PBD Podcast | EP 134 | Investigative Journalist: Chris Hansen
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PBD Podcast Episode 134. Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and host of To Catch a Predator: Chris Hansen. Subscribe to get all notifications.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
Follow Chris on Instagram here: https://bit.ly/3i7fKQc
Check out Chris Hansen's YouTube channel here : https://bit.ly/3q5nIO6
Listen to Chris' podcast "Predators I've Caught": apple.co/3iefe2M
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Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
About:
Christopher Edward Hansen is an American television journalist and YouTube personality. He is known for his work on Dateline NBC, in particular the former segment To Catch a Predator, which revolved around catching potential Internet sex predators using a sting operation.
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
0:00 - Start
6:04 - How Chris Hansen got his start in Journalism
14:39 - What made Chris catch predators
19:56 - Tips for online dating
29:30 - How kids are affected by sexting
37:52 - How do you have a conversation with boys about sexual predators/ Cain Velazquez
50:40 - What is the profile of a typical sex offender
1:05:11 - The investigative journalists playbook
1:08:58 - What does it take to do this job
1:18:35 - Transgenderism
1:36:37 - Loss of trust in media
Anyways, okay, we are live officially for episode number one.
Tell me what episode this is.
134.
134.
134 episodes.
With an A-time Emmy Award-winning Chris Hansen in the house.
Thank you for having us.
Yes, yes.
It's good to have you on.
I mean, if you listen, if you Google Chris Hansen, if you go on YouTube and put your name, you'll see videos, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million view videos.
Crazy.
With the show, you catch a predator, and you've been doing this TV stuff since 1981, I want to say 19.
40 years ago.
That's to last that long.
I was 12 when I started.
By the way, we got a lot of things I want to go through with you.
Times have changed.
And I watched some of your videos.
I watched the older ones.
I watched some of the newer ones.
I watched the guy with the pizza who offered you pizza.
It's just so classic.
Well, imagine this.
When we first did the initial predator investigation, which was 18 years ago last month, we merely had decoys in chat rooms on AOL and Yahoo.
That was it.
That's all we had.
Today, there's been, as you guys know, an explosion in the number of social media platforms upon which predators can approach children.
There are dating apps that didn't exist before.
There are TikTok.
There are interactive games.
And I have a hard time keeping up.
We're going to go out and do a predator investigation, another one this week, and we've been doing them.
And still, 18 years later, these guys show up.
And some know who I am, some do not.
But it's the same profile of a guy.
Same profile of a guy.
Is it easier to catch him today or 30 years ago, 20 years ago?
It's a draw for this reason.
We had the drop on him 18 years ago because people didn't know this investigation was going on.
The police were doing this.
ICAC was doing this, the internet crimes against children.
But guys would walk in thinking, okay, this is great.
You know, I've found my target.
And today, people know, I mean, guys walk into these investigations where I'm not involved that the FBI is doing or, you know, some sheriff's department.
And they say, oh, I know I'm getting arrested, but at least Chris Hansen's not here.
I'm not going to be on television or YouTube.
I got to think the last person you want to see walk into a room if you're all by yourself is Chris Hansen.
We usually start pretty much close to nine.
I think Pat and I were running five, ten minutes late individually just because we were like, I don't want to be the first person to walk in a room with Chris Hansen.
Did you get that joke quite often?
Yeah, actually, the have a seat right over there.
You know, it's funny because the whole have a seat, which is the name of my YouTube channel, I have a seat with Chris Hansen, and we use it for a lot of other things too.
But I didn't mean it to be a catchphrase.
It was merely a way of controlling a volatile situation.
You've got a guy come in.
Yeah, I need you to have a seat right over there.
No, have a seat.
In fact, South Park did a parody and the magic of power to have a seat right over there.
And it was pretty funny.
Let me ask you.
So you've been on Oprah, you've been on Kimmel, you've been on Conan, you've been on Stewart, you know, John Street, you've been on everything pretty much.
They've had you on.
Have you noticed a, you know how stories, like, for example, the other day I'm talking to someone about a mob movie.
And they contact me about potentially, do you want to fund this mob movie?
And, you know, we can go sell this.
And then I contact a few people that I know and they said, well, the market today doesn't buy mob movies like they did before.
Sure.
We're in the 90s, you know, 2000s.
You had Goodfellas, you had Carlito's Way, you had, you know, Scar, not Scarface, Scarface is old.
You had all these movies that would come out, right?
Casino.
Casino.
And nowadays, the last big mob movie that came out was Irishman, and Netflix did it.
They paid $140-something million dollars.
And it wasn't like the most profitable opportunity for them.
So producers are going away from these mob movies today.
That's what I'm hearing in a market.
Are you noticing media's level of interest in the topic of catching predators the way you're doing it increased today?
Are they less interested today and why?
I think it's increased because we're now into the third generation of people who follow this for a lot of different reasons.
You've got younger people who caught it on YouTube.
You've got people close to our age who watch it on television.
And a generation older than that who think, oh, it's great, Chris Hansen goes out and catches these creeps.
So I think the interest is there because crime stories, crime reporting continues to be so interesting to people, so compelling.
And what we do in the predator investigations and the other ones we do, we take people inside the commission of a felony.
We take them to places they wouldn't normally see.
They hear things they wouldn't normally hear.
So we do all the work, take on the risk, so people can have a view of this world they wouldn't normally have.
And it's real.
This isn't a made-for-TV movie.
This isn't a scripted series for Netflix or Discovery Plus or any of the others.
This is real life stuff.
Yeah, I would assume they would want who currently because it was on dateline, right?
It was on dateline.
And then we did Crime Watch Daily, which was a syndicated show I did for a few years.
And we had a predator investigation that I went out and shot on my own.
And that ultimately became part of my deal with Crime Watch Daily.
And now we're shooting them again with transition films.
And that's going to turn into a series for a new crime streaming network called True Blue that's going to launch.
Do you think you're like the OG in this?
Meaning, like I watched you for years, and then I would, that kind of stemmed off to Cheaters.
I'm sure you're familiar with this show, which, and then from there, it got really juicy with like First 48, which they would take police officer turn 48 hours to find a murder.
And then all the stuff that came out on Netflix, making him a murderer, even the Tiger King was sort of in this elk of crime mystery drama.
And were you the OG in this, or did you get this idea from someone else initially?
You know, this goes back a long ways.
I was in local news before I went to NBC.
And when I was in Detroit as a reporter, I was tagging along with the narcotics team, the No Crack Task Force.
This was 86, 87 when crack had taken over Detroit.
And I was allowed access to this group, local PD, DEA, other federal agencies.
And we would go in on these raids, right?
So it'd be the shotgun, the Ram, the Helicon, my cameraman, some other cops, then me.
I mean, we went on these raids.
We lived this for years.
And on one of those raids, targeting a drug gang called the Chambers Brothers, the cops found these videos.
I mean, you know, old-fashioned 1980s video tapes of the gang capturing their ill-gotten wealth, 24-karat gold faucets, cars, and this one iconic video of this guy, one of the Chambers brothers, no shirt on.
Money, money, money.
We're rich, goddammit.
I'm going to buy three cars tomorrow and a Jeep, and blah, I got those videos.
And we did a five-part series called All in the Family in about 1987.
And I held these tapes for 18 months because this investigation was ongoing.
And we broke this thing, and the power of taking people inside this drug world caught on.
And suddenly I was in Detroit, but in the middle of a national story because you might as well have had hidden cameras in there.
And it struck me right then the power of this kind of journalism, this kind of enterprise reporting, where you get inside the story.
And I never forgot that.
So we had done a lot of hidden camera investigations with NBC.
They gave me a pretty long leash, which I always appreciated.
And when this opportunity came up, to work with Perverted Justice, the online watchdog group, which essentially would find these guys and post them on their website, I thought if we could combine this with our ability to wire a house with hidden cameras and microphones, it could be compelling.
And so we did it.
Now, I didn't know in the beginning whether or not I had just wasted tens of thousands of dollars of the network's money and no one would show up or if it would become what it did.
And within the first 45 minutes of our investigation in Beth Page, Long Island, we had two guys ready to show up at the same time.
And before the end of that two and a half day investigation, we had 17 guys surface.
And I thought, oh my God, what have we got here?
And I thought we'd do it two or three times and no one would show up.
And here we are, 18 years later.
Crazy.
Just out of curiosity, because you are known as one of the best investigative journalists that we've had in America.
I mean, your name is on that list everywhere.
You don't win eight Emmys by pure luck.
You know what?
Ten, actually.
Two most people since I walked in the building this morning.
But here's a question for you.
I'm so curious, if we were in high school together and we're in 10th grade, I'm actually very curious to know who you were in high school.
You know, I was kind of a quiet kid at first.
You know, I went to Brother Ice High School outside of Detroit, all boys Catholic school.
And freshman year was a little bit of an adjustment.
I didn't have a lot of friends there.
In sophomore year, I came into my own, started playing sports, made some good buddies, buddies I have to this very day.
And I guess I was, you know, an okay student, ultimately figured it out, had a lot of fun, had some really good friends.
And but a bit of a ham maybe, but not a class clown.
Kind of a guy who, you know, took part in everything, but didn't wake up till my sophomore year.
And all of a sudden, you grow eight inches in six months and, you know, things change.
You're somebody.
Yeah.
And I always had a job.
I always had an interest in the media.
When I was 15 years old, Jimmy Hoffa was kidnapped from a restaurant a mile and a half from my home.
And I was fascinated by it.
The cops were there.
The FBI was there.
Yes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And it was right at Maple and Telegraph.
The restaurant's a different name now, but it's still there.
And I used to ride my bike up there.
And the local reporters from Channel 7, Action News, were there, and the network guys were in.
And I just got bit by the bug.
And so when I went away to college at Michigan State University, I just, on the first day, you know, figured out where the college radio station was, signed up, no experience.
You know, in those days, high schools didn't have radio and TV.
You had, you know, the yearbook and started.
So you knew even your major wasn't communications.
Like you knew you were going to go into telecommunications in those days, yeah.
So did you, when you were a kid, did anybody bully you?
Did anybody push you around or piss you off to create a feeling of underdog?
Did that ever happen to you growing up?
No, it didn't.
I had a wonderful childhood.
You know, we weren't wealthy, but we were on the periphery of, you know, well-to-do people.
Upper class.
Yeah, but you know, but I hustled.
I mean, I paid half my tuition at Brother Ice High School.
I worked in the back of Mr. Pastri's Bakery.
I hauled drywall to pay for college, and you don't know what hard work is until you've hauled drywall.
I showed up at the first day, 17 years old.
My drywall hauling partner was Lee Arthur Ramsey.
I jump in the truck.
