Theo Von has Chris Hansen 'take a seat' and talks to him about To Catch a Predator, his decades long journalism career, and his family. This episode brought to you by… Quip https://www.getquip.com/weekend 1st refill pack FREE with purchase of toothbrush using this link OMAX3 Visit OMAX.com/WEEKEND to receive a box of Omax3 Ultra-Pure, FOR FREE with your first purchase! Grey Block Pizza 1811 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA http://bit.ly/GreyBlock Music “Shine” - Bishop Gunn http://bit.ly/Shine_BishopGunn Gunt Squad Aaron Jones Aaron Rasche Aaron Stein Adriana Hernandez Aidan Duffy Alaskan Rock Vodka Alex Hitchins Alex Person Alex Sideris Alexander Contreras Amanda Sherman Andrea Gagliani Andrew Valish Andy Mac Angelo Raygun Angie Angeles Anna Winther Anthony Schultz Arielle Nicole Ashley Konicki Audrey Harlan Ayako Akiyama Bad Boi Benny Baltimore Ben Beau Adams Yoga Ben Deignan Ben in thar.. Ben Limes Benjamin Streit Big Easy Brian Martinez Brian Szilagyi Bryan Reinholdt Bubba Hodge cal ector California Outlaw Campbell Hile Carla Huffman Casey Roberts Casey Rudesill Cassandra Miller Chad Saltzman Charley Dunham Christian from Bakersfield christian prado Christopher Becking Christopher Stath Clint Lytle Cody Cummings Cody Kenyon Cody Marsh Cory Alvarez Dan Draper Dan Ray Dave Engelman David Christopher david r prins David Smith David Wyrick deadpieface Deanna Smith Dirty Steve Domonic DoMoreKid Donald blackwell Doug Chee Dwehji Majd Dylan Clune Felicity Black Felix Theo Wren Fernando Takeshi Sato Gabriel Almeda Garrett Blankenship General Moose Ginger Levesque Grant Stonex Greg H Gunt Squad Gary Haley Brown J Garcia J.T. Hosack Jacob Ortega Jacob Rice James banks James Bown James Hunter Jameson Flood Jason Bragg Jason Haley Jeffrey Lusero Jenna Sunde Jeremy Johnson Jeremy West Jerry Zhang Jesse Witham Joaquin Rodriguez Joe Dunn Joey Desrosiers Joey Piemonte John Bowles John Kutch John Slade Johnathan Jensen Jon Ross Josh Cowger Justin L justin marcoux justin shuy Karen Sullivan Katy Doyle Kelly Elliott Ken Comstock Ken Melvin Kennedy Kenton call Kevin Best Kevin Fleury Kevtron Kiera Parr Kigabo Kirk Cahill Kishalin kristen rogers Kyle Baker Lacey Briesemeister Laura Williams Lauren Cribb Leighton Fields Linsey Logan Yakemchuk Lorell “Loretta” Ray Luke Danton Mark Glassy Matt Eckenrode Matt Holland Matt Kaman Matt Leftwich Matthew Azzam Matthew Price Matthew Sizemore Matthew Snow Max Bowden MEDICATED VETERAN Megan Andersen-Hall Megan Daily megan Wrynn Meghan LaCasse Michael E. Ganzermiller Michael polcaro Michael Senkpiel Micky Maddux Mike montague Mike Poe Mike Sarno Mike Vo Mitchell Watson Mona McCune Ned Arick Nick Butcher Niko Ferrandino Nikolas Koob Nyx Ballaine Alta Old McTronald Old Scroat Mccrackin Owen Lide Paddy jay Passenger Shaming Patrick Gries Paul Flores Paul Lococo Peter Craig Peter Shea Philip James Qie Jenkins Ranger Rick Rashelle Raymond Renee Nicol RinDee Roar Hanasand Robert Doucette Robert Mitchell Robyn Tatu Ryan Crafts Ryan Forrest Ryan Garcia Ryan Jordan Ryan Walsh Ryan Wolfe Sam Illgen Sarah Anderson Scott Scott Lucy Scott Swain Sean Scott Season Vaughan Shane Pacheco Shannon Schulte Shawn-Leigh henry Sonja Prazic Stacy Blessing Stahn Johnson Stepfan Jefferies Stephanie Claire Steve Corlew Steven Stoody Sungmin Choe Suzanne O'Reilly Taylor Beall thatdudewiththepaperbag The Asian Hamster Thee shitfaced chef TheGremlin Cafe Tim Bonventre Tim Greener Tim Ozcelik Timothy Eyerman todd vesterse Tom in Rural NC Tom Kostya Tom Reichardt Tommy From England Tommy Redditt Travis Simpson Travis Vowell Trevor Fatheree Troy Ty Oliver Tyler Harrington Tyler Shaver Victor Montano Victoria Adams William Morris William Reid Peters xTaCx Stretch Zech JohnsonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Today's episode is a very unique guest.
This man has ran across more of the dark arts than maybe anyone.
He's come face to face with them.
He's sat them down.
You know him from To Catch a Predator.
You know him from his years of investigative journalism.
He is something unique.
Let's get to know him right now.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is Mr. Chris Hansen.
Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine that light on me Thank you for joining us today.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
And have you, do you get out to Hollywood a lot?
I do because some of the production companies with which I work are based out here.
And so when I was doing the Crime Watch Daily show, for instance, that's Warner Brothers.
They're, you know, right there in the Burbank area.
Right.
And so I get out here frequently.
Do you, do, crime is so, people are obsessed with crime.
They really are.
I mean, you look at the show, for instance, Killer Instinct that is on investigation discovery, the ID network.
And that network literally has either the first or second number of female viewers from that coveted demographic, not just of cable, but in all of broadcasts.
And people watch.
Because females are, those are the ones most likely to be shopping and spending money with advertising, right?
Taking care of Hannah.
I think that's part of it.
We also get a very healthy male viewership on the various crime shows that I do.
I think what draws people in is this attitude that I try to bring to every show where I take the viewer along on a journey of discovery, where they get to see things they wouldn't normally see, hear things they wouldn't normally hear.
I get to go places that most people don't get to go.
I get to talk to people most people don't get to talk to.
And so that's fascinating for the average viewer, I guess.
Yeah, it's kind of almost, I wonder if you seem to me like as, because I would consider myself a, I guess basically like this, I would consider myself probably a female viewer.
I mean, I've watched so much of those types of programming.
I mean, not really, but I mean, it's almost like, yeah, I guess I'm almost in that demographic.
But you're almost like a lia, you're like, I can't tell sometimes if I'm like, you seem like an Edgar Allan Poe of sorts, you know, or like a concierge to like the dark arts or something a little bit.
I mean, I know you're reporting and you're the you're kind of the Sherpa, but.
Well, that's valid.
You look at some of the different investigations we've done over the years and I do, you know, occupy a unique space in television and journalism.
And it's been crime and I've been at it literally for some 36 years.
I started very young in the business.
I was six.
But, you know, so it's true.
You know, I was at a news conference in LA one time for kicking off a show.
And one of the print writers who covers broadcasts for Gannett, who's covered me for many, many years, said, do you ever go to therapy or get counseling for all the dark stuff you do?
And see?
I said, no, it's all kept down there nice and safe.
I look where I like it.
I'm good.
Do you ever think that those types of things like that, subconsciously, though, that interacting with such a dark, a Voldemorty cauldron of the universe kind of, that that can impact you, like on a level that you're not able to?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you look at people sometimes like, what's that guy up to over there?
What's he doing over there?
Or you think through scenarios where something bad happens and you have to react, not just as a journalist and covering it, but you're in the middle of it.
Right.
And it's been interesting because my two sons are in the business now.
So one is an assistant cameraman and production assistant on my shows and many, many others.
And the other is a reporter in Traverse City, Michigan.
He just got a job in Oklahoma City.
Oh, nice.
So, you know, they've grown up in this.
And you see it affect them a little bit.
You know, we finished a season of Killer Instinct, and my oldest son looks up at me and goes, man, I am just murdered out.
I got to go do some food shows for a little while.
Yeah, I need to focus on.
Some flea market flip or something.
Dude, I need some pre-related fast, dad.
I got to go see Mr. Ramsey.
When you go back to, going back to talking about how women watch a lot of those types of shows, do you feel like there's something secretive in women or something that, like, I've always had this weird idea that some women like want to be murdered in a weird way?
And I know that's kind of a drastic statement, but like there's something about it.
What is that?
Well, you know, that's a great question.
And I think it's a lot of things.
I think that, you know, women empathize with victims.
I mean, men do too.
You get a lot of, you know, grizzled male cops who watch these shows all the time and Wall Street guys and business people and all shady comedians.
But I do think that for whatever reason, again, our key demographic on a lot of these shows skews females.
Do you think killers seem like tall, dark, and handsome in a way to women?
Like, is there like on a different level?
Do you feel like there's some romantic thing?
Because, yeah, for some reason in my head, I'm like, women secretly all want to have someone break into their home or something.
I don't buy that.
I think it's more of, all right, I'm going to learn how this stuff happens so I don't become a victim myself.
And that's kind of the way I look at these shows, these investigations, is if we can hear the voice of a victim or a victim's family, if we can get into the mind of a criminal, whether it's a killer or a predator or a sex trafficker or human trafficker or somebody dealing heroin in Dayton, Ohio, you can better understand how it all works and you can prevent other people from falling into that trap of becoming a victim themselves.
And that's a big part of what I do.
Do you feel like after to catch a predator and, you know, that do you feel, did you feel like a hero, like at certain points during that show?
Like, did you feel, how did you feel?
Like, as that show went on and you guys were, you know, you guys were catching, I guess, I don't know if they're pedophiles or perverts at that point or what the term is.
Predator, I think.
Okay, predators.
Pedagogy is the right term.
I mean, pedophile has a very distinct definition in psychiatric circles.
People use it all the time.
It was in the New York Post today on the flight here.
So, you know, people use that, but predator is the best way to put it.
And when we first did those investigations, the first one was in Long Island.
And I remember driving out there thinking, geez, what if nobody shows up?
What if I've just wasted thousands and thousands of dollars of the network's money?
And within seconds of that thought, my producer was on the cell phone saying, where the heck are you?
We've got two guys coming in 45 minutes.
And all of a sudden, 17 guys show up in the course of three days, including a New York City firefighter and several others.
And you can imagine that first investigation.
I mean, we had security and we had precautions and we had the online decoys in the house.
Right.
We had it all set up, but we didn't really know how this was going to go down.
So I've got transcripts all over a dining room table in the next room.
And I walk out to confront the third guy who comes in.
And I'm just trying to keep my heart in my chest at this point.
So you are actually nervous when you walk out there.
I was, especially on the first one.
Now, you always are on edge because you don't know what you don't know.
Right.
You don't know what is in his pocket.
I mean, we take precautions.
We know the background.
We know if they've got a concealed weapons permit and many other things that we have as much intel as you can, but you research.
But I walk out there and I confront this third guy in the first investigation.
I said, it says right here, you want to do this, that, and the other thing to a 13-year-old girl named Susan.
No, that's not me.
Excuse me.
Go back, get the other.
What about a 14-year-old named Beth?
No, that's not me.
Excuse me.
Come back.
A 12-year-old named Betty.
Yeah, that's me.
Okay, good.
We can start.
And it was just, it was that much.
Oh, wow, there was that much.
Obviously, we refined it as we went along.
And the most recent investigation.
But literally, you were like saying, oh, sorry.
I got the wrong transcript.
Yeah, I got the wrong recipe.
I need to go back and find it.
Oh, yeah, and I got to get the one.
So, you know, we refined it over time.
And, you know, the most recent one we did, we now call it Hansen versus Predator.
And we're getting ready to do another one very soon.
And, you know, we have it down to a system, but there's always that unexpected possibility.
You know, again, we have security.
The police are doing a parallel investigation, so I feel very safe.
The crew is very safe.
But there are a lot of moving parts here.
And we essentially set up a television production studio in another part of the house because most of what we get in terms of video is with hidden cameras.
Yeah, I'm seeing that, and I'm seeing the lights kind of hidden.
Like I've worked with Howie Mandel on some hidden camera shows, so like even when I'm able to watch some of you guys' work, it's like, you know, I'm even able to see some of the just the same parallels, you know, because a lot of the production kind of stuff is the same.
Did you, when these guys, like, did you feel, like as a viewer, sometimes when I would watch that show, sometimes I would feel like remorse.
I would feel like anger.
You know, I'd feel sorry sometimes for the person that was getting captured.
Not that, like in one part of me, if you asked me any day of the week, like, what do you think about, you know, people that molest children or something?
Yes, I would say, you know, they'd be damned.
Yeah.
You know, like, but in that moment in watching it, sometimes I felt bad for them.
What is that?
Well, sometimes I'm the prosecutor, the detective.
Sometimes I'm the psychologist, just trying to get in their heads and have them talk to me.
