E510 Investigative Journalist Nate Halverson

25:33Skies out, thighs out, baby. Summer is right around the corner and our friends over at Chubby's are bringing the good vibrations. Chubbies, I like them. I had on one of their shirts the other day in Miami, man. Beautiful, comfortable. Chubbies is a lifestyle apparel brand that makes every moment feel like a vacation. That's what Chubbies does. It's like, hey, look at that guy. He's just a walking mimosa right there. He likes to have a fun time. For a limited time, Chubbies is giving our listeners 20 % off your order with our exclusive code. Use code Theo at chubbiesshorts.com. You can experience unmatched comfort and style with the Chubbies iconic original stretch shorts.

26:21I just got a pair. I'm looking ready to put my dang butt in them. For a limited time, Chubbies is giving our viewers 20 % off your order with our code Theo at chubbiesshorts.com. that's code t-h-e-o at chubbies shorts.com support our show and tell them we sent you don't blend in with the crowd stand out with chubbies so in africa it's it's even more prevalent you're saying yeah and i think what i think you know it's it's it does seem to be i talked to a bunch of african investigative journalists at this thing in dc and they saw the documentary and they came up to me after and I'm like, dude, I've been seeing this in my country.

27:01I didn't realize it was part of this like giant international trend, right? Like it's all sort of tied in. And that's how, that was like the same revelation that I had as I started digging in deeper and deeper was just how interconnected these things are. Right. Cause like, you know, when you say that, like, yeah, what do you mean when you say that? I just mean, like, I think the dude was from Sierra Leone and he was talking about a big rice farm that had come in and plowed down the forest and moved people off their land. And then they were exporting the rice to wherever, you know, a wealthier country.

27:32And he's like, you know, how do I contextualize that? Like, it's obviously an injustice, right? Like people have been, their ancestral land's been taken from them, but like, where does that fit in? And then you see, oh, it fits in that like people in Arizona are basically dealing with the same thing, maybe not to the same degree, but all of a sudden they're finding what like was once theirs being taken by somebody else. I see. You know, and I think like, I think the, and so that's what I mean. It's just like, there is this big global push and yes, I do think it's probably happening. And these kinds of numbers are super hard to get.

28:03And this is the only reason I hesitate. Anecdotally, I would say, yeah, it appears to be happening most prevalently in Africa. But like getting any good numbers on that, like nobody, the UN, you know, like they're not going out and nobody's going out and like documenting every single instance. So as a journalist, I always hesitate. Right. So like in the documentary, you've seen it. We like, just to give you a sense of what we go through, I took every single fact that's mentioned in that documentary and I put it into a spreadsheet. And then me and a woman who's now a fact checker at the New Yorker, we went through every single fact that's in there.

28:37And then we put three sources making sure it was true. And then we hired an outside fact checker to fact check our fact check, you know, like, like, and so like I always, and that's like, That's the value to me of good investigative journalism is we're going to put in that extra effort so that everything is documented. And so I love this format because this is how, when I'm hanging out with friends, this is how we talk, right? And we're sharing knowledge. And as humans, we sit around the campfire. This is how we've been telling stories. And I love stories. But I'm always a little hesitant because I'm like, I don't got a fact checker behind me to whisper in my ear.

29:12They're like, oh, Nate, you screwed that fact up. And she doesn't have a fact checker behind her to be like, oh, no, you screwed up the fact checker. I need to fact check, you know? Right. So, yeah, you're just having a, yeah, you're just doing your best. Yeah. You know, but you obviously spend a lot of time investigating it. Yeah, yeah. And at what point do you start to go down a trail with investigative journalism where you're like, I've already gone too far. I have to fluff this thing up to at least make it hold the value of the weight that I've already put into it with my time. Is that a weird question?

29:42Well, I think. Or does that ever happen, you know? Well, you made me laugh when you said fluff.

29:52like no ever get going on a story yes and you abandon it yes yes you just you're like there's this not enough here even if you spend a long time yeah what often happens man is is you'll be like huh I'm this is what happens to me I'm like huh I'm curious about that right and then I'll start like digging into that and that thing that I started digging into I'll be like oh no actually that makes sense I don't want you know like I don't think the world needs to know more about that. I don't think it's going to make anyone's lives better. I don't think it's going to change anyone's perception on how they interact with the world.

30:19But as I was doing that, like I started seeing this other thing. Right. And then, so then I start looking into that other thing and I'm like, well, that is pretty interesting. But in the process of looking into that, then I'm like, holy shit, look at that thing over there. And then I'm moving in and these things are sometimes, you know, they can be totally unrelated. Oftentimes they're somewhat related. And then it's that thing that I end up really going after. Right. And so I would never, I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to waste your time And I don't want to do an injustice to a story by being like well I spent time on looking into a and now I have to do something on a right because oftentimes it's just a Slowly shifts into b and the next thing I know i'm like, dude I think people need to would want to know about c Right, like I think people should take a little break from their lives and lives are tough lives are complicated We've all got so much going on.

31:04I want to like, you know, I want to honor people's time But i'm like but I think c is probably worth their time, right? Yeah what parts of this as you went through this did did it start to like um be like okay this is something that makes me realize i have to keep going here oh i you know with this one i think it was it was kind of early on because again man it's like when when you know before this i'd been doing organized crime and now i'm doing food and i was asked to do it and i'm like okay it's a food story you know like it's not gonna blow my mind it's like papa john almost yeah dude and i was just like, but then all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute, this, you're an intelligence officer for the CIA or you were, and you're like telling me X, Y, and Z, like, that's pretty interesting.

31:48Well, let me go talk to somebody else to try to corroborate that or get like another hot take on it, you know? And it just kept building. And I'm like, and then I started seeing the stakes, right? Like, but the number of people that it was going to impact, and we're talking about like billions, you know, like we're talking about, you know, when you have Wall Street, you saying this is going to be the biggest trajectory. When you have the World Economic Forum saying this is one of the top five existential threats to our species, you start going like, food and water? And you're like, this is probably worth my time and a lot of sleepless nights.

32:23At some point, you just realized, I just think this is this story. So can I tell you, so we made a film, right? And I'm super lucky because I worked with this amazing director, Gabriella Copperthwaite. you know and she knows how to tell an amazing story the grab the documentary yeah it's just like she made this thing like an international ripper right and and but when we're going out and we're pitching it to the studios they're all like well what do you want to come of this and i wanted i wanted what i wanted to happen when people see this documentary is the same thing that happened to me when i started working on this stuff it shifted my perception of how i see the world like i fundamentally see the world differently now having worked on this story and And so I wanted people to have access to that same information because I think when you begin to, when you see this, and I don't know if this was your experience or not, but when you see it, you're like, oh, shit, like food isn't just food.

33:14Food has become like a weapon. Food has become like a power tool for governments to control people in other countries. Like it becomes way bigger. Like how, yeah, how would we see that start to show up in our daily lives? Oh, man, food prices. Right. Go to the grocery store. Right. I mean, do you remember during COVID when they were like, oh, everybody can stay at home except people that work in slaughterhouses. We got to get everybody that works in slaughterhouses back because we're really worried that there's not going to be meat on the shelves. Well, dude, as I recall, during that time, pork exports to China increased.

33:54So the executives of these big meat companies are like, oh, we got to get everybody back. We're worried about getting meat. And then they were shipping more meat to China. Well, it might have even been their farms. Well, yeah, they own this company that's in China. That was this deal that was backed by the Chinese government. Yeah, they control one in four American pigs. Wow. Yeah. Can you bring up that article that we're talking about if you can? On April 28, 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to keep meatpacking plants open. the executive order exempted plants from state and local orders to close non-essential businesses but did not solve plants problems with sick workers wow it's interesting yeah i mean it's just interesting because if people are going to need to eat people are going to need meat you're going to need people to be able to continue to eat or they're going to freak out so even if they're stuck at home as long as they can get a burger then they're going to they're going to keep going until their next burger.

34:58You're right, though. I mean, you kind of like put your finger on it, man. It's like it is like food is that one thing that people want to keep going. Right. Like the Chinese government, everybody. And, you know, and that's kind of that's what takes you to the Arab Spring. Right. Like when you saw all of these Middle Eastern governments getting toppled. Right. Like the Arab Spring, it was like. What do you mean the Arab Spring? But Arab Spring was like a little over 10 years ago now. And it was that period where you just saw civil wars breaking out across like North Africa and the Middle East.

35:31And those things never happen. It's just like one single issue. They're like super complex. People don't like their leaders. They don't feel like they have hope. but increasingly the thing that the intelligence community is saying is driving those issues is food prices you know like you were talking about food prices here in the where we were talking about food prices here in the grocery store but like americans man we only spend about seven percent of uh our income on food on groceries right other countries do they spend like 50%. So whatever they're making, like half their paycheck is going to food.

36:09And so when food prices go up for us, it's only going up on like 7 % of what we're spending on, right? Right. So it's not hitting us overall as much. Exactly. Why did they spend so much on food? Because in, I mean, we're just a wealthy nation, you know, and so we have bigger income. Oh, I see. So we have larger income. Yeah. So obviously, yeah, if you're making$100 a day, then that's just$7 a day, where if you're making$100, if you're making$10 a day, then$7 is 70 % of your income. Yep. And a lot of people, we're buying food that's finished. We're buying processed food. We're buying things you can open a package and eat.

36:48But a lot of people in these other countries, they're just buying commodities like grain and they're baking their own bread. And so when those prices basically double, all of a sudden, those people are seeing 50 % of their income almost eat up their entire income and they can't feed themselves. They can't feed their kids. And I think that's what it comes down to, right? So in the Arab Spring, there was a ton of that? It was a ton of that. Food prices shot up. They went to historic highs and that sustained and people started taking to the streets, right? A whole grievance of issues, but this was a big one.

37:22And you saw it move just across these countries. Yeah. And how was it alleviated? How did they, like, what kind of catharsis did they get into? Is catharsis the right word or no a lot of a lot of them just took out their leaders oh yeah like egypt overthrew their leader didn't they yeah that's right yeah and so you just saw you yeah yeah so you saw like and you saw you this and this is the thing about the 21st century is like that was probably the first blip that we saw like that and the forecast is for an increasing number of those. And when countries fall apart because of civil wars, oftentimes their people then migrate out.