I've got the wrong boots, the wrong gloves, and there's a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of the truck, big truck.
And he says, you want a cigarette?
I go, no, I don't smoke.
He goes, good.
You're going to need all the breath you got, motherfucker.
Let's go.
Who do people say you sound like?
I mean, you've got a voice for radio, but also a face for TV.
That's a compliment.
No, that's very kind of you.
Who do people say you sound like?
You have a very distinct voice.
You know, it is distinct.
And the funny thing is that I had news directors and consultants try to change it over the years and make it more FM or more broadcast friendly.
And it has always stuck out a little bit.
I don't know whether it's a Midwest nasal into it or whatever.
And, you know, people have worked with me on it over the years.
And what was interesting is when I went to NBC, we had another show called Now that was anchored by Tom Broker, Katie Couric.
And I came from local news, and it's different.
You know, what you rattle off in two minutes at the top of the six is different than the 15-minute piece you're going to do for now.
And literally had executives there, Paul Greenberg and Beth O'Connell and other people sit with me in the booth and say, okay, you got to tell a story now.
You have to, you know, you have to do this differently.
And those are the people who helped me be a way better storyteller because you can wash out.
There's a hazing year when you started the network, and some people don't make it.
And without these people, I wouldn't have made it.
Who do you say he sounds like?
I'm actually curious to know who you say because I wrote a name down.
There's a name I used to listen to back in the day, but it's a more masculine, I think, version of Casey Kasem.
That's interesting.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
Yeah, I have.
Who's a king of radio?
The legend, the king of radio of all time.
Are you kidding me?
Who do you got?
I got walking.
The space is a little bit.
No, he's got a little bit of the pipe.
You know, exactly.
He's got a little bit of the patience.
I don't know.
You got my guy all right.
I asked the question for one reason.
The reason why I asked the question is because, you know, a couple guys are right now coming.
Picks my 3MP just said he's James O'Keefe's grandfather.
Meaning that.
No, no, no.
What I'm trying to do.
Not by looks, by purely of catching the bad guy, getting in your face.
That is not an easy job.
That's not something that people.
I respect Mr. Hanson, though.
Let's not call him a grandfather, no, I'm old enough to be one.
The point I'm trying to make to you is the fact that to do what you do, because even in the moment when you come out, you're calm.
You know, it's not like so.
So I go back to like my belief system for capitalism.
People always curious, you know, where the hell does that come from?
Like, what are you out of your mind?
Like, why would you be such a proponent of capitalism?
Well, because I grew up communist and I grew up in a family.
So if you go back down to my lineage and you find out what prompted this level of belief system to see that I don't like the concept of manipulation and pinning people against each other where the guys that are creating the jobs that are bad guys all the time.
I'm sorry, I have a hard time with that.
I've got a very hard time with that.
So that stayed since as a kid.
So there's nothing for you that happened where you're like, I'm going to catch the bad guy.
Very little bullying, no victimization, nothing like that.
But I always, always, always felt a need to stick up for those who were being picked upon.
I always felt very fortunate.
Fighting for the little guy.
I always felt very fortunate to be in this body.
And again, to not, you know, be wealthy or anything, but to, as a kid, but to be comfortable.
I never worried about anything.
I mean, I worked and I did my part.
And I, you know, those were great experiences for me to understand hard work, to be in a different group of people, to understand what it was like to come from the South and work your way up and be in Detroit and make it and make a decent wage and to hear stories of how that happened in a truly urban life.
You know, we used to listen to different radio stations that I would hear when I was in high school working in the summers hauling town hall.
It made me a good reporter.
It made me, it gave me the ability to go into the inner city and be able to connect with people and have an immediate level of trust where they would talk to me.
People who I didn't know.
It's not an easy task.
It's not an easy task, but it's a combination, I think, of a genuine sense of curiosity.
September 13th, September 18th.
Why are you so curious, Pat?
Because Pat, you've asked that question quite candidly to a lot of people.
Yeah.
But it's a good question.
For Chris.
Chris Hansen, you're like, no, I really am genuinely curious about this one.
No, no, no.
Okay, so let's just say NBC calls you today saying you're the next guy to go do the show Catching a Predator.
You want to do that job?
No, no, I'll be honest with you.
I'm being honest with you.
I don't know if I want that life.
Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
Because how many people watching and say, oh, you know what?
Sign me up.
Chris Hansen's here.
Cancel the party.
No, it's not even that.
It's the job is it gets eyeballs.
But do you really want to have the, to do that job, there's got to be a certain level of true belief to say, I want to go do this because I want to correct an injustice.
That's why I'm saying that.
We said that about James O'Keefe.
It's like, do you want that life?
What he's doing is very noble and hard-hitting and investigative.
What does he call himself?
What does he call himself?
Muckraker.
Muckraker.
That's what he does.
You think he's got an easy life?
You think he goes to sleep, you know, gets his eight hours of sleep every night?
O'Keefe, you know, James O'Keefe Project Verito.
So that's not an easy life.
No, it's not.
That's why I'm asking a question, to see what was the wiring?
Who was the individual?
You know, that's the part that makes the story interesting.
Folks, here's what I want to talk today with Chris.
There's a few things that's on my mind.
So one, I'm a parent.
I got four kids.
I'm concerned.
Okay.
My kids are 10, 8, 5, and 8 months.
And I watched a movie called Disconnect.
I don't know if you've seen it or not.
If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you the premise of the story.
And if the audience hasn't seen it, it's mind-boggling.
I think every parent needs to watch this movie.
It doesn't have the highest scores.
It's not like a movie that won awards.
But if you're a parent, do yourself a favor, put this on the list, go watch it this weekend.
And if your kids are old enough, I'm going to watch this thing with my kids.
In about a couple of years, I'm going to watch this with my kids.
I'm prepared enough for them to watch his kids.
I want to talk to you about Kanye and T.I.
A part of T.I. is the fact that how protective he is with his daughter every year.
The fear of a father to go check to see if she's a virgin or not.
I don't know if you're aware of this story.
No, I've read about it.
Yeah, so we can talk about that.
And Kanye and Pete Davidson right now with Kim going back and forth, what is the effect of that on the kids?
Because is there anything that they're doing that's hurting the kids and they're not realizing how public they've made it?
And, you know, Tinder bumble some of these dating sites to date.
The other day, Adam's famous for swiping right.
He doesn't need to, but he's famous for swiping right.
This weekend, this was Leo's birthday, right?
Happy 40th birthday to Leo.
We go to Bodega and I'm like thinking we're going to Las Solas.
We end up going to Miami, our drive, and I go in there.
There's 20 girls around Adam.
I mean, it's like girls are just enamored with this guy.
He's a handsome fellow.
He's a handsome fellow.
Thanks, guys.
Compliments will get you everywhere.
But here's what happened to him last week, Tinder, which he called me at 2 o'clock in the morning, shivering.
He was nervous.
Tinder, apparently he swiped right with somebody where they sent you a message and they said, what to you?
Well, it was on Hinge, but you were serious, On Hinge?
Yeah, it was on Hinge.
Oh, I keep thinking on it.
It was on Tinder.
Nonetheless, they gave me a warning saying, someone you've connected to, we've identified as being a fraudulent individual.
You know, disclaimer alert, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Be careful.
And it actually intrigued me more.
I was like, well, hold on.
Let me find out more about this.
But she was canceled.
So they canceled her.
Here's a story.
Like, this is a story from tips for online dating.
How to keep yourself safe in 2022.
Sure.
We'll start there and then we'll see where we go from there.
Tips for online dating, how to keep yourself safe in 2022, wedding stats and Netflix junkie.
Number one, get contact details.
Collect some basic information about them.
Even if it's just an email address, phone number, you need more than their photo and username to go on the site where you met.
Number two, follow their online footprint.
Come social and Google.
It's not too late to bail if you unearth concerning the information.
Three, video chat your date before meeting them.
Pretty interesting.
Four, know the most common red flags.
Are they ranting against BLM or another movement as you've met?
Are they judgmental of someone of a group of individuals?
You'll learn a lot about them.
Five, delete them when in doubt.
Six, drive yourself or take public transportation.
Seven, let someone know where you are as you're going on the date, whatever it is you're doing.
Don't go without people know where you are.
So people nowadays are dating in a different way.
It's no longer, hey, meet Mary.
I met Mary.
It is how people meet.
It's to date.
I know people who have met on match.com who are in long-term relationships and married.
It's kind of successful.
Successful.
Wonderful human beings.
And, you know, I was never in the mix to do that, but that's how people meet today.
And there's nothing wrong with it, but you have to remember my overarching rule, which is if you don't know somebody in real life, you don't know them, right?
So just because somebody says they're a wealthy physician and they drive this car and they live there, that doesn't mean anything online.
And those guidelines, those suggestions are very good ones for safety because it is a tremendous opportunity for scam artists.
You know, we've seen the Tinder swindler on Netflix.
I'm working on right now, one right now where 40 women were courted by one fellow.
They're all in their 20s.
And each one of them was physically or sexually assaulted by this guy and then harassed.
They all got together online, started telling their stories to each other, put together a case.
Interesting.
Handed it to me, essentially with a bow on it, for a story that we are now shooting.
And this guy was operating on Facebook.
He was operating on other social media platforms.
But he was able to gain the confidence of these women.
The money that he took from them was not as big as the Tinder swindler.
But the sexual violence, the physical violence, the abuse and harassment is far worse, I think.
So does he know you're up to what you're up to or not?
Not yet.
He's got a data.
So you haven't yet started the investigation.
We're interviewing victims right now.
Really?
starting next week.
So how did these, so how did these 40- They reached out to me on social media.
I know, but how did the 40 find each other?
Well, somebody posted, beware of this guy.
He's a bad guy.
This is what he did to me.
And somebody saw that and said, oh, me too.
And then suddenly there are 38, 40 women with the same story.
Now, before we move on, the Tinder swindler, I mean, this is taking over Netflix.
People are talking about this left and right.
Great story.
What are your thoughts on that story?
Well, I think, you know, this guy's gotten away with a lot of bad stuff, right?
He is a great con man.
And I think it was brave for these women to come forward because it's hard to do that.
It's hard to realize you've been scammed.
But this guy was very good.
I mean, he had the whole backstory.
He had, you know, do you want to get on my private plane and fly to Albania with me?
I mean, you could see how an intelligent, successful woman might buy into that.
You know, everybody's got to, every date starts with the first date, right?
Everybody's got a little bit of puffery in them, right?
But not to this level.
Right.
You know, I think Mr. Rock once said, on your first date, you don't show up yourself.
You send your representative.
Right?
So, but he got caught, this guy, the Tinder Swindler.
Right.
But what's amazing to me is how few criminal charges he's faced.
