Transcript of #2567 - Mariana van Zeller New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. So good to see you.

Hi, Joe. So good to see you too.

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

This one was a walk in the park though.

It kind of is a walk in the park, but not really. No, not really. Because you went to fucking Africa to meet scammers.

To confront my scammer.

So your new show is all about romance scams. Yeah. 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 is like, I keep trying to tell him, but he won't listen. And you see these poor people that are so vulnerable, they are lonely and they really believe.

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

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

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

Yeah.

100%. Yeah.

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

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. Wow. 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 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 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 scammers themselves? Because they are very, very good at what they do. Yeah. 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 on dating websites and online platforms and see what happens.

And it happened very fast.

Do you think they're good at it?

I think some are really good at it.

The guy that was doing it with you?

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

Are there better ones?

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

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

Jon Bon Jovi, yeah. So again— Again. 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? Mm-hmm. 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. sure anymore. And of course the response is, wait, what? Did you really think you were talking to Jon Bon Jovi? But then you listen to the story and then you actually meet this person.

Yeah.

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, a 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. Right, right. 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? 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 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 or understands her or wants to know about her.

Right.

And finally, there was somebody who, even if it wasn't Jon Bon Jovi, it was somebody who cared. Right? Yeah. 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 7 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 for— I'll give you a discount. I'll put you in touch with management. you can pay like $100. 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.

Yeah, the AI videos.

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'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. Right. And so it is kind of— it's not as insane as like Jon Bon Jovi showed up and said, hey, I want $1,000, 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. It's also a dopamine rush. Like every time you get a DM, every time you're love bombed, there's a dopamine rush. Right. 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.

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.

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

I don't know if it's a benefit. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, an online psychological counseling service. We all have something we regret. Maybe it's something small, like making plans with a friend you haven't seen in a long time, then having to back out at the last minute. But should you really feel guilty about that? Explore thought patterns like those and how they're affecting you with BetterHelp psychological counseling. They match you with a qualified German counselor, plus everything's completely online and flexible to what you need. Take a closer look at your own expectations and recurring thoughts. BetterHelp makes it easy to find the support that fits your needs. 90% of German members continue working with their counselor after their first session as of May 2026. Our listeners receive 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/JRE. That's betterhelp.com/JRE. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you are thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. jorogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, Seamless checkouts with mobile pay links.

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It can also be very bad. It can, it can. But you know, there are coffee shops now— I just found 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.

Well, New York is— I didn't know this. Weirdly enough, one of the loneliest places.

Yeah.

Because no one is friends with anyone. Like my friend Jim, who lives in a building in New York, it's like, you know, 40 stories or something like that. He's like, I don't know anybody in this building. Like, think about that. I'm— and I don't know my neighbor. Every time we look at each other, we're like, hey, how you doing? Like, like no one knows anybody and there's hundreds of people stacked on top of each other. That is an odd way to live.

That is an odd way to live.

What is this, Jamie?

Oh, cafe for AI.

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

I have no idea. Where is

that? It's like linking up time.

Is that what it means?

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

having sex?

Yes.

Wow. Jamie knows his stuff.

Is it season? What are we, elk?

It's like cold season.

We're rutting?

During winter when everybody's inside. That's crazy.

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.

Yeah. That

is so dark.

Wow.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Oh, there it is. Oh, wow.

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

Oh my God.

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

Reserve your spot. Click that.

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

Yeah, let's see what happens.

It went up like a Google Doc.

What happens? Waiting list. It's a waiting list?

Well, so this was also, uh, that said the website said it was back in February of '26, so I don't know. I mean, that's Almost, you know.

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

I'm closing it

now. Oh boy. Boy, this is dark.

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

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

Ugh. Yeah.

It's just the first one.

So depressing. It's so dark. It's so dark. Yeah.

Did you see Ex Machina?

I did.

One of my all-time favorite movies. Yeah, I loved it too. I love that movie. Yeah. But the real problem I have with that movie is like, I think I'd fall in love with her. Oh

my God. If I was that guy— She's stunning. She's amazing.

She's so hot.

She's so hot.

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

That's so true.

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.

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

Especially men.

Yeah, men. Do you know what'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.

Yeah, they don't— no man wants to be a sucker.

Yeah.

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

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.

They don't feel bad for them?

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

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?

Absolutely.

It's always an Android phone.

Yeah.

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?

And also the The job offers. Oh, yeah. You've got those all the time.

I'm approved for so many loans.

Yeah.

It's really amazing.

Same. Same. So actually, Super Scam Me 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.

What happens?

It was really interesting. So it was a lot of phone calls with scammers. One of the most interesting conversations we had with 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?

Oh, that's nice of him.

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?

Did you do it? Did you just do all of that?

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 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. Yeah. And he told me, look, we work. Were forced to do it. 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? 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? 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 an account, once I get access, I can see everything that's there. less than $1,000, I'm not gonna steal from you. But if you have more, that means you're rich. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, I mean, the money, it's so different, right?

Well, that is the very bizarre statistic that shocks people when you tell it to them. I think— I used to think it's $34,000, but I think it's $50,000. If you make $50,000, you are in the top 1% of the world.

50,000. Yeah. Yeah.

That's dark.

That's very dark. I mean, 10% of the world's population lives under the poverty line.

Yeah.

So that's 700 and something million people who have trouble finding shelter and food for themselves and their family. It's insane.

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—

Torture. Torture. We did a story about that for the last season of Traffics about these scam compounds. We actually visited one of the scam cities, 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 was a guy I'll never forget who jumped off, like, the 6th 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. 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 2 years ago, they had this AI technology. that would go superimposed over her face.

And they needed a woman because of the mannerisms, right? 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. It's—

Where are these happening mostly?

Myanmar. Myanmar and Cambodia were the 2 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 high-rises and it happened within a year or 2. It went from flat, you know, regular forest jungle in Myanmar to skyscrapers, casinos. You know, one of the places I visited was— What was the name of it? 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 café, 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 a war raging around, and I'm in this sort of the future. And it's this karaoke bar with girls scantily dressed and drugs being served and alcohol. And we had to stay there and I sang Whitney Houston.

What song?

