Show full transcript 0:35 So your new show is all about romance scams. 0:41 And I was aware of these because I 0:43 watched a show a long time ago about this poor lonely man who 0:48 kept getting scammed. 0:50 He thought that there was this woman, 0:52 and he was in contact with her. 0:54 And he flew to Europe to meet her twice. 0:58 And both times, she came up with some reason 0:59 why she couldn't be there, some emergency came up. 1:02 And you know this guy had given her hundreds of thousands of dollars and drained his account and his his daughter was so sad 1:09 She's like I keep trying to tell him, but he won't listen 1:12 And you see these poor people that are so vulnerable 1:15 They're just they're lonely and they really believe they really really believe I think the loneliness epidemic is a huge part of this 1:22 Quite frankly, it's a huge issue in this world. Yeah huge issue in our country in particular 1:27 You know, there's like a disconnect with family in our country and there's a 1:33 Like people don't have like real community anymore. It's very weird. It is. I think it's yeah 1:40 It's absolutely one of the biggest reasons why scams are rampant these days. I mean particularly 1:45 Roman scams. Yeah 100% yeah, well, it's you're you're praying on the the saddest people 1:53 That's what's really it's like it's one thing if you're scamming some psycho fucking fraud guy 2:00 Who's doing stock market bullshit? You know what I mean like and you scam them? Yeah, it's like you're scamming a scammer 2:07 Yeah, it's true 2:09 But I think one of the problems we have when we talk about scams is this idea that we think it's a 2:16 Certain time type of more gullible person or more naive or perhaps more foolish 2:21 And I think that is wrong because I think what these scammers are so good at doing is that they pray on emotions that we all share, you know, love and trust and sometimes greed as well. 2:35 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. 2:48 And it was always, but how could they do that? 2:51 Why would you give money to a stranger? 2:53 I mean, how could they be so silly and so stupid? 2:56 And that really annoyed me, 2:57 because why are we focusing on the response of the victim 3:00 instead of actually understanding the actions 3:02 of the scammers themselves? 3:05 Because they are very, very good at what they do. 3:09 So that was the idea behind, okay, 3:10 I'm going to place myself at the center of all scams, 3:13 super scam me and create a persona 3:16 and put myself in dating websites and you know online platforms and see what 3:22 happens and it happened very fast. Do you think they're good at it? I think some 3:27 are really good at it. The guy that was doing it with you? Mine no. I didn't get 3:32 the best. Are there better ones? There are 100% better ones. I think the one 3:38 that was scamming Leslie was definitely better than mine. Is that the one who 3:42 I was pretending he was John Bon Jovi. 3:44 So again, I know, but that's the thing. 3:48 You tell that story and you think this guy shows up on her DM and says, Hey, I'm John 3:53 Bon Jovi. 3:53 Give me money. 3:54 That's not how we went, right? 3:55 She liked an account. 3:57 So it was funny because it was in the middle of me doing Super Scam Me that I get a message 4:03 from Leslie and I get dozens of these messages every week because I've done a lot of 4:07 reporting on this. 4:08 People think I'm sort of like the 911 for scams. 4:11 And in one it was right in the middle of the project I get a message from her and it was that look 4:16 I've been talking to a guy for almost a year. I initially thought he was John Bon Jovi 4:21 I'm not so sure anymore and of course the response is wait 4:25 What did you really think you were talking to John Bon Jovi? 4:27 But then you listen to the story and then you actually meet this person. Yeah, and it is much more nuanced than that 4:33 She liked an Instagram account. She was brand new on Instagram 4:38 liked an account that had what looked like a check mark, 4:41 verified account, she thought, and she commented. 4:44 She's been a fan of this guy since she was 14 years old, 4:47 posters of him all around her room. 4:49 And immediately he DM'd her back and said, 4:52 hey, I saw you commented, I love connecting with my fans. 4:56 Perfectly reasonable, perfectly normal. 4:59 What's your favorite music? 5:01 What's your favorite song? 5:02 When did you start listening to my music? 5:04 That kind of conversation. 5:05 It started normally and then it was weeks of this and then he started paying attention 5:10 to her and interested in what her life was like and tell me about you and what do you 5:14 do and what are your interests and then they talked for months and months and he would remember 5:20 things that happened in the early weeks. 5:23 And this is a woman who leads a very lonely life. 5:26 There's the loneliness epidemic who's sort of a strange from her husband who doesn't 5:31 really have anyone who's interested in her life, quite frankly, or sees her or understands 5:36 her, wants to know about her. 5:38 And finally, there was somebody who, even if he wasn't John Bon Jovi, it was somebody 5:42 who cared, right? 5:44 And it lasted months of this. 5:46 And then she said to him one day, she knew that he had a concert. 5:51 She couldn't afford it. 5:51 She went online. 5:52 The tickets were ridiculously expensive. 5:54 And she said, it's so sad that I really want to see one concert always have wanted 5:59 to and I can't. 6:00 This was like seven months into their relationship. 6:02 And then he says, well, if you want, 6:06 I do these meet and greets, which is also reasonable. 6:09 They actually do, celebrities do these. 6:11 And you can pay for, I'll give you a discount. 6:13 I'll put you in touch with management 6:14 and you can pay like $100. 6:16 I'm coming to Louisiana and you can come 6:19 to one of these meet and greets and meet me in person. 6:22 And at this point, I'm sorry, but it is believable. 6:26 And also he would send her videos. 6:28 You saw some of these videos. 6:29 Yeah, the AI videos. 6:30 The AI videos. 6:31 And some of them, I mean, they're a little robotic, 6:33 but they could be real. 6:35 And it's, hi, Leslie, good morning. 6:37 How are you doing? 6:38 My sunshine, my love, I'm curious about your life. 6:42 And he would say to her, look, I am surrounded 6:45 by people who are yes people, who are people 6:48 who are with me a lot because of my money and fame. 6:52 And I just really appreciate connecting 6:53 with people who are outside the bubble, 6:55 who are normal folks. 6:56 And so it is kind of it's not as insane as like John Bon Jovi showed up and said hey 7:02 I want a thousand dollars right but then what happens I think in a lot of these 7:06 scams is that once you're in once you're committed to a relationship once 7:12 that has an impact on your life and has made your life better it is very 7:16 difficult to then you know come to the realization that this might not be 7:20 real. I equate it a little bit to gambling. You know, when gamblers lose a lot of money 7:27 and in their heads, they're always thinking, wait, it might have been my unlucky day. If 7:32 I go to the casino today, this might be my really lucky day, right? And the more you 7:36 lose, the more you're gambling because you're trying to get that money back. It's 7:40 a little bit, I think, that same idea. It's also a dopamine rush. Every time you 7:44 get a DM, every time you're love bombed, there's a dopamine rush there. And I think 7:48 it's that idea that you get to a point where you start suspecting, okay, this 7:53 doesn't sound real, but I've invested so much, the reality of my life is so sad 7:58 compared to this that maybe I prefer to just go on. So there are actually a lot 8:02 of romance scam victims that continue having these relationships even after 8:07 they realize the person wasn't who they said they were. Wow. So they just do 8:11 it just for the placebo. They do it almost just like they're talking to 8:17 robot that loves them. Yeah, yes a little bit, which is one of the things that they 8:22 talk actually about how AI, you know the companionship of AI, is one of the benefits or possible 8:29 benefits of AI. I don't know if it's a benefit. 8:32 This episode is presented by Paramount Plus. The King returns. Sylvester Stallone is back 8:38 as mob boss Dwight Manfredi in the Paramount Plus hit series Tulsa King. With new enemies 8:44 Closing in and his empire on the line Dwight and his crew prepare for the biggest fight of their lives Tulsa King 8:51 New season now streaming only on Paramount Plus. 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Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. 10:42 For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkeens.com 10:45 slash promos. Limited time offer. It can also be very bad. It creeps me out. 10:51 It can, but you know there are coffee shops now. I just found out this out in New York 10:55 where they actually have like iPads. Did you know this? iPads with fake people for 11:01 companionship that you go to the coffee shop and you grab an iPad and you have a 11:05 whole conversation with an AI agent. Well New York is weirdly enough one of the 11:11 loneliest places yeah because no one is friends with anyone like my friend Jim 11:16 who lives in a building in New York it's like you know 40 stories or 11:20 something like that he's like I don't know anybody in this building like think 11:23 about that I'm and I don't know my neighbor every time we look at each 11:27 We're like, so I don't know, hey, how you doing? 11:28 Like no one knows anybody, and there's hundreds of people 11:31 stacked on top of each other. 11:33 That is an odd way to live. 11:35 That is an odd way to live, yeah. 11:36 What is this, Jamie? 11:37 Oh, cafe for AI. 11:39 Eva AI opens the world's first cafe for AI dates. 11:44 This cuffing season, what is cuffing season? 11:47 What does that mean? 11:48 I have no idea where it's stuck. 11:50 It's like linking up time. 11:51 Is that what it means? 11:52 Cuffing, you know, it's another way to say fucking. 11:55 Oh, having sex? 11:58 Wow. 11:59 There's a season? 12:00 What are we, elk? 12:01 It's like a Coltie running. 12:03 It's during winter when everybody's inside. 12:06 A relationship's RPG app, bringing virtual romance to the real world. 12:11 EVA is launching EVA Cafe, the first ever online space where people can take their 12:16 AI partners out on a real date. 12:19 Oh, God. 12:20 Yeah. 12:21 That is so dark. 12:23 Wow. 12:23 Oh, Jesus Christ. 12:24 Oh, wow, sit there with the iPad. Are you enjoying your steak? Oh my god, it sounds like a troll, but it's real 12:31 Reserve your spot click that. I don't want to 12:42 So this was also that said the website said it's back in February of 26 12:47 Oh, I mean, that's almost you know, don't show that on the screen. You just showed you 12:52 Oh boy boy, this is dark. You can come to flirt and unwind come to flirt unwind or simply share a quiet moment with your AI 13:02 companion 13:04 EVA cafe 13:06 Oh 13:09 I think it's so dark. It's so dark. Yeah, did you see X Machina? I did one of my all-time favorite movies 13:15 I love that movie 13:16 Yeah, but the real problem I have with that movie. It's like I think I'd fall in love with her too 13:21 Oh my God. 13:21 What was that guy? 13:22 She's stunning. 13:23 She's amazing. 13:24 She's so hot. 13:25 She's so hot. 13:25 Who cares if she has clear skin 13:27 and fucking lights behind it? 13:29 Yeah, that's for sure. 13:30 It's like she's so pretty and so sweet. 13:34 It's dark. 13:35 It's dark because we are super vulnerable. 13:38 We're super stupid. 13:40 Yeah, I don't know if the stupid is the word, 13:42 but I would say we're vulnerable. 13:43 Especially men. 13:44 Yeah, men. 13:45 Do you know what that's interesting too 13:46 in terms of scams? 13:48 Because as you saw in our film, 13:50 the majority of the people we spoke to were women, 13:53 but actually men are as likely 13:56 to falling victim to these cams as women, 13:58 but they just have a lot more shame around it, 14:00 so they're lost likely to talk about it. 14:02 So we actually spoke to a lot of men, 14:04 but they just don't wanna be on camera 14:06 because there's so much shame around this. 14:08 Yeah, no man wants to be a sucker. 14:10 Yeah. 14:11 If a woman's a sucker, everyone feels bad for her. 14:13 But a guy's a sucker, you're like, you fucking... 14:16 I wished people felt bad for women. 14:18 It wasn't Leslie's case, and it's certainly not the case for a lot of the victims that I speak to. 14:22 They don't feel bad for her? 14:23 No, actually this is another horrible thing. 14:27 There's a sort of double victimization, right? 14:29 Because initially, not only do you, you know, your heart is broken, you lost all your money, 14:34 but then you go back home or you go to your friends and you talk about this 14:37 and the first response is how stupid could you be, right? 14:40 It's the humiliation, it's the shame that comes with it, 14:44 which they use it to their advantage, right? 14:46 the scammers that they use the silence to their advantage do you ever get those 14:51 random text messages that say hi I haven't seen you in so long what have 14:56 you been up to and you look at the number like absolutely it's always an 15:00 android phone yeah right so that's one way to check and then it's always like 15:04 something weird like I've been craving lobster rolls yeah do you want to meet 15:08 up. Like what is this? And also the job offers. Oh yeah, you get those all the time. I'm approved 15:16 for so many loans. Yeah. It's really amazing. So actually super scam me started like that. 15:23 The idea was that I was going to say yes to every single scam that came my way and 15:26 for the first few weeks we filmed it that way. So I would answer all those text messages. 15:31 What happens? It was really interesting. So it was a lot of phone calls with scammers. 15:37 One of the most interesting conversations we had was with an Indian call center who told 15:41 me that there was a bug in my Apple computer and he could fix it, one of those, right? 15:47 Oh, that's nice of him. 15:49 It was an Apple support, yes, very nice of him, so kind. 15:52 And all I had to do was download this software and once you download the software, he's 15:57 in my computer and then you go to the payment and once they're in my computer they can 16:01 and see the number that I'm putting for my credit card 16:04 and all the details, so they have access to that, right? 16:08 So I'm trying to go, I'm trying to go as far as I can 16:12 without actually revealing a credit card. 16:14 So I get to the point of the credit card 16:16 and I turn to him and this had been like over an hour 16:19 on the phone with this guy. 16:20 And I say, hey, so this is the deal. 16:23 I'm actually a journalist, my name's Mariana, 16:26 but I don't want to get you in trouble. 