Now, again, I get he's overseas, and now there's some civil action that's been taken by the family he claimed to be the Leviev family, I believe.
Yeah, the Jewel people.
And I guess he did 15 months or something like that on a related charge.
But it's hard to prosecute these people.
I mean, we once did a series on online scammers, you know, to catch a con man.
And some of this stuff was Nigerian-based.
And the network gave me a year and a half and access to three or four different producers who would rotate in and out.
And it took that long to smoke these guys out of Nigeria because they typically work or in West African cafes and they don't come out.
They try to get you to send the money.
And finally, after more than a year with aliases and names like Jimmy DeMoney and Rich Greenback and kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing, we got these guys to meet us in London where we set up a pub with hidden cameras and they would come and they ran their scam.
And we caught them.
And it was hard work.
But you can't do that story in a week.
You can't do that story every year.
It was such a big deal because we pulled it off, but it was a Herculean task to do it.
And that's why these guys get away with it.
It's so ubiquitous, right?
Just the internet in general.
How are you going to, the guy you're talking about with the 40, you know, the 40 women that came up to you, the victims that came up to you, what's your approach going to be with him?
Well, we're going to have to be a little bit flexible, but I think ultimately you try to set up a sting.
So maybe the next victim who we can put in place to make her seem like she's a good mark, set up a date, send him to the travel expenses.
He shows up.
I'm there.
She's not.
Confrontation.
Are you worried you're letting the cat out the bag?
Well, I think it's vague enough in terms of there's so many of these guys out there.
I'm not going to do this right now.
Chris is coming for you, buddy.
Yeah.
If I'm that guy, I'd be moderating one person in the world, you, Chris Hansen.
Oh, my God, that's classic.
I think there's so many of these guys out there that I'm comfortable talking about.
Aside from dating, I mean, how many freaking Bitcoin scammers, fake value attainment accounts, fake SawsTalks money, fake DVD, non-verified accounts?
I mean, Pat, you've told this story.
Well, there were fake Chris Hansons courting young women to work in investigations into predators.
They were out on social media.
So what's the general rule these days?
Because you've dealt with this, I assume.
Nonstop.
We have fake value attainment accounts, you know, messaging people.
Is there like a go-to?
Like Pat write off these six, seven, you know, tips.
But is there sort of a rule, you know, like the rules for radicals or rules for interpretation?
Rules for online.
Yeah, if they're on social media and they're committing harassment or violating terms of service for Twitter or Instagram, you need to file the report.
And in numerous cases where people have targeted me for harassment or whatever, you can get that account taken down.
But it's painstakingly difficult to keep track of it all.
It's just give you a mind rant.
Because there's so many people out there trying to do it.
So you protect yourself as best you can.
There's some security people.
I'm sure you've got people monitoring accounts to see what pops up.
And I've got people who monitor mine, thankfully, because you can't do it by yourself.
Yet you don't want somebody out there saying you're doing something that's untrue or creating a misinformation campaign because people do it every day.
It's not that hard to do.
I mean, people pop up.
I report accounts all the time that have my picture and my name on it.
Instagram does not do a good job of deleting it.
Terrible, by the way.
I don't know if it's intentional.
I don't think it's, I don't know if it's volume, but they can probably do a better job.
Because would you say the number one app that they're targeting would be Facebook or is it more Instagram and TikTok due to the age being younger?
I think that to me, in my experience, Instagram has been very responsive when I've had an issue.
And I've had far fewer issues on Instagram than I have on Twitter.
Twitter, to me at least, seems to be where there are more trolls, more people getting away with stuff, harder to report.
And if you were to look at what people say about Chris Hansen on Instagram, he's the goat, he's this, he's that, all, you know, 99% positive on Twitter.
Oh, he did this, he's murdered.
You know, it's just a trendy title.
Hold on, Chris, are you saying that there's trolls on Twitter?
Is that what you're saying?
No, in a shocking breakthrough.
The toughest people in the world have to do with the break.
Let me target.
Let me target to one specific topic.
We'll come back to this dating stuff.
I want to target one specific topic.
So I watch this movie Disconnect.
If you can pull it up, let's just start with this.
So Disconnect is a story with the actor, what's his name?
Jason Badem.
Okay.
So he's a great actor, phenomenal job.
But this story is a story of a father who is working, doing what he's doing.
His son in a class.
Look at box office.
Look at box office.
1.5.
Think about it.
And I'm telling you, every parent must watch this movie, right?
So, you know, this father's got this kid.
He's got a daughter and a son.
This son falls in love with a kid in school, girl in school.
And he tells another guy, he finds out, but the guy tells the bully of the school.
The bully of the school creates a fake Facebook profile with the girl that he likes as a picture on there and befriends all the people in school, thinking that he is the girl.
Then she reaches out to him, and meaning he, acting as if it's her, reaches out to him saying, hey, thank you for your help or some message like that on Facebook.
So I didn't even know you paid attention to me.
So of course I pay attention to you.
And then he starts flirting with him thinking it's her.
Eventually, the bully says, I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Okay.
So he's like, really?
Yes.
So the bully sends a picture of some girls, you know, naked, and it's just the bottom, nothing more, right?
And the guy's like, oh my God, says, then he sends his picture, but he wants the bully wants him to send a picture with his face in it.
So he does.
They take that picture.
The next day, the kid goes to school, everybody's looking at this kid, laughing at him, right?
He's like, why is everybody laughing?
And everybody starts showing a picture.
And you send this message and the bully outs him, you know, exposes him, right?
So, this kid is devastated, doesn't know what to do, is 12 years old, doesn't know how to handle this, goes home, turns on heavy metal music.
They're wondering why he's doing that.
He's hanging himself in his room.
Sister walks and holds him before he kills himself.
Father comes and says, What the hell is going on?
He says, Finally, they find out the situation.
Dad goes to the other dads.
And then, anyways, this story right here, it's based on a true story, by the way.
It's based on a true story.
And it's happening.
And there are multiple versions of this.
I'll tell you what, I've done this on my YouTube channel, have a seat with Chris Hansen, in a case where a young man, same thing happened to him.
And the mom went to, and not only was this an embarrassment at school, it got into different sites that was being traded for child porn.
It went on Twitter and was being disseminated on Twitter.
They went to Twitter and said, take this down.
Twitter didn't act for months and months and months and months.
And it's the subject of a civil lawsuit claiming that Twitter was complicit in the distribution of child pornography.
This is real life stuff.
This happens.
You look at the case down in Naples, not far from here.
A girl was a very popular TikToker, started during the pandemic, 13, 14, 15.
A guy becomes obsessed, shows up at the door with a shotgun, blows open the door.
The father's a retired lieutenant from Jersey City PD, fortunately had a pistol, shoots him dead.
Stand your ground case.
We didn't find out till just a month or so ago that this was all involved in a Twitter type thing.
And it turns out the guy who was shot dead, the stalker, had been in contact with other kids at her school to get information about her.
See, this is stories like this.
I mean, it's, it's, you, I mean, look, it's all great to be on social media.
You know, it's a part of the fabric of our society, of our lives.
And kids should be able to go out and create accounts and be able to express themselves.
It's all good, but it's got to be monitored.
And the thing that drives me crazy, guys, is you see these parents who are exploiting their children.
Not in this case, I'm not arguing that in the case in Naples, but in other cases, and I've done stories on this where parents are pimping out their kids in these quote-unquote family channels.
And YouTube sometimes doesn't crack down on this stuff.
So they'll limit monetization on a show that I do exposing this stuff.
But the young girl who's being exploited, that show is fine.
They monetize the heck out of it.
It's insane.
So what do you do?
You're a parent, you're listening to this.
Okay, we've heard many different things.
What are the guidelines?
Because there's a difference between being too intrusive.
It's like, dad, leave me alone, mom, leave me alone.
You know, let me have my own life versus.
Absolutely.
You know, you know, these guys are out there.
You know, they're out there.
Well, you have to, look, when we talk about the drug problem, there's demand reduction.
We treat it as an illness sometimes as opposed to a crime.
There's no demand reduction effectively for predators.
So your best defense is education and the discussion you have with your children at home.
There's one discussion when they first get online and have a phone.
There are adults out there who want to trick you.
Kids don't like to be tricked.
And as they get older and as you allow them access to different areas of the internet, you have to up that conversation and be very straight up with them and say, look, you don't want to hear this from me.
But I do this for a living.
I talk to people who live in this world, and it's dangerous if you don't apply these rules.
They used to say to us when we were growing up, don't talk to strangers.
Good advice, then, good advice today.
But the problem is the stranger on Wednesday is so adept at grooming your child that he's not a stranger on Saturday.
And I read these transcripts.
When I go back and do the podcast, Predators I've Caught, I go back in the cases that we've already done, and I immerse myself in the transcripts, the confrontation, the interview, the stuff that didn't necessarily make the show at the time.
And you see this pattern of grooming and this normalization of adult sex to children and this conversation where they try to relate to a child at a child's level and it follows a pattern and it's effective because it works.
It works time and time again.
So if you eliminate that, you educate and you prepare your child and you have the conversation.
You have the conversation and they have to feel comfortable coming to you.
You're not going to take away the internet if they come to you.
No, no, no.
I'm saying, do you have kids?
Yeah, mine are grown.
I mean, my kids, my two oldest are in the business.
Let's just say you have a 10-year-old kid today.
Have the conversation.
Role play with us.
What's the conversation?
You have a son or you have a daughter.
How do you have the conversation?
I'm going to let you visit YouTube.
Okay.
But I'm going to put protections on this.
And you need to know that there are people on YouTube who are creating content or making shows that at first appear to be appropriate for children, cartoonish, but they're not.
They're intended to trick you.
So I'm going to watch closely and monitor the content that you view, the shows you watch on YouTube.
And if I see anything, we're going to have a conversation.
And if anybody ever comes to you who you don't know in real life and wants to be your friend, you need to tell me about it.
I'm not going to punish you, but you need to tell me.
Why?
Why?
Because there are people out there who want to hurt kids.
This is sad reality of life.
It's sad, but it's true.
There are people.
That's why we have police.
That's why we have the FBI.
That's why God created parents.
However, you want to phrase it with your belief system in your own home.
I'm here to protect you.
I'm not here to punish you.
And you need to tell me if something happens.
And if there is a bad guy out there who tries to do something with you, we'll go after him together.
Are you specifically saying YouTube for a reason?
Because I would feel like Snapchat would be probably one of the worst.
I use it just, yeah, Snapchat.
I'm using that as a TikTok, Snapchat, whatever it is.
And the thing that you really have to be careful with when the kids get on and play these interactive games, because somebody posing as a 13-year-old in St. Louis could be a 55-year-old in his mother's basement wearing his underwear, surrounded by pizza boxes, trying to trick kids.
