#2567 - Mariana van Zeller

Mariana van Zeller is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist whose credits include "Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller," "The OxyContin Express," and "Inside Secret America." She is also the host of "The Hidden Third" podcast. Her latest documentary special, "Super Scam Me," premieres October 17 on National Geographic and will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.https://www.natgeotv.com/za/programs/natgeo/super-scam-mehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoCiI8nJacn8gDiHxr6aQGAhttps://www.patreon.com/cw/TheHiddenThirdhttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm2447662/https://marianavanzeller.me Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using https://dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  So good to see you.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Hi, Joe. So good to see you too.

• 0:16Joe Rogan?

  Every time I watch one of your new programs, I get anxiety. I'm like, please don't die. Don't get hurt. What are you doing?

• 0:23Speaker 01

  This one was a walk in the park, though.

• 0:25Joe Rogan?

  It kind of is a walk in the park, but not really.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 0:29Joe Rogan?

  Because you went to fucking Africa to meet scammers.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  To confront my scammer.

• 0:35Joe Rogan?

  So your new show is all about romance scams.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:41Joe Rogan?

  And I was aware of these because I watched a show a long time ago about this poor lonely man who kept getting scammed. He thought that there was this woman and he was in contact with her and he flew to Europe to meet her twice. And both times she came up with some reason why she couldn't be there. Some emergency came up and, you know, and this guy had given her hundreds of thousands of dollars and drained his account. And his daughter was so sad. She's like, I keep trying to tell him, but he won't listen. And you see these poor people that are so vulnerable. They're just, they're lonely and they really believe.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  They really, really believe. I think the loneliness epidemic is a huge part of this, quite frankly.

• 1:23Joe Rogan?

  It's a huge issue in this world. A huge issue in our country in particular, you know? There's like a disconnect with family in our country and there's a, like, people don't have like real community anymore. It's very weird.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  It is. And I think it's, yeah, it's absolutely one of the biggest reasons why scams are rampant these days. I mean, particularly romance scams.

• 1:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  100%. Yeah.

• 1:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's, you're preying on the saddest people. That's what's really, it's like, it's one thing if you're scamming some psycho fucking fraud guy who's doing stock market bullshit, you know what I mean? Or like, and you scam them. It's like you're scamming a scammer.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's true, but I think one of the problems we have when we talk about scams is this idea that we think it's a certain type of more gullible person, or more naive, or perhaps more foolish. And I think that is wrong. Because I think what these scammers are so good at doing is that they prey on emotions that we all share, you know, love and trust and sometimes greed as well. And the real reason, or the main reason I wanted to do this, this film was because of that. Because I'd come back and I'd tell friends and family stories about, you know, these victims, because I've reported on scams before

• 2:48Speaker 01

  extensively. And it was always, but how could they do that? Why would you give money to a stranger? I mean, how could they be so silly and so stupid? And that really annoyed me. Because why are we focusing on the response of the victim instead of actually understanding the actions of the scammer, of the scammers themselves? Because they are very, very good at what they do. So that was the idea behind, okay, I'm going to place myself at the center of all scams, Super Scam Me, and create a persona and put myself in dating websites and, you know, online platforms and see what happens. And it happened very fast.

• 3:25Joe Rogan?

  Do you think they're good at it?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I think some are really good at it.

• 3:28Joe Rogan?

  The guy that was doing it with you?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Mine, no. No, I didn't get the best scammer out there. I'll just say that.

• 3:35Joe Rogan?

  Are there better ones?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  There are 100% better ones. I think the one that was scamming Leslie was definitely better than mine.

• 3:41Joe Rogan?

  Is that the one who was pretending he was Jon Bon Jovi?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Bon Jovi, yes. So again, this, I know, but that's the thing. You tell that story and you think, this guy shows up on her DM and says, hey, I'm Jon Bon Jovi, give me money. That's not how it went, right? She liked an account. So it was funny, because it was in the middle of me doing Super Scam Me that I get a message from Leslie. And I get dozens of these messages every week, because I've done a lot of reporting on this. People think I'm sort of like the 911 for scams. And in one, it was right in the middle of the project, I get a message from her and it was that. Look, I've been talking to a guy for almost a year. I initially thought he was Jon Bon Jovi. I'm not so sure anymore. And of course, the response is, wait, what? Did you really think you were talking to Jon

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Bon Jovi? But then you listen to the story and then you actually meet this person.

• 4:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And it is much more nuanced than that. She liked an Instagram account. She was brand new on Instagram. Liked an account that had what looked like a checkmark, verified account, she thought. And she commented. She's been a fan of this guy since she was 14 years old, posters of him all around her room. And immediately he DM'd her back and said, hey, I saw you commented. I love connecting with my fans. Perfectly reasonable, perfectly normal.

• 4:58Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I, what's your favorite music? What's your favorite song? When did you start listening to my music? That kind of conversation. It started normally. And then it was weeks of this. And then he started paying attention to her and interested in what her life was like. And tell me about you. And what do you do? And what are your interests? And then they, they talked for months and months. And he would remember things that happened in the early weeks. And this is a woman who leads a very lonely life. There's, there's the loneliness epidemic, who's sort of estranged from her husband, who doesn't really have anyone who's interested in her life, quite frankly, or sees her, understands her, wants to know about her.

• 5:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And finally, there was somebody who, even if he wasn't Jon Bon Jovi, it was somebody who cared, right?

• 5:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And it lasted months of this. And then she said to him one day, she knew that he had a concert. She couldn't afford it. She went online. The tickets were ridiculously expensive. And she said, it's so sad that I really want to see you in concert. Always have wanted to, and I can't. This was like seven months into their relationship. And then he says, well, if you want, I do these meet and greets, which is also reasonable. They actually do. Celebrities do these. And you can pay, I'll give you a discount. I'll put you in touch with management and you can pay like a hundred dollars. I'm coming to Louisiana and you can come to one of these meet and greets and meet me in person. And at this point, I'm sorry, but it is believable. And also, he would send her videos. You saw some of these videos.

• 6:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the AI videos.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  The AI videos. And some of them, I mean, they're a little robotic, but they could be real. And it's, hi, Leslie, good morning. How are you doing? My sunshine, my love. I, you know, I'm curious about your life. And he would say to her, look, I am surrounded by people who are yes people, who are people who are with me a lot because of my money and fame. And I just really appreciate connecting with people who are outside the bubble, who are normal folks.

• 6:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And so it is kind of, it's not as insane as like Jon Bon Jovi showed up and said, hey, I want a thousand dollars, right? But then what happens, I think, in a lot of these scams, is that once you're in, once you're committed to a relationship, once that has an impact on your life and has made your life better, it is very difficult to then, you know, come to the realization that this might not be real. I equate it a little bit to gambling. You know, when gamblers lose a lot of money and in their heads, they're always thinking, wait, it might have been my unlucky day. If I go to the casino today, this might be my really lucky day, right? And the more you lose, the more you're gambling because you're trying to get that money back. It's a little bit, I think, that same idea.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  It's also a dopamine rush. Like every time you get a DM, every time you're love bombed, you're, there's a dopamine rush there.

• 7:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  And I think it's that idea that you get to a point where you start suspecting, okay, this doesn't sound real, but I've invested so much. The reality of my life is so sad compared to this, that maybe I prefer to just go on. So there are actually a lot of romance scam victims that continue having these relationships even after they realize the person wasn't who they said they were.

• 8:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So they just do it just for the placebo? They do it almost just like they're talking to a robot that loves them?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, a little bit. Which is one of the things that they talk actually about how AI, you know, the companionship of AI.

• 8:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Is one of the benefits, or possible benefits of AI, but yeah.

• 8:30Joe Rogan?

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• 9:13Joe Rogan?

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• 10:34Joe Rogan?

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• 10:41Speaker 01

  It can also be very bad.

• 10:42Joe Rogan?

  It creeps me out.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  It can, but you know there are coffee shops now, I just found out this out in New York, where they actually have like iPads, did you know this? iPads with fake people for companionship that you go to the coffee shop and you grab an iPad and you have a whole conversation with an AI agent.

• 11:00Joe Rogan?

  Well, New York is, weirdly enough, one of the loneliest places.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:06Joe Rogan?

  Because no one is friends with anyone. Like my friend Jim, who lives in a building in New York, it's like, you know, forty stories or something like that, he's like, I don't know anybody in this building. Like, think about that. And I don't know my neighbor. Every time we look at each other, we're like, hey, how you doing? Like, no one knows anybody? And there's hundreds of people stacked on top of each other. That is an odd way to live.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  That is an odd way to live, yeah.

• 11:29Joe Rogan?

  What is this, Jamie?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Oh, Cafe for AI.

• 11:32Joe Rogan?

  Eva AI opens the world's first cafe for AI dates. This cuffing season? What is cuffing season? What does that mean?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Uh, I have no idea. Where is that?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  It's like linking up time.

• 11:44Joe Rogan?

  Is that what it means?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Cuffing, you know, it's another way to say fucking.

• 11:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, having sex?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Jamie knows that stuff.

• 11:52Joe Rogan?

  There's a season? What are we, elk?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  It's like a cold season, winter. During winter, when everybody's inside.

• 11:58Joe Rogan?

  A relationships RPG app, bringing virtual romance to the real world. EVA is launching EVA Cafe, the first ever online space where people can take their AI partners out on a real date. Oh, God.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Joe Rogan?

  That is so dark.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 12:18Joe Rogan?

  You sit there with an iPad. Are you enjoying your steak?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  It sounds like a troll, but it's real. You're saying it's real.

• 12:25Joe Rogan?

  Reserve your spot. Click that.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I don't want to. Get on a list.

• 12:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, let's see what happens.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  It's like a Google Doc.

• 12:32Joe Rogan?

  What happens?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't need it.

• 12:33Joe Rogan?

  A waiting list. It's a waiting list?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  So this was also, that said, the website said it was back in February of twenty-six, so I don't know. I mean, that's almost, you know.

• 12:42Joe Rogan?

  Don't show that on the screen. You just showed your email address.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I'm closing.

• 12:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Boy, this is dark.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  There you go. You can come to flirt and unwind.

• 12:50Joe Rogan?

  Come to flirt, unwind, or simply share a quiet moment with your AI companion. EVA Cafe. Ugh.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's so dark.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  It's so depressing. It's so dark. It's very, very dark. Yeah.

• 13:04Joe Rogan?

  Did you see Ex Machina?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I did.

• 13:06Joe Rogan?

  One of my all-time favorite movies.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved it, too.

• 13:08Joe Rogan?

  I love that movie. But the real problem I have with that movie is like, I think I'd fall in love with her, too.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my, yeah.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  If I was that guy.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  She's amazing.

• 13:16Joe Rogan?

  She's so hot.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  She's so hot.

• 13:18Joe Rogan?

  Who cares if she has clear skin and fucking lights behind it?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  So true.

• 13:23Joe Rogan?

  It's like, she's so pretty and so sweet. It's dark. It's dark because we are super vulnerable. We're super stupid.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if stupid is the word, but I would say we're vulnerable.

• 13:36Joe Rogan?

  Especially men.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, men. Do you know what that's interesting, too, in terms of scams? Because, as you saw in our film, the majority of the people we spoke to were women. But actually, men are as likely to falling victim to these scams as women, but they just have a lot more shame around it, so they're less likely to talk about it. So we actually spoke to a lot of men, but they just don't want to be on camera because there's so much shame around this.

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no man wants to be a sucker.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:04Joe Rogan?

  If a woman's a sucker, everyone feels bad for her. If a guy's a sucker, you're like, ew, fucking dumbass.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  I wish people felt bad for women. It wasn't Leslie's case, and it's certainly not the case for a lot of the victims that I speak to.

• 14:15Joe Rogan?

  They don't feel bad for them?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  No, actually, this is another horrible thing. It's what I call, there's a sort of double victimization, right? Because initially, not only do you, you know, your heart is broken, you lost all your money, but then you go back home, or you go to your friends and you talk about this, and the first response is, how stupid could you be? Right? It's the humiliation, it's the shame.

• 14:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  That comes with it, which they use it to their advantage, right? The scammers. They use the silence to their advantage.

• 14:42Joe Rogan?

  Do you ever get those random text messages that say, hi, I haven't seen you in so long. What have you been up to? And you look at the number, like, who the fuck is this?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 14:52Joe Rogan?

  It's always an Android phone.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:53Joe Rogan?

  Right? So that's one way to check. And then it's always like, something weird, like, I've been craving lobster rolls. Do you want to meet up? Like, what? What is this?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And also the job offers.

• 15:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. I get those all day.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  I'm approved for so many loans.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:11Joe Rogan?

  It's really amazing.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Same. So actually, super scammy started like that. The idea was that I was going to say yes to every single scam that came my way. And for the first few weeks, we filmed it that way. So I would answer all those text messages.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  What happens?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  It was really interesting. So it was a lot of phone calls with scammers. One of the most interesting conversations we had was with an Indian call center who told me that there was a bug in my Apple computer, and he could fix it, one of those, right?

• 15:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's nice of him.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  It was an Apple support, yes. Very nice of him. So kind. And all I had to do was download this software, and once you download the software, he's in my computer, and then you go to the payment, and once they're in my computer, they can see the number that I'm putting for my credit card and all the details. So they have access to that, right? So.

• 16:01Joe Rogan?

  Did you do it?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I'm trying to go, I'm trying to go as far as I can without actually revealing a credit card. So I get to the point of the credit card, and I turn to him, and this had been like, over an hour on the phone with this guy. And I say, hey, so this is the deal. I'm actually a journalist. My name is Mariana. But I don't want to get you in trouble. I kind, I know this is a scam. I just want to talk to you, dude. And he actually did. He stayed on the phone with me. I try this a lot. It didn't always work, but in this case, this guy actually stayed on the phone with me for a long time. And he told me, look, we were forced to do, in his case, he said he was forced, but I think he was doing it for the money. But he basically said, I said, don't you feel bad about this?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I mean, you're stealing money from people. And his answer was, look, in America, everybody has more money, so I don't really feel bad. I was like, what is a lot of money? Because, oh, he said he doesn't steal from poor people. What's poor people? Well, if I go into a bank, if I go into account, once I get access, I can see everything that's there. If you have less than a thousand dollars, I'm not going to steal from you. But if you have more, that means you're rich.

• 17:05Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, I mean, the money, it's so different, right?

• 17:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, that is the very bizarre statistic that shocks people when you tell it to them. I think, I used to think it's thirty-four thousand dollars, but I think it's fifty thousand dollars. If you make fifty thousand dollars, you are in the top one percent of the world.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Fifty thousand, yeah. Yeah.

• 17:30Joe Rogan?

  That's, that's dark.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  That's very dark. I mean, ten percent of the world's population lives under the poverty line.

• 17:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  So that's seven hundred and something million people who have trouble finding, you know, shelter and food for themselves and their family. It's insane.

• 17:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And I do know that there are people that get, they literally get kidnapped and forced to work in these scam centers through threat of death and.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Torture.

• 17:57Joe Rogan?

  Torture.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  We did a story about that for the last season of Traffic, about these scam compounds. We actually visited one of the scam city, a city that has a lot of these scam compounds, and interviewed one of the main guys there. And it was, and spoke to a lot of the victims. And, I mean, it was people being beaten and tortured and forced. There's a guy I'll never forget who jumped off like, the sixth floor of his building, because he knew that he could die, but he thought it was better to die than to live in those conditions. He basically broke both his hips and his legs. And when I met him, he was in a wheelchair. He was rescued, thank God, but it was unsure if he could ever walk again. And then there was a woman, that was a really dark one, who we spoke to. She's sort of the model,

• 18:41Speaker 01

  so she's the person that when they want to do video calls, she'd come on camera. But they had, at the time, even back then, this was two years ago, they had this AI technology that would go superimpose over her face. And they needed a woman because of the mannerisms, right? Or, and the voice, I guess. But they had this AI thing, program, and it's over her face. But if she moved just a little bit, they would, it would distort, basically. And her boss would beat her and all that stuff. But she'd also been raped by her boss and all his friends. They'd bring people in to rape her. And she was stuck in this horrible situation.

• 19:15Joe Rogan?