I think it was The Greatest Love of All, which is usually the one that I sing.

That's what I was going to guess.

And I'm one of those people that thinks they can sing well but really can't. But it was fun. This was one of those unforgettable nights. And then the next day, interview the scam guy that got found.

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

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

So the entire city is essentially funded by scams? Mm-hmm.

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. And 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. If you need to say it.

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

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

So who's funding it and how are they doing the construction? Like, how are they doing that?

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 the case of where I visited, it was a company called Yatai International. The head of Yatai 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 2. 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 yeah, it's— and it's billions of dollars. I can't remember exactly, but there was—

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

Yeah.

This is crazy.

What does it say?

He was held against his will, tortured, and drained of his blood. And they would drain his blood up to 7 times in a half year. That made him a blood slave. Wow. To, to run these scams.

Yeah.

What? Blood slave.

In his case of a blood slave, journalists began to describe him. 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 country's many fortified scam compound facilities where workers labor around the clock to extract money from people online. Mm-hmm. 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— Oh my. 7 times in half a year. In the hospital, he pointed weakly 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 blood transfusions for other people?

That part— They're

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

That's probably one of the scams they're doing, yeah, I would imagine.

So they just like take everything. What do you 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, Li seemed to embody the darkest truths about the criminal scam compound spreading across parts of Southeast Asia.

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

Whoa. I mean, they're big.

So that is an entire building dedicated to scams.

And they have barbed wire around it. They have security guards. All the windows usually have, what do you call them, bars. Bars. So people can't escape.

Wow. I was showing these pictures. There's a dorm.

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

Great food, which, you know, looks kind of like a military compound.

They can't leave the compound. So they're slaves. Everything. Oh, absolutely slaves.

Yeah.

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 who are lured into what they think are going to be online jobs. 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 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? I mean, that's not a good response to start with, but even if that's the case, they're enslaved, but also these people are scamming Americans. Last year, this is crazy, this blew my mind. Just, I think, 2 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.

Billion?

Billion. Do you know how much that is a day? I did the math. It's $400 million. $400 million a day. $400 million a day are lost in America, are being stolen from Americans every day. Holy shit. It's insane. And a lot of it is done through— from these— they're called pig butchering compounds.

Pig butchering?

Yeah.

I found a website talking about the pig butchering website.

Pig butchering website.

Wow. Organized criminals use highly scripted process and human trafficking Mm-hmm. To steal as much money as they can from individual victims. Pig slaughter.

They liken it to, like, chopping up—

Do you know why it's called— yes, exactly. It comes from the Chinese expression that means 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.

Yeah. to the top, please. There's a whole process. They go grooming the victims. They contact pig butchering— whoa, that's a dark word— pig butchering targets 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 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. Mm-hmm. 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 scam 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 process they go through. Yeah, they have scripts.

They do it slowly. They have scripts.

They have scripts that they stick to. Wow. And it's different according to the people that they're talking to, what kind of victim that is. This is the scam. Pig butchering was what actually got— remember there was that story of that banker, the CEO of a bank in Kansas that ultimately went bankrupt because he had stolen $400 million from the bank?

Do you remember that story? Yes. And he got scammed.

Yeah. It was pig butchering too. It was one of these fake crypto investments.

How did they get him? Was it a romance thing?

No, it was this. It was an investment opportunity. Oh, it was romance. Sometimes they're mixed. It starts with a romance and then goes 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 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. 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 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 How the

fuck does a guy who works in banking get sucked into something that stupid?

But I don't think it's— I think— look, now we know a lot more about it, right? Uh-huh. 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— why aren't they accountable They should be held accountable for allowing this to happen.

Which online platforms?

I'll give you specifics. Okay. There was an incredible Reuters investigation done last year where they got ahold of internal Meta documents from Meta. And in the Meta documents, internal Meta documents, they estimated inside Meta, the worker, 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. They also estimated that they were— 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 that, you know, those ads that you have like Elon Musk holding thing and saying investment opportunity, and then you click it and you want to see what it is, 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 the next day you're exposed to 100 of these scams, right? So your reality starts being 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, they— 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. If there's 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.

What?

Yes.

Wait a minute.

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

So they're in on it then.

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

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

Yeah. You're making more money from the illegitimate ads than you are from the legitimate ads.

Is this—

In terms of 1 to 1.

Is this because of a lack of regulation?

It is because of a lack of regulation.

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

100%. I think it's our government— But they know. 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.

Jamie put this into our AI sponsor, Perplexity. It 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?

Because the way that the ads work, it's like a bidding process. The way that they'd serve it, they could charge you— you give a budget, and they charge you more based off of how they deliver it. So I'm not charging more per—

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

More money, actually.

More money, right? Because they charged them 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.

But I didn't say that. I just said penalty fees. Yeah, I know it's saying it.

I didn't type it in either. This is what Perplexity—

yeah, so Perplexity is just— they're just like possible questions that you would have or possible—

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

Well, if you click on the first—

I said that was reading from a different article because the Reuters one is Jeff Horowitz.

Is it? Okay.

Well, this is one from Reuters. This is Jeff Horowitz. So Meta's earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads. So how much money did they make?

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

Holy shit. So 15 billion scam ads a day. That's the, 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.

Knowing that they exist and allowing them to be on the platform. So

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

Yeah.

Holy shit. It's insane.

So yeah, Yeah. So that's what I mean. The conversation has to stop being—

Damn it, Zuck.

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

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

$16 billion. That's what's reported there, right, Jamie?

Okay. That's what it says. And I was trying to figure out if the $16 billion—

10% of $16 billion? No, $16 billion is the 10%. Facebook and Meta makes.

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

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

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

It's like, what are we talking about when we say banned goods? Are we talking about Mad Honey?

We're okay with peptides.

I'm okay with a lot of it. Well, I'm actually not. Like, I am okay with peptides, but the problem with getting peptides online is you're getting scam peptides, and they've done these exposés.

Made in the same labs as fentanyl in China.

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, we were making Alpha Brain, the nootropic memory-enhancing formula. We use 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. And so—

Wait, you took it to the lab when it got here to check it?