You create these images in a kid's mind and they get it.
But I'll tell you this: early on in the predator investigations, I had a group of maybe a dozen 13, 14-year-olds.
And I said, show of hands.
How many of you have been approached online by an adult and it made you uncomfortable?
99%.
Oh, wow.
How many of you told your parents?
Two.
So they just don't feel comfortable telling their parents.
Pat, Dylan, Amtico and Dylan are 10 and 8.
And Senna is 6?
Five.
Five.
And obviously Baby Brooklyn.
What does that conversation sound like for the boys versus for the girls in your mind?
And Chris, you have, what, daughters?
What do you have?
I have three boys and a girl.
Three boys and a girl.
So, Pat, in your minds, is that a different conversation with the boys versus girls?
Or have you even, are the kids even old enough to have that conversation?
When should you start having these conversations?
What age?
Yeah, I'm watching, I'm reading right now the Cain Velasquez case.
You guys are following.
You know what happened there with the Cain Velasquez case.
I don't know if you know what happened there.
I heard something happened.
Tyler, you know the story?
Yeah, somebody had assaulted what, his four-year-old daughter tens, if not like a hundred times.
And he shot at the guy, but hit the father, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah.
So Cain Velasquez, probably not a guy's daughter you want to mess with.
UFC legend.
Yeah.
The guy goes and kills the guy, accidentally.
Killed him.
Kills a guy.
He's going after the guy, but accidentally.
Anyways, so he kills the guy or he kills a formal 33, I mean what's on the colour superior court, Velasquez according to Yasmeen Velasquez with the United Bill early this month after he was arrested and charged for allegedly trying to kill a man amongst other things who was charging himself for molesting Velasquez's younger relative, right?
Young relative.
Can you make that a little bit bigger?
So I can have known Mr. Velasquez for 15 years and during this time an inactive athlete and UFC he represented our company with dignity, always treat others with respect.
Dana's talking about he was a model of example of how professionals should carry out, carry themselves, project on a positive energy UFC.
White has joined Kamara and other people go a little bit higher.
Anyways, so Kane has helped me more occasions.
Okay, people are saying good things about him.
Here's the point.
When it comes down to kids, it's a very different situation.
Kids, sometimes when they're kids, they do things to each other when they're kids.
Like I got a call.
A guy's running a real estate office and their kids both are at the office.
Young kids, okay?
Under 14, under 12, whatever it was.
Maybe one of them was even four and five, you know, young kids that they had at the office.
And they're in the other room doing an appointment.
And they come in.
The two kids are fooling around with each other, okay?
Four or five years old.
Okay.
And they're like, how do we handle this?
Is this going to mess with their head or not?
And they're calling me.
This is one of the lengthiest conversations I had with someone because they had no idea how to handle this situation.
It's a pretty wild situation.
Whose fault is it in that situation?
Four-year-olds' fault?
Is it a five-year-old's fault?
They're both, what do you call it?
They're both, so I'm like, I'm not, I'm not call somebody and process it with them, but you know, you can't do anything with the kid at this point.
My daughter being five years old, you know, other kids come to our house and they're playing and they're going away.
You're always worried about when they go in a room by themselves.
The doors got to be open, you know, who they're playing with and adults got to be watching.
Even if you let a younger kid watch, how disciplined is that kid to watch?
Even if they're 13, 14 years old, I'm still not comfortable with that.
I'm not comfortable with a babysitter under the age of 40, to be honest with you.
I know this sounds kind of weird.
I'm just not.
I'm not comfortable with that.
I'm comfortable with a babysitter that's a little older.
But I've had many weird conversations with the boys, many weird conversations with the boys.
But with Senna, you have to talk to the girl from an angle of, look, you have something that guys want.
And unfortunately, there's some bad people out there.
And you need to know you got to process it with them like he's talking about.
My concern here is not as much the kids as it is the parents.
We had dinner with a parent the other day and I said, so how do you bring it up to them?
Oh, I'm not going to bring it up to them.
It's very awkward.
Like, what do you mean it's very awkward?
It's 14 years old.
I'm not going to bring it up to you.
You got to talk to your kid.
You don't think she's already gone through it?
You don't think she already knows about sex and other people are trying to get to you?
That happened at 11 years old with boys.
You don't think they're doing it at 14?
I think the challenge in here, going back to Chris's, help shape the mindsets of, because I don't think school teachers are doing it because they're worried.
If you do it, God forbid you offend somebody with transgender and all these different sensitivities they have.
What should parents be thinking about right now?
How should they process this?
Well, I think, you know, again, it's being proactive.
And if you need to read a book, if you need to do research, if you need help, if you need a professional, there's nothing wrong with that.
But you need to at least start having the conversation.
And again, create the opening for a child to come to you and say, I have a question.
Is this okay?
Is this appropriate?
And that's the best you can do.
And create that, because you can't rely on the school.
Yes, there are internet safety classes.
Yes, there are wonderful organizations that go into schools to try to educate kids.
But at its most organic level, it's what happens in the house.
And it's the comfort level that they feel.
And again, it starts, you can make the rules however you want them.
Computers only in public spaces.
You know, I control the access to the internet.
I control who you talk to on the phone.
But at some point, they're going to figure out a workaround, right?
They're going to get on the internet.
And I've given speeches where fathers say, oh, I just won't allow it.
I'll take it away.
Well, they can go to Starbucks.
They go to the friend's house.
The entire cities are wired.
So you have to say, look, you're protected here.
This is your safe area.
And you're generally safe everywhere you go.
And the reality is, when it comes to predators, the vast majority of kids who are preyed upon are preyed upon somebody they know, right?
Even though there are many, many scary stranger cases, and I deal with them all the time.
So it's really about creating the comfort level with the family to say, hey, and if you have a daughter, you can talk to your mom if you're uncomfortable talking to me.
But I'm here for you.
And there should be nothing off topic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the whole thing when I'm talking about babysitter under 40, I'm talking about like guys, men, women.
You know, it's a different story.
You were doing an interview and you said, in all these cases you've had with catching a predator, has there ever been a woman?
And you said none.
None.
Right?
None.
It's never been a woman.
It's happened, but the therapists or the experts in the area have always said to me that when you see the female predator scenario, you're more likely to see the teacher student.
The female predator does not like the anonymity where the male predator sometimes can thrive on it.
Right, right.
So, but you know, it's crazy.
Yesterday, I don't know who we're sitting down with and we're talking about why is it that teachers in Florida is women that are, who said that somebody, John said that.
John said that yesterday when we're doing a PVD podcast prep.
He says, you know, Florida, it seems like it's the women, teachers who take advantage of young boys.
How does that happen?
How do you have that conversation?
How different is a conversation with your sons if you have real handsome sons?
Traditionally, you know, and you hear the comments all the time, like, that'd be a dream come true or whatever.
You know, it's a fantasy come true for a young man.
But it's not.
And it's inappropriate.
It's not healthy, obviously.
So, you know, look, I, you know, remember in public school, it didn't happen at Brother Rice, but in public school or in college, you know, there were very attractive professors, TAs, teachers, you know, whatever.
And there would be chatter amongst the fellows about that.
But the reality is, when it comes to young kids and young boys, it's wrong.
We have ages in the law for a reason, you know, and it's illegal for an adult to have sex with somebody who's a minor.
And those laws are in place because it's hard to process.
How do you talk to your son about that?
What do you tell him?
Like, I was 13 years old.
I'm in eighth grade.
My history teacher's name is Miss Angulo.
Everyone, every one of us has a teacher.
What was that one movie with Dustin Hoffman?
Yeah, the graduate, right?
You know, it's a legendary movie.
So boys have these fantasy teachers that they think about, that they help them grow up.
What do you tell your son?
There's no rush to fulfill this fantasy.
It's natural to feel it.
And again, I'm not a therapist.
I just play one on TV with predators.
But from where I sit, having sons who are 30, 28 almost, and the youngest, my stepson, is 20, you know, they're out of the woods pretty much.
But when my older ones were younger, you know, it's all about respect.
It's about, you know, you don't have to rush into this, right?
You got your whole life to experience certain elements, right?
Take your time.
Be a kid.
Yeah, that's easy to say.
It is easy when you're 15, 16, and your hormones are raging and there's a hot teacher.
I get it.
I get it.
I don't know about that girl.
I lived with two boys.
I walked in one time, and my son will kill me for telling a story.
But we left the house, came back, drove by, going out to dinner, and the front door is open.
And I go in and I go down in the basement.
He's in the hot tub with a girl.
And I don't think they're driving yet.
And I haul them out and I said, look, first of all, you can't have a party here without parents, home.
That's number one.
Number two, you put her in a situation where she could be embarrassed because you weren't thinking of her how this may look or appear.
But they were both, what, 16, something like that?
15.
15, something like that.
Well, at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with it, but I had the conversation.
You got to see how this could look.
And what if her dad strolled by?
Would you be comfortable with that?
Yeah.
These conversations are going to work for 15-year-old boys.
Maybe not.
Let me ask you something.
Sometimes you pray for the best, you know, and hope everybody figures it out.
But I think if you preach respect, you're halfway there.
Well, here's just another scenario that is a little of a gray area.
Because I remember being a senior in high school, and there was like a freshman girl that talked about the laws.
I was just about to say that.
So how many 18-year-old boys are hooking up with 15, 16-year-old girls?
Depending on your school.
You're going to school together.
Like, it's not like it's that big of a difference.
I joke around with the girl who I dated when I was 18.
She was 15.
The girl's 38 now with kids.
It's like, what are we talking about?
But at the time, it was, oh, my God.
Right.
But that's why in many states, if you're 17, 15, it's not illegal.
If you're 30 and 15, it's illegal, as it should be.
So, you know.
But it's the 1815.
It's the 1916.
It's like, well, is it, we go to high school together, we go to school, you know, and that's the weird part.
I'd even take it a step further that you're branded for life.
Like, I worked with a guy who I think he might have been 19 and she was 15 or 16, and her dad didn't like him.
And now he's been branded as a sexual predator.
Well, he probably had to register.
Right.
Or even if like you're drunk and taking a leak outside and get arrested, you're labeled as.
Well, that's obviously, you know, at some point, you know, in some areas, we lost common sense in this, right?
If a 17 and a 16-year-old are dating and there's an issue, that 17-year-old probably should not have to be prosecuted or register as a sex offender.
I mean, that's just common sense.
I mean, they're within a year or two of each other, and that's why the laws have changed.
Now, you know, if it's the teacher and the 15-year-old student, yeah.
Different story.
Different story.
But I mean, we, you know, we sometimes, in an effort to have zero tolerance policies, find injustice.
I think.
And I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I have seen what you've said.
