Mariana van Zeller reveals how the 35% "hidden third" of the global economy—black and gray markets—undermines public services by siphoning tax revenue, citing Peru’s counterfeit money ring (millions via airlines) and cartel-linked drug distribution through Delta flights using strippers. She exposes corrupt cops in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil working with cartels while detailing risks like body brokering in fake rehab scams. Rogan and van Zeller critique opioid settlements (Purdue Pharma’s $6B deal) and pharma conflicts, then shift to immigration policies, debunking the 70% criminal claim (only 7% violent), and exposing scam factories in Myanmar and Cambodia where workers are tortured to fleece victims via love-bombing or fake celebrity schemes. The episode underscores systemic exploitation, from unchecked markets to media manipulation and crypto fraud, leaving listeners questioning how greed reshapes laws and morality. [Automatically generated summary]
An estimated 35%, which is what economists call the hidden third.
So we're not just talking about illegal activities and goods like drugs and scams and whatnot and guns.
We're also talking about so the gray that's the black market and then there's the gray market which is the irregular unregulated part of the economy.
So untaxed work, untaxed goods, everything from like the man selling fruit on the corner to other jobs and goods that are in tax.
But this actually has an effect on all of us because it's less money that comes in for schools and infrastructure and hospitals and all the stuff we need.
And then apart from all that we know, which is the black market and how that affects us all, which is, you know, whether you talk about guns or drugs or immigration, I mean, it all has a direct impact on our lives.
So with this podcast, what I really wanted to do is after reporting on these black markets for 20 years, is I wanted to have a place like this where I can have intimate, raw, you know, sometimes difficult conversations with people who have lived or are living on the other side of the law and who, you know, I wanted to figure out why somebody decides to become a smuggler, a trafficker, a scammer, a bookie, you know, all these crazy lives that people lead.
See how it affects us all, understand why what they do affects us all.
And also, I think the most important part for me, which has always been, and I've talked about this with you, which is trying to understand if the circumstances were different, if it could have been you and me doing that, you know, I think most certainly that's the case.
It was that story that we did in the same episode you mentioned, the cocaine trafficking, which I will never forget, which was the kid who was carrying in his backpack, right?
He was a 16, 17-year-old kid carrying cocaine, 20 kilos of cocaine on his back for days on end in the jungles, seen so many of his friends being killed in front of him by rebel gangs, rival gangs.
And when he, you know, when I asked him, why are you doing what you do?
He says, because I've always wanted to be a dentist.
I want to go to school and be a dentist, but my family's too poor and they can't afford my education.
And the only job that I have available for me now is doing this cocaine trafficking or, you know, carrying cocaine on my back.
And these are stories I hear all the time.
So the idea of being able to place ourselves in people's shoes and understand that, yes, even the people that we consider the bad guys could be me and you, as you know, has always been very important for me.
When you say that it's one-third, how much of it is stuff that's not dangerous, like selling fruit on the side of the road and it's difficult to have exact numbers, but the estimate is that about 15%, 15 to 20% are black markets, and the rest are gray markets.
Because, you know, a lot of times what happens in one side affects the other.
You know, one of the really interesting, the things that I think we've talked about a lot is I think this number shocks a lot of people, but if you think of the drug trade alone, $600 billion, that's the estimate, anywhere between $300 and $600 billion every year just from the drug trade alone.
You know, these are crazy numbers.
And so it's not so out of the box to think that, yeah, this is a large percentage of our economy.
So, you know, a lot of times the meetings that we had on the show happened in undisclosed locations in vans, for example, or in places that they felt comfortable with, their, you know, drug labs or their drug houses or their homes sometimes.
So this has been a little bit harder, but we're making it work.
We're hoping that it grows so then we actually have money to start traveling more and going to some of these places.
So as soon as I start brand, as this starts building up, the podcast, the hope is that I'll build it myself from the ground up because all the contacts are mine, you know, all the expertise.
No, no, you know, it's really crazy because of the success of traffic, the amount of messages I still get on Instagram and social media on a weekly basis from people who want to be on the show.
Now with the podcast as well, I'm hoping that it will grow into that.
But people just showing me their drugs and their guns.
They show me photos of the stuff that they're doing.
One of the most interesting people we filmed for this last season of Trafficked was a guy that we called El Gringo.
So it was a premiere episode of this season.
It was about cartel.
It was called Cartel USA.
It's about the cartel presence in the United States.
I've reported extensively on cartels in Mexico, right?
And in Colombia and in other parts.
But I haven't actually spent a lot of time with the cartel here or seen what kind of influence they have in the U.S. And so I had this idea, okay, let's try to figure out how massive their presence is here, how they make the money, how do they distribute the drugs, and what impact is it having in America.
And what I found was several very surprising facts.
The story actually starts in Sinaloa because I had to go there to get access to the people in the U.S. So I had to go to the top bosses to be able to get the green light to then film their operations here.
Even though I'm in Sinaloa, I'm not supposed to ask which cartel people work for, where it's obvious that when you're in Sinaloa, everyone works for the Sinaloa cartel.
I mean, everybody that's involved in the cartel works for the Sinaloa cartel.
There are the cartels trying to make headway in that region, but usually it's all Sinaloa.
So you're not supposed to ask who exactly they work for.
And yeah, there are some questions about money, for example, how much money they make.
People don't like to ask that.
But I always ask all those questions anyway.
And you get a sense whether you're pushing it too far.
Yeah, it started with a scene and that episode started with a scene in LA where we interviewed a guy who goes by the name of T. And he had a room packed with rifles.
And when I started asking him where they were from, he was like, oh, this one was confiscated.
We have an LAPD contact that sells us a lot of our drugs.
So in that case, it went back to my contacts in Sinaloa.
And I think it's three reasons why people talk to us.
I think the first one is ego.
People want to boast.
And if you're part of the Sinaloa cartel, or even if you're a boss in the Sinaloa cartel and there's an ongoing war between you, a terrif war between you and another gang, like the CE, JNG, which is a cartel Jalisco, they're fighting for power, right?
So here's an opportunity to show how powerful you are.
So it's ego, right?
And a lot of these people that talk to me, I don't, you know, very often or more often than not, it's not the bosses or the kingpins that I'm talking to, right?
It's the Sicarios, it's the middle and low-level people.
It's the traffickers, it's the chemists, the smugglers.
It's not the kingpins.
And for them, they spend their whole lives doing something that sometimes their own families don't know they do.
Like I remember an episode we did about counterfeit money, people who make fake U.S. dollars and Euros in Peru, in Lima.
And this guy, like shiny eyes, so excited, showing me how he finishes these bills to make it look and feel and smell exactly like a $100 bill.
And when I asked him, and he's a taxi driver by day and he does this by night, and I was asking him, so why did you accept talking to us?
He says, look, my wife doesn't even know how good I am.
I am the best of the best at doing this.
Like nobody in the whole world can make this as well as I do.
And I always wanted to be able to talk to somebody and show off how good my skills are.
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This was five years ago, season one, but it was a lot.
And it's the U.S. Secret Services that are in charge of going after these guys.
So we actually saw the real money being made when we came back to the U.S. And but I can't remember, but it was millions of dollars.
I mean, it was like five or six families in Peru, in Lima, they're the center of all this, that were in charge, that were the best of the best at making these.
And so one of the things we started was we reported on a lot of these small businesses that found out that they were having massive amounts of loss every year from fake bills.
And I remember it was in Oregon.
We did a few stories there where a lot of people were complaining about this small business.
But this all back to the story of why I talked about this guy, about why people talk to us.
And oh, and back to the cartel USA story, which started in Sinaloa.
There was a point to this.
