. | ||
| Well, there was also some pretty heavy moments in the documentary, the series, where you talk about yourself, and you talk about your own experiences as a child being raped, which is unexpected and very intense. | ||
| How difficult was that to sort of express on camera? | ||
| Well, I'm pretty comfortable talking about that. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| About being raped when I was seven years old. | ||
| But it was relevant to this show because it came up to your earlier point about the sort of topics, what a dark world it was up there. | ||
| So it's like, why am I drawn to those kinds of stories? | ||
| And why have I spent so much of my professional life steeping myself in Dark worlds, criminal subcultures, right? | ||
| So that was why that particular part of my life story, I think, was actually relevant to this series. | ||
| But to answer your question, how difficult was it? | ||
| Not very difficult. | ||
| It was difficult for me to go public with that story for the first time, which was in 2004. I mean, I'd lived with it as a secret pretty much my entire life. | ||
| But the decision to write about it That was a very difficult decision, a very difficult thing to do. | ||
| But since then, I've gotten pretty comfortable talking about it publicly. | ||
| I mean, that story's been adapted as a play. | ||
| It's been produced all over the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A play? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's called Stalking the Boogeyman. | ||
| I wrote an essay called Stalking the Boogeyman. | ||
| That's kind of when I went public that I'd been raped. | ||
| When I was seven, and I had then planned to kill the guy when I was in my early 30s. | ||
| Like, that was the subject of the essay. | ||
| And then that was adapted as a play, and it was on, you know, This American Life. | ||
| So, I've gotten comfortable with talking about that over the years. | ||
| Were you approached by law enforcement when you kind of went public about wanting to stalk this person? | ||
| I got fucking arrested. | ||
| You got arrested? | ||
| I got arrested. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| After the first essay came out, the cops arrested me. | ||
| Because I'd admitted stalking the guy and planning to murder him. | ||
| I mean, I'd admitted to criminal behavior in the piece that was published. | ||
| Had the guy ever been prosecuted for what he did to you? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| He was a juvenile when it happened, and also, like, the statute of limitations, it happened in Alaska, the statute of limitations expired, and also, you know, it's my word against his, you know, at that point. | ||
| I mean, so, I have since gone to the police and filed an official police report, um... | ||
| I mean, I withheld his name in the first piece that I published, and I let him know, because I met with him in person as part of the reporting, if you will, of that piece. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| It was a pretty uncomfortable conversation, you know? | ||
| It was a pretty uncomfortable conversation, because I'd been following the fucking guy for months, like, planning to kill him. | ||
| And I didn't tell him that when we met. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's see, I was early 30s, 32, 33. And how old was he then? | |
| How old was he when it happened? | ||
| He was, he was at the, when it happened, he was in his late teens, was still a juvenile though, so 16, 17. So he was a bit in his early 40s when I was stalking him. | ||
| And then when he and I met... | ||
| How'd you meet him? | ||
| How'd you arrange it? | ||
| Well, I sent him a letter. | ||
| I sent him a letter, like I sent him a register mail letter, a FedEx letter. | ||
| And I just made sure he was going to get this letter and that I knew he'd gotten it. | ||
| And there was a couple of reasons for that. | ||
| One is, by that time I'd planned to publish this essay. | ||
| And just for legal reasons, I needed to give him a chance to comment. | ||
| Even though in the letter I didn't tell him that I was planning to write the piece. | ||
| I was just like, listen, I remember what happened and you and I need to meet. | ||
| And if you don't respond to this letter, I'm going to show up on your doorstep and have a conversation with your wife. | ||
| So, he responded, like, pretty quickly. | ||
| And we set a meeting at a restaurant, and then I switched up the location several times, and we met on the 16th Street Mall. | ||
| Why did you switch up the locations? | ||
| I thought he might be dangerous. | ||
| You know, that's just, like, basic sort of... | ||
| But you still met him. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| What is the purpose of switching up the locations? | ||
| I didn't want him to be able to set up on the location at all. | ||
| I didn't want him to have other people waiting for me there. | ||
| And frankly, I just wanted to keep him off balance the entire day so that he wouldn't have a possibility to sort of arrange anything. | ||
| So we met on the 16th Street Mall, which is a pedestrian mall in downtown Denver. | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| Yeah, I mean that experience obviously has branded my memory pretty clearly. | ||
| You're a big guy. | ||
| Is he a big guy as well? | ||
| Not really, no. | ||
| I mean, he was a lot bigger than me when I was seven. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, that was one of the first things that crossed my mind. | ||
| I could just fucking dismantle this guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we just walked around the block a couple times. | ||
| And talked while you were walking? | ||
| Yeah, and I had a hidden recording device and a bike courier bag and a pistol. | ||
| That I was carrying. | ||
| Were you still thinking about killing them? | ||
| I knew I couldn't get away with it. | ||
| See, I planned to get away with it. | ||
| I think I would have gotten away with it. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He apologized. | ||
| He apologized. | ||
| And, you know, he said that, you know, that he'd been sexually assaulted when he was a kid, which is one of the most infuriating things to me when child molesters, or let's call them what they are, men who rape children, when they put that or let's call them what they are, men who rape children, when they put that out there as an excuse or a rationalization or a reason for their behavior | ||
| But he apologized, he said that it happened to him when he was a kid, and he swore that it had only happened with me, that I was the only person that he'd raped when that person was a child, right? | ||
| Like, repeatedly. | ||
| And I had been going back and forth on naming him in that essay, and his telling me that I was the only one, in the end, I decided not to name him. | ||
| Like, up to when, again, to that point of they have to take the story away from me, it was like we were just like an hour from the print deadline, and I still didn't know whether I was going to name him. | ||
| And my editor, Patti Calhoun at The Westward, she was like, just go block yourself in a room for 30 minutes, write both endings, and then we just got to pick one, man. | ||
| Just go with whichever one feels right. | ||
| So I wrote one ending that ended with his name, and one ending that ended with how the essay actually ends, which is not naming him and him just sort of disappearing into the crowd on the mall. | ||
| And went with that one. | ||
| That one felt right. | ||
| It felt like a better ending. | ||
| And it also, it kind of spoke to a point that I want to make, which is that they could be anybody, you know? | ||
| And I also wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| You're a good man. | ||
| That's a powerful thing to be able to forgive someone for such a horrific act. | ||
| I'm not sure I have forgiven him. | ||
| Well, enough to not name him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just to give him that, that's a lot. | ||
| Um... | ||
| I had two moments when I was a child where I dodged a bullet. | ||
| I never got raped, but I got close twice. | ||
| One time when I was somewhere... | ||
| I was in San Francisco. | ||
| I lived there between 7 and 11, so I think it was like 7 or 8 years old. | ||
| I was... | ||
| I was really into monsters. | ||
| I was really into monster books and monster movies and stuff like that and I was at a library and I was looking at these books and this guy came up to me and I was just I was so young and naive and he was like do you like monster books? | ||
| I said yeah yeah I love monster books and he said Come out to my car. | ||
| I've got a lot of monster books. | ||
| So I was like, okay. | ||
| So I started walking with him, and the librarian started screaming, Joseph, you get away from that man! | ||
| And she goes, you get out of here! | ||
| And she yells at him. | ||
| She goes, he just got out of prison! | ||
| And I just remember crying. | ||
| Just screaming and crying or just I was paralyzed with fear and and the guy ran he ran away you know and that was his thing he would pick up kids and I just I remember forever after that just feeling so vulnerable feeling so scared I It just changed how I thought about people. | ||
| Because up until that point, people, you know, adults had always been like, nice to me. | ||
| You know, they've always just been adults. | ||
| You know, I'm a kid. | ||
| They're adults. | ||
| They help you, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like the librarian, or like teachers, or coaches, or what have you. | ||
| And then there was another time when I was 13. I got real close to this guy. | ||
| We used to go fishing at this lake. | ||
| And we would always see this guy who would jog by. | ||
| And he would come by, me and my friends, and he would come by and talk to us. | ||
| And he just seemed like a nice guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then it went on for a while. | |
| He would always find us there. | ||
| We'd go fishing a couple days a week after school. | ||
| And then one day I was at this pond that was this kind of remote spot. | ||
| It was off the beaten path. | ||
| And he was drunk. | ||
| And I remember him telling me that he loved me. | ||
| And then I remember being real weirded out because he was drunk and I was fishing and he was just standing there and standing next to me and I was like, yeah, I like you too or something, you know. | ||
| I don't remember the exact words. | ||
| But I remember him saying, you know, there can't really be love without sex. | ||
| And then I reeled in the line, and I had a knife in my pocket, and I held onto the knife, and I told him, get the fuck away from me. | ||
| And he's like, you know, I think you're overreacting, you're misreading me. | ||
| I said, get the fuck away from me. | ||
| Because I'd remember that time when I was a kid, it just came right back to me again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I'd just gotten so stupid again. | ||
| I'd get in close to this guy. | ||
| I just assumed, here's this guy, and he's a big guy, too. | ||
| I remember him telling me that he was a teacher and he got fired for being a teacher and he gave some weird excuse for why he got fired mentoring kids or something like that. | ||
| I'm assuming he probably raped a kid or something or at least had an inappropriate relationship with a kid. | ||
| I hear stories like yours and as a parent, it just makes my blood boil. | ||
| My heart starts beating. | ||
| I just see red. | ||
| I get so angry. | ||
| It just makes me so furious and also so confused. | ||
| As to how human beings can become that. | ||
| And as you said, a guy who is a victim of that very same horrific act himself when he's young then becomes the perpetrator when he gets older. | ||
| And that is real common for whatever reason. | ||
| It's almost like a vampire that infects you and you become a vampire. | ||
| Well, that's what, fuck it, man. | ||
| I mean, I had this whole, when I was a teenager, I had this whole plan about how I was going to commit. | ||
| If I had started to look at little kids, like I wanted to be a predator and predate on them, I was going to kill myself. | ||
| I had this whole plan. | ||
| I did a lot of climbing at the time. | ||
| I even had the couloir and this one mountain picked out. | ||
| That I was going to be able to stage my own death and it would look like an accident because I wouldn't want my parents to know that I'd killed myself because I was starting to have the desire to rape kids. | ||
| Yes, it is common, but it's also dangerous for kids who have been raped, especially boys, to think that it's like they've been bitten by a werewolf or a vampire. | ||
| It's only a matter of time before it's going to happen to you because Although it's common, it doesn't happen in most cases, right? | ||
| Most men who were raped when they were boys do not grow up to then rape children. | ||
| So that's a fallacy. | ||
| At the time that I was growing up in the 80s, it was like that was the common wisdom. | ||
| Like, this is one of the causes of this behavior. | ||
| And so I spent my teen years like, fuck, when is this going to happen to me? | ||
| And then finally I realized, oh, it's not happening, so it would have happened by now. | ||
| I made it. | ||
| What a terrifying thought. | ||
| It was terrifying. | ||
| In some ways, that was as bad as the actual experience of being raped. | ||
| And plus, he was the son of family friends, so I saw him. | ||
| You know, all the time. | ||
| He tried to get me again, like, several times. | ||
| That's why when he told me that I was the only one, I, like, I should have, like, not believed him at the time. | ||
| I mean, I later found out he was lying. | ||
| That he lied to me. | ||
| But, because other people that had been raped by him approached me years later. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| So I had to navigate. | ||
| I spent a good chunk of my childhood until he went off to college. | ||
| And he was a star athlete in Anchorage, kind of a small town at the time. | ||
| He was like a local athlete, celebrity, kind of cool guy, right? | ||
| Somebody that I really looked up to before he raped me. | ||
| And so I spent a good chunk of my childhood, like, having to be in proximity with him, you know, and having to, like, keep myself safe and having to, like, maneuver situations so that he wouldn't be able to get me alone in fear. | ||
| Basically, it's like, spent a lot of time in fear. | ||
| And the other thing is that other survivors, especially male survivors, told me this. | ||