And no, you shouldn't.
If you get caught outside a bar, urinating in public, you should not have to register as a sex offender.
That's not right.
By the way, Nick McKinley and I were talking yesterday, okay?
And Nick McKinley from DeliverFunds, which is human trafficking.
I don't know if you're familiar with them.
Absolutely.
For some folks that are listening, he's right now raising money.
I'll put the link below.
I gave myself yesterday.
If you find it in your heart to contribute, they're going right now doing stuff with Ukraine and Russia.
I'm going to find the link and put it below.
I asked him a question about what's the profile of people who are child traffickers, right?
What is the profile?
What does this person look like?
What is the profile?
For parents to know, how do you know who's a child predator?
How do you really don't is the answer?
And that's the frightening part of it.
We've had guys surface in our investigations who are doctors, teachers, members of law enforcement.
And yes, there are characters who surface who might as well have the word predator tattooed across their forehead because they look rangy.
They've had criminal contact with the law before in this area.
But I think, and again, I'm not a therapist, but in my experience, these guys break down into three different categories.
There's the younger offender, right, who 19, 20, 21, who finds a girl who's in her early teens, says, well, I have a hard time talking to girls in person.
I'm going to do this online.
And if it works out, great.
At some point, she'll be old enough and it won't be illegal.
We've got the hardcore heavy hitter on the other side of the spectrum, the guy who would be the little league coach, you know, the bad Boy Scout leader, the guy hanging out at the food court at the mall.
This guy is a stone-cold pedophile predator.
Can't fix him.
And then you've got this group in the middle, you know, white-collar guys often who have real jobs and are real members of society and oftentimes have families.
They have a predilection towards wanting to be with a younger boy or girl.
But they wouldn't act upon it without the internet, the addictive nature, the anonymity, and the 24-7 access.
And at some point, they get involved in these conversations and they cross this line between fantasy and reality and they end up knocking on our door.
We had a guy in our Connecticut investigation who was a real estate executive who I had met on the commuter train between Connecticut and New York.
And here he is showing up for a 13-year-old boy in our investigation in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Shocking.
So you don't know what secrets somebody may hold, you know, in your everyday moving around town, in your casual acquaintances.
It's a very interesting thing you just pulled up, Tyler.
It says profile of a predator.
Their aim is to gain your trust first before your child.
Think about that statement for a moment.
Your child is not the initial target.
You are.
Why?
Because you are the gateway to your child and your child's trust.
If the adult gains your trust, he has become a trusted adult in your child's eyes.
And this means your child will be much less likely to disclose abuse by that person thinking that you will be angry with them or will not believe that this trusted adult will do such a thing.
The information in this section will be taken primarily from the book, The Socially Skilled Child Molesters, Differentiant Killers and How is it that so many child molesters get off, get by with what they do for decades without being caught?
First of all, please be aware that they do very often get by with what they do or doing because again, comments are so much like so interesting.
Trusting your parent first?
Well, that makes me think of Larry Nasser or like a doctor.
A gymnastic.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, Michigan.
You must know that story very well.
I do know it very well.
And it's horrifying what he got away with and how he got away with it for so many years.
It was a doctor at Michigan who molested players.
It is up to school administrators to monitor this.
And in the Nasser case at Michigan State, there were warnings.
And because people in the athletic department were more focused on football and basketball, they were not focused on this issue with the gymnasts.
But, you know, these brave women came forward, not pleasant, hurtful, and told their stories.
And that's what it finally took for him to face justice.
But what a horrible human being.
Had been warned.
Oh, you could feel it, though, in the court.
Oh, yeah.
You could feel the darkness.
You could feel the like, you know, just the way he would stand.
And imagine how the parents feel.
Yeah.
Being sometimes on the other side of a screen.
Didn't one of the parents jump out or was that a different case where there was an incident in the future?
Yeah, one of the fathers got upset.
Well, can you relate to that?
No, I do.
I can.
I can relate to that.
I thought you would.
I didn't blame him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's other high-profile stories like obviously what was the Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, crazy situation.
I'm sure you have strong feelings.
Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein.
Harvey Weinstein.
And then even within politics, everything that happened with Matt Gates a handful of months ago, the guy out of Alabama, Roy Moore, Anthony Weiner.
I mean, it crosses the landscape.
You're given this profile, but what about these high-profile people, the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world?
Well, I think congressmen.
Yeah, it's a powerful narcissistic personality disorder, and they think that they can get away with anything they want because they have wealth and power.
And Epstein's a great example of that because he was so well politically connected in Florida.
And I'll tell you an interesting backstory.
A few years before it all exploded, I had a series of meetings here in Florida with investigators and lawyers who were in the case.
And I actually tried to, he had already done his time down here and was out.
And I tried to fashion a way to do a sting in New York with him.
And the levels of security were such that it was virtually impossible.
And at the time, victims were not speaking up about it.
So honestly, I got busy with other stories.
It was the Miami Herald and Julie K. Brown who stayed on that story every day, chipped away at it, convinced the victims to speak out, the survivors.
And it's that kind of local reporting that is so important.
And without the Miami Herald's reporting on this, there may not have been criminal charges.
And so, you know, I've got to give a lot of credit to her and the Miami Herald and other people who worked on the story there.
Once they indicted him, obviously, you know, a lot of people jumped in and were reporting on it.
But it speaks to the importance of you really got to stay on a story like that because it's hard to get at somebody.
I mean, look at how long it took for the Weinstein story.
He was working with women who would wear two pairs of pantyhose because if he got aggressive with them, they'd have one extra layer of protection.
Imagine going into a business meeting, being a female executive, and thinking you had to wear two pairs of pantyhose for your protection.
How shocking is that?
What do you think is going to happen?
Wait, wait, wait.
What do you mean, two pairs of pantyhose?
There was a victim who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about her experience with Harvey Weinstein.
She was an executive, and she would wear dress protectively to give her extra time to extricate herself if he became aggressive sexually with her, as he was known to do.
Extra undergarments.
Extra undergarments.
Speaking of Epstein.
And then just that, I mean, the whole thing is horrible for so many different reasons.
But when I read that, for some reason, it was just so shocking that anyone would have to think that way, and that a guy like that could maintain power in any industry.
For decades.
For decades.
Speaking of Epstein, obviously, I don't know if you have strong feelings on who killed him or anything like that, but his partner in crime literally was this Gelaine Maxwell.
Ghelaine, yeah.
Ghelaine Maxwell.
We covered what happened with her and her sentencing.
She's been convicted.
Yeah, what are your, like, she's basically an accomplice in what's going on there.
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I think she was held accountable, which is good and proper.
I think the interesting thing will now be if she gives a proffer to federal investigators to say, here's what I can tell you if you'll cut my sentence.
And she's got a lot of time to think about that now.
And she's not the kind of person who's used to being in federal prison, although she deserves to be there.
Federal prosecutors will have to make a decision.
And what she'll have to possibly do.
Usually, like in the mafia, you give up the big boss, but the biz boss is dead.
The big boss is dead.
But how many other people were enabling him?
How many other people abused young women in this syndicate?
And there are a lot of powerful, wealthy men, allegedly, who were in this circle.
Did they actually act?
Did they do something?
I don't know.
Didn't you go in deep, like into the island?
Didn't you go see his Palm Beach place?
You were investigating a part of that, weren't you?
A part of it.
I didn't really go to the island.
I mean, you went to Peter Nygaard's place.
Yeah, Peter Nygaard, we were intimately involved in that investigation.
So Peter Nygaard is the fashion mogul, made jeans for any number of private label operations and for Dillard's.
I mean, big, big business.
And he was based in Canada, but also in New York, and he had a big compound in the Bahamas at Nygaard.
Very weird-looking thing.
Go to his Bahamas.
Oh, it's like Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park.
Just Google Peter Nygaard Bahamas compound.
Yeah, go to that.
Click on images.
You're not going to believe this guy's place.
Holy shit.
Yeah, that doesn't even do it justice.
Like, there's pyramids in there.
There are structures in there.
It looks just like Jurassic Park.
Yeah, I mean, look at that.
And what was going on here?
It's like a playground for kids?
What was he doing?
Yeah.
So he was, it turns out that Nygaard has a history of sexual abuse and predatory behavior going back some 50 years involving thousands of victims, not just models who wanted to work for him.
Yeah, he prides himself into looking like a lion.
He's got these 78-year-old guy, 79 now, and he's got this long hair.
And he used to have these pamper parties, and he'd invite these women there.
But he would also sexually assault young women in the Bahamas who would be lured to his compound.
They would be drugged, violently sexually assaulted, and many of them were never taken seriously.
We got involved in this a couple years ago and did a documentary that's now out on Discovery Plus called Unseemly, the Peter Nygaard Investigation.
And the reason this came to light was his compound was next to a billionaire hedge fund investor, Louis Bacon, in the Bahamas.
They got into a beef over property lines and environmental issues.
And in the course of that legal battle, Bacon's people, and I'm sure you know who he is, found all this information out, gave it to investigators.
And I knew some of these investigators, and we got involved in it.
The New York Times got involved in it.
The CBC up in Canada got involved in it.
And we put this expose together.
But I was down in the Bahamas interviewing these victims right before COVID.
Great expose, by the way.
Well, thank you.
It was shocking in its brutality.
And so he's been arrested now, and he's in Canada awaiting extradition.
He's been indicted in New York.
And they're looking at other members of his circle.
Is he done done?
Oh, he's done.
Okay.
He's going to die in prison?
Yeah, he's not going to trial yet.
They're still messing around with the extradition, but he tried to get out on bond.
Yeah.
Private jet.
I mean, this is such a shocking case.
This guy, according to the allegations, would impregnate young women.
This is crazy, by the way.
Have them.
Brace for impact.
Yeah, Brace for Impact is right.
Have them get abortions, harvest the stem cells from the aborted fetus, and have them injected into his body as some form of a fountain of youth.
These are the freaking stories that the QAnon talks about.
This guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, but this is basically eating babies.
This is it.
What is it?
This is something chrome of my drinachrome.
Trinochrome?
Yeah.
This is the guy?
Well, I don't think QAnon has any insight into this case.
Guyana has its own thing separate of this, but I can tell you about the Peter Nygaard case.
And in the midst of this two-year investigation we had, which resulted in the documentary on Discovery Plus, you know, doing this case was like a 3D game of chess because we had to get so many people to help and cooperate and coordinate and there was competition and, you know, to get down to the Bahamas and do these interviews.
And in the course of this, I get a call from a guy I know who's involved in human trafficking investigations and says, you're working on the Nygaard case, right?
I said, yes, we are.
He goes, I need you to talk to this lawyer.
I know.
I said, oh, you're great.