38:02Right. And then they put pressure on the countries around them because now they've got to feed more people because now you've got a failed nation next to you. And it became almost like a domino effect. Wow. Yeah. And are the forecasts saying that there is going to be like less water, that there's going to be less food? Like where are we getting those forecasts from? Yeah. So, um, we could pull something up, but it's like, like 70 % of the world's population or some number is going to be living in some form of water scarcity by like 2050. It's like a huge number, right. Of people that are dealing with water shortages.

38:39And again, like usually you can eke out enough water for your drinking water. Uh, but can you, do you have enough water to grow the foods you need to eat or for somebody else to grow the foods you need to eat. And so, and then the other thing we're looking at, it's like some places are going to have, you know, people are going to have droughts, of course, but then some places are going to have flood floods and too much water can have the same impact as not enough water, right? Like we just saw this in Pakistan where like their crop was wiped out by this, these massive floods that just kill off the crops.

39:13Yeah. I used to work on a soybean and corn and cotton farm for a couple of years. and it was amazing how like water was just, I mean, you would stand around and talk about it. You would go look at a radar. You'd ask somebody if they'd seen any water. Like it was just crazy. It was unbelievable how that was the biggest thing. That was the biggest thing. It was like, is it going to rain? Is it not? How are you going to manage your crops if it doesn't? And then how are you going to get subsidized by the government if it doesn't happen at all? Yeah, that's right. And what happens is in those countries that are dealing with all these economic hardships, these dictatorial leaders weren't subsidizing the farmers, right?

39:54And what's worse is they were given like their buddies access to whatever, better, better. And so this is what you see in Syria. Oh, so you're saying in Venezuela when you open the – and you see that the people who are going to maintain the status quo of keeping starving people at bay are getting full groceries. Yes, that's it. It's crazy how quick you will become the Gestapo in that moment, you know? Yeah, yeah. Food becomes the ultimate currency. Yeah. What else were you going to say? I interrupted you. Well, I was going to say something similar in Syria where, you know, a drought hits Syria and, you know, all of these farmers are losing their crops, people having to move into the cities, food prices are going up.

40:34And, you know, rather than being like, okay, the government being like, okay, we need to make sure everyone's taken care of. from what I've read, wasn't in Syria at the time, but it was like Bashir was just giving subsidies to like his buddies, you know, and then you just, you're building up this, this, this, this, you're just building up a lot of anger. And you can't feed your kids. It's like, and this is what the, when I, when I talk to people that are in the intelligence community, this is the thing they say, it's, it's not when this, and this sounds shitty, but this is what they say. It's not when the lowest income, the people that are the poorest can't eat that you see a country topple.

41:08Because unfortunately those people have already adjusted their mental mindset to just being shit on. Yeah. It's when the middle class can eat people that are used to being comfortable. Right. And with Honda Accords. Yes. And then when they can't afford to eat and when they're, they're having to tell their kids, sorry, we can't eat today. We got to wait till tomorrow. Right. Those people take to the streets. Fuck yeah. Yeah. And then they overthrow governments, you know, and sometimes the government turns out better and sometimes the government turns out worse and people live in violence and bloodshed for years, you know?

41:42Um, so it's, yeah. And this is kind of the, the trend line that, that we're seeing. And you believe it's an overall trend after all your research and all your digging, you believe that it's an overall trend that's going to continue. It's totally, it's, I think personally, I think it's solvable. Okay. Right. I think it's solvable, but it is, it is the trend line that we are on it, that, that like, if we don't get into another lane of traffic, this is the direction that this road is heading. Got it. And this is straight up from like the, the, the, the U S government, I keep saying intelligence community, right.

42:15But there is the ODNI, the office of director of national intelligence that oversees the CIA, the DIA, the Nick, all of these intelligence agencies. And the highest level work product they do is something called a national intelligence estimate. And they did a national intelligence estimate on, on water in the year 2012. So basically they came out and the guy who was spearheading, and this is like the highest level work product, the intelligence, U S intelligence community does said business as usual, you know, is going to be a catastrophe. Right. Like, and that was their prediction basically.

42:50Yeah. And, and then they lay out solutions. Like we can move things. Right. But it, you know, it has, that's going to have to happen on an international level. And like, we look at our domestic politics and we're like, there's a mess. And you look at international politics and you're like, there's a real mess. So, you know, we all are going to keep doing what we can and we all, you know, keep living. But like, but still this is, I mean, having foresight is, is super important, especially in a time where it's like, we don't even, there's so much artificial sight that you don't know what is foresight anymore you know there's so much um manipulation you just it's so hard to know what's real on march 22nd 2012 the national intelligence council which you're saying is a conglomerate of all of those the the nick exists underneath the odni okay yeah the odni but yeah release the unclassified report the intelligence community assessment on global water security the report concludes that several regions of the world such as North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems and that during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems that will increase the risk of instability and state failure, exacerbate regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important policy objectives.

44:06Yeah, I guess how you barter and trade and deal with things is going to become a lot different. Wow. You mentioned Africa, and you guys go into a lot in the doc. Why is Africa always get screwed? I mean, since the beginning of time, whether it's the British coming in or a foreign entity coming in and enslaving or claiming, whether it's them enslaving each other, whether it's the tribes that just can't get along, whether it's a government that starts up and then sells out, why do they have so much trauma there? Yeah, man. It's a good question. And, you know, I always try to operate from like a place of historically informed journalism, right?

44:51Because some of these trend lines are massive. And, you know, what we saw was that Western Europe for some centuries just had this intense power as they sort of globalized the world. and Africa had a lot of resources that they wanted. And they went in there and they grabbed them and they created artificial boundaries and borders around, you know, that suited Western Europe. Like Africa got carved up into territories that suited Western Europe and their treaties so that they wouldn't fight with each other in Europe, right? And that wasn't always the boundaries of the governments and the nations that had lived there.

45:30and you go back even farther than when Western Europe was sort of the international dominant player, right? Like you look at Genghis Khan, right? Genghis Khan, born in the central steeps of Asia, the dude became a slave, then went from being a slave to controlling like the entire Mongolian empire. Then they went into China and they took over China. Then he pushes East and starts taking over Eastern Europe and then he drives down into Southern Asia, you know, the middle East dude controlled the largest empire of any human in history. Right. And when he, this is the thing, and I'm getting a lot of this.

46:07Yeah, totally. Denver nuggets. It's like the kind of in one person, but go on. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. And he gets to Europe at that time. And, and I'm getting this from this, this guy, Jack Weatherford's book, Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world. He's a historian in Minnesota, somewhere, one of those, one of those colleges. And when Genghis Khan gets to, to, to Europe, he's looking around, he's like, these people are too dumb and too poor for me to bother conquering. You know, like they didn't even have pants at that point, like pants, like pants are an Asian invention, right? Like pants came from Asia at that time in Europe, people are just wearing cloaks.

46:46Like they didn't even have pants yet. They didn't, you know, that gunpowder came from China, movable type from China. And so Genghis Khan gets to Europe and he's like, these people are too dumb, too poor, and too ignorant. And he just drove South into the Middle East where people were doing like algebra and advanced math and like had all of this technology. Right. And then that set up these trading routes and those trading routes connected some of these great advanced technologies from the Middle East and from Asia. And they started working their way into Europe and then boom, Europe has the Renaissance and boom, the Renaissance blows up into the industrial revolution.

47:18And then that industrial revolution, now you have like the Pope carving up the entire world between Spain and Portugal. Like Portugal gets one half, Spain gets the other half. And then they're going down and they're carving up Africa. Right. And, and then you just, you, you, you get to where we are today, which is that, you know, Africa never had a strong say. Yeah. Yeah. And how they were and what went on. Yeah. And in the, in the last few, you know, centuries. What things did you notice when you started to explore some of this stuff happening in Africa? Well, issues in what sense? like i guess like the ownership like who was doing the like you say land getting bought up that had ancestral value of course yeah who was doing that like who was is it hard to know who was doing it well oftentimes it's really hard to trace back who's doing it because you can be like this rush it can just be these layers of llcs and who ultimately is behind this llc can be really tough like i can go there and be like okay so this is the white south african dude or white Zimbabwean dude who now is in like Zambia and he's, you know, moved people off the historic ancestral land and he's doing this like super modern farming.

48:29Right. And, and these other people that had been there for the families have been there for centuries are now like dying. Right. Cause they don't have access to even enough drinking water, much less enough water to grow food. Right. Um, and I can, I can be, I can see that, but like, then I look at the property ownership and it's just a jumble of LLCs and that can be pretty tough. Um, but you know, in the film, one of the things we were able, we got this like trove of information documents. I mean, we see that in some cases it's the leaders of foreign governments that are paying essentially mercenaries to go in and gobble up these resources.

49:05Right. And, and one of the ways they do it, you know, and these, these emails that we get, we see, they just talk about giving gifts to the chief. Right. And, and, and, you know, essentially bribes, right. And it's how I'd interpret that. And what is a mercenary just so everybody knows? Well, a mercenary is effectively somebody who can provide military logistics on behalf of another government. Okay. So like, how would I use a mercenary? Well, you could use a mercenary to go into. Are they good guys or bad guys? Oh, they can be. This is interesting. You brought up Rwanda just a minute ago, and I'm trying to remember the name of the actress that was going to hire a mercenary outfit to go in.

49:48Like when no one on the international level was stopping the Rwandan genocide, this Hollywood actress wanted to hire a mercenary group to try to go in and stop it, right? So like she was using it potentially – like she thought of using it as this force of good. But so there are these examples of people wanting to use these types of groups to like quell violence, to bring stability, right? To move food into areas that are being controlled by warlords, right? Like so you can – sometimes people make an argument that you need to meet force with force to do good, right? And then you also see them being used by corporations to make deals with warlords to extract resources.

50:30And those tend to have a more deleterious or, you know, fucking create, make life shittier for the people who live there. Did you see some of that? Like, what were some of the things that you saw like people struggling with? Oh, dude, just feeding themselves, having shelter, you know, like super basic stuff, super basic stuff. And it sucks. It sucks to see that stuff. I don't want to see that stuff, you know? And then I got to carry it home, you know? And then, you know, it's like, it's that thing they always say, like, you see these people who have done nothing wrong or just like struggling to survive.