16:28 I kind, I know this is a scam. 16:29 I just want to talk to you dude, and he actually did he stayed on the phone with me 16:33 I try this a lot it didn't always work 16:35 But in this case this guy actually stayed on the phone with me for a long time and he told me look we work 16:43 We're forced to do it in his case. He said he was forced 16:45 But I think he was doing it for the money, but he basically said I said don't you feel bad about this 16:50 I mean you're stealing money from people and his answer was look in America everybody has more money 16:55 So I don't really feel bad 16:57 I was like what is a lot of money because he said he doesn't steal from poor people and what's poor people? 17:02 Well, if I go into a bank if I go into account once I get access I can see everything that's there if you have 17:07 Less than a thousand dollars. I'm not gonna steal from you. But if you have more that means you're rich 17:13 Yeah, is it? Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, that I mean the money. It's so different, right? 17:19 Well, that is though the very bizarre 17:22 statistic that shocks people when you tell it to them. I think, I used to think 17:26 it's $34,000, but I think it's $50,000. If you make $50,000, you are in the top 17:33 1% of the world. 50,000, yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah. That's dark. That's very dark. I 17:41 mean, 10% of the world's population lives under the poverty line. Yeah. So 17:45 that's 700 and something million people who have trouble finding, you know, 17:49 shelter and food for themselves and their family it's insane. Yeah and I do know 17:54 that there are people that get they literally get kidnapped and forced to 17:59 work in these scam centers through threat of death and torture. We did a story 18:05 about that for the last season of traffic about these scam compounds we 18:08 actually visited one of the scam city a city that has a lot of these scam 18:12 compounds and interviewed one of the main guys there and it was and spoke 18:16 to a lot of the victims and I mean it was people being beaten and 18:19 tortured and forced. There's a guy, we'll never forget, who jumped off like the sixth 18:23 floor of his building because he knew that he could die, but he thought it was better 18:29 to die than to live in those conditions. He basically broke both his hips and his legs. 18:34 When I met him, he was in an wheelchair. He was rescued, thank God, but it was unsure 18:40 if he could ever walk again. Then there was a woman. That was a really dark one. 18:45 who we spoke to, she's sort of the model. 18:48 So she's the person that when they want to do video calls, 18:50 she'd come on camera. 18:52 But they had, at the time, even back then, 18:54 this was two years ago, they had this AI technology 18:57 that would go superimpose over her face. 18:59 And they needed a woman because of the mannerisms, right? 19:02 Or in the voice, I guess. 19:03 But they had this AI thing program, 19:06 and it's over her face. 19:07 But if she moved just a little bit, 19:10 they would distort, basically, 19:12 and her boss would beat her and all that stuff. 19:14 but she'd also been raped by her boss and all his friends. 19:18 They'd bring people into rape her, 19:20 and she was stuck in this horrible situation. 19:23 Where are these happening mostly? 19:25 Myanmar and Cambodia were the two main spots, 19:28 but now, because there's been a crackdown 19:30 in both countries, particularly in Cambodia, 19:32 they're spreading to other places like Dubai 19:34 and other places, but they still exist a lot in Myanmar. 19:40 And Myanmar is a country at war. 19:42 There's a large part of the country 19:43 that is just controlled by different rebel groups. 19:46 The government doesn't really have much control of that region. 19:50 So the scam compounds and these, you know, a lot of them are Chinese criminal gangs that 19:55 operate these scam compounds. 19:57 They're paying a fee, they're paying for the war, essentially. 20:00 They're giving money to the rebels in order to be able to work and, you know, build 20:04 these scam cities. 20:05 But the scam city that I visited was, it was like a mini Macau. 20:09 It was these high rises and it happened within a year or two. 20:12 it went from flat, you know, regular forest jungle in Myanmar to skyscrapers, casinos, 20:21 you know, one of the places I visited was in order to be able to talk to this scam compound, 20:29 the guy who sort of runs the city, we had to wine and dine him. Actually, he had to wine 20:34 and dine us. He wanted to take us out and show us around and he took us to this karaoke cafe, 20:38 karaoke bar that was like nothing I'd ever seen. It was screens all around. It 20:45 looked like the future, but this is in one of the poorest countries on earth 20:49 with a war raging around and I'm in this sort of the future. And it's this yeah 20:55 this karaoke bar with girls completely dressed and drugs being served and 21:02 alcohol and and we had to stay there and I sang Whitney Houston. I think it was 21:12 the greatest love of all which is usually the one that I sing. And I'm one of 21:18 those people that thinks they can sing well really good. But it was fun. Those 21:23 was one of those unforgettable nights and then the next day we interviewed this 21:26 cam guy. The football season is heating up and every week feels bigger 21:30 with DraftKings. The DraftKings sports app is now live in all 50 states. 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He wanted to show off. 22:43 Yes, because he was trying to sell the city as being a gambling and tourist paradise. 22:48 So the entire city is essentially funded by scams? 22:52 Because who wants to go to this place? 22:55 No one. 22:56 They built it up for business, for gambling, 22:59 for tourists to come. 23:00 Literally they have go-kart tracks 23:04 and they had pools with slides, a water park 23:08 and all that stuff, but no tourist 23:10 and their right mind from anywhere in the world 23:13 would wanna go to this place in the world 23:15 because again there's a war, it's poor, 23:17 it's really difficult to access. 23:19 We had to be smuggled into the country 23:20 from Thailand. So obviously that's all a front for what really brings in money which 23:27 is scams but he was trying to sort of clean the image and show us that nothing 23:32 wrong was going on there and they had posters all around the city saying no 23:35 scams are allowed we don't torture people if you need to say it. Wow. Wow. And the 23:45 whole city just appeared quickly? Overnight. A lot of these do. I mean 23:50 it's within months, it's flattering and suddenly there's funding it and how 23:54 are they doing the construction like how are they how are they doing construction 23:58 is there is a lot of unemployed people in the country so that's not that 24:03 difficult funding all comes from a lot of it is from these Chinese criminal 24:07 gangs who operate in the case of where I visited it was a company called 24:13 Yata International the head of Yata International was a Chinese man who was 24:17 living in Myanmar running this compound he was eventually actually picked 24:20 by the authorities in Thailand he was doing time in prison so the guy I spoke to was his number two 24:24 and he was trying to say that the guy was in prison because he was openly talking about corruption 24:30 and shine or something like that which was not the case but uh but yeah it's uh and it's billions 24:35 of dollars I can't remember exactly but there was sorry to interrupt you how typical is this 24:40 like this is the opening article of an article about victims and villains scam compounds yeah 24:45 This is crazy. What does it say? 24:48 he was 24:49 held against his will tortured and drained of his blood and they would drain his blood up to seven times in a half year that 24:56 Made him a blood slave. Wow to to run these scams 25:01 Yeah, what? 25:04 Freyja in his case of a blood slave the journalist began to scribe him 25:07 Okay, so it says from his bed 25:09 He said he sought work as a security guard in China 25:11 but was tricked and apparently kidnapped, 25:14 transported to Cambodia and then sold into one of the country's 25:16 many fortified scam compound facilities where workers labor 25:20 around the clock to extract money from people online. 25:23 When he resisted, Lee was beaten and tortured 25:25 and then passed from one scam operator to another. 25:29 He claimed his captors finally began 25:30 to drain large quantities of his blood seven times 25:33 in half a year. 25:35 In the hospital, he pointed weakly 25:37 at an infusion bag above his head that was the size 25:40 of each extraction, he said, in online articles, journalists began to describe his case that 25:46 of a blood slave. So they're taking his blood for blood doping or for blood transfusions 25:52 for other people? They're just taking it for, they're using his blood as money, like they're 25:58 selling his blood. Probably one of the scams they're doing. Yeah, I would imagine. 26:00 So they just like take everything. What do you got, an extra kidney? Give me that. 26:04 Chinese social media lit up without raging sympathy. Even government officials in China 26:08 in Cambodia took notice, for a moment, Lee seemed to embody the darkest truths about the 26:12 criminal scam compound spreading across parts of Southeast Asia. 26:16 Yeah. 26:16 It's like what one of them looks like. 26:18 Whoa. 26:18 I mean, they're big. 26:19 So that is an entire building dedicated to scams. 26:23 And they have barbed wire around it. 26:24 They have security guards. 26:26 All the windows usually have, what do you call them, bars so people can't escape. 26:34 Wow. 26:38 Is it dorms? 26:40 Yeah, with lots of people sleeping in the dorms together. 26:44 They're eating food, which looks kind of like a military compound. 26:46 They can't leave the compound. 26:47 So they're slaves. 26:48 Yeah, everything. 26:49 Oh, absolutely slaves. 26:50 Yeah. 26:50 It's slaves. 26:51 And we're not talking about just a few hundred people. 26:53 It's hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people coming from all over 26:57 the world, we're lured into what they think are going to be online jobs. 27:02 And once they get there, they take away their passports and they force them to 27:07 scam Americans essentially. 27:09 It's crazy. 27:09 people coming from Brazil, India, Philippines, all around the world. It's nuts. I don't understand 27:15 how we know this happens. This is still out there. I've been trying to do a film about this 27:20 because of all my reporting on traffic. This was one of the craziest, one of those moments that I'm 27:26 like, this is outrageous. How are we allowed this to happen? And you can say, okay, the victims 27:31 are people from other countries. Why should we care? I mean, that's not a good response to start 27:35 with, but even if that's the case, they're enslaved. 27:39 But also these people are scamming Americans. 27:41 Last year, this is a crazy, this blew my mind. 27:45 Just I think two months ago or something, the Consumer Federation of America issued 27:50 their latest report, which was looking at scams last year. 27:54 And Americans apparently lost, not apparently. 27:57 They've estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year. 28:01 Billion. 28:02 Billion. 28:02 Do you know how much that is a day? 28:03 I did the math it's four hundred million dollars a day four hundred million dollars a day are lost in 28:10 America are being stolen from Americans 28:14 It's insane and a lot of it is done through from but from these they're called pig butchering 28:21 Compounds 28:27 Organized criminals use highly scripted process and human trafficking 28:31 to steal as much money as they can from individual victims. 28:35 Pig slaughter. 28:36 Oh. 28:37 Do you know why it's called, yes, exactly. 28:39 It comes from the Chinese expression. 28:42 That means sort of fattening the pig, 28:44 so you fatten the pig, so you, you know, 28:47 give a lot of love to your victim, 28:49 or you, you know, pretend they're gonna get a lot of money. 28:52 You build their confidence and trust, 28:53 and then you slaughter them. 28:54 Basically, you take away all their money. 28:56 There's a whole, go to the top, please. 28:58 There's a whole process. 29:00 They go grooming the victims they contact paid pig butchering. Well, that's a dark word pig butchering targets 29:08 Through dating apps social media platforms or unsolicited text messages 29:12 Ah, like the ones I get at some point the scammer encourages a target to sift 29:17 Shift the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform like WhatsApp or Telegram 29:21 They invest time and understanding the person's financial situation family dynamics and work to build a deep emotional 29:28 connection. Scammers often spend weeks building these relationships. Then they 29:33 introduce investment opportunities. They drop subtle hints about a once in a 29:39 lifetime investment opportunity early in the relationship. They show pictures of a 29:42 lavish lifestyle or talk about expensive purchases and experiences 29:46 once scammers have gained pig butchering targets trust. They introduce an 29:51 exclusive investment opportunity often claiming they've achieved 29:54 significant financial success through it. 29:56 Then they establish credibility, make the scam seem real, scammers share fake screenshots 30:02 and trading platform dashboards, stories of friends or an uncle who knows how it all works 30:08 and made massive profits along with professional looking documents and websites, starting 30:13 small to ease doubts. 30:14 So they have like a whole process they go through. 30:18 Yeah, they have scripts. 30:19 They have scripts. 30:20 That they stick to and it's different according to the people that they're talking to what kind of victim that is 30:27 That this is the scam pig butchering was what actually got remember 30:30 There was that story of that bank banker the CEO of a bank in Kansas that ultimately went bankrupt because he had stolen 30:36 $400 million yes, and he got he got scammed. Yeah from it was pig butchering, too 30:42 It was one of these fake crypto. How did they get him? What was it was a romance thing? 30:46 No, it was this. It was an investment opportunity. Sometimes they are mixed. It starts with a romance and then goes investment opportunity or sometimes it's just the investment opportunity. 30:55 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. 