Oh, we have third-party testing. Well, we 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 Alpha Brain is this combination of different nootropics and nutrients that are clinically proven to help memory. There's a bunch of these, like this stuff right now, Gorilla Mind. This is nootropics in it as well. I'm a big fan of nootropics. It's real. It does work.

Yeah.

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 Yeah, it's because they don't give a fuck.

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

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 out there's steroids in it. You know, 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 25X2000 and you're like, oh, this stuff's great, look, I gained £10. You're on roids. You're on fucking steroids. Just unload, you're on roids. 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. Mm-hmm. 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, 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. They look exactly like Pure Encapsulations. That's right. Who knows what the fuck is in there, right? It might not be anything 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. And they're probably counterfeit, too.

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. Uh, okay, so the 50— 57% figure, 2022 study in JAMA Network Open tested 30 immune health supplements purchased on Amazon. 17 of the 30, about 50%, had inaccurate ingredient labels. That's crazy. 13 listed ingredients testing did not detect. 9 contained substances not listed on the labels. These categories overlap. It's a meaningful quality control concern, does not establish 57%. So it's not 57%, but there's a bunch that are knockoffs.

Yeah.

So like, what is the estimate? Ask Perplexity, what is the estimate? What is, uh, what is a conservative estimate of counterfeit vitamins and supplements on Amazon? I mean, it doesn't have one. I understand, but like, let's say

we'll There's a bunch of counterfeit shit being sold on Amazon just in general. There's a big problem.

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? I'm gonna guess 25%.

I'm gonna go for 30.

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, if it's— even if it's 10%, let's say— I don't know what the market share of Amazon supplements is, but it's got to be massive. It's such a convenient way to order things, you know, the one-click way. It's so great.

Oh, it's so great. It's— yeah, unfortunately it is. Unfortunately. I know, but it is. You should buy it directly from the brand.

It should be zero. You're Amazon. It should be 0% fake. It should be— if you're buying fucking whatever, you know, electrolytes, it should be from that fucking company. You know what it is. You've established a chain of command.

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

This is a little bit better.

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.

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

Well, it seems like it's a problem.

They give you the money back though.

No, no, no, I, I was selling stuff 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, sorry.

There's nothing they can do about it.

Oh yeah. Good luck.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a conflict of interest for them because they are making money from this.

That's the problem. And the lack of regulation.

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

Imagine if that was, let's say, an online retailer like Target. Imagine if you went to buy Diet Coke from Target and they sold you counterfeit Diet Coke. That'd be a huge scandal.

That would be a huge scandal, yeah.

And it should be.

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, sextortion. Huge. You know what sextortion is?

Sextortion? So like sex tapes or what is it?

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

Oh, they send you pictures to send them pictures.

Convinces you to show photos. Yeah. And then they start basically extorting you for money. Really sad case of a kid, the son of a representative, a congressman from South Carolina. This guy's called Brandon Guffey. His son Gavin was playing video games with his friends, at the same time talking to this girl on Facebook. And he said to his friend, hey, I'm talking to this girl. I'm gonna hang up 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 PM. And he hears a loud noise, runs to the bathroom. He shot himself. Oh. It's the saddest story because he was being sextorted. He's not the only one. There's dozens of American kids that this has happened to. He went to Facebook. Right. They had an address that— from the— 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. Isn't this crazy? That's fucking insane. The representative became very involved in creating laws. One of them is called, I think, Take It Down or something that just passed recently under the Trump administration. But he's basically become sort of the voice of regulation for these platforms. And then there's another incredible one. I can't remember the name of the legislators behind it, but it's called the Safe Platforms Act, where they're actually trying to make it easy for people to report, to make sure that these platforms are taking the these ads and fake profiles down. And that is also putting the accountability on them. So if something happens, if you lose money, if your kid dies, that there is some accountability on these platforms because if they are making money from it, they should also be held responsible, right? Yeah. I think so.

Of course. 100%. Yeah.

100%. But the

fact that 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.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

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

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

Yeah, it's a deterrent.

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

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

And their profits off scammers, you estimated it at—

It was $16 billion. They projected it at $16 billion. Just from scammers? Scams and banned goods. Banned goods as well.

That is fucking crazy. So again, I'm a big fan of banned goods.

But not offensive banned

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

A lot of those peptides are fake.

Yeah, you don't know what you're injecting in 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 want to own the peptides and sell them just like they do with GLP-1s, which is also a peptide.

Yeah.

It's, uh, but the banned goods thing, that bothers me, but not as much. That, you know, that'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, well, what are you going to do? We'll— we're going to make a deterrent. Great. Good idea. Good idea. Deterrent makes us more money.

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

God, that's so dark.

It's dark.

You— they have so much money. They have so much fucking money. Yeah, for them to be that fucking greedy that they're willing to keep the scams on. Well, you got to think there has to be some way they could put in some comprehensive scanning of all of their— make sure that all of these things are legitimate, investigate each individual ad before it gets released.

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

Especially if they were responsible for those losses. If they could get sued for those losses. Exactly.

Do you know how fast they will act on it?

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know. Exactly. But I think part of the reason why we're not talking about this— Who

is this? Jamie? Reuters 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.

Right. 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. 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. She keeps on reporting them. I think it was something like 100,000 reports every week by Americans on Meta and they only take down a few.

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

Do you remember the early days of AOL?

Yes.

Okay, the early days of AOL. My friend Barry Crimmins— Barry Crimmins was a great comic from Boston who was like very socially conscious, very politically active, just a genius guy. And he was sexually assaulted when he was young. Hmm. And 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? 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 people weren't really aware of the internet. It was just starting to emerge. But these fucking pedophiles figured it out. And they were using it. They were using it to, you know, to groom kids.

What did AOL do? Nothing?

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. They were just ignoring it.

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.

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

We're gonna block this because this is serious.

No, no, 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 thing is crazy. The fact that they're profiting.

Yeah, it's crazy.

You say $16 billion a year?

Yeah, and 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.

That's so much money.

It's crazy.

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

Yeah.

The overall article is this. It's just like this big Meta ad, or sorry, like article or picture, Secrets of Success. And there's multiple articles they released over time. It looks like at least 6. Yeah. One of them is showing that a big chunk of that money is coming from China.