And sometimes I'm the dad, you know, when it's a younger guy.
Yeah.
And I do sometimes feel empathy for some of these characters.
And everybody wants in our society one size fits all.
This is how we treat the problem.
And the reality is that, you know, not all these guys are the same character.
They're the hardcore guys who would go after kids no matter what.
Those guys like 50s or 60s.
They'd be at the playground with or without the internet.
The middle section are guys who do this because they have the access to the internet, the 24-hour access, the anonymity, and just the ability to be on there and continually chase their fantasy.
And all of a sudden, they cross this line between fantasy and reality, and they're knocking on our door, and they're there.
And then you've got the younger guys who may be socially inept, and I'm not defending them one bit, but these are guys who made a mistake and they can probably get probation for a year and computer monitoring and they'll get scared straight.
Yeah, I saw there were some guys, yeah, like in their 19 and 20 year old.
We usually don't even, the decoys don't even engage somebody unless they're 21, unless there's extenuating circumstances.
Right.
So you guys, so at a certain point, the decoys started to really seek out, like, oh, these guys are a lot more predatory than maybe some guy who's 18 years old might be just a little bit more on the perverted fringe or something?
Well, we don't seek them out.
Right.
We have a very strict protocol.
So the online decoys will go into various social platforms and they'll create a profile that is unmistakably of an underage child.
Right.
Picture, age, everything there.
And they don't contact anybody.
They get contacted.
And then the alleged predator has to make the sexual suggestion first.
Otherwise, we don't engage.
We don't go out and say, okay, here's a 44-year-old man.
Let's see what he's going to do if he's approached by a mature-looking 13-year-old girl.
That doesn't happen.
Then it's a gray area.
What we do is pretty much black and white.
Yeah.
Was there ever a predator that came in that brought tears to your eyes that really hit you?
Not because I was sorry for them, but I remember one, people always ask, what's the most memorable moment?
I said, well, it's a hundred away tie for first because they're all memorable.
But there was a fellow in Fort Myers, Florida, who showed up to meet a 13- or 14-year-old boy, clearly had solicited this boy for sex.
And he shows up and he pulls up in an SUV, and we're watching on the monitors, and he goes around to the passenger side rear door, and we think he's going to pull out pizza or DVDs or something.
Was it a red SUV?
I think it was a little bit of a double-decker.
It was bluish-green.
Sorry, yeah.
There were plenty to go around.
So anyway, he gets his five-year-old son out of the car, out of the child seat, and they walk up the driveway.
And I'm like, how am I going to handle this one?
But where does that hit you?
Does that hit you at that moment?
It hits you just as a reporter, like how I'm going to, like, like a logistic.
No, it was, it took the breath out of the room.
Now, these guys, who I work with, I mean, I've had them around the world.
We've been in Africa and India and Cambodia on all kinds of heavy-duty investigations over the years.
And these guys were silent.
Some in tears.
And so he walks in.
It even hits me when we're hearing you say that.
I mean, just he's got a five-year-old kid with him.
And I don't think he was going to involve the kid in the sex act.
He was going to put a Barney DVD on in the next room or, you know, some child show.
And he walks in.
I said, look, I'm Chris Hansen.
You know why you're here.
I know why you're here.
I'm not going to subject your child to what I normally do.
And he left and a female officer scooped up the child up and he was arrested.
And all the while, his wife's at work on a Sunday in a retail store.
And he's running around town doing this.
Yeah, and a lot of that type of behavior, it seems like, you know, I'm like in recovery and stuff like that.
So I'm in a lot of world where you see a lot of people who struggle with stuff and they try to get through their demons.
I've actually met friends.
I have a friend now that's a flasher, you know, which is crazy, right?
It's crazy, but it's also, he's a regular guy and he has this compulsivity that like he's like, sometimes I'll go walk in my dog and halfway down the block, I realize I don't have my dog, you know?
Right.
Like, so you like start to see some of the stuff that goes on in his head, right?
Do you feel like a lot of these guys that are predators, did something happen to them?
Like, are you able to see any of that, like, or learn about any of that, like lineage?
Is there any lineage in that?
I think there's been some linkage there, you know, among some of the 300-plus guys who have surfaced in our investigations.
It's hard to tell because once, you know, they're off our radar, they're either in prison or in counseling or doing whatever.
I think a lot of it is really just the opportunity and the ability of these guys to reach out to underage.
I mean, remember when we first started doing these investigations, we merely used chat rooms on Yahoo and AOL.
Right.
And that was just a little box.
Just it.
Just it.
That was it.
I mean, I remember one time when Yahoo lost all power because of a fire on the West Coast.
And we were down.
We were done.
We couldn't put our decoys out there and we couldn't communicate with the alleged predator.
And we actually had to stop the investigation for a few days until it came back up.
So that just shows you how the internet is integral in the world.
And look at today with Badu and Kik and all these other social platforms.
Twitch and all these things were.
All of it.
The children interacting on video games with people that they don't know.
One of my producers was having a conversation with his teenage son.
I want to say he was like 14, 15 at the time.
And he said, what's that on your cell phone?
He goes, oh, well, there's this app where you can randomly talk to people who are just on the app.
And he said, well, show me how it works.
And he dials somebody up and it's a 42-year-old woman who says, or someone who identifies themselves as a 42-year-old woman says, I'm just jumping in the shower.
I'll call you when I get a towel around me.
He's like, no, no, no, no.
We're getting rid of that app right now.
But just without even trying.
It's such a gateway.
It was a random connection.
Do you feel then that there's some like sometimes the internet, I mean, even for myself, like I've struggled in my life with like relationships, commitment.
I think a lot of it is probably from or some of it, some of the things have been from growing up issues.
I had some of them, though, I've struggled with watching pornography growing up and like using that as like an outlet to feel something good about myself sometimes in a whatever wrong way that is, right?
But I can see how that web can get tricky and you can get down that staircase and it's excessive.
It's like having addictive.
It's addictive.
It's like an opiate.
Should there be laws or more restrictions against that?
Well, it's hard to make laws because the whole notion of the internet is its ubiquitous nature.
And all the access is right there.
I mean, I think there's a responsibility for parents to regulate children on the internet.
I always say that the golden rule should be that if you don't know the person in real life, you shouldn't be chatting with them or giving personal information to them on the internet because the person who is a stranger on Tuesday can groom kids into being their best buddy by Friday.
Yeah.
It's very dangerous.
You know what's interesting?
I used to do this thing called crank texting, right, Chris, where I would basically take, I took my phone number one day and I changed the last two digits of it and I just sent out a random text to that number and I said hello, right?
So my last number, my name, my number ends in 6.7, so I changed it to like 7.4.
Right.
And I just said hello and sent a message out.
And then somebody texted me back and they're like, hey, who's this?
And I was like, oh, it's Alan, made up a name.
And that person's like, oh, Alan from so-and-so?
And I said, yep.
And next thing you know, they thought I was Alan.
So then for a while, I started doing this thing where I was just crank texting like masses of numbers.
I would send like a, hey, what's up to like large groups of anonymous cell phone numbers that I didn't know.
And one time I found myself texting, it was some kid who's like after school or something.
They thought they were in like a band Or something at school, and they thought I was some friend of theirs who was in the band, right?
And I realized, holy, this is crazy.
Like, I'm just here goofing around, like trying to do like prank calls, but on text.
And next thing you know, I'm communicating with a kid who thinks I'm immediately a peer of theirs, you know?
They assume.
It's, you know, obviously I do a lot of social media for the shows and for what I do for a living.
And, you know, the vast majority of the people on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, they may be listed as friends, but I actually don't know them.
And it's shocking sometimes what people will expect from you, will say to you.
And you really don't know sometimes, do I respond to that?
If somebody identifies themselves as a live-in nanny in Washington State who suspects the mother's boyfriend has, you know, improper interest in the daughter, she's babysitting, what do I do about that?
You know, it's a real quandary.
Because that could come into your situation.
It happened last week.
And this is why I get these every day.
And so is it a prank?
Is it real?
What is my social responsibility to deal with it?
You know, normally I alert the police or I tell the person to alert the police.
And if they have a problem with that, I'll facilitate it.
But if I give them advice and it goes sideways.
Right.
Do you have some liability?
Do I have some liability?
Or, you know, how do I know that somebody's not trying to set a guy up?
Right.
You know, you always assume the worst when somebody reports that sort of thing, but you never know.
And you don't even know if that person is who they say they are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody could screenshot that and say, Chris Hansen said my husband is a sexual predator.
Absolutely.
And so you try to do the socially responsible thing, the journalistically responsible thing, but you have this gray area where, wait a minute, who am I actually talking to?
Or, you know, someone will say, hey, can you talk for a minute?
Well, I'm on an airplane coming up to LA.
No, I can't.
And I try to be hard in all this stuff and answer all the questions and to be helpful.
But it's difficult to follow.
And again, you really don't know who all these people are.
Yeah, and you're kind of a linchpin in a strange way because a lot of reporters and a lot of journalists and investigative journalists, you know, they have the, it doesn't have, their thing hasn't hit home with so many, you know, it hasn't, I don't know, you have, yeah, you're like the, you're like the person that people think of when they think of anything in that world, you know?
Like I thought of John Walsh and I thought of you.
Like, I mean, you know, like just in terms of like, you know, just like helping out children or dealing with issues with children, you know?
Well, it's really hit home with people for a lot of different reasons.
You know, I only half-jokingly tell the story of being parodied on South Park some years ago.
Yeah, I saw that last night.
And my kids were both in high school at the time.
And it was the only South Park that season they didn't see.
For some reason, they went to bed early.
And I didn't know it was going to be on.
So I get a call from one of my agents on the East Coast saying, South Park is doing you right now.
It's pretty funny.
And then about 20 minutes later, it's taking a dark turn.
Because I was on the West Coast, so I didn't see it until three hours later.
And it's fine.
Look, they're brilliant guys.
And they're a lot of fun.
Yeah, they're brilliant.
And they also use a lot of people to just get funny.
It's fine.
And they, look, yeah, it was dark.
Would I have written it that way?
No, but I'm not a comedian like you or Matt Groening or those guys, right?
Stone and Stone Park.
Stone and Parker do the genius.
They really are.
Now, you can take issue with whether it's appropriate or whether, you know, you like it or not.
But in my son's eyes, at 16 and 18 years old at the time or whatever, that was, I had made it in their book because Chris Hanson was a song.
Oh, that's cool now.
Oh, yeah.
And all the kids at high school the next day were like, oh man, your old man was on softball.
So that was, you know, that was the benchmark.
But, you know, it hits home with a lot of people.
And look, it's very serious subject matter.
Right.
It's a very serious crime.
At the end of the day, just like any other investigation, we're trying to educate, create a dialogue that didn't exist before and awareness that didn't exist before.
And we've done that.
We will continue to do it.
And the big lesson, I think, is that enterprise journalism is still very important using techniques like hidden cameras and computer-aided reporting and things like that.
You really can make a difference, but you've got to get inside the crime.
And it's sometimes difficult.
It's sometimes expensive.
It's sometimes dangerous.
And you have to get the network to buy off on it.
Was there a lot of pushback when you guys first pushed to catch a predator?
There wasn't pushback, but there was an issue where some of the people didn't get how to promote it.
And I had a very blunt meeting with higher-ups in the chain of command, and I put it this way.
I said, there's a man knocking on your back door who wants to have sex with your 13-year-old daughter.
Tonight we're going to show you how to keep that from happening.
And suddenly it was on TV.
Yeah.
Was there parts where, so as it, because I mean, it was like being on the endeavor, you know?
I mean, that show, it was like a space show.
I don't know.
That's not the one that blew up, is it?
I hope not.
The Challenger.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
So it was like being on the Endeavor.
I mean, that thing was a rocket, right?
Right.
Was there parts, though, where it started to become too much like, okay, let's, Chris, we want you to talk to him more.
We want to watch this guy fry out there kind of stuff?
Well, I think the goal has always been to get inside these guys' minds, whether it's this or whether it's somebody who's trafficking young women here in Los Angeles or in Atlanta.
And look, anybody can jump out of the bushes and create 10 seconds of dramatic video.
My goal is to get the guy to have a seat and to explain to me what brought him into the situation.
And more often than not, they will sit and talk.
Now, they may run their line of BS and say, I was here to check on the girl.
I was worried about her safety.
Or, I was just going to be a mentor to this young boy.
And I've heard all the excuses that you can possibly imagine.
But I want to know.
And oftentimes, these guys will open up and say, I just got going on the internet.
And as I got older, the people I was talking to got younger, and I just had this fantasy.
And it seemed like it was going to be okay.
I mean, I've had guys in the latest investigation that aired last year.
Is this True Crime Daily?
Is this a subscriber?
This is a part of Crime Watch Daily.
So we did Hansen versus Predator on Crime Watch Daily.