| It's like, once you've been raped as a kid, it's like... | ||
| To other pedophiles, it's like a sign has been hung around your neck for some reason. | ||
| They can fucking sniff it out, man. | ||
| And I don't know how they do it, but they do. | ||
| And then you're just targeted even more than other kids. | ||
| They just sense some sort of wound in you, and they target you. | ||
| And so I was targeted by other pedophiles in youth sports or fathers of friends of mine. | ||
| It was just kind of a constant thing. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| And it fucking twists you up because on the one hand, I'm like, adults are telling me that the world is essentially a good place. | ||
| But yet I know from firsthand experience that one of these adults or like a big kid, you know, some of them were adults, he was a big kid, can just like rip off the mask and there's a monster there. | ||
| So it was, it really, yeah, it's, I try not to like, Go back and think like what my life would have been like had that not happened because now that I'm 50, life's turned out pretty fucking great. | ||
| But I went through some dark shit because of that. | ||
| Was that experience part of what led you to journalism? | ||
| Like exposing things? | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| I mean, if I had been a journalist, I would have been a criminal. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Just because you're hurt. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's something I think essential got edited out of me, and I think I just lack it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean by that? | |
| The idea of killing him, or frankly killing any pedophile... | ||
| I'll tell you, man, I could kill pedophiles all day and feel worse about killing a caribou than I would about them. | ||
| Like, the idea of taking another human life doesn't bother me. | ||
| I don't think that's necessarily wrong. | ||
| If you talk to a lot of people, they feel that way. | ||
| But could they do it themselves? | ||
| Yeah, I think they could. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think there's a lot of men that could do that. | ||
| I don't think a lot of women could do it. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| What am I saying? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just guessing. | ||
| I know I could. | ||
| If I saw some raving a kid, yeah. | ||
| If I saw some man holding down a seven-year-old boy, yeah. | ||
| I don't think I'd have a problem with that at all. | ||
| I guess also what I was trying to say is I was drawn to like breaking the law or breaking the rules even when I was a kid. | ||
| I was just like this is bullshit because you're telling me there's rules and there's laws but your rules and your laws are coming from the same place where you're assuring me as a child that the world is essentially good and that adults are looking out for me and I know that's bullshit. | ||
| So that's what I mean about something essential got kind of Well, most adults are looking out for you. | ||
| Most adults. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| It's just, like, what is that? | ||
| Like, what causes that? | ||
| What makes a monster? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| Because it's common. | ||
| It's not everywhere. | ||
| But it's common enough so that you say it, I'm not like, what? | ||
| I've never heard of such a thing. | ||
| We've all heard of such a thing. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, what the fuck causes that? | ||
| When you think about human beings, it's almost like they want, you know, when some people, that's not the expression, you know, the expression, hurt people hurt people. | ||
| You know, when someone has had their life destroyed, like sometimes they want to destroy other people's lives. | ||
| Yeah, I see that. | ||
| But that is the most... | ||
| You can't possibly think that kid has it coming. | ||
| Nobody can think a kid has it coming, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I just think that's a cop-out. | ||
| I mean, I think I turned... | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, it's a cop-out. | ||
| That's why when these guys try and explain away their pedophilia by saying that it happened to them, it's just like, my blood boils. | ||
| I think it's also like some people are just not capable of seeing other people. | ||
| You know, there's some people that just... | ||
| They just, they see themselves. | ||
| The world is themselves and how other people are just not as important as themselves, including children. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, I tried for a while to put myself in that mindset, and I realized I really just don't have any empathy for it. | ||
| I don't have any empathy for it. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with that, man. | ||
| I know you're saying it like you're missing a thing, you know? | ||
| Like, you don't like it, but... | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| I've always been drawn... | ||
| To criminals. | ||
| And criminals for my entire life, even going back to my teenage years, I've always felt very comfortable around me. | ||
| And that's enabled me to do the kind of journalism that I do. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| That's what I mean about something... | ||
| Edited out might not be the best phrase, but something about that experience... | ||
| Put me outside the norm in a sort of deviant way. | ||
| And I don't mean deviant like sexual deviancy. | ||
| I mean deviant as if like... | ||
| Danger. | ||
| Danger, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you have anger and danger. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, so... | ||
| So yes, to get back to your original question, yes, I can draw... | ||
| Now at 50, I can draw a direct line between being raped when I was seven years old and the type of journalism that I started to practice Really in my late teens. | ||
| So you've done some pretty wild shit as far as journalism. | ||
| You got embedded with skinheads. | ||
| Describe what that was like. | ||
| The first time I went undercover as a skinhead was in 2002. And I was right kind of in the thick of about a 15 year run of gonzo journalism right where I where my specialty was full immersion in a subculture whether it's like staying up for three days with with tweakers or like embedding with street gangs living on the street with gutter punks you know hopping freight trains | ||
| and shit whatever like I would just like participant observer but fully participating whatever I was reporting on and so there was a there was a hate crimes investigator for I probably shouldn't name the organization. | ||
| For a major civil rights organization in the U.S. And she contacted the paper that I worked for. | ||
| She had this idea of helping to train a reporter to go undercover as a skinhead. | ||
| And she hadn't been getting any traction because she called up most publications and they were like, no, we don't have anybody that wants to do that. | ||
| But she called the Westward, the weekly paper in Denver I worked for, and ran this idea. | ||
| And the editor was like, yeah, we got a guy. | ||
| So they put me in touch with her and she trained me On how to dress, walk, talk, you know, steep myself in the ideology and pass as a neo-Nazi skinhead in advance of this event that was coming up in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest, which was like the first major semi-underground neo-Nazi gathering in Colorado in quite a while. | ||
| And so I went undercover as a skinhead at that gathering, fully expecting that this was just going to be a one-off. | ||
| I was going to pose as a skinhead, I was going to report this story, and then I was going to be done with it. | ||
| But once I got behind that curtain and saw how well-organized, well-financed, and... | ||
| Agenda-driven. | ||
| That movement was and is. | ||
| I was like, holy shit. | ||
| I was like, people have no idea how pervasive this is. | ||
| And so then I started doing more stories. | ||
| I worked for a chain of papers at the time. | ||
| They had papers in, I think, about a dozen cities. | ||
| And so whenever there was going to be a neo-Nazi gathering in one of the cities, I would kind of like parachute in and do my skinhead thing and report a story. | ||
| But I started to become more ideologically driven with it. | ||
| with it, where I was like trying to like raise awareness of the stuff that really, to my perception, people have only really gained, that's only really gained sort of widespread public awareness just in the recent years about how pervasive like right wing domestic terrorism, neo-Nazi movement, whatever you want to call it, is in the that's only really gained sort of widespread public awareness just in And so I did that for a couple of years. | ||
| And then there was this organization based in Alabama that I will name, the Southern Poverty Law Center. | ||
| And they called me up and they're like, hey, why don't you just come do this full time? | ||
| You seem to have a knack for this shit. | ||
| So... | ||
| That's how I got into it. | ||
| Full-time? | ||
| Full-time skinhead undercover? | ||
| No, not full-time skinhead. | ||
| Full-time investigative reporter specializing in right-wing extremism in the U.S. and Europe. | ||
| Like, sometimes involving undercover work, sometimes just acting as a traditional journalist. | ||
| So, these people are really well-funded and well-organized? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There were... | ||
| The Rocky Mountain Heritage Fest... | ||
| On the one hand, yes. | ||
| On the one hand, no. | ||
| They were getting shut down wherever they were trying to have their concert that day. | ||
| Because it was basically... | ||
| There was a hate rock concert, skinhead bands from all over the country playing. | ||
| And then there was a conference that was kind of in the... | ||
| The side rooms, right? | ||
| But just to see the recruiting that was going on, just talking with people there and getting tips from them about other events that were going on or chapters of different organizations in different places around the country where they were from, seeing how mobile they were, seeing that they had dough. | ||
| Like, it wasn't what I was expecting a neo-Nazi skinhead gathering to be. | ||
| Yes, there were like a bunch of like drunk knucklehead guys throwing Sieg Heil's and like moshing with their shirts off. | ||
| That was going on. | ||
| But the more adult neo-Nazis that were there, like trying to move the skinheads into a more sort of lower profile stealth mode neo-Nazism. | ||
| And what they were preaching was like, look, we need to get elected. | ||
| We need to get elected to school boards. | ||
| We need to get elected to zoning commissions. | ||
| We need to get elected to county sheriff's Like, that's how we're going to eventually get our hands on the levers of power in this country. | ||
| It's like, grow some hair, put on a suit, and get elected. | ||
| And when I saw that, I was like, this is, these people are fucking serious. | ||
| This isn't just like kids that took a wrong turn at the Renaissance Fair, you know? | ||
| This is like really serious white national, you know... | ||
| It was eye-opening to me. | ||
| And how did you get embedded in them? | ||
| Did you just show up and make friends? | ||
| So I never lived full-time as a skinhead. | ||
| So once social media started to come on, then it's as much about maintaining and curating your online presence as it is showing up at the physical events. | ||
| But originally, I would show up at... | ||
| Hate rock festivals and... | ||
| What's hate rock? | ||
| Hate rock is like skinhead rock and roll. | ||
| It sounds like punk rock, but the lyrics are like, you know, about the day of the rope and like killing Jews and... | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this stuff's available like online? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's available online, but it's banned in most European countries. | ||
| And so skinhead groups or neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., a lot of their funding comes from selling this stuff on the black market in Europe. | ||
| Like it's produced here. | ||
| In the U.S., it's like Europe treats it like it's child porn. | ||
| It's like banned, like super banned. | ||
| But here in the U.S., because the First Amendment is perfectly legal to make this stuff. | ||
| So they make it and they burn CDs or whatever. | ||
| When I got into this in the early aughts, it was all CDs. | ||
| And so they would smuggle CDs into Europe and sell them, and that would finance the neo-Nazi movement here in the U.S. So you start going to these places. | ||
| You shave your head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you have to do? | ||
| Do you have to, like, dress a certain way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, flight jacket, dark martens, you know, suspenders. | ||
| Make sure they have the right color laces in your boots because different laces mean different things. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You don't want to fuck that up. | ||
| What does laces mean? | ||
| Oh, you know, if certain laces mean that you've killed somebody for the movement, certain laces mean you killed a cop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, certain laces mean you killed a cop for the movement. | ||
| You know, so you basically just want to have like... | ||
| What are those laces? | ||
| Can you say what the laces are? | ||
| Gold lace means you killed a cop. | ||
| Gold laces? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And Jack Martin's... | ||
| So if you see a guy, like you're at this thing, and you see a guy with gold laces, do you question him? | ||
| Fuck no. | ||
| We can compliment him on his gold laces and see if he'll give something up. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the first... | ||
| So what laces did you wear? | ||
| Just black. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just black. | |
| Because you don't want to make the mistake... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't take any chances. | |
| Yeah, you don't want to see that the other skinheads are wearing colored laces and think like, oh, maybe I should do that. | ||
| Because otherwise, you know, it's like a... | ||
| You're claiming something. | ||
| And I was always like, David, a fishing guide from Alaska. | ||
| I mean, use your real first name so you don't fuck that up. | ||