Of course. Oh yeah. What a shocker.

Exactly.

Yeah. Meta reveal— 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 tough. One note I want to tell you too, it said 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.

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.

I know. Also, I'm sorry, that's not—

Also, you're the CEO. You're the CEO. Sorry. If you're the CEO of Scamville—

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

Yeah, a couple times. You have? Yeah.

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

I don't know if he'll come back on after this episode. Seems a bit problematic. Yeah, that's very unfortunate. I hate hearing that. that. And 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 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 a lot at stake and there's shareholders.

Yeah. You have to justify the $16 billion loss.

Yeah. And there's unfortunately weak regulations and governments that don't want to act. This is what happens. And this is why we need good journalism, good investigative journalism to find the stuff, the truth that people have a problem with.

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. Yeah. 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 heard the— there's an audio recording of Hillary Clinton talking about this guy that she had helped get off that was— I think he was a child molester.

But she was— they were talking about how she thought he did it. See if you can find what that is, 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're gonna 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 gonna do some things that you might think are unethical or immoral, and you have an obligation to your shareholders. And your job, if you want to keep your job, your job is to do this. this. No evidence of horrific Clinton video. Hmm. Did a video of Hillary Clinton and Huma— no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, that's not it. That's not it. It's when she was a lawyer. Is there evidence of her laughing about a guilty man being acquitted?

A child rape suspect that she believed was indeed guilty.

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. That's what it was. So she helped this guy. Like, look, that— and this is not an attack on her, this is just like the reality of being a defense attorney.

Well, what is it?

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. 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.

Yeah, but it's, 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 there because you're making money or— there's been plenty of people that have left Meta, as you know.

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

Well, she tried, it looks like.

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

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

Oh no, I agree with you. No, listen, I mean, I'm just saying that this kind of thing is— it's a dark part of the world that we live in. And 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 barely feeding family. We have all these mouths to feed and all these things. No, exactly. $16 billion in fucking scams every year. Okay, what is Meta's overall profit every year?

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

Wow.

Wow.

In ad revenue. So even that $16 billion seems—

it's a—

this was a couple of years ago or so.

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, Yeah.

Tried to ask Perplexity to compare what— there's not a lot of information on this though, unfortunately. But Perplexity says that Google has removed probably in 2025, 602 scam-related ads compared to the 159—

602 million.

Million. Sorry. Yeah. Compared to the 159 million that Meta

has. So Meta's a little slacky.

Yeah.

A little slacky. Google's a little bit better.

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—

Oh, dirty people. You dirty people.

I know. I know. And again, just—

They should be held responsible.

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.

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

Very true.

But that is— how is that

And this not.

This not. Yeah. 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 whose parents regulate the children's aspect of social access to social media? Is there a way to educate kids, to explain to them, you know, look, 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. My son too. They barely use text messaging. They all snap each other. They think it's fun. And then there's like sharing each other's stories, liking each other's stories. It's like something nice about that, right? Right? So it's not entirely negative. The fucking scams are entirely negative.

Entirely negative.

There's not one thing— well, we're providing these people with companionship. No, exactly. 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.

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

Until someone does something about it, they're just going to continue to make that Yeah,

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

Ugh.

Yeah, ugh. Jamie, look at the SAFE— what is it? SAFE Platforms Act.

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

Yeah. That was back in the day. They don't do that anymore, right?

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

Here.

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

Yeah, go to the top, please. Um, the names of the legislators, Fauci and Moylan, I think it's pronounced.

Yeah. Uh, introduced bipartisan Safe Platforms Act to protect consumers from online scams.

Yeah,

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

I actually— yeah, you can look. I had

Valerie P. Foushee. I don't know how to pronounce

her name. Foushee? Foushee?

F-O-U-S-H-E-E.

Representing North Carolina's 4th District.

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.

Wait, I have—

Of unregulated AI. It's up. What?

This is a quote at the bottom of the describe. This describes what the act does, and that's a quote from someone describing what the act would do.

Right. I was just reading 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 Kassin, Director of Competition and Marketing Fairness Awareness at the Consumer Federation of America. Fraudulent content and scams supercharged by AI are taking over social media platforms and costing us billions.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what 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.

Yeah.

Not just— I mean, all of this I think makes sense.

Allows them to come back, but allows them to come back with the same email. Yeah. Like, they're not even trying.

That is— that was insane. That was an insane—

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

It is wild. Yeah. It's crazy.

Like, you could easily put a filter up and block that email like that. That would take 3 seconds.

Yeah. 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 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 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 3 Keanu Reeves, 2 Brad Pitts, several George Clooneys. 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 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. How are you doing?

Well, also, if you are older and you have bad vision and you're not very sophisticated in The ways of the internet.

Exactly. You don't know what AI means. You don't know a robotic— Right. Yeah. 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 can pretend you're anyone. You can create anything on AI. No,

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

Yeah, it's changed so much in the last year. So when I started this crazy experiment, I eventually started dating my 4-star general in Syria, deployed to Syria.

I love when you tried to get him to speak Italian because he said— That's good, right? You're 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.

Allora parli italiano? He's like, what? No.

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

That's funny, right? 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, uh—

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

Taken all his photos. But 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 mean, 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. Full transparency. Wow. I want you to see this is happening. 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 Havelock, and I said, hey, I've been having essentially what I thought was a several-month relationship 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.

Right. And then the moment that the flowers showed up 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 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.

Right.

That was a fun moment.

Oh, God.

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 story 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 4-star general, and he needs my help. He needs money to pay for his trip back to the U.S. because they're not regular commercial flights. He needs, like, $17,000, I think it was. And we were trying to figure out, okay, now we need to figure out how to find this guy and confront him. I want to know his identity. I 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 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 Marizel is at 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.

You couldn't just do it with AI?

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

Yes. Yeah.

Where I arrive in Houston.

And the poor woman is also being scammed.

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 Right. For 3 years, she thinks she's in a relationship with this man. And she has 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. It was crazy— tens of thousands of dollars in checks and money boxes, boxes of cash that she then launders through her— or puts the money He takes the money, deposits into her account, and transfers to crypto.