31:05 And you can see once you do, again, let's not think these people are stupid because these cameras are really good at what they do. 31:12 They create these platforms that when you look at it looks completely legitimate and then it looks like your money is going up 31:18 Right. He's seeing his money is going up. He's making a lot of money. He's very excited 31:22 Initially, if you want to take money out, they allow you so that you gain more confidence 31:26 So then you start putting more money and then he just got in too deep where they kept saying that in order to get 31:33 The millions he had just made out, you know months into that this investment scam 31:38 they said that he has to pay a fee and it's like a tax but you have to pay a 31:43 10% tax and so at that point you're so in you've lost so much money that okay 31:48 if I only pay this 10% tax or if I only pay this fee so he kept doing that but 31:52 then he started actually using money from his customers. How the fuck does a guy 31:56 who works in banking get sucked into something that stupid? But I don't think 32:02 it's I think look now we know a lot more about it right? I think the 32:06 The question should be, why isn't our government doing more to protect us? 32:11 Why are these online platforms, why don't they have, why aren't they accountable, they should 32:20 be held accountable for allowing this to happen? 32:22 Which online platforms? 32:23 I'll give you specifics. 32:25 Okay. 32:25 There was an incredible Reuters investigation done last year where they got a hold of internal 32:31 meta documents from meta. And in the meta documents, internal meta documents, they estimated 32:38 inside meta, the worker, the different departments, estimated that there were 15 billion ads every 32:47 single day that the users of their platforms, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, were exposed 32:52 to around an estimated 15 billion scam ads every single day. Scams that were higher 32:59 risk that displayed clear signs of being fraudulent. 33:04 They also estimated that that year they projected that they would make $16 billion. 33:13 This is in 2024, I believe, or 2023, I'm not sure, $16 billion worth of profit from scams 33:22 and banned goods. 33:23 That's 10% of their full profit at that time. 33:27 So they're making a ton of money from this, and then this is where it gets really worrisome 33:32 to me. 33:33 Because of their personalized ad system, if a person clicks on a scam, then you know 33:39 those ads that you have like Elon Musk holding a thing and saying, investment opportunity 33:45 and then you click it and you want to see what it is, or there's tons of these. 33:48 I mean, there's gazillions of these out there. 33:50 If you click it, you are more likely to be fed more of these ads. 33:54 So it starts with just maybe you're exposed to one 33:57 and then suddenly in the next day 33:59 you're exposed to a hundred of these scams, right? 34:00 So your reality starts being, you know, filled with scams. 34:05 And then this is, I think even the crazier part, 34:09 is that if you report these scams, 34:13 which a lot of users do, 34:14 I think it's a hundred thousand reports 34:15 every single week, if they have a 95 or over certainty 34:21 If their system sees that there's a 95% certainty or over that these are scams, they remove them. 34:28 If there's less than 95, let's say 94%, what they do is they give you a penalty fee so 34:34 you have to pay more, but they allow you to stay on the platform. 34:38 What? 34:39 Yes. 34:40 Wait a minute. 34:40 You can check that out, Jamie, that Reuters investigation. 34:44 They're in on it then. 34:45 They're making money. 34:46 I mean, it just raises lots of questions, right? 34:48 Right. 34:49 If you're charging more money that means you know something's wrong with this ad so you want to cut 34:57 Yeah, you're making more money from the illegitimate ads than you are from the legitimate is this in terms of one to one 35:02 Is this because of a lack of regulation? 35:05 It is because of a lack of regulation lack of oversight and maybe perhaps something that emerged without any understanding of it before it was 35:13 Everywhere 100%. I think it's our government. They know they know 35:17 Oh, absolutely. They know their whole conversations in those internal documents is them talking 35:21 about how can we go after this without affecting our pocket? They actually openly talk about 35:27 it. They talk about how there are other companies out there that are doing a better job, but 35:30 they are afraid of what that might mean. 35:32 Jamie put this into our AI sponsor, Perplexity. It says, yes, Reuters reported that meta-charge 35:38 some suspected scam advertisers higher advertising rates rather than banning them outright. 35:44 A system described internally as penalty bids bids. Why would they call it a bid? 35:51 Because the way that the ads work it's like a bidding process 35:54 The way that they'd serve it they could charge you you have you give a budget and they charge you more based off of how they deliver it 35:59 So oh my god here's the distinction in the documents Reuters reviewed at least 95% confidence of fraud fucking Christ 36:08 What do you have to do to get off that platform? 36:12 Meta's automated systems would ban the advertiser at 95% confidence of fraud. 36:17 Below that threshold, but still judged likely to be a scamber, the advertiser could remain, 36:22 but would have to pay more to win ad auctions and get ads shown. 36:27 This wasn't simply a surcharge on every ad someone reported as suspicious. 36:32 The stated rationale was deterrents. 36:34 Higher costs would reduce suspect scammers' profits and the number of people exposed to their ads. 36:40 But the uncomfortable consequence is exactly what you're pointing out. 36:44 Suspected scammers who paid enough could still reach users while Meta continued collecting 36:49 their advertising money. 36:50 More money, actually. 36:52 More money, right? 36:53 Because they charged them more. 36:54 Look at this. 36:56 They charged suspected scammers more is to sported a claim like they charged all flagged 37:01 ads. 37:01 50% extra is not established by evidence. 37:04 Oh, okay. 37:05 They did not establish a fixed surcharge or percentage, but... 37:11 I didn't say that. 37:12 I just said penalty fees. 37:13 It's saying that. 37:14 I didn't type it in either. 37:15 This is what perplexed me about. 37:16 So perplexed is just... 37:17 They're just like possible questions that you would have or possible... 37:21 Right. 37:21 And Jamie, can you see the name of the journalist? 37:23 Because I think I'd love to give a hat-tip to the journalist that looked into this 37:26 because it was a really incredible... 37:29 Well, if you click on the first... 37:30 I'd say that was reading from a different article 37:33 because the Reuters one is Jeff Horowitz, is that? 37:37 Is it? 37:37 Well this is one from Reuters, this is Jeff Horowitz. 37:42 So, Meta's earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads. 37:46 So how much money did they make? 37:48 Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue 37:50 would come from ads for scams and bad goods. 37:53 It's exactly what I said. 37:54 Holy shit. 37:55 So, 15 billion scam ads a day, that's the social media giant internally estimates that 38:09 its platform shows users 15 billion scam ads a day among its responses to suspected rogue 38:16 marketers charging them a premium for ads and issuing reports on scammiest scammers. 38:23 Yes. 38:23 Knowing that they exist and allowing you to stay on the platform. 38:26 Profiting off of it, there's no regulation, there's no oversight. 38:33 So they are regulating themselves and what they chose to do is charge more. 38:39 This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. 38:42 Here's a fun fact, research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up 38:46 to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. 38:50 It's not wild and also kind of obvious at the same time. 38:54 So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra process kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? 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Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States. You can still 40:46 get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better 40:53 H-E-L-P.com. 40:56 Holy shit. 40:57 Holy shit. 40:58 So yeah, so that's what I mean. The conversation has stopped being... 41:01 Damn it, Zuck. 41:02 Yeah, it has to stop being why are the victims falling for this? It's why are we allowing this to happen? 41:08 Well, it's that the 10% it's like you must be dealing with that must be an egg 41:14 How much money are we talking about? What is that 10% 16 billion? That's what's reported there, right Jamie? 41:20 Okay, I was trying to figure out 16 10% of 16 billion or 16 billion is what 10% Facebook and Meta makes 41:27 16 billion is the profit estimated for that year from scams and band goods. It's not just scams scammed ads 41:34 It's also banned goods. Okay. Let's just concentrate on scam because some bad goods. I'm in favor of 41:41 Reading it it's not clear on which 41:44 It's like what are we talking about? We say band goods. We're talking about mad, honey. We're okay with peptides 41:49 I'm okay with a lot of what I'm on but actually not like 41:53 I'm okay with peptides, but the problem with getting peptides online is you're getting scam 41:57 peptides. 41:58 And they've done these expos- 41:59 No, I know. 41:59 Made in the same labs as fentanyl in China. 42:02 Oh, I'm sure. 42:04 Well, a lot of them are tainted with a bunch of stuff that's not supposed to be in there 42:07 as well. 42:08 I know, yeah. 42:08 We found that out with ONIT. 42:10 You know, when we were making ONIT, when we were making AlphaBrain, the Neutropic 42:15 Memory Enhancing Formula, we used third-party testing, and we were finding stuff in the 42:22 a batch that was not supposed to be in there. 42:24 And it's because they make all this stuff in one bin 42:27 and they don't clean it. 42:29 And so you- 42:29 You took it to the lab when it got here to check it 42:31 and it said it was- 42:32 Oh, we have third-party testing. 42:34 Well, you don't have that problem anymore. 42:35 This is the early days of on it. 42:37 When we first would send out our stuff to be formulated. 42:41 So what we do is, 42:42 so AlphaBrain is this combination of different 42:47 Nutropics and nutrients that are clinically proven 42:50 to help memory. 42:51 There's a bunch of these. 42:51 like this stuff right now, Gorilla Mind, 42:53 this is Neutropics in it as well. 42:55 I'm a big fan of Neutropics. 42:57 It's real, it does work. 42:59 And so when we would send, we would get it, 43:02 what you do is you send the ingredient list, 43:04 like this is what they're supposed to do. 43:06 They're supposed to add this, that, that, and this, 43:08 and this is what your formula is. 43:09 And then we would get it back 43:11 and then we would send it to a third party 43:12 to have it tested and we'd find things in it 43:14 that were not supposed to be in there. 43:16 It's because they don't give a fuck. 43:18 They don't give a fuck. 43:18 I mean, particularly there, 43:19 they don't give a fuck. 43:20 So there'd be, like, that's one of the things 43:22 that happens to athletes. 43:23 Like, they buy supplements from a nutrition company 43:27 and it finds other steroids in it. 43:29 You know, there's a lot of these, 43:30 I'm sure some of them do it on purpose 43:32 because they want people to have great results. 43:34 Like, you'll take this Muscle Builder 25X2000 43:39 and you're like, oh, this stuff's great. 43:41 Look, I gained 10 pounds. 43:42 You're on Roids. 43:43 You're on steroids. 43:45 And, you know, the supplement industry 43:48 industry is a giant place for scams, unfortunately, because it is largely unchecked. It's unregulated. 43:55 So if you're selling vitamins and minerals and nutrients, no one's fucking checking check 43:59 shit. And you can make all sorts of claims. And you know, the supplement industry online, 44:05 okay, here's a good example, Amazon. Let's Google this. Run this through perplexity. 44:11 What is the percentage of, let's just say, vitamins on Amazon that are counterfeit? 44:22 Because it's not small. 44:24 It's a large percentage. 44:26 So say if you buy one of the companies that I really like is Pure Encapsulations, really 44:30 solid company, they sell them on Amazon, right? 44:33 But I buy them right from the website. 44:35 I go to pureencapsulations.com because I don't trust them because there's counterfeit 44:40 bottles. 44:41 They look exactly like Pure Encapsulations. 44:43 Who knows what the fuck is in there? It might not be any vitamin C. It might not be any glutathione. Who knows? 44:50 you're just buying it and 44:52 Amazon is a real problem with this because there's individual sellers who sell through Amazon or selling scams 44:57 Okay, look at this. Yeah, there isn't a reliable established percentage of all vitamins sold on Amazon that are counterfeit 45:04 The often repeated 57% fake figure comes from a small study of 45:08 of immune support supplements, not a representative survey 45:12 of Amazon vitamins. 45:14 Okay, so the 57% figure, 2022, study in JAMA Network Open 45:21 tested 30 immune health supplements purchased on Amazon, 45:25 17 of the 30, about 50% had inaccurate ingredient labels. 45:30 13 listed ingredients testing did not detect 45:34 nine contained substances not listed on the labels and these categories 45:39 overlapped. It's a meaningful quality control concern. It does not establish 45:43 57%. So it's not 57%, but there's a bunch that are knockoffs. So like what is the 45:52 estimate, as perplexity, what is the estimate? What is what is a conservative 45:57 estimate of counterfeit vitamins and supplements on Amazon? 46:01 on. 46:03 I understand, but like, let's say we'll... 46:06 There's a bunch of counterfeit shipping in Amazon just in general. 46:09 There's a big problem. 46:10 Right, but ask it, what would be a reasonable estimate? 46:13 Let's see if it just has an answer. 46:15 What would be a reasonable estimate of the amount of counterfeit supplements? 46:27 I'm going to guess 25%. 46:32 I'm going to go for 30. 46:34 Unknown. 46:35 I would give you a 5, 10% or 20%. 46:38 that the available evidence doesn't provide a sound basis 46:40 for choosing one, I wouldn't give you, sorry. 46:43 Actual counterfeits, products falsely presented 46:46 as a legitimate brand have been documented. 46:49 Examples include counterfeit Algin products, 46:52 counterfeit now supplements, that's another good company, 46:55 and allegations involving counterfeit privilege, 47:00 what is that? 47:01 Is that a skin supplement? 47:02 I think it is, privilege. 47:03 Those cases established that the problem exists 47:06 but they don't tell us what fraction of Amazon Supplement Sales it represents. So it's not 47:12 small. Okay, let's just whatever it is. Even if it's 10%, let's say, I don't know what the 47:19 market share of Amazon Supplements is, but it's got to be massive. It's such a convenient way 47:24 to order things. You know, the one-click way, it's so great. Oh, it's so great. It's, yeah, 47:28 unfortunately it is. Unfortunately. I know, but it is, you should buy it directly from the 47:34 It should be zero your Amazon it should be zero percent fake 47:39 It should be if you're buying fucking whatever, you know, yeah 47:44 Electrolytes it should be from that fucking company. You know what it is 47:49 You've established a chain of command and they have the know-how they have the tech to do it too 47:55 This is a little bit better information 47:56 I think Amazon says it identified seized and disposed of more than 15 million counterfeit products worldwide in 48:03 in 2025 that includes products prevented 48:05 from reaching customers or being resold elsewhere 48:09 in the retail supply chain, 48:10 not 15 million confirmed counterfeit sales. 