And we had a guy show up, an insurance executive from Boston drove all the way to Fairfield, Connecticut, brought pizza, offered me pizza, offered the crew pizza, but he had in his car a quote-unquote marriage contract that he thought would make it legal for him to have sex with a creator.
I saw him, and he sat and ate pizza.
And he had the contract.
We had a guy show up who was an employee of one of the cable companies who was on the waiting list to become a police officer in Connecticut, who, when they searched his car, they found a loaded gun, duct tape, a camera, and a knife.
Oh, that's hide-and-go-seek in Afghanistan, I feel like.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's scary.
What's he going to do with the 13-year-old girl once she goes for a ride with him?
Right.
To give, quote-unquote, a driving lesson.
Right, yeah.
What if some, what if, yeah, say one behavior, a sex act occurs, then he still has these wet.
Like, what is it?
Then where does his mind go that he doesn't even know his mind is about to go to another place where then it escalates?
And what if she, you know, says, hey, wait, this is too much for me.
I'm only 13. Yeah.
And he kills her.
Yeah.
Anything could happen.
Did you, it's interesting to me that, like, when it goes from online to real life, like, that's really a lot of what I feel like when I'm watching your, like, that's what I started to see.
Like, oh, this is wild because this is something that, you know, it's this fictional universe online.
It's, I mean, it's real, but it's, you know, it's not, it's not tangible.
Right.
You know, it's, so your brain can go to kind of dark places, but not really be doing dark things.
What happens, I think, sometimes, and you hit it right on the head, is that men will say things online that they wouldn't say face-to-face, not to a woman, certainly not to a 13-year-old or 12-year-old girl.
Yeah, I'll even text things when I'm dating somebody that I wouldn't probably be making.
Well, you think about it later and say, you know, that's not, you know, kosher.
But I think people get ahead of themselves texting or online.
It feels safer.
You're one step removed and it feels safer.
And suddenly this line gets blurred at some point between fantasy and reality.
And that's when these guys step over and, as I said earlier, come knocking on our door to fulfill this fantasy that's building inside them.
Did you ever feel...
Were you the one calling your own shots as well?
Were you directing yourself?
Well, there was a whole team together.
Obviously, we have a whole team producer and we have the crew and we have security and everything.
But, you know, generally, you know, I'm out there without a net.
We did try one time having an earbud so I could communicate.
And I honestly didn't like it because it was, I don't, when I'm out there, whether it's on those investigations or others, if I'm listening to somebody, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to do next.
It's like doing an interview like this and having a list of questions and going from this to that.
The first thing I do when a producer hands me a list of questions, I put them under the chair.
Right.
Or you hold these and when I finish, if there's anything else you want me to do other than what I've done.
Because an interview, as you know, because you do them every week.
I'm learning, yeah.
Is getting inside somebody's mind.
And it's more about listening than looking down at the legal pad for the next question.
Well, especially these days, I think audiences want more authenticity.
I think audiences feel like they've been so, and I feel like they have.
It became such a pattern with television to create such a specificity, fueled by advertising kind of thing.
It just became watertight.
Formulaic.
Yes, formulaic.
And this is why I think this investigation and others like it have become so popular with people is because you don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen next.
I mean, I always say a good interview is when I look back at the producer and I say anything else and he or she says no, and I'm drained.
Yeah.
You know, whether it's with somebody who almost became a murder victim, somebody who is a relative of a murder victim, somebody who's a detective who investigated a murder, or any of these other cases that we delve so deeply into.
Did you ever follow up personally with any of those people?
Like, was there ever, is it always like a work?
Does it always feel like a work kind of?
Are you able, was there ever any where you're like, you know, I need to follow up with this person?
I think it'd be interesting to go back and see what some of these guys are up to.
And we're talking right now about doing that.
Yeah.
And I think some would do it.
I think somebody would say, you know, you put me on TV doing something bad.
I never want to hear from you again.
I hate you.
You know, there are people posing as some of the predators caught in the Stings, you know, on social media.
On social media and online, reaching out.
And I have a hard time believing it's actually them.
I think it's somebody's sick prank.
But I think that would be worth doing because I think there are going to be guys who are angry and didn't change.
I think they're going to be guys who are repeat offenders, and we know this.
And I think they're going to be guys who say, you know, I had some therapy.
I figured this out.
I had some time to think about it.
And it's wrong.
And they're probably not going to reoffend.
But when you get to the hardcore person, you know, and you talk to the psychiatrist who interview them in the prison where they have no reason to not tell the truth, two things are common.
One is if they've done it once, they've done it at least a handful of times.
And two is there's a very strong Correlation between the viewing of child pornography and the commission of solicitation of a child.
Wow.
Almost always.
Do you think we are able as humans, especially as men, to be able to withstand the fire that is coming off the internet and social media?
Are we even built to be able to do that?
I mean, at the end of the day, you're just as responsible online as you are in person.
Right, but it's different.
It is different, clearly, as we've discussed.
But I still say that, you know, in this case, right is right and wrong is wrong.
I mean, I don't care what people are doing if they're adults and it's consensual online.
Right.
That's not my business.
I'm not the moral arbiter of society, but you can clearly say that soliciting a child online is illegal and wrong on every level.
And you create a victim there at a very young age who's scarred for life.
Undeniably.
Do you feel though that like the like, I guess like there's, I just feel sometimes like it's hard to battle against, not against the child pornography type of stuff, but even if you just start with pornography, right?
Like it's hard to like, it's such a, it's such an opiate in a way, you know, it's addictive.
There's no question.
It just feels like it's unfair sometimes.
Like when I think about the young men now, you know, like I didn't have as much access.
Like when I was young, we had, when I was young, we had a guy that would draw a picture of a woman for us for the weekend.
If we wanted, like, if I wanted to see like some genitalia or something, they had this guy, Nick, would draw pictures, and then you buy it from him for a couple dollars.
You know, I'm of the age where, you know, we buried Playboy magazines in the woods.
Yeah.
And that was.
And it was, you know, not even that racy by today's standards.
It just makes you wonder, like, if kids see that or young people see that, then do other darker things seem less, you know, those aren't real to them?
You know, like just the effects of that and us not knowing nothing.
I think there are studies that will prove that's true, that, you know, the repeated viewing of pornography and child pornography especially is addictive and it creates addictive, you know, illegal antisocial behavior.
And the antisocialness has a lot to do with it, too.
Right, and that feeds into the internet.
So, I mean, who needs Playboy Magazine anymore when you can go to Google and find out whatever you want?
I have blockers on my phone and computer.
Not for any child.
I've never had, you know, but just from pornography, like, I don't want that influence anymore.
Well, you get a friend request on social media.
Yeah, and it can have breasts in the picture.
It's just like delete, delete, delete, delete.
And you don't know what's up or whether it's real or somebody's creating something or somebody wants to create a linkage that doesn't exist.
I mean, but you see it.
Yeah.
How many women reach out to Chris Hansen because like there must be like a wild web of ladies out there that are intrigued by this Clint Eastwood of pedophiles kind of, you know?
It's pretty tame, really, to be honest.
I mean, you know, there are some texts like that or messages on social media like that, but generally like, you know, 95% of them either, you know, whack jobs who are saying something absolutely outrageous, like, you know, you should burn in hell for what you do to these innocent men.
You know, it's like, come on.
It's not even worth responding to.
It's block, block, block, and, you know, move on.
And most of it's like, we've got a situation in our neighborhood.
What do I do?
Or thank you for what you do.
Or you should look into this.
Or, you know, city council member in whatever city is up to no good.
You know, it's mostly story related.
Right.
Or it's my mom, you know, putting out pictures of, you know, my nieces.
Or, you know, it's, it's mostly on-brand kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's nothing really.
Yeah.
But do you feel like, though, that there's a, I mean, I feel like, you know, especially with so many women watching that type of programming, that they would see you as like a, you know, you're kind of like a Hugh, like not that you're a Hugh Hefner, but they would envision you like that.
Well, I mean, I think some people have fun with, you know, graphics of the body.
There was one the other day, and I sent it to my significant other with, you know, I was in like all built-up muscles and chains and things and stuff like that.
Yeah, definitely for sure.
That Peloton bike's been working for me.
I feel pretty fit these days.
Did you, you know, a lot of people, when they think about, you know, you guys' show, there's a lot of To Catch a Predator and some of that work and Crime Watch Daily, right?
Right.
Okay.
That people talk about entrapment a lot.
You know, that word gets thrown around a lot.
Did you feel like that sometimes?
No, and here's why.
First of all, you have to be in law enforcement to commit entrapment.
And second of all, we don't create a situation where we go out and say, hey, here's the enticement.
Here's the shiny red apple.
Come get it.
These people all come to us.
Right.
You know, we are passive.
We just exist online.
And the potential predator has to make that first approach.
And even in something like human trafficking, where we worked with the LA County Sheriff's Department or the Sheriff's Department police departments down in Georgia, there's a very strict protocol.
Because after we make TV out of it, those cases have to be prosecuted.
And so it's a very strict protocol.
And people bring it up.
People say, I was entrapped.
The other common misunderstanding is that if somebody asks if you're the police or Chris Hanson, that you can't do anything about it.
Well, that's not true.
It's just not.
And the police sort of don't want to say that because it's fine.
It just makes their cases easier.
Yeah, we're the police.
Are you the police?
No.
They're not committing a crime or committing entrapment by saying, no, they're not the police.
But did you ever, even on a personal note, was there times where you're like, man, like, because it's definitely like these guys, a lot of these pedophiles and predators, I mean, they're sick, right?
There are some really bad people in that mix of 300.
So to take cocaine around somebody that like, you know, they're addicted to cocaine.
They don't have any ability to control themselves.
You know, doesn't it...
I mean, what would happen?
I mean, in all these cases, 300 plus cases over, gosh, going on 14 years now.
Yeah.
And when you think of it, I mean, Predator is maybe 10, 15% of what I've done over my career, maybe 20%.
Right.
You know, but it's just one of those franchises that's gotten all the attention.
What would happen if the guy walks in and there is a real 13-year-old?
I'll give you an example.
We were doing an investigation down in Riverside, and it was just crazy.
We had 51 guys in three days.
And one of the guys who walked in clearly was not 100% intellectually.
And he came in, the first thing he wanted to do was- Mentally challenged.
And I could see that there was a scar, like a carve out on the side of his head where maybe he had suffered an injury or something.
Like a gang or something.
No, but it was an injury.
Okay, yeah.
And he, you know, was shown in the show, but it wasn't a big part of that particular show.
I didn't really go hard with the interview.
He left and was arrested and processed.
And I thought, you know, there's a guy who's got some problems, and I'm not going to make him, you know, too much worse.
He was wrong.
He broke the law.
He'll face that with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the prosecutor's office.
A month later, we're in Long Beach, and lo and behold, the same guy services in that investigation and in fact says, I can't make it on a Friday because I've got a court date from the other Riverside County case.
Shows up on a Saturday.
And in the course of him traveling to Long Beach, we find out that he did a year in jail for a violent assault.
Well, suddenly he's going to make the movie.
You know, this is a danger.
And while I feel sorry for whatever injury he suffered and how that may impact his behavior, it doesn't take anything away from the danger he posed.
And so he becomes a significant part of that particular investigation.
And so you feel like over time, you've seen enough proof and evidence for you where you don't feel that you feel your responsibility tried and true.
If we weren't there, a real child would be.
You believe that?
I think in many of these cases, I believe that, yeah.
Wow.
Because, I mean, these profiles are not.
Yeah, no, yeah, of course.
Right.
Those guys are already out there.
You're not making them make profiles.
Right.
You're not, yeah.
You guys are just putting something into that universe that is something they would be intrigued by.
You're not making them drive to a place.
Kids don't see the danger.
I'll give you another example.
We did some investigating, and I did this in a book called Catch a Predator some years back.
And we found a case in Arkansas where a young woman, great student, was in high school, the daughter of a police officer, was on a Christian youth chat room talking to somebody who identified themselves as a teenager in San Diego, I think named David, and was harmless until it wasn't.
When David, who ends up being, you know, well, into his 40s, shows up in a van, kidnaps her from the home, assaults her, chains her to the back of his van, and kills her.
And so this whole panic starts looking for this poor missing young woman.
And tragically, it ended up the way it did.
But it was a real wake-up call to me.
And that's why I wanted to make it its own chapter in the book, because it's an example of a kid who was doing everything right and got tricked.
And that's exactly what happened.
He was able to reverse engineer the information.
The dad was working the night shift, and there's this haunting log of chat where she's talking to her boyfriend.
And her friends were talking to this guy, too.
It wasn't like, I want to date you, or what are you doing?
Or when are you coming to San Diego?
Yeah, David and San Diego.
Little bit, little bit at a time, was able to get the information, figure out where she lived.
And he had a storage locker all set up for the crime, a hotel room, and it was just, it was horrible.
So the risk of possibly, you know, of some exploitation, you feel like that no matter what, that the reward and the, that that far outweighs it?