51:01Yeah. You know, and I go in there is essentially like a storyteller and I'm like, you know, and they're like, dude, like we need food, we need water. And you're like, Oh, you know, like, what can I, what can I do? That's not my role. My role is to tell people about what's happening to you. And then I fly back to San Francisco and I turn on the faucet and I can drink fresh water, you know? And you're like, you know so these are the these this is these are some of the challenges um of going in and anyways i went off a little bit but like this is a lot of things though yeah i've seen this shit you know and like there's you know there are stories i've heard and there are things that i've seen that you know like i i wish you know which didn't happen to people and then i wish that i didn't have to experience firsthand you know do you feel like we're doing the same thing in other countries though the u.s government or like u.s corporations yeah like are we doing the same thing that's happening here and other places for sure for sure yeah so is it all just even out well no i mean i i would say that if you're like if if you're looking at it like oh china's a bad guy or the saudis are the bad guys but you know the u.s is is is okay it evens out in that sense right like we have massive corporations that are going in and are contributing i think to this pattern of people who are living on land, losing their land or people whose water supplies are being taken from them.

52:19Right. And, and it's destabilizing the world is like the short of it. And then you end up with a destabilized world and you end up with like mass migration and you end up with countries being like, we don't want any more immigrants, you know? And you're like, yeah, but they left because they were hungry. I'm like, why were they hungry? Like what was happening to them? Right. And so you, you're not getting just immigrants. You're getting starving in some cases. Increasingly, that is the case. At one point, the State Department said the number one reason people were leaving Guatemala was because they were hungry.

52:49And think about Guatemala, man. Think about that region of the world. What have they given us? Avocados, chocolate. I think tomatoes come from that region, right? What's that thing called when you go under the stick or whatever? Under the stick. The limbata or whatever? I don't know that. The limbo? Limbo, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like those countries have given us so much food. Like how is it possible that a country that is the source of so many, like you think of tomatoes, you're like, oh, Italians must've invented it. Right. You're like, no, man, that came from the Americas. Potatoes came from the Americas.

53:22Chocolate came from the Americas. Avocados came from the Americas. Right. And how do you have now a region like that where half of the children are stunted because they're not getting enough calories and nutrition. Right. And so like people are leaving Guatemala because there's not not enough food. And that's crazy because this place is growing plenty of food. So what's happening to the food is just being exported to wealthier countries. So do you think that we're like some of the reason for China's low water supply is because of us? No, I don't think that's the case with China. I think China is a really interesting example, right?

53:57We manufacture a ton over there. Yeah, totally. No. China is an interesting case, right, man? Because this is like, I don't think this is well enough known, but one of the greatest achievements, in my opinion, of the 20th century was what China accomplished. And that was pulling 400 million people out of poverty in like three decades, right? Like you'll hear people talking about all of the great achievements of our species, you know, over the last, you know, whatever, 50 years. And they'll be like, you know, we've reduced, we reduce poverty and hunger by this much. 80 % of poverty reduction, as I understand it, 70 or 80 % of poverty reduction in the world is what China accomplished.

54:42One country, 400 million people they pulled out of out of poverty in like two or three decades. Gosh, they now have the world's largest middle class, right? I think their middle class might be bigger than the entire population of the US. The challenge there, man, is that they want to eat diets more like our diet, right? Like in the 1980s, you basically had a country full of vegetarians because they couldn't afford meat. Now you have the world's largest middle class and they want to eat more meat, right? They want sausage patties. Exactly, man. And to have meat, you have to grow more grains, more feeds for the animals.

55:15It's kind of an inefficient way to develop a calorie. and they don't have enough water to grow enough grains to be able to feed all of the animals that the people want to eat. Right. So they're doing it over here. They're doing it over here. They're doing it in Brazil. They're doing it across the world. Oh, so they're doing it in a lot of places. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably this might even be one of the fewer places. It's just that the U.S. is an agricultural superpower, right? Like we are one of the largest exporters of food in the world. And this, you know, then takes you to like, so who are the other ones?

55:46And you're like, well it turns out now Russia is and that's not by accident. Putin has built the country up over the last 15 years to be a food superpower. Right. And then you're like well huh so if if if Russia is becoming a food superpower what does that tell me about you know the Ukraine war because you know what Ukraine's been known for man Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. Yeah it it has for you know for centuries been considered the breadbasket of Europe. And when the Nazis, they invaded Poland, but what do they do right after that? The first place they invade when they go into USSR.

56:22Stop over to Ukraine for a little bit of bread. Exactly. And Hitler said it, we need to control food to keep our soldiers fed. And people don't realize this, but the Nazis had what they called the hunger plan. And by controlling Ukraine, they intended, according to these little known documents that historians have on earth, you know, from the Nazis, they intended to starve 30 million people to death by controlling Ukraine. And if you're the leader of like Russia, right? And you're trying to build a food superpower, right? And just below you is the most fertile soil, right? And that country was deeply aligned to your country until like 2010, right?

57:03And now all of a sudden it's moving its way to the West. Right. It was thinking about going into NATO, right? Yes. Ukraine was. Yeah. And then moving in closer to Europe and that food supply, you know, and so that historically that food supply has been used as a weapon against Russia, right? It's been used as a weapon against others, right? It's a huge strategic asset. It's Ukraine's biggest strategic asset. And so you think that that basically for water is one of the reasons why we're, why that war is going on. I think all of these things have many facets and are super complicated, but But when you're saying what is Ukraine's strategic importance and its food, production of food, and you see Putin saying – like in the film – because I went to Russia.

57:46In the film, I go to Russia and we sit down with the largest – the CEO of Russia's biggest beef company. He says, yeah, Putin came to me. He said, whatever you guys need because food and water are going to give us more strategic power in the future than all of our weapons and oil does. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of my fattest friends have the most guns too, to be honest with you. Because they want to keep eating. I think they just, you know, if you're fat and happy, you'll start shooting, I feel like. And if you're not happy, you'll start shooting. So it's really kind of a... Yeah, right.

58:18The circles meet in the back. Yeah. It's like on this end, it's kind of fireworks, like... But on this end, it's like, I need to survive. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. That's right. BetterHelp. If you've been struggling with something in your brain or in your life, there's something that's not making sense anymore, you're not associating to your world maybe the way you once were, you're having a tough time. You don't know who to talk to. BetterHelp can help. That's right. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.

58:58Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. That's one thing that I've enjoyed about BetterHelp is the ability to just switch to another one. Yeah, this therapist maybe isn't perfect or maybe this therapist is good, but I'm going to try another one and see how it feels. I think learning to differentiate which therapists help and which don't for you is crucial. It's crucial because it can only expedite how quickly you can feel better.

59:58Just take a moment. up in Oregon to start Blue Cube Baths. And he sent me one and it's absolutely beautiful. A wonderful cold plunge, the best cold plunge in the market. If you value American made and pinnacle cold exposure, this is your cold plunge. Blue Cube Baths. What I love is you can set that temperature, get it down to, I mean, it might just, you might be able to ice skate in there. I haven't put it that low, but you can set it to a place where you feel comfortable. I'll get in around 50 degrees for about 10 or 12 minutes. And that's what really sets me and activates me. I've done it before podcasts to really put me and just put me in my body and put me in the moment.

1:00:47You know, the positive side effects of cold plunging are countless. You can follow Blue Cube's Instagram for a chance to win your own cold plunge this spring and summer. That's right. They're giving one away. They will announce the giveaway soon. So follow them at Blue Cube Baths. And we wish them the best of luck and thank them for supporting the podcast so early on. And so I just think you start seeing like a bigger picture, you know, like you start seeing how these things interplay with each other. Yeah, no, I look, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's because I was watching the documentary. I was like, well, is this just kind of fear?

1:01:25Is this creating fear? And then that's what I wanted to get to talk to. I was like, I was just I was like, is Nate like just creating fear here is the director or they is this just a trend that they're seeing? And is this like something that they really believe in and notice? Yeah, dude, that's a great question. Thanks for that. Because it is like, it doesn't do anybody any good to just be afraid, right? Just to like stress people out, bum people out. But no, I mean, I think like fundamentally when the landscape is shifting in front of us and like the most powerful people are shifting with that landscape, like I'm a big advocate of the everyday guy.

1:02:04yeah and i'm like dude we got to empower ourselves with that same information you know we have to know how this thing is shifting right because otherwise those people in arizona they just see this big farm come in and they're like well okay what they don't know is that it's part of this big international trend and they're coming for the water right they don't know that their own government is is allowing that which in some ways are nice things that america does allows you know and that we've also we've done a ton of like of open-handedness you know but there does become a point where yeah if it gets back to survival that um you're gonna change your tune yeah and america's i don't know if you'll do it as a country yeah but you as an individual you won't have a choice but to do it right i i think for for some people yeah i mean food prices will probably continue to climb right and people are going to have to make like real you know lifestyle decisions based on that.

1:02:59You know, we'll probably see food potentially becoming a bigger and bigger percentage of our like take home incomes. But, you know, potentially, you know, like that's the trend line especially. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think I just think it information is power. Yeah. And what I'll tell you is that the most powerful have access to better information today. I think that the disparity of information between the powerful and the everyday person has just grown. Like we always talk about income disparity and it's a real thing. Totally. I get it. But information disparity, man, it might even be worse.

1:03:32A hundred percent. Even just to go to accredited news sources online, not to get information, you have to pay for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Even to get what used to be just a newspaper, right? Yeah. You have to pay for that information. So whether you even believe that it's going to be true or not to have information that's even kind kind of sourced, you know, that's put together, that's formatted, that's not done by AI. You're having to pay for that. Yeah. And I hope that we get back to more of that, man, because that's how it used to be when we were kids, right? Like you pay of a newspaper subscription.

1:04:03Right. I think people decided they couldn't trust the news anymore. I think a lot of that has occurred in the past 10 years for sure. I think I feel like the news, every time I turn it on, I feel like it is, there's some lobbyists behind it. there's some, you know, I mean, people say big farm all the time, but we have so many drug ads on our television. It's like, you know, it just feel, I wouldn't be surprised if it's compromised. That's what it feels like. I, the news industry is in a tailspin, man. I'll give you my two cents for what it's worth. Cause I've been a journalist now for like 25 years, some insane amount of time.

1:04:39I can't believe that. But when I started as a daily newspaper reporter, like we had a nice big staff, man. Like we had, we had librarians on staff. We had researchers on staff, you know, we had photographers, a sports desk, a business desk, you know? And, um, and I, I think, I don't know, man, was it like, there's like a third as many journalists as there used to be, right? Like if there's fewer people doing anything, it's going to be a shittier job. You're going to get a crappier product. Right. And so, and, and, and, And the trend line that gutted journalism wasn't initially that, because I totally agree, all the stats say what you're saying.