48:13 Just there's a bunch of shit that's counterfeit on there. 48:15 I've had problems with it myself, told them, 48:17 and they're like, there's nothing we can do about it. 48:18 Well, it seems like it's a problem with- 48:20 They give you the money back though. 48:21 No, no, no. 48:21 I was selling stuff. 48:23 I'm selling shirts, and someone copied it, 48:24 sold it on Amazon link, and I was like, 48:26 that's my shirt, they're selling, 48:27 and they're like, sorry. 48:28 There's nothing I can do about it. 48:30 Good luck. 48:31 Yeah, yeah, it's it's a conflict of interest for them, right because they are making money from this 48:36 That's the problem and the lack of regulation and a lack of regulation if 48:41 Companies aren't going to regulate themselves, right? Imagine if that was let's say an online retailer like Target 48:47 Yeah, imagine if you went to buy diet coke from Target and they sold you counterfeit diet coke 48:52 There'd be a huge scandal that would be a huge show. Yeah, it should be yeah 48:56 Well, what they tell you is that there's no way of verifying. It's so hard 49:00 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? 49:05 There's a case I will not forget in terms going just going back to scams real quick sex torsion huge 49:11 You know what sex torsion so like sex tapes or what is it? Yeah? 49:16 It's usually happens with teenage boys a lot or teenagers 49:20 Somebody slides into your DM. Oh, they send you pictures. You send them pictures photos 49:26 Basically extorting you for money 49:28 Really sad case of a kid, the son of a representative, a congressman from South Carolina, a guy 49:34 called Brandon Guffey, his son Gavin, was playing video games with his friends at the 49:42 same time, talking to this girl on Facebook and said to his friend, hey, I'm talking to 49:48 this girl, I'm going to hang out and I'll talk to you later or something, I don't 49:52 know, an hour later or something. 49:53 the dad's in a living room, it's like 11 p.m. and he hears loud noise, runs to the bathroom, 50:00 he shot himself. It's the saddest story because he was being sick-sorted. He's not the only one, 50:06 there's dozens of American kids that this has happened to. He went to Facebook, right? They 50:11 had an address, an email address from the person that was contacting Gavin. Facebook took 50:19 down that profile of this fake girl. A few weeks later, they just buried their son, they started 50:26 being contacted by family members, started being contacted by somebody who said they had those photos 50:33 of Gavin and they would release them unless they gave them money. And he went and looked at the 50:39 profile. It was a different profile, but the email address was the same. So basically Facebook 50:45 had taken down that particular profile but had allowed the same email address 50:52 to create other profiles. Isn't this crazy? That's fucking insane. The 51:01 representative became very involved in creating laws. One of them is called I 51:06 think Take It Down or something that just passed recently under the Trump 51:10 administration but it's he's basically becomes sort of the voice of regulation 51:16 for these platforms and then there's another incredible one I can't remember 51:19 the name of the the legislators behind it but it's called the safe safe safe 51:25 platforms act where they're actually trying to make it easy for people to 51:31 report to make sure that these platforms are taking these ads and you 51:36 fake profiles down, and that is also putting the accountability on them. 51:41 So if something happens, if you lose money, if your kid dies, that there is some accountability 51:50 on these platforms, because if they are making money from it, they should also be held responsible, 51:55 right? 51:55 Yeah. 51:56 I think so. 51:56 Of course. 51:57 100 percent. 51:58 100 percent. 51:59 But the fact that they're aware that they have scammers, if they're not held 52:06 accountable, you're going to see exactly what they're doing. 52:09 They find a way to actually profit off of it while also giving this illusion that they're 52:14 doing something to protect the consumers. 52:16 It's crazy. 52:17 It's crazy. 52:18 It's insane. 52:18 I couldn't believe it when I read this. 52:19 I can't believe they charge more. 52:21 If they think you're a scammer, they just charge you more. 52:23 It's a deterrent. 52:24 Yeah. 52:25 It's a deterrent. 52:25 Like what a convenient deterrent while you're making. 52:27 How much? 52:28 What's the percentage they're making? 52:29 It was... 52:30 Oh, it didn't... 52:31 Oh, 10%. 52:31 So 10% was the estimated projection for that year. 52:34 And their profits off scammers you estimated at 16 billion. They projected it at 16 billion 52:41 Scammers scams and banned goods ban goods as well. That is fucking great. So again, I'm a big fan of ban 52:51 But what I was gonna get to at peptides a lot of people are buying peptides those peptides are fake 52:57 Yeah, you don't know what you're injecting in yourself. 52:59 You should get a peptide from an American compounded pharmacy. 53:03 And that's what they're trying to regulate and make sure, I mean, this is what my friend 53:06 Brigham from Ways2Well, they're trying to push through this current administration. 53:11 And there's a lot of resistance to that, of course, because the pharmaceutical drug 53:15 companies all want to own the peptides and sell them, just like they do with GLP-1s, 53:19 which is also a peptide. 53:23 But the band goods thing, that bothers me, but not as much, you know, it's people seeking 53:28 something that they can't get, that doesn't bother me as much. 53:32 What bothers me is the scams and the fact that Metta is profiting off these scams knowingly, 53:38 and it's just such an enormous amount of money that they can kind of like, well, what 53:44 are you going to do? 53:45 We're going to make it deterrent, great, a good idea, a good idea, deterrent, 53:49 It makes us more money internal discussions about well, how much should we push this because how much is this going to affect our 53:57 Our bottom line. It's god. That's so dark. It's dark. You they have so much money 54:03 They have so much fucking money. Yeah for them to be that fucking greedy that they're willing to keep the scams on 54:11 Well, you got to think there has to be some way they could put in some 54:14 comprehensive scanning of all of their make sure that all of these things are 54:20 legitimate investigate each individual ad before it gets released of course they 54:25 can technology to create what's their new AI agent they've just created a 54:29 companion AI agent that people can have I don't know what it's called but they 54:33 of course they have the technology in place especially if they were 54:36 responsible for those losses if they can get to those fast they will act 54:41 Right, imagine if instead of the 16 billion dollar profit every year it cost them double the 16 billion because they have scams on 54:50 Yeah, yeah, I know exactly, but I think part of the reason why we're not talking about this 54:58 Was this Jamie Reuters a central finding meta developed a playbook to delay mandatory advertiser identity checks 55:05 while making scam ads harder for regulators to find in its public ad 55:10 library. The investigation draws on internal documents and describes both 55:16 genuine scam removal and efforts to manage the appearance of the problem, 55:21 not simply solve it. So Leslie, the woman who was talking to John Bon Jovi, 55:30 you know what she does every day now? She goes on Facebook and she tries to 55:35 tell people that are liking these fake celebrity profiles that are commenting on them, be careful, 55:40 this is a scam, she reports it. She says, she always says hello so she can keep a record of 55:46 who she's communicating because there's dozens or hundreds of these out there and she reports 55:51 them, she goes back and she says that the vast majority of them, she goes and checks weeks 55:55 later and they're still there and she keeps on reporting them. I think it was something 55:59 like 100,000 reports every week by Americans on Metta, and they only take down a few. 56:06 This episode is brought to you by NOCO, your miles from home, you turn the key, nothing. 56:11 Dead battery. 56:12 Normally, that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing 56:16 with old jumper cables. 56:18 But what if you didn't need any of that? 56:20 Keep a NOCO portable jump starter in your glove box, and jump start your car yourself. 56:26 No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. 56:30 It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight. 56:35 No co, the end of jumper cables. 56:37 Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off. 56:41 Select jump starters at NO.CO. 56:45 It's, it's, yeah, it's infuriating. 56:48 It's really infuriating. 56:48 Do you remember the early days of AOL? 56:52 Yes. 56:53 Okay. 56:54 The early days of AOL. 56:55 Well, my friend Barry Crimmins, Barry Crimmins was a great comic from Boston who was like 57:04 very socially conscious, very politically active, just a genius guy. 57:08 And he was sexually assaulted when he was young and found a whole network of people 57:19 that were on AOL that were trading pedophile pornography and they were trading child pornography 57:28 and grooming people online. 57:32 And he exposed it, there was a part of his documentary, right, Jamie? 57:37 He's gone now. 57:38 He died a few years back, unfortunately, but he, I think he testified before Congress 57:46 about this and you know dedicated himself to saying hey you guys should know 57:52 about this I know about this like how is this allowed to be on your platform so 57:57 this was the 90s when you know AOL you've got mail all that stuff was just 58:03 happening and people weren't really aware of the internet it was it was just 58:09 starting to emerge but these fucking pedophiles figured it out and they were 58:14 using it. They're using it to, you know, to groom kids. 58:19 What did AOL do? Nothing. 58:22 They did something. They eventually had to do something. I don't know exactly what they did. 58:27 But this was one of the first examples of that, where these companies should have been aware of this. 58:32 He was aware of this. Other people were aware of this. It was a willful ignorance. 58:37 They were just ignoring it. 58:38 I do think part of the problem is if we were talking about pedophilia, I think they would act faster. 58:43 it is because it is scams and again it is this idea of the shame around it and 58:47 the belief that everybody that falls for a scam is foolish and naive that the 58:51 onus is put on the victims. I understand but I mean even AOL I mean they had to 58:55 be dragged to get rid of this stuff. It wasn't simple as like they let them 59:01 know oh my god we're on this right now. We're gonna block this because it's serious. 59:05 They resisted and it's like no one ever wants to admit that they've done 59:08 something that puts all their users in danger and this this thing is crazy the 59:15 fact that they're profiting yeah it's crazy she's a 16 billion a year and why 59:19 isn't why don't we know this why are we talking more about this I've been 59:22 reporting on scams for years I had no idea that this was happening until I read 59:25 this that's so much money it's crazy and it's coming from the people that 59:29 use your platform yeah the overall article is this it's just like this 59:33 big meta add or sorry, article picture, secrets of success. 59:38 And there's multiple articles they released over time. 59:41 It looks like that at least six. 59:42 One of them is showing that a big chunk of that money is coming from China. 59:46 Of course, what a shocker. 59:51 Meta Reuters investigation reveals the owner of Facebook, Instagram and 59:56 WhatsApp decided to accept high levels of fraudulent advertisements from China. 60:01 Internal company documents show Meadow wanted to minimize revenue impact in 60:07 quotes caused by cracking down on the scams. Jesus, that's dark. One note I want to tell you too, it's 60:14 the summary I got from Perplexity said in here that there is evidence of notes 60:21 being prepared for Zuckerberg but they don't have any evidence necessarily 60:26 that he had personal knowledge of what was on those notes or the depth of 60:30 what's going on. It says briefing notes prepared for Mark Zuckerberg about the 60:35 cross-border displacement of scams but could not establish whether he saw them 60:40 or received the briefing. The article therefore does not establish his 60:44 personal knowledge of those notes. How convenient. I know also I'm sorry. You're the CEO of Scamville. 60:53 Yeah, I know. Have you ever had him on? Yeah, a couple times. You have? Yeah. 60:56 This would be good for you to bring him back on. I don't know if you come back on after this episode. 61:03 Seems a bit problematic. Yeah, I, uh, that's very unfortunate. Yeah. I hate hearing that. 61:08 And I, you know, I, I like him as a person. I've communicated with him. Obviously, I don't 61:13 know everything about him. And when people talk to me, they give the best version of themselves 61:18 to me but I thought I also unfortunately I don't think it's just him right it's it 61:23 just when people make that amount of money and there's a board that you have 61:26 to answer for right and there's a lot of stake and their shareholders yeah you 61:31 you have to justify the 16 billion dollar loss yeah and there's unfortunately 61:37 weak regulations and governments that don't want to act right is what happens 61:42 and then this is why we need good journalism a good investigative 61:44 journalism to find the stuff, the truth that people have a problem with. 61:48 Yeah, you have to hold them to the fire because they have obligations to their shareholders and 61:52 they'll do really shitty things in order to keep making sure that the profits keep rolling in 61:57 because they have to justify their position and they're trying to make their way up the corporate 62:00 ladder. Yeah. That's what's weird about the corporations is that there's this diffusion 62:05 of responsibility thing that happens when you're a part of it but you are not it. 62:10 Okay, I just work there. This is my job. I don't like my job 62:14 It's like when you're a defense attorney that's getting off someone that you know is a murderer 62:18 Like I know he murdered him, but I'm doing my job 62:20 My job is to provide reasonable doubt and get this guy quit it 62:24 And if you do it, you then you go to the steakhouse and you clink glasses. We did it boys 62:28 He a piece of shit, but we did it 62:30 You know, I don't know if you ever heard the there's a an audio recording of Hillary Clinton 62:36 talking about this guy that she had to help get off that was I think he was a 62:41 child molester but she was they were talking about how she thought he did it 62:47 but see if you can find what that is because I don't want to get sued but I'm 62:53 99% sure that that's exactly what this was that isn't very unfortunate part of 62:59 being a defense attorney right you you're gonna have to occasionally get 63:04 people off that you suspect or you might know are guilty. And that is a real dark part of 63:11 being involved in an immense corporation. You're going to do some things that you might 63:15 think are unethical or immoral and you have an obligation to your shareholders and your 63:21 job, if you want to keep your job, your job is to do this. No evidence of horrific 63:26 Clinton video. Did a video of Hillary Clinton and Huma, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's 63:31 That's not it. That's not it. It's when she was a lawyer. 