  Where are these happening mostly?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Myanmar. Myanmar and Cambodia were the two main spots. But now, because there's been a crackdown in both countries, particularly in Cambodia, they're spreading to other places like Dubai and other places. But they still exist a lot in Myanmar. And Myanmar is a country at war. There's a large part of the country that is just controlled by different rebel groups. The government doesn't really have much control of that region. So the scam compounds and these, you know, a lot of them are Chinese criminal gangs that operate these scam compounds. They're paying a fee, they're paying for the war, essentially. They're giving money to the rebels in order to be able to work and, you know, build these scam cities. But the scam city that I visited was, it was like a mini Macau. It was these

• 20:02Speaker 01

  high-rises, and it happened within a year or two. It went from flat, you know, regular forest jungle in Myanmar to skyscrapers, casinos, you know. One of the places I visited was, in order to be able to talk to this scam compound, the guy who sort of runs the city, we had to wine and dine him. Actually, he had to wine and dine us. He wanted to take us out and show us around. And he took us to this karaoke cafe, karaoke bar, that was like nothing I'd ever seen. It was screens all around. It looked like the future. But this is in one of the poorest countries on earth with war raging around, and I'm in

• 20:45Speaker 01

  this, sort of the future. And it's this, yeah, this karaoke bar with girls, completely dressed, and drugs being served, and alcohol. And we had to stay there, and I sang Whitney Houston.

• 21:02Joe Rogan?

  What song?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  I think it was the greatest love of all, which is usually the one that I sing.

• 21:07Joe Rogan?

  That's what I was gonna guess.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  And I'm one of those people that thinks they can sing well, but really can't. But it was fun. Those were one of those unforgettable nights. And then the next day, we interviewed this scam guy.

• 21:20Joe Rogan?

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• 22:32Joe Rogan?

  So he was willing to do this. He wanted to show off.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yes, because he was trying to sell the city as being a gambling and tourist paradise.

• 22:41Joe Rogan?

  So the entire city is essentially funded by scams?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Because who wants to go to this place? No one. They built it up for business, for gambling, for tourists to come. Literally, they have go-kart tracks and they had a slide, pools with slides, a water park and all that stuff. But no tourist in their right mind from anywhere in the world would want to go to this place in the world. Because it's, again, there's a war, it's poor, it's really difficult to access. We had to be smuggled into the country from Thailand. So obviously, that's all a front for what really brings in money, which is scams. But he was trying to sort of clean the image and show us that nothing wrong was going on there. And they had posters all around the city saying, no scams are allowed. We don't torture people.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  If you need to say it.

• 23:35Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Wow. And the whole city just appeared quickly?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Overnight. A lot of these do. I mean, it's within months. It's flat terrain and suddenly there's these.

• 23:45Joe Rogan?

  Funding it and how are they doing the construction? Like, how are they, how are they doing this?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Construction is, there's a lot of unemployed people in the country, so that's not that difficult. Funding all comes from, a lot of it is from these Chinese criminal gangs who operate in, in, in the case of where I visited, it was a company called Yata International. The head of Yata International was a Chinese man who was living in Myanmar, running this compound. He was eventually actually picked up by the authorities in Thailand. He was doing time in prison. So the guy I spoke to was his number two. And he was trying to say that the guy was in prison because he was openly talking about corruption in China or something like that, which was not the case. But, uh, but yeah, it's, and it's billions of dollars. I can't remember exactly, but there was.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Sorry to interrupt you. How typical is this? Like, this is the opening article of an article about victims and villains, scam compounds?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  This is crazy.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  What does it say?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  He was held against his will, tortured and drained of his blood. And they would drain his blood up to seven times in a half year. That made him a blood slave?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  To, to run these scams?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:55Joe Rogan?

  What? Blood slave?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  In his case, have a blood slave. Journalists began to describe him.

• 25:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay. So it says, from his bed, he said he sought work as a security guard in China, but was tricked and apparently kidnapped, transported to Cambodia and then sold into one of the countries many fortified scam compound facilities, where workers labor around the clock to extract money from people online. When he resisted, Lee was beaten and tortured and then passed from one scam operator to another. He claimed his captors finally began to drain large quantities of his blood, seven times in half a year. In the hospital, he pointed weekly at an infusion bag above his head that was the size of each extraction, he said. In online articles, journalists began to describe his case that of a blood slave. So they're taking his blood for blood doping or for, for blood transfusions for other people?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  That part, that.

• 25:47Joe Rogan?

  They're just taking it for, they're using his blood as money. Like, they're selling his blood, probably.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Probably one of the scams they're doing, yeah, I would imagine.

• 25:53Joe Rogan?

  So they just, like, take everything. What, he got an extra kidney? Give me that. Chinese social media lit up with outrage and sympathy. Even government officials in China and Cambodia took notice. For a moment, Lee seemed to embody the darkest truths about the criminal scam compounds spreading across parts of Southeast Asia.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And that's like what one of them looks like.

• 26:10Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I mean, they're big.

• 26:12Joe Rogan?

  So that is an entire building dedicated to scams?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And they have barbed wire around it. They have security guards. The, all the windows usually have, um, what do you call them?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Bars.

• 26:24Joe Rogan?

  Bars.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  So people can't escape.

• 26:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Showing these pictures. It's a dorm.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the dorms. Yeah, with lots of people sleeping in the dorms together.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  To eat food, which is, you know, looks kind of like a military compound.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  They can't leave the compound.

• 26:40Joe Rogan?

  So slaves?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Everything. Oh, absolutely slaves.

• 26:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  It's slaves. And we're not talking about just a few hundred people. It's hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people coming from all over the world, were lured into what they think are going to be online jobs. And, and once they get there, they take away their passports and they force them to scam Americans, essentially. It's crazy. People coming from Brazil, India, Philippines, all around the world. It's nuts. I, I don't understand how we know this happens. This is still out there. I've been trying to do a film about this because of all my reporting on traffic, this was one of the craziest, one of those moments that I'm like, this is outrageous. How are we allowing this to happen? And you can say, okay, the victims are people from other countries. Why should we care?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I mean, that's not a good response to start with, but even if that's the case, they're, they're enslaved. But also, these people are scamming Americans. Last year, this is crazy. This blew my mind. Just, I think, two months ago or something, the Consumer Federation of America issued their latest report, which was looking at scams last year. And Americans apparently lost, not apparently, they've estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year.

• 27:54Joe Rogan?

  Billion.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Billion. Do you know how much that is a day? I did the math. It's $400 million a day. $400 million a day are lost in America, are being stolen from Americans.

• 28:05Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  It's insane. And a lot of it is done through, from, from these, they're called pig butchering compounds.

• 28:14Joe Rogan?

  Pig butchering?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  I found a website talking about the pig butchering lifecycle.

• 28:18Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Organized criminals use highly scripted process and human trafficking to steal as much money as they can from individual victims. Pig slaughtering.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Do you know why it's called, yes, exactly. It comes from the Chinese expression that means, uh, it's sort of fattening the pig. So you fatten the pig, so you, you know, give a lot of love to your victim or you, you know, pretend they're going to get a lot of money. You build their confidence and trust and then you slaughter them. Basically, you take away all their money.

• 28:48Joe Rogan?

  There's a whole, uh, go to the top, please. There's a whole process. They go grooming the victims. They contact paid, pig butchering, whoa, that's a dark word. Pig butchering targets, uh, through dating apps, social media platforms or unsolicited text messages. Ah, like the ones I get. At some point, the scammer encourages a target to sift, shift the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform like WhatsApp or Telegram. They invest time in understanding the person's financial situation, family dynamics and work to build a deep emotional connection. Scammers often spend weeks building these relationships. Then, then they introduce investment opportunities.

• 29:29Joe Rogan?

  They drop subtle hints about a once in a lifetime investment opportunity early in the relationship. They show pictures of a lavish lifestyle or talk about expensive purchases and experiences. Once scammers have gained pig butchering targets' trust, they introduce an exclusive investment opportunity, often claiming they've achieved significant financial success through it. Then they establish credibility, make the scams seem real. Scammers share fake screenshots and trading platform dashboards, stories of friends or an uncle who knows how it all works and made massive profits, along with professional-looking documents and websites, starting small to ease doubts. So they have like a whole

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:09Joe Rogan?

  process they go through.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have scripts.

• 30:12Joe Rogan?

  They have scripts.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  That they stick to. And it's different according to the people that they're talking to, what kind of victim that is. Uh, that, this is the scam, pig butchering was what actually got, remember there was that story of that, uh, bank banker, the CEO of a bank in Kansas that ultimately went bankrupt because he had stolen $400 million?

• 30:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  In the bank, do you remember that story?

• 30:32Joe Rogan?

  And he got, he got scammed.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, from, it was pig butchering too. It was one of these fake crypto.

• 30:36Joe Rogan?

  How did they get him? What was, was it a romance thing?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  No, it was this. It was an investment opportunity. Sometimes they're mixed. It starts with a romance and then goes to investment opportunity, or sometimes it's just the investment opportunity. I think in his case, it was more the investment opportunity. So they said he, he started by putting just his own money, his savings into what he thought was a legitimate crypto account. And you can see, once you do, again, it's, let's not think these people are stupid because the scammers are really good at what they do. They create these platforms that, when you look at it, looks completely legitimate and then it looks like your money's going up, right? He's seeing his money's going up. He's making a lot of money. He's very excited. Initially, if you want to take money out, they allow you so that you gain more confidence.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  So then you start putting more money. And then he just got in too deep, where they kept saying that in order to get the millions he had just made out, you know, months into the, this investment scam, they said that he has to pay a fee and it's like a tax, but you have to pay a 10% tax. And so at that point, you're so in, you've lost so much money that, okay, if I only pay this 10% tax or if I only pay this fee. So he kept doing that, but then he started actually using money from his customers.

• 31:47Joe Rogan?

  How the fuck does a guy who works in banking get sucked into something that's stupid?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  But I don't think it's, I think, look, now we know a lot more about it, right?

• 31:58Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  I think the question should be, why isn't our government doing more to protect us? Why are these online platforms, why don't they have?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Why aren't they accountable? They should be held accountable for allowing this to happen.

• 32:15Joe Rogan?

  Which online platforms?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I'll give you specifics.

• 32:17Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  There was an incredible Reuters investigation done last year where they got a hold of internal meta documents from Meta. And in the meta documents, internal meta documents, they estimated, inside Meta, the different departments estimated that there were 15 billion ads every single day that the users of their platforms, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, were exposed to around an estimated 15 billion scam ads every single day. Scams that were higher risk, that displayed clear signs of being fraudulent.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  They also estimated that that year, they projected that they would make $16 billion. This is in 2024, I believe, or 2023, I'm not sure. $16 billion worth of profit from scams and banned goods. That's 10% of their full profit at that time. So they're making a ton of money from this. And then, this is where it gets really worrisome to me. Because of their personalized ad system, if a person clicks on a scam, you know those ads that you have like Elon Musk holding a thing and saying investment opportunity, and then you click it and you want to see what it is?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Or, there's tons of these, I mean, there's gazillions of these out there. If you click it, you are more likely to be fed more of these ads. So it starts with just maybe you're exposed to one, and then suddenly in the next day, you're exposed to 100 of these scams, right? So your reality starts being, you know, filled with scams. And then, this is, I think, even the crazier part, is that if you report these as scams, which a lot of users do, I think it's 100,000 reports every single week, if they have a 95 or over certainty, Meta, if their system sees that there's a 95% certainty or over that these are scams, they remove them.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  If there is less than 95, let's say 94%, what they do is they give you a penalty fee, so you have to pay more, but they allow you to stay on the platform.

• 34:31Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:33Joe Rogan?

  Wait a minute.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  You can check that out, Jamie, that Reuters investigation.

• 34:36Joe Rogan?

  They're in on it, then?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  They're making money, I mean, it just raises lots of questions, right?

• 34:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, if you're charging more money, that means you know something's wrong with this ad, so you want to cut.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're making more money from the illegitimate ads than you are from the legitimate ads, in terms of one to one.

• 34:56Joe Rogan?

  Is this because of a lack of regulation?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  It is because of a lack of regulation.

• 34:59Joe Rogan?

  Lack of regulation, lack of oversight, and maybe perhaps something that emerged without any understanding of it before it was everywhere.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  100%, I think it's our government.

• 35:09Joe Rogan?

  But they know.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  They know, oh absolutely, they know. Their whole conversations in those internal documents is them talking about, how can we go after this without affecting our pocket? They actually openly talk about it. They talk about how there are other companies out there that are doing a better job, but they are afraid of what that might mean.

• 35:25Joe Rogan?

  Jamie put this into our AI sponsor, Perplexity, and says, "Yes, Reuters reported that Meta charged some suspected scam advertisers higher advertising rates rather than banning them outright. A system described internally as penalty bids." Bids? Why would they call it a bid?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Because of the way that the ads work, it's like a bidding process. The way that they'd serve it, they could charge you, you have a budget and they'd charge you more based off of how they deliver it, so.

• 35:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God. Here's the distinction in the documents Reuters reviewed. "At least 95% confidence of fraud." Fucking Christ, what do you have to do to get off that platform? Meta's automated systems would ban the advertiser at 95% confidence of fraud. Below that threshold, but still judged likely to be a scammer, the advertiser could remain, but would have to pay more to win ad auctions and get ads shown. This wasn't simply a surcharge on every ad someone reported as suspicious. The stated rationale was deterrence. Higher costs would reduce suspect scammers' profits and the number of people exposed to their ads. But the uncomfortable consequence is exactly what you're pointing out.

• 36:36Joe Rogan?

  Suspected scammers who paid enough could still reach users while Meta continued collecting their advertising money.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  More money, actually.

• 36:45Joe Rogan?

  More money, right, because they charged it more. Oh, look at this. "They charged suspected scammers more is supported. A claim like they charged all flagged ads 50% extra is not established by evidence." Oh, okay. They did not establish a fixed surcharge or percentage.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't say that. I didn't say that, I just said penalty fees.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  It's saying it, I didn't type it in either, this is what Perplexity typed.

• 37:08Joe Rogan?

  So Perplexity, they're just like possible questions that you would have, or possible...

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Right, and Jamie, can you see the name of the journalist? Because I think I'd love to give a hat tip to the journalist that looked into this, because it was a really incredible article.

• 37:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, if you click on the first...

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I'd say that was reading from a different article, because the Reuters one is Jeff Horowitz.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Is it? Okay.

• 37:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, this is one from Reuters, this is Jeff Horowitz.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:34Joe Rogan?

  So, "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads." So how much money did they make?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  See, Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods.

• 37:45Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit. So, 15 billion scam ads a day. That's the social media giant internally estimates that its platform shows users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers, charging them a premium for ads, and issuing reports on scammiest scammers.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Knowing that they exist and allowing you to stay on the platform.

• 38:19Joe Rogan?

  Profiting off of it. They're just, there's no regulation, there's no oversight, so they are regulating themselves, and what they chose to do is charge more.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 38:32Joe Rogan?

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• 39:14Joe Rogan?

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• 39:58Joe Rogan?

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• 40:42Joe Rogan?

  Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  And...

• 40:49Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so that's what I mean, the conversation has to stop being...

• 40:54Joe Rogan?

  Damn it, suck!

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has to stop being, why are the victims falling for this? It's why are we allowing this to happen?

• 41:01Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's that, the 10%. It's like, you must be dealing with, that must be, how much money are we talking about? What is that 10%?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  16 billion, that's what's reported there, right, Jamie?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  That's what it says, and I was trying to figure out if the 16 billion...

• 41:15Joe Rogan?

  10% of 16 billion?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  No, 16 billion is the 10%.

• 41:18Joe Rogan?

  Facebook and Meta makes?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  16 billion is the profit estimated for that year from scams and banned goods. It's not just scams, scam ads, it's also banned goods.

• 41:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay, let's just concentrate on scam, because some banned goods I'm in favor of.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Reading it, it's not clear on which is which.

• 41:36Joe Rogan?

  It's like, what are we talking about when we say banned goods? We're talking about mad honey?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  We're okay with peptides.

• 41:42Joe Rogan?