1:05:15People don't trust the news like they used to. But it wasn't, the trend line wasn't that people stopped subscribing. What happened was is that newspapers used to make huge profits from things like classified ads, right? Like, you know, we used to read the classified ads in the back, right? So you could meet a woman or even adopt a pet. Get a new BMX bike or like a dirt bike, like a new car. Like it was all back there, right? And that stuff, man, that subsidized the journalists. And so of course that went away and that was like a lion's share of the profits, right? Craigslist kind of killed that.

1:05:44Totally. And it's fine. Technology is going to do. And like the newspapers didn't, they didn't react in time. You know, they lost this big thing. And so like you just started seeing the industry shrinking and shrinking. And now the layoffs in the last two years have just been like brutal. But the problem there is, man, is like I could quit journalism and I could go become a private researcher doing the exact same thing I'm doing now as an investigative journalist. But instead of giving it to the public, I would be giving it to hedge funds. I'd be giving it to super wealthy people that would literally, I'm not shitting you, would pay me four to five times what I'm getting paid now.

1:06:18Right. And that's actually what's happening. Right. And so like you, you, you have the public who is increasingly just getting not as good as much information, especially if you're in like a local news market, right? Like you're not getting information. People aren't paying for it. There are fewer journalists and then the wealthiest are paying for it still. And they're getting incredibly in-depth information. Right. And now you're starting to see privatized spaces have the journalists almost on their side working for them to give them information that better helps them to market to the everyday person.

1:06:55Yeah. And I wouldn't say call that person a journalist, but that, that same like deep research or investigative project, especially in tech, man. Well, I think it's like, you know, they had, even if you look at the case of the opioid epidemic, right. And that there was a documentary, there was a television show. I can't remember the name of it. Um, all the beauty in the bloodshed was a doc that came out that looked super deep at the opioid or i can't remember alex gibney maybe on hbo looked at the opioid epidemic too this one had michael uh keaton okay you know is that a real person yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't know hollywood so i don't know actors and i don't know the space as well but yeah yeah they had this there you go dope sick they had this this series came out it's unbelievable it's how um it's how the opioid companies pay, like basically hired people that had been working on the food and drug administration to come and work for them so they could work the loopholes.

1:07:50Totally. And I mean, I'll just tell you my two cents. The reason that we often know stories like this, like how FDA former employees were then going is because a journalist went in and dug it out and published it, right? Like these types of fictionalized versions get written off of like hard work of investigative journalists. And there are fewer and fewer people pulling out stories like this. And I'll tell you, man, as a journalist, like my problem 20 years ago was that I was always worried that some other journalist was going to scoop the story and get it before me. Today, my problem is that people are coming to me with important stories and I don't have the time to work on them because I'm already working on something and I don't even have another journalist I can tell them to go to, right?

1:08:33Like we're just not getting out as many important stories like that as we used to because there's just fewer of us. And there are more people working for the lobbyists. There are more people working for the PR firms that are spinning stuff. And so this is, we're getting into this really imbalanced place of information and - It's a dark time. And that's why conspiracy theories rise. I totally agree. Because it's like, well, people are going by their gut. People are looking to fill a void. Yep. And people want some truth. I think if you don't have truth, you can feel it. Yeah, I think so. And I always say, and this is the other thing, man, is for me, journalism, it's okay.

1:09:08So like take a football, right? Like the surface of a football is imperfect, right? It's why a quarterback spirals the ball. Because if you throw the football without spiraling it, because the surface of the football is - It's fancy, yeah. Yeah, it's like imperfect. It just flops around. Yeah. But you spiral it and all of those imperfections get smoothed out. And journalism is the same way. Like no journalist is the voice of God. But when you've got 10 journalists covering the same thing, you're going to get as close to the to the obtainable version of the truth as possible because you have 10 different people that are competing to get it out.

1:09:43They're going to they're going to check each other. They're going to they're going to point out of somebody else, you know, misses something or screw something up. And you get at the closest possible obtainable version of the truth. Now, when you just have one person, it's like a football that's not spiraling anymore. It just gets totally off kilter. And I think we're getting closer to that. And, and I think that's like in a democracy when we're supposed to be an informed group of people that are going to go to the ballot box and vote, you know, it's a problem. If we were in China, it wouldn't matter because the government's going to tell us what to do anyway.

1:10:12But in a country where we're like, no, no, we need to be informed so we can go to vote. That becomes a problem. How does that end for us? Was that football analogy, the dumbest analogy you've ever heard? It just kind of came to me. No, I thought it was pretty good. Okay, cool. Yeah, but I'm also dumb a lot of times. So it's like, I wouldn't have asked me, but I thought it worked for me. All right, cool. I'm easily susceptible to just whatever. But yeah, I wonder what does that look like for us when you get to a place where you don't trust. I wonder if it's that we don't trust authority now. But I never trusted authority.

1:10:48Right, I never trusted authority either. But I always thought there was this level of integrity maybe in the distance that I, maybe I thought I'm, it's so hard for me to figure out what I feel like is missing these days. I feel like as individuals, a lot of us are missing purpose and our purpose is being farmed out to technology and to big corporations instead of things that are meaningful. I think we're losing community. Yes. And then that's going to happen too. You have no purpose. You don't have a local newspaper. You don't have like a local place where everybody can even go meet up. People aren't going to church.

1:11:24So there's at that point, you're just a lot of strangers living near each other. I think that's it, man. I think that's a huge problem in this country. And how does that change? I wonder, you know, like, what does the future of that look like? Do we just turn into like these lemmings just waiting for the next cheeseburger? Like, you know, I, I, I, you know, I, I've done some investigative reporting on big tech And that's a space, you know, like that I, you know, like, man, my reporting has shown me like things that just like as a human, as a person concern me, you know, like it's like really cool because they become these beautiful creative spaces.

1:12:02Right. And like as people that are artistic and like to share their stories, people get on there and they can connect with communities and there's all these great things that happen. But I increasingly see those spaces as a hunting ground for big tech companies to target specific people and take them down. And I'll give you one of the examples I'm talking about is that I did this investigative project where I got this investigation where I got internal emails from inside of Facebook and I got, you know, documents from inside of this company that was like a social casino company. It was essentially like you could play games on your phone that looked like a slot machine and you would never win any money.

1:12:44Like you just got to understand it. You would never win any money back. And if you used up all your coins that they get in the day for free, you would then have to buy more coins. Something like 99 % of people never pay for coins. It's like 1%. And then it's something like one-tenth of 1 % drive like 97 % of the revenue at that company. And those companies that, again, you can never win your money back, were now generating more revenue than the Las Vegas Strip. Billions and billions of dollars. So who were the people that were spending money? Well, I found one of those women. She was living outside of Dallas.

1:13:21She was living modest middle income. she spent$400 ,000 buying virtual coins that she could never win back. So who does that, right? Well, it turns out that a certain slice of people, very small slight, have a type of brain that can get super fixated on this. Like they compulsively can't stop. And the technology companies devised algorithms, they use artificial intelligence, where the CEO of one of these companies said the first time somebody opens that app and starts playing, they can identify them from all of the little habits and immediately mark them as what they would call a VIP or a whale, right?

1:14:07And they would put them down this path where they would actually get a special representative, like an actual human who would call them. This woman outside of Texas who lost 400 ,000 when her mom they sent flowers to her mom's funeral, right? Like they immediately identify that you have this type of brain that's gonna keep spending money that you can't afford and be your, you'll never get back. And they just target you and they push you and they pull as much money out of you as they can. That's what I see, man. I see this like, I see now like people are spending their time on there, but people are watching you spend your time and they're building your behavior and they're looking for your weakness.

1:14:45And as soon as they can exploit your weakness, man, they are going to grab everything they can. Wow. It's really the, it's the devil. It's what you would think of as the devil using yourself against you even. I mean, look. What if your own shadow could fucking pick your pocket? What would your life be like? You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, maybe that's a crazy thing. That's almost as bad as your football thing, but.

1:15:10But no, bro, it's the, it's the dark arts. It's like the algorithm learning you and learning you and learning you, massaging you and all that matters. But is it, is it for profit or is it for control? I don't understand. I'm guessing it's probably both. I just don't understand how that behooves anybody. Like who closes their eyes at night and was like, yeah. Dude, those companies that I just talked about went from nothing in like 2009 to 2010 to being billion dollar companies. and they were owned by a few dudes who started them up. Like it behooved those dudes. Those dudes are killing it. I found one of the women who worked at one of these companies who was pushing this woman outside of Dallas to spend all of this money, right?

1:15:57And I got on her Instagram. That girl was just flying around the world, living it up. Egypt, oh, look how cool I am now. Oh, look at me. And I'm photos in front of the Sphinx. Now I'm in Italy eating in Tuscany, right? Living this life. And in the meantime, she's just encouraging people to lose their money. Yeah. Wow. And can we name these people or is it kind of private information? Well, I can, you know, I, I mean, the story, my, I wrote my story. Susie Kelly is the woman outside of Dallas. Um, let's see product madness. Is that the name of the company that was, uh, we're targeting? And I want to pull up the story to make sure I was getting this right, because this is the challenge I have as an investigative journalist.

1:16:36I misspeak just a little bit. I can get sued. Get sued. Yeah, for sure. We can get sued as well. And so I always want to be accurate. Right. And so, you know, we can pull up the story and because I did this story now, what was that? Six, seven years ago. These are companies where you can't win, really. You can't win your money back. But people have figured out that there's a type of person with a behavior that it's basically a definitive victim. Right here it says, Social casinos now use behavioral analysis software to quickly identify people who are likely to become big spenders. Behaviors like increasing your bet or playing frequently are signals to the companies, and they target these players with heavy marketing and label them proto-whales.

1:17:20as Brotons explained to a room full of game developers back in 2015. And if I remember correctly, that guy, Jose Brotons, was like a Stanford graduate in computer science or something, took that knowledge. They pair it up with essentially behavioral scientists, psychologists, and then they just start getting better and better at focusing on these people who they can extract from. Yeah. Man, it's like you're up against it. And sometimes though, there's a part of people that go to gamble like that. There's a part of them that wants to. Some, sometimes I think that there's a part of us. When I'm amazed that we don't stand up sometimes as a population, right?

1:18:03I don't think we always know that's the problem, man. I don't think we have the information to know this story. Like how many, like that to me, that story is mind blowing that that's going on. Right. Yeah. How many people are gambling on their phone or looking at playing solitaire and then it turns into a finite. Yeah. Right. Or how many of us are just aware in which like the patterns of ads that we see are like, oh, because they have your behavioral profile. Right. Like you're getting a pattern this way or your news feed looks this way or you're getting content this way. And how is that affecting you?