You were asking me about how it ended up in the U.S. Oh, what I discovered with cartel's operations in the United States.
So one of the people we interviewed, which was really fascinating, and it was somebody who had this, carried this load on his back and why he decided to talk to us, was this guy called El Gringo, or we called him El Gringo.
And El Gringo is an American citizen who doesn't speak a word of Spanish and who's sort of the wholesale buyer of drugs from the cartel and then is in charge of distributing the drugs here in the U.S. He distributes most of his drugs through commercial airlines, usually Delta, because they have really good baggage fees.
70 pounds, two bags, 70 pounds if you fly business.
And so a lot of times it was strippers who would carry the drugs from the West Coast to the East Coast.
And one of the things I'll never forget, he says, if you're taking a Delta flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, I guarantee that there's a very high chance that somebody is carrying drugs on one of those flights.
They just don't want us recording, and they are afraid that if we by any chance are being followed by American law enforcement, they're way more scared of American law enforcement than they are of Mexican law enforcement.
They're corrupt cops who work many times for the cartel, right?
And that happens all over.
I mean, that's not just in Mexico that it's happened.
I've seen it in Colombia.
I've seen it in Brazil.
We did a story about militias where I filmed a militia in Brazil with cops around.
So yeah, that happens unfortunately everywhere.
But so when it's not as if they don't know where these people are, they're just afraid that maybe the DEA, knowing that I'm a journalist and I go and do this stuff, that they might be following me.
So sometimes they ask for our phones to stay behind, but a lot of times they just want our phones off so that we don't transmit any signals.
But once we're in their territory, it takes months to get them to say yes.
And there's all these ground rules, right?
We can't disclose locations or people.
We have to make sure we always bring masks and t-shirts, long-sleeve t-shirts and hoodies and everything with us because if they have tattoos and we want to make sure that we don't show who they are because that can create a problem for them, but it can also create a problem for us.
And it can create a problem to the local journalists that help us because they're going to be the first targets.
I really realistically don't think it's not because they don't know who they are or where they are.
It's not that law enforcement is blind to this.
I think it's unwillingness sometimes to go after this.
It's realizing that actually these are the low-level guys and what they really want is to get at the big guys, the kingpins, which is a better strategy anyway.
We had a little bit of a debate about this last time because I keep giving the example of Portugal and you said, which has decriminalized drugs, right?
And I know Portugal is not the United States.
We're 10 million people.
We're a small country.
But whatever, it worked there.
Drug abuse went down, incarceration went down, HIV went down, levels of HIV went down.
And it's about how in California, we filmed in Arizona and California.
In California alone, we had an insurance, the head of the insurance investigations in California, an insurance fraud investigator in California, told us that in his estimates, but he said they're probably very low, 10% of the thousands of rehab facilities out there are probably a fraud and a scam.
So rehab scams is basically the buying and selling of addicts in this billion-dollar market, right?
So it's they create these fake rehab centers that bill insurance for treatments that they are not actually giving people.
So for example, it's a huge problem in Arizona.
That's why we started, and in California, but we started in Arizona.
Native Americans have really easy access to health insurance through the Indian American health plan that they created.
And it started as a good thing because it was difficult.
A lot of people lived in reservations far away.
A lot of people, you know, because of generational trauma and alcohol abuse and drug abuse, there's a real need for health insurance and for them to have access to health insurance.
So you have these huge communities that when COVID happened, the state made it even easier for them to get the help that they needed through health insurance.
But all these bad actors realized, oh, this is great.
We're just going to build these fake rehab centers, go around in white vans, literally.
There's like thousands of people still missing in Arizona, most of them Native Americans.
And they go out in white vans to these reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, and they bring people, people who, you know, have problems with drug and alcohol, and they bring people to these centers.
And then they start billing insurance.
They get you on an insurance plan and they start billing insurance, crazy amounts of money.
Like we spoke, we were investigating this one facility that they were making $800 and something million dollars, sorry, $800 and something thousand, $870,000 a week, a week, from dozens of people that they were housing and not actually providing them the treatment that they so desperately needed.
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Yeah, if you open the door to criminals, and the thing about rehabilitation centers is a lot of people that go to rehab or get involved in rehab, they've also had shady pasts.
They've been involved with criminals.
And then they go, listen, man, I think there's money to be made here.
You need a license, probably a state license, but in some cases, it was just really easy to get a state license.
In Florida, it became a huge problem.
It was called the Florida Shuffle, which was this.
You were going back and forth between detox and rehabs and outpatient treatment centers, and they were all owned by the same sort of well-known rosters.
So you have to get a license, but there's not much more.
And that was the problem, is that anyone could get a license and anyone could operate one of these.
So it's a really interesting, you know, as we all know, it all started with oxycontin, and then it went to heroin.
And heroin was a great high for people who are addicted to opiates because it was a powerful high and it would keep you high for a long time.
And then came fentanyl.
And fentanyl gives you an even more powerful high, but it's fast acting.
So you get out of it fast.
So somebody realized if we mix trank, animal tranquilizer, with this, you will still have the big high, but it will extend the time that you have that high.
And what is happening to thousands of people across the U.S. is that they are taking these drugs, getting the high that they want.
But I think, yeah, in many ways, people sometimes think, oh, they're junkies, they're out there, they just want this life, and they have failed society.
Yeah, that is insanely effective and readily available in Mexico.
And now, fortunately, because of former Governor Rick Perry, it's available in Texas.
So they're doing it now in Texas with soldiers, with PTSD, people coming back from the war with great efficacy, and people that have also been hooked on substances because of some of the things that they've seen.
So I think that's a great doorway into the right because the right has always viewed these things, like particularly a psychedelic, which Ibogaine is, I guess, it's category one, right?
It's Schedule One.
I don't know.
I think it's Schedule One.
Is Ibogaine Schedule I?
But it's certainly illegal in America.
And it's thought of as, I don't know how you could ever consider it recreational because it's apparently a very brutal experience and very introspective.
And most people say, I did not enjoy that at all.
I hated it.
I had Dakota Meyer on the podcast, and he talked about it.
He was like, I wanted to punch the guy who gave it to me.
He's like, he's fucking terrible.
For like one whole day, you're going over every horrible aspect of your life.
And it finds like the pathways in your brain that created behavior afterwards.
And it gives you this insanely introspective slideshow of your life and sort of lays out this is why you're an addict.
This is why you're a gambling addict.
This is why you're addicted to ruining your life.
Like these are the things that happened to you when you were young.
And these are the things that you did when you were an adult that you had shame over and all these different things.
These are the things that you've seen that are horrific, that have scarred you.
And it has like an 80% effective rate for people getting off drugs with one session.
Well, I don't know what the regulations are or how they're doing it, but at least they're giving it to some people in Texas.
And like I was saying, this is a doorway for the right to understand.
And I think this is a lot of the case with a lot of these special forces guys, a lot of SEALs and Green Berets.
They come back from combat and they're all fucked up.
And some of their friends take them on ayahuasca journeys.
And that helps them a lot.
So that's another doorway into the right because people on the right have always thought of psychedelics as being for losers and hippies and people just trying to escape life.
But just the sheer horror of combat experience has forced a lot of people to reconsider this position.
And then they've had so many family members that are veterans and that are, you know, especially guys that are like in the heart of combat.
And then they come back and they're just fucked up and no one wants to help them.
Nobody can just talk you through it.
And the one thing that I don't want to say universally, but a high percentage have had great success with is psychedelics.
So I think it's another massive disservice that those are lumped in in the same illegal category as fantasy.
But do you think that the pathway is legalization?
Because like even decriminalization, where are you going to get it?