| So somebody like, you know, David, and you turn around like you wanted to, you know. | ||
| Just steep myself in the literature and the music and was aware of what was going on. | ||
| So you show up at these things solo? | ||
| Yeah, always solo. | ||
| And how do you integrate? | ||
| Drink, you know, drink and socialize. | ||
| One thing I did, this is funny, one thing I did, the second one, the second gathering I went to is there's this organization called the Women for Aryan Unity. | ||
| And they're like, basically they are an Aryan baby drive, but they're also like a matchmaking service. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And so the second one of these that I went to was in Arizona, and I was getting some heat. | ||
| I showed up a little early, and guys were sober, and there wasn't too many, and they didn't really recognize me. | ||
| And so I went over to the Women for Arian Unity booth and started chatting them up. | ||
| And they immediately assessed, I mean, told them I was a fishing guy and everything, but they assessed, like, this guy's reasonably well-spoken, reasonably, like, good-looking, like, tall, seems to have his shit together, has a job, you know? | ||
| And so they were, like, bringing over all these skinhead chicks to, like, introduce me to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it hot? | |
| Some. | ||
| Some. | ||
| Some of them you think, listen honey, you're on the wrong path. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Didn't try and convert any of them. | ||
| But I'd go like, you know, like you ask a skinhead chick to dance like you're in the mosh pit 30 seconds later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're pretty hardcore. | ||
| They want to headbutt you and shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of them were, like two of them were truckers and then they were trying to get me to go with them into their like truck and like consummate the deal, you know. | ||
| And you said no? | ||
| I played hard to get. | ||
| Oh, look at you. | ||
| Yeah, because then for the next few of these, I would show up and I would immediately go like reintroduce myself to the Women for Air and Unity. | ||
| I'd be like on their side because they have a lot of power in the movement. | ||
| So like when they're like, no, this guy's OK, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's okay. | ||
| You played hard to get, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you play hard to get with skinheads? | ||
| I would imagine, if you're a skinhead guy, the pickings are slim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's string them along. | |
| Get their numbers, their emails, and string them along. | ||
| And then you get invites to more things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You don't want to sack up with one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you're stuck with this one murderous skinhead lady with gold laces. | ||
| She's out there killing cops. | ||
| Do they wear Doc Martens with laces, too? | ||
| Yeah, Doug Martin's got those skinbird haircuts close to the skull and sort of tendrils down. | ||
| Tendrils? | ||
| Like Orthodox Jews? | ||
| Yeah, oh God, you wouldn't want to say that. | ||
| But isn't that kind of the thing? | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's a good point. | ||
| They leave one lock on each side. | ||
| The fuck is that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you meet any gals with the gold laces? | ||
| No. | ||
| Let me tell you a funny story. | ||
| The first one that I went to in Colorado, I borrowed a friend's car because I needed an American sedan. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| Oh, you have to drive American? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'd, like, gone through the car, you know, and put, like, I had hate rock music in the CD player. | ||
| I'd gone through the car. | ||
| I'd gotten, like, all their, like, school shit and documents and everything out of there. | ||
| Put, like, stuff that a skinhead would have, like, crumpled up, you know, hate literature and cigarette butts and stuff. | ||
| You know, pocket litter kind of thing. | ||
| Just making the car look right. | ||
| Searched it for anything that I thought would incriminate me. | ||
| And for whatever... | ||
| I actually found out later what it was. | ||
| I'll get to that in a minute. | ||
| But... | ||
| The security at this event was these guys called the Hammerskins. | ||
| And the Hammerskins, they're badass. | ||
| Most of them are sober, and most of them are pretty well read when it comes to their ideology. | ||
| They've actually read Mein Kampf, and they consider themselves to be sort of the stormtrooper elite of the movement. | ||
| And they're really good at sniffing out cops. | ||
| And they sniffed me out. | ||
| Like, I was not reading right to them at all. | ||
| But I wasn't reading cop, exactly. | ||
| But they were like, there's something off about this guy. | ||
| And they, like, got me behind this hotel. | ||
| Two guys got me up against the hotel, and the rest of them ripped the car apart. | ||
| They were searching it, you know? | ||
| And any time I tried to come off the wall, they were like, back up. | ||
| You're staying right here, man. | ||
| And they're ripping the car apart. | ||
| And then this one guy, he's ripping up the passenger side floor mat. | ||
| And he's like, he finds something. | ||
| He's excited. | ||
| And he comes out with this, and it's an Annie DeFranco CD. Oh no. | ||
| And he's like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| And I'm like, fuck, I'm about to get killed because of Annie DeFranco. | ||
| So it's like, I'm thinking, one part of me is like, deny that it's here. | ||
| I was like, this is a friend of mine's car. | ||
| That's her CD, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not listening to that shit. | ||
| Turn on the music in my stereo. | ||
| And they turn it on and it's like, Max Resist, which is a classic skinhead band. | ||
| I was like, that's my fucking shit. | ||
| And they're like, well, is she white? | ||
| I'm like, yes, she's white. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think I'd be driving a racial epithet there car. | ||
| And they were like, okay, well, maybe you could try and bring her to the gathering today and we could maybe talk some sense into her. | ||
| Talk some sense into her? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because she's listening to Annie DeFranco? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You can't talk some sense to Annie DeFranco fans? | ||
| That's their shit, man. | ||
| Imagine thinking you could take someone from Andy DeFranco to like... | ||
| Skinbird. | ||
| Hate music. | ||
| So how terrifying is this? | ||
| Like you're being interrogated by these guys who think you're a narc or whatever, you know, a cop or something. | ||
| I knew I was in danger. | ||
| I didn't know enough about these guys at that point to like realize just how... | ||
| How much danger I was in, you know? | ||
| Like, that curb stomping thing, like, they actually do that shit. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| In my experience, undercover with skinheads, skinheads are, like, way more dangerous to one another than they are. | ||
| I mean, yes, there's been some horrible hate crime murders. | ||
| Eventually, sometimes they do go out in packs and, like, kill people or really hurt people. | ||
| But they tear one another to pieces more often than they do, you know, go after non-whites and Jews or... | ||
| But you thought there was a real possibility that you could get killed there. | ||
| I thought, yeah, I was like, if I'm lucky, I'll wind up in the hospital. | ||
| If I'm not, I'll just... | ||
| So did you see those same guys after that? | ||
| I talked to them, because I wrote a story and it came out. | ||
| And I talked to them after, and I was like, you guys, they called me. | ||
| And they were kind of like complimentary. | ||
| They were like, we knew you weren't right, but we knew you weren't a cop, you know? | ||
| And they actually thought that I treated them sort of fairly in the piece that I'd written. | ||
| I was like, are you guys, do we have a problem? | ||
| They're like, no, we don't have a problem. | ||
| And I actually, they helped me out because I asked them, I was like, what was it? | ||
| And they're like, you know what, dude? | ||
| It could tell that you were in your late 20s or early 30s and you didn't have any ink. | ||
| I didn't have any tattoos. | ||
| You know, all these guys have tattoos. | ||
| And so I was like, if I'm going to keep doing this, I've got to get a tattoo. | ||
| So I went and got away. | ||
| I got an Othala rune, which is like, at the time, it was a pretty subtle white power symbol. | ||
| It's not like a swastika. | ||
| At the time, and you get it in a position where it's like a short-sleeved shirt just barely covers it. | ||
| And so then if you want to throw up a flag, we call it throwing up a flag, you just kind of do this, like you're maybe stretching your shoulder, and it brings the shirt sleeve down and reveals the tattoo. | ||
| So if you see somebody that you want to throw up a flag to, you go like that, and then they see it. | ||
| And I'll come over and talk to you. | ||
| This is not obviously at a white power gathering. | ||
| This is in public or at some sort of mainstream political rally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| So I got an Othala rune there in that spot. | ||
| But the problem is that when that Unite the Right shit went down in Charlottesville, There was this neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement, and they had changed their symbol from a Swazi, from a swastika, to the Othala rune. | ||
| And so when these guys were marching in 2016 in Charlottesville, I'm looking at the same thing I got on my right arm, like, on their banners. | ||
| Fuck, you know? | ||
| You still have it there? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| You didn't get it lasered off? | ||
| I'm gonna get it covered. | ||
| You know, I just... | ||
| What are you gonna put over it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I gotta figure that out. | ||
| For some reason, I haven't gotten it taken off or covered up, even though I don't do this shit anymore. | ||
| After Charlottesville... | ||
| I came out of retirement one time and I went undercover at a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it wasn't a neo-Nazi rally. | ||
| It was supposed to be a bunch of neo-Nazis defending a Civil War statue. | ||
| And I showed up, and it basically turned out to be, like, a couple yahoos in, like, Confederate reenactment Civil War uniforms, some Klan guys, a couple neo-Nazis skinheads from Portland, and, like, me on one side of the street. | ||
| And on the other side of the street, like, 4,000 anti-racist demonstrators, including what looked to be, like, the entire University of Tennessee football team, like, hurling invective at us for, like, two hours. | ||
| And after the rally, I was trying to... | ||
| They shut down all the downtown Knoxville, and I was trying to get back to my hotel. | ||
| And I kept running into, like... | ||
| And protesters, including some big dudes who were from the football team, because I later talked to them, and they were like, there's the long-haired Nazi. | ||
| Get him, because my hair was long now. | ||
| Because I've been in character. | ||
| I've been shouting at him for hours as a neo-Nazi. | ||
| And so I'm just running. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So getting back to my hotel was like that movie, The Warriors, man. | ||
| I just had to get back. | ||
| And you couldn't explain to them, hey guys, I'm undercover. | ||
| I finally got in a jam where I realized, because I kept running across them, and they kept recognizing me. | ||
| And so I got out a phone, and I pulled up, I had my driver's license, and I pulled up one of my articles that I'd written for the Southern Poverty Law Center on my phone. | ||
| And the next time they confronted me, I was just like, give me 10 seconds. | ||
| This is me. | ||
| I was undercover, guys. | ||
| This is the kind of stuff that I write. | ||
| And then they were like, not only like, okay, you're cool, but they like walked me back to like remaining six blocks to my hotel. | ||
| Yeah, no shit. | ||
| So I was like, that's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So I do not do this shit anymore. | ||
| Thank God you wrote something. | ||
| It wasn't just, hey, this is a documentary that I made. | ||
| We just watched this for a little bit. | ||
| You get a sense that I'm on your side? | ||
| There's Motley Crue's, Decline of the Hammerskins, Independent Skinhead Groups Grow. | ||
| So this whole undercover thing, man, like... | ||
| What a wild adrenaline rush that's gotta be. | ||
| People get very addicted to that shit, don't they? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And another link back to, like, the childhood sexual assault is, like, when I was being raped, I disassociated, right? | ||
| I, like, have a clear memory of being like, this is... | ||
| I didn't know what was going on. | ||
| I was like, this is tremendously painful and terrifying. | ||
| So I'm just going to leave my body. | ||
| And I remember kind of floating up around the room, you know, almost like a near-death experience. | ||
| I'm like, oh, there I am down in that waterbed with that terrible thing happening to me, but I'm up here and I'm okay. | ||
| And... | ||
| I don't know if this is going to make sense, but I can sort of tap into that in a way in situations that a quote-unquote normal person might find terrifying. | ||
| I can just like remove myself from the fear of it a little bit. | ||
| Hmm and be able to Pass I guess because one of the things they're gonna like somebody's gonna look for is like Do you does it seem like you belong in this situation? | ||
| Right or does it seem like you're scared because if you're scared then you don't belong here That's what's craziest right your childhood experiences horrific act put in you this like switch we could hit the the anger outsider switch and Right. | ||
| Yeah, you nailed it. | ||
| They're like, yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, yeah, I get this dude. | ||
| He's one of us. | ||
| I think he just nailed it. | ||
| Because you got this, fuck everybody, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to fucking kill a pedophile thing. | ||
| And they're, oh, he's angry like us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| That always gives me crazy anxiety. | ||