1:18:34Right. Like how is that affecting your everyday decisions? and in Susie's case, it was affecting her everyday decision to the point where she was lying to her husband. She was taking out, if I recall correctly, second mortgages on her homes and spending$400 ,000 that she did not have. I had the emails, the messages back and forth with her and the rep from that company and she was begging them to cut her off. I've spent$4 ,000 last night. Please don't let me, cut me off. Oh, Susie, no, Susie, we love you. We'd hate to see you leave. Here's a billion free coins. You know, if you still want to quit when you're done with that.

1:19:05It's a drug dealer. Well, that's what's interesting to me, too. It's like, when would we stop allowing certain things? You would think like even pornography, right? Like I've fallen victim to it, obviously. And a lot of people use it, right? But it's like at a certain point, I recognize, oh, I'm not using this safely, right? Like I go use it when I'm feeling down or when I'm agitated or something. And it's like, and then just like it's bad. We know it's probably bad for us, right? I'm not disparaging any of the people that use it or that perform it. I have friends that are in the industry. It's not anything against any person.

1:19:49But I wonder if overall sometimes we know that it hurts us. Or like they just had that documentary on Ashley Madison, right? And it was so strange. You had this couple pushing the company, and they're married, and the husband was the owner, and they're saying, well, we don't cheat, but you might need to, right? Life short, have an affair. Just like it's just evil, it feels like. I mean. Like why would we allow that? Like it seemed like if you took a vote amongst people, do we want this in our lives? Right. that most of them would probably say no. But if you are tempted with it, if it comes in, like if a cat comes on your, if you tell me, hey, man, do you want a free cat?

1:20:31I'll tell you, dude, honestly, you can fuck off, right? I'll tell you straight up. But if a cat keeps coming on my porch, dude, I'm gonna go out there and touch it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like at some point, even if I might be like, man, fuck this thing, I might be out there petting it at the same time. So it's like, you know, and is that our responsibility? And now the cat's in your pocket. Yeah. Carry the cat around in your pocket with you all the time. I guess you can get a baby cat. But yeah, it's like, I guess I often wonder like, is that just our responsibility? And, or is there, should there be a, yeah, I guess you can't depend on the government, but you would think as a society, we wouldn't want these things.

1:21:14Does that make sense to you? No, dude, totally makes sense. And I think part of it is like, these things are being developed in San Francisco, Silicon valley wherever faster than like we can learn about them and adjust to them the government's always a few years behind yeah yeah yeah and and and again like i mean i don't i mean obviously i'm biased because i'm an investigative journalist but like this is the role that i think we're losing in our society by as journalism keeps going away is because like in that story that we were just talking about with suzy and and the social casinos those dudes would suit me if i got it wrong.

1:21:47Right. Like if, if, if, like they are going to ask for a correction, if I got something wrong. Right. And they did it right. In the end, Susie and a bunch of other people got 155 million bucks back from them. Really? Yeah. Fuck yeah. Right. So, you know, and, and, and like, I don't have it out against anybody, man. I just want good information out there in the public. Yeah. You know, like it empowers all of us, even if like, dude, it could be the same piece of information. And from that same accurate, good piece of information, you might decide that A is the best course. And I might decide that B is the best course.

1:22:22But to me, that's a democracy because now you and I are passionate out whether A is better or B is better, but we're operating off the same good information. Right. Yeah. And if you're saying that other, that information is also becoming like what's valuable and what isn't, and that there's better information out there that obviously corporations can afford, that they can afford the researchers now to privatize them and put them to work for themselves, then yeah, for the regular person, it just gets, it gets low interest. Dude, I'm never going to have good enough information to tell you who are the people most likely to compulsively spend on something, right?

1:22:56Those companies do. But if I, if I'm given enough time, I can probably find out what the companies are that have that information that are targeting people like Susie. And I can at least make us aware of it. So we probably as a society will never have access to that. We probably don't want all of us to know who the compulsive gamblers are. Right. But at least we want to know who the companies are that are targeting people who have that behavior. Yeah. Right. Or targeting people for whatever their weaknesses. Right. Cause we all have a man. We all have our weaknesses. Right. Yeah. And they can all just be, it can, they can almost be mathematically equated now are mathematically equated now and they're attacking.

1:23:32And then that's used to attack us. I mean, that's the scary part. It's like, it's like, um, I want to say it's like our reflection is using the fact that it's our reflection against us. I don't know. I can't know what I'm trying to say. Um, no, you know what it is, dude? I think you're right, man. It's like, they're creating like a data profile, like a virtual one of us, like evil Kirk from Star Trek. Right. And then like that person's telling them our weaknesses, right? It's like you're looking in, you're like, God, that's like a version of me they've created. And that person is ratting me out and they're coming at me with that dude's info.

1:24:10Yeah. Right. I mean, and it's getting stronger and better, that technology. Yeah. And then it also makes you a little bit upset at yourself because you're the one feeding into the same thing that's, you know, beckoning you with things that'll end up being painful to you. Yeah. And look, I have a stoic philosophy on these things. Like I, I, I believe that we can't control, you know, what happens outside of us, but we can control how we react to it. Right. And I think this is something like you and I were talking about cold plunges or like, you know, just like how you can reset, like, and it's super uncomfortable, but like you can control your body and your body's like, dude, I do not want to go in that cold water.

1:24:48And you're like, no, no, I control you. I'm going to dip you in there for two minutes. Cause I know that when I get out, I'm going to feel better. Right. And, and part of it is personal responsibility. Part of it is being like, I control me. I'm going to set the phone down. Right. I'm going to delete that app. Right. Like we do have personal, but we also shouldn't be targeted in that way. Right. It's crazy to let somebody continue to be targeted. It's like at a certain point, you would stop a pedophile from coming near a child. You know? Yes. At a certain point, if somebody had a hatchet and somebody was just trying to sit there and eat a sandwich, you would stop the hatchet guy from bothering the sandwich eater.

1:25:24Yes. You know, it's like. Yeah. Could the sandwich eater get up and leave the restaurant? But maybe the solution is just getting the hatchet guy out of the restaurant. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Instead of making this huge hullabaloo, like now every sandwich eater can only eat sandwiches in this area. Or yeah, it's just. Because some sandwiches are good, man. You don't, you just want to sit there and finish your sandwich. Yeah. Yeah, dude. Yeah. In the end, it comes down to our own personal responsibility for now. That's it. I think that's a piece of it. And I also think we should be demanding better environments for ourselves and our children.

1:25:56I don't have kids, but, you know, I always bring in kids because people seem to be more responsive, you know, but I think kids are living in. Yeah. And they're living in that environment. Right. And I don't know that those, you know, I think we just need to be more proactive about what are the environments we want as a society. Right. But how do we get there? Because it feels like everybody has kind of the same things in mind, but we never seem to get them. And it feels even more like the voting is coming from the other side, like that it's big business. Like, you know, like tech is the new fossil fuel.

1:26:28I've said that for a long time where it's like, that's the thing that's power. It's like, you know, they control everything. It feels like they have a lot of information, man. They do. They do. Yeah. Trump's information then. I wonder. well i think like people like the like if all of us have better information right like again like we can we can push like the part like the documentary man like you were talking about it earlier like you know like i do think there's stuff in the documentary it's going to freak people out freak me out when i learned about it right so at the end of the day it's the point of it just to freak people out no it's to be like you know we have no national water policy in the united States.

1:27:08You know that we have no national water policy. So that means that, uh, people from anywhere or any country, whatever can move here and use our water to grow their crops. Is that true or no? It's true in some places, like different States, different counties have different laws. Right. Okay. But we have no, we have no national water policy that just says like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Water's a big deal. Let's make sure that we're not using it for just like any old thing. Let's make sure that just like as a general rule of thumb, we're using it for like the best purpose. Right. Right. And let's help states and counties in these places come to the decision.

1:27:43What's the best purpose? We just don't. Other countries do. Right. Other countries have put that in place. But if water is such a solid, like a, if it's so important for the future, wouldn't that be one of the first things we would do probably. But this goes back. It's like, I don't know that people know. I don't know if just like when I go to, when I, you know, when I go to family reunions, I don't know that all my family knows. And a lot of my families, they're like farmers, right? But I don't know that they know that this is the trend line that's happening, right? And so you put this documentary out there, not to freak people out, but so that we all just have this baseline of information, right?

1:28:15And then we can push our elected officials who, and man, you hear about all the different lobbies and all that push the government around. The agricultural lobby is one of the most, if not the most powerful lobby in the country. And in part for really good reasons, man. You screw up farmers, like you can really jack up a country. Like we need to support farmers growing foods. Great. Right. And they should have a voice, you know, but at the same time, like communities that are around the farms and others and who's coming in and who's controlling it, that needs to make sense too. Right. And so it needs to be a conversation.

1:28:50And until people have good information, it's tough to have a good conversation. So whether or not we're talking about tech and like people targeting you because they're a big technology company and they know that you're going to be compulsive about this one thing and they can extract something from you, whether it's like how you choose to behave or how you choose to spend, or whether it's like, you know, foreign company, foreign countries coming in or wall street coming in and pumping out water in places that really need that water right there. You know, like we just need good information. Yeah.

1:29:19Yeah. Because it's the days are over where people have anybody else's best interest a lot of over, like it's where companies certainly don't because they're not an individual. Yeah. It's a spreadsheet. They're thinking with a different. Yes, they are. They're thinking it's a spreadsheet trying to have a brain. Yes. And so like how, if you're China, right. And you now have like some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds, you know, which is, what does that mean? Oh man, it's, it's crazy. Cause you know, I have friends I grew up with. Some of them got advanced degrees from college and some of them barely graduated high school.

1:29:48I mean, I was somebody that barely graduated high school, but you know, they didn't go to college. Right. And so like, I have a huge spectrum of people I love. And someone will tell me about the Illuminati. The Illuminati are controlling things. I'm like, dude, no. But go look at sovereign wealth funds, right? Sovereign wealth funds are countries like China that are pooling together these huge pools of cash, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. And then they can use that strategically to buy things, to drive the markets how they want. Now, here in the United States, We just believe that the profit is how everything.

1:30:23So like, oh, if you can make more money doing A than B, then you should go do A because that's how our system operates. But China goes, no, no, we want to create the most jobs we can for the country. And therefore, we're going to take all of our assets. We're going to try to create the most jobs, not the most profit, but the most jobs. Right. And so then what happens is you have Smithfield Foods, one in four American pigs, and you have a Chinese company. and they go like, we don't care necessarily about per se driving the maximum profit, right? Like our government is saying to us that we need to go overseas and buy up food and water.