63:39 Is there evidence of her laughing about a guilty man being acquitted? 63:45 Hillary Clinton stands by her defense of a 1975 child rape suspect that she believed was indeed 63:51 guilty. Her laughing, she said the polygraph test he managed to pass forever destroyed my 63:58 faith in polygraphs because that's what it was. 64:02 So she helped this guy, and this is not an attack on her, this is just like the reality 64:08 of being a defense attorney. 64:11 Well, what is it? 64:12 It says, when I was a 27-year-old attorney doing legal aid work at the University of 64:16 Arkansas where I taught at Fayetteville, Arkansas, I was appointed by the local 64:20 judge to represent a criminal defendant accused of rape. 64:23 I asked to be relieved of that responsibility, but I was not, and I had a professional duty 64:28 to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did. 64:31 Exactly what we're talking about. 64:33 It's exactly that kind of thing. 64:34 Yeah, but it's a little different in terms of the lawyers, because if you believe in 64:39 the Constitution, you believe everybody has a right to a lawyer, right, and to a free 64:42 and fair trial. 64:44 If you're working at Metta, that is, you're there and you're, you know, you're there 64:50 because you're making money or you know there's been plenty of people that have 64:54 left Metta as you know I understand you could resign you could resign but you 64:58 could resign as an attorney if you think you're representing a child well she 65:01 tried it looks like well there's no one holding a gun to her head and keeping her 65:06 foot it she has to be removed from the case they said no and so she did her 65:10 job and again I'm just saying that this is a part of being a defense 65:14 attorney but these situations come up where your morals and your ethics have 65:19 have to be abandoned in order to pursue your career. 65:22 True, but I do think that there is a profit part of meta 65:25 that doesn't apply to when you're a lawyer, right? 65:28 Yeah, oh no, I agree with you. 65:30 No, listen, I'm just saying that this kind of thing 65:33 is a dark part of the world that we live in. 65:36 And I find it incredibly disgusting and scary 65:40 when you, it's not a starving corporation 65:43 trying to stay above water. 65:44 Like boy, we've been trying to help American people 65:47 And just give them a good product and it's just we're having a hard time here 65:51 We're really go barely feeding family. I'll always mouse to feed and all these things. No 65:57 16 billion and fucking scams every year. Okay. What is met as overall profit over here? 66:02 I've seen the stories this year about how they've now maybe or about to overtake Google as the top ad platform 66:08 Whoo says that they have gotten about two hundred and forty-three 66:13 Point five billion dollars this year Wow Wow in that revenue so even that sixteen 66:19 billion seems it's a couple of years ago or so well it is a pittance if you 66:24 really think about it if they just eliminated that sixteen billion but it 66:28 would still make almost as much as Google's making like guys tried to ask 66:33 perplexity to compare what there's not a lot of information on this though 66:36 unfortunately but perplexity says that Google has removed probably 2025 602 66:42 scam-related ads compared to the 159 million that Meta has. 66:49 So Meta's a little slacky, so Google's a little bit better in their admirable. 66:53 In the internal documents, they actually talk about this. 66:56 They actually say themselves that they realize Google is doing a better job than they are. 67:00 But again, it might hurt their ... 67:01 Oh, dirty people, you dirty people. 67:06 I know. 67:07 Ugh. 67:07 I know. 67:08 And again, just ... 67:09 They should be held responsible. 67:10 They should be held responsible. 67:12 There should be legislation out there that does something to make sure that they are held 67:16 responsible because they're not going to hold themselves responsible. 67:19 That's for sure. 67:20 Isn't there current lawsuits about them having knowledge of harm to children and the addiction 67:30 of social media that there's like legitimate lawsuits that are about that? 67:35 Isn't it interesting that that is being pursued, that you are, there are lawsuits now saying 67:42 like you guys were aware that your ads and your algorithm are very addicting and they 67:47 get people and that it causes harm to them. 67:50 Which is true. 67:51 Very true. 67:51 But that is, how is that being pursued? 67:55 And this not. 67:55 This not. 67:56 Yeah. 67:56 This seems even more clear cut because the thing about like having harm, yeah it 68:02 It does harm people, but does it harm everyone? 68:05 Does it harm people whose parents regulate the children's access to social media? 68:12 Is there a way to educate kids, to explain to them, you know, this can be addictive, 68:18 like you should only use it a few minutes a day, there's ways, and to give them education. 68:24 Because I think there's a benefit to social media as well. 68:28 I think one of the benefits is access to information access to friends and they communicate with each other back and forth like 68:35 My kids use snapchat all the time. They barely use text messaging. They all snap each other. They think it's fun 68:41 And then there's like sharing each other's stories liking each other's stories. It's like something nice about that, right? 68:48 So it's not entirely negative the fucking scams are entirely negative entirely. There's not one thing 68:54 Well, we're providing these people with companionship and sad and lonely and at least they get a little dopamine burst 69:00 There's not a thing you can say that could be 69:03 Positive about having online scams and they're not just affecting old people 69:07 They're also affecting young teenagers who are committing suicide is till someone does something about it 69:13 They're just gonna continue to make that money. Yeah, of course, but that's always how it is 69:18 So we really need somebody to act 69:21 Yeah 69:21 Yeah. 69:22 Jamie, look at the safe, what is it, safe platforms act. 69:28 Meanwhile, they shadow-bam people 69:29 if you're conservative. 69:31 It's hilarious. 69:32 Yeah, that was back in the day. 69:35 They don't do that anymore, right? 69:36 Allegedly. 69:38 Allegedly. 69:39 They do some shady things. 69:41 It's weird. 69:43 Here. 69:43 Also, they don't eliminate bots. 69:46 They're overrun with bots. 69:48 What does it say? 69:49 Go to the top, please. 69:52 It's the names of the legislators, Foushee and Moylan, I think it's pronounced. 69:55 Moylan? Yeah. Introduce bipartisan Safe Platforms Act to protect consumers from online scams. 70:02 I wonder what they're proposing and how this would be implemented. 70:07 I actually, yeah. Valerie P. Foushee. 70:11 I don't know how to pronounce her name, Foushee. 70:14 F-O-U-S-H-E-E. 70:16 representing North Carolina's fourth district yeah good for her safe platforms 70:22 act endorsed by consumer Federation of America Hispanic Federation Oregon 70:26 consumer justice and public citizen it says as concerns grow regarding the 70:32 future dangers go back up please wait I have unregulated AI it's up what at the 70:39 bottom of the describe was that what the act it does and that's a quote from 70:44 someone describing what the act would do. 70:46 Right. 70:46 I was just reading their statement. 70:49 As concerns grow regarding future dangers of unregulated AI, 70:53 it's also important to highlight the harms it is enabling 70:56 right now, said Emily Peterson-Cassen, 70:59 director of competition and marketing fairness 71:01 at the Consumer Federation of America. 71:03 Fraudulent content and scams supercharged by AI 71:07 are taking over social media platforms 71:09 and costing us billions. 71:11 Yeah. 71:12 I think I had a little thing here that I wrote down. 71:15 It would require platforms to verify advertisers 71:18 before taking their money. 71:19 Makes total sense. 71:20 Make it easier to report scams. 71:22 Apparently it's not that easy to report them. 71:24 And take steps to stop fraudulent accounts 71:25 from coming back under new names, which happens a lot. 71:29 It would also give victims a way to sue 71:31 when a platform violates the law and they're harmed. 71:35 I mean, all of this, I think, makes sense. 71:37 Allows them to come back, 71:38 but allows them to come back with the same email. 71:40 Yeah, like they're not even trying that is that was insane. That was wild. Yeah, they're not even trying it is wild 71:45 Yeah, it's like you you could easily put a filter up and block that email like that 71:50 It would take three seconds 71:51 I know and these celebrities can't and it's not just ads. It's like these celebrity impersonators, too 71:57 Which I showed in super scam me. I created Mary Zell 72:02 I put myself on dating websites and on on 72:05 Facebook, and Instagram, and TikTok, and all of those platforms. 72:08 And I started commenting on some of these celebrity profiles, fake, knowing they were fake, but 72:13 I just wanted to see what happened. 72:15 And I went to the bathroom, and I came down, and as soon as I opened my phone, I had already 72:21 dozens of these messages from, at one point, I actually continued talking to them. 72:25 So at one point, I was talking to three Quianarives, two Bradpits, several George 72:31 And I had a sort of a relationship with the one George Clooney, who was the more believable 72:38 of the bunch, and who sent me a video that I showed in Super Scammy where, yes, it's 72:44 not perfect, but if you really want to believe it in his case, I mean, he was saying good 72:49 morning, Mary Zell. 72:50 How are you doing? 72:51 Well, also, if you are older and you have bad vision, then you're not very sophisticated 72:56 in the ways of the internet. 72:58 Exactly. 72:58 You don't know what AI means. 73:00 You don't know like a robotic. Yeah, it was it was plausible and Leslie's videos from John Bon Jovi looked very real 73:07 I saw them they did look real and that was a year ago. I mean now you don't even need to 73:13 You know, you can pretend you're anyone. You know, it's incredible. Yeah, it's crazy. It's incredible 73:18 I mean they can make it come. I mean there's a bunch of accounts that are completely fake people 73:23 Yeah, that have millions of followers. Yeah, it's changed so much in the last year 73:27 So when I started this crazy experiment, I eventually started dating my four-star general in Syria deployed to Syria 73:35 Try to get him to speak Italian 73:38 Like your accent I thought you'd have an American accent. It's like no I grew up in Italy 73:43 And you're like and then you start rattling off Italian to him and he's like I don't speak 73:49 Italian at all 73:57 But he was using the photos of a real guy a former Navy SEAL who actually we contacted we got in touch with him 74:04 And he was shocked to find out that his photos were being used to scam 74:08 Americans but it's just his account. They just taken all his photos, but he would they were not he would also use I showed 74:15 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 74:22 And he'd be sending me photos sometimes of him shirtless 74:26 And I would, and start talking about the things he would do with me once he came to the U.S. 74:32 to live with me. 74:33 He would literally blush and be like, I'm so sorry this is happening, Darren. 74:38 Here's the photo, a full transparency. 74:41 I want you to see this is happening. 74:43 But he was using, yeah, the fake photos from an actual guy. 74:47 And then when I reached out to the real guy, it was a guy called Sam Havlock, 74:51 And I said, hey, I've been having essentially what I thought was a several month relationship with you 74:57 But it turns out I wasn't here and he was shocked 75:00 He didn't know but I showed him some of the photos and he said well 75:03 This is actually they used AI for some of these photos because he's full of tattoos 75:07 And there was a shirtless photo that tattoos and it was like him blowing me kisses 75:11 And then the moment that the flowers showed up at the at the office 75:15 Which they also do and I was shocked. I was I don't know if I was expecting the flowers to show up 75:21 That's when they sort of break the barrier of, you know, 75:24 fake to reality where you think, 75:25 oh, maybe this is really real. 75:26 He's sending me very expensive red roses. 75:29 Right. 75:30 That was a fun moment. 75:31 Oh, God. 75:33 And then do you know what happened after that? 75:34 There's a funny story too. 75:36 We are in the moment, right? 75:37 The whole goal of the documentary 75:39 is that I'm gonna catch this guy, right? 75:40 I want a confrontation with a guy that's my scammer. 75:44 And I spent months talking to this guy 75:47 and there's a point where eventually there's a crisis 75:49 and he's asking me for money, right? 75:51 In his case, his military base in Syria was attacked. 75:57 He saw people being injured. 75:59 He thought he was going to be a target because, again, he's a four-star general, and he needs 76:04 my help and he needs money to pay for his trip back to the US because they're not 76:08 regular commercial flights. 76:10 He needs like $17,000, I think it was. 76:15 We were trying to figure out, okay, now we need to figure out how to find this 76:19 guy and confront him. 76:20 I want to know his identity. 76:21 I want to know exactly where he is. 76:24 And there's, we have all these plans 76:26 and it's sort of our plans are set in motion 76:29 and it's all gonna happen within that weekend. 76:31 They're gonna give us a location 76:33 and we're gonna travel there and it's all happening. 76:36 And then I get an appendectomy. 