Yeah, I think so.
And it's also about, you know, being ethical about your storytelling.
Right.
I mean, from the methodology to how you portray someone.
And, you know, when we do these investigations, whether it's predator or anything else, I mean, we are absolutely transparent about the way we do things.
And if you say, look, we do it this way.
This is why we do it.
This is why the police run a parallel investigation and are there.
I mean, you got to remember, the first three investigations we did, the first two, the police were not involved until after the fact.
And it was, number one, socially irresponsible to let the go.
Now, the police did make some cases after the fact to their credit.
And it was also, from a television production standpoint, it wasn't really rewarding to the viewer.
And that's not what drives the decision.
Why, because the police weren't involved?
Because the guy walked away.
The guy walked away.
You know, we have video of him walking down the street or getting in his pickup truck and going away.
And yet he's out ready to offend the next day.
I mean, the social responsibility is what drove the decision to cooperate with the police.
And we developed a protocol.
So that's true.
It wasn't like an element of, okay, we need to add an element at the end where it's like the guy gets nabbed.
It actually came from a place you feel like a social responsibility?
It did.
I'm not accusing you.
I'm just saying.
No, no, no, no.
I'm just telling you how it went down, which was, you know, we had done the two.
We had done the one in Long Island, New York, and we had done the one in a suburb outside of D.C. And we were looking to do the next investigation.
And I don't know whether they reached out to us or we reached out to them, but we got in contact with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
And, you know, a lot of lawyering and a lot of meetings went on and to do this in the appropriate fashion.
And I think we've done it all along, both at NBC and at Crime Watch Daily and down the road and how we distribute the next Hanson versus Predator.
Yeah.
And what is Hanson doing now against Predators?
Like, what's going on in the NBC?
We're developing the next investigation as we speak.
We pretty much know where it's going to be.
The team's all on board, and we're really just deciding where it's going to go.
And in fact, some of the meetings I have out here in L.A. revolve around that.
Oh, great.
That's awesome.
I was thinking with the Me Too movement, right, and a lot of that.
Would you ever consider doing a to catch a predator type of show, type of show in that world?
Not saying that they're sexual like pedophiles, but in the corporate space or anything like that?
It's in the works.
There's a lot of that out there.
There's a lot of talk about it, yeah.
And there are people who would like to see me do it, and I've had meetings about it.
And, you know, again, it's harder to do something like that.
Right.
There's a lot of legalities, I'm sure.
There's a lot of legalities, a lot of gray.
I mean, what's wrong is wrong.
I mean, if you're a boss, you should not be hitting on an employee or doing some of the stuff that those have been accused of out on this side of the country.
It would be.
Well, I think you would need to have people come to you and say, this is my horrific story.
And then you would have to go backwards and say, okay, how do we capture this on hidden camera?
How do we prove it?
How do we show viewers what happened?
How do we take viewers inside the crime?
Right.
And then figure out a way to do a confrontation.
We just can't go be damned out of doors in private offices around the country.
But there are ways to do it.
And if the right cases come along where we know this is what's happening, we know it's wrong.
We know it's illegal and actionable that we'd take a look at doing it.
It's interesting, man.
Yeah, because I grew up.
My mother was a provider for me and my siblings.
And so I remember there were times where I know she was trying to get involved with different business or move up in her ladder.
And there were just times I even felt as a child that whatever maybe she'd been taking advantage of.
Even as a kid, I remember getting a specific feeling like that.
Like a man had mistreated her.
Well, I think any woman of a certain age has a story about looking back on a situation saying, ooh, that was a little creepy or that was inappropriate.
And what was accepted in even newsrooms across the country in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s is just, you know, people look at it today and say, well, how did that even happen?
Yeah, now you couldn't say like, you know, get your bosom up, Rhonda.
We got to sell it.
I remember as a young reporter and anchor, having a general manager walk in and berate my female co-anchor who also did the weather because a certain part of her anatomy was covering Montana and just in front of the newsroom.
And having her apologize.
Today she'd get a chance to move the problem with that.
Yeah, I mean, it was cruder than that.
I'll spare your audience the exact language.
But, you know, I look back on that stuff.
And this is like 1981, 82. Yeah.
And, you know, he'd have been fired for sure.
And here you have this woman who's just trying to do her job.
Right.
Who's a good reporter?
And she's apologizing because of part of her anatomy was covering the lousy weather map that we had in that market in 1982.
I mean, it's insane to think that that happened.
Yeah.
I mean, in front of the whole newsroom.
That map might have had three Indianas on it.
Who knows how much?
Didn't you know what it was?
Yeah, it was pretty cheap.
No, it is interesting.
But it's also, we're in a time now where we're kind of prosecuting historically sometimes in a weird space in the world.
So, yeah, it's interesting.
It's like things that I would say even 15 years ago or 20 years ago to someone, almost anyone, man or woman, some things.
It's like, man, when I watch even old stand-up, I'm like, man, I couldn't even say that now.
Yeah, it's changed for the better.
You know, I hope it doesn't continue.
Over that will.
I don't think so either.
I think it's swinging back a little bit.
I'm feeling it in the comedy world.
I'm feeling things start to like enough is enough.
Like, I do think some things have needed to be noticed.
We do need to notice what a lot of women have been through.
Like, even as you said, like, we were talking in the beginning about victims, like women are always kind of the victim, like, or have been the victim a lot of times.
Absolutely.
And especially in the workplace.
I mean, again, whether it's your mother or, you know, your significant other or your girlfriend or, I mean, everybody of a certain age has a story.
Yeah.
That looking back, they might have just laughed off or said, ah, you're hysterical and, you know, made sure they didn't get put one-on-one with that person again.
Right.
But, you know, it's unfair.
Yeah.
Fundamentally.
Yeah.
Fundamentally, it's unfair.
And I think we're getting to that place in society now where it's like, yeah, it's like we're getting to a place where we're starting to be able to look back at what we've done.
It's almost like a comfortable level and a comfortability.
I think we're getting there.
Where we can look back and like see, okay, here are some ways where things could have maybe been different.
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And now back to the episode.
Do you feel like, did you have a good relationship with Hollywood?
Have you always had a good relationship with Hollywood?
Yeah, but it's pretty limited.
My relationship with Hollywood is a cameo appearance on 30 Rock or Blackish.
Right, right.
You know, on Will Farrell's Funnier Die.
You know, I enjoy that.
It's fun stuff to do.
It gets you out there.
But I mean, even with your own show, like when you're, like when you went, like, did things get weird at the end of Predator?
You know, like, was there any issues with Hollywood?
Like, were they?
You saw a different version of yourself being played in an entertainment world, which is always interesting.
It almost jumped the shark a little bit.
Still today.
I mean, you know, I remember getting a phone call.
One of the guys who does my security also did security for Saturday Night Live.
And Ronnie Knight, who's a former NYPD and had his own security company for years.
And I still bring him out of retirement for, you know, that's the versus Predator.
When do we do it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Track him.
I just asked him, can you still shoot straight?
That's all I want to know.
So he calls me one day, he said, hey, Bill Hayter is doing you tonight on SNL.
So I got to the rehearsal and I was watching and they did a whole thing, the Chris Hansen show, where they had different actors on SNL portray Hollywood celebs.
And so they'd walk out and Hayter, who was imitating me, would pop up from behind the desk and they had a band and the whole thing.
And they'd say, what are you doing here?
And the guest would say, well, I came here to be interviewed.
You invited me on your show.
And he goes, what's in the bag?
I don't know.
Your producer told me to walk out with it.
And so they obviously pull out the, you know, the whatever's in there.
Yeah, the condoms and whatever else.
And then he said, you can go.
Well, you didn't ask you any questions.
Oh, I'm done with you now.
And he goes out and he gets arrested.
So I'm sitting in the audience and they come out after dress rehearsal to take their bow and I see hater and hater sees me because I'm in the front row of the secretary.
And he's just like this.
I said, it's fine.
I get it.
You know, you're all good.
Don't worry about it.
Was there, like, as you started to become very famous, you know, because that's happened over your career.
And, you know, fame is a different thing, you know, and like, and in my, even in this year of my career, my career is like exponentially increased, right?
And to me, it's like, it's, it's, I'm grateful.
And at the same time, it's a little alarming because I get scared of my own ego and like things that can happen if I get a wrong idea of myself, you know?
Did any, did you start to notice some of that in your world?
Like.
Yeah, just the recognition factor, you know, taking my kids to a baseball game or just, you know, in general being out in public, you know, especially here in LA, there's a lot of that.
And, you know, New York, yeah, you get stopped on the street.
But it's cool, but it's also, to me, it's cool and it's also scary.
How did you kind of interpret some of that?
I know you've had a long career.
Like, you know, my best friend, I wanted to be a journalist.
We wanted to be broadcast journalists when we were young.
And he started in like in Mississippi and he went to a market in some small markets and then he made your way up to anchor at WWL in New Orleans.
It was just neat because he did that process and I kind of did broadcast from a stage as a stand-up.
Exactly.
But once you start to get popular and stuff, people start to – did you start to notice that and feel that?
Like how did that kind of – There was always some recognition.
Right.
You know, especially the morning after a piece would air, you know, people would stop and talk to you or ask about it or do whatever.
And very much in law enforcement circles because so much of the lawsuits.
Oh, that's interesting.
You know, cop will stop you walking through the airport.
And yeah, they just want to chat or take a picture or something like that.
But I was with my sons.
I'm from Detroit originally, and I'm back there a lot.
Sorry about your Lions.
I know.
Well, we were at the Thanksgiving game, yeah.
Beautiful, wonderful seats.
Of course, you watch the Lions do very well against the Bears in the first half and then go to hell in a handbag after that.
Yeah, I'm a big Barry's hand fan.
That's a whole IMT.
I'm a big Lions fan.
You're from Wichita.
A lot of people didn't know that about Barry Sanders.
He's from Wichita.
You know, I wouldn't have been able to answer that question.
It's kind of interesting.
But anyway, yeah, I'm a Saints fan, so we're doing good this year, but I've always, you know, B.J. Armstrong, I see him at the gym.
He used to play for the Chicago Bulls, and he's like a big Lions fan.
You know where B.J. Armstrong went to high school?
Brother Rice High School.
Is that where you went?
I'm pretty sure it was Brother Rice High School.
I shouldn't.
I went to Brother Rice in Birmingham, Michigan, yeah.
I should double-check that.
He's a super sweet.
I have it in my mind that he went to Brother Rice.
He went to Brother Rice.
Yeah, Brother Rice in Birmingham, right?
Yeah, I thought so.
In Michigan.
Yeah, that's where I went to.
Yeah, that's where I went to high school.
Now, he was probably five years younger than me.
Yeah.
But he was a standout and well-known.
Yeah, he's always, but anyway, he's a big Lions fan.
And so I'll get to like.
Well, where all the Lions will learn.
I mean, we're, you know, Paul and I were sitting right there.
I just, you know, come on, let's do it.
But I think people in Michigan, Detroit appreciate it.
They appreciate, you know, seeing me with my gang cutting down a Christmas tree in the suburbs.
I think they appreciate being at a tiger game or a Lions game.
And, you know, I very much have a presence there.
In fact, one of the shows I'm working on, one of the new shows, is a crime-based show that's going to be a lot of Detroit.
And I still feel very connected there.
I'm there.
That's awesome.
That's really cool to hear, man.
If there's ever anything that I can do as a comedian to come and do like a fundraiser or something, let me know.
Oh, sure, yeah.
That's cool.
You know, one thing I noticed, we grew up in kind of like an impoverished area, and we would get more, we would get a lot of those sex offender registry cards on our door lot because a lot of poor neighborhoods can't keep, they don't have HOAs that can like, you know, even hypothetically scare off pedophiles and predators sometimes.
So I remember being, you know, in a lot of environments where you would have neighbors that, you know, were abused or, you know, guys that were doing things that were illegal, you know, and it was a little, it wasn't common, but it was more part of the world in more of like an impoverished area because there aren't any HOAs.
You know, parents are working.
There's only a single parent family known as that.
A lot of latch key kids.
Yeah.
And it gets, I just remember it being kind of scary.
So, yeah, I mean, if there's ever anything that I can do to help be a part of that, man, I would gladly come and help you.
I try to do stuff like that for not only groups that, you know, raise money for awareness of issues with kids, but also, you know, the opiate addiction crisis.
Yeah.
And I try to do stuff for areas.
It's big in a lot of Americans.
It's, you know, I was looking at there were 70,000 overdoses, overdose deaths in America in 2017.
And 28,400 of them were fentanyl involved.
And it's, you know, more than car wrecks, more than gunshots, more than 10 years ago.
It has gotten so bad that for the first time, the life expectancy of an American has dropped by a tenth of a year.
Do you think it's like as humans, we're do you think we're running out of like a desire to engage in life or something?