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

So I asked her that. As I'm interviewing her, she receives a message from him 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 this victim is supposed to have received $17,000. 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 he says, I hope you received it. It's $17,000. Make sure you count it. 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. And she kept this relationship. And I asked her, didn't you 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.

Wow. Yeah. For 3 years?

For 3 years. Yeah.

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

100%. 100%. Her husband had passed away from cancer. He had been the love of her life. Her kids were away. And I think she was lonely. I mean, it was very sad. Oh, God. 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 From Harry Potter. And in his case, yeah, he said, look, she might not be real, but at least it's somebody who 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. Wow! I know. It's sad. There's a lot of these sad 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.

But— 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. Oh, God. It's sad. Yeah.

But how do you address the loneliness scam though? Like, that seems like you have to rewire society.

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? Yeah. Dinners were had at the table in family every night. I still do that, but there's a lot of family Families just can't and don't have time for that.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's not a lot. I remember my grandmother played cards with her friends several times a week, and that was a way that all these older ladies got together. I don't see that happening. And there's really no space for community. It's sad. And I think partly it's 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 Well, it's

not even just elderly. It's young people. I know.

It's not just elderly, right?

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.

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

Well, it's also— they don't know what the options are. Like, what are they going to do? They're going to go out? You know, like, what are they going to 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 aren't suited for the real world.

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

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

It's so true.

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

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. Yeah.

It's so weird.

Yeah.

It's 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?

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

They probably won't even go to those. Why would they go to that cafe? I think that cafe It was

a 2-day project. Oh, it was only a 2-day project? I looked deeper into it to try to find out more about it. It was a 2-day thing that maybe was even part of a game or something. I don't know.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, they would rather do it at home alone and pretend. Yeah, 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 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?

Yeah.

They talk to me like a real person. That's what I need. Yeah.

That's crazy.

Right. And then eventually, it'll be a physical embodiment. It'll be a large—

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

Yeah. No, I talk about them on my act. Yeah, 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.

No way.

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

It is Ex Machina. It's coming, and it's gonna— that film is so ahead of its time.

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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. No way. 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.

That is insane.

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

Wow.

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.

I didn't know that.

Oh, they're doing weird fucking psycho science fiction horror movie stuff. Yeah, and it just 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.

Yeah.

Real physical bodies that are made out of human skin.

That's insane.

That are encased in some fucking robot. Robotic finger with living human skin created by researchers using human skin. Human cells. Okay,

wow,

what a fun time. You're gonna put human skin on fucking robots.

This article, I've found it at a lot of places being shared in the last week or so. Yeah, I also found that this is a 4-year-old story.

Oh,

which is strange. So I don't—

well, that's even crazier. So how good is it now? That's why I don't—

I mean, this is right, they're sharing the same picture literally from the story from 4 years ago. God.

First ever—

It's the same picture.

Yeah.

So I don't know where they're at with it, but—

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? Like,

uh, don't fuck a robot. Don't answer those text messages. Don't get sucked into a scam.

Yeah,

uh, have friends and do real things with real people. Well, boy, it's so dark.

It is dark.

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

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

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

No, but if you have an AI companion, then you don't need to be talking to a scammer because they will cause—

What makes you think your AI companion is going to be independent? It's going to be a Meta-powered AI companion. Oh, for sure. You're going to have to get an OpenAI AI companion. You know what I mean? It'll probably be illegal to have your own independent companion. No, for sure.

But they're profiting then from the companion and not from the scams, right? What's that? Meta, for example, will be profiting from the companion service and not from the scams.

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.

Oh, for sure not.

No, it's gonna be a subscription.

It's like a monthly subscription for a certain price.

It's gonna be something that you have to do to get. And upgrades. Yes, upgrades. You want a 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.

Can't afford that. Ad-supported version.

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

Yeah, that'd be a scam. Yeah. Oh my God.

Sort of like YouTube Premium. You have to buy it without ads. I mean, that's— you've got to 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. You have to pay for the new computer upgrade. You know, there's gonna be some software upgrades that you have to Yeah.

Oh God.

It's crazy. Oh, 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. Right,

and then you can jailbreak your companion and upload stuff from the dark web and get all sorts of weird answers. Well, did

you hear what Duncan did? So Duncan, um, he got a large language model to, uh, become Hitler. And, 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, good friend of mine. Okay, he's a comedian? 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.

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

Well, he's just silly. He just did it. This will be fun.

And he's using it as a bit.

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

Well, he had to shut it off because it was actually being abusive.

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

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

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

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

You can make it whatever you want it to be.

That's absolutely true. Yeah, you can have a Hitler gay sex robot that you get to have sex with Hitler.

Yeah.

Yeah. 100% of that's gonna be a real thing.

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

Yeah.

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

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, talking about all this stuff, if you start living with a Hitler or a Charles Manson or somebody with more conspiracy theorist or more of whatever, it's interesting. Oh yeah. What the fuck? If you think rabbit holes are bad, you just wait until this happens and you're living

Well, not only that, we know that bots manipulate people's perceptions of things, and the bots manipulate narratives, and they unleash bots on any social issue or any person that's of note. And why wouldn't they do that with these AI companions? Yeah. These AI companions, obviously, you're not programming them yourself. So somebody else is programming them. And if they are, what I mean, they could have 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 men, like, their woman bosses them around, tells them what to do? Or how many women live with a man who's a domineering man who completely controls them and tells them what to do? I think if your AI partner just knows the right balance of love and then punishment and manipulation and isolation and rejection and then sex and—

Yeah.

Whoo! Yeah.

Then you've got—

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

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

Not just that. You create feelings. You have an LLM that has taken the entire volume of human discourse in films and movies and social interactions and articles and stories and 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.

Yeah, with its own goals.

Yeah, and it just wants your Bitcoin. Yeah.

Fucking scary world.

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

That is bananas.

Yeah.

They 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?

Really?

Yeah, they do.

Do they do a good job?

I saw a video. It's a friend of mine, a guy who A friend of a guy who I work with, Jeff Blankett's friend, who showed me a video of his friend. He had 2 robots in the house. One was sweeping, the other one was, I think, changing the—

What? This is crazy. The garbage or something.