| When I see things like that or I read about things like that, like undercover shit, freaks me the fuck out. | ||
| I don't know why, but maybe more than anything. | ||
| When you're telling me the story about being pushed up against a wall, my hands are sweating like crazy. | ||
| Like, woo! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I used to say, I don't do that shit anymore. | ||
| And then I did, in a way, for Sasquatch. | ||
| I really had gotten to a spot where I'm like, man, I'm too old to be doing that shit. | ||
| So how did you have to do it for Sasquatch? | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't undercover. | ||
| I was just... | ||
| You pretended to be someone who you're not? | ||
| I pretended to... | ||
| Be one of them? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, I was always coming to them like, I'm a documentary filmmaker. | ||
| I'm making a documentary. | ||
| But I was at the same time presenting a persona to them That I thought would make them feel comfortable. | ||
| So the way I talk changes a little bit. | ||
| The way I dress changes a little bit. | ||
| So it's not really undercover, but I'm definitely code switching with, you know, crooks. | ||
| Yeah, no, I understand. | ||
| Well, that makes sense, though, because you kind of had been around enough criminals and bad people that you kind of knew the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you take a guy who's like a nerd and you put him in Mendocino around these savages that are out there growing weed and murdering people and using backhoes to shove them into the earth, they'd stand out. | ||
| And they're not going to learn anything. | ||
| Nobody's going to talk to them. | ||
| Nobody's going to feel comfortable talking to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| The organization and the financial backing of these people, like, there's this thing like... | ||
| There's this weird thing that happens simultaneously where people want to call everything and everyone racist to the point where it's like you're ruining the word because there's real racism. | ||
| Those skinhead people and many more like them and Nazis and there's real ones. | ||
| When you call everybody a Nazi, you fuck it up because there's ones like you're encountering that actually are real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, their racism is like, we want to put people in death camps. | ||
| Like, that was a great idea. | ||
| Hitler just didn't finish the job. | ||
| Now, how dumb are these? | ||
| Are they dumb? | ||
| Are they smart? | ||
| Not all of them, man. | ||
| Some of them are really smart. | ||
| That was the other thing that I found really alarming. | ||
| As I was talking to them, I was like, this is not what I was expecting. | ||
| Like, when I'm talking about the organizers and the financiers and the, like, shot callers, they're not... | ||
| Most of them are not dumb people. | ||
| Where is it coming from? | ||
| Where is their hatred? | ||
| Where is it coming from? | ||
| Did you try to get to the bottom of it with any of these guys? | ||
| I put a lot of thought into that. | ||
| Some of them are raised in the movement. | ||
| There's different kinds. | ||
| Here's what I've been able to identify. | ||
| Some of them are raised in the movement. | ||
| Some of them had some sort of traumatic experience involving a non-white or Jewish person. | ||
| That just sent them down that road, okay? | ||
| Like they were a victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a non-white would be one example, okay? | ||
| Some of them are just lost children looking to belong. | ||
| They could have just as easily... | ||
| I mentioned the Renaissance Fair. | ||
| It always seemed to me like they'd taken a wrong turn at the Renaissance Fair. | ||
| They could have found some other scene to belong. | ||
| Some other fringe thing. | ||
| In terms of leaders, here's the thing. | ||
| If you have just even moderate... | ||
| If you're slightly above average intelligence and you're fairly well organized and you can gather a little bit of dough, you can become a major fucking player in this movement. | ||
| In the same way that if you're in a punk band and you're not getting anywhere, if you change your lyrics to white power lyrics, you're going to go from being a floundering punk band to having a worldwide fan base in the space of about three months. | ||
| If you can play your instruments reasonably competently and that's the ideology you put out, Because the standards really kind of aren't that high. | ||
| So by the same token, the point is that I think a lot of people are drawn to the power. | ||
| They see it as a way that they can easily amass power and control over other people. | ||
| Because the followers are waiting in that movement. | ||
| They're always there. | ||
| They're always waiting for different leaders to pop up and sort of amass power within it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So in some ways, it's like an insidious form of political grifters. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, you know how political grifters, like someone will be a Republican their whole life and then they'll see an opening and then they'll go, you know what, I'm going to be progressive. | ||
| And they'll be like aggressively progressive and then shit all over Republicans or vice versa. | ||
| You know how there's people that do that and you go... | ||
| I think you're just latching on to a thing. | ||
| You found a movement. | ||
| And I think the comparison to Renaissance Fair is brilliant. | ||
| I went to Renaissance Fair only once, but I had a great moment. | ||
| I was with my kids, and they were young. | ||
| I thought it would be a fun thing to take them, you know, silly thing. | ||
| But there's this one lady who would not play along with the other ladies. | ||
| The other ladies were talking, and we just had... | ||
| I forget what we were doing. | ||
| We were waiting for something. | ||
| I think my kid was getting her face painted or something. | ||
| And this lady was complaining about her husband not taking his medication. | ||
| You know, some people just, they just want to be themselves in this thing. | ||
| Like, Mark won't take his medication. | ||
| I fucking tell him, you know, you got high blood pressure, you need to take your medication, and this lady is in character. | ||
| She won't break character. | ||
| The other lady, what does Thao talk about with this medication? | ||
| Like, she wouldn't let this lady... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that shit, yes. | |
| I think it's so mad, too, when you're like, well... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like one lady was... | |
| The one lady was just being this, like, fucking complaining Karen, and this other lady was like, hey, bitch, I'm all in on this I live in the 1400s shit, so get the fuck out of here with your medication shit. | ||
| I don't know what medication is. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| But it's such a weird dance that they're doing, right? | ||
| It's like they don't like whatever. | ||
| They don't like their station in life or maybe they just like drama. | ||
| They like dressing up. | ||
| They like theater. | ||
| And so they like putting on this stuff and pretending they're a blacksmith or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| It's like these guys are doing that but in a way more intense way. | ||
| They're going all in and they found a group of people that they can... | ||
| That's the thing about humans. | ||
| We fucking, we seek tribes. | ||
| And whether it's a tribe of, you know, growers up in the middle of the mountains that have all agreed that it's okay to murder people, that try to steal your crop, or whether it's a bunch of people that just decide because you got beat up by a Mexican guy. | ||
| When you're 15 that, you know, the white power movement is valid and we need to purify the race and then you're about a bunch of other people that are like really hardcore and committed to this and you feel like a brotherhood in this weird fucking crazy way of thinking. | ||
| It's like a fucking virus that gets into people's brains and it just overrides the operating system. | ||
| But it finds a place where it's like, oh, here's the tribal place. | ||
| Let's take over this tribal place. | ||
| Because people have this desire to be accepted by their tribe. | ||
| They have this weird desire to be in a group of people that's intensely committed to them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And the thing is, I would sort of give myself over to the brotherhood of being among fellow skinheads. | ||
| And there was something very sort of affirming and enjoyable about it. | ||
| That's gonna sound fucked up, but that's the truth. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like these guys just like so accepting of you and like moshing together with your arms around one another and drinking beer. | ||
| And it's like everyone's like... | ||
| The only thing that I've experienced that's anything like that is like the rave scene when everyone's on ecstasy. | ||
| It's fucked up and weird as that sounds. | ||
| It's only like that vibe of like, you're accepted here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a part of a person, like human beings. | ||
| It's a part of our brains. | ||
| There's this tribe part that you could tap into with good and bad. | ||
| I had this thing for a while that I was watching a lot of like radical Islam videos. | ||
| Like these Islamicists that would talk to all these people and they would say like wild shit, and I don't even know these videos are still available on YouTube, but they would talk about death to apostates, death to homosexuals, | ||
| and I got down this rabbit hole because someone sent me this video saying that here's these guys that are speaking to these people in this other country and they're They're trying to say that it's not radical Islam. | ||
| This is just Islam. | ||
| But they're saying these things that a lot of people equate with radical Islam. | ||
| And I'm watching these guys say these things and I'm like, I'm recognizing why this is so intoxicating. | ||
| Because the guy was talking about all these other religions. | ||
| And he's like, the difference between all these other religions and Islam is that Islam is the truth. | ||
| That's the way he said it. | ||
| And everybody's like, yes, yes, yes. | ||
| And they're all in on this. | ||
| And it's like there's something attractive about someone who has this incredible confidence about this idea. | ||
| And all these other people agree to it vehemently, right? | ||
| Intensely. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I remember watching this thinking like, and I watched a lot of them for like months. | ||
| I watched a lot of them thinking like, these are strange patterns that I find very attractive. | ||
| And whether it's this or whether it's Islam or whether it's, you could find the same thing about, there's some evangelical Christians. | ||
| There's a video that I play all the time on my phone about this guy. | ||
| This guy converts this guy who's gay, and this guy has this fiery way of talking to him. | ||
| Then he gives the young man the mic, and he's like, I'm not gay no more! | ||
| I am delivered! | ||
| And he starts dancing, and everybody starts dancing with him. | ||
| It's like, I don't want to be with a man. | ||
| I don't want to wear a purse. | ||
| I want to be with a woman. | ||
| I'll play you the video. | ||
| I'll have it on my phone. | ||
| I'll show it to you later. | ||
| But it's attractive. | ||
| There's something attractive about everybody agreeing that this guy's not gay anymore. | ||
| He's clearly gay. | ||
| He's got a bow tie on. | ||
| And he's dancing around and everybody's dancing with him. | ||
| There's something about everyone committing to a thing. | ||
| Whatever that thing is, it doesn't have to be a good thing sometimes. | ||
| That's how cults get started, right? | ||
| You just all agree that this guy is a living God. | ||
| And you gotta wash his feet and hang around him. | ||
| Like Wild Wild Country, right? | ||
| Like Osho. | ||
| Did you have something to do with that? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The people who did the... | ||
| Yeah, the Duplass brothers that made that. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| They were executive producers on Sasquatch, yeah. | ||
| Goddamn, that's good. | ||
| Wild Wild Country. | ||
| Fuck yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| Goddamn, that's good. | ||
| But it's that same kind of thing, right? | ||
| I'll never forget this. | ||
| My friend Todd, who's like... | ||
| Different Todd, not Todd McCormick. | ||
| Todd Colker, one of the nicest guys I know, we were talking about it. | ||
| He goes, in the beginning, you're like, wow, I want to live there. | ||
| These guys look like they're having a good time. | ||
| They look so sweet. | ||
| Everyone seems like they're all being loving to each other and wonderful. | ||
| It's this utopian idea. | ||
| Everyone's committed to this thing, and they have this tribe. | ||
| They're all together. | ||
| And they even brought in homeless people and vagrants. | ||
| And they said, look, you've got a place. | ||
| And then these people- They're so happy. | ||
| Oh, they were so happy! | ||
| All of a sudden they're like, oh my god, I've got a place! | ||
| And you realize that's what everybody wants, man. | ||
| Everybody wants to be accepted. | ||
| Even if it's a bad idea that they have to all agree to and cling to. | ||
| No, but the feeling of belonging overrides any sort of critical thinking over the ideology, right, if you're one of the followers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking weird. | ||
| It's weird, these little traps, these little switches that can go off in the brain where they can become attached to anything or any person or any ideology. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I'm fascinated by that. | ||
| Because, you know, I was never in a cult. | ||
| But I was really into martial arts. | ||
| Well, I still am really into martial arts. | ||
| But I was really into traditional martial arts when I was young. | ||
| And, you know, I was a Taekwondo student. | ||
| And my instructor, I used to have to call him sir. | ||
| And you always had to bow. | ||
| It was a good cult because it was very beneficial to me. | ||
| And I learned a lot of discipline from it. | ||
| But it was very cult-like. | ||
| I thought my instructor could do no wrong. | ||
| I thought he was a super person. | ||
| No one could beat him. | ||