You're going to get, see, here's the problem with decriminalization.
In California, my friend John Norris, he was a game warden.
And do you know the story?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So John, for people who don't know, oh, he's great.
So John was a game warden, right?
Loved the outdoors, became a game warden.
He really wanted to check people's fishing licenses and hunting licenses and making sure the land was taken care of and making sure people aren't littering or doing anything stupid.
So he gets this call that the stream is blocked up.
It's like the stream stopped running and they can't figure out why.
Maybe a farmer diverted water.
They follow the stream.
They find these PVC pipes that are rerouting it to this massive marijuana farm that the cartel owns.
So when California made marijuana legal in the state, what they also did is make it a misdemeanor to grow marijuana illegally.
So the cartels are like, fucking great.
Let's just start growing.
So they're bringing AKs and assault rifles out into the woods, setting up camps, super toxic pesticides, super toxic, like shit that's totally illegal in modern farming in America, like way worse than glyphosate.
And that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of all the marijuana that gets sold in the places where marijuana is illegal.
It's all getting sold from these grow ops in California by the cartels.
And because it's impossible to get a license in California, when they legalized it initially, they made it so hard for people to actually get their licenses and doing and do it legally that the actual black market increased when they legalized it.
He had great insight as to what's going on in Texas, too, where these Christian fundamentalists who are very, very wealthy are trying to turn Texas into a theocracy.
These guys sound like full-on nutters.
And this is something that people have to be really careful of when you become aligned with one party or another party.
If you become aligned with the left, like Jimmy Kimmel was like ignoring, he was like mocking the president for saying that Antifa, like Antifa's not real.
Antifa's.
That's so crazy to say.
I know it's a Democrat talking point currently, but it's dangerous for you and for everybody else to say because they are real.
They're real.
And they're anarchists who are committed to overthrowing capitalism.
They want to destroy the Western government.
And a lot of them are retards.
A lot of them are just like goofy kids that got lost in the system and then they found like a gang, like a lot of gang members.
Like that's the same kind of thing.
They get, you find a community and all of a sudden these people are yours and they're real.
And also they're willing to fight for something and there's like a lot of passion involved in it.
So it's kind of exciting.
And then you also realize like, yeah, corporate society is fucked up.
Yeah, United Healthcare, that is kind of crazy that you spend all that money on health care and you get fucking nothing.
And then when you do have something, they deny your claim.
Like, what is going on?
And is it fucked up?
And so they don't know where to turn.
And so they get involved with a bunch of people that are doing stupid shit and they light Starbucks on fire.
Or they, you know, but a lot of it's funded too.
That's the other thing.
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The reality is a lot of these, you know, I don't know about the funding part of it.
It was one of the stories we did this last season.
And it was important for me when we did that story.
I've been wanting to do there's rising militias, rising threat of militias everywhere in the world, but particularly here in the United States.
And we also filmed in Brazil because it's a real problem there.
And I knew from the start that I didn't want to just do right-wing militias, that it was important to also do left-wing militia.
So we spent time with a group that operates on the border, a right-wing militia that operates on the border and was basically trying to catch illegal immigrants.
And then we also spend time, you know, just a few miles away from that group, there was another group called the Black Cat Rifle Group that is a left-wing militia.
And it is, to me, what was so scary was that they existed because of the other side.
They existed because the other side exists, right?
And none of them understood that, you know, that one would become stronger the stronger the other would become.
And that this was all going to end not well for any of us.
And when I was asking the Black Cat Rifle Group, you know, when I was asking why they have a militia and why are they training?
I mean, they were training with guns and, you know, they look, if you look at these guys, they actually look, I mean, especially the guys at the border, which were the right-wing militia groups.
if I was an immigrant crossing the country illegally and I saw one of these guys, a hundred percent would think that this is the U S army or border patrol and, and I'd be terrified or I'd hand myself in and then, but it's, it's there, which by the way is not what that's the part that's not legal.
You're not, You can train with your buddies.
You can do all that, but you can't pretend to be and you can't look like you're part of the military or law enforcement when you're not.
And these guys 100% look like they were.
I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for this because every time we talk about, I talk about militias, I get flack for it.
Because we're living in the most divided era of our time.
And there's a lot of people who believe that militias are important and think that it's important that they exist.
I find them incredibly dangerous, the existence of militias outside or on the periphery of the law.
I find it incredibly dangerous.
And so when I was talking to the right-wing group, they said something when I started talking to the left-wing group, they were giving me the exact same reasons.
I mean, it was the exact same conversation, but seen from the other side, right?
And so I said, do you not, this is exactly the same thing that the other guy said.
And they were like, yeah, we're here.
We think their point was that, and they don't call themselves militias, by the way, the left-wing group.
And they didn't like the fact that I call them militias.
But they were saying was that, but this is basically a group who trains for what they think is going to be an incoming possible civil war.
We talked about civil war with them.
I know.
And they said, look, minorities in this country are under attack a lot of times by these right-wing militias, whether they are part of the LGBTQ community or they're, you know, black or Hispanic, they're under attack.
And it's our job to train to make sure that we protect these people that are the most vulnerable in our society.
And we have to arm up and train and be ready to fight and go after the other people if we have to.
That was my point was that like people like Jimmy Kimmel talking about Antifa not existing, like that's not good for anybody.
No, they are real and they are violent.
And then people on the right that want to ignore these people that are trying to turn Texas into theocracy and put the Ten Commandments in every school.
The great thing about Tallarico is that he went to seminary school.
He's in seminary right now.
So he's a very religious person and he does not want them to have the Ten Commandments in schools.
He's like, you should not, this is going to create less Christians.
It's going to have more resistance to Christianity.
And also, why would you have that up, but you don't have something from Hinduism, something from Buddhism, something from Islam, something from Judaism?
Like, you should, it should be all religions.
If you're going to have a religious class, that's a different thing.
But if you're going to have a thing on the wall that everybody pays attention to that you have to look at every day because it's your commandments and it's Christianity, well, then you're forcing Christianity on people and that's very un-American.
And I think he's really right.
And I think that's the thing about being on a fucking team is that you feel like you have to defend your team and ignore the horrible thing that your team does and then only pay attention to the bad things the other team does.
And that's crazy.
Now you're doing the man's work for the man and you get no benefit.
Not only do you get no benefit, but you actually help society erode and become more fractured.
We need someone who's like an adamant expressor of nonviolence as the only option.
And then we all need to embrace that because there's too many punch of Nazi people out there.
There's too many people out there that think you could just go out and do violence.
And I get it.
That sounds exciting.
I'm a revolutionary.
Yeah, I get it.
It's exciting.
It's the wrong way for human beings.
This is supposed to be 2025, right?
We are supposed to have evolved to a point where we recognize that violence is one of the worst things that we ever have in our community in any way, shape, or form, whether it's police violence or whether it's gang violence, any kind of violence is the worst thing that we can do to each other.
We're supposed to be living together in harmony.
There's a way at least to minimize that violence by never having violent rhetoric, by never encouraging violence.
And we seem to have lost that somewhere along the line.
Well, look what happened when Charlie Kirk got murdered.
People were literally cheering.
And we found out about it.
I was doing a podcast with Charlie Sheen.
And we went to the restroom.
And when we were going to the restroom, Jamie told us that Charlie Kirk got shot and he's dead.
And we came back and did the podcast.
And I was like, people are going to celebrate this.
And this is what's terrifying to me.
And I got a message from a friend of mine who was like, man, I think you're wrong.
I think it's a bunch of bot counts that are going to, it's just to rile people up.
But it wasn't.
I watched it.
I watched a lot of it online.