1:30:57So we'll pay you a 30 % premium over the share price. Well, for the American company, that's like 30 % premium over the share price. Like I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders. Like I have to sell the company. Like I have to give you guys the company. Otherwise I can actually legally get in jeopardy here for saying no to that offer, right? Because I'm, I am, I'm legally obligated to return profits to the shareholder. Well, the Chinese company is operating under a completely different system. Right. And so that's where you begin to see, gosh, this is probably super in the weeds, but that's where you begin to see like this international power play.

1:31:29And like you're talking about, like where the U S is so focused on profits, China's like, cool, you're super focused on profits. We're focused on the future and we can manipulate you because you're super focused on profits. Oh, because if they own a fourth of the, of the industry. Yeah. Or they, they just know, like the American company is always going to do whatever is most profitable. And, and, and we don't like, so we can buy that, you know, like they, they, they know how our system works and they're getting better at manipulating that system is like right out of the gate. When I started looking at this.

1:32:01So instead of this, of this American company saying, Hey, this is an American company, let's keep it here. Let's keep it American. It's part of like, Like, you know, it affects our GDP, all these sorts of things. They just think, oh, for profit. And China knows that. So it's like, let's just pay more and we'll definitely get it. That's exactly. It's a wrap. That's it. Because the way that the American companies built, their shareholders would get upset if they didn't. If they took a vote, the shareholders were like, why didn't you do it? We would have made dividends or whatever. Not only why didn't you do it, but we could sue you and probably win if you didn't return us the max profits.

1:32:33And so China has sovereign wealth funds, which are literally trillions and trillions of dollars of pools of cash. Whose money? Is it theirs? It's their money, yeah. Individuals or the government? The government's. Okay. Yep. And the government can decide how to allocate that, right? And so if the U.S. had that, you'd always be allocating it for whatever is going to make you the most profits. China's going to be allocating it potentially for whatever gives them the most political strength, whatever makes them the most powerful country. It's very different. And that's what sovereign wealth funds are.

1:33:05And they've become huge. They're like, as I understand, I wouldn't talk to this professor, this academic at Stanford, who's one of the foremost experts in the country on these things. As I understand it, they're fairly new. The Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, they also have really big sovereign wealth funds. China's got really big sovereign wealth funds. Surprisingly, Norway has a really big sovereign wealth fund. but they can use these things strategically, especially against like a profit driven country like the U S. Wow. So it's crazy that to think that being profitable could be your weakness.

1:33:41That's interesting, right? Yeah. Wow. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund as of December, 2022 was China investment corporation managing assets, reaching around a 1.35 trillion U S dollars. Where do we rank in that? Pull up like the top 10 list of sovereign wealth funds. Norway, Qatar, GIC, the one we just talked about, national welfare, oh no, China, China Investment Corporation. And Tamasek, that's Singapore. Public investment fund could be us, but who knows? Oh, it's Saudi Arabia. Huh. So those are the big, 10 biggest sovereign wealth funds. So those can really... Somebody's got to have a list for how much assets each of them have.

1:34:23at 1.7 trillion seems small to me. But we're not even on the top 10 list. We don't operate a sovereign. As far as I know, the U.S. doesn't operate a sovereign wealth fund like this because it's not how we think. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, you start to, yeah, you don't think about how perspective and mindset affects how an entire country operates, really. No, the United States does not have a federal sovereign wealth fund, but several states do. These funds are usually smaller than international SWFs and can serve different purposes. For example, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, established in the early 1980s, has roughly$67 billion in assets and was created to ensure that Alaskan citizens benefited from oil extracted from state lands.

1:35:08Wow, that's some forward thinking. And that's like Norway too. Norway's is very similar to Alaska, where it's like they are an oil wealthy nation and so they created a sovereign wealth fund to benefit the citizens. Oh, that's smart. Texas also, it says, has two sovereign wealth funds, including the Texas Permanent School Fund, which was founded in 1854 and manages 46.5 billion in assets to benefit public schools. Wow. That's pretty incredible. Yeah. Just to think that they had that forethought. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And they're going to think maybe I'm going to own the land, the schools on just different things like that.

1:35:37Yeah. And then, so these foreign countries have these massive pools of cash that they can use strategically. Yeah. It's interesting, man. You start like seeing the chess players on the board, like moving in different ways. what states are um are looking out for their land what states are kind of at the head of the forefront were you able to notice any of that uh off the top of my head you know well so like i think iowa has a law that that foreign companies uh can't own farmland in iowa it's off the top of my head. And, um, but like, is it, you know, like the question is, is like, does it really matter if it's a foreign company or a domestic company, if they're doing good by the local people?

1:36:25Right. Right. Like ultimately in that, like, who cares? Like, are you doing well by the local people? Is there enough water there? Are you creating jobs? Like, you know, is it like people, local people prospering? Like that's like, I don't know, at the end of the day, like what people are going to care about. Right. Right. Like, I think what becomes dangerous is when you see these things that are just like highly extractive to the, to the detriment, you know, of the local folks who are seeing their water disappear, um, who aren't seeing like a lot of job creation, you know, like, right. There's no return on it for them.

1:36:58Right. And especially if it's their space, you know, I even pulled up on that Saudi farm. I remember, I think I pulled up visas and they were bringing in workers, if I'm recalling correctly, from the Philippines. So they'd be like, well, we're creating jobs. And I'm like, man, you guys are pulling visas. So you're bringing in workers from the Philippines to work on your farm. Yeah. You probably have farmers right in the area that would do it. Yeah. So these things are complicated. So many loopholes and stuff. There's so many tricky ways out there. Yeah. So when you look at places not having enough water, right?

1:37:33America has a lot of water. Totally. Right. And a lot of land and a small population. Okay. So we're probably in a really good space. We're in a good space, right? Yep. What places aren't in good spaces? And we're in a good space except for like these like regional examples, right? Like places in the West and the Southwest places that are going to get potentially a lot hotter, you know? Um, so I, I got these classified cables answering your question, like what places aren't in a good space? I got these classified cables and I'm from, uh, the U S embassy that had gone. What does that mean like uh diplomatic cables that the state department was sending back from its embassy in switzerland back to uh the u.s government here sometimes that stuff goes to like cia the state department other other but cables what's the term it's paperwork or yeah it's like a report they'll send back yeah got it um and uh and so there the some folks from the u.s embassy in switzerland had gone to the the headquarters of nestle and nestle is like the world's largest food company and the chief economist at Nestle sort of gave him a tour and like a perspective from the world's largest food company about how screwed up everything was.

1:38:37And they talked about the regions that were going to get hit hardest by not having enough water. And so that's like China. It was like India, the Middle East, but it was also the Western United States, you know, like the Western United States is in a pretty tough spot when it comes to having enough water to keep doing all the things they're currently doing. And so, yeah. And that was like the hot take from Nestle was like, you know, forget about it. At that time, it was like the, it was 2009. It was the Great Recession. And Nestle's just like, forget about it. That's going to resolve itself. The world is running out of enough water to feed everybody.

1:39:15Right. Yeah. And so do states start to plan ahead? You think some of them would? I think some of them do. These things like water, people will always tell you water is super local, right? And so some counties, some regions within states and some states themselves are doing better than others. And some countries are definitely doing better than others just in terms of like planning ahead. And it is solvable, man. That's like the thing with a lot of the issues that we face. We're a super smart species. We've done a lot of stuff. We could still do a lot of stuff. We just have to move off of the trend lines that we're currently headed on.

1:39:51And those trend lines are more like me, me, me. Instead of us, is that it? Or is it like, because is there enough water for everybody? There is enough water to grow enough food that everyone in the world could eat. Not even like today, man, which we, what are we, 7 billion people or so? Like there's enough water to grow enough food to feed 10 billion people. You know, like it's not just a population issue. It kind of goes back to what I was saying about China, where it's like, they just, now they're just wealthier, man. And they're eating more meat. And Nestle in that classified cable said like, if everyone in the world ate as much meat per capita as Americans do, we would have run out of fresh water in the year 2000.

1:40:29Wow. Right. And, and I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a vegan, right. I'm just like, this is what the world's largest food company is saying, you know? And, um, I know people love beef and I know people love steak, you know, and like it's there, but like, but that's all of it. But when it comes to like, how can we shift, how can we take some personal responsibility to putting us in a place we want to be. That's one area we can look at. And it's not even saying like you need to become vegetarian or vegan. It's just like, how much meat do you need to be a healthy human? Right. Right. And you got people with obesity and heart attacks, you know, and all these issues.

1:41:03You got people damn snorting meat out there. You got some real mammal pervs out there. You know, people who will just cook anything that wandered up on their porch even and eat it. And won't even share it with their spouse either. I had a buddy that had a t-shirt, and this is in San Francisco, so he definitely pissed people off. But his shirt said, meat is murder. Delicious, delicious murder. Just trolling people. Yeah, that's definitely, definitely. People love it. Well, you do have businesses like Bill Gates is starting like a Beyond Meat. Is that his company or no? I can't remember if he invested in that one.

1:41:45There's like, yeah, Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers. Yeah, I think it's Impossible Burgers maybe. Yeah, a lot of those guys got really – they got funding. And again, those were like – that's a way to replace meat with a less water-intensive meat substitute, something that tastes like meat. Right. Yeah. Right. So that's one way that people could preserve water probably. We still have to grow the – Yeah, it just requires a lot, lot, lot less water to eat a grain than it does to feed enough grains to eat an animal. Got it. Yeah. And what about other methods that people – you hear about like desalinization.

1:42:19Totally. You hear about cloud seeding. Yeah. I'm not sure what other methods they are. I believe cloud seeding is very expensive. Yeah, and I don't know as much about cloud seeding. And I remember like one of my buddies, he learned I was doing this and I'd moved off organized crime. And I was looking at this. You got to look at cloud seeding. And I was like, dude, that's some conspiracy shit you read online. and I looked at it. I was like, oh no, people do really do cloud seeding. Like I think the ski resorts were doing cloud seeding. I think the Israeli government was doing cloud seeding. But yeah, I think it's expensive.

1:42:45It hasn't really found a practical application. As far as I know, this isn't my area of expertise. Like desal, desal I'm more familiar with. Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that improves a cloud's ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny ice nuclei into certain types of sub-freezing clouds. So you You have a cloud that's already there, and I guess you then, it looks like just fire ice particles into it. And precipitates the rain out or something. Four-hour operation. A four-hour operation that seeds 24 clouds can cost around$5 ,000. Wow. So rich people could have rain or something if they wanted to have like a Noah's art party or like the perfect storm, if they wanted to do a perfect storm reenactment of that movie.