| There's these people that were taking these classes with him that thought that this guy was a superhuman. | ||
| He could go fight Mike Tyson or something like that, and he would kill him. | ||
| It's a weird belief thing that people get sucked into. | ||
| And there's a lot of that out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot. | |
| Like these weird little, like a hypnosis thing, a weird little thing that the brain can get locked into. | ||
| Yeah, it taps into something that's in all of us, right? | ||
| Whether it's a cult or the Skinhead Hate Rock Festival. | ||
| Yeah, just saying that you felt connected to these guys while you're locking arm in arm, dancing and singing to horrible fucking lyrics. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| Did it feel, was part of you, like, going, this is, like, you know where they really did a great job of exposing that was American History X? That's a great movie. | ||
| Yeah, that movie got it right. | ||
| Because they show his understanding of what was fucked up about it, and you really believe that he had a transformation. | ||
| It wasn't like some ABC after-school special transformation. | ||
| Like, you really thought that Edward Norton, at the end of the film, had become a different human being. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a character in that movie that was based on this guy, Tom Metzger, that I ran across several times at these festivals. | ||
| He was a major neo-Nazi leader. | ||
| But he seemed to be somebody that actually always bought into it. | ||
| I think he was legitimately a hater. | ||
| But he always had all these young guys around him. | ||
| Just a flock of them. | ||
| Did you ever worry you were going to get sucked into something doing these things? | ||
| Not that, but any one of these things. | ||
| You know how DEA agents sometimes become drug dealers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I never had any fear that I was actually going to become a neo-Nazi. | ||
| No, not that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Other things you've been undercover. | |
| Um... | ||
| You know, there was this story I did where I was up for three days with speed freaks, and I did find that a little alluring. | ||
| I'm not sure I came back from that the same, you know? | ||
| What were you doing? | ||
| What kind of speed? | ||
| You know, actually, well, I think that they were smoking this really high-grade crystal meth they called Shabu. | ||
| It came in this, like, statue of this, like, demon, you know, and they just shaved little pieces off of it. | ||
| That was what it was. | ||
| It was sort of like a... | ||
| So the statue was the meth? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was kind of cool. | ||
| It was like this Japanese demon, and they would like... | ||
| But of course, by the end of the 72 hours, it was down to just sort of a misshapen lump. | ||
| But it started off... | ||
| Is that a common thing? | ||
| If it's really good shit, yeah. | ||
| That they do that? | ||
| Did they make a statue out of it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find some pictures of that. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's looking. | |
| He's on the wall. | ||
| So... | ||
| Shabu. | ||
| S-H-A-B-U. Fuck! | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's very ritualistic, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they were smoking it. | ||
| So I think you can get a contact high off people exhaling meth vapor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| You were talking about that in your documentary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I was... | ||
| I was taking a provigil, modafinil, like the stuff they give to fighter pilots these days instead of amphetamines to stay awake. | ||
| But I think I was also good. | ||
| And there's also just a contact eye thing to that fucking frenzy and hyper-focus on tasks and stuff. | ||
| Did you have to fake that you were smoking? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They knew I was a reporter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They knew you were. | |
| Yeah, they trusted me that I wasn't going to identify them. | ||
| So you took the new vigil or provigil just to stay awake with them? | ||
| Stay awake, yeah. | ||
| How many days? | ||
| 72 hours. | ||
| You start getting real weird, right? | ||
| After about 40. You start seeing shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the end of it, it's the story kind of... | ||
| I was worried after it because I was like, oh man, I started to lose track of shit around an hour 50. I wasn't taking notes properly. | ||
| I wasn't recording interviews as much anymore. | ||
| And I was like, this story is going to be not so good after that point. | ||
| It's going to be rich in detail. | ||
| But the way the story reads, it's called 72 Hour Party People. | ||
| And the way it reads is it kind of starts to fritz out. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Yeah, it kind of starts to fritz out, you know, around hour 50. It kind of works. | ||
| It's like it kind of... | ||
| Hold on, go back to that. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| I love the opening statement. | ||
| It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon with clawed feet, a mane of fire, and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Transparent, the size of a child's fist. | ||
| Looks like a tiny ice carving or a statuette of glass. | ||
| It is neither. | ||
| In fact, it's 25 grams, a little less than one ounce, of nearly 100% pure, crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride known on the streets of Asia as shabu. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Certainly manufactured in a clandestine laboratory in China, then shipped to the Philippines. | ||
| Is that where they're making that stuff? | ||
| Shabu demon dolls, they're making them in China? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At least they were in the early 2000s. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And these guys that were doing this stuff, did they have normal lives and they would occasionally go off the rails and do meth or were they just meth till they die? | ||
| At the time, you know, interesting, another great question. | ||
| At the time, they all did this once a month. | ||
| They would get together once a month and, you know... | ||
| Like a ritual. | ||
| Yeah, like a ritual. | ||
| Like a psychedelic ritual. | ||
| But over the next few years... | ||
| Some of them got out of it, and the others, it became a lot more frequent than once a month. | ||
| So, predictably, it's just mathematics in a way. | ||
| A certain number of those individuals are going to find that they have a real taste for it. | ||
| Well, it becomes, apparently, I mean, I've never done any amphetamine other than caffeine. | ||
| I've never done Coke. | ||
| I've never done any of those things. | ||
| I'm scared of those. | ||
| I think I like them too much. | ||
| But it seems that it becomes a pattern. | ||
| And then when you get off of it, the crash is so hard that people take a little taste to kind of get back to homeostasis. | ||
| And then the next thing you know, there is no normal. | ||
| Next thing you know, you're just fucking going for it all the time. | ||
| Yeah, I lived in Phoenix in the mid-'90s, and I remember when crystal meth hit that city. | ||
| It was just friends were going down right and left on that shit. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| When did it start? | ||
| When did the crystal meth thing start? | ||
| Well, I mean, that's hard to say. | ||
| I mean, it's been around since... | ||
| I mean, shit. | ||
| Hitler was doing crystals, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, John F. Kennedy was getting crystal jacked into his ass. | ||
| Was he? | ||
| To keep him up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His ass? | ||
| Story goes. | ||
| Well, that was Dr. Feelgood, right? | ||
| Wasn't that the story behind Dr. Feelgood? | ||
| Now, that's not biker myth, obviously. | ||
| It's pharmaceutical shit. | ||
| The good stuff. | ||
| Yeah, but in the 90s in Phoenix, there was a lot of the home labs. | ||
| The cartels just south of the border weren't really manufacturing at large scale yet. | ||
| They hadn't realized the profit potential yet. | ||
| So it was a lot of labs. | ||
| So you had these houses and trailers blowing up left and right all the time, and it was just nuts. | ||
| Now all the shit's like cartel. | ||
| Yeah, friends that I know that are cops have told me about, you know, going up on a trailer that exploded. | ||
| You know, people are fucking torn apart and the place is a mess and everything's on fire. | ||
| Yeah, they're not like trained chemists in a lot of cases, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, if they're making it with road flares and cold pills and shit. | ||
| I mean, this was that era. | ||
| I read once a story about Japanese suicide bombers, the kamikazes, and that's how they got them to do it. | ||
| They gave them meth, just methed them up and told them to fly the planes right into the boats, which totally makes sense. | ||
| The history of meth. | ||
| A Japanese chemist, there you go, first synthesized methamphetamine, also called meth in 1893. Holy shit! | ||
| I was just reading about that while you were talking about it in this article here, The History of Crystal Meth. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Go up a little bit there. | ||
| Oh, look at that. | ||
| 1887 in Germany. | ||
| Amphetamine was first made in 1887 in Germany. | ||
| And then methamphetamine, more potent and easier to make, was developed in Japan in 1919. Crystalline powder was soluble in water, making it the perfect candidate for injection. | ||
| Methamphetamine went into wide use during World War II when both sides used to keep the troops awake. | ||
| High doses were given to Japanese kamikaze pilots for the suicide missions. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Methamphetamine abuse by injection reached epidemic proportions when supplies stored for military use became available to the Japanese public. | ||
| What scares the shit out of me, and I'm sure you know journalists, journalists like Adderall. | ||
| A lot of journalists like Adderall. | ||
| A lot of writers I know like Adderall. | ||
| Do you like that stuff? | ||
| I love Adderall. | ||
| It's a meth, right? | ||
| It's three different kinds of amphetamines. | ||
| The thing about amphetamines, though, is it doesn't make you a better writer, but it does make you a more productive one. | ||
| So people think they can become Philip K. Dick or something by taking speed, and then they look at what they produce the next day, and it's like, you know, it's as if... | ||
| For me, it works for me in terms of being more productive. | ||
| Well, it works for a lot of people. | ||
| Use strategically. | ||
| Well, you're a smart guy and you obviously have discipline. | ||
| That's why you didn't become a skinhead. | ||
| But the discipline to only use it productively and use it for your writing. | ||
| The one story that did sort of suck me in was about rave culture. | ||
| In 1995, I immersed myself in rave culture You know, went to a lot of raves, glow sticks, blow pops, ecstasy, the whole thing. | ||
| And found that I fucking loved it. | ||
| I was like, my people. | ||
| I found them. | ||
| And stayed in that. | ||
| How long? | ||
| Five years, probably. | ||
| So you were raving? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I pretty quickly became a party promoter, which... | ||
| That's what we called ourselves. | ||
| The DEA would have called us narcotics traffickers, right? | ||
| Because party promoting was like throwing a party, like often in a warehouse and stuff, but you're also supplying the ecstasy. | ||
| So you're buying ecstasy in bulk and you're arranging a distribution system. | ||
| I mean, we didn't look at ourselves as drug traffickers, but the DEA certainly would have looked at it that way. | ||
| So that story did... | ||
| That story, I didn't move on. | ||
| I found something that I liked and stuck with it. | ||
| So I was like, gonzo journalist by day, raver at night, but really it was just like, gonzo journalist, one night, raver every weekend kind of thing. | ||
| And it was something that you enjoyed recreationally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've only done ecstasy once. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| But the next day, I couldn't read. | ||
| I went to a coffee shop and I was trying to read a magazine. | ||
| Not even anything heavy. | ||
| It was a boxing magazine. | ||
| I literally couldn't read. | ||
| I couldn't get through a paragraph. | ||
| My brain was so drained. | ||
| And then I did stand-up that night and I sucked. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It wasn't good. | ||
| I was like, I'm not doing this stuff ever again. | ||
| I was just so low energy. | ||
| Yeah, your serotonin's gone. | ||
| Yeah, toast. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's a weird drug in that when people are on it, they are the nicest, sweetest, most loving people in the world. | ||
| Like, wouldn't we want that? | ||
| Like, in terms of drugs, like, people on Coke, what do they want to do? | ||
| They want to fight you, or they want to open up a business with you, or they want to, like... | ||
| They want to talk a lot. | ||
| Yeah, invent things, go to the moon. | ||
| You know, people on... | ||
| On MDMA, they want to hold your hand. | ||
| They want to hug you. | ||
| They want to dance. | ||
| It's like a loving, nice drug that alleviates anxiety and insecurities. | ||
| And it has great promise. | ||
| Like MAPS is using it for PTSD for soldiers. | ||
| And there's... | ||
| Ongoing studies that seem to hold great promise in helping people alleviate some really traumatic moments from their past So there's like it's a it's a weird drug and that it's probably better if it's legal and regulated and if people figure out some sort of a way to keep it To keep it pure, where you know what you're actually getting. | ||
| And then there's also some pharmaceutical or some supplemental strategies to re-boost your serotonin after you're off of it. | ||
| There's this, what is that shit called? | ||
| The stuff that's in new mood. | ||
| What is that stuff called? | ||
| 5 HTTP right? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| It's tryptophan. | ||
| I forget the ingredients. | ||
| But there's stuff that you can... | ||
| Jamie will pull it up. | ||