I watched it through famous people and prominent people that were just condoning his assassination, if not celebrating it, by saying, you know, that he put hateful rhetoric out there in the world.
The way they'll counter hateful rhetoric is love.
You have to recognize that these people are wrong.
They're coming from a wrong position and eloquently state the right position, which is what Martin Luther King Jr. did.
But it's also the only way that that guy survived what he did, what he went through, what they tried to put him through.
You have to be a kind of a nut.
They tried to put him in jail.
They try to make a fake Russia collusion thing they did for three years, a concerted effort that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that funded the Steel dossier.
It was like nutty stuff.
Like, try to put him, he got convicted for 34 counts of felony that none of them were a felony.
It was misdemeanor booking, bookkeeping errors because he was paying off a lady he had sex with.
Like you got to be a nut to get through that and not have any feeling about it at all and just brush it off your shoulder.
Okay, I have spent time on the trail of immigrants.
I was in the southern Darien Gap where a lot of the immigrants were coming and I spoke to dozens of people who were doing the journey.
And maybe I just got lucky or unlucky that I spoke to the majority of the people that I spoke to had, you know, a lot of them were from Haiti, from Venezuela, places that are completely torn up.
No economic opportunities, whatever, whatsoever, violence, extreme violence.
These are the stories that I know are happening.
And I have a good friend.
His name is Jacob Soboroff.
He's a reporter for MSNBC.
And he's been covering immigration raids from the beginning.
And one of the stories he did, and I love that I'm talking about this because this has become really important for me because I live in L.A. and I'm affected by this on many levels.
But one of the stories he covered, and I think exemplifies what's happening to me right now, is Estella and Nori.
This is a mother and a daughter from Guatemala.
The daughter was born in Guatemala with her mother, and her mother was gang-raped in a small town.
She's from a small, impoverished town in rural Guatemala.
She was gang-raped.
And the next day, and her daughter watched her being gang-raped.
And she was violently beaten up.
She had blood all over her face.
They broke her bones.
It was horrible.
With her daughter, who was young at the time, watching.
And the next day she decided she had family members in the U.S. and she decided, this is it.
I can't live here.
And I have to take my daughter to a place that's safer.
Her daughter was traumatized, by the way, by now.
They came to the U.S. They immediately went and asked for asylum, which, by the way, most people don't know this, but it is completely legal to come to the United States, whatever way you enter, even if you enter illegally, it is legal to come to the U.S. and ask for asylum.
That is not coming to the U.S., entering without papers, and then asking for asylum is legal.
So even when people say, yes, but do it, you can't do it illegally, you're wrong.
Well, this says in addition to these apprehensions and encounters, officials reported an estimated 2 million gotaways, individuals who were detected crossing the border illegally but evaded capture.
Combining these figures suggests roughly 12.8 million total unauthorized border crossings or attempts during the Biden administration.
So not 20, but 12.8.
That's still quite a bit.
Here's another thing that people keep talking about is how many people Obama deported.
But I think that's not, I think they're saying it incorrectly.
Because I think when they say that Obama deported 3 million people, they always use this like an aha against Trump deportations.
I believe Obama's deportation numbers count turnaways.
Like when someone makes it to the border and then you send them back.
Oh, yeah, no, I know a lot of friends who became American citizens, and it was a long, grueling process, and they had to prove that they were exceptional, that there was a reason for them to be here.
Okay, Minnesota elections confirms non-citizens can vote with driver's licenses.
October 14, 25, this is it.
State hearing, Minnesota Director Elections Paul Linnell testified that non-citizens holding driver's licenses under the 2023 driver's licenses for all law can register to vote and cast ballots by affirming eligibility as the ID verifies identity but not citizenship.
Secretary of State Steve Simone, Steve Simon, noted that such voting is illegal and rare with post-election adults identifying discrepancies for prosecution, including 59, just 59 potential cases in 2024.
The testimony has prompted Republican demands for voter role audits and reforms coinciding with federal lawsuit against Minnesota for incomplete registration data.
So at the very least, this is opening up the door for people that are non-citizens to vote.
And it seems like they're confirming that non-citizens with this driver's license can vote.
And these are human beings, like the mother, and like so many of these stories, like the father of the three military American guys went and served for our country and the father was deported.
These are horrible stories of human beings.
And a lot of times the people that are traumatized are American citizens.
They're the kids.
They're pulling away their family members, their mothers, their fathers.
And you're showing to the world that you don't care, that you just want to achieve a result and you want to achieve a result that is going to leave a terrible feeling for anybody with a heart that looks at that story in that case.
And then you're going to associate the United States government more and more with tyranny, more and more with fascism, more and more with, you know, you think you're just enforcing a law because these people broke a law.
But there's still human beings that have been a part of these communities.
The law is just some shit people wrote down.
It should make sense.
And there should be exemptions or at least some sort of amnesty for someone who's been here.
I read about this recently because it's something that so many people, it's often used by the right, how these people are here and they don't pay taxes.
That is actually not, it's millions of dollars a year that undocumented immigrants paying for the public.
Social Security numbers, but I think there's a way also that they figured out that people are here while they're going through asylum procedures or trying to get their green card.
But meanwhile, if they had figured out a pathway to citizenship, I bet that number would increase.
You know, and also they could get different jobs.
You know, they wouldn't be stuck economically because that's the weird thing about people that sneak about, like when these farms get raided and they bust all these people, the farm doesn't get busted.
Like, hey, who are you doing?
And how much were you paying them?
Like, should you go to jail for paying them less than you're supposed to pay people?
Because that's the reason why you hire people that don't have any paperwork.
But I do believe that once people are here and they've completely integrated into society, it seems pretty foolish to just snatch them up and send them to countries that they don't even know anymore.
How about this guy in Maryland that this Brego Garcia guy that they keep, they're trying to send him to Africa.
I'm happy you use your platform to talk about this because rarely do I get an issue that I'm like this passionate about and that I see so much injustice that I feel like I need to talk about this.
You have to, like, the law should be to serve and protect, right?
This is the whole reason why we should have law enforcement, right?
So in this situation, what are you protecting?
Are you protecting American jobs?
Do you want to go pick strawberries?
Like, these people are coming here because this is a way better option than where they live.
Wouldn't it be better if those people were doing that work and making a livable wage?
And wouldn't it be better if these greedy corporations weren't just able to hire illegal people and pay them under the table a tiny amount of what they really should be getting as a normal human being?
You can't just snatch a hardworking father away from his children that he brought over here from another country just because he wants them to be able to live and not get killed in the streets.
He wants to be able to make a living.
And this guy probably works 14 hours a fucking day, sees them, kisses them on the head before he goes to sleep, crashes, gets up in the morning and does it again.
It's like you got to find the pathway for good people.
And like, you can't tell me we don't have enough resources for that.
Because you see about the amount of money that goes through USAID or went through USAID, the amount of money that goes to fucking weapons manufacturers.
We don't have enough money to sort out who's a good person and who's a bad person and find some sort of a pathway.
I'm not saying keep the border open, but the people that are here, let's root out the fucking terrorists.
Let's figure out who's the bad people.
Some definitely bad people got through.
After that, let's, you know, let's fucking break bread.
If you come over here and you bust ass for 25 fucking years and you're a part of the American community and then all of a sudden you don't have the right paperwork.
So they're going to send you a country that you don't even remember because, you know, you came over here when you're 15.
Like you barely know how to speak Spanish anymore.
But it all really started with moving manufacturing overseas as well.
Once we took all the manufacturing out of America and then we moved manufacturing overseas or over to other countries across national lines, now all of a sudden you can get things made way cheaper.
But then you create all this poverty and then what happens with poverty?
People fall into drugs because they have massive despair.