Do you think there's a bigger thing going on that we're not seeing besides the fact that the medicine itself is addictive?
Well, I think it's out there more.
I mean, you know, I graduated from Michigan State University in 1981.
And when I started there, weed was decriminalized in East Lansing and in Ann Arbor, where University of Michigan is.
And so it wasn't a big deal.
The drinking age was 18. If you only have a few beers, you had a few beers.
And, you know, people had, you know, pot around the dorm rooms.
And didn't seem like anybody was really abusing it.
It wasn't this mystery.
And then, you know, it sort of went away with the war on drugs and obviously cocaine and crack.
And I watched that as a reporter, Detroit, what that did to Detroit and the drug dealers and, you know, front lines of that.
Chambers Brothers and White Boy Rick and all that.
I mean, I lived that, you know, in the 80s and 90s, you know, right in the thick of it.
And I think with the advent of the opiates, I think so many young people follow that same road where, you know, somebody shows up freshman or sophomore year with a bottle of this stuff.
Yeah.
And you're all good with it for a long time.
And you take one once a week or on a Friday night or Saturday night.
And suddenly it snaps back and it owns you.
And you can't get it.
You can't get the prescription.
You can get it on Craigslist for $60 for two pills, but you're trying to stay on the budget that your parents set for you and what you can earn.
And suddenly you can't get it and you're desperate.
And so heroin is way cheaper.
These kids start snorting their heroin.
Then they figure out if they inject it, they only have to do it once a day as opposed to three times a day.
And then they're into that.
It's almost necessity at a certain point that leads them down.
That's why they call it chasing the dragon.
You're always chasing that first high.
Is that synonymous a little bit, you think, with the pornography and how it can lead people down?
Well, I think addiction is addiction, whether it's alcohol or drugs or pornography or any number of things.
But I think that this opiate crisis, and a year ago, we did this story outside of Dayton, Ohio, right around Dayton, in Montgomery County, Ohio, which per capita had the highest number of overdoses in the country.
And who's to think?
They had Mexican cartel members living in Dayton, Ohio, because it's way safer to be there.
And the Sheriff's Department and the task force was very aggressive.
We rode with them.
And literally, they were doing a buy bust.
And while the confidential informant was waiting for the dealer to buy the heroin so we could bust him, another dealer came by and threw her a pack and said, hey, try this.
It's got my phone number on it.
It's cheaper and better.
Jesus.
I mean, in a snowstorm.
Yeah.
In Dayton Hall.
Grassroots marketing.
That's what I'm saying.
But I mean, no, it's, yeah.
But that's it.
That's what's happening.
It's happening everywhere, everywhere in the country.
No, it's wild, man.
Like, you know, like, you know, I go to a lot of meetings and stuff like that in that recovery universe, and it's sad, man.
I mean, it's especially when you see young people, you know.
And that's the saddest thing, I think, you know, even hearing some of your stories is like, because, you know, when it's wild how sometimes I'm still a child in some ways, but in other ways, like, you know, at least now I can get a perception of things.
I can see what's going on.
I have a clear view of the world a little bit.
And yeah, how susceptible you realize you were when you were a kid and almost how grateful you were that some things just didn't come along that locked you into something that you couldn't.
You know what always strikes me is, you know, the random nature of this stuff.
In crime, this person made a left-hand turn and ended up being, you know, carjacked and killed.
This person went the other way and is fine.
This person was presented with a roommate who had drugs.
This person didn't.
It doesn't make them good or bad, but it's just, you know, what if they had not been presented with that opportunity and never took the pill?
Yeah.
It's vexing.
And, you know, what's interesting is the level of prescriptions being written for opiates has gone down, yet the overdose is still rising.
So it'll be interesting to see with all this education awareness treatment, what happens when they tabulate 2018 to see if it hopefully starts to come down.
When you do shows like To Catch a Predator, do you feel like you are doing that for kids?
Do you feel like you are doing that to, is it entertainment?
Do you feel, just in your own person, do you feel like there's a...
I mean, you know, there's no question.
Having said that, you know, I feel that I'm doing it for parents and kids.
Right.
Parents.
I understand the ratings value, the popularity of it, and I understand why.
And there are undeniably some humorous moments.
I mean, you think, you know, some guy some guy put together the top five most humorous moments.
Yeah, went through all those this week.
10 million hits, 12 million hits.
Exactly.
I mean, people just watch it over and over again.
And people know the characters.
Yeah.
You know what I do?
I do feel like it's deterred a lot of people probably from going down that road of getting caught in the internet and staying indoors and getting into these dark circles.
I hope so.
And again, it comes back to raising awareness and creating a dialogue.
But it still stuns me.
I mean, the last investigation we did, I identified myself, I'm Chris Hansen.
He said, no, you're not.
I go, oh, yes, I am.
Oh, no, you're not.
I said, well, look, I get the first investigation I did was in 2004, but I don't look that much older.
And I certainly sound the same.
You know, I may have been off my diet for a minute and gained five or 10,000, but I mean, it's Chris Hansen, trust me.
You ever thought of opening like a chair store, like have a seat?
I thought about that.
It was interesting.
The second investigation we did, as I mentioned earlier, was outside of Washington, D.C., and it was at the home of a longtime acquaintance who was a retired FBI agent.
And that was one of the investigations where a guy came in naked.
And, you know, imagine that scene.
That's the whipped cream guy, too?
Was it the same?
That was the other naked guy.
That was in Florida.
So the Washington, D.C. guy comes in, and he comes in naked.
And, you know, I had the towel on top of the refrigerator.
I said, why don't you wrap that around?
But he sat on the stool.
And so that stool became famous.
And I said, you may want to have that disinfectant.
So the fellow, Greg Schwartz, sent it to another friend of ours, Danny Dietz in Detroit, and said, this is a piece of, you know, Predator memorable history.
He's got it sealed in plastic in a closet in some place.
Oh, I bet a small museum people would go see.
I bet a small Fed Ticketer Predator Museum or the Chris Hansen Museum.
I bet people would go to see different artifacts from that type of stuff.
I mean, there's just such an infatuation with it.
There's such a curiosity.
I'm trying to think of a couple of other, like, do you think that after having seen a lot of these people that have these diseases of being predators?
And I don't know if it's, and I might use some of the terminology wrong, right?
But do you think that it's a sickness that can be repaired sometimes?
I think sometimes.
Look, I think these guys break down into three different categories.
And I'm not a psychiatrist, but based upon everything I've seen and done, and I've interviewed some of the top people in this field, and one of the problems in society is there are not enough men and women in this field.
It's not a glamorous segment of medical practice.
I mean, do you want to be the doctor who spent how many countless years studying to be a specialist and spend your time in prisons talking to child sex offenders?
Right.
People who are addicted to childborn.
Is that what you want to do?
Now, there are some very dedicated people who do some very important work, and many of them are connected to the U.S. Marshals who, you know, sort of on a federal level are in charge of monitoring the sex offenders around the country.
We'd love to have one of those people, and that'd be really interesting, I think.
It is.
You might be able to set us up.
I'll hook you up.
I know a really good guy who's based out of the Washington, D.C. area.
Cool.
But, you know, they break down into three different categories.
One is, you know, the heavy hitter who'd be doing this with or without the internet and can't be cured.
The second one is, you know, as we discussed earlier, the guy who wouldn't be doing this without the internet, the 24-hour access, the addictive nature, and the anonymity.
And so these guys get out there, do it.
It doesn't make it any less wrong, but they get hooked into the whole online culture.
And then there's young guys, as we discussed, who are mopey and antisocial, and they're just trying to make some sort of a connection.
And if they're 19 or 20 and they're talking to a girl who's 13 or 14, well, in two years, theoretically, it would be legal.
And I think they think that way.
And those are the guys who Get wrapped on the knuckles and probably never do it again.
But we had a case in the last investigation where a guy walked in and he was 19, but he was a towering presence.
And he went in for the hug of this girl, and it was disturbing.
Now, the guy ended up breaking down in the interview and saying, I'm a loser and I'm overweight and I want to be a cop, but I can't do that.
And I can't make friends.
As a parent.
Yeah, how do you feel about that?
Yeah, I felt sorry for him.
So that's when it turns into me saying, look, as bad as this situation is, go to your parents, get some help, straighten it around, get going in the right direction.
And is that genuine from you when you say that to this person?
Yeah, I don't want to see this 19-year-old kid get jammed up.
But at the same time, we've got them talking to two different decoys posing as 12 or 13-year-old girls.
And if they were real girls, what's going to happen?
Yeah, no, look, man, I'll love it because this is, you know, that's a question I've always had from watching Scatcher Predator and some of those types of things.
So it's good to hear, like, it's good to think of putting those things on the scale and think about which one really can weigh heavier if it gets out of hand, you know?
So to the young guys who are struggling, to a young guy who maybe, you know, spends a lot of time by himself online and he's looked at too much pornography and maybe he's gotten into some strange spaces, what kind of suggestions do you tell those guys like that if there are any listening?
Because I think that pornography and that kind of stuff is really, it can be an opiate, you know?
And I think there are therapists who specialize in this, too.
And I think there are programs just for alcohol and drugs.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's sex addiction, sex and love addiction.
And, you know, you see this all the time with these poor women.
You talk about being victimized, you know, on these sweetheart swindles.
And this is a story that I've been wanting to do for a long time is, you know, I'm not talking about a guy who's trying to meet women online who's saying he's got a PhD when he only has a master's.
I'm talking about somebody who says they're an astronaut when they've got a criminal history.
You know, I mean, it's a big difference there.
But you see all the time, and we've done the, you know, the stories where these women are vulnerable.
They're working two jobs to support their kids.
And their only social outlet is online.
And these guys know that.
And whether it's a Nigerian-style scam where they're looking for money or they're having them buy electronics and they're selling them, we've seen it all.
We had a case one time where we're doing the Nigerian scams and we set up a drop site or we're looking for a drop site and we found one that was outside of Rochester, New York.
And we knock on the door and we posed as delivery guys.
It was CH delivery and the slogan was we absolutely positively guarantee you're going to get it.
So we deliver a bunch of packages.
So we finally get the guy who's getting all the packages and we want to get him into a controlled environment where we can do a hidden camera interview.
And so I'm in a warehouse office and all these boxes and I'm hoping he doesn't touch the boxes because they're all empty.
And I'm not really undercover.
I mean, I've got a sweatshirt, a tiger's ball cap on, and I'm sitting there.
And I said, well, you know, how did you meet this woman for whom you are, you know, taking delivery of all this stuff?
And he said, well, I met her online.
But he said, you got to be really careful on those chat sites.
I said, why is that?
He goes, well, that Chris Hansen, you know, he's out there.
He's going to catch you.
And I'm sitting there.
I said, I said, yeah, he's a pretty sharp guy, isn't he?
And I want to say handsome too, but I thought that might have been pushed a little bit.
But yeah, this is all on camera.
Good posture as well, actually, the guy.
And so we have him back again.
And this is not playing.
This is just.
It plays out.
He goes, you know, that, and again, I'm not, I didn't, you know, I've done stuff undercover where the makeup people will put a beard on and they'll make me dirty and messy and all that.
But this is, you know, basically with a fleece and a ball cap on.
And he just laid it all out there.
And so we had him back again.
I said, look, you know, I got to tell you, you know, I am.
You know, and jaw dropped and I said, we're going to try.
He was an innocent victim.
Yeah.
He was getting played.
Right.
You know, and he had this, you know, this woman was, you know, set pictures and real, you know, looker.
And of course, it wasn't reality.
It was fake.
The scammers had gotten the picture from someplace.
And, you know, we traced it back to a Danish softborn swimsuit site or something that they just clipped it.
Yeah, when I used to, sometimes I used to do drugs and I would be at night and I would look at like pornography and stuff on the internet.
You know, I did it like I would be by myself.
And that was my kind of thing.
Like I wasn't out partying.
I would do some cocaine and stuff by myself at home.
Right.
And my audience knows about this.
And so, and I would find myself, I would, you know, you start looking at escort sites and stuff like that.
And then a lot of those pictures, they're not even real.
Like it's all, there's just such a scam.
There's so much of a scam online.
It's such a fake world.
Just go to Craigslist sometime.
Yeah.
You know, and they got rid of the site that advertised, you know, those.
But it exists in other places within Craigslist.
And, you know, I'm not casting aspersions on Craigslist, but the reality is that, you know, there are millions and millions and millions of people buying and selling things across the world at any given moment.
And Craigslist has, you know, 40 or 50 people monitoring it.
Now, they cooperate with law enforcement.
They do their due diligence, but it's almost ungovernable.
Right.
And so when we do a human trafficking investigation, oftentimes it is on a site like that.
And it's Craigslist is, you know, we purchased drugs.
We found alleged hitmen.
We've seen all kinds of stuff.
That hitman thing's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You tried to save me across from in Bryan Park one afternoon.
Really?