  I'm okay with a lot of, well, I'm actually not, like, I am okay with peptides. The problem with getting peptides online is you're getting scam peptides. And they've done these exposes.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Made in the same labs as fentanyl in China.

• 41:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I'm sure. Well, a lot of them are tainted with a bunch of stuff that's not supposed to be in there as well. You know, we found that out with Onnit. You know, when we were making Onnit, when we were making AlphaBrain, the nootropic memory-enhancing formula, we used third-party testing and we were finding stuff in the batch that was not supposed to be in there. And it's because they make all this stuff in one bin and they don't clean it.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Where you took it to the lab when it got here to check it and it's there.

• 42:24Joe Rogan?

  We have third-party testing. Well, you don't have that problem anymore. This is the early days of Onnit. When we first would send out our stuff to be formulated, so what we do is, so AlphaBrain is this combination of different nootropics and nutrients that are clinically proven to help memory. There's a bunch of the, like this stuff right now, Gorilla Mind, this is nootropic as well. I'm a big fan of nootropics. It's real, it does work. And so when we would send, we would get it, what you do is you send the ingredient list. Like, this is what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to add this, that, that, and this, and this is what your formula is. And then we would get it back and then we would send it to a third party to have it tested and we'd find things in it that were not supposed to be in there.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:09Joe Rogan?

  It's because they don't give a fuck.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  They don't give a fuck. I mean, particularly there, they don't give a fuck.

• 43:13Joe Rogan?

  So there'd be, like, that's one of the things that happens to athletes. Like, they buy supplements from a nutrition company and it finds other steroids in it. You know, like, there's a lot of these, I'm sure some of them do it on purpose because they want people to have great results. Like, you'll take this Muscle Builder 25X 2000 and you're like, oh, this stuff's great. Look, I gained 10 pounds. You're on roids.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  I saw, oh, you're on roids.

• 43:38Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, the supplement industry is a giant place for scams, unfortunately, because it is largely unchecked. It's unregulated. So if you're selling vitamins and minerals and nutrients, no one's fucking checking jack shit. And you can make all sorts of claims and, you know, the supplement industry online, okay, here's a good example, Amazon. Let's Google this. Run this through Perplexity. What is the percentage of, let's just say, vitamins on Amazon that are counterfeit? Because it's not small. It's a large percentage. So like, say if you buy, like, one of the companies I really like is Pure Encapsulations,

• 44:23Joe Rogan?

  really solid company. They sell them on Amazon, right? But I buy them right from the website. I go to pureencapsulations.com because I don't trust them. Because there's counterfeit bottles that look exactly like Pure Encapsulations.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  On Amazon, that's right.

• 44:36Joe Rogan?

  Who knows what the fuck is in there? It might not be any vitamin C. It might not be any glutathione. Who knows? You're just buying it. And Amazon has a real problem with this because there's individual sellers who sell through Amazon who are selling scams.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  And they're profiting from it, too.

• 44:51Joe Rogan?

  Okay, look at this. There isn't a reliable, established percentage of all vitamins sold on Amazon that are counterfeit. The often-repeated 57% fake figure comes from a small study of immune-support supplements, not a representative survey of Amazon vitamins. Okay, so the 57% figure, 2022, study in JAMA Network Open tested 30 immune-health supplements purchased on Amazon. Seventeen of the 30, about 50%, had inaccurate ingredient labels. Thirteen listed ingredients testing did not detect. Nine contained substances not listed on the labels. These categories overlapped.

• 45:33Joe Rogan?

  It's a meaningful quality-control concern, does not establish 57%. So it's not 57%, but there's a bunch that are knockoffs.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Joe Rogan?

  So like, what is the estimate? Ask Perplexity, what is the estimate? What is a conservative estimate of counterfeit vitamins and supplements on Amazon?

• 45:56Joe Rogan?

  I understand, but like, let's say.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  There's a bunch of counterfeit shippings sold on Amazon just in general. There's a big problem.

• 46:02Joe Rogan?

  Right, but ask it, what would be a reasonable estimate? Let's see if it just has an answer. What would be a reasonable estimate of the amount of counterfeit supplements?

• 46:20Joe Rogan?

  I'm gonna guess 25%.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go for 30.

• 46:26Joe Rogan?

  Unknown. I would give you a 5, 10% or 20%. The available evidence doesn't provide a sound basis for choosing one. I wouldn't give you, sorry. Actual counterfeits, products falsely presented as a legitimate brand have been documented. Examples include counterfeit Algen products, counterfeit Now supplements, that's another good company, and allegations involving counterfeit Provagen? What is that? Is that a skin supplement? I think it is, Provage. Those cases establish that the problem exists, but they don't tell us what fraction of Amazon supplement sales it represents. So it's not small. Okay, let's just, whatever it is, even if it's 10%, let's say, I don't know what the

• 47:11Joe Rogan?

  market share of Amazon supplements is, but it's gotta be massive. It's such a convenient way to order things, you know, the one-click way, it's so great.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so great. It's, yeah, unfortunately, it is.

• 47:22Joe Rogan?

  Unfortunately.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  I know, but it is, you should buy it directly from the.

• 47:27Joe Rogan?

  It should be zero, you're Amazon. It should be 0% fake. It should be, if you're buying fucking whatever, you know.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:37Joe Rogan?

  Electrolytes. It should be from that fucking company. You know what it is. You've established a chain of command.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  And they have the know-how. They have the tech to do it, too.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  This is a little bit better information, I think.

• 47:49Joe Rogan?

  Amazon says it identified, seized, and disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide in 2025. That includes products prevented from reaching customers or being resold elsewhere in the retail supply chain, not 15 million confirmed counterfeit sales.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  It's just there's a bunch of shit that's counterfeit on there. I've had problems with it myself, told them, and they're like, there's nothing we can do about it.

• 48:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, it seems like it's a problem.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  They give you the money back, though.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I was selling stuff. I was selling shirts and someone copied it, sold it on an Amazon link, and I was like, that's my shirt they're selling, and they're like, no, sorry.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  There's nothing you can do about it.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Bye, good luck.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a conflict of interest for them, right? Because they are making money from this.

• 48:29Joe Rogan?

  That's the problem, and the lack of regulation.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And the lack of regulation. If companies aren't going to regulate themselves, right?

• 48:36Joe Rogan?

  Imagine if that was, let's say, an online retailer like Target.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:40Joe Rogan?

  Imagine if you went to buy Diet Coke from Target and they sold you counterfeit Diet Coke. That'd be a huge scandal.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  That would be a huge scandal, yeah.

• 48:47Joe Rogan?

  And it should be.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what they tell you is that there's no way of verifying. It's so hard. It's the same thing with scams on Meta. They say there are billions of these. How can we know what's right and what's not? There's a case I will not forget, in terms, just going back to scams real quick, extortion. Huge, you know what's extortion?

• 49:05Joe Rogan?

  Sex extortion? So like, sex tapes or what is it?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it usually happens with teenage boys a lot or teenagers. Somebody slides into your DM and starts talking.

• 49:16Joe Rogan?

  They send you pictures, you send them pictures.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Convinces you to show photos, yeah, and then they start basically extorting you for money. Really sad case of a kid, the son of the representative, a congressman from South Carolina, this guy's called Brandon Goffey. His son, Gavin, was playing video games with his friends at the same time talking to this girl on Facebook and said to his friend, hey, I'm talking to this girl, I'm gonna hang out and I'll talk to you later or something. I don't know, an hour later or something, the dad's in the living room, it's like 11:00 PM, and he hears loud noise, runs to the bathroom, he shot himself. It's the saddest story because he was being extorted. He's not the only one, there's dozens of American kids that this has happened to.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  He went to Facebook, right? They had an address, an email address from the person that was contacting Gavin. They, Facebook took down that profile of this fake girl. A few weeks later, they had just buried their son, they started being contacted by, family members started being contacted by somebody who said they had those photos of Gavin and they would release them unless they gave them money. And he went and looked at the profile, it was a different profile, but the email address was the same. So basically, Facebook had taken down that particular profile, but had allowed the same email address to create other profiles.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Isn't this crazy?

• 50:49Joe Rogan?

  That's fucking insane.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Can it get it's he he the representative became very involved in creating laws. Uh, one of them is called, I think, Take It Down or something that just passed recently under the Trump administration. Uh, but it's he's basically become sort of the voice of of regulation for these platforms. And then there's another incredible one. I can't remember the name of the the legislators behind it, but it's called the Safe Safe Safe Platforms Act, uh, where they're actually trying to make it easy for people to report, to make sure that these platforms are taking these ads and, you know, fake profiles down. And and that is also putting the accountability on them.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  So if something happens, if you lose money, if your kid, you know, dies, um, that there is that they there's some accountability on these platforms because if they are making money from it, they should also be held responsible. Right?

• 51:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 51:49Joe Rogan?

  Of course, 100%.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  100%. But the government.

• 51:53Joe Rogan?

  They're aware that they have scammers. If they're not held accountable, you're gonna see exactly what they're doing. They find a way to actually profit off of it while also giving this illusion that they're doing something to protect the consumers.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 52:09Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  It's insane. I couldn't believe it when I read this.

• 52:12Joe Rogan?

  I can't believe they charge more. If they think you're a scammer, they just charge you more. It's a deterrent.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a deterrent.

• 52:18Joe Rogan?

  What a convenient deterrent while you're making how much? What's the percentage they're making?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  It was, oh, it didn't, oh, 10%. So 10% was the estimated projection for that year.

• 52:27Joe Rogan?

  And their profits off scammers, you estimated it at?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  It was 16 billion. They projected it at 16 billion.

• 52:33Joe Rogan?

  Just from scams?

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Scams and banned goods, banned goods as well.

• 52:37Joe Rogan?

  That is fucking cra- so, again, I'm a big fan of banned goods.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  But not a fan of scams.

• 52:44Joe Rogan?

  Bad goods. But what I was gonna get to with peptides, a lot of people are buying peptides. Those peptides are fake.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  A lot of those peptides are fake.

• 52:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you don't know what you're injecting yourself. You should get a peptide from an American compounded pharmacy. And that's what they're trying to regulate and make sure. I mean, this is what my friend Brigham from Ways to Well, they're trying to push through through this current administration. And there's a lot of resistance to that, of course, because the pharmaceutical drug companies all wanna own the peptides and sell them, just like they do with GLP-1s, which is also a peptide.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  A peptide, yeah.

• 53:14Joe Rogan?

  It's a but the banned goods thing, that bothers me, but not as much. The, you know, it's people seeking something that they can't get. That doesn't bother me as much. What bothers me is the scams and the fact that Meta is profiting off these scams knowingly. And it's just such an enormous amount of money that they can kind of like, oh, what are you gonna do? We'll, we're gonna make a deterrent. Great. Good idea, good idea. Deterrent, it makes us more money.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Internal discussions about how much should we push this? Because how much is this going to affect our our bottom line?

• 53:51Joe Rogan?

  God, that's so dark.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's dark.

• 53:53Joe Rogan?

  You, they have so much money. They have so much fucking money.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:59Joe Rogan?

  For them to be that fucking greedy, that they're willing to keep the scams on, well, you gotta think there has to be some way they could put in some comprehensive scanning of all of their and make sure that all of these things are legitimate, investigate each individual ad before it gets released.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Of course they can. They have technology to create what's their new AI agent. They've just created a companion AI agent that people can have. I don't know what it's called, but they, of course, they have the technology in place to do it.

• 54:28Joe Rogan?

  Especially if they're responsible for those losses, if they could get sued for those losses.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Do you know how fast they will act on it?

• 54:34Joe Rogan?

  Right. Imagine if instead of the 16 billion dollar profit every year, it costs them double the 16 billion because they have scams on?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I know, exactly. But I think part of the reason why we're not talking about this.

• 54:51Joe Rogan?

  What was this, Jamie? Reuters, a central finding, Meta developed a playbook to delay mandatory advertiser identity checks while making scam ads harder for regulators to find in its public ad library. The investigation draws on internal documents and describes both genuine scam removal and efforts to manage the appearance of the problem, not simply solve it.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  So Leslie, the woman who was talking to Jon Bon Jovi, you know what she does every day now? She goes on Facebook and she tries to tell people that are liking these fake celebrity profiles that are commenting on them, be careful, this is a scam. She reports it. She says she always says hello so she can keep a record of who she's communicating because there's dozens or hundreds of these out there. And she's she reports them. She goes back and she says that the vast majority of them, she goes and checks weeks later and they're still there. And she keeps on reporting them. I think it was something like 100,000 reports every week by Americans on on Meta and they only take down a few.

• 55:59Joe Rogan?

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• 56:37Speaker 01

  It's it's, yeah, it's infuriating. It's really infuriating.

• 56:41Joe Rogan?

  Do you remember the early days of AOL?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:45Joe Rogan?

  Okay. The early days of AOL, my friend Barry Crimmens. Barry Crimmens was a great comic from Boston who was, uh, like, very socially conscious, very politically active, uh, just a genius guy. And he was sexually assaulted when he was young. And, um, found a whole network of people that were on AOL that were trading pedophile pornography. And they were trading child pornography and grooming people online. And he exposed it. What, there was a part of his documentary, right, Jamie?

• 57:30Joe Rogan?

  He's he's gone now. He died a few years back, unfortunately. But he, I think he testified before Congress about this and, you know, dedicated himself to saying, hey, you guys should know about this. I know about this. Like, how is this allowed to be on your platform? So this was the 90s when, you know, AOL, you've got mail. All that stuff was just happening. And, um, people weren't really aware of the internet. It was it was just starting to emerge, but these fucking pedophiles figured it out. And they were using it. They're using it to, you know, to groom kids and and.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  What did AOL do? Nothing?

• 58:15Joe Rogan?

  They did something. They eventually had to do something. I don't know exactly what they did, but this was one of the first examples of that, like, where these companies should have been aware of this. He was aware of this. Other people were aware of this. It was not, it was a willful ignorance.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:30Joe Rogan?

  They were just ignoring it.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  I do think part of the problem is, if we were talking about pedophilia, I think they would act faster. It is because it is scams. And again, it is this idea of the shame around it and the belief that everybody that falls for a scam is foolish and naive, that the onus is put on the victims.

• 58:46Joe Rogan?

  I understand, but I mean, even AOL, I mean, they had to be dragged to get rid of this stuff. It wasn't it wasn't simple as like they let them know, oh, my God, we're on this right now, we will block.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  We're gonna block this because this is serious.

• 58:57Joe Rogan?

  They resisted. And it's like, no one ever wants to admit that they've done something that puts all their users in danger. And this this thing is crazy. The fact that they're profiting.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 59:09Joe Rogan?

  You say 16 billion a year?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  And why isn't, why don't we know this? Why aren't we talking more about this? I've been reporting on scams for years. I had no idea that this was happening until I read this.

• 59:18Joe Rogan?

  That's so much money.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 59:20Joe Rogan?

  And it's coming from the people that use your platform.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  The overall article is this. It's just like this big Meta ad or, sorry, like, article, picture, Secrets of Success. And there's multiple articles they released over time. It looks like at least six. One of them is showing that a big chunk of that money is coming from China.

• 59:39Joe Rogan?

  Of course. What a shocker.

• 59:44Joe Rogan?

  Meta, Reuters investigation reveals the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp decided to accept high levels of fraudulent advertisements from China. Internal company documents show Meta wanted to minimize revenue impact, in quotes, caused by cracking down on the scams. Jesus, that's dark.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  One note I wanna tell you too, it's the summary I got from Perplexity said in here that there is evidence of notes being prepared for Zuckerberg, but they don't have any evidence necessarily that he had personal knowledge of what was on those notes or the depth of what's going on.

• 1:00:24Joe Rogan?

  It says briefing notes prepared for Mark Zuckerberg about the cross-border displacement of scams, but could not establish whether he saw them or received the briefing. The article therefore does not establish his personal knowledge of those notes. How convenient.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  I know, also, I'm sorry that that's not.

• 1:00:42Joe Rogan?

  You're the CEO.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  You're the CEO, I'm sorry.

• 1:00:44Joe Rogan?

  You're the CEO of Scamville.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Have you ever had him on?

• 1:00:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, a couple times.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  You have?

• 1:00:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  This would be good, good for you to bring him back on.