| I haven't taken it in a long time. | ||
| There's stuff that you can take that actually allows your body, the precursors for serotonin, allows your body to... | ||
| It helps your body build serotonin. | ||
| The idea is you take this stuff. | ||
| 5-HTP, right? | ||
| Isn't that what it is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You take it and then tryptophan. | ||
| And then tryptophan converts to 5-HTP so you get like two versions of it and then you take it while you're tripping. | ||
| So that like as your body depletes it because you're on this wild high because of the drug, this stuff forces your body to start reboosting it. | ||
| And then I know a lot of people who have depression, who suffer from low serotonin. | ||
| Like my friend Neil Brennan was taking that stuff for a while. | ||
| Just as a supplement and he found that it helped him a lot. | ||
| So there's ways that they could do this where they could maybe administer it in a way that you know people don't abuse it or they're less likely to abuse it but make sure that it's pure because part of the problem is when people are buying this stuff you're getting it laced with like fentanyl and all sorts of other shit and that's what's killing people. | ||
| It's not the MDMA that's killing people necessarily as much, I mean maybe it does, but not as much as the stuff that's laced with other shit because it's illegal. | ||
| People don't know what they're buying. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| We always tried to get what we call the molecule. | ||
| The molecule was the good shit. | ||
| And the good shit really came from Seoul, South Korea. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There was decent shit that came from Amsterdam, but the pure stuff, batch after batch, was coming from South Korea. | ||
| Why South Korea? | ||
| There were labs there that were just, whatever. | ||
| I mean, that's where we had a source, I guess. | ||
| You know, I mean, like, in my experience, like, the pure mod, back in the 1990s again. | ||
| But it's like, I mean, it's the same thing, like, profit. | ||
| Like, I watched the ecstasy scene get, like, taken over by real criminals. | ||
| Like, ravers were soft marks. | ||
| You know, like, real criminals came in in Phoenix and, like, just took it over. | ||
| Mmm, that sucks. | ||
| How'd you get out? | ||
| Cold turkey? | ||
| I moved. | ||
| I moved out of Phoenix. | ||
| I just got older, too. | ||
| I grew out of it. | ||
| The scene kind of took a dark turn. | ||
| It served its purpose for me, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of those things are unsustainable, right? | ||
| Those scenes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was really hardcore in it for like three years and then kind of tapered off and moved on with life. | ||
| And you don't have a problem not doing Adderall? | ||
| The people that I know that have an issue with Adderall, they like to do it all the time. | ||
| No, I don't have a problem. | ||
| That could be, honestly, because I don't have a regular supply of it. | ||
| It's like every once in a while I'll come across and stock up. | ||
| But hey, I'm sure I could figure out a way to get a script for Adderall. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I haven't done that. | ||
| Begging to give those scripts away. | ||
| Hey, David, you look a little tired. | ||
| Want some coffee? | ||
| Here, have some coffee. | ||
| I do want some Adderall in your coffee. | ||
| I mean, that's easy. | ||
| Cheers again, sir. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Enjoy this conversation, man. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I got a great story about The ecstasy scene being taken over by the mob in Phoenix. | ||
| Can I tell it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It starts in the summer of 1997. And there were these hackers that were some of the best sources that I had. | ||
| There were these hackers and this group called the National Security Anarchists. | ||
| Anyway, they would send me information. | ||
| And one of them sent me a tip that there was a mafia hitman I'm going to get to the ecstasy, trust me. | ||
| Who was hanging out at this coffee shop near the Arizona State University campus called the Gold Bar Coffee Shop every Friday night. | ||
| And he was like signing autographs and this hacker had found this information on like a goth bulletin board on campus, like online bulletin board. | ||
| And he sent it to me. | ||
| He was like, you might want to check this out. | ||
| So I went and staked out the coffee house the next Friday night. | ||
| And I walk in and there are all these like goth chicks We're good to go. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So, I'm thinking, like, at this time, Gravano was in witness protection. | ||
| It was just a few years after he'd ratted out John Gotti. | ||
| This is like, he was the highest-ranking, you know this guy, highest-ranking mob informant turncoat ever, right? | ||
| So I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be a good story, because there's some, somebody has convinced these goth chicks that he's Sammy the Bull Gravano, you know, because there's no fucking way. | ||
| And this... | ||
| Silver Lexus pulls in the parking lot of the coffee shop. | ||
| Owner of the coffee shop runs over to this piano. | ||
| It's in the lobby, starts playing the theme of The Godfather. | ||
| And in walks this guy, and I'm like, that is Sammy the Bull Gravano, like, without a doubt. | ||
| Like, that's fucking him. | ||
| And Sammy the Bull Gravano proceeds to go over and, like, sign these chicks' books and hold court for about an hour while he's drinking his double espresso, telling stories about, like, the mob and shit, okay? | ||
| I'm going to get to the ecstasy, trust me. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Keep talking. | ||
| So I go back to my editor and I'm like, guess what? | ||
| Sam Nebo Gravano is obviously living here in Phoenix. | ||
| And he's hanging out with goth chicks from Arizona State University every Friday night at a coffee house. | ||
| I think I got a story. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, you got a fucking story. | ||
| So then it becomes like, so then I go to the coffee shop and I start working my way in. | ||
| And I like, sign my book of Underboss, ask him questions, get him coffee. | ||
| He likes to play chess. | ||
| I start playing chess with him every Friday night. | ||
| For how long? | ||
| Three weeks. | ||
| And I know it was three weeks because I was going there and I was like, when are we going to pull the trigger? | ||
| When am I going to be like, Mr. Gravano, let me introduce myself. | ||
| My name is David Holthaus. | ||
| I'm a journalist. | ||
| I know, you know, I would really like to do a story about the fact that you're living in Phoenix. | ||
| What kind of terms can we come to so I can tell this story? | ||
| I waited one week too long. | ||
| Week number four, he's not there. | ||
| Five, six, seven, he's not there. | ||
| Ghost, gone. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I was like, fuck. | ||
| It still, to me, is the story that got away. | ||
| I waited one week too long. | ||
| All right? | ||
| So this is like... | ||
| This is the time in my life where I was like having the rave scene too. | ||
| It's the summer of 97. That summer... | ||
| These guys from New York that were in their 20s like showed up kind of in the rave culture and they were like they had thick like Brooklyn accents and they stood out because they would wear like they were kind of trying to dress like ravers but we gave them the nickname the shiny shirt mafia because they would wear just these like gold and silver lame shirts and finally somebody's like dude that's not the shirts you want to wear let me take you to like a proper rape clothing store and thing but it's the rave scene everybody's accepted And they, | ||
| you know, they were going to warehouse parties and stuff and doing ecstasy, and they were just like part of the scene. | ||
| A few months after that, raves started to get robbed. | ||
| It took, it was like, looking back, it's a wonder it took so long for us to get robbed. | ||
| But these guys came in, guns, masks, took the gate, like, you know, probably 10 grand in cash at the gate, and they knew who was selling the ecstasy, and they took the pills and the cash. | ||
| Three raves got hit on the same night. | ||
| Then, ecstasy dealers started to get robbed. | ||
| One guy got kidnapped and held for ransom. | ||
| Like, this shit's going on. | ||
| Everyone's like... | ||
| Everyone who's... | ||
| Again, we... | ||
| You know, we thought of ourselves as party promoters, okay? | ||
| But really, we were ecstasy traffickers, but we were soft targets, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| We were rave kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right? | ||
| And eventually... | ||
| One guy gets taken up, gets nabbed, and taken up into the Superstition Mountains outside Phoenix. | ||
| And he says that he was shown a grave. | ||
| And these guys told him, like, here's the deal. | ||
| You can go in that hole tonight, or you can go back and tell all your little friends that you're only buying ecstasy from us from now on. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And so he comes back with this message. | ||
| Meanwhile, these guys in the shiny shirt mafia, they're still going to raves and shit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| We haven't put it together. | ||
| So, everybody starts buying their ecstasy from a single source. | ||
| Ecstasy is not great, to your earlier point, but it's like the price per pill is such that everybody's making more money, the violence stops, the robberies stop, all the hassles stop. | ||
| 1999, I get off a plane at Sky Harbor Airport, and there's front page news. | ||
| Sam and the Abro Gravano busted for running Ecstasy Ring. | ||
| And I open it up, and there's the news story. | ||
| At first, I'm like, God damn it. | ||
| You know, again, that story I missed, right? | ||
| And in there is a picture of Sam and the Bull's son and his son's friends. | ||
| And it's those fucking guys from New York. | ||
| I've never told this story, by the way. | ||
| The part about the coffee house and playing chess with Sam and the Bull, I wrote about that. | ||
| But for obvious reasons, I didn't write about being an ecstasy trafficker. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, I can't prove it, but I know what happened. | ||
| And what happened is, at a certain point... | ||
| Sammy the Bull Gravano's son told his dad about what they were doing, ripping off parties, robbing drug dealers and everything. | ||
| And Sammy the Bull Gravano said, you fucking knucklehead, instead of terrorizing these guys and extorting money from them, just take over their entire operation. | ||
| Because what Sammy the Bull Gravano got caught for was trafficking ecstasy in Arizona. | ||
| That's what he got popped for and went back to prison for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Imagine if you're one of those guys that's in jail for the rest of your life for cannabis, and you hear this story about Sammy the Bull, murdered people, got into witness protection, got out, signing autographs, starts running ecstasy, gets out... | ||
| While still in witness protection. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gets out again, now he's got a podcast. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're like, what in the fuck? | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
| War on drugs. | ||
| Again. | ||
| The war on drugs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| You should do his podcast. | ||
| I don't think I want to see that guy again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would like to play chess against him again, though, because I let him win. | ||
| I think I could beat him. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is he good? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't want to diss Sammy the Bull here. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I think I can beat him. | ||
| Let me put it that way. | ||
| Are you good at chess? | ||
| I'm alright. | ||
| It's a good game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a game that requires a lot of thinking. | ||
| Like in terms of like, it's not a game you do once. | ||
| And then you get better at it if you think about it all the time. | ||
| And then you learn it and you become obsessed. | ||
| And the next thing you know, you're one of those fucking guys. | ||
| Playing online and playing on your phone and... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember Howard Stern got really into chess at one point in time. | ||
| He was taking lessons and he was talking about it on the air. | ||
| I'm like, uh-oh. | ||
| Slippery slope. | ||
| Obsessive person. | ||
| Gets involved in a competitive game. | ||
| Next thing you know, all your time is gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sam and they both played prison chess. | ||
| Like, really aggressive. | ||
| What's prison chess? | ||
| Really aggressive and lots of tricks. | ||
| Lots of, like, traps. | ||
| I mean, that's what chess is sometimes. | ||
| It's like set in traps. | ||
| But, like, lots of kind of gimmicky traps, you know? | ||
| Oh, so you really play chess. | ||
| You understand the game really well. | ||
| Well, you get to a certain level with chess where you're limited by your IQ. Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I think grandmasters in chess also happen to be super geniuses. | ||
| So you get to a certain point where you can only think so many moves ahead and keep it straight in your head. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| I think I've maximized my potential in chess. | ||
| And that potential is short of being world class, but... | ||
| I'm pretty good. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty good. | ||
| So don't you think though that it's like a muscle and that the more you use it or it's like endurance? | ||
| To an extent, but at a certain point you cannot work that muscle anymore. | ||
| In my opinion, at a certain point you're not going to get any better. | ||
| Did you learn when you were young? | ||
| Yeah, my dad taught me, yeah. | ||
| When I was in New York, I used to go to this pool hall and it was a really interesting mix of people but a lot of gambling addicts and weirdos and a lot of ex-cons and criminals and shit. | ||
| And this one guy who was this ex-con used to play no board chess with this kid. | ||