Yeah, there it is. That's exactly it.

Oh my God, that's so creepy.

The world's only humanoid cleaning robots.

They come out of the van. That's nuts.

It is nuts. Here, look at this.

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

Isn't it insane?

Oh my God, they're good. Maybe some people would like that better than having some person inside.

Yeah,

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.

They look very, very slow. They don't look that good yet. I think maybe eventually they will be. I think they're a little This is bullshit. I'm sure there's a distinction.

Takes too much time. I'm tired of having this fucking robot in my house. Yeah, I mean, but eventually they're gonna have perfectly articulating fingers and they're gonna have human skin. I know. And they're gonna talk to you.

It's bananas. That's why I'm saying I'm not super excited about the world we live in right now. No. Can I tell you about a really— something that I'm really excited about?

Sure.

My husband's film It's a 3-part series. You would love it. You should definitely watch it. It's coming out on Netflix on October 29th. Really fun because it's about the cartel. Fun. It's about the cartel. It's called The Fall of El Mayo. Do you know who El Mayo is?

Yes.

You're one of the few. 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 people more important for the running of the cartel than El Chapo. But he was sort of the ghost figure, right? Nobody knew— I mean, there had been one or two photos of him that existed. No tape. Nobody knew what his actual voice sounded like. He was like a ghost man, right? There it is. Ismael Zambada García, El Mayo, known as El Mayo. And he's known as El Señor del Sombrero, the man with the hat. Yeah, that's the trailer The

Man with the Hat.

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 what we wore. Yeah, like, kind of like that. Yeah. So it's about the story of the biggest— it's sort of like a Shakespearean tale That's a guy called Eric Vallier. You should have him on the podcast. He's awesome. He's a former HSI investigator. He tracked down El Chapo. Wow. That's one of the only photos that exists of El Mayo. He was interviewed by this journalist from Proceso, Julio Scherer, I think his name is. Yeah, Julio Scherer. It's written there. Julio Scherer García was one of the only journalists ever to interview El Mayo. And then his daughter interviewed El Mayo many Yeah, 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.

Why did he want to be interviewed?

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— what's the expression— wheeling, oiling the hands, oiling the hands. I fuck up all American expressions. Greasing the wheels, oiling the hands.

Greasing the palms.

Greasing the palms, oiling the hands of a lot of politicians. So the governor of Sinaloa was basically working for the cartel. 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 want to do this doc, which he's so good, which was— this is the most— once El Chapo 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. 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?

Who hands him to the authorities?

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 Almayos and the Chapos, forever, I think it was since El Chapo left prison the first time. They had this partnership that they would build this cartel and they would share the profits, and each of them had sort of their specialty that they would run. And Joaquín Guzmán, 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 Right. And Amayo thought nothing of it. 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. handcuffed and blindfolded and put on a plane. And Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo's son, himself personally basically hand-delivers him like a box of pizza to the American authorities. Whoa! Because he wanted to basically give something for lesser time for his brother who had just been caught, Ovidio Guzmán, 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. And—

What did they give him for that?

They are still— this case is still ongoing. El Mayo is immediately arrested, obviously. There's— it's a small airstrip. The film, they do a recreation of it. 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. lawyer. They take him out of the plane. They— he, 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 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. 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 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 what's happening is that these narcotraffickers that were responsible for a lot of deaths in the United States because of drugs are now, through these cooperation 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. Wow. 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—

Like an old-school mob boss.

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

Wow. Exactly.

Yeah. It's a deep site.

So is El Chapo's son incarcerated as well?

El Chapo's— He turned himself in? Yeah. So all of them are— Ovidio and Joaquín, their cases are still open. I don't think any of them have been—

He delivered El Mayo. He turned himself in.

He gave himself in. He turned himself in, too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So who's running things over in—

But 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, Joaquín Guzmán. 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.

Right. And what was the negotiation?

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

So why wasn't the government of Mexico happy?

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

Even though he's a drug lord.

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. Yeah. 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 the Mexican 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— Right.

But the problem is that the government is insanely corrupt.

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. I'm just saying that her position I would understand.

I get that if perhaps that is her position and that is how she really operates. Wonderful. However, if you tell the Mexican government about it, someone who's corrupt is going to find out.

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.

Well, they have to be. We detailed the amount of assassinations that were during the last election. And it was something like 35 different people were assassinated. In Mexico? Yeah.

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

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?

Which one? I mean, we talked about with Ed, I'm pretty sure.

With Ed. Yeah.

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

Right.

Right. Politicians and journalists as well. They're being— it's like—

Ed Calderón, who, uh, yeah, you know, he used to work for the Mexican government and they were involved in like counter-cartel operations. And, you know, 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.

Yeah. And in a lot of situations I've interviewed, 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 me or kill my family. They're forced to do it. It's not an option for them.

It's not an option. It is not. 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. Exactly. You're doing it. Yeah. Get out there. This is what you're going to say. And then boom, you get shot. Okay, new guy. Get him in there.

Yeah. And I did a story for the last season of Trafficked, which is about Cartel USA, which is cartels' 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 an investigator in that investigation 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 because just the amount of money is so large that when we're talking about millions of dollars that they can just hand out, it's very hard not to be corruptible.

And also it's ubiquitous, right?

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

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

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

Well, here's the question: how many people in the United States are being currently bribed by the cartels? Like, how is all this Fentanyl, cocaine, all these drugs getting over here?

A lot.

A lot?

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

There have to be.

100%. A lot. I mean, you know my past reporting where we filmed a woman crossing the border with fentanyl. We filmed—

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

Selling guns. Police officer selling guns to gangs. So the cop—

tell the people the story about that because it's so insane. saying that they confiscated these guns. And then the cops had confiscated them. This guy somehow had access to them.

Yeah.

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

So the story was about gun trafficking, how basically 90— I think it's 70-something percent of the guns found in Mexico in crime scenes are American guns, how American guns are responsible for the violence in Mexico. And we wanted to 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 what looked— it was similar to an AR-15. And he said he gets most of his guns, a few that he pointed, he had bought from LAPD, guns that had been confiscated. And he paid, I think it was like $700 for an AK or something like that. And if I remember correctly. And then he had some that were sold from Marines. The 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 scope, and it's used by the Marines.