Well, it turns out he's the lawyer for a guy who was a videographer for Nygaard for two or three years and had hundreds of hours of videotapes on the private jet, going to Asia, the pamper parties, and gave them to us.
Didn't even ask for money.
And gave us anything.
Well, it was amazing.
So imagine we were going to do the story anyway.
Holy crap.
But in the final stretch to get these videotapes, I mean, it was in terms of storytelling for television.
Man, oh, man, it was incredible.
Did you watch this?
Yeah, I watched it.
So what ends up happening is one of his closest, who he hires to be his assistant, very attractive girl.
He hires her when she was 17.
She stayed with him for a while.
And one day she's sitting there with the people that are managing the property, a husband, a wife that was managing the property.
And she writes like on a note and she says, I need help.
I have to figure out a way to get out of here.
Some message like that.
Then Nygaard's top helper in the house, a lady who's seen a lot of this stuff taking place.
One day, his sister, her sister, is there with her.
And he noticed Nygaard taking her sister upstairs.
And her sister's 13 years old.
Says, what are you doing?
And he smiles, gives a smile to her.
Says, the day I saw that smile, I told my sister, go to the beach.
He says, that's when I realized this is, if you're going to cry, you're going to do it to my sister, and I'm somebody, so now you're going to my 13-year-old sister, we have a problem here.
And the next thing, you know, all these guys came together and flipped and turned against him.
And obviously, the rest is history.
There are people like this out there, by the way.
And you see similar profiles of guys like this out there.
You know, some of the guys nowadays, my thoughts goes to a completely different place I want to go into that has nothing to do with this stuff.
What is the playbook of investigative journalism?
So walk me through.
Is it something that applies?
An investigative journalist in 9-11, can he also go be investigating to Peter Nygaard?
And can he also go into investigating a Wall Street, you know, Bernie Madoff?
Is the playbook the identical same playbook?
Or slightly different.
Well, it's similar.
I mean, there's a template in terms of what we do, but it often starts with a reporter's intense interest into something.
Or, you know, 40 years into it, as I am, you have a lot of contacts and people who will say, you should look into this.
And a lot of the material that I come across, including the Nycard investigation, came from somebody who is involved, sometimes a former local or federal law enforcement person who does this privately, who's working for somebody and says, you need to take a look at this.
And that's how it starts.
And you verify it.
Sometimes you may find that it's somebody who's got a personal interest or a vendetta, and you have to approach that differently than when you find a case like Nygaard where this guy's got to be exposed.
And between the pressure that we put on him and the other media put on him, it was helpful in terms of getting him indicted and placing charges.
What do you think about what James O'Keefe is doing?
If you said you recognize it, what do you think about what he's doing?
I think that's in a different category.
I think when you're doing something that's potentially politically motivated, and I don't know him.
I've been contacted by some of the people who have worked for him for different stories.
I have typically stayed away from it just because I have questions about how it works.
I don't pretend to have intimate knowledge about how it works, but I know he's got a political bent, which is his right.
But that's not how I base my journalism.
I don't base it because I believe in one political party over another.
I base it on justice.
I base it on what people are interested in.
I base it on my expertise.
And that is a whole different world that crosses a lot of different boundaries.
He thinks he's justified in crossing those lines.
I can't agree with that.
Do you like how Oliver Stone does it, where he just goes from a curious place and he goes and wants to find out, you know, what Putin is about?
He goes and says, he wants to find out what Ukraine's all about.
He goes under.
He wants to find out what Castro did.
He goes in.
JFK, he goes through it.
Do you like the style he does it?
I do.
You just have to remember that it's one man's opinion sometimes, right?
So it's point of view.
It doesn't mean that that's true.
It's a work that is based upon one man's curiosity and his ability to spin a story.
So, you know, JFK wasn't necessarily all true, truth-based maybe, event-based, but it's his theory on what happened.
As long as you keep that in mind, I think it's fine with it.
I mean, it's really no different than me saying, okay, I want to investigate Peter Nygaard and putting together a team and getting a production company, or me saying we need to do more predator investigations, or me saying we're going to go after this guy who's been assaulting the women on social media or any of the other stories we have going on right now.
I mean, we got this case that I just was working on last week, exposing in a southern state what appears to be a human trafficking ring involving politically connected people.
And think about, you ever watch the first series of True Detective?
Yeah, Matthew McConaughey.
Yeah.
That's what I lived last week.
Damn.
In real life.
Some say that's some of the best TV ever produced.
I thought it was.
And now we're in the thick of exposing it for real.
Let me ask you, to Pat's point, because you brought up O'Keefe, you brought up Oliver Stone, Curious Mind.
James O'Skeef, what he does is pretty ballsy.
My question is, I mean, does it take some brass balls to do this?
Does it take a certain percentage of a curious mind?
Like, those sit-downs, when you walk in that room, how intense are they?
How much balls do you have to have to just be like, hey, have a seat, buddy?
We're going to have a little talk.
How do you know they're not going to pull out a weapon?
How do you know that your life's not in danger?
It's a good question.
Talk about that.
We bulletproof it as much as possible, right?
And as the years have gone by, we have trended more closely to working with law enforcement.
Remember, the first two we did, we just went out and did.
Now, I had security.
Ronnie and I was there.
He was an NBC security guy and former NYPD lieutenant.
And so we felt pretty safe, but we didn't have all the background of the guys.
As we progressed and collaborated with law enforcement starting in the third investigation, it made it safer.
We were able to find out more about this guy.
Does he carry a pistol?
Does he have a permit to carry a pistol?
For instance, in Fairfield, when the guy showed up, he had a gun in his car, duct tape, rope.
He was on the list to become a cop.
He worked for the cable company.
We knew that there was a possibility he had a gun with him because we could do that kind of extensive background.
When he approached the house, our internal security coached the decoy in saying, turn around, I'm worried about a gun.
We had a mass shooting here at a school.
Lift up your shirt.
As best as we could with some other technology, we determined that he probably didn't have a gun with him, so we let him come in.
If we think he's carrying, the police will arrest him before he comes in.
We don't need a live gun in that confined space.
It's not safe.
But to your point, the first time I confronted one of these guys, yeah, my heart was in my throat.
You still get a little bit anxious.
You're very focused.
Guys put their hands in their pockets.
That makes you nervous.
Put them on the table.
But you control the environment as much as possible.
And I've done it enough times.
You know, we're getting close to 500 guys now where I can kind of see the way this is going, but you can never take it for granted.
You know, we have a lot of protections in place that we don't show because we don't want to give those away.
And obviously the worst case scenario is that somebody comes in, tries to do something to get attention or create harm to themselves or others, and then our security team has to take action and ends badly for everybody involved.
We have taken the right steps, I think, thus far to prevent that from ever happening.
And we continue to tweak that as we go along.
Yeah, you're always on edge when you're doing it.
That's what makes it what it is, right?
If it was easy, everybody could do it.
Those scenes where they walk in that room, and that is built for TV.
Well, we're taking people into the commission of a felony.
They see the transcripts.
They see the text.
They see what has been said.
They see the motivation.
And then here he comes.
And more often than not, they talk to me.
Does your job ever make you feel a certain level of pessimism?
It seems like you said the first, what, two days you had 17 guys, then you find out about Peter Nygaard, and it just seems like every time it gets a little bit worse.
And it's got to affect your outlook on life.
You know, occasionally I get asked that question.
And I'm a pretty optimistic guy, actually.
You know, I do have a dim view of some aspects of life.
But I guess I've gotten to the point where, you know, I know that there's more good than bad out there.
And so I try not to dwell in it.
I mean, and I'm able to compartmentalize it.
I mean, I think when you do something for 40 years, you either let it own you or you put it in its proper perspective.
You know, have I always had balance in my life?
I don't know that you can achieve all this and do everything I've done and have balance, but I have balance now.
You know, I'm at a great point in my career where I can do a lot of different things.
And I do.
And it's very satisfying.
But I don't dwell in it.
I escape it.
I know when to turn it off.
I built a day into this trip to come see you guys by being in the sun yesterday and relaxing.
You got a good time.
I feel good.
You got a real nice time.
Yeah.
Now, you know, as we're going through this, the reason why I'm asking about the investigative journal, there's a lot of things I would want to hire a professional to go investigate.
Like if you look at what's going on today in the world, what would I love to investigate?
What are tens of millions of people, if not billions of people, what is billions of people in the last 24 months, what would they love to investigate?
I think it's only one thing people would love to investigate the last 24 months.
Where the hell did this coronavirus thing come from?
What did they do?
What happened?
Could we have prevented it?
Thank God it wasn't as bad as something else could have been.
If it was more deadlier, we lost many lives, but it could have been 50 million.
It could have been 100 million.
It could have been a lot more people than it costs.
So isn't it worth us going and investigating that?
And if we do, what approach do you take?
How do you go about it when it's international?
What is the right way to do it?
Are they really going to want to cooperate?
Do you get people from the inside to be whistleblowers?
How do you protect the whistleblowers to come out and share information?
Because one of the things that is working out very well with James O'Keefe's model is now people are calling him who are with New York Times, who are in those meetings, who are with the CNNs or the Foxes or the OANs or whatever networks it is that they're calling CBSs, ABCs.
They're calling him and they're saying, listen, here's what happened here.
They don't want to share the story because of XYZ.
Here's how they protected this guy.
Here's how they did this.
And he's getting Google, Facebook.
That's pretty what he's doing.
No, it's doing it.
No, I understand what you're getting at.
So all I'm saying is I think there is a business model.
And, you know, although what catching a child predator as a parent, I'd love for that show to be on every day because I think what sometimes you have these shows like America's Most Wanted or what was it, Bad Boys, Bad Boys.
Is that America's Most Wanted?
Cops in the Columbia.
That was in the 90s.
You see these things, and some people would say, well, you know, to catch a predator, aren't you training them to even be wiser on what not to do?
Or are you putting the fear on them?
Is it cops aren't training people how to commit crime?
Is it America's Most Wanted?
more of a way of training people, I think it potentially is scaring the hell out of the guys to say, you know what, I'm going to be a little bit more careful.
I think the most important thing is when you create an awareness and a dialogue that didn't exist before, you are achieving your goal.
So anybody can say anything about, you know, you write a book on financial thought.
You know, are you teaching the next people to, you know, mix different kinds of securities in a toxic soup that creates the downfall of 2008?
No, we're teaching people to avoid getting into that once again.
And it's the same thing in crime reporting.
Well, that was crime reporting, too, actually.
It was criminal the way this worked.
But, you know, it's about creating awareness and a dialogue.
And people are smart enough to make their own decisions.
But we're not teaching predators how to prey on kids.
I mean, we're showing how it's done.
But I don't think there's ever been a case where somebody said, oh, I saw it to catch a predator.