You know, and then the pharmacy drops.
Well, you brilliantly documented that with the OxyContin Express.
That piece was how I found out about you, but also how I found out about that problem, which was so insane.
Where you could tell people if they're not aware of how it all started.
Okay, so I found out that reading the newspaper, my husband and I were working together at the time, and we found out that there were all these people who were going to Florida just to buy pills.
So there was these pain clinics, these pill mills, as they were called.
And they were distributing.
The numbers were crazy.
90 of the top 100 doctors prescribing OxyContin were in Florida.
It's not as if these pharmaceutical companies or the distribution companies didn't know this was happening.
They did.
They just pretended that they didn't because it was huge business and it was great.
And why Florida?
Because they had really lax regulations.
So you could go doctor shopping.
You could go.
I went undercover.
So that was part of the story that we did, OxyContin Express, where I went undercover into one of these pain clinics and I asked the receptionist, I said, I have a little bit of a back pain.
What do I need to do if I want to get some pills?
And she said, oh, what would you like?
And we can give you OxyContin.
We can give you some benzos.
We can give you what's called the South Florida cocktail, which is essentially muscle relaxants, benzos, and oxycontin.
She didn't say it, but that's what it became known as, is the South Florida cocktail.
But she said, we can give you this, this, and this.
It's the Holy Trinity, right?
And all you need to do is you go to the back of the clinic, and there's a place there where you can get an MRI.
And then you come back to us.
And an MRI is a ridiculous thing because you can read anything into an MRI.
Like all of us have backs, have a spine, and whatever comes out results in the MRI that the doctor can pretend to look at it and say, oh, yeah, yeah, I can see why you're having back pain or neck pain, and I'm going to give you this.
But the problem is that the doctors weren't even looking at the MRIs.
That was just fake.
They were just, you know, in case somebody ever came after them, they could say that they had MRIs.
They were seeing people in less than three minutes and saying they were doing all these less than three minutes.
So you'd have a patient come in.
And then these amazing entrepreneurial twin brothers called the George brothers built this business.
It was called American Pain.
They basically built a business out of two or three paintings.
And because we were chased down I-95 by these goons, by these two brothers, by these twins, Darren became obsessed with them and then contacted them in prison.
Okay, so it's a really funny story.
I'm going to tell the story.
So we find out that these were the biggest operators.
Five of the top 20 prescribers in the whole country were doctors working for the George brothers.
They were, it was millions of pills they were not only prescribing but selling out of their pain clinics.
They were making millions of dollars.
I mean, so much so that they were stashing it in bags and putting it in the attic, their mother's house's attic and stuff.
There was like insane amounts of money.
And people would come in from all over the country, mainly from Appalachia, and they would come in, drive down, and they would get to these clinics and they would say, I want, you know, see a doctor for less than three minutes.
The doctor had a rubber stamp to stamp the prescription to make it fast.
So they'd see you three minutes, okay, next one, and stamp it.
There were people passing out in these pain clinics in the lobby, people passing out outside.
So when I went inside, talked to the receptionist, and then I went outside and I bummed a cigarette out of somebody.
And I explained, hey, I pretended I had secret cameras.
They didn't know I was filming.
And I started saying, what are you doing here?
And he's like, oh, yeah, I came from Kentucky.
And this is one of the best clinics.
I can get all my pills here.
And then I go back and we sell them.
And we can still use the pills we want.
It's feeding our addiction.
And we go out and we sell them for 10 times what we're paying here.
Now, I know that after Peter Berg's Netflix series, Painkiller came out, that they put a halt on, because they were supposed to pay an enormous settlement, like $6 billion.
I mean, they're not directly guilty of all those deaths, but they created the problem of the opiate crisis, the biggest drug epidemic in America's history.
And they're buying their way out with a profit of the drop in the bucket of the process.
You know, when we investigated fentanyl, it started as a drug for terminal cancer patients.
And we went after this one company called Subsys, where the guy, the head of that company called John Kapoor, was the first, and I believe only until this day, head of a pharmaceutical company to be charged and go to jail.
And we had a whistleblower in our investigation.
This was before he was arrested and found out and charged.
We had a whistleblower telling us that the company, Incys Pharmaceuticals, Subsys was the thing, Incys Pharmaceutical was the name of the company, that they were doing exactly the same that Purdue Pharma did back in the day, which was in their case, they were actually bribing doctors.
They were taking these doctors all to travel experiences around the world and paying them to prescribe their medication.
So you'd call and you'd go to the doctor and say, I have a headache.
Oh, you should be taking subsys.
It's a great fentanyl.
It's a fentanyl.
It's going to cure your headache.
Imagine.
And then the people at the company, hired by Insys, they had their insurance department, would call insurance and say, oh, this person, you need to approve this medication for this person because they have cancer.
They were lying to insurance because it was only approved.
The insurance would only pay.
And these were very expensive drugs if it was for cancer patients.
So they would lie.
And so this whistleblower basically opened up the Pandora's box and told us all about this.
And then there was a big investigation into it.
And it was the first and only, I believe, pharmaceutical company owner that ever went to prison for it.
And they're detached from it because they're not like seeing the purple person die in front of them.
They're not seeing some child trying to wake their father up and realizing their father is cold and dead because he had an overdose in the middle of the night and no one's taking them to school because their dad's dead.
They don't see any of that.
They're sipping scotch in some fucking country club somewhere and driving around in a Mercedes and they're just looking at the amount of numbers that they made from that.
We did a story about fake pharmaceuticals and why I think it's 20 million Americans that can't afford their pharmaceuticals.
So they go to places like Mexico and online to Indian pharmaceutical companies or fake and buy medication that sometimes works but a lot of times is counterfeit and is bad and actually can kill you.
And I remember interviewing the sort of the head of this big lobby, one of the biggest DC lobby groups for pharmaceutical companies and asking her, and she was very happy to be on the show because we were talking about counterfeit, right?
And she thought she was going to be able to just talk about how bad counterfeit medications are and how important it is to buy the real medications from real pharmacies.
And I was asking her, but what does it say about the pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare system in this country when 20 million Americans can't afford their life-saving medications?
What do you think that says?
And she says, oh, I don't, you know, the medications, these, they're too expensive.
We have to figure out a way to bring prices down.
And, you know, they always say that it's not for profit.
It's for research and development, which is bullshit.
Because a lot of it is used for marketing and a lot of it is used for its profit, right?
And I asked her, have you ever actually spent time with anyone who's struggling to buy their medications?
As the head of this pharmaceutical lobby, have you spent time with any of these people?
She was like, no.
Like straight out, no.
It's like, how can you represent the pharmaceutical companies?
Know that one of the biggest problems we have in this country is that people cannot afford these medications and not have spent one single minute with a person who has a hard time affording these medications, right?
I agree with you, and I know that it's a huge conflict of interest, and we've seen how bad that can be and prejudicial, how bad it could be.
But I also try to put myself, I've spent my whole entire career with ambition and trying to do good, and then I end up at the FDA and I have a chance to do something good, and then I, yeah, whatever happens, I lose my job, or I. You're in the vampire machine.
I know, I know, but I try to look at it through other eyes and see, like, okay, we have to figure out what these people are going to do because what do you do after if you can't work for 10 years?
This is what they've lived all their lives working in, right?
I think they are making laws and pushing things specifically at the behest of the pharmaceutical drug industry, knowing that there's a golden parachute awaiting them.
I think a lot of people, and I've interviewed the head of the CDC.
It was a while back.
We did a story about, anyway, I've interviewed some of these government officials that work at the FDA, and I don't think all of them are there with benefits.