Having him give you the price list to curt or make somebody disappear.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
It reminds me of Napoleonic Code.
I'm from Louisiana.
And so there they have, like, if you lose an arm, you get, there's no lawsuit.
Like, you get 40 grand.
You know what I'm saying?
There's no, it's like pirate law.
Yeah.
You know?
Like, you lose a thumb, that's $11,000.
We're not going to court.
Right.
Come pick up your check.
I'm trying to think of one other question that I had that was specifically.
Nick, is there anything else that you think of?
I was just wondering If there's any people that you're fans of that you found out were big fans of you and the show and like or like massive fans?
Yeah, have you ended up in any wild like has somebody said, you know, Chris Hanson, I want you to be at this event and then you're like, next thing you know, you and Mike Tyson are playing squash together?
You know, I've met some people over the years, you know, celebrities and such, who one who I won't embarrass, but I was at the U.S. Open once and sitting in a nice, you know, box suite type setting.
And I'm a big tennis fan and try to play as much as possible.
And an actor came up to me and he had just gotten engaged.
His fiancé was there.
He pulls me aside.
He said, hey, I got to thank you.
I said, why?
Well, the girl I dated before her, she used to get so turned on when we'd watch her show.
I said, well, got to help her brother out.
Oh, nice, man.
Yeah.
Was there seeing the shows and being a part of To Catch a Predator and did it adjust the way that you raised your own children?
You know, or did it make for the way you'd raised your own children?
Yeah, you know, it, you know, they watched it with me on the couch.
You know, and they grew up in an environment where, you know, FBI agents were over socially, judges, other reporters.
You know, I joke my oldest son, his first assignment was he was 18 months old, and I had him in a backpack.
And I was at a gun and knife show in Detroit on eight mile at the armory.
And, you know, I had a hidden camera hidden in the baby backpack.
It's going to work a day.
Oh, you're going to work with a day.
It's way more interesting.
What'd you guys do today?
Oh, nothing.
And they're all looking at cute baby.
And they've got the tri-blast illegal trigger additions to make a semi-automatic automatic.
And then, you know, so he went along on that and got the video and got back in the car.
And we're driving back home.
And this is in Detroit, as I said, and we're almost home.
And the pager and cell phone goes off.
And Dr. Kvorkian had performed a meticide on the, so we pull in there and the producers got him.
And then I'm doing a live shot for the 6 o'clock news on a Saturday on another Kvorkian incident.
So they've always been around it.
And so I never said you should go into it.
Right.
But I wasn't going to prevent them from doing it.
And it's interesting because one is so behind the scenes.
You said one just got his first news or anchor job somewhere?
He's been a reporter for the last two years up in Traverse City, Michigan for a new station.
He just got a job in Oklahoma City, which is a nice jump.
That's cool, yeah.
That's a bigger market.
Yeah.
And so I'm going to drive out with him, I think, get him settled and get back to work myself.
Do you enjoy being a dad?
Is it fun?
Yeah.
I mean, I have a very cool situation because, you know, I've got, you know, the two oldest are 27 and 24. And then, you know, my significant other's kids who I'm very close with are going to be 19 and are 17. So, you know, I learned a lot.
Right.
And it's sometimes easy.
I never had someone who was a daughter before.
So it's, you know, that's a whole different thing.
But they're both great.
Everybody gets along.
It's a nice blended situation.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's really pretty cool.
But, but you do learn some stuff.
So when you get a shot at being helpful, or as I say, I'm just an unpaid advisor.
So you can come to me for advice.
At the end of the day, talk to your mom.
She's the one who's in charge here.
Yeah.
Do you do when you look forward to like the future of like, I guess almost a lot of the guys you caught on to catch predator were men.
Yeah.
Is there a reason?
Well, if you ask the people who really know the psychology of it, they'll tell you that when it comes to female predators, you're more likely to see the teacher and the student.
Right.
Because the female predator doesn't get off on the anonymity, where the male predator sort of likes the anonymity and it gives them a sense of excitement.
Like a hunting thing or something, maybe.
Or just, I don't know what's going to happen.
Right.
Yeah, man, it's fascinating.
After meeting a lot of these people face to face, do you feel like there's just did it make you feel worse about humanity or better about humanity or did it have any effect on you like that?
Well, it's, you know, I was on Jon Stewart's show one time.
He said, you know, what do these guys have in common?
And I said, what they have in common is they typically don't stand out in a crowd.
They don't have, you know, the word predator emblazoned on their forehead in scarlet letters.
It could be the guy, you know, standing next to you at the grocery store or the dry cleaner.
And to which Stewart said, I'd find another dry cleaner if I'm here.
But they don't stand out of the crowd.
You know, it's guys who have darkness within them who are committing this crime.
After doing stand-up for about 14 years or whatever, I've been doing it.
I start to get a sense of the crowd when I'm there.
I can tell in the first couple of moments where the laughter is coming from, if everybody's having a good time, if people aren't.
I can get a vibe if somebody in the distance is starting to pay their check or if them and their wife even aren't getting along.
At a certain point, you really get some kind of keen senses.
Do you start to have those senses when you're just out in the regular world of sexual predators and people that might be deviant?
Well, that's tough to do.
Right, it is tough to do, but do you feel like at moments that there's any because it can only build in you because you've had that much experience.
But honestly, I can't decide whether it's just me being overly suspicious of somebody who may look overly suspicious or whether I'm just reading it into something.
But I do know what you're talking about in terms of the vibe because I give a lot of speeches and do a lot of fundraisers.
And you know when you're engaged.
You know when you're on a roll.
You know when you own them.
You know when you lean into the bike and people are listening.
And you have to remember that when you're doing the broadcast, when you're doing an interview with somebody, and take them on that journey of discovery and kind of just get in their heads and peel it away like an onion.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
It's just, have you ever been at a dinner party and a man's come over to you and said, hey, Chris, I'm having a problem, like on a side or something like that?
Frequently I'll get people approach me in public settings and say, or even on the Internet, on social platforms, and say, I was victimized.
Oh, wow.
And thank you for the show.
It probably makes me feel comfort in some way.
Well, it does.
And you end up hearing all about it, whether it was a priest thing or a teacher thing or a stepfather thing.
On one hand, it's like, okay, I'm glad we're able to be helpful.
And they're just really reaching out to say, it soothes the pain a little bit.
And I just can't imagine, yeah, being victimized that way or having a child who is victimized.
It's a dark arts, man.
I'd come unglued if it happened to a loved one.
I mean, honestly, I just, I don't know that I could be the guy who just stood back and, I mean, it would just.
Yeah.
I mean, it's wrong that it happens to anyone.
But I'm saying suddenly it sure, you know.
Yeah, you're trying, yeah, how you would feel if that was in your world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's striking.
I mean, it's a huge thing.
I think it's why, you know, it's a dark, it's such a darkness.
I think that's why, you know, like you're saying, it's so fascinating to people.
You know, it's just such a, it's such a taboo kind of.
Well, and, you know, most people thankfully go through life without being the victim of a crime.
Yeah.
You know, and again, I get accused sometimes of creating fear amongst my loved ones about, you know, coming and going and parking lots and locking doors and, you know, the usual stuff.
But, you know, I've seen some random stuff where people in safe areas get victimized just by being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
And it's not always a diabolical serial killer like in the movies.
I mean, it's just kids who take advantage and make a wrong decision and suddenly they're criminalized.
I'm sure you've had an instance where you just went to sit in an area at an airport or something and some dude saw you come and sit near him and lost freak, just got super scared.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like people must think anywhere you go that you're always on the bus.
I mean, you were standing in the lobby at Discovery, you know, on 3rd Avenue in New York City, you know, with my rollerbag that's sitting right over there.
Yeah.
And you're like, wait, what?
I remember one time I was looking, it was years ago, and it might even have been before Predator, but we had just done some hidden camera stuff.
And I was looking at an item, and the guy is showing it to me, and sweat starts pouring out of his forehead.
I said, hey, man, you all right?
You know, and it was just last minute Christmas, I mean, and he says, do you have a hidden camera on me right now?
I said, no, no, no.
I mean, I'm just, you know, like, you know, on 47th Street trying to figure something out at the last minute.
I've seen a lightsaber, brother.
I said, calm, chill.
I've seen a massage chair guy.
I went to the pharmacy in the office building, and my doctor had prescribed a bunch of different antibiotics traveling overseas.
So there's, you know, there's five different antibiotics.
And if you were to take them all together, you could get sick or die.
But that's not the point of it.
The point of it was to have it.
And if I got sick, I could call the doctor and say, what should I do?
And he could say, okay, take this one for that.
And so the pharmacist looks at me and he said, I'm going to fill this, but are you trying to trick me into giving too many of the wrong things with counterindication?
No, no.
I carry this with me.
It's approved by my doctor.
And this is just what I do when I travel overseas.
Have you ever gotten to meet John Walsh?
Yeah, I know John Walsh.
Do you really?
Yeah.
He and I, I did some work for the National Center for Missing Exploited Children and was honored to receive an award from them a few years back and got to know John through that.
And John does some stuff with LexisNexis and LexisNexis was very helpful to us.
We had sort of a cooperative effort on some investigative stories.
So yeah, John's a great guy.
He's a really neat man.
He's a good guy.
I was actually down in Florida just after that case occurred.
And I just could not imagine having gone through that and the strain on a relationship, the loss of a young child.
There's a lot of things I could survive, but I give him and his wife as well just such great credit for the way they've channeled this into something positive.
When you say that, yeah, there was something about them that made it so like you can see what's going on on his face so well.
Like it made it so human.
Like it made it so.
And here's a young couple who had it all late life down in Florida, and suddenly Adam's gone.
And I started in Tampa.
I went from Lansing to Tampa after that occurred, but it wasn't too long after.
And one of my cameramen was actually working on the east coast of Florida when they found Adam's head floating in a canal.
And he would tell the story.
And you can see just being the cameraman out there, it just affected him at such a level that he just never, you know, it was seared into his mind.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
I think, yeah, I think it just made that kind of stuff just so human to everyone, you know, and especially watching he and his wife use how you saw their relationship part, but them still have the foundation.
Well, they held it together.
You know, as far as I know, I mean, I don't pretend to be, you know, in contact with them regularly.
Oh, I thought there was a point, maybe, and I could be wrong.
I thought there was a point during, I remember seeing the movie or reading something where I thought that they had to separate from each other at a point because they were just losing their minds.
I think they all pulled it back together.
Yeah.
Both of them did.
What a fascinating, I mean, what a sad story, but what a fascinating story.
This is Nick from Maryland.
Chris Hansen, huge fan.
Two questions or two-part question, whatever.
These guys always seem to come up with crazy excuses as to why they're there, I guess not knowing that you already know.
So what's the funniest or craziest or wildest one that you've ever heard?
And then the second part would be, what's the craziest thing that's happened that's never been on, you know, aired on TV?
Well, I'll take the second one first.
Everything has aired that was appropriate, but there's no one scene that was crazy and wild that we didn't put on.
Okay.
I mean, we might have had to edit around rough language or rough video or pictures that the predator may have sent.
But everything that happened, the viewer saw.
In terms of the excuses, I mean, I've heard them all.
I was just coming over to take care of the young woman to make sure she didn't do anything wrong until her mother got home.
Bad one.
I thought the house was for sale.
I said, well, who told you the house was for sale?
Well, my friend.
I said, what's your friend's name?
Roger.
I said, what's Roger's phone number?
And I pulled my cell phone.
I said, let's call Roger right now and see how he found out this house was for sale.
And we had one down at Florida, where the guy shows up and he's a real estate executive.
And he pulled it again.
He said, well, I thought the house was for sale.
I said, so you didn't just write down the number on the sign?
And where is the sign?
Well, there's no sign.
He said, well, you know, then I saw the young woman and she was waving at me and I wanted to make sure she was okay.
Well, you know, they're talking on the phone.
They're texting back and forth.
So he walks in and I'm reading him the transcripts.
I said, you said this to someone who identified themselves as a 13, 14 year old girl.
He said, no, I would never say that.
My computer is in my office, which is upstairs in my home, and my wife and daughter were downstairs.
I said, well, let me read further.
Wow.
I have to be very careful talking to you like this because my wife and daughter are downstairs.
I'm up in my office.
Oh, hello.
Was there and was that both parts of the question?
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
Is there an arch nemesis out there that you've always wanted to catch that you haven't been able to?
Like that big, like a big fish, you know?
Not really.
You know, a lot of these things develop as, you know, crimes become not more popular, but more active.
And, you know, you sort of see a trend coming, whether it's the opiates or whether it's human trafficking, and you pursue that.
If you find along the way that there is a person who is the kingpin of this particular crime, yeah, of course, you want to pursue that.
But do you have one that swims around in the back of your head where you're like, oh, you know, there's a dark artist out there that I need to catch?
You know, there was a story, a case, a series of killings in suburban Detroit when I was in high school and college called the Oakland County Child Killer.