And Chris Hansen verbally lambasted this guy.
So I'm going to go do it now and be smarter and better at him.
Is there a show like that on TV, like network, like regular cable TV where people can watch on a weekly basis?
What, on the Predator thing?
Yeah.
No, we're shooting them now.
We're out doing new ones.
Who are you going to?
It's going to be on True Blue, the new digital crime network that we're starting and launching in November.
Oh, but it's not like ABC or ABC.
It may be.
We're in discussions about that too.
I think it needs to be whatever is going to be to the most right and you got a YouTube channel as well with a few hundred thousand subs and you've created content on that but But let's go to another story.
Sure.
Let's go to another story.
Is this the one that just came out?
No, this is an older one, right?
Professor Said, who said pedophiles should be called minor attracted persons, agrees to resign.
Did you see this story or not?
No, I did.
What are your thoughts on that?
They should resign.
Children are children.
They need to be protected.
You know, you can buy into this whole minor attractive persons thing, and I'm not an expert in it, but anytime you're saying that it's okay for an adult to have a sexual relationship with a minor, it's wrong.
It just is.
There's no gray area here.
You know, people talk about, well, child porn is a way for these guys to fulfill their fantasy without actually touching a kid.
No, it's not.
If you go into the prison and you talk to Dr. Michael Burke, who works for the U.S. Marshal Service, who's interviewed dozens and dozens of these people, they will tell you without exception that there's a link between the viewing of child pornography and offending.
The viewing of child pornography and offending.
And offending.
It's got to be very easy to catch that, though, isn't it?
It can be, but you think about, I mean, when people had to buy it, yeah, but now it's all over the internet.
I mean, there are, yeah, there are multiple investigations going on every minute of every day into child porn.
It's horrible.
Every time somebody looks at that stuff, it's the re-victimization of a child.
And that's why the penalties are so severe.
But it's not easy to find every image.
I mean, it's a painstaking investigation.
And imagine the investigator who's got to view this stuff, which is horrible.
Yeah, we had a guy on who was a former Facebook auditor.
Do you remember when we had a minority?
And he said the stuff he had to watch on a daily basis.
He says, in this place, we had people throwing up.
We had people going to the bathroom.
We had people would quit their jobs because they couldn't believe the content they had to consume.
People were going insane, marching.
And he says the most damaging tool.
I've ever seen it.
Was what?
The iguana, that the guy was hitting his head and screaming.
He says, I've never heard an animal voice like that.
But I want to read something too that's concerning because we're playing a little bit of the slippery slope with the trans side, right?
And so this story comes out of California trans child molester, Hannah Tubbs, gloats over light sentence and jailhouse phone calls.
Okay.
Explicit Los Angeles jailhouse recordings of Hannah Tubbs, a 26-year-old trans child molester who received a slap on a wrist in January after pleading guilty to molesting a 10-year-old in 2014.
Depict her admitting it was wrong to attack a little girl, but gloating over the light punishment.
Tubbs pleaded guilty last month to the cold case attack, which took place in a woman's restroom at Denny's restaurant when the suspect who was two weeks shy of 18 and identified as a male named James Tubbs after being arrested roughly eight years after the crime, Tubbs began identifying as a woman.
She received a sentence of two years at a juvenile facility because Democrat District Attorney George Moscow.
Okay, so how concerned are you with what's happening today with the trans side where laws are almost protecting against, I think somebody even had a, did somebody have a sex change to prevent from having a long sentence?
This was a two months ago story.
Do you remember that one story where somebody did this?
How much of a slippery slope are we dealing with when it comes down to this topic?
Well, I think if you take this case and isolate it, I think the more the question is, you know, did this person, I mean, take the trans out of it for a minute.
There was a sexual assault of a minor, but they didn't catch the person until they were older.
So at the time of the crime, what was the age difference?
Now, gloating about getting away with it is horrible and wrong.
And that person probably deserved a higher sentence.
I'm not so sure that in this case, being trans had anything to do with the sentence.
I think it had more to do with the age of the person when the crime was committed.
And I know that there have been a lot of criticisms of this particular district attorney out there.
And I know people who work in that office who think that he's too light on some of these crimes, and they don't go after some of the stuff aggressively enough.
But I think in this case, the trans issue gets a headline because of what it is.
But the real matter of the case is that somebody got away with a light sentence, whether they're trans or not.
Yeah.
So you know the topic about the pizza guy with the pizza.
He's like, well, it was consent.
Like, what do you mean consent?
You can't consent to me.
What are you talking about, right?
No, this is a guy.
He had a marriage contract.
This guy was a bad guy.
And I've gone back to some of these guys.
He's 44 years old at the time, Jeff Sokol.
And I went back to him to reach out, as I do with many of these guys, to get them to see if they'll talk to me on the podcast.
Because I think it would be interesting.
And I'm in discussions with some of them who I think may do it.
Jeff said yes.
Jeff said no.
Okay, I'm not surprised.
So maybe you've brought some awesome pizza.
Yeah, they planted pizza from the city.
The part about the slippery slope is, you know, the law today states what?
At what age, if you have sex with a minor, it's what?
18?
It's under 18.
Depending on the state, it's different, but it can be, it's usually 18 unless both parties are under 18.
So in other words, if a 15-year-old girl has sex with a 16-year-old boy in a lot of states, that's not illegal, right?
Because the age difference.
In some states, it is illegal.
No, in some states it may be.
I don't know the law in every state, but I know that in many states, if both parties are within a year of each other and underage, it's not illegal.
If one party is 30 and one is 15, then that's illegal, right?
And then the gray area comes when somebody, as you mentioned earlier, somebody's 16 and somebody's 19.
Is that inappropriate?
I can tell you that during our investigations, the profile of the target is at the oldest 14 because it takes that gray area out of it.
So in other words, if it's a 19-year-old and a 14, 13, or 12-year-old child, you can say, well, he's only 19.
But then I would argue that, okay, what's the difference between a 19-year-old violating a 12-year-old and a 38-year-old?
What's the difference?
I brought this up to a guy I was speaking to about the 19-year-old and the 15-year-old.
And I said, what do you think about that?
Well, you know, that's not cool.
You shouldn't be doing that.
I said, okay, how about a 60-year-old dating a 20-year-old?
What do you think?
16-year-old?
I think a 20-year-old is of legal age in terms of consent.
So, you know, it may look creepy, but it's not illegal.
Yeah.
So the law for me that I'm going to with trans is the following.
They're trying to pass.
Are you following the story that they're trying to allow a minor to make a decision to have a sex change?
How does that, and they're talking about the same thing?
In Seattle, the minor doesn't even have to get the parent's permission, and it's against the law for the physician to tell the parent that the minor wants a sex change.
This is happening in a lot of places across the country.
Well, I think you get into a really complicated area here because, and I'm not expert in it by any stretch of the imagination, but I do read up on it because it's interesting.
There are cases where somebody at a young age thinks they want to have gender reassignment surgery and then has regrets afterwards.
Now, how do you put that back together once it's happened?
So just like in a lot of other areas, there's mandatory counseling before you take certain steps.
And it would seem this is one of them.
And again, this is all new.
So we're all making this up as we go along.
We don't know.
But there is information out there that suggests that in a certain number of cases, people feel that they want to do this and then they have regrets and second thoughts and they want to reverse it.
And that's difficult, if not impossible.
Washington laws now allow teen gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.
That's just weird to me.
You tell me how that makes any sense.
What comes after that?
You know, what comes after that to say, what's wrong with a 22-year-old dating a 13-year-old?
I mean, I'm from Iran.
In Iran, the age used to be a 50-year-old man could marry a 13-year-old girl.
And when the Shah got elected, I think he raised it to 15, maybe 18.
It's back down to 13 today, by the way.
Today, a 50-year-old man can marry a 13.
I think it's 13 years old right now, and it's normal there.
What if now, you know, stories like this end up passing, and people say, oh, you got it, it's their choice, it's their choice.
And people say, I think 18 is too old.
I think we got to lower that to 15.
Should we fight that?
It's a law, right?
Should we say, okay, what if there comes a time where they change the law from 18 to 15?
And half the country agrees.
And they say, what's wrong with that?
What are we doing now?
Now, people can't say, well, that's just the law now.
We have to follow that law.
Well, I think sometimes common sense loses out.
And I think we have to find this middle ground.
You know, we get so polarized in so many aspects of politics and everything else that we're going through today.
You know, you get to the COVID thing.
I mean, yes, there's a great story there.
And I'm talking to a lot of people about that.
Is it hard to get to China?
Yes.
Is it hard to get the truth out of China?
Absolutely.
I've been there.
I've done stories there.
But we do lose common sense sometimes.
And I think this is an area.
I mean, I don't think a 13-year-old should be able to decide on their own surgery, no matter what the surge is.
We're on the same page.
And I think parents have to be.
And the civilians are on the same page.
I can tell you this, and this is the only thing in this whole area that I can tell you for sure, is that When you have a potential transgender issue in your family, the rate of suicide is dramatically lower when a family is open and accepting and has a discussion.
That I can tell you.
That I know for a fact.
Other than that, you know, we're making new decisions in an area that we haven't dealt with before.
How much do we have transgenderism in the 20s?
So go to 20s and 30s.
What was transgenderism in the 20s and 30s?
Like this whole thing to say if it's accepted by parents, didn't we just read an article that said the number one step to somebody abusing your kid, the first step is to win the trust of who?
The parents.
I mean, that's the same argument as saying, Chris, I may be wrong, is to say, let's first get the parents to accept the concept of their kids wanting to go through it.
And then once we win the parents over, and then we can get the kids.
But we first have to get the parents to think that it's normal.
Because I don't know if this topic was a topic.
And I'd love to get more of the history of it on when it started.
I'd love to see in the 30s, was it a normal thing?
Was it normal to talk about these types of surgeries?
I mean, I know it's been around for a while, but I want to know the, what's the word?
I want to know the history.
Not only the history of it, you know, again, from an investigative journalistic standpoint, like I want to know the, out of a thousand people that did the surgery, I want to know the profile.
I want to know the parenting.
I want to know at what age.
I want to know, you know, siblings.
Do they have an older sister, older brother?
What's the relationship with the older brother, sister?
Was there an abusive uncle or person?
I want to investigate that.
I want to know that, but we're so afraid to investigate that.
All we're investigating is, well, parents should be more acceptable about this, this, this, and that.
And I think rather than doing that, we're not putting the time into the real conversation, which is, you know, suicide in the military.
Why does suicide in the military happen?
What is it?
What causes suicide in the military to happen?
You know, is it away from the family?
Did some people join the military to get away from the family?
Are they running away from family?
You mean to tell me everybody that joins the army is that patriotic?