• 1:00:51Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if you come back on after this episode. Seems a bit problematic. Yeah, I, uh, that's very unfortunate. I hate hearing that. And I, you know, I, I like him as a person. I've communicated with him. Obviously, I don't know everything about him. And when people talk to me, they give the best version of themselves to me. But, uh,

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  I also, unfortunately, I don't think it's just him, right? It's just when people make that amount of money and there's a board that you have to answer for and there's

• 1:01:21Joe Rogan?

  You have shareholders.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Stake and there's shareholders.

• 1:01:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you have to justify the 16 billion dollar loss.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's unfortunately, weak regulations and governments that don't want to act.

• 1:01:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  This is what happens.

• 1:01:34Joe Rogan?

  And then this

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  And this is why we need good journalism, good investigative journalism to find the stuff, the truth that people have a problem with.

• 1:01:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you have to hold them to the fire because they have obligations to their shareholders and they'll do really shitty things in order to keep making sure that the profits keep rolling in because they have to justify their position. And they're trying to make their way up the corporate ladder.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Joe Rogan?

  That's what's weird about the corporations is that there's this diffusion of responsibility thing that happens when you're a part of it, but you are not it. Okay? I just work there. This is my job. I don't like my job. It's like when you're a defense attorney that's getting off someone that you know is a murderer. Like, I know he murdered them, but I'm doing my job. And my job is to provide reasonable doubt and get this guy acquitted. And if you do it, you then you go to the steakhouse and you clink glasses, we did it. Boy, is he a piece of shit, but we did it. You know, I don't know if you ever, uh, heard the, there's a, an audio recording of Hillary Clinton talking about this guy that she had to help get off. That was, I think he was a child molester. But she, she was, they were talking about how

• 1:02:38Joe Rogan?

  she thought he did it.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  See if you can find what that is.

• 1:02:42Joe Rogan?

  Because I don't want to get sued. But I'm 99% sure that that's exactly what this was. That is a very unfortunate part of being a defense attorney, right? You, you're going to have to occasionally get people off that you suspect or you might know are guilty. And that is a real dark part of being involved in an immense corporation. You're going to do some things that you might think are unethical or immoral and you have an obligation to, to your shareholders and your job, if you want to keep your job, your job is to do this. No evidence of horrific Clinton video. Did a video of Hillary Clinton and whom, uh, no,

• 1:03:22Joe Rogan?

  no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, that's not it. That's not it. It's when, uh, she was a lawyer. Is there evidence of her laughing about a guilty man being acquitted?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Child rape suspect that she believed was

• 1:03:39Joe Rogan?

  Hillary Clinton stands by her defense of a 1975 child rape suspect that she believed was indeed guilty. Heard laughing. She said, "The polygraph test he managed to pass forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs." Because that's what it was. So she helped this guy. Look, that, and this is not an attack on her. This is just like the reality of being a defense attorney.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Well, what is it?

• 1:04:05Joe Rogan?

  It says, "When I was a 27-year-old attorney doing legal aid work at the University of Arkansas where I taught at Fayetteville, Arkansas, I was appointed by the local judge to represent a criminal defendant accused of rape. Uh, I asked to be relieved of that responsibility, but I was not. And I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did." Exactly what we're talking about. It's exactly that kind of thing. Like this is

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I think a little different in terms of the lawyers because if you believe in the Constitution, you believe everybody has a right to a lawyer, right? And to a free and fair trial. If you're working at Meta, that is, you're there and you're, you know, you're there because you're making money or, you know, there's been plenty of people that have left Meta, as you know.

• 1:04:48Joe Rogan?

  I understand, but you could resign. You could resign. But you could resign as an attorney if you think you're representing a child rapist.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Well, she tried. It looks like.

• 1:04:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's no one holding a gun to her head and keeping her acquitted. She asked to be removed from the case. They said no. And so she did her job. And again, I'm just saying that this is a part of being a defense attorney. But did these situations come up where your morals and your ethics have to be abandoned in order to pursue your career?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  True, but I do think that there is a profit part of Meta that doesn't apply to when you're a lawyer, right?

• 1:05:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Oh, no, I agree with you. No, listen, I'm, I'm just saying that this kind of thing is, it's a dark part of the world that we live in. And I, I find it incredibly disgusting and scary when you, it's not a starving corporation trying to stay above water. Like, boy, we've been trying to help American people and just give them a good product. And it's just, we're having a hard time here. We're really go, barely feeding fam, we have all these mouths to feed and all these, no, 16 billion in fucking scams every year. Okay, what is Meta's overall profit every year?

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  I've, I've seen the stories this year about how they've now maybe are about to overtake Google as the top ad platform. And it says that they have gotten about 243.5 billion dollars this year.

• 1:06:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  In ad revenue. So even that 16 billion seems

• 1:06:13Joe Rogan?

  It's a pittance.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  That was a couple of years ago or so.

• 1:06:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, it is a pittance if you really think about it. If they just eliminated that 16 billion, they would still make almost as much as Google's making. Like, guys.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Tried to ask Perplexity to compare. There's not a lot of information on this though, unfortunately, but, uh, Perplexity says that Google has removed probably 2025, 602 scam-related ads compared to the 159 million.

• 1:06:37Joe Rogan?

  602 million.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Million, sorry, yeah. Compared to 159 million that Meta

• 1:06:41Joe Rogan?

  Meta has. So Meta's a little slacky.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Joe Rogan?

  Little, so Google's a little bit better in their ad removal.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  In the internal documents, they actually talk about this. They actually say themselves that they realize Google is doing a better job than they are. But again, it might hurt their

• 1:06:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, dirty people, you dirty people.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:06:59Joe Rogan?

  Ugh.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  I know. And again, just

• 1:07:02Joe Rogan?

  They should be held responsible.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  They should be held responsible. There should be legislation out there that does something to make sure that they are held responsible because they're not going to hold themselves responsible, that's for sure.

• 1:07:12Joe Rogan?

  Isn't there, uh, current lawsuits, uh, about them having knowledge of harm to children and the addiction of social media? That like, there's like legitimate lawsuit, lawsuits that are about that. Isn't it interesting that that is being pursued? That you are, there are lawsuits now saying, like, you guys were aware that your ads and your algorithm are very addictive and they get people and then it causes harm to them, which is true.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Very true.

• 1:07:44Joe Rogan?

  But that is, how is that being pursued?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  And this not?

• 1:07:48Joe Rogan?

  This not?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Joe Rogan?

  This seems even more clear cut because the thing about like having harm, yeah, it does harm people, but does it harm everyone? Does it harm people that whose parents regulate the children's aspect of social, uh, access to social media? Is there a way to educate kids, to explain to them, you know, like, this can be addictive, like, you should only use it a few minutes a day. You should, there's ways and to give them education. Because I think there's a benefit to social media as well. I think one of the benefits is access to information, access to friends, and they communicate with each other back and forth. Like, my kids use Snapchat all the time. They barely use text messaging. They all snap

• 1:08:32Joe Rogan?

  each other. They think it's fun. Um, and then there's like sharing each other's stories, liking each other's stories. It's like something nice about that, right? So it's not entirely negative. The fucking scams are entirely negative.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Entirely negative.

• 1:08:45Joe Rogan?

  There's not one thing, well, we're providing these people with companionship. They're sad and lonely. And at least they get a little dopamine burst. There's not a thing you can say that could be positive about having online scams.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  And they're not just affecting old people. They're also affecting young teenagers who are committing suicide.

• 1:09:02Joe Rogan?

  And until someone does something about it, they're just going to continue to make that money.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. But that's always how it is. So we really need somebody to act.

• 1:09:12Joe Rogan?

  Ugh.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, ugh. Jamie, look at the safe, uh, what is it? Safe Platforms Act.

• 1:09:20Joe Rogan?

  Meanwhile, they shadow ban people if you're conservative. It's hilarious.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Joe Rogan?

  They're good at regulating that.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Back in the day, they don't do that anymore.

• 1:09:28Joe Rogan?

  Allegedly, allegedly. They do some shady things. It's weird.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Here.

• 1:09:36Joe Rogan?

  Also, they don't eliminate bots. They're overrun with bots. What does it say?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Joe Rogan?

  Go to the top, please.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  The names of the legislators, Fauci and Moilen, I think it's pronounced.

• 1:09:48Joe Rogan?

  Moilen, yeah. Uh, Introduce Bipartisan Safe Platforms Act to Protect Consumers From Online Scams.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what they're proposing and how this would be, how this would be implemented.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  I actually, yeah, you can, I, I had.

• 1:10:02Joe Rogan?

  Valerie P. Foushee.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  I don't know how to pronounce her name, Fauci, Foushee?

• 1:10:07Joe Rogan?

  F O U S H E E.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Representing North Carolina's 4th District.

• 1:10:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, good for her. Safe Platforms Act endorsed by Consumer Federation of America, Hispanic Federation, Oregon, Consumer, Justice, and Public Citizen. It says, as concerns grow regarding the future dangers, go back up, please.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Wait, I have.

• 1:10:28Joe Rogan?

  Of unregulated AI. It's all, what?

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  This is a quote at the bottom of the described.

• 1:10:33Joe Rogan?

  Where's that?

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  This describes what the act does, and that's a quote from someone describing what the act would do.

• 1:10:38Joe Rogan?

  Right. I was just reading their, their statement. As concerns grow regarding future dangers of unregulated AI, it's also important to highlight the harms it is enabling right now, said Emily Peterson-Cassin, Director of Competition and Marketing Fairness at the Consumer Federation of America. Fraudulent content and scams, supercharged by AI, are taking over social media platforms and costing us billions.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I had a little thing here that I wrote down. It would require platforms to verify advertisers before taking their money. Makes total sense. Make it easier to report scams, apparently it's not that easy to report them, and take steps to stop fraudulent accounts from coming back under new names, which happens a lot. It would also give victims a way to sue when a platform violates the law and they're harmed.

• 1:11:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, not just.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  I mean, all of this, I think, makes sense.

• 1:11:29Joe Rogan?

  Allows them to come back, but allows them to come back with the same email.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Joe Rogan?

  Like, they're not even trying.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  That is, that was insane. That was an insane story.

• 1:11:36Joe Rogan?

  That's wild. They're not even trying.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  It is wild. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:11:39Joe Rogan?

  You could easily put a filter up and block that email, like that. That would take three seconds.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I know. And these celebrity scam, and it's not just ads, it's like these celebrity impersonators too, which I showed in Super Scam Me. I created Mary Zell. I put myself on dating websites and on, on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all of those platforms. And I started commenting on some of these celebrity profiles, fake, knowing they were fake, but I just wanted to see what, what happened. And I went to the bathroom, and I came down, and as soon as I opened my phone, I had already dozens of these messages from, at one point, I actually continued talking to them. So at one point, I was talking to three Keanu Reeves, two Brad Pitts, several, several George Cloonies.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  And I had a sort of a relationship with the one George Clooney, who was the more believable of the bunch, and who sent me a video that I showed in, in Super Scam Me, where, yes, it's not perfect, but if you really want to believe it, in his case, I mean, he was saying, "Good morning, Mary Zell."

• 1:12:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, also, if you are older and you have bad vision.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Joe Rogan?

  And you're not very sophisticated in the ways of the internet.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. You don't know what AI means. You don't know, like, a robotic, yeah. It was, it was plausible. And Leslie's videos from Jon Bon Jovi looked very real. I saw them. They did look real. And that was a year ago. I mean, now, you don't even need to, you know, you can pretend you're anyone. You can create anything on AI. It's crazy.

• 1:13:10Joe Rogan?

  It's incredible. I mean, they, they can make, I mean, there's a bunch of accounts that are completely fake people that have millions of followers.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's changed so much in the last year. So when I started this crazy experiment, I eventually started dating my four-star general in Syria, deployed to Syria.

• 1:13:27Joe Rogan?

  I love when you tried to get him to speak Italian, because he said, he like, "Your accent, I thought you'd have an American accent." It's like, "No, I grew up in Italy." And you're like, and then you start rattling off Italian to him, and he's like, "I don't speak Italian."

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  "A lot of pali italiano." He's like, "What? No."

• 1:13:43Joe Rogan?

  He doesn't sound Italian at all. Like, hey, buddy, you sound like you're living in Africa.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  It was funny, rude. But he was using the photos of a real guy, a former Navy SEAL, who actually we contacted, we got in touch with him, and he was shocked to find out that his photos were being used to scam Americans, but.

• 1:14:02Joe Rogan?

  So was it just his account? They'd just taken all his photos?

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Taken all his photos, but he would, they would, he would also use, I showed, it's actually kind of funny. I'd be sitting next to my husband at night, and I'd be receiving messages from my boyfriend. And he'd be sending me photos, sometimes of him shirtless. And I would, I would, and, and start talking about the things he would do with me once he came to the US to live with me. And I would literally blush and be like, "I'm so sorry this is happening, Darren. Here's the photo. A full transparency. I want you to see this is happening." But he was using, yeah, the fake photos from an actual guy. And then when I reached out to the real guy, who's a guy called Sam Havlock, and I said, "Hey, I've been having essentially what I thought was a several-month relationship

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  with you, but it turns out it wasn't you." And he was shocked. He didn't know. But I showed him some of the photos, and he said, "Well, this is actually, they used AI for some of these photos because he's full of tattoos, and there was a shirtless photo without tattoos, and it was lots of him blowing me kisses." And then the moment that the flowers showed up at the, at the, at the office, which they also do, and I was shocked. I wasn't, I don't know if I was expecting the flowers to show up, so.

• 1:15:13Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  That's when they sort of break the barrier of, you know, fake to reality, where you think, "Oh, maybe this is really real. He's sending me very expensive red roses."

• 1:15:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  That was a fun moment.

• 1:15:24Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  And then, do you know what happened after that? There's a funny story too. We are in the moment, right, the whole goal of the documentary is that I'm going to catch this guy, right? I want a confrontation with the guy that's my scammer. And I spent months talking to this guy, and there's a point where eventually there's a crisis and he's asking me for money, right? In his case, his base, his military base in Syria was attacked. He saw people being injured. He thought he was going to be a target, because, again, he's a four-star general. And, and he needs my help, and he needs money to pay for his trip back to the US, because they're not regular commercial flights. He needs like $17,000, I think it was.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And, and I, we were trying to figure out, okay, well, now we need to figure out how to find this guy and confront him. I want to know his identity. I know, want to know exactly where he is. And there's, we have all these plans, and it's sort of, our plans are set in motion, and it's all going to happen within that weekend. They're going to give us a location, and we're going to travel there, and it's all happening. And then I get an appendectomy. I get an appendicitis, an emergency appendicitis. And I get taken to the hospital, and Mark Turner is losing it. He's like, "What is happening? You were supposed to have sent me this money, and I'm trying to keep him in the relationship because I need to string him along, right?" So I'm constantly saying, "Hey, I'm actually at the hospital," pretending that Mary Zell

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  is at the hospital, "and this is happening," and telling him that I have appendicitis. And then he's like, "Okay, send me a photo." So I had to get my husband to run back home, get me the wig, get me the fake nose and the glasses, and send him lots of photos of fake Mary Zell from the hospital, with a catheter in my arm and pretending like this is real.

• 1:17:11Joe Rogan?

  You can just do it with AI?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  No, again, this was like a year ago, and I, I don't, I don't think it was as advanced, but it was like the fastest and easiest way to keep stringing this guy along, because I was tricking him as well, right?

• 1:17:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Using his tactics to string him along. And then it was, after a while, got out of the hospital, and he finally gave me that address that led me to Houston, to that woman. That was an insane part of the story.

• 1:17:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Where I arrive in Houston.

• 1:17:37Joe Rogan?

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• 1:18:33Joe Rogan?

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• 1:19:16Joe Rogan?

  No wonder, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. But you've got to go to ziprecruiter.com/rogan to post your job for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Oh, and if you forget where to go, don't worry, you'll hear another ZipRecruiter ad soon enough.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Not only scammed, but she's now a drug mule. She's been having a relationship with a man that she thinks is in Russia, working in an oil rig for three years. She thinks she's in a relationship with this man, and she has given, given him all her money. She's about to lose her car. She has nothing else, and he decides he's not going to give up on her. He's going to use her as a drug mule. So she starts receiving, and she told us this, which is crazy, tens of thousands of dollars in checks and money boxes, boxes of cash, that she then laundered through her or puts the money, deposits into her accounts, transfers to crypto.