And the victims were both male and female.
And this one hits home because a family that I became friendly with later in life as a reporter had lost a child in this string of killings.
And it was just bizarre and random and good kids from good homes.
Nobody was at risk.
And there are theories as to who the killer was, or perhaps there were two killers because there were male and female victims, but they never have charged the case.
It has always haunted me.
I'd love to be able to solve that.
I'd like to be able to give the family closure on that.
And again, there have been some people identified over the years, and I've reported on it.
But nothing ever definitive.
No charges were ever brought.
Which is sad, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, this goes back to the late 70s.
Do you feel a little bit like you have a responsibility to bust people?
I mean, and I use the term bust, like, I don't even know, but do you feel like you have a responsibility to catch these predators because you have such a profile in that space now?
Like, do you feel like there's this ticking time clock?
Like, you know, even just with your own life and livelihood, I mean, I know you're still pretty young, but it's like, you know, I have this platform, you know, and we, because that's a rare platform.
It's like, you know.
No, you're right.
And whether it's, you know, the actual, you know, child predators, you know, or predators targeting children is a better way to put it.
Or something else.
I mean, yeah, I feel like I have this currency that I can use and a brand that I can use to go route these things out.
And I have, you know, a great team of folks around me who, you know, want to work and do these things and do important work.
And it's, you know, this is a funny business, as you know.
I mean, I'll go, there are periods of the year where I'm seven days a week and then, you know, you have two months off and then you're waiting for the next thing.
And so it can be a little herky jerky, but it does weigh heavily on me that, you know, I'm that God.
Yeah.
And while I love my summertime in Michigan, you know, I got stuff to do.
Yeah.
And I got stuff to do.
I like that.
Yeah.
So, and we're, we're teeing it all up right now.
Good.
A lot of exciting stuff coming up, including more Predator.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, well, we'd love to, you know, be able to support in any way.
And I genuinely meant that.
Like, you know, I've never offered to go and do a show if there's someone you guys are doing for fundraising to help with that, with that, something like that.
And that may be 10 years from now.
You never know.
I've been fortunate throughout my career to meet people in entertainment and to meet people in the music world who have big hearts.
Kid rocks that way.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it.
He'll pick up the newspaper in Detroit and see somebody in distress and tell one of his writers check and I don't want any attention, just send it over there.
I mean, he does this stuff all the time.
Nobody, you know, he doesn't seek attention for it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
It just, I mean, it really hurts my heart when I think about, you know, just kids, something happening to kids and them not being able to, you know, just even realize that life can have joy in it because something like stunts them at such a point, you know.
Yeah, and it could be being a victim of a crime.
Or, you know, there was a story in the papers this morning about a kid in Britain of Middle Eastern descent who was, you know, harassed at school and bullied at school.
And they sort of, according to the story, you know, simulated waterboarding the kid in the playground.
And it's like, oh, God, I mean.
Yeah.
What makes kids so mean sometimes?
The whole bullying culture is something that needs to be dealt with, too.
Yeah.
There's a lot of space out there for you to, there's a lot, you know, you're kind of a shark and there's a lot of space for you to swim in, you know?
Do you have to be cognizant of your own behaviors too sometimes?
Because you worry like that you're going to be under such a microscope though.
Like I think about that sometimes like, you know, like shit, if I start talking about something or being in a world, am I going to somehow, in a way that I don't even know, bring that into my own life?
Well, you know, the truth is, I lead a pretty, you know, sedate life.
Sedate's not the right word, but centered at least.
But it's true.
I mean, if you are the guy who's using hidden cameras to catch people, you should be aware of that when you're out in public and govern yourself appropriately.
It's no longer an issue.
And when I was young enough to be running around, it was mostly before the internet and cell phones, much less cell phone video.
So it doesn't take much to get dusted up if you're not paying attention all the time.
I've watched the show.
I've seen it.
I've seen the show.
I've been in the show.
Anything else, Nick?
Yeah, here's another one.
We'll do one more here, Chris, and then we'll wrap it up.
Yo, Theo, it's Jake from Charleston, South Carolina.
It's weird hearing your voice on the phone.
I love the podcast.
Keep pumping them out.
My question for Chris Hanson is, which guy that they caught was he most freaked out by?
Was it the Indian guy who walked in naked, or was it the guy that they caught twice?
Anyway, gang, gang, man, get that hitter.
Gang, bro.
Thank you.
Well, I think both.
I mean, those two are right on the top of the list.
I remember the fellow who came in naked, the first guy you referred to.
Literally, I was in like a back den of this house, and here comes this guy, naked, and he's moving fast, faster than I was able to get around the.
Oh, fast and naked sounds scary to me.
And this is a guy who was talking about whipped cream and a cat and incorporating all this stuff with the young girl.
And so literally, I go to open the door to confront him.
And he's got his hand on the opposite doorknob.
And so I open up and he sees me.
He's, whoa, you know, and so this whole crazy Q ⁇ A develops after that.
And, you know, again, with the towel and he walks out the door with the towel and tries to find his clothes at the back door.
And so he's nutty.
And then, you know, the other guy in Washington who came in naked, the next day, there's all this commotion upstairs with the online decoys.
I said, what's going on?
He said, remember the guy who walked in naked last night?
I said, hard to forget.
He said, well, he's online again trying to talk to another kid.
And I said, set up a meeting at the, you know, find a McDonald's set of meeting.
So we show up, you know, we leave the house, which is a little edgy because what if you miss something?
That's rogue, yeah.
Yeah.
So we go and we watch him and the guys get video and walking into the McDonald's and we, you know, move in.
And now I'm trying to think of what I'm going to say.
Yeah.
You know, because I got one shot and he runs.
It's over.
I didn't want to chase him into traffic.
And you had just seen this guy the day before.
The day before, naked in the kitchen of this house.
So he's John Kennelly.
That was a bad second guy.
I remember his name.
John Kennelly was his name.
Special guy 29. He wasn't 29, nor is he that special.
So he's coming out of McDonald's and I'm there with two camera crews and two soundmen with the booms.
I said, John, startled.
I said, you know, I've been in this business at the time 20-some years, and I've very seldom been at a loss for words.
But I don't know what to ask you first.
I just said it because it was the only thing that came to my mind.
And he looked at me and says, well, I'm getting help.
I'm getting treatment.
I said, John, I got news for you.
It's not working.
You remember yesterday, right?
Yeah.
Last night?
And now you're out here again?
And, you know, he took off in his red pickup truck.
And I don't know if they ever prosecuted him in that case or not.
I know that they found him trying to do something with some other little kids in a park someplace.
And I don't know what happened after that.
But yeah, those are two very bizarre cases.
Overall, what do you think these predators like to eat?
Like, they always seem to bring a snack.
Well, they bring snacks, and obviously we have sometimes snacks there.
Oh, yeah, I've seen you got the little cupcake sometimes and that, but what do they bring?
You know, do they have a food or choice?
Usually fast food.
You know, we actually got a letter from the lawyers one time from Mike's Hard Lemonade.
Yeah.
Because whatever period of time during two or three of the investigations, that was the hit drink of the.
Oh, the Rich People's Zema.
That was Rich People's Zema.
Exactly.
So we had this letter saying, please do not use our product investigations anymore.
But no specific fast food company really kind of resonated.
Was it overall that you saw?
It was just a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
And basically, it's whatever the decoy asked for in many cases.
There was one guy who showed up.
He was a plumber, and he brought food for himself, but not for the 13-year-old girl he was going to molest.
It's like, really?
Yeah, how are you going to molest somebody that doesn't have any energy in their body?
I mean, that's not a way to think about it, but it's also like, yeah.
What about Chick-fil-A?
Did anybody ever bring that?
Not that I can recall.
Yeah, that's awesome.
I like that, and I don't want to think about that when I eat it.
Are there any things that you, are there other stuff that you like to do, like outside?
Like, do you have any games on your phone or anything?
What else does Chris Hansen like to do?
You know, I don't really have any games in the phone or do the video game thing.
I mean, I did them, you know, when the kids were young, obviously, and they would routinely, whether it was Guitar Hero or whatever, beat me senseless at whatever game.
I think the last one I played was Pong, you know, back when I was a kid.
But, you know, I like tennis and skiing and, you know, being out on the water and reading.
You know, it's, it's, uh, I've really gotten into this Peloton bike, though.
Have you really?
Yeah, it's really, and I'm, I'm not, I promise that I'm not.
No, it's one of our friends, Rod's one, one of the biggest podcasts also is right through this wall.
They're not tipping today, but Fighter and the Kid and one of their guys, he's Peloton every day almost.
Yeah, I do it pretty much every day because we have an apartment in New York and then, you know, home in Michigan.
So, you know, in Michigan, it just lends itself.
It's near a park and, you know, you go for a run and you do the hills and all that stuff.
And in New York, while I enjoy running in New York and I'm close to, you know, being on a walkway near the river, it just, if I can get 45 minutes right off the bat and it's right in the bedroom and I have to trip over it, you know, going to make the coffee in the morning, I do it.
Right.
You know, and it's a great piece of equipment.
It's interactive.
You can take the live classes or the classes that are taped.
And for me, it's just, it's a great way to ensure, you know, getting work out of it.
Yeah.
No, I love hearing that, man.
It's funny.
I was just thinking about it the other day.
When I see my friends on him and stuff, it's like, oh, it's interesting.
Who inspired, do you have like inspiration at this point?
Do you find like inspiration has changed in your life as you've gotten further in your career?
You know, one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten was, you know, I ran into Mike Wallace one time years ago, and he was still working for 60 minutes at the time.
And he's so good with people.
And I said, hey, Mike, Chris Hansen, and I was with Daylight at the time.
And he looked at me and said, oh, Chris.
And I was on like goofing off that day in Miami.
And he was working.
He was doing an interview with Lawrence Taylor, I think, who had just written about it.
Wow.
He's at a wild life.
Yeah.
I could catch him.
And so, and Wallace looks at me and says, Chris, what was it that I just saw that you did?
Not having seen it, but he knew how to compliment a younger version of him.
And I said, oh, it was the story on the Stinger missiles of the terrorists who were trying to buy, you know, before 9-11.
He goes, oh, it was so good.
And I felt so, you know, later I sort of figured out a system of being able to say something nice, even though he didn't have it at the top of his head.
But it meant so much to me that he would even think to do that.
Yeah.
And he had so many great classic stories over the years.
Do you feel like when you look back just on the work in Sexual Predator, do you feel personally?
Do you feel like a hero or no?
No.
Look, I think it's important.
I think we've made a difference.
You know, it...
It built a platform for me to do some of the stories that weren't automatic fits in the format of a syndicated show.
It's given me some leverage to do things that I think are important, you know, that, you know, are highly rated, but they're expensive.
Right.
You know, if you're going to go hang out and do stuff undercover, you know, it's not the murder story where you interview the six characters and you put it together with dramatic video.
I mean, you got to go get it.
There's no guarantee.
I mean, as much as you try to get it set up and you work, you know, side by side with law enforcement so you know something's going to happen that'll, that'll constitute interesting television, there's no guarantee.
I mean, there's nothing worse than going out, talking your executive producers into doing something, spending the money, and then missing the guy at the last minute.
I mean, we're going after a guy.
It's a horrible case where this guy was raping his 11-year-old stepdaughter and did it for like four years.
And we did the story and they had let him out on parole.
Now they got these nonviolent drug offenders who have been in for 29 years.
They want to get this guy out after, you know, far less time.
And so we're going to go chase him down.
He's working at this plant and I was ball setting in front of him.
I'd driven around it.
We'd checked it out and we're there.
And I just, you know, I jumped the gun too early.
He saw and his buddies smuggled him out a back gate across, you know, and I got to call Los Angeles and say, hey, oh, how'd it go?
Was it really good?
Was it dramatic?
Well, it was.
$20,000 the drain today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or something, you know.
It's not a good conversation to have.
Right.
Did you feel, yeah, at a certain point, does it get tricky, though, when like, you know, there's an executive, there's a financial push to like get it right.
And it's like you have to, like, did you ever feel like at that point you're sacrificing integrity?
No, nobody's ever asked me to sacrifice integrity ever.
Oh, wow.
And again, I started television in 1981 when I was still in college and making $4.80 an hour, 39 hours a week, and then went full-time when I graduated.
But honestly, and I know these questions come up with different syndicates that own different groups of television stations.
And are you pro this or pro that?
Are you right-wing, left-wing?
But I've never felt it ever in a lot of years.
And yeah, I mean, are there realistic constraints in terms of budget?
Absolutely.
You know, do we necessarily go around the world that we once did?
You got to justify it.
Right.
And you got to make sure the audience is there.
Yeah, it's different.
Shows used to go around the world a lot more, and now everything is, I mean, budgets are smaller and bigger pieces.
Production companies take bigger pieces.
Overall, there's back people behind the scenes.
And who's your audience?