I have a hard time believing it.
When I was in the military, I had a lot of guys that were in the military.
They were not in there because they were patriotic.
They were people that were in the military that actually didn't like the country.
They were just people in the military for GI Bill.
Some were there because they couldn't stand their dad.
They wanted to get away.
And we had stories of, what do you call it, suicide.
And it's heartbreaking.
You know, I had one of my close friends from the military that went through it.
And I saw his relationship with his father.
His father would slap him in the face in front of us.
And I'm like, I can't even be around it.
His father was so abusive to him in front of all of us.
And he would be so embarrassed when he was around us.
So he never felt like he could do anything to please his dad.
And eventually he took his life.
Was that the reason?
So education is what it comes down to, is where I'm going through.
In awareness, in a dialogue.
That's all I want to know.
Like when you said you said something about James O'Keefe, you said that's an opinion.
And then he said, Oliver Stone is an opinion, right?
That's an opinion.
Well, the opinion is on both sides, right?
Absolutely.
You said you want to get to, what was the word you used?
Not the truth.
You said you wanted to, you given, which I agree with.
You want to find out the why, let's just say, right?
Originally.
The origin of why.
The original.
I want to know the why.
I want to know, you know, there's a lot of questions I got.
I want to know, do we really make the right choice going to war in Iraq?
You know, and we're like, oh, that weapons of mass destruction, guess what?
Was this whole thing with the way we handled Afghanistan?
That was catastrophic.
We just lost $80 billion.
This whole thing going on with Russia and Ukraine right now, what is the real motive?
Does America, is America using Ukraine as a proxy to get rid of Putin?
We don't know.
I want to know.
I'm curious, right?
I'm curious to know what some of the things are.
Historically, you haven't been in this space for a while.
Who was the name of people that would go investigate the heavy-duty topics that would come and give the most fair assessment from both sides?
Cronkite was more of a personality guy, but he was like the investigative journalist that would give both sides of the story.
Just saying Wallace?
Yeah, I think the 60 Minutes guys, obviously, and Mike Wallace, sure.
Our friend John Stossel.
Stossel did a lot of great work over the years in a whole combination.
Walt Bogdanovich, you know, at the New York Times and other places.
And the whole teams of print reporters who would go after this.
The Chicago Tribune, going back to the meatpacking industry, Upton Sinclair, and talking about all that.
The Chicago papers did a great thing where they opened up a bar and they saw everybody hitting them up for bribes, the inspectors and the contractors.
But it was seminal.
We once had a story put together where we had some guys come in and we were going to open up a gentleman's club, a strip club, and watch the people come in in New York City.
We had a location and everything, from the mob supplying the dancers to the people inspecting the place to do the whole thing and then put hidden cameras in and capture the whole thing.
And the lawyers ended up nixing it because there are, admittedly, a lot of issues doing that.
You know, how long do you run it?
But the interesting thing was that the guys who were consulting with me on it said that they could pay for the entire project with the proceeds of actually having a club in Queens.
And it got pretty high up at NBC.
No, we're going to open a name for it, the whole thing.
Didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
Well, and I understand why.
I mean, the legal questions were just overwhelming and strangling of doing something.
No question.
But I mean, and then, you know, you're operating this thing and you've got legitimate people working there, people going there as customers.
Do you, you know, what do you do?
Why are the place with hidden cameras?
And that's constitutionally iffy.
I mean, it'd be great television.
But, I mean, the lawyers, and the best part was in the pitch meeting.
I said, and it pays for itself, you know, because we'd raise, it was going to be $400,000 to do it, and I think we're going to make back $400,000 in the first year.
And we actually had former federal and local law enforcement people who were going to consult on this, who had done this for other investigations.
And I thought it was genius, but I understood at the end of the day why it was.
$400,000 to do it, and you're going to get $400,000 back.
I mean, that would be perfect TV right now.
Yeah, but then, you know, you got a guy who goes into a club like that for one night and he gets captured on a hidden camera.
You know, what do you do with that?
Yeah.
And you get a woman who's working in that business because she's trying to feed her kids.
What do you do with that?
At what point does it become exploitative versus interesting, notwithstanding all the other legal issues?
Out of the 500 people that you dealt with, did anybody ever sue you out of the 500?
Did you ever get sued by them or no?
Excuse me.
There were some attempts, none of them successful.
And the reason is it's so clear, right?
These aren't gray area cases.
The majority of the crime is committed in the online solicitation.
Showing up is just the television part, the arrest, the culmination of it.
Yes, what James said.
James said, you know, I want to see it on video.
You see it on video.
Right.
It's real.
It's not like it's hearsay.
You make they make criminal cases on the transcripts on the online channels all the time.
Really?
Yeah.
On online?
Did you hear?
Because it's a solicitation.
So if on a DM an adult is going through with a 13-year-old, that can be.
You cross that threshold.
That's the case.
That's great news.
That's the case.
Okay, that's great to hear.
Yeah, when they show up, they often make statements to me that, you know, if they admit the crime, obviously that can be used.
But I've never even been called to testify in one of these cases because it's so clear-cut.
Hell yeah.
Sounds like Pat wants to put together a team.
A task force, a team.
You, James O'Keefe, John Walsh from America's Most Wanted.
What was the guy from Cheaters, Joey Grico?
And go down to Wuhan and get that thing figured out.
Wallace Wallace was also Wallace.
Wait, Wallace.
Did you watch the testimony about his father?
Oh, Michael, I'll tell you a funny story.
So I'm in Miami one time and I'm off.
And I run into Mike Wallace, who's working, doing something.
He was doing an interview with somebody.
And I introduced myself.
He goes, oh, Chris, yeah, sure.
What was it that I just saw that you did that was so good?
I couldn't wait to tell him.
And he probably didn't see it, but because I explained it in such details, oh, yeah, that was really good.
But he was such a consummate pro.
You know, it's not like I knew him well, but the couple times that I met him, he was gracious and kind.
And during the Predator, the media coverage of the Predator story, I was, you know, likened to him, and it was a great compliment to me.
He was, I mean, he did something.
He did Khomeini.
He did the Shaw multiple times.
He sat down with everybody.
Mike Wallace.
Yeah, Mike Wallace.
Was it in his documentary?
I am Mike Wallace.
Who was Mike Wallace?
I don't know what it is, but I know what's great.
I'm watching him to learn about his story.
Go ahead.
Well, Pat brought up Walter Cronkite.
We're talking about Mike Wallace.
People just think that on the face of it, you're just this guy to catch a predator.
You're a real journalist.
You went to School for Journalism.
You've done all this.
I wanted to get your thoughts on just the overall distrust in media these days.
Oh, it's fake news.
You can't trust anybody.
Everything's so polarized.
You know, Jeff Zucker resigns.
Roger Ale, Cuomo, just so much distrust in news these days.
As a newsman, this must be a little disheartening for you.
It is.
And I think what you've seen is, besides targeting by politicians, in this catchphrase, fake news.
I mean, the reality is nobody's perfect in the news business.
Nobody's perfect in politics.
Nobody's perfect in the financial world.
But generally, most of the people try to do the right thing.
But with the advent of cable news and this need or perceived need to take a point of view, Fox obviously had a point of view and it made them successful.
Their news reporting during the day is their news reporting.
But when you get to personalities and point of view at night, the same with MSNBC or the same at CNN, it creates polarization and it creates targeting.
And I think when you elevate that for ratings, you take the risk of being painted on one side or the other.
And we've lost what happens at 6.30 for the evening news, and we lost what happens between 10 in the morning and 5 at night on cable news, which is generally speaking reporting.
I mean, you watch on Fox, you see their correspondent in Ukraine showing this incredible story all day long.
And then you get to some of the columnist, opinionated people, and they're telling a whole different story and saying what's wrong with Putin and everything else.
When all day long, their guys have been dodging mortar shells in the field, telling the real story.
Think there should be a disclaimer, like opinion journalism, opinion news versus actual news.
The viewer needs to be aware of what you're looking at.
But there's such a gray line it is, it is, and that's like you're watching this environment.
You're watching the four o'clock news uh, with Brett Bear, and then next on the five is a bunch of opinions.
Right, so you got to switch your mind over.
That was the news, now it's opinions.
Well, same thing on CNN.
It goes from Wolf Blitzer to BOOM.
Now it's done Laman, and now you're.
So Do you think the media needs to be held accountable to say, this is the news portion, facts.
This is the opinion portion.
Take it with a grain of salt.
I think the best they need to be.
The best consumer is an educated consumer.
And so I think there is a certain responsibility that we have.
But also, I think the people watching need to know and be aware that, look, this has just crossed over from reporting and journalism to somebody's opinion.
But you're putting that on the people just.
Well, I think a consumer always has your eyes on the news.
I think people know it.
Maybe they should.
I'm not saying you're wrong, by the way.
I'm just saying that, you know, are we insulting to the viewer by saying, okay, we're leaving the news portion of the day and here's this personality doing it.
I mean, I think people sort of know that.
Maybe you're right.
I'm not arguing it.
I'm just saying that, you know, when I answer these questions, when I look at these situations, I try to give the viewer, who is generally incredibly intelligent, you know, credit for being able to get the best.
Are you giving the viewer too much credit, Chris?
I don't think so.
I mean, maybe some.
But I mean, I think what does Denzel say?
Denzel says if you watch the news, you're misinformed.
If you don't watch the news, you're uninformed.
You've got to pick one of the two.
You're either going to be misinformed.
That's a pretty good question.
Uninformed, right?
One of the two.
Anyways, Chris, it's been great having you on.
Appreciate you for coming out.
Thanks for having me.
We're going to put the link below.
Tyler, if you can put the link below to his YouTube channel, is there any other links you would want folks to go check out?
We have the podcast, Predators I've Caught with Chris Hansen.
That's on all platforms now.
We've got Watch True Blue.
You can get updates in the ramp up to the launch of that.
Discovery Plus, Onision in Real Life, and Unseemly, the Peter Nygaard investigation, and a lot of stuff in the pipeline.
Let's put that all in the description as well in the chat.
And for some of you guys that support Nick McKinley's work, he messaged me yesterday.
They are working right now to relocate 30,000 orphans from various locations in Ukraine to Poland, just like the Afghanistan.
There's a budget that's needed for this crisis.
We put the link below.
Tyler put that again.
They're trying to raise $450,000.
They've raised a little over $100,000, still needed another $350,000.
If you support what he's doing, please go find it in your heart, if you do, to support his cause to get to $450,000.
Are we doing podcasts again this Thursday or no?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow with Mr. Mike Baker.
Oh, we've got Mike Baker tomorrow.
CIA Mike Baker.
Okay, sounds good.
So if you like the CIA stuff, we've had Mike on before.