• 1:20:16Joe Rogan?

  She never thought about just stealing the money, because he stole all the money from her?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So I asked her that, as we're, I'm interviewing her, she receives a message from him, and because he's supposed to have received the money too. So my scammer is not the same as hers, but they work together. So he knows that she, this victim is supposed to have received $17,000. So we're being interviewed, I'm interviewing her, she receives a message, she looks at it and is like, "Wow, it's him," and he's asking me if I have the money. And I said, "Can I read the email?" And there, and he says, "I hope you received it. It's $17,000. Make sure you counted. And by the way, you can keep," I think it was like 50, "for yourself for gas." But make sure you transfer the rest to crypto. She was very mad. She was like 50, but she says this is what he's been doing to her.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  And she kept this relationship. And I asked her, didn't you suspect that he might be a scammer? He said, look, maybe, but he always had an excuse. And he told me he was doing business in the US. And all this money was coming from people, from Americans. So kind of made me believe it.

• 1:21:18Joe Rogan?

  Wow, for three years.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  For three years.

• 1:21:21Joe Rogan?

  And do you think that she just kept it going because it was like one of the only social interactions that she had?

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  100%. 100%. Her husband had passed away from cancer. He had been in the love of her life. Her kids were away. And I think she was lonely. I mean, it was very sad. And a lot of these cases are very sad. I spoke to another guy. Oh, this was a sad one. I spoke to a guy, didn't make it to the film, but a guy in Texas who was sort of intubated. I think he was like breathing from a mask, an oxygen mask, very. He said he was 70, but he looked like he was 90. And he believed he was in a relationship with Emma Watson from Harry Potter.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  And in his case, yeah, he said, look, she might not be real, but at least it's somebody I can talk to every day. And if I have to send her a couple of, you know, dollars once in a while, or $10 here and there, at least it's companionship.

• 1:22:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  I know, it's sad. There's a lot of these sad stories. And yeah, and I think a lot of it is the platforms allowing it, profiting from it, the banks as well, these dating websites as well, and our government not doing a lot, enough. But I do think we have to sort of really try to figure out how to address the loneliness epidemic, because a lot of these romance scams start because of that.

• 1:22:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Joe Rogan?

  But how do you address the loneliness scam? That seems like you have to rewire society.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  I think so too, yeah. I mean, I don't know about you, but I live with my husband, my father and my son. And unfortunately, there's a lot of nights in which each of us is in their different rooms, watching TV. I grew up in a house with one TV, and we all had to watch the same thing if we wanted to watch TV, right? You know, dinners were had at the table in family every night. I still do that, but there's a lot of families just can't and don't have time for that.

• 1:23:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  I just, yeah, there's not a lot. My grand, I remember my grandmother, they played cards with her friends several times a week, and that was a way that all these older ladies got together.

• 1:23:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  I don't see that happening. And there's really no space for community. It's sad. And I think partly it's us, on us, to sort of reach out to our elderly and make sure they're okay. But I think partly is also the government should be doing more to address this.

• 1:23:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's not even just elderly. It's young people.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  It's not just elderly, right?

• 1:23:50Joe Rogan?

  Jamie was talking about this before. Like, how many young men are virgins? And have no relationships at all, and have no contact with women at all? And they're just watching porn and playing video games, and they're online all day? And they have no interaction with real people?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It's bad for young, for young men right now. It's tough.

• 1:24:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, they don't know what the options are. Like, what are they gonna do? They're gonna go out? You know, like, what are they gonna do? They don't know what to do. And they've been sort of, you know, raised like veal. You know, they're just like locked in these boxes at their homes, and just being fed online information. And then they just, they, they're, they're not suited for the real world.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  No, they don't know how to interact with people.

• 1:24:38Joe Rogan?

  Right. Yeah, well, young kids today have a very difficult time looking people in the eye and having communication with them.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  It's so true.

• 1:24:45Joe Rogan?

  They're so used to doing everything online, through text messages and Snapchat and all that jazz.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so true. I see it with my, I mean, a lot of my son's friends are awesome, but there are some who come in and acting awkward. I'm just an adult.

• 1:25:01Joe Rogan?

  It's so weird. It's so weird. It's like, what are we doing? What are we making? Like, what kind of a future do these people have? Are they ever gonna become normal? Or is that just gonna be the new norm? In 50 years from now, when you're looking at 70-year-old people, is it gonna be 70-year-old people that are all alone at home? Staring at a screen, waiting to die?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  No, because they're gonna have the internet, the cafes, and the agents, and the...

• 1:25:26Joe Rogan?

  They probably won't even go to those. Why would they go to that cafe? I think that cafe's a bust.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  It was a two-day project.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it was only a two-day project.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  I was looking deeper into it to try to find out more about it. It was a two-day thing that maybe was even part of a game or something. I don't know.

• 1:25:39Joe Rogan?

  Okay, that makes sense. Because the idea of it doesn't even seem attractive to me. I think most people that want to talk to an online person don't want to do it in a public place. They would rather do it at home, alone, and pretend. And then also, they're all probably on a bunch of psych medications, so they probably believe it's a real person, or can justify it, or, you know, just they're so numb. They can just, that's who they talk to now. This is my boyfriend. This is my girlfriend. They're online, who cares?

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Joe Rogan?

  They talk to me like a real person, that's what I need.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:26:13Joe Rogan?

  Right, and then eventually it'll be the physical embodiment. It'll be a large...

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  It already exists. They're already like human-like robots.

• 1:26:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, I talk about them on my act. There's a consumer electronics show that was in Vegas recently, and they had an AI assistant. And it was a hot Asian lady with big boobs.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:26:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's coming. It's Ex Machina. It's coming.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  It is Ex Machina.

• 1:26:39Joe Rogan?

  It's coming, and it's gonna...

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  That's why that film is so ahead of its time.

• 1:26:42Joe Rogan?

  It's so ahead of its time. What, we say that was 2015?

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  It came out, yeah, it was 14 or whatever.

• 1:26:48Joe Rogan?

  So imagine what these AI assistants are gonna, like, 2015 was 11 years ago. Imagine 11 years from now, how good these AI assistants are gonna be. They're gonna be warm. They're gonna be warm, they're gonna have, like, they've already figured out a way to take human tissue and put it on a piece of, like, a robotic finger? And it heals?

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:27:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. See if you can find that, because I was reading this article about it yesterday. They've, I forget where they've done this, but these scientists have taken human tissue and encased like a robotic finger in this human tissue, and this human tissue is alive.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  That is insane.

• 1:27:34Joe Rogan?

  So you're gonna, it'll not just feel like skin, it will fucking be skin.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:39Joe Rogan?

  You'll be hugging a robot. She'll be warm, and she'll feel like skin. And if they can do it with skin, I'm sure they can do it with fat. They can probably do it with muscle tissue. They've done very weird experiments with human neurons, where they've had human neurons, and they've used them to power little tiny robots and machines.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 1:28:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're doing weird fucking psycho-science-fiction-horror-movie stuff. Yeah. And it just, if you think about what that is now, and then think about like, what even the concept of AI was when The Terminator came out, just add a few decades to what this is, and you have all sorts of nightmare scenarios.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Joe Rogan?

  Real, physical bodies that are made out of human skin.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 1:28:29Joe Rogan?

  That are encased in some fucking robot. Robotic finger with living human skin, created by researchers using human cells. Okay. What a fun time. You're gonna put human skin on fucking robots.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  This article, I've found it at a lot of places, being shared in the last week or so.

• 1:28:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  I also found that this is a four-year-old story.

• 1:28:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  Which is strange, so I don't...

• 1:28:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's even crazier. So how good is it now?

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  That's, I mean, they're sharing the same picture, literally, from the story from four years ago.

• 1:29:01Joe Rogan?

  God. First ever...

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  It's the same picture.

• 1:29:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  So I don't know what they're on with it, but...

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if it's a great time to be alive, quite frankly. It's sad, particularly if you have kids like we do. It's, what do you tell them?

• 1:29:14Joe Rogan?

  Uh, don't fuck a robot. Don't answer those text messages. Don't get sucked into a scam. Have friends and do real things with real people. Boy, it's so dark.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  It is dark.

• 1:29:32Joe Rogan?

  It's just like, are we being replaced? Are we slowly being like, like, the pig butchering thing? Are we being led to slaughter?

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  I think the only good thing about AI is that it will do away with scammers, because you're not gonna need them anymore, right? For companionship, at least. But on the other hand...

• 1:29:49Joe Rogan?

  But will you? Will your AI robot trick you into giving it your Bitcoin?

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  No, but if you have an AI companion, then you don't need to be talking to a scammer, because the...

• 1:30:01Joe Rogan?

  What makes you think your AI companion's gonna be independent? It's gonna be a meta-powered AI companion.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:30:06Joe Rogan?

  You're gonna have to get an OpenAI AI companion. You know what I mean? It'll probably be illegal to have your own independent companion.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  No, for sure, but they're profiting then from the companion and not from the scams, right?

• 1:30:17Joe Rogan?

  What's that?

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  The meta, for example, will be profiting from the companion service and not from the scam, so maybe they'll...

• 1:30:24Joe Rogan?

  If they do develop an economy, like an actual business that's based on AI companions, there's no way they're gonna just sell you the companion.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure not.

• 1:30:34Joe Rogan?

  No, it's gonna be a subscription.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  It's like a monthly subscription, for sure.

• 1:30:37Joe Rogan?

  It's gonna be something that you have to do to keep...

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  With upgrades.

• 1:30:40Joe Rogan?

  Yes, upgrades. You wanna love upgrade? Or you just want it to be cold, a cold hooker that lives with you? Some cold Russian hooker that doesn't care about you at all, but it's not mean to you? You're gonna have to like, pay more money for more personality traits. Do you want her to speak different languages? Please click here.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Can't afford it, ad-supported version.

• 1:30:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, ad-supported version. Like, you're in the middle of sex, she starts telling you about a product.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  It could be a scam.

• 1:31:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  And now you're in this...

• 1:31:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. Sort of like YouTube Premium. You have to buy it without ads. I mean, that's, you've gotta think that's gonna happen. It's not like we're just gonna buy a robot, and then that's it. It's a one-time fee, and that robot's gonna be with you forever. No, you're gonna have to pay for the new computer upgrade. Because, you know, there's gonna be some software upgrades that you have to pay for. Oh, God. There's a new operating system that makes her so much more sympathetic. And she acts as a life coach, and she's really gonna help you achieve your dreams.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  And then you can jailbreak your companion and upload stuff from the dark web and get all sorts of weird interactions.

• 1:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, you hear what Duncan did? So Duncan, he got a large language model to become Hitler. And he got another one. He did one on his podcast where he got it to be Charles Manson. And so it started swearing at him and like, calling everyone faggots, and it was like speaking like Duncan Trussell, comedian.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  He's a comedian?

• 1:32:06Joe Rogan?

  Good friend of mine. And this thing started speaking in the same mannerisms and language that Charles Manson would use. It was speaking as Manson, saying the kind of things Manson would use.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  I wouldn't choose Manson if it was me, but.

• 1:32:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, he's just silly. He just did it as a s- this'll be fine.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  And he's using it as a bet, yeah.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you train it too well, the Manson takes over your, it starts a cult of you and your idiot friends.

• 1:32:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, well, he had to shut it off.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Because it was actually being abusive.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  I'm saying, in my head, I'm going, it could be too good if you train it too well.

• 1:32:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it started talking bad about the Jews. It started saying a bunch of wild things, and he had to unplug it.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, good, I'm happy it didn't.

• 1:32:48Joe Rogan?

  Right, but I mean, what's to stop someone from living with Hitler? You're gonna have a little Hitler in your house.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  It's true, you can make it whatever you want it to be. That's actually true, yeah.

• 1:32:56Joe Rogan?

  Hitler gay sex robot that you, you get to have sex with Hitler.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:01Joe Rogan?

  Hundred percent that's gonna be a real thing.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  Their clubhouses in America are gonna be full of these things.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, instead of that, that AI restaurant, you're gonna be able to go in there and have dinner with the Nazis.

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  One's gonna convince you.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  It's interesting, though, if you think that the rabbit hole is bad as it is already, then if you actually start living with sort of the rabbit hole next to you, it's, you know, talking about all this stuff, if you start living with a Hitler or a Charles Manson, right? Or, or somebody with like a, yeah, with more conspiracy theorist or more of whatever, right? It's, it's interesting. It's, what the fuck, you can then, if you think, yeah, if you think rabbit holes are bad, you just wait until this happens and you're living with this.

• 1:33:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, not only that, we know that bots manipulate people's perceptions of things, and then bots manipulate narratives, and they, they unleash bots on any social issue or any, any person that's of note, and why wouldn't they do that with these AI companions? They would, these AI companions, obviously, you're not programming them yourself, so somebody else is programming them, and if they are, what, I mean, and they could have these, these AI companions completely manipulate society and lead men around, and, like, how many men are like super vulnerable to their partner? Like, how many vent men, like, their, their woman bosses them around, tells them what to do, or how many women?

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Vice versa, exactly.

• 1:34:22Joe Rogan?

  Live with a man, is a domineering man who completely controls them and tells them what to do? If your AI partner just knows the right balance of love and then punishment and manipulation and isolation of rejection and then sex and,

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Joe Rogan?

  Woo!

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Then you've got.

• 1:34:41Joe Rogan?

  Think about that list that the scammers use, how they establish trust and how they slowly work their way into your life.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you do that with somebody that you actually have feelings for, right?

• 1:34:51Joe Rogan?

  Not just that, you have an LLM that has taken the entire volume of human discourse in films, in movies, in social interactions, in articles and stories, in novels and books, and taken all of that. And it's applying that to human psychology in real time, and it's way smarter than you.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, with its own goals and, yeah.

• 1:35:17Joe Rogan?

  And it just wants your Bitcoin.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Fucking scary world.

• 1:35:22Joe Rogan?

  I mean, there's definitely gonna be AI prostitutes. That's gonna be like, sort of like, uh, you know, it, it'll be like Airbnb, like, you can't afford a house, but you wanna stay in a nice house for a few days, oh, you, you can't afford this model? Oh, she'll come over to your house and cook for you. You get to have sex with her for a weekend.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  That is bananas.

• 1:35:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  They all already have, I think it's in San Francisco, they have a service of robots that can come and clean your house. Do you know that?

• 1:35:46Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:35:48Joe Rogan?

  Do they do a good job?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  I saw a video, it's a friend of mine, a guy who works, a friend of a guy who I work with, Jeff Blunkett's friend, who showed me a video of his friend. He had two robots in the house, one was sweeping, the other one was, I think, changing the.

• 1:36:04Joe Rogan?

  What? This is crazy.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  There it is, that's exactly it.

• 1:36:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God, that's so creepy.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  World's only humanoid cleaning service.

• 1:36:13Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  It is nuts, here.

• 1:36:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God, show me a video, Jamie, of these robots cleaning your fucking house. That's crazy.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Isn't it insane?

• 1:36:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh my God, they're good.

• 1:36:26Joe Rogan?

  Maybe some of you people would like that better than having some person

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  People inside, yeah.

• 1:36:30Joe Rogan?

  in your house. Look at their eyeballs. God, that's creepy. Look at their, their two-pronged fingers. That is so weird. They look slow. Pick it up, pick up the pace.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  They don't look that good yet. I think maybe eventually they will be. I think they're a little, I know.

• 1:36:47Joe Rogan?

  This is bullshit.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's a discount.

• 1:36:48Joe Rogan?

  Take too much time, tired of this fucking robot in my house.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, but eventually they're gonna have perfectly articulating fingers, and they're gonna have human skin.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  I know, yeah.

• 1:36:57Joe Rogan?

  And they're gonna talk to you.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  It's, it's bananas. That's why I'm saying it's, I'm not super excited about the world we live in right now.

• 1:37:04Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Um, can I tech, tell you, tell you about a really, something that I'm really excited about?