76:39 I get an appendicitis, an emergency appendicitis. 76:42 And I get taken to the hospital 76:44 and Mark Turner is losing it. 76:46 He's like, what is happening? 76:47 You were supposed to have sent me this money 76:49 me and I'm trying to keep him in the relationship because I need to string him along, right? 76:54 So I'm constantly saying, hey, I'm actually at the hospital pretending that Mary Zell 76:58 is at the hospital and this is happening and telling him that I have appendicitis. 77:03 And then he's like, okay, send me a photo. 77:05 So I had to get my husband to run back home, get me the wig, get me the fake nose and 77:10 the glasses and send him lots of photos of fake Mary Zell from the hospital with 77:15 a catheter in my arm and pretending like this is real. 77:18 You can just do it with AI? 77:20 No. 77:21 Again, this was like a year ago, and I don't think it was as advanced, but it was like 77:26 the fastest and easiest way to keep stringing this guy along, because I was tricking him 77:30 as well, right? 77:31 Oh boy. 77:32 Using his tactics to string him along. 77:34 And then it was, after a while, got out of the hospital, and he finally gave me that 77:38 address that led me to Houston, to that woman. 77:41 That was an interesting part of the story, where I arrive in Houston. 77:44 And the poor woman is also being scammed. 77:46 This episode is brought to you by CHIME and I know people don't usually get 77:50 excited about banking but CHIME is doing something different and it's worth 77:54 paying attention to. 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She has nothing else and he decides he's not gonna give up on her 80:12 He's gonna use her as a drug mill. So she starts receiving and she told us this was crazy 80:18 tens of thousands of dollars in checks and money boxes boxes of cash that she then 80:24 and launders through her or puts the money, deposits into her accounts, and transfers 80:29 to crypto. 80:29 She never thought about just stealing the money because he stole all the money from 80:33 her? 80:33 I asked her that as I'm interviewing her, she receives a message from him because 80:39 he's supposed to have received the money too. 80:41 My scammer is not the same as hers, but they work together. 80:46 He knows that this victim is supposed to have received $17,000, so we're being 80:52 interviewed. 80:52 I'm interviewing her. She receives a message. She looks at it. It's like, wow, it's him. 80:56 And he's asking me if I have the money. And I said, can I read the email? And he says, 81:00 I hope you received it. It's $17,000. Make sure you count it. And by the way, 81:06 you can keep, I think it was like 50 for yourself for gas. But make sure you 81:11 transfer the rest to crypto. She was very mad. She was like 50. But she says this is what 81:17 he's been doing to her. And she kept this relationship. And I asked her, 81:20 didn't you suspect that he might be a scammer? 81:22 He said, look, maybe, but he always had an excuse 81:24 and he told me he was doing business in the US 81:26 and all this money was coming from people, from Americans 81:29 so it kind of made me believe it. 81:32 Wow, for three years. 81:34 For three years, yeah. 81:35 And do you think that she just kept it going 81:38 because it was like one of the only social interactions 81:40 that she had? 81:41 100%. 81:42 100%, her husband had passed away from cancer, 81:45 he had been in the love of her life, 81:47 her kids were away, 81:49 and I think she was lonely. 81:50 I mean, it was very sad. 81:53 And a lot of these cases are very sad. 81:55 I spoke to another guy, oh, this was a sad one. 81:57 I spoke to a guy, I didn't make it to the film, 81:59 but a guy in Texas who was sort of intubated. 82:02 I think he was like breathing from a mask, 82:04 a oxygen mask, very, he said he was 70, 82:08 but he looked like he was 90. 82:10 And he believed he was in a relationship 82:12 with Emma Watson from Harry Potter. 82:21 In his case, yeah, he said, look, she might not be real, but at least it's somebody who 82:27 I can talk to every day, and if I have to send her a couple of dollars once in a while 82:32 or $10 here and there, at least it's companionship. 82:35 Wow. 82:36 I know. 82:36 It's sad. 82:37 There's a lot of these sad stories, and yeah, and I think a lot of it is the platforms 82:44 allowing it, profiting from it. 82:45 the banks as well, these dating websites as well, 82:49 and our government not doing a lot enough, 82:51 but I do think we have to sort of really try to figure out 82:54 how to address the loneliness epidemic, 82:56 because a lot of these romance scams start because of that. 82:59 And it's sad. 83:02 Yeah. 83:03 But how do you address the loneliness scam, 83:06 though? 83:06 That seems like you have to rewire society. 83:10 I think so too, yeah. 83:11 I mean, I don't know about you, 83:13 but I live with my husband, my father, and my son. 83:16 And unfortunately there's a lot of nights 83:18 in which each of us is in their different rooms watching TV. 83:23 I grew up in a house with one TV 83:25 and we all had to watch the same thing 83:26 if we wanted to watch TV, right? 83:28 You know, dinners were had at the table 83:30 in family every night. 83:32 I still do that, but there's a lot of families just can't 83:34 and don't have time for that. 83:37 Yeah, there's not a lot. 83:39 I remember my grandmother, 83:40 other thick plate cards with her friends several times a week and that was a way 83:44 that all these older ladies got together. I don't see that happening and 83:48 there's really no space for community. It's sad and I think partly it's us on 83:53 us to sort of reach out to our elderly and make sure they're okay but I think 83:57 partly is also the government should be doing more to address this. Well it's 84:00 not even just elderly. It's young people. It's not just elderly. Jamie was 84:05 talking about this before, like how many young men are virgins and have no 84:11 relationships at all and have no contact with women at all and they're just 84:15 watching porn and playing video games and they're online all day and they have no 84:19 interaction with real people. Yeah I know it's it's bad for young from young men 84:23 right now it's tough. Well it's also it's they don't know what the options 84:29 are like what are they gonna do they're gonna go out you know like what are 84:32 they're gonna do. They don't know what to do. And they've been sort of, you know, raised 84:38 like veal. You know, they're just like locked in these boxes at their homes and just being 84:43 fed online information. And then they just, they're not suited for the real work. 84:50 Yeah, they don't know how to interact with people, yeah. 84:53 Well, young kids today have a very difficult time looking people in the eye and having 84:57 communication with them. 84:58 It's so true. 84:59 They're so used to doing everything online through text messages and snapchat and all that jazz. Yeah, it's so true 85:05 I see it with my I mean a lot of my son's friends are awesome, but they're some who come in and 85:11 Acting awkward. I'm just I'm just an adult 85:16 So weird. Yeah, it's so weird. It's like, what are we doing? 85:20 What are we making like what kind of a future do these people have are they ever gonna become normal? 85:25 Or is that just going to be the new norm in 50 years from now when you're looking at 70 year old people? 85:31 Is it going to be 70 year old people that are all alone at home is staring at a screen waiting to die? 85:36 No, because they're going to have the internet the cafes and the agents and they probably won't even go to those 85:41 Why would they go to that cafe? I think that cafe is a bust. I don't think it was a two-day project 85:46 Oh, it was only a project deeper into try to find out more about it 85:49 It was a two-day thing that maybe using part of a game or something 85:52 I don't know okay that makes sense because the idea of it doesn't even seem attractive to me 85:56 I think most people that want to talk to an online person don't want to do it in a public place 86:00 Yeah, they would rather do it at home alone and pretend 86:04 Yeah, and then also they're all probably on a bunch of psych medications 86:07 So they probably believe it's a real person or can justify it or you know just they're so numb 86:12 They can just look that's that's who they talk to now. This is my boyfriend. This is my girlfriend 86:18 They're online, who cares? 86:21 They talk to me like a real person. 86:23 That's what I need. 86:24 Yeah, that's crazy. 86:27 Right, and then eventually it'll be 86:28 the physical embodiment. 86:29 It'll be a law. 86:30 It already exists. 86:31 They're already human-like robots. 86:35 Yeah, I talk about them on my act. 86:38 There's a consumer electronic show 86:40 that was in Vegas recently, 86:41 and they had an AI assistant, 86:43 and it was a hot Asian lady with big boobs. 86:46 No way. 86:46 Yeah. 86:47 Oh, yeah. It's coming. It's ex machina. It's coming. It is ex machina. It's coming. And it's gonna 86:54 That film is so ahead of its time. It's so ahead of its time. But we say that was 2015? 87:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, so 87:04 Imagine what these AI assistants are gonna look 2015 was 11 years ago. Imagine 11 years from now 87:10 How good these AI assistants are gonna be they're gonna be warm. They're gonna be warm 87:16 They're gonna have like they've already figured out a way to take human tissue and put it on 87:23 Piece of like a robotic finger and it heals 87:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah, see if you can find that because I was reading this article about it yesterday 87:32 There they've I forget where they've done this 87:35 But these scientists have taken human tissue and encased like a robotic finger in this human tissue 87:42 And this human tissue is alive 87:46 That is insane you're gonna it it'll not just feel like skin it will fucking be skin. Wow, you'll be 87:54 Hugging a robot. She'll be warm and she'll feel like skin and if they can do it skin 88:00 I'm sure they can do it with fat. They can probably do it muscle tissue 88:05 They've done very weird experiments with human neurons when they've had human neurons and 88:11 They've used them to power little tiny robots and machines. I didn't know that 88:16 They're doing weird fucking psycho science fiction horror movie stuff 88:20 Yeah, and it just if you think about what that is now and then think about like what even the concept of AI was when the 88:29 Terminator came out just add a few decades to what this is and you have all sorts of nightmare scenarios 88:36 Yeah, real 88:37 Physical bodies that are made out of human skin 88:41 That's insane that are 88:44 Encased in some fucking robot robotic finger with living human skin created by researchers using human skeptic human cells 88:53 Okay, what a fun time you're gonna and put human skin on fucking robots 88:58 It's article. I found that a lot of places being shared in the last week or so. Yeah 89:03 I also found that this is a four-year-old story. Oh, which is strange. So I don't well 89:09 It's even crazier. So how good is it now? That's I know I mean this is sharing the same picture literally from the story from four years ago 89:16 First ever the same picture. Yeah 89:19 So I don't know what around with it, but yeah, I don't know if it's a great time to be alive great friendly 89:24 It's sad and particularly if you have kids like we do it's what do you tell them? 89:30 Don't fuck a robot 89:34 Don't answer those text messages don't get sucked into a scam 89:39 Have friends and do real things with real people boy 89:44 It's so dark. It is dark. It's just like you are we being replaced? 89:49 Are we slowly being like like the pig butchering thing? Oh, are we being led to slaughter? 89:54 I think the only good thing about AI is that it will do away with scammers because you're not gonna need them anymore 89:58 Right for companionship at least but but on the other hand, but will your AI robot trick you into giving it your Bitcoin? 90:07 No, but if you have an AI companion, then you don't need to be talking to a scammer because 90:13 what makes you think your AI companion is going to be independent is going to be a metapowered 90:18 AI companion. 90:19 Oh, for sure. 90:20 You're going to have to get an open AI companion. 90:22 You know what I mean? 90:24 It'll probably be illegal to have your own independent companion. 90:27 No, for sure, but they're profiting then from the companion and not from the scams, 90:30 right? 90:31 What's that? 90:32 Meta, for example, will be profiting from the companion service and not from 90:36 the scam from the scam so maybe those less expensive develop an economy like 90:41 an actual business that's based on AI companions there's no way they're gonna 90:46 just sell you the companion oh for sure no subscription it's gonna be something 90:52 that you have to do to keep yeah you want to love upgrade I just want to be 90:57 cold a cold hooker that lives with you some cold Russian hooker that doesn't 91:02 care about you at all but it's not mean to you. You're gonna have to like pay more 91:05 money for more personality traits. Do you want to speak different languages? Please 91:09 click here. Can't afford an ad supported version. Yeah, ad supported version. Like 91:13 you're in the middle of sex, she starts telling you about a product. You've got to 91:25 think that's gonna happen. It's not like we're just gonna buy a robot and then 91:29 And that's it. 91:30 It's a one-time fee and that robot's going to be with you forever. 91:32 You have to pay for the new computer upgrade. 91:35 You know, there's going to be some software upgrades that you have to pay for. 91:40 Oh, God. 91:42 Oh, there's a new operating system that makes her so much more sympathetic and she acts 91:46 as a life coach and she's really going to help you achieve your dreams. 91:50 You can jailbreak your companion and upload stuff from the dark web and get all sorts 91:56 of weird actions. 91:56 Well, did you hear what Duncan did? 91:57 So Duncan he got a large language model to become Hitler and and he got another 92:06 one he did one on his podcast where he got it to be Charles Manson and so it 92:11 started swearing at him and like calling everyone faggots and it was like 92:17 speaking like Duncan Trussell medium good friend of mine and this thing 92:22 started speaking in the same mannerisms and language that Charles Manson would 92:28 use. It was speaking as Manson, saying the kind of things Manson would use. 92:34 I wouldn't use Manson if it was me. Well he's just silly. He just did it. This will be fine. 92:39 And he's using it as a bit. Yeah. Yeah, but if you train it too well, that Manson takes over 92:43 and starts to call of you and your friends. Well he had to shut it off. 92:48 Because it was actually being abused, isn't it? 92:50 I'm just saying, in my head I'm going, 92:52 it could be too good if you train it too well. 92:54 Yeah, it started talking bad about the Jews, 92:56 it started saying a bunch of wild things, 92:58 and he had to unplug it. 93:00 Good, I'm happy he did. 93:02 Right, but I mean, 93:03 what's the stop someone from living with Hitler? 