Right.
And do you spend a year going undercover and going to India to expose human drug trials of something that you know is dangerous, but you caught them doing?
I mean, it's good TV.
It's a brilliant TV.
You win an overseas press club award, maybe an Emmy.
But, you know, where do you put your resources?
Right.
And that's the, you know, depending on the show, you know, look, crime is big.
Look, a live crime is big.
I've literally got four shows in the works.
Wow.
All crime.
And I love crime.
It's important.
It's what I've always done.
I mean, I just didn't start doing this, you know, four years ago because it was popular.
Do you think it would be more exciting to die of natural causes or to honestly to get murdered, be honest?
I just want a long life.
But at the end, though.
I think I'd want a long life.
Okay, but when you get to the end of that long life, I think about this.
But I want to die of natural causes or is there something exciting about getting murdered?
I don't want to get murdered.
I can accept a horrible ski accident.
I can accept a heart attack doing something that I truly was passionate about.
Right.
But I don't need to, you know, have a cleanup crew mop up after me.
I just think it would be that less.
I just watched the Equalizer 2 on the plane from the audience.
I thought that I'd seen more blood and guts today than a normal five and a half hour flight.
You mentioned sex trafficking.
We had a sex worker in, right?
And she was upset, and a lot of sex workers were upset when they shut down some of the sites where they were able to sell their services because, you know, there's such a big sex trafficking, let's stop sex trafficking.
But then at the same time, it was preventing women who had been sustaining their livelihood and supporting families or whatever for a while.
Do you think that one just outweighs the other and it doesn't matter?
I still think women are being exploited.
Right.
You know, that's got to be a tough life.
You know, I'm not one to say, look, you know, law or society should arbitrate what a woman does with her own body.
That's not up to me.
But in my experience, Seeing this and doing stories and talking to recovered sex industry workers, that's not a pretty life.
I mean, you sit there and you talk to a 17 or 18-year-old who was coaxed into this life at 14 or 15 years old because she was having a bad day and somebody appealed to her weaknesses and exploited that.
And a pimp made her feel loved and put her to work and took all the money.
Oh, yeah, that's that.
You talk about degrading, showing up in a hotel room in Cincinnati or wherever and being forced into doing things that.
Lewis.
Yeah, this woman was, she was in her 30s, I think.
And so I guess her perception was different, but I guess how these people get into that situation and how that all starts, it's probably...
I mean, you know, it's like, you know, the notion of, you know, somebody working their way through law school, you know, that's a rarity.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, using that.
These people get jammed up in bad situations on whatever level and resort to this sort of thing.
Is sex trafficking as big of a problem in America?
Like, like, you know, every now and then, like the far liberal go up, you know, it's like they'll just make a postcard that says 700,000 women were abused yesterday.
Yeah, the number is, I always caution.
I sit on boards and am an advisor to, you know, a number of groups, airline ambassadors being one of them, which is made up of airline employees who, it started out donating their airline perks miles to bring kids in from third world countries who needed extraordinary medical care and they'd fly them into the United States for that medical care.
And then it sort of branched off into educating airline employees to recognize human trafficking when it goes on.
So I speak to, because of a lot of the stories I've done over the years, I speak to these groups and I'm on a panel that helps educated flight attendants.
But flight attendants will see stuff.
If you see a guy with a young girl and for some reason it's not doesn't fit, they don't look like you get a sense about that stuff.
I mean, look at, and again, I caution these groups about coming up with numbers and extrapolating things.
People say, well, you know, how many predators are online at any given time?
And we one time in one of the stories used the number 50,000.
And it could be 10 times that.
But the problem is you don't know because of the ubiquitous nature.
And, you know, we got wrapped by some fact checkers and how do you know?
And, well, it came out of a speech by a state attorney general.
And then it was picked up and, you know, confirmed by an FBI agent who worked that kind of crime.
And so somebody traced it back.
I think it was NPR to say, where did this number actually come from?
And I did interviews.
I was very honest about it.
I said, look, this is the estimate that has been commonly used.
And I used it too.
I'm guessing that worldwide, it's much higher than this.
Right.
Yeah, especially worldwide.
But I always caution these groups, don't put a number on it because we really don't know.
What I can tell you is that when it comes to human trafficking, you can take any big event, whether it's a Super Bowl, World Series, a Republican convention, a Democratic convention, and I guarantee you, a fight in Las Vegas.
A dog show, too, probably even.
Thousands of women will be flown into that area and trafficked.
Right.
That I can guarantee you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think I even see that.
I mean, I don't know any of those people, but I definitely see things where it's like, oh, that makes me, it sets off a bell.
Like, I'll see things on Instagram or social media.
It's like, oh, that seems very odd that suddenly, you know, these people are there for some.
We did this thing with the LA County Sheriff's Department a year or so ago.
And, you know, within 30 minutes' drive of where we're sitting right now, in one afternoon, literally had six or eight cases.
Yeah.
You know, where.
And who are these predators mostly that are doing that sort of thing?
Is that more of an international type of thing?
Well, it's both.
I mean, you have people who are importing vulnerable women from Eastern European bloc countries, Asia.
You see it within Asia.
And then you see PIMs who are just small games.
Like the local mall.
You recruit people.
And suddenly there's money where there was no money for.
I remember we did a story in Las Vegas once.
We were doing a lot of undercover stuff down there a few years back.
And there was a young woman.
She had been accepted into Air Force intelligence.
She was good to go.
All she had to do was show up.
She had passed all the tests.
And she was dating a guy who is kind of living on the fringes, gangster-wise.
And he pulls up in this BMW.
He says, Carl, let's go for a ride.
She goes, where'd you get this?
He goes, ah, it's, you know, it's a friend's.
LaCarney, being stolen.
They put them both in her in the women's lockup and him in the men's lockup.
And while she's in the lockup, there's a woman there who works for a pimp in Las Vegas who recruits her.
And suddenly she goes from being an Air Force intelligence officer to being sold on the streets of Las Vegas by a notorious pimp.
Right.
Wow.
To think that they would have somebody in a prison that that's where they would be recruited.
No, it was the lockup.
It was the county lockup.
What a unique.
I'm just saying, but think about if she didn't take the ride, she'd be in the Air Force.
Yeah.
As opposed to being a recovering sex trade worker.
Yeah, so those small things that, yeah, it's just, like you say, sometimes it's just so moment to moment how one thing could happen to somebody in one turn or one car ride or one this or one that.
So it really, at that point, then you have to just be aware.
You have to be cognizant of what's going on, no matter what situations you're getting into.
Well, again, it goes back to why we do all these stories.
If you can get into the mind of a criminal and hear the voice of a victim, you can prevent other people from becoming victims.
And that's really the credo of the thing.
Yeah, and I feel it, too, from this conversation that the risk of exploitation, the risk, I kind of feel like it does.
It outweighs, you know, it just weighs heavier.
You know, it weighs like it's a worthwhile risk to take when you look at the other side of the scale and see the possibilities of things that can be going on.
You know, it's interesting, man.
Do you try to stay off of certain places on the internet to try and keep your own head straight?
Yeah, I mean, I don't go big on it.
You know, I use it for research, for stories.
I do, you know, engage in, you know, promotion of projects and stories.
And, you know, I'll wish everybody happy Thanksgiving.
Right, but you're not dabbling in Portnite.
Have you ever had any issues with that kind of stuff?
No.
It's powerful.
I mean, it's a lot of young men, you know, a lot of guys.
Unquestionably, and I think your age group was more exposed to it than my age group.
Again, the only thing we ever saw was Playboy Magazine from 1973.
Oh, those were good.
It was a team compared to 80% of the magazine.
Dude, sometimes they would get a perfume thing and would get stuck in a Playboy magazine, right?
A woman's perfume thing.
So you had like, that was another universe because then you had the bosoms and you had the scent.
You were just like living, oh, man, it was like having a stepmother, you know, like a hot stepmother.
Yeah, but I don't even know how those magazines stay in business anymore, except for the editorial part of it, because any young man who wants to see anything, it's until I remember years and years ago, a friend of mine was helping his daughter with a school project and went to the – It was on the Wizard of Oz and he put into a search website Dorothy and the stuff that came up.
Wow.
And this is 10, 12, 15 years ago.
And it was like, you know, cover the kid's eyes.
That lion ain't very cowardly all of a sudden.
Yeah, it's a whole different situation.
Yeah, that's wild, man.
It's a wild world out there.
It's the dark arts, you know?
Oh, what about the dark web?
Think about that.
Oh, I can't even think about that, man.
I can't even.
I don't even know how to get there.
Is there really a dark web?
Oh, yeah, yeah, it exists.
And what is it?
You get into the back of your computer?
It's non-monitored, really.
And it's kind of this secret world you need access.
It's like the blockchain or something kind of, like in a way.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a good way to put it.
And I don't pretend to be an expert.
No.
I've never been into it.
It's something I'd like to explore.
Wow.
But it's a real thing.
It's a real thing.
There's no question.
I know that.
Because I know people who are involved in investigating it.
Dude, that makes me scared, man.
Because the internet's already dark enough as is, you know?
It makes me really, really scared.
Take care of yourselves.
Happy holidays from us.
What do you have planned for Christmas, Chris?
I'll be back in Michigan once I get things wrapped up.
As you know, in this business, I'm trying to do a month's worth of work in two weeks because after the 15th, everything pretty much shuts down to the first.
Have you ever been on Dr. Drew's podcast, Drew Pinsky?
I have not.
I know a lot of people who have.
I love to hear you guys talk.
Kind of run in concentric circles.
You know, a lot of the Dr. Lisa Strowman, who's a psychologist, a lawyer who's done some stuff for our shows, also does a lot of stuff with Dr. Drew.
So, I mean, he's a smart guy with a good reputation.
I've done Dr. Oz, who's a sharp guy, and that's an interesting show to do.
Yeah, I've never done that.
I've seen that guy at the gym once or twice.
But yeah, Dr. Drew's is fascinating.
Anyway, I'll have to reach out to him and see if, yeah, sometime when you're around, if you guys could be in the same circle.
I would just love to hear that conversation.
I think it'd be really cool.
He's a special guy.
He's a sharp guy.
And so are you, man.
Chris Hansen, we appreciate you your time, man.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much, and we look forward to your future projects, and we'll promote them however we can to help out.
And you got a quick gift for Chris?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
If you go up to that, but this is from our sponsor.
This is at night.
Oh, that's great.
Oh, thank you.
Might be some guys after you holding grudges.
Appreciate it.
Not today, but just overall, you know.
Yeah, we're safe.
And it's even hard to get into it.
You almost need a knife to get into it.
To get into it.
Yeah, but it is a nice blade, man.
And I keep one in my car just in case.
Yeah.
Well, that's nice.
How do you open this?
Yeah, it's a good.
It's just a flap on the front.
Yeah, it's kind of tricky, man.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah.
So there you go.
But yeah, that's a nice little piece.
And I keep one in my car, though.
That's nice.
Just to be safe.
You don't use one until you need it and something's messed up or you're trying to.
I'm not saying break it out, you know.
No, no, no.
It's not just switchblade.
I'm not saying lead with it.
Years ago as a kid, a buddy of mine and I were down in Tijuana.
I mean, we're 19 years old.
And, of course, we bought switchblades and stilettos.
I was digging through a drawer, I don't know, a couple years ago, and I found this thing.
It's a stiletto.
It still works.
And I keep it in the drawer in the apartment because it works as a screwdriver.
If they're a letter opener, and my oldest saw it, he goes, you know, you carry that on the street.
That'll get you a year.
I said, I don't take it out of the apartment.
All about your son is teaching you.
He says, you know, you get a year for that.
Not in the apartment unscrewing a light fixture for God's sake.
I happen to be pretty familiar with the laws, by the way.
Man, I taught you everything you know.
You're serving it back to me in bad increments.
Chris Hansen, thank you so much.
Thank you.
You have to remember to check my bag with this so I don't get busted.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
Yeah, we would love for you to get busted with your hands over the.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.
I can feel it in my bones.
But it's gonna take a little time for me to set that parking break and let myself on wild shine that light on me.
I'll sit and tell you my story just for you.
And I will go away to the face.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jonathan Kite, and welcome to Kite Club, a podcast where I'll be sharing Thoughts on things like current events, stand-up stories, and seven ways to pleasure your partner.
The answer may shock you.
Sometimes I'll interview my friends, sometimes I won't.
And as always, I'll be joined by the voices in my head.
You have three new voice messages.
A lot of people are talking about Kite Club.
I've been talking about Kite Club for so long, longer than anybody else.
So great.
Aye, Suiar.
Easy deal.
Anyone who doesn't listen to Kite Club is a dodgy bloody wanker.
Jamain.
I'll take a quarter potter with cheese and a McFlurry.
Sorry, sir, but our ice cream machine is broken.
I think Tom Hanks just butt-dialed me.
Anyway, first rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
Second rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
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