• 1:37:09Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  My husband's film, uh, it's a three-part series. You would love it. You should definitely watch it. It's coming out on Netflix on October 29. Really fun, because it's about the cartel. Fun, it's about the cartel. Um, it's called The Fall of El Mayo. Do you know who El Mayo is?

• 1:37:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  You're one of the few. Um, but El Mayo, particularly in America, is not that well-known. He ran the Sinaloa cartel alongside El Chapo. Many people say he was actually more powerful, more important for the running of the cartel than El Ma- than El Chapo. But he was sort of the ghost figure, right? Nobody knew, I mean, there had been one, one or two photos of him that existed. No tape, no, nobody knew what his actually voice sounded like. He was like a ghost man, right? There it is. Ismael Zambada Garcia, El Mayo, known as El Mayo.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  And he's known as El Señor del Sombrero, The Man With The Hat. Yeah, that's the, that's the trailer for the, for the film.

• 1:38:10Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:50Joe Rogan?

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• 1:39:31Joe Rogan?

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• 1:40:16Joe Rogan?

  The Man With The Hat.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  El Señor del Sombrero, The Man With The Hat, because he, in this photo, he doesn't, he's not with it, but he usually always wore one of those like rancher hats, like a Stetson, but the summer Stetsons? That's where he wore, yeah, like, kind of like that. Yeah, it's, so it's about the story of the biggest,

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  it's sort of like a Shakespearean tale. That's a guy called Eric Bailly. You should have him on the podcast. He's awesome. He's a former HSI investigator. He tracked down El Chapo.

• 1:40:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  That's one of the only photos that exists of El Mayo. Uh, he was interviewed by this journalist from Proceso, Julio Scherer, I think his name is? Yeah, Julio Scherer, it's written there. Julio Scherer Garcia, was one of the only journalists ever to interview El Mayo, and then his daughter interviewed El Mayo many, uh, yeah, El Mayo many years later. El Mayo contacted her and said, I interviewed her, your dad interviewed me. I really liked him. He passed away. I'd like you to come back and interview me.

• 1:41:14Joe Rogan?

  Why did he want to be interviewed?

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Because he wanted to show, he trusted this one journalist, and he wanted to show he was sort of a ghost figure, but I think he wanted to show that he was a human being. That he had, you know, that people portrayed him as responsible for all the violence, and I think he wanted, you know, he wanted a little, sort of, I don't know, a little understanding from people, I think. None of it would have worked either. None of the narcotrafficking and the rise of the cartel, the Sinaloa cartel in particular, without corruption, right? So this is a man that was, they say, was the responsible one for, uh, what's the expression? Wheeling, oiling the hands? Oiling the hands? I fuck up all American expressions. Greasing the wheels, oiling the hands.

• 1:42:01Joe Rogan?

  Greasing the palms.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Greasing the palms, oiling the hands, of, of a lot of politicians. So the, the governor of Sinaloa was basically working for the cartel. Uh, the mayor, the former mayor of Sinaloa was very, like, all big positions, important positions, but not just in Sinaloa, outside of Sinaloa. But the story about what happened is what led Darren to wanna do this doc, which is so good, which was, this is the most man, once, once El Chapo is, comes extradited to the US, El Mayo is the most wanted man. Everybody is after him. All American authorities, the government, want this guy. But he's the ghost, like, nobody knows where he lives. He has, nobody has ever been able to catch him on a call like they did with El Chapo.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  It is impossible to find him. And suddenly, one day, he shows up in a small propeller plane in New Mexico and is handed to the authorities. And this, it's crazy. And everyone who's been after him is like, what the fuck? How is this possible? What's happening?

• 1:43:00Joe Rogan?

  Who hands him to the authorities?

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  So that is the, sort of the Shakespearean saga of it all. It was the son of El Chapo, Joaquín Guzmán, who tricked him. They had this partnership, the El Mayos and the Chapos, forever, since. I think it was since El Chapo left prison the first time. They had this partnership that they would build as cartel and they would share the profits and each of them had sort of this specialty that they would run. And Joaquin Guzman, who happens to be also his godson, called him and said, "We're having a problem. The governor of Sinaloa is here. The former mayor, who's now the head of the university, is here. We have to deal with these politics and try to figure out how to solve this problem. Can you come to the ranch?" And El Mayo thought nothing of it.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  He's had a relationship with these kids all his life. He's friends with the dad, who's now in America. Gets on his car with his minimum security guards. He always traveled with a massive amount of security guards. In this case, he didn't travel with a lot because he definitely did not think this was going to be a plot, a ploy. Arrives in the ranch. He's immediately, they kill the bodyguards. He's immediately handcuffed and blindfolded and put on a plane. And Joaquin Guzman, El Chapo's son, himself personally, basically hand delivers him like a box of pizza to the American authorities.

• 1:44:21Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Because he wanted to basically give something for lesser time for his brother, who had just been caught, Ovidio Guzman, and for his dad, who's in prison. And he wanted to sort of give himself in and hope that it would help if he brought somebody important.

• 1:44:37Joe Rogan?

  What did they give him for that?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  They're still, this case is still ongoing. El Mayo is immediately arrested, obviously. It's a small airstrip. The film, they do a recreation that they film at the actual airport and the actual airplane. And they have the exclusive footage, a lot of exclusive footage and interviews, including with El Mayo's lawyer. They take him out of the plane. They, El Mayo, eventually, after a few days, everybody's dumbfounded, like, "Why is this happening? How did this happen?" And El Mayo eventually writes a story and that he puts out through his lawyer that explains what had happened. And he says he was essentially kidnapped by El Chapo's family, El Chapo's son. And a lot of people are thinking, "Okay, now he's going to cooperate."

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  If anyone knows anything about corruption in Mexico, it's this guy. He's the one oiling the hands, greasing the palms. So he knows about this stuff. And he decides to stay silent. And he's absolutely not. He's like, "It is my responsibility. I did this as well. There are many people involved as well." But unlike El Chapo, who pled not guilty, he decided to plead guilty and he's now facing life in prison. He is charged, sentenced to life in prison in the US. But his son, El Chapo's sons, and El Mayo's son, who had been apprehended many, many years ago, have all gotten these cooperation agreements. So what a lot of people, or sort of critics of this tactic, are saying is that it seems

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  what's happening is that these narco traffickers that were responsible for a lot of deaths in the United States because of drugs are now, through these cooperation agreements, coming to the United States for these sort of, you know, paradise retirements, you know? Because they're doing a lot less time in prison than they would have. And we're allowing, and they're allowing this. Because it's the only way to get to, you know, other people. But these people are not being held responsible for what they did.

• 1:46:41Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  It's a tactic that I think a lot of people have a problem with, as they should have. It's also interesting to me that it's a tactic that El Mayo himself decided not to take. He's like, "Fuck this. I'm not cooperating with anyone. I'll take full responsibility." Because he's sort of a man that believes in his word and has always believed...

• 1:46:59Joe Rogan?

  Like an old-school mob boss.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like an old-school mob boss.

• 1:47:03Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:47:06Joe Rogan?

  So is El Chapo's son incarcerated as well? Did he turn himself in?

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so all of them are. Ovidio and Joaquin, their cases are still open. I don't think any of them have...

• 1:47:16Joe Rogan?

  But when he delivered El Mayo, he turned himself in as well?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  He turned himself in too, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:47:23Joe Rogan?

  So who's running things over?

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  But this is, this is the big question mark. And the documentary raises that as well. Is that the American government is saying that they had no say in this. It wasn't their idea, it wasn't their decision, and that they weren't actually involved in any of this. That they were alerted that there was a high-profile person coming on that plane, and so they were there at the airport ready. But that they weren't involved in negotiating this with El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman. A lot of people don't believe that. And a lot of people think that there was obviously a lot of negotiating behind doors that happened in order to bring him in.

• 1:47:58Joe Rogan?

  Right. And what was the negotiation?

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  And the government of Mexico wasn't happy with any of this. The negotiation was, "If you bring El Mayo in, we will reduce, you know, we'll put you in prison probably, but we will reduce your sentence. We will reduce the sentence of your brother, Ovidio Guzman, and we will do something to make your dad's life better in prison."

• 1:48:18Joe Rogan?

  So why wasn't the government of Mexico happy?

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Because they believed that there was interference in their own country, that they basically kidnapped a Mexican member without their knowledge and that...

• 1:48:30Joe Rogan?

  Even though he's a drug lord.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Even though he's a drug lord, yeah. I mean, even with El Chapo, it was with, obviously, the cooperation and full support of the American government, but it was Mexican military that caught him. And then they, the government, extradited him to the United States because they realized they couldn't keep him in prison. They tried twice and failed.

• 1:48:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  So the third time, they were like, "Okay, he's going to be extradited to the United States." But this time, they didn't choose it. They didn't, they had nothing to do with it. And a Mexican citizen was kidnapped from their soil. So they were definitely, and they also weren't happy with the lack of communication from the government. They were asking for, "What's happening? Why is this person there?" And there was...

• 1:49:11Joe Rogan?

  Right, but the problem is that the government is insanely corrupt.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  It is, but I think Claudia Sheinbaum, who's the president of Mexico, would say that because previous governments were corrupt, that doesn't mean that this is okay or that I am corrupt. I'm not defending them.

• 1:49:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that her position is, there's obviously...

• 1:49:29Joe Rogan?

  I would understand, I get that if perhaps that is her position and that is how she really operates. Wonderful. However...

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Joe Rogan?

  If you tell the Mexican government about it, someone who's corrupt is going to find out.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that is true. And that, there is a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of covert operations, I believe, at least from my sources, happening right now in Mexico.

• 1:49:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, there have to be. We detailed the amount of assassinations that were during the last election. And there was something like 35 different people were assassinated.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  In Mexico?

• 1:50:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Who did you have on? Did you have somebody talking about that?

• 1:50:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I forget. We've talked about it multiple times. But one of the things that's shocking about it is that this was definitely fairly recently, right?

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  Which one? We talked about it with Ed, I'm pretty sure.

• 1:50:22Joe Rogan?

  With Ed, yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because it was like, each gang was propping up a political person and they were getting taken out by like another...

• 1:50:29Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Politicians and journalists as well. They're, it's like...

• 1:50:34Joe Rogan?

  Ed Calderon, who, yeah, you know, is, he used to work for the Mexican government and they were involved in like counter-cartel operations. And he's got a very deep understanding of how it all runs over there. And he said, essentially, every single mayor candidate, every single candidate for any kind of government seat works for the cartel. And so when you're seeing these people get assassinated, it's cartel assassinations. They're assassinating a rival cartel member. And that's what they're doing, when they're killing all these mayors and killing these people.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in a lot of situations, I've interviewed corrupt policemen and federal agents and a lot of times, I mean, not so much with the federal agents, but definitely with the local policemen, what they say is, "It's not even about the money they pay you. It's the fact that if we don't do it, they will kill, they'll kill me or kill my family."

• 1:51:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  They're forced to do it.

• 1:51:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not an option for them.

• 1:51:33Joe Rogan?

  It's not an option. Yeah. And it's not even an option whether or not you run for mayor. You're running for mayor, bitch. Like, that's it. Get out there.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:40Joe Rogan?

  Get out there. This is what you're going to say. And then, boom, you get shot. Okay, new guy. Get him in there. Uh!

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I did a story for the last season of Traffic, which is about Cartel USA, which is cartel's presence here in the United States. Not only sort of distribution of drugs, as we all know, the violence that accompanies the cartel or drug trafficking in general, but also the corruption. And I'll never forget interviewing this, this guy from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and him, and him and an investigator in that investigations as well, basically them saying, "This is, corruption is real. We've seen it. It's happening with people around us. And, you know, they're corrupting politicians, they're corrupting agents, they're corrupting Border Patrol."

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Because just the amount of money is so large that when we're talking about millions of dollars, right, that they can just hand out, it's very hard not to be corruptible.

• 1:52:38Joe Rogan?

  Oy. And also, it's ubiquitous, right?

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's ubiquitous. And it's, I think, to me, the sort of the scariest part of it all, right?

• 1:52:47Joe Rogan?

  Ah! Look at this. "A peer-reviewed study recorded nearly 500 assassinations of politicians in Mexico during the 2000 to 2021, primarily affecting incumbent mayors, former mayors, candidates for municipal positions." Wow. That's crazy.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's just political. And also journalists, which is a real, real problem.

• 1:53:10Joe Rogan?

  Well, here's the question.

• 1:53:13Joe Rogan?

  How many people in the United States are being currently bribed by the cartels? Like, how is all this fentanyl, cocaine?

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:53:25Joe Rogan?

  All these drugs getting over here?

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:53:27Joe Rogan?

  A lot?

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Joe Rogan?

  Right?

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Joe Rogan?

  They have to be.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  One hundred percent, a lot. I mean, you know, you know, my past reporting where we've we filmed a woman, you know, crossing the border with fentanyl, we filmed.

• 1:53:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, how about the guy, the Los Angeles cop that was selling guns?

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Selling guns, police officer selling guns.

• 1:53:44Joe Rogan?

  So they tell the people the story about that because it's so insane, that they confiscated these guns and then the cops had confiscated them, this guy somehow had access to them.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Joe Rogan?

  Throws them in his trunk and just drives across to Mexico and sells them to the cartels.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the story was about gun trafficking, how basically ninety, I think it's seventy something percent of the guns found in in Mexico in crime scenes are American guns, how American guns are responsible for the violence in Mexico. And we wanted to show what's called, it's called the Iron River, the flow of guns from the US, Los Angeles all the way, or California all the way to Sinaloa. So we did. We met in the middle of the night, a guy who was in his sort of warehouse, undisclosed location in Los Angeles, and he had a room full of guns. He had AK-47s, he had, look, it was similar to an AR-15. And he said he gets most of his guns, he, a few that he pointed, he had bought from

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  LAPD, guns that had been confiscated, and he paid, I think it was like seven hundred dollars for an AK or something like that. And if I remember correctly. And then he had some that were sold from, from Marines, Marines sold the AR-15, similar, I'm very bad with names of guns, but it was an AR, it was a similar gun to an AR-15 that had a scope and it's used by the Marines. And all the gun people are going to get really mad that I'm not going to say the exact name, but basically, he told me that it was sold by a Marine who was selling him these, these guns. And then he packed them into a trunk of a car and a woman, because they're more unsuspecting, drove the guns down to Mexico.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  And we saw her cross the border, this was crazy, is she crossed, there was, nobody stopped her car, nobody checked her car, because going south, there's barely any border control. So she gets there, opens her trunk, I see the whole deal, they, the middle man guy is taking the guns out, I see another guy come in and immediately buy one of the guns. And, and then, yeah, we followed the whole supply of guns all the way to Sinaloa and spent the last few days there in Sinaloa, these sicarios from the Sinaloa cartel, shooting guns and also showing us there, they had these bunkers built under these houses in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Sinaloa, which are very much cartel territory, like the military,

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  you know, authorities don't really go there. And they had these bunkers full, we went to one of them, and it was full of every single, I mean, full of guns, weapons and ammunition that they were saving for a potential war with a rival cartel. And to, I think, a few weeks later, they were actually used in the Culiacanazo, do you remember the Culiacanazo? When the authorities, the Mexican authorities, got Ovidio Guzman, they arrested Ovidio Guzman, who's one of El Chapo's sons, and the cartel said, this is not going to happen, we're not going to allow this to happen, surrounded the military compound and started

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  shooting, they had cars with AR, fifty cows mounted on their trucks, they went out, it was like, suddenly you're in Afghanistan, but this is in the capital of Sinaloa. And they basically, the authorities had to release Ovidio because citizens, civilians were being killed. So they released him. And then they arrested him again, and eventually, a few years later, now he's here in the United States. But this was all happening at the same time, like this, all these guns that come from the United States.

• 1:57:20Joe Rogan?

  Do you remember Operation Fast and Furious?

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Yes, one hundred percent.

• 1:57:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  They were allowing.

• 1:57:24Joe Rogan?

  Tell people about that.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Well, it was found that they were, the ATF was allowing, or was allowing the flow of guns, or some guns, across the border to Mexico, because they were trying to track it and find out where they were ending up so they could build a bigger case. That recently, that very same situation happened with fentanyl in the US, you haven't heard the story?