1:43:34per acre cloud seeding operations can cost around 40 cents per planet acre or 10 to 15 dollars per acre foot for additional water that's in utah well that's actually not you know this is not my area of expertise but 10 to 15 dollars for an acre foot of water that's a lot of water and that's a that's a really low price um so if that you know and that's in utah specifically right so they're going to have their own like climatology their own hydrology like um so it can be super specific but 10 to$15 for an acre foot is really cheap for water. Yeah. Because you start talking about desalination plant and now you're talking about $2 ,000 per acre foot.

1:44:13Really? Yeah. So that's very expensive. Yeah. And like we're growing tomatoes typically with like$50 per acre foot water and an acre foot just, it's a, it's, it's actually super simple. It's how, if an acre foot is the equivalent of flooding an acre of land with one foot of water. Okay. Yeah. The global cloud seeding market is estimated to have a valuation of$131.4 million in 2023. Over the forecast period from 2023 to 2030, it is projected to experience substantial growth with an estimated compound annual growth of 5.8%. By 2030, the market is expected to reach a value of$194.4 million. So it's getting more popular.

1:44:54They're saying this is a market insights website. so if I don't know if that's legit or not but what else does it say anything else on there? here's an article right here not since Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD has the American West been so dry a recent study in nature climate change found the period 2021 was the driest in 22 years in more than a millennium attributing a fifth of that anomaly to human caused climate change hmm Lake Mead and Lake Powell have reached their lowest levels ever Triggering unprecedented cuts in water allocations Cloud seeding operations have also expanded In water stretched regions outside Let me see Within the past two years Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and California Have expanded cloud seeding operations

1:45:48So they're trying it Yeah I remember the ski resorts doing it And people are doing it I wonder how much water ultimately you're going to be able to squeeze out of the atmosphere by shooting these minerals up into it. But yeah. Ian, how effective is it? Like if you spend the money to shoot the water, to put the particles out there, but cloud seeding should not be thought of as a response to drought. Experts agree for one, in a drought, there are likely to be fewer seedable storms. That's a good point. And when there are storms, even the estimates from cloud seeding companies themselves show the practice increases precipitation by only around 10 % in a given area.

1:46:25That might be worth the effort when every acre foot counts, but it's not going to end a drought across an entire region. So you have to have a storm already there. I see, yeah. So that's kind of interesting. Oh, super interesting. You can't just completely create a storm. Not yet anyway. Right, right. It's like terraforming the earth at that point. Yeah. Yeah. That gets, yeah, when it becomes like air sims or whatever, it's going to get weird. And what about desalinization? It's super expensive. because basically it takes a ton of energy, like electricity, to basically push water through what's just like a giant filter and pull out the salt or whatever it is that's contaminated the water.

1:47:04And so the water ends up costing 100 times what farmers are paying for it now, and oftentimes it makes crops unaffordable. So it's good for drinking water. People use desal all the time for drinking water and for some industrial use. But at the price, it becomes very difficult to create food with that expensive of water. Are some countries saying you can't buy land here? Some countries are like that, right? For sure. Right. Yeah, yeah. And they're saying you can't grow that type of crop here because it requires too much water. Yeah. Right? Other countries are getting really selective as to how their water is going to be used and what it can be used for.

1:47:46It's so tough for us to think because we've manipulated so many other markets and has done things ourselves. You know, you would go upstream from your neighbor and split that river that split that creek that's headed your way if you had to. And that's what that's what you're seeing. And that's, you know, people are just seeing like the river their village relies on all of a sudden now is diverted. And it's for a palm oil plantation. Right. And that's more and more what you're seeing. In Africa and places like that, you mean? Yeah. Central America, like Guatemala, I think, has one of the largest expanding palm oil plantation in the world.

1:48:19yeah what do you think there's a way a solution like yeah what do you look at is well first off i think people just need to know what's happening right just like bottom you're saying yeah bottom line and then and then dude we just need to empower and push our government to putting forward like the best minds you know i think like right now basically the laws that we have on the books for water around this country were are from like the 1800s yeah right like when water when there were few people, there was water was plentiful. Yeah. No gargling water in church and stuff. You're like, that shouldn't be in the, uh, in the, um, state doctrine, you know?

1:48:56Yeah. And, and, and now, and now water's tight and there's a lot more people. And so we, you know, they need to go back onto the books and revise the laws to be like, okay, so what do we want our water laws to look like in this place? Given the realities we have now in the 21st century and not the 19th century, right? Like it's, it's like all this stuff, man. and it's kind of common sense, but we're just not getting it done. Yeah, and it's like, how is it tough to get it done when a lot of the great minds, it feels like are working on the other side of popular sentiment. Is that a fair statement?

1:49:31Yeah, how do you mean like which? Like that the best researchers and a lot of great journalists and lobbyists even are working for bigger companies or in the private sector more to garner information and learn information to give that to the private sector to better do their doings that they're doing. Does that make sense? It does. I think, you know, journalists are always going to try to give the information to the public. There's just fewer of them. And yeah, I think the private sector has a lot more resources to manipulate, you know, the markets to what they want, right? Which oftentimes can be quarterly profits or annual profits.

1:50:11And we need our government to be like, okay, okay, okay. but what's in our long-term best interest, right? Like what do we want for your kids and your grandkids? And I think that's where we really need to be pushing folks. Yeah, and some of the companies are doing it because they're beholding to their stockholders who are the very people who are wishing that companies wouldn't do this sort of thing. That's really crazy, isn't it? I mean, dude, you've seen the duck and it's like in the duck, man. It's like, so Holly Irwin is the county supervisor in Arizona that we follow. and what county is that in it's in La Paz County okay right and that's like a deeply red county you know Holly is is a Republican like a conservative Republican and now she's she's fighting for what people might be like that's an environmental issue no she's fighting for the water of the country of the county right and she's working with Democrats which is great like you got Republicans and Democrats coming together finally to like work on something and come up with solutions.

1:51:08But what I showed to Holly was, and she didn't know this, you know, she's like, oh, the Saudis have come, they're taking our water, you know? And I said, but Holly, look here, this is your pension fund from the state of Arizona. Look what it's invested in. That farm right over there that's shipping hay to China and the UAE, that was bought with your pension fund money. Like it's your own pension fund. Your retirement fund is helping export the water that you need to stay, to be here and for people to retire here. But how I'm not following that. Yeah. Right. So like how they use the money. So they had a pension fund, but the Saudis came in and bought the land.

1:51:45So that's a separate one, right? So you got the Saudis are there, but there's another big farm owned by a company out of North Carolina and the Arizona state pension fund gave a bunch of money to that, to IFC, this company out of North Carolina, and then IFC rented it to a company from the United Arab Emirates that's controlled by like the brother of the ruler of the country that's controlled by a guy whose like job it is to control national security in the country. And so they're shipping it overseas. And so like at the end of the day, Holly's pension fund, you know, she's like fighting so hard to keep the water there in her county so her people can stay there.

1:52:26And then our own pension fund is financing a deal that shipping water overseas. Right. Cause it's more short-term profit than it is a long-term vision. Yeah. And so how do you try to align those things? How do you, how do you align with Holly wants money to retire on? Holly wants water for her County to live on for the next hundred plus years. Right. Wow. Interesting, man. What were some other, there was some other stories that I was investigating that you had, or that I was researching that you had looked at. One that I found was interesting was this Somali pirate scenario. Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

1:52:58So this was a guy from the intelligence community who told me this, you know, and wasn't the only person that told me this. But he just said, look, like Somali pirates, like we think of them as like pirates, like they took to the high seas, you know, like. But what they were, they were fishermen. They were just fishermen along the coast and foreign trawlers from other countries. I think his example was primarily China. We're coming in and just depleting the fishing stocks. Right. So these guys that are on the Somali coast, they got pretty basic systems for fishing. And then these big badass boats come in with these super deep nets and they just scoop up all the fish.

1:53:37So what do the dudes do? The same thing you and I would do if somebody was doing that to us. We come together. We sit around. We have a drink. We're like, dude, how do we stop that? And we're like, dude, next time one of those things come through, we're going to go out there in our shitty little boat with some guns and take it over and tell them to stop doing it. And we create like a little small coast guard. Well, that sounds like what they kind of did, right? And so then they have a little Coast Guard and they're trying to fight back against these trawlers. And then they take one hostage and they're like, dude, you guys have been taking all our fish.

1:54:03Give us money and we'll give you your boat back because you've been taking all our fish. And they do, right? And then they're like, well, that kind of escalates because maybe we should get a bigger, we should hijack a bigger boat next time because now we don't have any fish. Like we're not selling anything. We can't buy our kids books. Now they're in the boat abduction business. Yes, right? And so that's how these things evolved. It started as some dudes just being like, we just wanted to protect our fishing stock, right? To being like, now we're taking over huge oil tankers and demanding. And then what ended up happening?

1:54:31And then the oil tankers hire mercenaries or private security corporations to come in, oftentimes former like special forces guys or guys that have a background working for a national military service. And they come in with guns and they're blowing everyone up. And you're like, these dudes, in the beginning of this story, these dudes just wanted their fish. Right. They just wanted their food supply. Yes. Which is so ironic because it's really the same other same thing we're talking about. It is, man. It's like basic. They just wanted to eat. Yep. It's super basic. And when you're not eating, two months later, you are a pirate.

1:55:06Yeah. It turns out, man, if we solve like something super basic, like just making sure everyone around the world has enough food, we're going to see. Because this is the other thing is like Boko Haram. Again, I mean, I could go on to these stories forever, man. And what is Boko Haram? It's a terrorist organization in Nigeria. Okay. And in that region of the world. Well, that was where Lake Chad was. And if you look back on maps, satellite maps of Lake Chad, like 30 years ago, it was the giant lake. And now it's just like a pond. It's shrunk way down because people have been diverting the rivers that flow into it for farming fields.

1:55:37And the people that lived there that were fishing out of that, it was a huge lake. They lost their livelihoods. And then people start getting pissed. They start getting radicalized. People are hungry. Then like some people with crazy ideas start being like, well, you join my group. I'll feed you. people are taken from us all of a sudden, you know, just like, and it just spirals, man. And then you just end up with these crazy groups that are abducting children that are blowing things up. And like the beginning, like the, the origin of that story was like, people got thrown into shit by not having their basic necessities met like food.