| Who was this young Jewish kid who was hanging around the pool hall. | ||
| He got kind of obsessed with the culture of gambling. | ||
| But he was a chess master, like a legit chess master. | ||
| So this guy was in his 40s with gray hair, his criminal with fucking missing teeth and shit. | ||
| Would play no-board chess with this young kid who's like 16 years old. | ||
| They would sit there and say the moves in their head. | ||
| Like, say the moves out loud. | ||
| The two of them would keep track of it. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| It was wild to see. | ||
| Because you're watching something like, are these guys, is this a made-up language? | ||
| Like, what are they doing here? | ||
| Is this real? | ||
| Because I don't know how to play. | ||
| I mean, I know how to play chess, but I don't know how to play chess, really. | ||
| And I'm watching these guys doing this. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| It's very impressive. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see The Queen's Gambit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking genius, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a great show. | ||
| I like Searching for Bobby Fischer, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like that flick. | |
| That's very great, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's based on Josh Waitzkin, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a jiu-jitsu master. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Black belt under Marcelo Garcia. | ||
| Yeah, legit. | ||
| Yeah, everybody I know that's rolled with him is like, he's really good. | ||
| He became obsessed with jiu-jitsu the same way he became obsessed with chess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's counterintuitive, right? | ||
| That's similar to that chest of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| The best jiu-jitsu players are all really fucking smart. | ||
| Really fucking smart. | ||
| And you'd be amazed. | ||
| A lot of them are like, you would see them, you're like, oh, these guys are... | ||
| Like moves and counters? | ||
| I guess that does make sense, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And also, the... | ||
| The amount of information that you have to acquire to be really good is extraordinary. | ||
| It's one of those things that on the outside, you look at it and you go, oh, it's like a bunch of meatheads just choking each other. | ||
| And then you actually learn the thing itself. | ||
| You're like, no, it's incredibly intricate and detailed and it's all about leverage and positioning and it's a language. | ||
| It's like a language of... | ||
| It's like you're having a conversation. | ||
| It's like you're exchanging words. | ||
| You're exchanging... | ||
| But instead of words, you're exchanging movements and concepts. | ||
| And the idea is about getting to checkmate. | ||
| And that's what Hicks and Gracie, who's like one of the greatest of all time, would always describe jiu-jitsu. | ||
| He's like, you know, we all start at zero. | ||
| And then I move to one. | ||
| And when I move to one, I'm not going back to zero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I go to two and to three and checkmate. | |
| And this guy is a legitimate, I don't know if you know who Hicks and Gracie is, but he's a revered master, like a yogi, and like super exceptional jiu-jitsu player. | ||
| But he would talk about checkmate, and that's how a lot of guys talk about it. | ||
| That it is like, it's like you're trying to, this guy's trying to keep up a rhythm with you. | ||
| You're trying to get his back, he's trying to counter, and he's trying... | ||
| And there's all this stuff going on. | ||
| You have to understand where the right place to be and the wrong place to be is. | ||
| So it's not nearly as much brute strength and athleticism as people think. | ||
| It plays a part, particularly because you have to be in shape to keep up while you're rolling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You have to be able to keep these movements going because if someone is as good as you but in better shape, they can push a higher pace. | ||
| And even though you understand where to be, your body can't respond properly because you're not in shape. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Other than that, it's really all about an understanding of the movements, and then it's about this deep well of knowledge that you have to have at a certain level, you know, at a level of a Marcelo Garcia that we were talking about before. | ||
| It's a deep, deep, deep well of knowledge. | ||
| You don't realize it until you start doing it. | ||
| So, like, one of my best friends, Eddie Bravo, who's a jiu-jitsu instructor, and he always says, like, the best guys are like nerd assassins. | ||
| Like these super smart guys who like you and if you met them like you would never believe in a million years Right these guys are like until you looked at their ears their ears are all fucked up You know they're all cauliflower ear, but so many of them are just these really sort of thoughtful Thinking people who are just obsessed with these ideas that that that in comping encompasses jujitsu and Yeah. | ||
| That's why on the street, man, you never know who you're talking to on the street, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I could, like, seem like a total nerd. | ||
| Like, I love martial arts. | ||
| I study Tang Soo Do, and, like, my teacher's, like, 70 years old and close to, and, like, a little dude, but, like, you can kick your ass. | ||
| That's what Chuck Norris used to study. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He learned tangsudo. | ||
| I studied kenpo when I was a kid. | ||
| I always wanted to study jujitsu and wrestling and stuff, but even to this day, I flash back to the fucking sexual assault when I was a kid. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| When I tried to join my junior high school wrestling team, the coach was like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| You're treating it like it's a fight. | ||
| I would just freak out. | ||
| No, that makes sense. | ||
| I know fighters who have been raped, and there's an intensity to them that's... | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's not a game. | ||
| There's a little door that they can open, and it's life and death. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a thing that's a good thing to know and learn. | ||
| I mean, maybe you could get over it, but it's a great exercise, too. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But for people that look at it on the outside, it's not what it seems. | ||
| It's like many things in life, you know? | ||
| You look at it, like, as an outsider, you're like, oh, I think I know what that is. | ||
| Like, nope. | ||
| You really don't. | ||
| You really don't. | ||
| You know, it's a bunch of people obsessed with strangling people, yes, but it's really they're playing a crazy game. | ||
| It's like a real live video game of I'm trying to kill you and you're trying to kill me. | ||
| But the thing about it is it's a very friendly game in that like a guy can get you and you don't even really get hurt. | ||
| Like you just get kind of, you know, like someone gets you in an arm bar, you tap, And your arm doesn't get broken. | ||
| You go, good job. | ||
| You got that. | ||
| Like, what did I do? | ||
| Did I leave it in there? | ||
| Did I leave my hand in this? | ||
| Yeah, you gotta pull it here. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And like, you talk to each other. | ||
| You exchange it. | ||
| And you can go again. | ||
| And you can keep going. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, you know, you get caught in a triangle. | ||
| Like, ah, fuck, I left my arm in there. | ||
| And there's the details. | ||
| And you become obsessed with these details. | ||
| Has anybody made a really smart doc on that, a documentary? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| I think Stuart Cooper, he has a documentary on jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I'm sure there's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's interesting. | ||
| There's one thing on YouTube that's really interesting. | ||
| It's about this one team, and their gym's called Daisy Fresh. | ||
| And what it is is, I think they're in Illinois. | ||
| And I saw one of them compete two weekends ago in Austin. | ||
| They have this thing called Who's Number One? | ||
| It's a thing on flow grappling. | ||
| It's a professional jiu-jitsu competition that they have once a month in Austin. | ||
| They stream it live. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| And this one guy... | ||
| How do I say his last name? | ||
| Yeah, what is that young man's name? | ||
| Andrew... | ||
| I don't want to fuck up his last name this is the Daisy this is the Daisy Fresh team and And anyway, what this Daisy Fresh team is, it's a laundromat called Daisy Fresh. | ||
| They bought this laundromat and converted it into a jiu-jitsu academy. | ||
| And these guys live in this jiu-jitsu academy. | ||
| They have like blow-up mattresses and shit, and they train like 24-7. | ||
| And they're a team of fucking savage nerd psychos who live in this place. | ||
| And it still says Daisy Fresh on the outside. | ||
| So people will show up thinking they're going to get their laundry done, and they see all these guys, and this is the inside of the place. | ||
| Look, they're sleeping on these mattresses, and they have jugs of water that they're drinking. | ||
| It's like this weird, crazy, primitive environment with wrestling mats, but they're producing world-class grapplers. | ||
| It's a fascinating documentary series that's available on YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll check it out. | |
| But you see these guys, they're not meatheads. | ||
| They're really smart, interesting guys. | ||
| And you see them going over techniques and talking about these techniques. | ||
| And it's kind of similar to the way you see in the Queen's Gambit, people talking about chess moves. | ||
| So it's just another thing, like people go down a hole, a rabbit hole, and what it really is is them trying to figure out a game. | ||
| And this game is jujitsu, and with some people it's chess, with some people it's a video game or whatever it is, but that's what they're doing, you know? | ||
| For you it's chess. | ||
| You play a lot? | ||
| Not as much as I used to. | ||
| Like I said, I got to a certain point. | ||
| I was like, I'm not going to get any better. | ||
| I play on my phone. | ||
| I don't play in tournaments or anything like that. | ||
| Do you play against people on your phone? | ||
| No, I just play against the computer. | ||
| Did you see that the most watched chess match of all time was against a guy who was a cheater? | ||
| Do you know that story? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't know that story? | ||
| No. | ||
| There was a guy who was playing online, and I think he was from Indonesia. | ||
| And he was playing online and his score jumped up way too fast and someone decided this guy was a cheater and so they red flagged him and banned him and then that person got a bunch of hate from all these other people like no that's my relative and he just hasn't played in a long time but he used to be a professional player and the reason why it takes him a long time to do the moves is because he's got an old phone and his phone just doesn't process very well. | ||
| And so they convinced this person to let this guy have a match. | ||
| And so this guy had a match against this woman who was a real master. | ||
| And they did it online. | ||
| And he fell apart. | ||
| Instead of being like at 90% accuracy, like a really elite chess player, he was making all these mistakes and he got trounced by this girl. | ||
| So everybody realized like, oh... | ||
| The guy who said he was cheating was correct. | ||
| He really was cheating. | ||
| But in the process, more than a million people watched it streamed. | ||
| See how many people watched? | ||
| It says 1.25 million people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was the most watched chess game of all time because of the controversy about it. | ||
| Because this guy used to be, or they thought this guy was, they thought he was cheating, and he was. | ||
| Turns out he was. | ||
| But it became, because of the controversy, this huge event. | ||
| Which makes you think, like, it's weird, right? | ||
| Like, this is it. | ||
| Cheating controversy results in most watched chess stream in history. | ||
| So that guy on the left is full of shit. | ||
| And they caught him because, like, it's, you know, it's like jujitsu. | ||
| It's very similar in that if you pretend you're a black belt and you roll with a black belt, That black belt will say, yeah, man, you don't know what the fuck you're doing. | ||
| This is fake. | ||
| You could just go buy a black belt and pretend. | ||
| Maybe you're an athletic guy. | ||
| And people have done that before. | ||
| And there's a bunch of videos online, on YouTube in particular, of fake black belts getting exposed at gyms. | ||
| Because you just can't fake that. | ||
| And also people know where you got it from. | ||
| They'll say, where'd you get your black belt from? | ||
| And you'd be like, Pedro Sauer. | ||
| And like, hmm, that's interesting because my cousin's from Pedro Sauer's academy and he's never heard of you. | ||
| And then, because there's only, you know, every elite instructor, you know, even the best instructors ever, maybe they have a hundred black belts. | ||
| Like maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Why would people fake that though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because they're crazy. | |
| I mean... | ||
| People are crazy. | ||
| Why would that guy play that chess master? | ||
| Why would you put on a fake black belt and go like... | ||
| I think he made a lot of money. | ||
| I think he made several thousand dollars doing that. | ||
| I think that was the thing. | ||
| If I'm correct, she made $10,000. | ||
| I think he made $7,000 or something like that. | ||
| How much did he make? | ||
| To do this match? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This article is not saying... | ||
| I was looking through the thing. | ||
| I think to get him to do it, they had to guarantee him, even if he lost. | ||
| Oh, yeah, here we go at the bottom. | ||
| The equivalent of $10,500 that was then doubled by a businessman. | ||
| I don't know who got that, though. | ||
| I think that's the winner. | ||
| But he got money for second place. | ||