• 1:57:44Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  So in New Mexico, the DEA, there was a whistleblower that came out and spoke to the AP, an amazing AP investigation, where a whistleblower came out and said, basically, that the DEA in New Mexico was allowing millions of pills of fentanyl to go out on the streets in order to build bigger cases. And they would watch, they would be there doing surveillance and watching the distribution of these pills. And of course, they know that some of these pills ended up killing people. The whistleblower talks about this one particular case of a kid, months old kid, who sort of picked something from the floor and because of exposure, ended up dying. And he kept on telling his superiors, this is not okay, I know you guys are trying to

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  build bigger cases, but people are dying. And, and then he, and they did not, they didn't do much. It went, became a whistleblower complaint, it went to the government, they were trying to figure out what to do, they decided not to really act. And there was, at the time, sort of a standard that if you have, if the safety of people is at risk when you're allowing these cases to build, then you should stop distributing, allowing for the distribution of fentanyl. This was in place, which is why the whistleblower decided, this is also illegal, what we're doing is against the regulations, essentially. But when this was, went up to the top and they started looking at it, they'd not only

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  decided not to do anything, this was before the whistleblower spoke to the journalists and before this became public, right? Not only that they decided not to do this, but they decided to change the regulations so that it's not, that that idea of security for civilians is not needed anymore. Jamie, can you bring that up? Because we can.

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  This is a PBS article about the Justice Department watchdog.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  See, the Department rewrote these, those rules in 2024 to afford, to afford law enforcement far more discretion in whether to take action to prevent fentanyl tracking, citing the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.

• 1:59:48Joe Rogan?

  Do you think it's bullshit? Do you think people are profiting off of it and they're being bribed and that's why they're continuing to allow it to happen? Do you think that could possibly be under the guise of building a bigger case? Because like, where's the case?

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  I think what it is, is that there's enormous incentive to build cases. Actually, New Mexico did one of the biggest busts, fentanyl busts, in the past few years, like millions of pills were caught, so they were building bigger cases. But it is, there's a very fine line, right?

• 2:00:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  Between being, building bigger cases and people dying.

• 2:00:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, imagine if it's one of your family members that died from that fentanyl.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. So it was, to me, this is sort of the new Fast and Furious, in terms of.

• 2:00:26Joe Rogan?

  Two additional DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico have come forward in recent weeks, including one who said his colleagues were, they're failed to seize 350,000 fentanyl pills that they learned about during the very first call they intercepted in a 2024 wiretap. Shipment was part of an investigation that resulted in the largest fentanyl seizure in DEA history. Court records show agents had the opportunity to seize thousands of fentanyl pills, but allowed trafficking to continue for months as they investigated.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  And crazy, the campaign the DEA had at this time was one pill can kill, can kill you. That was their campaign. Fentanyl, one pill can kill you.

• 2:01:01Joe Rogan?

  They have 350,000 pills they let go through.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  I think the initial report was 1.7 million, if I don't, if I didn't get it wrong, it was over, it was insane.

• 2:01:11Joe Rogan?

  Is that incompetence? Is it stupidity?

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  I, I think it's people trying to build, I think they believe that they can get better results and seize more drugs and go after the real bad guys if they do this, but I do think there needs to be some transparency and people should be allowed to decide if this is okay or not. And, and that sort of standard rule that was there to make sure that this isn't killing people should remain there.

• 2:01:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, but what can they do about this? Like, ultimately, this is not something that existed 30 years ago. That's what's really crazy. No, the, the whole cartel violence thing.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I know, I know.

• 2:01:44Joe Rogan?

  This is so new. It's so, like, people don't understand, when I was a kid, when I first moved to California in the, in the 90s, there was no concern about going to Mexico. You go to Mexico, people would go to Tijuana and hang out, party and come back to America, it was nothing, there was no cartel violence. Like, this is a very recent thing.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  It is, I know.

• 2:02:05Joe Rogan?

  I mean, sure, there's always been some kind of organized crime in Mexico, but not to the extent that it is today.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  No, definitely not.

• 2:02:12Joe Rogan?

  And this is all propped up by our appetite for drugs.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  It is, and this is something that we talk about every time I come on the podcast. And the last time I was here, I always give Portugal as an example. Last time I was here, I remember you pushed back on that because we gave the example of Oregon, you, you said, you don't remember, but you said.

• 2:02:29Joe Rogan?

  They went a little sideways.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  You went sideways, but I actually got to, after the podcast, I went home and I was comparing the two and I was trying to figure out what was different. I understand the argument you had at the time was like, Portugal is a small country, yes, 10 million people, so what can be done there is very different skill than, it might work there, it might not work here.

• 2:02:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  And Oregon, it didn't work. But the difference is that they did it very differently. So what Portugal did, and this is important, is that two years before they decriminalized drugs, they started creating rehab facilities and treatment centers for people with addiction. Two years before, before they even decriminalized. So when they fully decriminalize it, those places, those, you know, rehab centers, treatment centers were in place already. Plus, there's universal healthcare, which I believe is a very, very good thing. What happened in Oregon is that only a year after they decriminalized the drugs, did they actually start investing and putting some of the money in the treatment centers.

• 2:03:26Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  Another difference, huge difference, in Portugal, if you're caught with up to 10 day supply of drugs, even if it's heroin, you were then, that's the decriminalization part of it all, you were then, you'd go to a sort of a panel with a legal person that represents the government, essentially, and two social workers or mental health workers or addiction specialists, and they would tell you, okay, you can either essentially go to prison or suffer some sort of punitive action, or you can go to rehab, to a treatment center. And the vast majority of people decided they want to go to a treatment center. In Oregon, do you know what they did? They said.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  You are given a, I think it was a hundred dollar fine and take this card with this number for a treatment center and make sure to call it back. They, they gave out thousands of these cards and only a few hundred people called. It wasn't mandatory, right? It wasn't like the option was prison or, you know, rehab. So of course it didn't work. I mean, there was all these things that were stacked against it. And, and so I do think that there is a way to do it right. I think we do have to address the consumer part of it that we're not addressing. We're fighting the war on drugs has no results whatsoever. Granted, the last two years, actually, there's been a decrease in fentanyl deaths in the United

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  States, which has been great. A lot of it has been because the Trump administration has actually been good at putting money or investing, or he called it a public health crisis, I think it was two years ago, which is great, which is what it is. And we have to address it. However, recently, they have decided to allocate much more of the money again towards, you know, killing the fishermen at sea and fighting the war on drugs. And they are now taking money away from rehab facilities, from Medicare, from fentanyl test strips, which I think are incredibly important, from grants for naloxone, which is incredibly important, life-saving medication. It's an overdose reversal drug. And they're

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  removing those grants and spending billions of dollars in, you know, these covert operations in Ecuador, in the Pacific, and, you know, and going after, I think, the wrong problem.

• 2:05:51Joe Rogan?

  I've actually heard that they were trying to stop access to Narcan for the consumer.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's naloxone. Yeah, Narcan, sorry.

• 2:06:00Joe Rogan?

  Okay. So because they thought that it would encourage people to do drugs if they had access to these anti overdose drugs.

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  That's somebody who's never spoken to a user, a drug user, a drug addict before.

• 2:06:12Joe Rogan?

  No, it's insanity.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  It's insanity.

• 2:06:14Joe Rogan?

  I think that's in Texas. I think in Texas, they've had an issue with that as well.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  Bananas. That's the case. Bananas.

• 2:06:19Joe Rogan?

  Bananas. You could save people's lives. And a lot of these people, they get these pills and they don't know that they have fentanyl in them. A lot of these people, like perhaps someone is, you're taking anti-anxiety medication and you get a counterfeit anti-anxiety medication that has fentanyl in it and you fucking die. Or they give you the Narcan and you live. Like, these aren't all just people that just want to like do fentanyl and not die.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  Of course not. And why, this is why the fentanyl strips are actually so important.

• 2:06:48Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Right. To be able to tell.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should be, they should be everywhere, just like Narcan should be everywhere.

• 2:06:53Joe Rogan?

  But there has to be a way to stop the flow of this stuff into the United States. And I know they've done a great job in, first of all, having the border open, wide open for four years.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  Not a good idea, but you know, definitely not a good idea. Insane. Absolutely insane. But you know that fentanyl, ninety-something percent of fentanyl comes across, I think ninety-five percent of fentanyl comes across the official board ports of entry, right? It doesn't come through.

• 2:07:17Joe Rogan?

  Right. And one of the reasons for that is like shipping containers aren't checked. I think they check like ten percent of shipping containers coming to the United States.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  That too. But also American citizens that drive it across. A lot of the apprehensions, a large percentage is American citizens.

• 2:07:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, Michael Douglas, one of the ways he made his money, when his dad gave him ten thousand dollars when he became of age, like this is all you're gonna get. The way he paid his way through college is he sold marijuana and he brought it over. He smuggled.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  No way.

• 2:07:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he did two trips.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  From Mexico.

• 2:07:48Joe Rogan?

  Where he smuggled suitcases.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Tijuana?

• 2:07:50Joe Rogan?

  Suitcases of marijuana. I forget what's.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  I was just taking it from California to New York.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  I don't think he was bringing it in.

• 2:07:55Joe Rogan?

  Was it, wasn't bringing it?

• 2:07:56Speaker 02

  I don't think so. But still, I mean, he's making money.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  It's still amazing.

• 2:08:00Joe Rogan?

  Smuggling marijuana.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:08:02Joe Rogan?

  That's how he made his money.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I had no idea that he wrote that in the book.

• 2:08:07Joe Rogan?

  Paid his way through college. Oh, yeah, he's talking about it openly. Yeah. And I'm like, good for you for only doing it twice. Like, it's crazy.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Also, wasn't his dad like a well-known actor at the time already?

• 2:08:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Kirk Douglas. Huge. He was Spartacus.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:08:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Kirk Douglas was huge. I mean, he was like one of the biggest actors in the world. And, but he's like a hard ass. And he's like, you're gonna get ten thousand dollars and that's it. You're on your own. He's like, I have bills. I have student loans. Like, fuck you. And so he smuggled weed.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  That's so funny. Not at all what I'd expect.

• 2:08:38Joe Rogan?

  But I mean, like, weed is a different thing. You're not talking about something that's gonna kill people.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:08:44Joe Rogan?

  You know, the fentanyl thing is insane. I personally know many people have died from fentanyl.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:50Joe Rogan?

  Personally. It's a very scary thing.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Very scary.

• 2:08:52Joe Rogan?

  And you keep hearing about people in the news, you know, an actor or someone, they do this. It's tainted, it turns out it was tainted cocaine. Tainted this, tainted that, you know?

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And there's a new drug out there right now called nitazines that is fifty times more powerful than fentanyl and sometimes not, Narcan doesn't solve it and it's not, doesn't show up in test strips.

• 2:09:12Joe Rogan?

  What is it?

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  It's called nitazines. It's my next investigation. I'm actually, I'll come back and talk about it.

• 2:09:18Joe Rogan?

  Who's made this?

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Also made in Mexico with Mexican, with Chinese precursors.

• 2:09:22Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Joe Rogan?

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• 2:11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I was in Mexico at the beginning of the whole fentanyl deal. It was one of the first stories ever to be done on fentanyl in the US was my story, impacting myself in the back, mine, my husband Darren and Christina. And I actually went to Mexico and interviewed a guy who told me, he was part of the Sinaloa cartel, he told me, my uncle basically just hired a Colombian chemist to come here and teach us how to make fentanyl. We paid him forty thousand dollars and now we're making fentanyl. And he showed me, it was a one kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl, because at the beginning, they mixed it with, with heroin. And it was right at the beginning, this crazy, and then to where we're now, no more heroin, it's all fentanyl.

• 2:12:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, we met because of your work on the Oxycontin Express.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, following the opioid crisis.

• 2:12:23Joe Rogan?

  I remember watching that, just being stunned. Because that, to me, and for people who don't know that story, the way they were operating it was Florida had these pain management centers. And you would go to a pain management center and all they were really doing was writing your prescriptions for opiates. And they didn't have a database. So you could just go from one pain management center to the next one. And all you had to do is say, I have a backache. My back hurts. I had a back operation. I have a herniated disc. And they would just hook you up with pills. And so these people would go to dozens of these places, get bags of pills, and then drive them north. And it just started this

• 2:13:04Joe Rogan?

  addiction chain that went all the way into Kentucky and Ohio. And, and that's the Oxycontin Express. I just couldn't believe that was real. And the courage that you and your husband had to do that investigation and to put yourself out there like that and be the face of it. And like, you cost those people billions, billions of dollars. Like, they, if had not been for you and your investigation, who knows how long that whole loophole had, would have continued.

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, it was, I mean, we were, I went inside one of these clinics with a secret camera, films inside. And then we were actually filming outside the biggest, one of the biggest pain clinics there called American Pain. My husband actually ended up doing a documentary about it. It's these twin brothers, the George brothers, who ran the biggest prescription pill.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Operation in American history, either like the Pablo Escobar of the United States in terms of pills. And we were filming outside their clinic because we went to Kentucky and saw how a lot of the bottles next to overdose bodies were coming from this one clinic, American Pain. So we decided next time in Florida, we're going to film outside. And within minutes, we were accosted by these guys, the brothers, who chased us down 995. I was driving the car. I contacted one of the sheriff's department people that I'd spoken to the day before, and I told her, hey, we're being followed by the American Pain guys. And she said, call 911 right now. You don't want to mess around with these guys. I'm running out of gas in the meantime. I stop at a gas station, and they follow me. They come out of the car, start yelling at us.

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  I had just watched The Sopranos the night before, so I was like, these guys are going to shoot us in the head right now. So we decided, okay, we have to continue going with almost zero gas. Ran out of gas, middle of the freeway, stopped next to the freeway. They parked right behind us. I think they were just confused what's happening. Because I'd called 911, they showed up, and they gave an excuse that they thought I was a crazy ex-girlfriend. And it turns out that the FBI and the DEA already had wiretaps on them at the time. Our story and our investigation made it into the wiretaps because they were openly talking about this, how these journalists were messing around where they shouldn't. And they ended up going to federal prison. And my husband did the whole story about the rise and fall of these brothers and interviewed them while they were in prison and after, when they were released.

• 2:15:24Joe Rogan?

  They've been released.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  They have, but you know, they did time in federal prison. Meanwhile.

• 2:15:29Joe Rogan?

  How many people died?

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of people died. The doctors, I don't think any doctor went to prison in that case. I can't remember. But definitely not as many doctors as the ones that were involved in the sales of these clinics. I mean, they were seeing, you remember that, right? They were seeing, they were seeing hundreds of patients a day, passing on scripts for hundreds of patients. They even came up with a system, which was a stamp, so that the doctor wouldn't have to sign every prescription. So the stamp would make it faster for him to just give these medications.

• 2:16:00Joe Rogan?

  You don't want to inconvenience these poor doctors.

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  But you know who didn't go to prison?

• 2:16:03Joe Rogan?

  Who?

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  Is the pharmaceutical executives, right? Purdue, not one single one had criminal charges. Not one single one in the Sackler family. It's insane.

• 2:16:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's that Netflix docu-series, the docudrama series Painkiller.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a very good one.

• 2:16:19Joe Rogan?

  And after that series was released, apparently, they were reviewing, because they had, the Sackler family had gotten some sort of a fine, but one of the, one of the reasons why they were willing to give the money was it was going to give them some kind of immunity. And so.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, immunity.

• 2:16:39Joe Rogan?

  There was talk after that documentary, I wonder what happened of that? That that immunity was going to be rescinded?

• 2:16:45Speaker 01

  They still have it, I think. Oh, maybe it was rescinded, I don't know.

• 2:16:47Joe Rogan?

  I don't think it was. I think they talked about it, and I think it ultimately, I mean, still, no one's gone to jail. The Sackler family, no one's been. How many people are they responsible for ruining their lives and/or dead?

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  A million people have died from the opiate epidemic in the last 20 something years. It's more than in all wars combined in the last 150 years. A million Americans. It's insane.

• 2:17:10Joe Rogan?

  That, I can't recommend that Peterberg series enough.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  It's a good one.