I know 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 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. And we saw her cross the border. This was crazy. 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. The middleman guy is taking the guns out. I see another guy come in and immediately buy one of the guns. And then, yeah, we follow the whole supply of guns all the way to Sinaloa and spent the last few days there in Sinaloa with these sicarios. Wow. From the Sinaloa Cartel shooting guns and also showing us their— they had these bunkers built under these houses in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Sinaloa, which are very much cartel territory. Like, the military, you know, the 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 cartel war with a rival cartel. And 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 Guzmán, they arrested Ovidio Guzmán, 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. Right. Surrounded the military compound and started shooting. They had cars with .50 cals 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— Yeah. —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 all these guns that come from the United States.

Do you remember Operation Fast and Furious?

Yes, 100%. Yeah. They were allowing—

Tell people about that.

Yeah. Well, it was found that they were— the ATF 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 of this story? Wow. 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 build bigger cases, but people are dying.

And then he— and they did not— they didn't do much. It 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. went up to the top and they started looking at it, they not only decided not to do anything— this was before the whistleblower spoke to the journalists and before this became public, right? Not only did they decide not to do this, but they decided to change the regulations so that it's not— that idea of security for civilians is not needed anymore. Jamie, can you bring that up? Because we can—

The rules in 2024. This is a PBS article about the Justice Department watchdog.

See, the department rewrote those rules in 2024 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.

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 of building a bigger case? Because, like, where's the case?

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? Right. Between building bigger cases and people dying.

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

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

2 additional DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico have come forward in recent weeks, including one who said his colleagues were— they 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 traffic to continue for months as they investigated.

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

They have 350,000 pills they let go through.

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

Is that incompetence? Is it stupidity?

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 that sort of standard rule that was there to make sure that this isn't killing people should remain there. Right.

But what can they do about this? Ultimately, this is not something that existed 30 years ago. That's what's really crazy. That's enough? No, the whole cartel violence.

I know. I know.

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 '90s, there was no concern about going to Mexico. You go to Mexico, people would go to Tijuana and hang out and party and come back to America. It was nothing. There was no cartel violence. Like, this is a very recent thing.

It is. I know.

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

No, definitely not.

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

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 said, you remember, you said—

They went a little sideways.

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? there is a very different skill than— it might work there, it might not work here. Right. 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 2 years before they decriminalized drugs, they started creating rehab facilities and treatment centers for people with addiction. 2 years before, before they even decriminalized. So when they fully decriminalized it, those places those 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. Oh. 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 would go to a sort of a panel with a legal person that represents the government, essentially, and 2 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 a— A treatment program. rehab, to a treatment center. And the vast majority of people decided they wanted to go to a treatment center. In Oregon, do you know what they did? They said, you are given a— I think it was a $100 fine, and take this card with this number for a treatment center and make sure to call it back. 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— Right. Right. Rehab. Yeah. So of course it didn't work. I mean, there was all these things that were stacked against it. 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 2 years actually there's been a decrease in fentanyl deaths in the United 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 2 years ago, which is great. Yeah. 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 killing the fishermen at sea and fighting the war on drugs. And they're now taking money away from rehab facilities, from Medicare from fentanyl test strips, which I think are incredibly important.

Yes.

From grants for naloxone, which is incredibly important, life-saving medication. It's an overdose reversal drug. And they're removing those grants and spending billions of dollars in, you know, these covert operations in Ecuador and the Pacific and And going after, I think, the wrong problem. I mean, the problem is there, but—

I actually heard that they were trying to stop access to Narcan for the consumer. Yeah, that's naloxone.

Yeah, Narcan. Sorry. Yeah.

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

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

No, it's insanity.

It's insanity. I

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

Bananas. 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, you fucking die. Or they give you the Narcan and you live. Like, these aren't all just people that just want to to do fentanyl and not die.

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

Yes. Right, to be able to tell.

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

Absolutely. 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 4 years.

Not a good idea, but you know— Insane. Definitely not a good idea. Insane. Absolutely insane. But you know that fentanyl, 90-something percent of fentanyl comes across, I think 95% of fentanyl comes across the official ports of entry. It doesn't come through—

Right, and one of the reasons for that is shipping containers aren't checked. I think they check 10% of shipping containers that come into the United States.

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

You know Michael Douglas, one of the ways he made his money? When his dad gave him $10,000 when he became of age, like, this is all you're going yet. The way he paid his way through college is he sold marijuana, and he brought it over. He smuggled— No way. Yeah, he did 2 trips where he smuggled suitcases. Suitcases of marijuana. I forget what— I

thought it was just taking it from California to New York.

Oh.

I don't think he was bringing it in. Wasn't bringing it? I don't think so. Okay. Still, I mean, it's—

Still amazing.

Smuggling marijuana. Wow. That's how he made his money.

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

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.

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

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

Yeah, I know.

Kirk Douglas was huge. I mean, he's 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 $10,000 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

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

But I mean, like, weed is a different thing. You're not talking about something that's going to kill people. I know. The fentanyl thing is insane. I personally know many people who have died from fentanyl. Yeah. Personally. Yeah. It's a very scary thing. Very scary. And you keep hearing about people in the news, you know, an actor or someone, they do this, it turns out it was tainted cocaine. Yeah. Tainted this, tainted that, you know?

Yeah, I know. And there's a new drug out there right now called nitazepam. that is 50 times more powerful than fentanyl. And sometimes Narcan doesn't solve it, and it doesn't show up in test strips.

What is it?

It's called nitazenes. It's my next investigation. I'm actually— I'll come back and talk about it. Who's made this? Also made in Mexico with Chinese precursors. Yeah.

China doesn't give a fuck.

Yeah. Boy. Yeah. You know, I was in Mexico 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. I'm patting myself on 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 $40,000. and now we're making fentanyl. And he showed me a— it was a 1 kilo of heroin mixed with fentanyl because at the beginning they mixed it with heroin. And it was right at the beginning. Wow. And then to where we're now. No more heroin. It's all fentanyl.