And their job is to go out and which is why it's so troublesome that we live at a time where people don't believe in journalists and think that all journalists are either fake or they're lying.
But the one solution to that, I think, is A, mainstream journalism has to change its way.
You can't just be working as a propaganda arm for the Republican or the Democratic Party, which is what Fox News does and which is what MSNBC does.
They stick within the lines, right?
And you also, It opens the door for independent journalists, which I think is the most promising part of it.
The people that come through that you know you can count on because they always tell the truth about stuff.
And then they develop a reputation, like guys like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, those type of Michael Schellenberger, those type of people that work for mainstream organizations and then realize I'm being constrained and this is not real journalism.
This is not what I signed up for.
Like Matt Taibbi, I trust that guy just with everything.
He doesn't lie.
And he's going to tell you what he knows about this and why he thinks it's this way and what's going on.
They want to ignore it because they're the tough guys of the left.
They're the people that are going to go out and do the dirty work that needs to be done.
The same way that people would look at like some right-wing militias if they're a right-wing, a few extremists, but hey, they keep those left-wing people on their toes.
It's partly why I've now started this podcast on YouTube is because I know it's a place that I can keep doing if it grows, and I hope it will.
Doing the kind of reporting that I do, that I don't have to depend on a Disney or as much as I thank Disney and National Geographic for having me all these years.
It is really important to be able to do independent journalism and not be limited and be told what you can and cannot do.
Unfortunately, because of social media, you can kind of suss out who's legit and who's just a propagandist.
You know, it's a really...
I agree.
Yeah, because now, like, if you're a person who's an independent journalist, but it seems fishy that you only talk about one issue all the time, and then all of a sudden someone finds out, oh, look, this guy gets funding from this organization, and this organization is run by this guy, and this guy supports, you know, he's from Russia or whatever it is.
And then they're on social media talking about stuff with so many opinions, but with no actual knowledge.
Like, not once having spent time actually on the ground looking at any of these issues, right?
They talk about these immigrant raid, immigration raids, or drugs coming across, but not one single one of these people that have all these opinions have actually spent a fucking day reporting on it.
They think that they were moving people into this country politically to get these people eventually a pathway to citizenship, and then they would have lifelong voters.
And this is what, this is the allegations of why they were moving people to luxury hotels in New York City and paying them and doing it in Chicago as well, where the people that were poor that were living in Chicago were like, hey, we're not getting these resources.
Like, why are you giving these resources to people that just came here from another country?
This was obviously before all the ICE raids, which have completely changed public opinion.
So that's where it gets really fucked up because there's people that probably would have been willing to vote Republican again because they didn't like what the Democrats were doing because essentially they had a dead man who was pretending to be president and then they just had some people running the government from behind the scenes.
We're not really sure who that was and that doesn't seem right.
So I voted Republican.
There's a lot of people that feel that way.
And then they see this and they're like, I can't support that.
Like, you know, there's certain people like I could say what I mean.
I say hi and they're like, hi.
And like, they don't like me because I represent something, but they're not mean to me.
You know, whereas in the privacy of their own home or sitting on the toilet, they could say the most awful shit on Twitter.
I don't need to read that.
And I would probably say it if I was them, too.
That's the thing.
If you feel powerless and voiceless and you see someone doing something that you don't agree with, and then you have this Twitter account and you just are like, fuck that guy.
But the point is, at least more information is available now than ever before, which makes it very difficult for governments to pull off stuff that they were trying to pull off before.
It makes it very difficult for people to get scammed like they were getting scammed in the past.
It's just, it's, it's just, there's going to be a bunch of people that get duped no matter what.
And there's going to be a bunch of people that get kidnapped by social media, meaning that their attention span and their focus, their life becomes a part of that thing.
But I think this is a new and emerging aspect of society that we will navigate and that we will learn from the failures.
And it'll cost a lot of people their happiness and prosperity.
A lot of people will get wrapped up in that shit and it'll fuck them up.
And that's net negative, right?
But I think we'll learn from it.
Like you don't want to get bit by the rattlesnake.
You hear that rattle?
Get the fuck out of there.
We'll realize through all these other people's mistakes where the pitfalls are.
So we'll have to develop more robust ways of thinking about things and more resilience, more resiliency.
And I think that's the net positive.
And then this communication with people all over the world, net positive, I think, ultimately.
The real problem is the challenging aspect of it is a lot of people you're communicating with aren't real.
And that's a giant problem now.
China was busted using Chat GPT to promulgate.
They were using it to Reddit forums and they're using it on social media.
And they were pretending to be people and they were arguing about stuff.
And you could just give it a prompt, like from the position of a white supremacist, say why all Mexicans should create division, I know, in this country.
I know.
Yeah.
And so that's a giant percentage of all social media discourse.
So I don't necessarily think you should be going back and forth with people.
But I think as a source of information and news and alternative perspectives and boots on the ground, people, like, hey, I'm reporting live from Gaza.
And it was what we thought was going to happen when the Arab Spring happened, you know, because everybody has a phone and finally we were able to film these amazing magnets, you know, revolutions.
But I think that promise has sort of waded a little bit.
I have to point out one thing you said, how scams are not as prevalent these days.
I'm going to come on your podcast next year once I'm done with this project, but I'm working on a really fun project for National Geographic, which is where I say yes to every single scam that comes my way.
We actually sort of modified, we put a fake nose on me and a wig and glasses.
But people say it doesn't look at all like me.
I can see it's me.
But I will talk, it's really fascinating.
But also to talk about scams, which I can talk about a lot, is we are living in the golden age of scams.
I think it was Baron Buffett that said fraud and scams are the number one growth industry of our time.
And one of the stories we did, which is so sad, and I hate to bring it down back to a sad topic, but is that we, I didn't know this before starting to report on it, which a lot of times you think, you know, these scammers, these guys that are texting and emailing you and calling you, that these are, you know, people in West Africa or, you know, wherever, but like loan operators.
It's these compounds in places like Cambodia and Myanmar in Asia, where they are, it's basically factories, sometimes with thousands and thousands of people forced labor.
So these are mostly people from India, sometimes Brazil, other Asian countries, the Philippines is a big place, where they respond to ads to work in what they think are legitimate businesses, to work in online companies and whatnot.
And they pay for their expenses to travel to these places to Cambodia and Myanmar.
In Myanmar, they're operating out of this area that's an ongoing civil war and is ruled by these militias.
And they get in there and as soon as they get in, they take away their passports and they're trapped and they're forced to scam.
So they spend 24-7 scamming Americans and European people.
And it is an industry where they're making billions of dollars.
The U.S. government just recently seized $15 billion from one company, from one group of people alone in crypto.
It's the craziest thing.
So these people are being tortured and beaten, sometimes killed and forced to scam.
So we went actually to Myanmar.
We were smuggled into the border, into Myanmar, into the country illegally.
Whoa.
Across the river and spent time in this town that was basically built by this Chinese gang that was all with the money of scamming Americans.
And they were trying to build like a mini Macau.
And the guy that ran the company is called Yatai International.
And he took us on a tour of this mini Macau.
And it was so surreal.
It was like these aqua parks with no one in the aqua park and these luxury casinos.
We ended the night.
It's so crazy.
We were trying.
This guy said he would give us an interview, but first we had to do the tour.
And the interview would happen the next day.
So we ended a night, this was actually not filmed, in a karaoke that was a massive room where every single, the whole, every wall and the ceiling was all a screen.
It was like the future.
And this is in a war-torn area of a country that's incredibly poor.
And they've built this place with millions and billions of dollars from profits of scamming.
And we ended the night with this guy who's basically the head of this criminal Chinese gang running these scams.
in this karaoke singing Celine Dian and Whitney Houston and being poured whiskey and whatever high-end brand we wanted.