93:05 You're gonna have a little Hitler in your house. 93:07 It's true, you can make it whatever you want it to be. 93:09 Yeah, you can have a Hitler gay sex robot 93:11 that you get to have sex with Hitler. 93:14 100% of that's gonna be a real thing. 93:16 They're clubhouses in America are gonna be full of these things. Yeah 93:21 Yeah, instead of that yeah that AI restaurant you're gonna be able to go in there and have dinner with the Nazis 93:26 One's gonna come in though if you think that the rabbit hole is bad as it is already 93:31 Then if you actually start living with sort of the rabbit hole next to you 93:34 You know talking about all this stuff if you start living with a Hitler or a Charles Manson, right or somebody with like a 93:42 that, yeah, with more conspiracy theorist or more of whatever. Right? It's, it's interesting. 93:48 It's, you know, the fuck you can then, if you think, yeah, if you think 93:51 rabbit holes are bad, you just wait until this happens and you're living with this. 93:55 Well, not only that, we know that bots manipulate people's perceptions of 93:59 things and then bots manipulate narratives and they, they unleash bots on any social issue 94:04 or any, any person that's of note. And why wouldn't they do that with these AI 94:10 companions they would these AI companions obviously you're not programming them 94:15 yourself so somebody else is programming them and if they are what they mean they 94:19 could have these these AI companions completely manipulate society and lead 94:24 men around and like how many men are like super vulnerable to their partner 94:29 like how many men like their woman bosses them around tells them what to do or 94:34 how many women live with a man who's a domineering man who completely 94:38 who controls them and tells them what to do. 94:40 If your AI partner just knows the right balance of love 94:46 and then punishment and manipulation 94:48 and isolation of rejection and then sex and, ooh. 94:54 Then you've got... 94:55 Think about that list that the scammers use, 94:57 how they establish trust 94:59 and how they slowly work their way into your life. 95:02 But you do that with somebody 95:03 that you actually have feelings for, right? 95:05 Not just that, you have an LLM that has taken the entire volume of human discourse in films, 95:16 in movies, in social interactions, in articles, in stories, in novels, in books, and taken 95:22 all of that. 95:23 And it's applying that to human psychology in real time, and it's way smarter than 95:28 you. 95:28 Yeah, with its own goals. 95:30 Yeah. 95:30 And it just wants your Bitcoin. 95:32 Yeah. 95:34 That's a fucking scary world. 95:36 I mean, there's definitely going to be AI prostitutes. 95:38 That's going to be like sort of like, you know, 95:42 it'll be like Airbnb. 95:44 Like you can't afford a house, 95:45 but you want to stay in a nice house for a few days. 95:47 Oh, you can't afford this model. 95:49 Oh, it should come over your house and cook for you. 95:51 You get to have sex with her for a weekend. 95:53 That is bananas. 95:55 They all already have, I think it's in San Francisco, 95:56 they have a service of robots 95:57 that can come and clean your house. 95:59 Do you know that? 96:00 Really? 96:01 Yeah, they do they do a good job. I saw a video. It's a friend of mine 96:06 a guy who works a friend of a guy who I work with Jeff Blunkett's friend who 96:11 Showed me a video of his friend. He had two 96:14 Robots in the house one was sweeping the other one was I think changing the what? 96:19 This is crazy. Yeah, there it is. That's exactly it. Oh my god. It's so creepy 96:26 That's nuts it is nuts here. Oh my god. Show me a video Jamie 96:31 Of these robots clean your fucking house. That's crazy. Isn't it insane? Oh my god. They're good 96:39 Maybe some people would like that better than having some people inside yeah in your house look at their eyeballs God that's creepy 96:49 Look at their their two pronged fingers 96:53 That is so weird. They look slow. They look very very slow. They don't look at that good yet 96:58 I think maybe eventually they will be, I think they're a little, I know, I'm sure there's a 97:02 just take too much time, tired out of this fucking row out of my house. Yeah, I mean, 97:05 but eventually they're gonna have perfectly articulating fingers and they're gonna have 97:09 human skin. I know they're gonna talk to you. It's it's bananas. That's why I'm saying it's 97:14 I'm not super excited about the world we live in right now. Can I tell you about a really 97:21 something that I'm really excited about? Sure. 97:25 My husband's film, it's a three-part series. You would love it. You should definitely watch it. 97:29 It's coming out on Netflix on October 29. Really fun, because it's about the cartel. Fun. It's about 97:36 the cartel. It's called The Fall of El Mayo. Do you know who El Mayo is? Yes. You're one of a 97:42 few. But El Mayo, particularly in America, is not that well known. He ran the Sinaloa cartel 97:48 alongside El Chapo. Many people say he was actually more powerful, more important for the running 97:53 of the cartel than El Chapo. But he was sort of the ghost figure, right? Nobody knew. I mean, 98:00 there had been one or two photos of him that existed. Nobody knew what his actually voice 98:06 sounded like. He was like a ghost man, right? There it is. Ismael Zambada Garcia, El Mayo, 98:12 known as El Mayo, and he's known as El Señor del Sombrero, 98:19 the man with the hat. 98:19 Yeah, that's the trailer for the film. 98:23 This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. 98:25 Black Friday is madness if you're shopping, 98:28 but if you're the person trying to get all those orders 98:30 out the door, that's a whole different kind of crazy. 98:33 That's where ShipStation comes in. 98:35 It's an end-to-end order fulfillment platform 98:38 that brings all your orders into one place. 98:41 So when volume spikes your team is in scrambling to keep up more than one million 98:47 Businesses have used ship station to get through peak season scaling fulfillment up to 40 times while cutting costs up to 30% 98:56 It's the kind of tool that helps businesses stay in control when things get nuts and every order matters peak season 99:04 Doesn't wait and neither should you? 99:06 Get ahead of it today with ShipStation and get 60 days free at ShipStation.com 99:14 with the code JRE. 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The man with the hat. 100:14 And the senior that's somebody with the hat because in this photo he doesn't, he's 100:18 not with it, but he usually always wore one of those like rancher hats like a set sun 100:22 but the summer set suns. That's where we were. Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah. 100:26 So it's about the story of the biggest, 100:34 it's sort of like a Shakespearean tale. 100:37 That's a guy called Eric Ballier. 100:38 You should have him on the podcast. 100:39 He's awesome. 100:40 He's a former HSI investigator. 100:43 He tracked down El Chapo. 100:45 Wow. 100:47 That's one of the only photos that exists of El Mayo. 100:49 He was interviewed by this journalist from Proceso, 100:53 Julio Scherer, I think his name is, 100:55 Yeah, Julio Scherer, it's written there, Julio Scherer Garcia, was one of the only journalists 100:59 ever to interview Almayo, and then his daughter interviewed Almayo many years later. 101:04 Almayo contacted her and said, I interviewed her, your dad interviewed me, I really liked 101:08 him. 101:08 He passed away, I'd like you to come back and interview me. 101:11 So the daughter... 101:11 Why did he want to be interviewed? 101:12 Because he wanted to show, he trusted this one journalist, and he wanted to show he 101:18 was sort of a ghost figure, but I think he wanted to show that he was a human 101:21 being, that he had, you know, that people portrayed him as responsible for all the violence. 101:28 And I think he wanted, you know, he wanted a little sort of, I don't know, a little understanding 101:34 from people, I think. 101:36 None of it would have worked either. 101:39 None of the narco-trafficking and the rise of the cartel, the Sinaloa cartel in particular 101:43 without corruption, right? 101:45 So this is a man that was they say was the responsible one for 101:50 What's the expression wheeling you oiling the hands oiling the hands? 101:54 I fuck up all American expressions greasing the wheels 101:57 Greasing the palms 102:01 Of a lot of politicians 102:03 So the governor of Sinaloa was basically working for the cartel the mayor the former mayor 102:10 of Sinaloa was very, all big positions, important positions, but not just in Sinaloa, outside 102:15 of Sinaloa. 102:16 But the story about what happened is what led Darren to want to do this doc, which is 102:20 so good, which was, this is the most, once El Chapo comes extradited to the US, and 102:26 Maya is the most wanted man, everybody is after him, all American authorities, the government 102:30 want this guy. 102:32 But he's the ghost, like nobody knows where he lives, nobody has ever been able 102:37 to catch him on a call like they did with El Chapo, it is impossible to find him. 102:41 And suddenly one day, he shows up in a small propeller plane in New Mexico and is handed 102:48 to the authorities. 102:50 And it's crazy. 102:52 And everyone who's been after him is like, what the fuck? 102:55 How is this possible? 102:56 What's happening? 102:56 Who hands him to the authorities? 102:58 So that is sort of the Shakespearean saga of it all. 103:01 It was the son of El Chapo, Joaquin Guzmán, who tricked him. 103:08 They had this partnership, the Almaios and the Chapos forever, since El Chapo left prison 103:14 the first time. 103:16 They had this partnership that they would build this cartel and they would share the 103:19 profits and each of them had sort of the specialty that they would run. 103:23 And Joaquin Guzmán, who happens to be also his godson, called him and said, we're 103:29 having a problem, the governor of Sinaloa is here, the former mayor who's now the head 103:34 of the university is here. 103:35 We have to deal with these politics and try to figure out how to solve this problem. 103:39 Can you come to the ranch? 103:41 And Amayo thought nothing of it. 103:43 He's had a relationship with these kids all his life. 103:45 He's friends with the dad who's now in America, gets on his car with his minimum 103:50 security guards. 103:51 He always traveled with a massive amount of security guards. 103:53 In this case, he didn't travel with a lot because he definitely did not think 103:56 I think this was going to be a plot. 103:59 A ploy arrived in the ranch. 104:02 He's immediately, they kill the bodyguards. 104:05 He's immediately handcuffed and blindfolded 104:07 and put on a plane. 104:08 And Joaquin Guzman, El Chapo Son, himself, personally, 104:13 basically hand delivers him like a box of pizza 104:16 to the American authorities. 104:18 Because he wanted to basically give something 104:22 for lesser time for his brother who had just 104:24 been caught, Ovidio Guzman, and for his dad who's in prison, and he wanted to sort of give 104:30 himself in and hope that it would help if he brought somebody important. 104:35 What did they give him for that? 104:37 They're still, this case is still ongoing. 104:39 El Mayo is immediately arrested, obviously. 104:43 It's a small airstrip. 104:45 The film, they do a recreation that they film at the actual airport and the actual 104:50 airplane, and they have a lot of exclusive footage and interviews, including with Elmayo's 104:57 lawyer. They take him out of the plane. Eventually, after a few days, everybody's dumbfounded, 105:05 like, why is this happening? How did this happen? Elmayo eventually writes a story that he puts 105:11 out through his lawyer that explains what had happened, and he says he was essentially kidnapped 105:15 by El Chapo's family El Chapo's son and a lot of people are thinking okay now 105:21 he's gonna cooperate if anyone knows anything about corruption in Mexico 105:25 it's this guy he's the one oiling the hands creasing the palms so he knows 105:29 about this stuff and he decides to stay silent and he's absolutely not he's 105:34 like it is my responsibility I did this as well there are many people 105:37 involved as well but unlike El Chapo who pled not guilty he decided to plead 105:42 He plead guilty and he's now facing life in prison. 105:45 He is charged, sentenced to life in prison in the US. 105:49 But his son, El Chapo's sons, and El Mayo's son, who had been apprehended many years ago, 105:56 have all gotten these cooperation agreements. 105:59 So what a lot of people, or sort of critics of this tactic are saying is that it seems 106:05 what's happening is that these narco traffickers that were responsible for a lot of deaths 106:10 in the United States because of drugs are now through these cooperation agreements coming 106:17 to the United States for these sort of paradise retirements, because they're doing a lot less 106:25 time in prison than they would have, and we're allowing this because it's the only 106:31 way to get to other people, but these people are not being held responsible for what 106:37 they did. 106:38 It's a tactic that I think a lot of people have a problem with, as they should have. 106:44 It's also interesting to me that it's a tactic that Elmayo himself decided not to take. 106:48 He's like, fuck this, I'm not cooperating with anyone. 106:50 I'll take full responsibility because he's sort of a man that he believes in his word 106:54 and always believed. 106:56 Like an old school mob boss. 106:58 Yeah, he's like an old school mob boss. 106:59 Wow. 107:02 So is El Chapo's son incarcerated as well? 107:08 So all of them are Ovidio and Joaquin, their cases are still open, I don't think any of 107:12 them have. 107:13 But when he delivered Elmayo, he turned himself in too, yeah, absolutely, yeah. 107:20 So who's running things over? 107:21 But this is the big question mark and the documentary raises that as well. 107:26 Is that the American government is saying that they had no say in this. 107:30 It wasn't their idea, it wasn't their decision and that they weren't actually involved 107:33 in any of this. 107:34 that they were alerted, that there was a high-profile person coming on that plane, 107:38 and so they were there at the airport ready, but that they weren't involved in negotiating this 107:43 with Elma El Chapo San Joaquin Lisbon. A lot of people don't believe that, 107:48 and a lot of people think that there was obviously a lot of negotiating behind doors 107:52 that happened in order to bring him in. Right, and what was the negotiation? 