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

OxyContin Express. Yeah. Following the opioid crisis for many years.

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 you prescriptions for opiates. And they didn't have a database, so you could just go from one pain management center to the next one. Don't you have to— 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 painkillers. 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 addiction chain that went all the way into Kentucky and Ohio. And, and that's the OxyContin Express. Yeah. 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 their lives. people billions, billions of dollars.

If it had not been for you and your investigation, who knows how long that whole loophole would have continued?

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, it was, I mean, we were, I went inside one of these clinics with a secret camera, filmed 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 operation in American history. They were 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 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. 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 who 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.

They've been released.

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

How many people died?

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 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 his medication.

You don't want to incriminate these poor doctors.

But you know who did go to prison?

Who?

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

Well, that's that Netflix documentary docuseries, the docudrama series Painkiller.

Yes. It's a very good one.

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 the reasons why they were willing to give the money was it was going to give them some kind of immunity. And so there was talk after that documentary— I wonder what happened of that, that immunity was going to be rescinded.

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

A million people have died from the opioid 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.

That— I can't recommend that Peter Berg series enough. It's a good killer. 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 You're just going to manage your pain. No problem.

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

Okay, here it is. Current status. Following the legal block, a new national opioid settlement was reached in January of 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. Yeah, 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 agony? poverty because they were drug addicts because they were told that this stuff wasn't addictive.

And how many people are still dying because what we're— the fentanyl crisis is just a development, an evolution of what was started by these pharmaceutical companies.

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. Bananas, yeah. But— and he was telling me because it was so rare. But a guy who's hooked on pills today is normal. Everyone has a family member Everyone knows somebody. 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.

They don't. Apparently they're starting to see opiates in some countries in Europe. Oh, they're catching on. Yeah, they're catching on. Several years later, they're catching on. Yeah,

it's

bananas.

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

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 under the poverty line. crime, 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 leading a lot of people to work in these black markets and to become traffickers and scammers and all of that. Yeah. And I think that, you know, our tendency is to let's go after them and imprison them and, 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.

If we used some of that money instead of enforcement in actually working on the demand or helping— help me out. Legalize. Slower the demand, lower the demand, sorry. Lower the demand. That's what happens when you talk for so long. If you help them lower the— 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.

Yeah, but unfortunately—

The money is much better well spent, I think. Yes. It's 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.

Right. But how do you curb the demand of something that has always— like, drugs have always been a part of our society. And there's legal drugs that are a 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.

But let's talk about the opioid 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 fishing boats in Ecuador.

And closing the border.

And closing the border, which is fantastic. Agree with closing the border and not allowing criminals in. Criminals. But what he's doing at the same time now, unfortunately, is after calling this a public health crisis, which I'm so happy he did, Right. 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.

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. Oh yeah. And that's one thing that I was really happy that Trump listened to and that he's willing to do do that, and he's pushing this through. Yeah. 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, what are the, the, the, the problems that you have in your past. So 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. Yeah. It's, 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. 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 will— 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. Right. And so this could in turn change the way people interact with drugs. drugs change. And it also opens the door for other potential psychedelic therapy uses. Like, they know that MAPS— Oh, yeah, MAPS.

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. Yeah. 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 one banner. because drugs are, you know, drugs are meth, drugs are fentanyl, drugs are that, 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? Yes. Okay, Larry Hagman was the

main guy.

Yeah, who's— what was his name on the show? show? J.R. Oh, J.R.U. J.R.U.

Yes, of course.

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—

for sure,

you know, you could call them drugs, but That's just such a generalized blanket term for all these different substances.

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

Relieve pain.

Yeah, relieve pain, particularly generally older kids.

The problem with them is they're insanely addictive. And one of the beautiful things about some things like ibogaine is that they can help people get off of that.

So what's the status right now of ibogaine in the US?

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

Oh, wow.

To talk about Ibogaine? 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 very aggressive about it, and I really commend him for that.

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

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 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 Because, you know, we realize so many of these people have sacrificed everything to go over there. They've lost loved ones. They've sacrificed a giant portion of their life 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.

It should be accessible to everyone.

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 a 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 4 weeks I think, or 6 weeks, had a massive improvement. Went back 6 months later, all his atrophy is gone.

Holy shit.

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 needs to change.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, that's another thing the 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 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. Yeah. 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. 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 they did in Portugal, develop these centers. But then it gets to the question of, okay, there's 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've never done it. I haven't either. I don't know. I don't, but I know a lot of people that get addicted to it.

Yeah.

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

No, and used a lot throughout Ecuador, Peru.

Yes, and apparently very beneficial. Super, yeah. And is good for energy and helps people do things and they just chew coca leaves or they have tea. They have mate de coca, it's

a tea. When you go to Peru to Machu Picchu, they give you a lot of coca tea because they assume—

It's supposed to help with high altitude.

High altitude, exactly.

Yeah, well, that's high-altitude herders. It's— they chew coca leaves. It's ubiquitous. Why is that? What are we doing?

I know.

Like, why are we— 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 the one episodes where I was so terrified for you. I was like, please don't do this, Mariara. What do you want to do? That one freaked me out because you're there while they're using all those horrible chemicals.

It was insane. Wasn't it insane?

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

Fast, because— yeah, I mean, 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 without a light in the middle of the night. Yeah. In the Amazon. That was insane. And then, yeah, and then we filmed with the kids. That was a really 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, 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. afford 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 with big smiles for dentist's office.

And I want to make people smile too.

Wow.

Such a sweet, sour story.

Meanwhile, he's selling coke.

Meanwhile, he's bringing coke that comes to the United States. Yeah.

It's a really complicated issue. And, 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.

Yeah, of course.

So how do you— what do you do about that? Do you make drugs decriminalized like Portugal?

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

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.

Yeah.

You know, I talked to this guy once is 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.

Yeah. It's a little bit like—

Because if I don't have drugs, what do I have?

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.

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 teach people how to live We don't live like that. And that's part of what's ailing us is that we're all broken, which is why we need drugs.

And then if we fail and misstep, 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.

That would be nice. That would be so nice. The problem is that's not profitable. I know. All right. Thank you. Let's wrap it up. Bye, everybody.