And then the next day we interviewed him and it was just fucking crazy.
And we ended our last day.
I mean, we interviewed a Chinese dude, so sad, like 21-year-old, who was caught trying to escape and was chased out of the building.
He ran out of a third floor, broke both his legs, one at the hip, practically died, was actually saved by an onlooker who took him to the hospital and then moved to Thailand where I met him.
He was in a wheelchair, told us about beatings.
We spoke to another Indian kid also who was like, they had a water hose on his body.
He was forced to stand for 24 hours and then electrocuted.
And I mean, the videos out of these places were insane, like people with horrific wounds and people dying and killed.
And yeah, and just forced to be forced and I never considered that being forced to fucking scam.
And then we interviewed a girl called Angel who was raped repeatedly by her bosses.
And she's sort of the face model.
So a lot of times after speaking to these, what they think are romantic relationships for a long time, they want to see people's faces.
So this is the girl that then they put a fake AI face on top of her, but it has to be a girl because of the aneurysms and the voice.
And they have this girl who actually speaks English.
And she would talk to victims of scams and pretend that she was the wonderful woman that they'd been dating for months and convince them to put their money into this crypto business that was fake and take millions out of these victims.
So this woman starts crying and telling me how she knows she's doing something awful and how she's raped and how she doesn't want to be doing.
And at the end, she says, I just want your, I said yes to doing this, even though it's incredibly dangerous.
But I accepted doing this because I just want a message for the victims in America, the people that I've spoken to, that I don't, that I'm sorry.
I just want to apologize for all the harm that I've caused.
And she's like in tears, but I have no way out.
I mean, these are heart-wrenching, heart-wrenching stories.
And the last day we were there, we were able to, there's this amazing organization called Acts of Mercy, religious-based organization that is working to try to get these people out.
And a lot of these bosses actually, you can pay for ransom, you can pay $10,000 to save a person from there.
Because if you're a bad scammer, if you're there and you're horrible and you're, you know, if you're sad and depressed and you're not doing your job, it's better for these bosses if you just get paid $10,000 to let this person go.
So there was this case of this, the Filipino woman who the boss had agreed to a $12,000 payment to release her.
But it's really dangerous for, there's this negotiator that goes and sort of tries to get her out of this compound.
But he has to come with the money and he has to be able to pay the crime boss, but he also has to pay the militias to get him in.
So it was like a whole process.
And we were with this group, Acts of Mercy and another guy, filming them as they're on the phone, negotiating her release.
And they're on the phone with her.
She's inside the scam center.
And she's like, where do I go?
This scam center is massive.
She had no idea where to go.
And they're saying, go to the West Gate and the guy is there waiting for you.
She's like, I don't know where to go.
And she's crying.
If they see me with the phone, because it's a confiscated phone, they're going to beat me and they're going to put me in the dark room where I'm beaten and, you know, tortured for days.
And Amy, the woman on this side, is telling her, believe us, there's somebody waiting for you.
Do not be afraid.
Bring your phone.
We need to be telling you how to get there.
It's this whole, it was his whole ordeal.
It was like fucking insane.
It was out of a movie.
And in the end, they didn't manage to get her out.
But she was not that day, but she was released a month later.
And she made it to safety.
Just to show how dangerous and difficult it is, even when they agree to let them go.
It was a story in the New York Times, and then it got reported everywhere.
I was trying to get this guy to talk to me because this story is fascinating.
So this guy, amazing member of the community, small town in Kansas, the local bank that was started by the farmers decades ago, it's where all the farm community would put their money, would trust this bank.
Well, it turns out that this guy, the head of this bank that everybody trusted, upstanding member of the community, stole millions of dollars from the bank, and the bank went bankrupt.
And he was stealing the money because he was being scammed by a pig butchering scam.
And it started with him putting his own money.
And then they kept on saying that in order to release the funds and all the millions that he'd made from his initial investment, he would put in more and more money.
I think he ended up putting in something like $47 million from.
I don't think I think it got to a point that he was swindled and made to believe that if you give more money, he would get the money that he initially invested back.
he would be able to put back the $45 million that he gave, he stole from his customers.
I think the realization, and this is something that I know from talking to so many scam, scamming victims, it's not so much about wanting to make that money.
It's the realization that you've been talking to somebody that's not real and that you have been so swindled.
And, you know, I don't want to use the word dumb because I think all of us can fall victims to these scams.
But that the acceptance of that is really difficult.
So you just want to keep on believing it.
You just pay whatever you need to pay so the dream stays alive.
I feel that with this experiment I'm doing right now.
I mean, even though I know I'm being swindled, but there's something about once you're deep in that relationship, it's, yeah, it does something funny to you.
You know, and if you're involved in something that may or may not yield money or may or may not yield some sort of romantic relationship or may or may not yield a drug deal or a celebrity scam, which is huge these days.
There's a lot of dumbasses out there and it's not fair to scam those people.
Some scams we tolerate, like televangelists.
We're like, look, if you really believe that guy with the private jet and the Bentley, that guy, you need to send him money because God wants you to send him money, you're on your own.
Hal Putoff, who's, he was running some various programs for the United States government.
Specifically, I had him on, though, to not talk about remote viewing, to talk about UFOs.
And he was actually brought on board during Herbert Walker Bush's administration.
Well, he was working for the government at the time, but they brought him on as one of the scientists that they'd got a group of people from various disciplines, and they said, we're going to compile a list of pros and cons in terms of the impact of society of disclosure of alien life.
And this is what they were telling him.
We have recovered crashed UFOs and we are doing back engineering programs on them.
We have for years.
We also have recovered biological entities.
We are thinking about disclosing this information to the American public.
I want you to compile a list on the positive aspects of disclosure, how it'll affect society, and give a numerical value to these things.
And then negative.
And all these scientists came up with a much higher negative than positive.
And yet we've spent time talking about politics because we're talking about the fascinating aspects of politics as it affects human civilization and how we can discourse.
Yes, but also like the division and the right and the left and being careful with what you say because what if the other side, this and that.
It's now in every single home, in every single conversation people have.
And it's just, it didn't used to be like that.
It just didn't.
Like government was there.
It existed.
It's supposed to work well.
If it's not, hopefully there are good journalists out there exposing what's not working out well.
But it should not be the discourse all the time about whether you're right wing, you're left wing, whether you're with us or not or against us.
And it just taints everything And takes too much space, I think.
For other conversations with much more important conversations that we should be having, whether it's about AI, whether it's about social media, whether it's about aliens, there are much bigger problems that are coming in our future.
And we shouldn't be so sort of tunnel-focused on whether we're, you know, whether what we're saying is approved by the right or the left or whether this or that.
People that have nothing else going on in their life, and all of a sudden, it's this whatever issue it is, whatever it iss, that's their whole identity.
It's not doing what you really want to do, not having the relationships you really want to have, the friendships you really want, and instead you're involved in this fucking stupid cause.
I'm sleeping in the morning, and I start getting phone calls.
And I was sleeping that late because I'd been studying until really late that night, the night before.
And the first phone I pick up was my television station that I'd worked for in Portugal.
I'd done an internship there and worked there.
And they called me and said, hey, turn on your television.
And it was when the first tower had collapsed.
And they said, turn on a television and see what's happening.
I had no idea this was happening.
And they said, we need you to go to Midtown and do that.
We have no Portuguese journalists in Manhattan.
All our journalists are in DC or they are outside of Manhattan.
Manhattan had been locked down.
You need to go down and do the live reporting for us of what's happening.
And suddenly my cell phone started ringing and it was my mother who was crying and begging me not to leave the house.