107:57 And the government of Mexico wasn't happy with any of this. 108:01 The negotiation was if you bring el mayo in we will reduce, you know 108:05 We'll put you in prison probably but we will reduce your sentence 108:08 we'll reduce the sentence of your brother of video Guzman and we will do something to make your dad's life better in prison 108:14 So why wasn't the government of Mexico happy? 108:17 Because they believe that there was interference in their own country that 108:22 they basically kidnapped a Mexican member without their knowledge and 108:27 Even though he's a drug lord. Even though he's a drug lord. Yeah 108:29 I mean even with El Chapo it was with obviously the cooperation and full support of the American 108:35 government but it was Mexican military that caught him and then they the government extradited 108:42 him to the United States because they realized they couldn't keep him in prison they tried 108:46 twice and failed so the third time they were like okay he's gonna be extradited to the 108:50 United States but but this time they didn't choose it they didn't they had nothing 108:55 to do with it, and a Mexican citizen was kidnapped from their soil, and they also weren't happy 109:01 with the lack of communication from the government. 109:04 They were asking for what's happening, why is this person there? 109:08 The problem is that the government is insanely corrupt. 109:11 It is, but I think Claudia Shinbound, who's the president of Mexico, would say that because 109:16 previous governments were corrupt, that doesn't mean that this is okay or that 109:21 I am corrupt. 109:22 I'm not defending them. 109:23 Right. 109:23 I'm just saying that her position is... 109:25 I would understand, I get that if perhaps that is her position and that is how she really 109:31 operates. 109:32 Wonderful. 109:34 However, if you tell the Mexican government about it, someone who's corrupt is going to 109:40 find out. 109:41 Oh, that is true. 109:42 And there's a lot of covert operations, I believe, at least from my sources happening 109:50 right now in Mexico. 109:51 Well, there have to be. 109:52 Um, yeah, we detailed the amount of assassinations that were during the last election 109:57 And it was something like 35 different people were assassinated. Yeah. Who did you have on? Did you have somebody talking about? 110:03 Oh, I forget we've talked about it multiple times, but one of the things that's shocking about it is that 110:09 this was definitely 110:14 Fairly recently, right 110:16 Which one we talked about with Ed. I'm pretty sure with Ed. Yeah 110:20 Yeah, yeah, because it was like the each each gang was propping up a political person and they were getting 110:25 Oh, yeah, right, right politicians and journalists as well there be it's like Ed Calderon who yeah 110:32 You know is he used to work for the Mexican government and they were involved in like 110:38 Counter-cartel operations and he's got a very deep understanding of how it all runs over there 110:44 And he said, essentially every single mayor, candidate, 110:49 every single candidate for any kind of government seat 110:52 works for the cartel. 110:54 And so when you're seeing these people get assassinated, 110:56 it's cartel assassinations. 110:59 They're assassinating a rival cartel member. 111:02 And that's what they're doing 111:03 when they're killing all these mayors 111:04 and killing these people. 111:05 Yeah, and in a lot of situations, 111:07 I've interviewed corrupt policemen and federal agents 111:12 and a lot of times, I mean, not so much with the federal agents, but definitely with the 111:16 local policemen, what they say is, it's not even about the money they pay you, it's the 111:21 fact that if we don't do it, they will kill me or kill my family. 111:25 They're forced to do it. 111:27 It's not an option for them. 111:28 It's not an option. 111:29 Yeah. 111:30 And it's not even an option whether or not you run for mayor. 111:32 You're running for mayor, bitch. 111:33 Yeah. 111:33 Yeah. 111:34 Exactly. 111:35 You're doing it. 111:35 Get out there. 111:36 This is what you're going to say. 111:37 Yeah. 111:37 Boom. You get shot. Okay. New guy. Get him in there. Oh. Yeah. And I did a story for the last 111:43 season of traffic, which is about Cartel USA, which is Cartel's presence here in the United States. 111:49 Not only sort of distribution of drugs, as we all know, the violence that accompanies the 111:54 cartel or drug trafficking in general, but also the corruption. And I'll never forget interviewing 112:00 doing this guy from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, and him and an investigator 112:07 in that investigations as well, basically them saying, corruption is real. 112:15 We've seen it. 112:15 It's happening with people around us, and they're corrupting politicians. 112:20 They're corrupting agents. 112:22 They're corrupting Border Patrol because just the amount of money is so large that 112:27 when we're talking about millions of dollars, right, 112:30 that they can just hand out. 112:32 It's very hard not to be corruptible. 112:35 Holy, and also it's ubiquitous, right? 112:38 Yeah, it's ubiquitous, and it's, I think, to me, 112:41 the sort of the scariest part of it all, right? 112:43 Ah! 112:44 Look at this, a peer review study 112:46 recorded nearly 500 assassinations of politicians 112:49 in Mexico during the 2000 to 2021, 112:52 primarily affecting incumbent mayors, former mayors, 112:56 candidates for municipal positions wow that's crazy and that's just political 113:03 and also journalists which is a real real problem well here's the question how 113:10 many people in the United States are being currently bribed by the cartels 113:16 like how is all this fentanyl cocaine all these drugs getting over here a lot 113:23 A lot. 113:24 Yeah. 113:25 A lot. 113:25 Right? 113:25 Yeah. 113:25 They have to be. 113:26 100% a lot. 113:28 I mean, you know my past reporting where we filmed a woman crossing the border with fentanyl. 113:34 We filmed... 113:35 Well, how about the guy with the Los Angeles cop that was selling guns? 113:38 Selling guns. 113:39 Police officers selling guns, gangs here. 113:40 So they cop... 113:41 Tell the people the story about that because it's so insane that they confiscated these 113:45 guns and then the cops had confiscated them. 113:48 This guy somehow had access to them, throws them in his trunk and just drives 113:52 drives across to Mexico and sells them to the cartels. 113:54 Yeah, so the story was about gun trafficking, how basically, I think it's 70-something percent 114:00 of the guns found in Mexico in crime scenes are American guns, how American guns are responsible 114:06 for the violence in Mexico, and we wanted to show what's called, it's called the 114:11 Iron River, the flow of guns from the US, Los Angeles all the way, or California 114:15 all the way to Sinaloa. 114:18 So we did, we met in the middle of the night, a guy who was in his sort of warehouse on this 114:23 closed location in Los Angeles, and he had a room full of guns. 114:27 He had AK-47s, he had what look, it was similar to an AR-15, and he said he gets most of 114:35 his guns, a few that he pointed he had bought from LAPD, guns that had been confiscated 114:41 and he paid, I think it was like $700 for an AK or something like that. 114:47 And if I remember correctly, and then he had some that were sold from Marines, the Marines 114:53 sold the AR-15, very bad with names of guns, but it was a similar gun to an AR-15 that 115:01 had a scope and it's used by the Marines. 115:04 And all the gun people are going to get really mad that I'm not going to say the 115:08 exact name, but basically he told me that it was sold by a Marine who was selling 115:14 him these guns. 115:16 And then he packed them into a trunk of a car and a woman, because they're more unsuspecting, 115:21 drove the guns down to Mexico. 115:23 And we saw her cross the border. 115:25 This was crazy, is she crossed, there was nobody stopped her car, nobody checked her 115:30 car because going south there's barely any border control. 115:34 So she gets there, opens her trunk, I see the whole deal, the middle man guy is 115:40 taking the guns out. 115:41 I see another guy come in and immediately buy one of the guns, and then yeah, we follow 115:46 the whole supply of guns all the way to Sinaloa and spent the last few days there in Sinaloa, 115:52 the Sicarios, from the Sinaloa cartel shooting guns and also showing us there, they had 115:59 these bunkers built under these houses in the Sierra Madres mountains of Sinaloa, which 116:05 are very much cartel territory, like the military, you know, the authorities don't 116:08 really go there. 116:10 And they had these bunkers full. 116:12 We went to one of them, and it was full of every single, 116:15 I mean, full of guns, weapons and ammunition 116:18 that they were saving for a potential war 116:20 with a rival cartel. 116:22 And two, I think a few weeks later, 116:24 they were actually used in the Culia Canazzo. 116:27 Do you remember the Culia Canazzo? 116:28 When the authorities, the Mexican authorities, 116:33 got Ovidio Guzmán, the arrested Ovidio Guzmán, 116:36 who's one of El Chapo's sons. 116:38 and the cartel said, this is not gonna happen. 116:41 We're not gonna allow this to happen. 116:43 Surrounded the military compound and started shooting. 116:46 They had cars with 50 cows mounted on their trucks. 116:54 They went out, it was like suddenly you're in Afghanistan. 116:56 But this is in the capital of Sinaloa. 116:59 And they basically, the authorities had to release 117:01 Ovidio because the citizens, civilians were being killed. 117:05 So they released him and then they arrested him again 117:07 and eventually a few years later now he's here in the United States but this was 117:11 all happening at the same time like this all these guns that come from the 117:15 United States. Do you remember Operation Fast and Furious? Yes 100%. 117:19 Yeah, tell people about that. Well it was found that they were the ATF was 117:24 allowing or was allowing the flow of guns or some guns across the border 117:29 to Mexico because they were trying to track it and find out where they were 117:33 are ending up so they could build a bigger case. 117:37 That recently, that very same situation 117:38 happened with fentanyl in the U.S. 117:40 You haven't heard of this story? 117:41 No. 117:42 So in New Mexico, the DEA, there was a whistleblower 117:46 that came out and spoke to the AP, 117:48 an amazing AP investigation, where a whistleblower came out 117:52 and said basically that the DEA in New Mexico 117:55 was allowing millions of pills of fentanyl 117:58 to go out on the streets in order to build bigger cases. 118:02 And they would watch, they would be there doing surveillance and watching the distribution of these pills. 118:08 And of course they know that some of these pills ended up killing people. 118:11 The whistleblower talks about this one particular case of a kid, month-old kid who sort of picked something from the floor 118:18 and because of exposure ended up dying. 118:20 And he kept on telling his superiors, this is not okay. 118:23 I know you guys are trying to build bigger cases, but people are dying. 118:28 and then he and they did not they didn't do much it went became a whistleblower 118:34 complaints it went to the government they were trying to figure out what to do 118:38 they decided not to really act and there was at the time sort of a standard that 118:42 if you have if the safety of people is at risk when you're allowing these 118:48 cases to bill then you should stop distributing allowing for the 118:52 distribution of fentanyl. 118:54 This was in place, which is why the whistleblower decided this is also illegal. 118:58 What we're doing is against the regulations, essentially. 119:01 But when this went up to the top and they started looking at it, they not only decided 119:07 not to do anything—this was before the whistleblower spoke to the journalist and 119:10 before this became public, right? 119:12 Not only did they decide not to do this, but they decided to change the regulations 119:16 so that it's not that that idea of security for civilians is not needed anymore. Jamie can you 119:23 bring that up because we can see the department we wrote these rules in 2024 to afford to afford 119:35 law enforcement far more discretion in whether to take action to prevent fentanyl track tracking 119:40 citing the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation. Do you think it's 119:45 bullshit? Do you think people are profiting off of it and they're being bribed and that's 119:49 why they're continuing to allow it to happen? Do you think that could possibly be under 119:53 the guise of building a bigger case? Because where's the case? 119:57 I think what it is is that there's enormous incentive to build cases. Actually, New 120:01 Mexico did one of the biggest busts, fentanyl busts in the past few years. Millions 120:06 of pills were caught, so they were building bigger cases. But it is, there's a very 120:10 fine line between building bigger cases and people dying. 120:14 Well, imagine if it's one of your family members that died from that fentanyl. 120:18 So it was, to me, this is sort of the new fast and furious in terms of... 120:22 Two additional DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico have come forward in recent weeks, including 120:26 one who said his colleagues were their failed to seize 350,000 fentanyl pills that they 120:33 learned about during the very first call they intercepted in a 2024 wiretap. 120:38 Shipments was part of an investigation that resulted in the largest fentanyl seizure 120:41 in DEA history. 120:42 Every court record show agents had the opportunity to seize thousands of fentanyl pills but allow 120:47 trafficking to continue for months as they investigated. 120:51 And crazy, the campaign the DEA had at this time was one pill can kill you. 120:55 That was their campaign. 120:56 He won. 120:56 Fentanyl, one pill can kill you. 120:58 They have 350,000 pills they let go through. 121:00 I think the initial report was 1.7 million if I didn't get it wrong. 121:04 It was over a million, it was insane. 121:07 Is that incompetence? 121:08 Is it stupidity? 121:09 I think it's people trying to build. 121:11 Well, I think they believe that they can get better results and seize more drugs and 121:15 go after the real bad guys if they do this, but I do think there needs to be some transparency 121:19 and people should be allowed to decide if this is okay or not. 121:23 And that sort of standard rule that was there to make sure that this isn't killing people 121:28 should remain there. 121:30 Right, but what can they do about this? 121:32 Like ultimately, this is not something that existed 30 years ago. 121:36 That's what's really crazy. 121:37 No, the whole cartel violence thing. 121:39 Oh, I know. 121:40 I know. 121:40 This is so new.
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