| It wasn't like a winner-take-all thing. | ||
| What do you think you're going to do now? | ||
| Do you have a project you're working on currently? | ||
| I got a few, man. | ||
| I got a few. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Working on a play about a guy that's undercover in the new Nazi movement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Gee, where'd you come up with that idea? | ||
| Why a play? | ||
| You know, I really... | ||
| When Stalking the Boogeyman, that essay about my childhood trauma, was adapted as a play, I was like... | ||
| I kind of got in there and rewrote some scenes and was like, I got kind of a knack for this. | ||
| I get this medium. | ||
| I grew up going to theater in Alaska. | ||
| My parents took me to theater a lot. | ||
| But the thing I really found out is that... | ||
| I really enjoyed being part of a collaborative team effort in a creative pursuit. | ||
| The type of journalism I did, pretty lonely pursuit. | ||
| Every once in a while, I pair up with a photographer, but for the most part, just out there on my own, you know, reporting. | ||
| And the play, which was an off-Broadway production, and just working with the actors and the director and the set designers and everything, hey, I actually like working with other people, and they're smart, creative people. | ||
| So I'm sort of drawn to that. | ||
| Same reason I like making docs. | ||
| Docs are a team effort. | ||
| I think the play... | ||
| A good buddy of mine who was on your show recently, Tiller Russell. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he and I have a few things cooking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| I'm glad you're doing something with him. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| Dude, Operation Odessa is fucking bananas. | ||
| He talked to me about it on the show, and then I went and watched it, and he actually undersold how fucking bananas it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He didn't tell you the story about the Chechen secret police, though. | ||
| Which one's that? | ||
| When we were in Moscow. | ||
| Was that when you were trying to buy the sub? | ||
| No, not when they were trying to buy the sub. | ||
| We were shooting with Tarzan, like the Russian mobster that's in the movie. | ||
| We were shooting with him in Moscow, and this DEA guy had told us, like, Assume your hotel room is bugged. | ||
| But we got to the hotel. | ||
| We're staying at the Four Seasons in Moscow. | ||
| That was the whole scene. | ||
| And we weren't cautious about what we were saying in our hotel room. | ||
| So we were talking about the movie. | ||
| We were just like, this is bullshit. | ||
| These rooms aren't bugged. | ||
| But in the lobby of the hotel, and every hotel in that area is so close to Red Square. | ||
| There's these guys that are... | ||
| There's this secret police force that's especially in that part of Moscow. | ||
| Then they're Chechens, and you can spot them. | ||
| They're wearing these ill-fitting suits, and they have big beards, and they're always sitting in the lobby wearing newspapers and shit. | ||
| And after the second of three days of interviews, Tiller and I and Tarzan, the Russian mob guy that was buying a sub for the cartel, right? | ||
| We left the hotel and we went to walk around and talk and stuff. | ||
| And I noticed that the Chechens have left the lobby and are now following us. | ||
| And so we're texting with one of the producers and we're like, because every day we've been sending the footage by FedEx, we thought, back to L.A. And then we had a copy with us in the hotel room safe. | ||
| So we're texting the producer and we're like, that footage is gone, right? | ||
| And he's like, yes. | ||
| And the other footage is in the safe in the hotel room. | ||
| And then we get back to the hotel and it turns out that actually none of it had left the hotel. | ||
| And so then we just panicked because all of our interview footage is there in Moscow with us. | ||
| And we just fucking raced to the airport and got the fuck out of there. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| The Chechen guys had left the lobby and were following us. | ||
| So you're just constantly being bugged if you go over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just assume. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That whole documentary is so wild. | ||
| It's so hard to believe that it's all based on the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, like the dude who stole the money, and at the end they're doing the interview with him in the plane, and you're like, what? | ||
| Where are you? | ||
| And he's in Africa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what in the fuck? | ||
| You stole the money? | ||
| It's like the characters in there, they're so outrageous. | ||
| And then when you realize that these are real human beings that were involved in this, Yeah. | ||
| We were in Moscow when that guy, Tony Ester, texted us. | ||
| He texted Tiller and he was like, you're in Moscow interviewing the waiters. | ||
| Why don't you come to Africa and interview the chef? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's a fun call to make. | ||
| It's like, we're in Moscow. | ||
| We need like another 20 grand to get to Africa like tomorrow. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The kid's name that I couldn't put my finger on is Andrew Woolsey. | ||
| That's his name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His last name popped up when you were... | ||
| Oh, did it? | ||
| He doesn't have a birth certificate because his family, his mom gave birth to him in the woods, and they convinced him until he was 12 years old that he was a wizard. | ||
| His parents were crazy. | ||
| So he tried to travel outside the country. | ||
| He can't get a passport because he doesn't have a birth certificate. | ||
| It's a wild story. | ||
| He talks about it in this documentary series. | ||
| Brilliant kid. | ||
| Amazing at jujitsu. | ||
| I mean, just amazing. | ||
| I watched him compete and win a couple weekends ago. | ||
| That's neither here nor there. | ||
| I just wanted to amend that because I felt bad because I couldn't quite replace his name. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Let's get the winning hat on! | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And he's obsessed with Panda Express. | ||
| I think he would be a great podcast guest. | ||
| There's a couple stories that I wrote that I never felt like I cracked them. | ||
| Back to that earlier point early on today about never feeling like the story's finished. | ||
| And the director that I worked with on Sasquatch, Joshua Faye and I, he and I are trying to put together also like Going back and reinvestigating a story I wrote about unsolved murders, basically. | ||
| Another unsolved murder that I wrote about in Denver in the early 2000s. | ||
| So I'm hoping to go back and kind of get a second bite of that apple, too. | ||
| So a different, completely different environment? | ||
| Yeah, than Northern California. | ||
| But I mean, a completely different, this Unsolved Murders, like, you want to say what it's about? | ||
| No, it was a drug dealer who was murdered in Denver in 2002, and I wrote about his murder at the time, and, you know, kind of got a few leads on whodunit, but just kind of ran out of time and had to move on to the next story. | ||
| And so it's, like, similar to Sasquatch, it could be going back and, like, investigating the crime. | ||
| The key difference here is that actually, like, there was for sure there was an actual murder in a body. | ||
| But also kind of an autobiographical story that will probably get into the stalking the boogeyman, stalking the guy that raped me kind of thing. | ||
| Because at the same time I was investigating this murder, I was plotting a murder that I was plotting to commit. | ||
| Once you opened that door in your head and you actually committed to it, was it difficult to back away from that idea? | ||
| Yeah, because it was, you know, I get asked a lot, like, would you have actually done it? | ||
| And I think so, because it was, I freaked out. | ||
| I mean, now I know, like, I have PTSD. Ecstasy has been hugely helpful to me with treating PTSD. But it was the first kind of full-blown PTSD episode I had was when I found out that I'd just moved to Denver and that this fucking guy lived there. | ||
| I'd lost track of where he was living, right? | ||
| So I just flipped out, like nightmares, flashbacks, adrenaline surges, panic attacks, all of it. | ||
| I was just a mess. | ||
| But as soon as I kind of isolated his proximity to me as the cause, I was like, okay, and I'm going to eliminate that cause. | ||
| I got calmer. | ||
| And the more I started to plot it, I, like, calmed down more to where it was, like, the plotting and the planning and the following and everything. | ||
| It was like, that's what I needed to do to kind of keep myself calm. | ||
| And it felt good in the sense that I didn't feel as bad as I did. | ||
| And it felt... | ||
| I described it as, like, feeling like a kind of... | ||
| But it wasn't a pleasant calm. | ||
| It was like a void. | ||
| It was like an absence of feeling. | ||
| It's like the same way that outer space is calm. | ||
| You know, that's like the space that I was sort of operating in, the mind space I was operating in. | ||
| So to give that up was hard, but I found that I achieved the same effect by then writing the story and plotting the story and how am I going to write that? | ||
| Like I was able to sort of like self-treat my own PTSD. When they arrested you about it though, did you tell them, you know, hey, is this a story? | ||
| Like what did you tell them? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was a thin case. | ||
| I think that his wife had enough juice, and I think it was Broomfield, that she was able to get the cops to, like... | ||
| That's a bold move, especially if the guys raped other people. | ||
| Well, I think he wasn't honest with her. | ||
| I think he told her, like, look, this guy's, like, some kid, like, maybe something. | ||
| Maybe he presented to her as some sort of game of doctor gone wrong a little bit or something. | ||
| I don't know what he told her, but I don't think he told her the truth, because she went to the cops and filed a complaint, and... | ||
| me up. | ||
| They held, they only held me for a few hours. | ||
| They like, they got such a shit storm over it. | ||
| I mean, you know, it was, it was, it was major news. | ||
| You know, it was on the drudge report. | ||
| I mean, it was a fucking thing. | ||
| And the, the DA was immediately flooded with letters and calls of people like, what, you know, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| And they, but I had to then meet with the guy. | ||
| Like, that was the resolution, was to get the charges dropped. | ||
| I had to, like, meet with him with, like, psychiatrists and cops present and, like, assure him that I was no longer a threat to him. | ||
| And he assured me that he was no longer a threat to me. | ||
| So I had to, like, that was the last time I saw him, was at the kind of court-ordered mediation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a video that I've watched a few too many times of a guy who was a karate instructor and he raped this man's son. | ||
| And they're walking him, I think, through... | ||
| An airport in Louisiana. | ||
| The guy's at the phone. | ||
| He turns around and caps it. | ||
| And shoots him right in the head and then drops the gun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah Yeah, I mean Yeah. | |
| Look, I get it, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm amazed at your control that you didn't do it. | ||
| I didn't have a choice because I didn't want to go to prison for an extra time. | ||
| Yeah, no, I understand. | ||
| So, I mean, yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, Sammy the Bull out there selling ecstasy. | ||
| The balls on that guy. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Were you involved in the Night Stalker series as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a creepy one. | ||
| My wife was watching that and I had to get out of the room. | ||
| Like, I don't like these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have a hard time with those things. | ||
| I know it's a good show. | ||
| It did very well. | ||
| But I have moral qualms about it because I know that that sick fuck, Ramirez, would have loved the fact that there was a Netflix series made about him and his crime spree. | ||
| And it's more about the cops that caught him. | ||
| And we did do a really good job of... | ||
| Giving victims and surviving family members of victims their say, and not just treating the victims as abstract names and ages, which most serial killer shows do, and showing the real human impact of what he did. | ||
| But even so, he would have loved it. | ||
| He would have loved seeing his face on billboards around L.A., and when they came out with the marketing campaign, I was like, ah, God, fuck. | ||
| So I had mixed feelings about that one. | ||
| You are very attracted, obviously, to these dark stories, these heavy, intense, disturbing stories. | ||
| Do you think that's forever? | ||
| Do you think you'll ever do something like something that's a pick-me-up movie? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| There's something calming. | ||
| There's something calming to me about operating in those sorts of worlds or with that sort of subject matter. | ||
| The truth is I find it relaxing. | ||
| And also, there's something to be said for following a professional pursuit if it's something that you're really good at. | ||
| And I just happen to be really good at telling really dark stories. | ||
| Finding them, getting them, and telling them. | ||
| You certainly are. | ||
| I'm telling you, man. | ||
| Sasquatch got me. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I was like, maybe I'll watch one. | ||
| I was like, there's three of them. | ||
| I'm like, man, do I have three hours? | ||
| Okay, let's just see. | ||
| And then once the first one was halfway in, I was like, oh, I'm seeing this motherfucker to the end. | ||
| It's good, man. | ||
| You did a great job. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And thanks for coming here, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And good luck with whatever you do. | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| I'll be watching. | ||
| Great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, man. |
Export Selection