And I had to explain to her mom, this is like my dream is to become a journalist as part of my job and I have to go.
Anyway, an hour later, I was at the rooftop of this building surrounded by all these journalist heroes of mine that I grew up watching on live television and shaking.
I was so, so nervous.
I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to put the words together.
So nervous.
And I ended up doing my live report and it all went well and I was ecstatic.
I have a future in this profession that I really want to be a journalist and this is great.
And then I will never forget, and I get emotional every time I talk about this.
But I will never forget just walking down to the streets and it's every time I talk about this, and seeing the first people looking for their loved ones, right?
And it's like the posters with the faces of the husbands and the children and not knowing where they were.
And that moment totally changed my life because, sorry.
It was a moment that I, yeah, first of all, realization, like, what the fuck?
This is not about you, and this is about something so much bigger that's happening where so many people are affected by this.
And it was a moment also that I realized that the kind of journalism that I wanted to do was try to understand why this sort of evil happens in the world and how does things like this exist.
And a year after I graduated from Columbia, I moved to the Middle East.
And I enrolled in the University of Damascus in Syria to learn Arabic and to try to do my, I did my first story as a freelance journalist about the jihadis who were crossing to Iraq to fight against the Americans.
That was the first story I ever did as a freelance journalist.
And so, yeah, so I was there on 9-11.
And remember after reporting and going to school and going up to my building and meeting strangers on the streets and everybody was just looking at each other and hugging each other.
Well, for just that one brief moment, I realized like for that, during that time, when everybody had that American flag on their car and they were driving around with it in LA, which is like one of the most unpatriotic places in the country.
They all had American flags in their car.
It was a crazy moment.
And I realized, like, oh, this is possible to unite us.
And, you know, what's so sad is that 3,000 people died on that day, right?
I'm going to bring it back to drug and alcohol addiction, but 3,000 people die every single week in America from addiction, from drug and alcohol addiction.
These crises are happening every day.
And like, yes, let's actually unite to do some good and to try to solve problems instead of dividing to try to figure out how to hate more another person and how to separate us.
It's just like try to place yourself in somebody else's shoes.
Don't be quick to judge.
Like actually try to understand why these migrants are coming to this country, why these people are carrying drugs on their backs and excruciating difficult work and dangerous work.
Why are they doing it?
Instead, and why are people scamming?
Try to understand why they're doing what they do.
And once you understand the root causes, then you can actually make a difference and try to change that and actually have an impact.
But I think that the real problem with Los Angeles is the government and the fact that they want to ignore the rampant fraud and the fact that everything is so over-regulated, it's impossible to get permits for things.
But it's about how if you're he's a Democrat, as you know, but how Democrats have to figure out how to make the system work and how to build things and how to and not do what you were saying, create all these limits and these problems for like building houses in the palisades.
What's also the problem is that Democrats are the Democrats of 2025, not the Democrats of 1994.
If you go back to the Democrats and Bill Clinton was president, it was a totally different thing.
Like Bill Clinton's, if you hear him talk, he sounds like a populist that is like going after criminals.
Pre-pro-America.
It's like that's what everybody can get on board with.
It's like that's the real problem is these ideologies shift with special interests and money and funding and propaganda, and then they become something unrecognizable.
They become something that supports war.
They become something that suppresses free speech.
They become something that is like entirely in direct opposition to what it would have been in 1985.
Well, another very high-level politician told me once, I can't remember if he said it on the podcast, I don't want to say his name, but that he had a conversation with a man who was a CEO of a large corporation and said he was very opposed to tightening up the border because he needs the illegal immigrants for the workforce.
Which is a problem also now with the raids is that a lot of violence is happening, you know, even if it's rapes or domestic abuse and people are just, even if they're going through this, they're not going to call the police because they're afraid of being deported.
And I actually, it's, to me, it's always heartbreaking when you hear people saying that they don't vote or they don't really, they're not into politics.
They don't, they don't care about what's happening because politicians are all the same and they don't, they're completely disengaged.
You have a bunch of cowards on the Republican side that when they're seeing this stuff happening, even though we know that they don't agree with it, even though we know they know it's morally wrong, they're too afraid to speak out.
He's the guy who went after the pill mills in Florida who was doing his investigation at the same time as I was doing.
And then Fabian Alomar is a great guy.
He's a former skater, did nine years in prison.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison for kidnapping and beating the shit out of this guy who supposedly, he was on meth, on crack, actually, very high on crack.
Anyway, he beat the shit out of this guy who supposedly, allegedly had raped his sister, but beat the shit, kept him in a trunk, beat the shit out of him, was arrested for seven years and then did two more years because he almost killed a child molester in prison.
But basically did a whole 180, is now an actor on the Mayans, has an incredible life story.
He was brought up by gangs.
His family member were all gang members.
They were all the time in prison, but has done a whole 180, is now involved in an hunting.
Biggest, most well-known, most successful, I don't know term, I don't know, sports talks about the best player, baseball player ever, apparently, is Otani.
He's in the Dodgers.
He was signed up for the Dodgers.
It turns out that his translator, who is also his best friend, because Otani is Japanese and doesn't speak fluent or doesn't speak English.
So he has a translator who's also his best friend in the U.S., who was with him 24-7, had a gambling problem.
And the bookie in this gambling problem was a guy called Matt Boyer, fascinating guy, grew up in Orange County and built an empire.
I mean, making millions of dollars as an illegal bookie, flying private jets, like betting insane amounts of money himself.
He's also a gambling addict, but had high, you know, athletes from all over and important and celebrities basically placing bets with him.
Instead of placing them online, they placed them with him, but all illegal.
And it was found out just before he was about to sign for the Dodgers, the Otani, that while they were investigating a casino in Vegas, they came across this bookie.
And through this bookie, they found out that Otani's translator, and possibly they thought initially maybe Otani, was illegally betting.
This is a guy that stands to make millions for the Dodgers, for all the companies that he sponsors.
So this was a fucking massive deal.
And it turns out that Otani was not the one betting, that it was his translator.
Matt Boyer, who's at the center of the scandal, believes that Otani knew that his friend and translator had a betting gambling problem.
But he came out and said he had no idea.
And, you know, nobody wanted this problem on their hands for the amount of money that you could lose.
And so they basically, the guy came out saying, initially he said that Otani knew.
The translator said Otani knew.
And then he came out and said, actually, Otani had no idea.
And I lied.
And now he's also in prison.
But Matt Boyer is now serving, I believe it's seven or something months in prison.
You know, when I was in my early 20s, I spent a lot of time in pool halls.
And I was around a lot of gambling addicts, and I was just fascinated by it.
People that would go from the track to the pool hall.
So they would go to the racetrack all day, gamble on the races, and then go to maybe off-track betting, bet there, and then they'd go to the pool hall, bet there, try to get a poker game, bet there, try to go to Atlantic City on the weekend, bet there.
here's the thing because I don't have a gambling problem so if like but I agree that you the problem is not that you're making money from the betting but then knowing that gambling is a problem and that there is addiction then you should be able you have to It is your responsibility to set aside some money to try to figure out how to address the problem of addiction and gambling.
Yeah, but I don't think there has been an established solution for gambling addiction.
I think some people are going to fall by the wayside, and they've always been that way.
That's my take on it.
It's like, I'm not a gambling addict, but like, say, if there's a boxing match and like it's Terrence Crawford versus Canelo Alvarez, I'm like, I think Terrence Crawford's going to beat the odds.
I think he's going to beat him.
That's what I was saying before the fight.
No, I didn't.
But if I did, I would have bet, but I would have bet a couple hundred bucks or something, maybe a thousand.