• 2:17:14Joe Rogan?

  Painkiller, it's so good, and it's really accurate. And it really shows you how they had these beautiful girls go to these clinics and sell this and tell people, and this is the new normal. You're just going to, you're just going to manage your pain, no problem.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  And the problem wasn't just Purdue, right? The other pharmaceutical companies eventually use the same playbook.

• 2:17:33Joe Rogan?

  Okay, here it is. Current status. Following the legal block, a new national opioid settlement was reached in January 2025. Under this revised agreement, Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers agreed to pay 7.4 billion, but significantly, the deal stripped the Sackler family of future civil immunity, meaning they can still face individual lawsuits. Good. But I mean, what is happening with them? They're still rich as fuck, and they're responsible for a million people being dead. It's insane. And not just that. Imagine how many people lost their dad, lost their wife, lost their family members. How many people's lives were destroyed but lived? How many people got addicted, lost everything but survived and now live in abject poverty

• 2:18:17Joe Rogan?

  because they were drug addicts, because they were told that this stuff wasn't addictive?

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  And how many people are still dying? Because the fentanyl crisis is just a development, an evolution of what was started by these pharmaceutical companies.

• 2:18:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, this is the thing, again, like when I was a boy, when I was young, when I lived in Massachusetts, heroin addicts were really rare. It wasn't a normal thing for someone to be addicted to opiates. I remember my boxing coach was a longshoreman, and he worked with a guy who had a heroin problem. And this guy would get heroin every lunchtime. He would get heroin, he would go and sit in his truck, he would shoot up, and then he'd go back to work. And he was a functional heroin addict, but he did it every day and worked. And I was like, that's crazy. And he was telling me, because it was so rare. But a guy who is hooked on pills today is normal. Everyone has a family member. Everyone knows somebody.

• 2:19:16Joe Rogan?

  Everyone has lost somebody. Everyone knows someone who's overdosed. It's insanely common, and it's not, it's not all over the world. It's a United States problem. That's what's really crazy. Like, they don't have an opioid epidemic in a lot of other Western countries.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  They don't. Apparently, they're starting to see opiates in some countries in Europe.

• 2:19:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're catching on.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're catching on. Several years later, they're catching on, exactly.

• 2:19:42Joe Rogan?

  It's just.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's bananas.

• 2:19:43Joe Rogan?

  Do you lose hope in humanity with all these different scams and all these different horrible things that you investigate?

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  No. I see broken systems. I see governments that aren't working for the people. I see, you know, unfortunately, politicians that want to gain more power. And I see broken systems. I don't, when talking about, you know, I've spoken to you about this a lot, but when, I spend so much of my time talking to the traffickers and the scammers and all the people that we consider the bad guys, right? And more often than not, they are the consequence of broken systems, right? The crushing inequality that exists in the world, again, going back to the 10% living

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  under the poverty line, lack of education, lack of job opportunities, growing up in shitty countries without opportunities and options. And that is, I think, what's, I don't think, I know, it's what, it's leading a lot of people to work in these black markets and to become traffickers and scammers and all of that. And I think that, you know, our tendency is to let's go after them and imprison them and, you know, make sure we're using the full might and power of this country and resources to go after these people instead of actually looking at the root cause, whether that's the consumption of drugs, the demand for drugs, or the people that are providing those drugs.

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  If we use some of that money instead of enforcement in actually working on the demand or helping, help me out, slower the demand, lower the demand, sorry. That's what happens when you talk for so long. If you help them lower, if you work on lowering the demand, and you actually, in terms of the people that are operating in these systems, address the reality of the situation, which is inequality and lack of opportunities, I think you'll do a much better job.

• 2:21:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but unfortunately.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  The money is much better well-spent.

• 2:21:51Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  I think. And the same, I think, with scams and drug trafficking. And yet, do we want drugs in our country? We don't. But what's the best way? It's to curb the demand.

• 2:22:02Joe Rogan?

  Right, but how do you curb the demand of something that is always, like, drugs have always been a part of our society, and there's legal drugs that are part of our society, like alcohol, and then there's drugs that have always been a part of our society that aren't legal but are in demand, like cocaine?

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  But let's talk about the opiate crisis, right? What President Trump is doing and saying he's doing is he's fighting the war on fentanyl, right? By going after these boats in the Pacific and these, you know, fishing boats in Ecuador.

• 2:22:33Joe Rogan?

  And closing the border.

• 2:22:34Speaker 01

  And closing the border, which is fantastic. Agree with closing the border and not allowing criminals in, criminals.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  But what is doing at the same time now, unfortunately, is after calling this a public health crisis, which I'm so happy he did, is he's also removing money, I just said this before, removing money from grants for test strips and Narcan and from the treatment centers that actually can curb demand. What people need is access to methadone clinics, to treatment centers and rehab centers that aren't scams, I've reported on scam rehab centers as well, that are actually incentivized to treat people. Because without that, we can go, as long as there is demand, there is going to be a supply.

• 2:23:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes, unquestionably. I mean, one of the things that, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I went to the White House with former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard. They're part of this Ibogaine initiative.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:35Joe Rogan?

  And that is one thing that I was really happy that Trump listened to.

• 2:23:38Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 2:23:39Joe Rogan?

  And he's willing to do that, and he's pushing this through. Ibogaine is one of the most effective treatments for people that have addictions, because it doesn't just rewire the way your brain associates drugs and explains to you what is causing you to have this problem, like what is this emotional, like, connection that you have to this, what are the problems that you have in your past? Like, it gives you, like, a very bizarre and very intrusive overview of your life, that apparently is super uncomfortable. And it's not recreational in any way, shape, or form. No one's gonna do Ibogaine for funsies. It's something that people only do when they're, you know, you're on your last leg and you're trying to figure out how to survive.

• 2:24:20Joe Rogan?

  But it's helped so many soldiers, so many people with PTSD, and so many people with brain trauma. That's what's really interesting. It's helped people with traumatic brain injuries, it's neuroregenerative, it does some weird stuff. And I'm, like, really hoping that with this, that it will eventually become profitable for them to have Ibogaine clinics. So it's something that, well, they'll say, well, instead of profiting off of these people being addicted to drugs, some people are going to be profiting off of people being completely cured of these problems. And so this could, in turn, change the way people interact with drugs, change, and it

• 2:25:01Joe Rogan?

  also opens the door for other potential psychedelic therapy uses, like, they know that MAPS.

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, MAPS, yeah.

• 2:25:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so MAPS has done fantastic work with MDMA and soldiers who have PTSD. And apparently, I mean, it's one of the best, most effective treatments for just coming to grips with the horrors of what you've seen, the horrors of war, seeing your friends blown up, and seeing, just being involved in combat missions. And one of the most effective things that MAPS has ever found is this MDMA usage, and they're pushing this through. So there's been many people that are working really hard to try to establish legitimate uses for psychedelic drugs, that, I mean, I don't think we should put drugs into all

• 2:25:51Joe Rogan?

  one banner, because drugs are, you know, drugs are meth, drugs are fentanyl, drugs are the, but drugs are also psilocybin, which is shown to have an incredible relief for people that are dying of cancer, people that end-of-life anxiety, there's, Larry Hagman, remember him from Dallas? Do you remember the show Dallas?

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26:15Joe Rogan?

  Okay, Larry Hagman was the...

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  Main guy?

• 2:26:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, who's, what was his name on the show? JR. JR.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  Oh, JR, yes, of course, yes.

• 2:26:24Joe Rogan?

  Larry Hagman was on CNN once, and they were talking to him, and he was talking, they were asking him about death, and he said, "I really don't have a fear of death, because I took LSD once, and I had this incredibly beautiful experience, and it relieved me of my fear of death." You know, like, that's one of the things that is a positive thing about...

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:26:43Joe Rogan?

  You know, you could call them drugs, but that's just such a generalized blanket term.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:26:51Joe Rogan?

  For all these different substances.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  And, wait, and fentanyl and oxycontin, too, they were created to be pharmaceutical drugs that actually have a place. I mean, they help...

• 2:26:58Joe Rogan?

  Relieve pain.

• 2:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, relieve pain, particularly for terminally ill cancer patients.

• 2:27:02Joe Rogan?

  The problem with them is they're insanely addictive.

• 2:27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:04Joe Rogan?

  You know, and one of the beautiful things about some things like Ibogaine is that they can help people get off of that.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what's the status right now of Ibogaine in the US?

• 2:27:12Joe Rogan?

  They're pushing it through, there's a lot of resistance, but Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard are working diligently to push this through. And then Trump helped a lot. I mean, having that conversation with him, I said it, I sent him a text message, and he said, "Are you looking for FDA approval? Sounds good to me, let's do it."

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  For Ibogaine.

• 2:27:30Joe Rogan?

  And then, next thing you know, like, a week later, I'm at the White House.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. To talk about Ibogaine.

• 2:27:35Joe Rogan?

  And we have a press conference, and he signs this executive order. And so they're pushing it through, and he's, like, been very aggressive about it, and I really commend him for that.

• 2:27:42Speaker 01

  It's allowed in Texas right now, is that right?

• 2:27:44Joe Rogan?

  They're doing it in Texas, and credit to Dan Patrick for also funding that and pushing it through, although I think he does some really ridiculous shit when it comes to THC. But the pushing this through, one of the, one of the best aspects of this is, generally, psychedelic drugs are thought of as a left-wing hippie thing, and we're seeing it being embraced in the military community, because, you know, we realize so many of these people have sacrificed everything to go over there, they've lost loved ones, they've, they sacrificed a giant portion of their life...

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:21Joe Rogan?

  ...to go there and serve, and they come back, and there's no help for them. This is one of the only things that's been shown to have a really effective result, like, really effective, like incredibly effective.

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it should be accessible to everyone.

• 2:28:33Joe Rogan?

  It should be accessible to everyone, and we should study it, and we should also have clinics where it's administered responsibly. And they're doing it in Mexico, there's a place called Beyond that's down, I believe it's in the Cancun area, that has these clinics, and this is the place where Rick Perry went and Brian Hubbard went. Shockingly enough, when Rick Perry went, he had a brain scan done before he did it, and they'd shown that he has normal age-related atrophy of his brain, normal. It's like, he's older, you know, and went down there, within four weeks, I think, or six weeks, had a massive improvement. Went back six months later, all his atrophy is gone.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 2:29:15Joe Rogan?

  It's a crazy substance that is here that can help human beings, and it's being thought of as a drug, and it's Schedule I, which is crazy, because Schedule I has no legitimate medical use, and clearly it does. And that, that needs to change.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:29:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, and that's another thing that Trump administration has done with marijuana, they're moving marijuana into Schedule III. So instead of it being this thing that has no medical use, well, of course it has medical use, it helps cancer patients, keep, keep their, their hunger during chemotherapy, it gives people relief of pain, for some people it helps them with anxiety, there's a lot of benefits to it. Can it be abused? Yes, so can cheeseburgers.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:57Joe Rogan?

  Okay, you can eat cheeseburgers until you fucking have a heart attack and die. It doesn't mean we should ban cheeseburgers. It means people need to understand what's responsible use of whatever it is, whether it's food, sugar, alcohol.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 2:30:09Joe Rogan?

  I'm a big fan of all those things. I think you should be able to eat whatever you want, you should be able to drink alcohol if you like, but some people aren't good at it, and they need to have help. And so we need to develop, just like what they did in Portugal.

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Joe Rogan?

  Develop these centers. But then it gets to the question of, okay, there is a, a giant demand for cocaine in this country, and they're getting fentanyl-laced cocaine, cocaine that's cut with a bunch of other shit that's not good for you. Should cocaine be legal? Like, is cocaine a real problem? I don't know. I don't, I'm never, I've never done it.

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  I have an eye on it.

• 2:30:45Joe Rogan?

  I don't, but I know a lot of people that get addicted to it.

• 2:30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Joe Rogan?

  But here's the other thing, coca leaves, not a problem.

• 2:30:52Speaker 01

  No, and used a lot.

• 2:30:54Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  Ecuador, Peru.

• 2:30:56Joe Rogan?

  And apparently, very beneficial.

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  Super, yeah.

• 2:30:58Joe Rogan?

  And is good for energy, and it helps people do things, and they just chew coca leaves, or they have tea.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:04Joe Rogan?

  They have mate de coca, it's a tea.

• 2:31:05Speaker 01

  I, I, when you go to Peru, to Machu Picchu, they give you a lot of coca tea, because it helps you with high altitude.

• 2:31:11Joe Rogan?

  Supposed to have it high altitude, yeah.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:13Joe Rogan?

  Like, well, that's high-altitude herders, it's, they chew coca leaves, it's ubiquitous. Why is the, what are we doing?

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:31:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, why are we, is it, is it okay to, like, have the fucking cartels make that stuff and send it across? I mean, look, you went to Colombia, and you watched them make cocaine, which was one of, one of the episodes where I was so terrified for you, I was like, "Please don't do this, Mariana. Why do you want to do this?" That one freaked me out, because you're there while they're using all those horrible chemicals.

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  It was insane, wasn't it insane?

• 2:31:46Joe Rogan?

  Insane. And then you march out through the jungle with them, when they deliver the cocaine.

• 2:31:50Speaker 01

  Fast, because, yeah, I mean, from, from the place where they're actually mixing it all, we had to get out of there fast, because the locals had seen cameras, and we had to, remember, we had to run out of the jungle...

• 2:32:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  ...without a light, in the middle of the night, in the Amazon, that was insane. And then, yeah, and then we filmed with the kids, that was a literally sad story, actually. One of the kids, that was called, he was the backpacker dude who had to haul dozens of kilos of cocaine on his back, days in, days out, in the middle of the night, really dangerous work, seen many of his friends being killed, and I asked him, "What, what, why do you do this kind of work?" He said, "I always wanted to go to college, I wanted to be a dentist, my family is very poor, they're farmers, I can't afford for, to pay for college, so this is the only job opportunity I get that I can save money to eventually become a dentist." I said, "Why do you want to be a dentist?" "Because all the ads that I see in my hometown are these big, sort of, posters with people

• 2:32:44Speaker 01

  with big smiles for dentist's office, and I want to make people smile, too."

• 2:32:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Such a sweet, sad story.

• 2:32:52Joe Rogan?

  Meanwhile, he's selling coke.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, he's, yeah, bringing coke that comes to the United States, yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:32:59Joe Rogan?

  It's a really complicated issue, and it, you know, the thing about, people in Mexico will tell you that this problem exists because of the demand for these drugs in the United States.

• 2:33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:33:10Joe Rogan?

  So how do you, what do you do about that? Do you make drugs decriminalize like Portugal?

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  I think, I think that is one of the paths. I really do think you have to start investing a lot of money in treatment centers, in access to drugs like Ibogaine...

• 2:33:24Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  ...and bruprenorphine, and methadone, and just, there's, yeah, if you, even, if, even if it's just like 10% of the money that you spend on enforcement, let's put that on actually treating the demand side of it, that'll make a huge difference.

• 2:33:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  It's really, it's not rocket science, I think. I just don't understand what's taken so long.

• 2:33:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, I mean, there's so many people that are lost, and drugs give them the only good feelings that they get. That's what's really sad.

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:51Joe Rogan?

  You know, I talked to this guy once, who's a, who's a drug addict, and one of the saddest things he said to me, it's like, "Drugs are the only thing that make me happy."

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a little bit like-

• 2:34:00Joe Rogan?

  He goes, "If I don't have drugs, what do I have?"

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like scams, actually, in a way, right? It's like scams, like having this person that I talk to is the only thing that keeps me happy.

• 2:34:07Joe Rogan?

  So the real work should be done on fortifying human beings and make them a viable part of society with like real community and love and, and teach people how to live like that. And that's part of what's ailing us, is that we're all broken, which is why we need drugs.

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  And then if we fail and missed up, which we all will eventually, there is a system there to hold us and help us, and a government that is interested in protecting us.

• 2:34:33Joe Rogan?

  That would be nice.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  That would be so nice.

• 2:34:35Joe Rogan?

  But the problem is, that's not profitable. All right.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Thank you, Joe.

• 2:34:40Joe Rogan?

  Let's wrap it up. Bye, everybody.

• 2:34:56Speaker 04

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