1:56:10And then things spiral out of control, right. A little like Mad Max kind of style, you know, I mean, it could get really weird everywhere. Yeah. So that's what like, that's what we're hoping doesn't happen. Right. But then, you know, it's life. It's always gone on. Society has always gone on in some form or other, whether we end up in tribes or whatever, you know. Yeah. It's like that's humanity. You know, you start to get this idea of what humanity is based on your own childhood and things you've heard and also the safety that we feel in America. Don't you feel like we've lost our tribes, our community though?

1:56:44Like everyone's got their little like suburb. They don't have to interact with anybody anymore. And like. 100%. Everybody's just like, like, yeah. And it's. I feel like a country of loneliness, man. I feel like half the problems we see is just because people feel isolated and lonely and depressed. And they're not like, they're not like in a community anymore. They're not seeing the same people every Sunday or they're not going out. Like, dude, I play ice hockey, right? I play ice hockey and those dudes are awesome. And I am so lucky to be able to go and see that same group of cool dudes and just play hockey and have that community.

1:57:17And like, I think a lot of us in so much of our communities around what going out to the bar and getting drunk. And like, I used to drink a lot and now I think alcohol is a shitty drug, right? Like, I think it's bad medicine. Like, you know, I think I, I view like, you know, a lot of this stuff, I think they should be viewed medicinally. And yeah, it's just like sports piss almost really, you know, I mean, yeah, I don't drink. I mean, I prefer cocaine probably, but that's not even that good for you. And it's like, I think, um, yeah, I definitely feel you though. It's like, where do you meet up with people?

1:57:47I mean, I go to a recovery meeting, so I've seen people there all the time. So you have like some semblance of groupness, but yeah, it's like everybody gets their food delivered. A lot of times the family, it's just, you're staring at a phone, your food's getting delivered. You're not going outside. And it's like, how do we re-instill like a stronger community in the U S right? Because, okay, dude, I have a little cabin in a teeny town, like 100 people. And those people are across the board politically on the spectrum. And it doesn't matter if somebody's voting one way and somebody else is voting the other way.

1:58:19If somebody's like house floods, people are going to show up. People are going to help each other out. That's what it is to be a good person. It's not who you vote for or what you necessarily like your political ethos. It's like, dude, did something bad happen to you? Does your community come out and support you? That's community. And that's what I feel like we're losing. Right. We're so distracted about, I feel like petty crap right now that we're forgetting it's time. We just need to show up for each other. Yeah. I wonder if you're going to see more of an influx towards like religious services, even not even entirely for religion, but for community.

1:58:53It's like some of the first places you go back to for community. Like, yeah, one thing I always loved about church was just seeing like the kids play together. You're all sitting there in peace. Even it's like if you're just in your own thoughts, like thinking of something bigger than yourself, no matter what your denomination was or whatever, or yeah. Yeah. So I grew up, my dad was a Lutheran pastor and, and, and I, you know, I don't, I don't go to, I don't go to church anymore. I don't follow those beliefs anymore, but I miss that Sunday get together, man, because you would show up and, you know, there would be like a tax preparer there and you knew you'd see them every Sunday and you could rely on them.

1:59:29There was a mechanic that was there and you knew that they'd show up every Sunday and you would rely and they weren't going to screw you. And there was a sense of community, like in that community where people that had vocational trades across the board and you could trust each other and you can know each other and you could ask them questions. You could get knowledge, you could share experience, you could carry each other, right? Like showing up to that one place every week and having that community. That's what I feel like so much is what that's been lost. I feel like it'll be a few generations and I feel like there will be a rebellious generation that will throw off the VR headsets and masturbate naturally if there's a way to do that into the ocean or whatever and reclaim what it feels like or at least go in search of what it feels like to be human.

2:00:12Yeah, man. That's what I think would probably happen. And are you talking about this with other buddies too? Because I feel like I'm having this conversation more and more with buddies like, dude, how do we create community again? Like I said, it can be as simple as like finding a good hockey team, right? And just like, because after every game, man, it doesn't matter if that game starts at 1030 p.m. at night and we're not in the parking lot until midnight or like 1 a.m. Dudes are going to stand around and drink a beer. Oh, yeah. Just catch up. Have a blast. Have a nice time. It's the same after any real get together.

2:00:42People always kind of mill around, see what's going on. You and one buddy or two guys might stay late if one of them is having a problem and they'll talk about it. Yeah. If everything's cool that you're out of there, kind of like one of the first couple of guys out, but you're joking around. Yeah, I think that thing is – I feel like we would find ways – in the end, I feel like you just believe enough in something that we can't create outside of us, that's inside of us, that would lead us to. victory in some sense, like some human spirit or something that will prevail. It always kind of feels like that.

2:01:20I think it just feels like we're down maybe two rounds to one right now. Yeah, I feel like it's tough for that human spirit to connect through a phone. Yeah, I think it's hard, man. And I think there's a lot of like, I have to be doing something all the time. There's a lot of factors in it. It's interesting to think about. Before you leave, I know you worked in organized crime. You mentioned that a little while ago. And what'd you do in it, bookies or what was it? Pretty close, man. And it was a lot of casino work. It was a lot of Asian organized crime. I went over to Macau, which became like - Oh, that's by Hong Kong, huh?

2:01:53Yeah. I went there once. Hong Kong or Macau? I went across the ferry there. I went to both of them. That's a fun ferry ride, right? Yeah, it was nice, dude. Some lady I think was either flirting with me or trying to tell me I had something on my shirt or something. Yeah, it's a wild place, man. They do more revenue than Vegas does now. It became massive. When I was there, it'd become just like, in a very short period, it'd become massive. and I was over there because we were looking into how what the U.S. government largely considered was organized crime people connection to triads etc were working inside of the casinos to bring money from mainland China that could be gambled in Macau because that time there was like I think it was a five thousand dollar cap right like this was the law like you could only bring five thousand from mainland China into Macau but then you'd go and you go to the casino and people are betting like 500 ,000 us per hand.

2:02:43You're like, well, how is that money? And it was basically this informal credit network, which is like, we know you're good for it in China. So we'll spot it for you in Macau. Right. But if you don't pay your debts, you're probably going to be found burned up and shot in your car. Wow. You know? And so like that was the ecosystem. And then these big us casinos were operating in that ecosystem. And so how does all of that? Yeah. So I went over there. And like, my job was to try to get these guys to go on camera, to open up to me and to tell me about this operation. And as one of the U S you know, casino bosses, a white guy from America said to me is like, he's like, man, that dude who's casino you're staying in for the six weeks you're here is known.

2:03:23If people say stuff, he doesn't like for hanging them out their window, you know? And like, that's where I was staying. And, um, yeah, and it was, it was, that's a rough start. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was, um, you're just down there looking and we say triads. What is that mean? Triads are like a British word for what they would describe as Asian organized crime networks. Um, and, and the triads actually have this super interesting history that go back to martial arts, um, to the Shaolin temple and to like all the way back to like the overthrow of the emperor, man. It's like, it gets like, that's why the triad guys are known for being such bad-asses with regards to martial arts.

2:03:58Like I still get calls from federal prison pretty frequently from a guy named Raymond shrimp boy chow and shrimp boy shrimp boy. Amen. Yeah. And, uh, dude, just crazy, bad-ass martial arts guy. Um, but, uh, yeah, he'll call, you know, he, he, I, and I, I went to him because I knew I was going to Macau and he hadn't been arrested. Now he's, now he's in prison doing, I think multiple life sentences. Um, yeah, but, uh, but that's just a, that's a different world, man. Cause you're operating, um, in a world of violence, right? Yeah. That's how they solve it there. If you, yeah, that, you know. Things are punishable by real violence.

2:04:38Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it's kind of organized. So it's difficult to go in as an investigative journalist into that, you know. And so the first thing I'd always do is just tell people right away, like, I am an investigative journalist. I'm looking into this. You know, that's my role. And I don't necessarily need to push people for answers right away. But, like, I don't want anybody thinking that, like, I'm sneaking around behind their back or, like, trying to be transparent about it. Super transparent. So there's a different level of respect if you come in like that over there. Yeah. And I do that with everybody.

2:05:05Like as a journalist, if I'm working on a story, I always identify myself as a journalist right away. You know, like this is what I'm working on. This is my interest, you know, and then over there, it's like, we don't got to deal with that right away. You can just identify me as a person, you know, in, in parts of China that I've traveled to. One of the things people want to do when they're going to get into business with you is they just want to get hammered with you. Yeah. They just want to get hammered because they want to see what kind of drunk you are. are you going to be a total dick when you're drunk or are you going to still just be like kind of funny and happy and upbeat and like honest or what kind of drunk are you?

2:05:39Um, and so like there are just different ways. And so sometimes you identify who you are and then you just kind of a human for a little bit, just like, just hang out. Yeah. I never wanted to be Chinese that much really. I mean, I haven't, I haven't not wanted to be it, but I haven't, I'll be honest. I, yeah, I haven't really wanted to be it. I guess I would be willing to be it, but I don't, I would probably think about it a lot more than I have recently why do Chinese businessmen insist on getting you drunk that's interesting in a culture where relationships can make or break you in business getting drunk with a potential business partner is often viewed as a crucial way of solidifying that relationship and showing that you are in fact friends huh

2:06:27let me think is there anything about the liquor anything more about booze alcohol is a very long tradition in Confucian society Confucius who advocated only eating at mealtimes and not in between made an exception for wine he said only wine drinking is not limited so Confucian really liked to have that he liked to have a little sip in the daytime time. No, no shade, no shade before you go. Have, is there, have there been stories that you wanted to go to and you just didn't have the time? Oh dude, that's all the time. That's like the thing that haunts me most right now. Um, just like really important stories that people come to me and they want me to look into.

2:07:05Um, and I, it's just like, it's super tough to find the time, you know, there's just too many things that I would love to be able. I wish, you know, yeah so it happens yeah and who funds like investigative reporting who funds like guys like you so i work at a non-profit called the center for investigative reporting okay it's like a super old non-profit's been around since the 70s it was a bunch of rolling stones reporters when rolling stones used to be based in san francisco um they ended up moving it to new york and a bunch of the reporters didn't want to move to the east coast they liked san francisco and one of those guys was one of my mentors lul bergman who i don't know if you ever saw the movie insider with Al Pacino, but Al Pacino was playing Lowell.

2:07:46Lowell was the one that got the documents from, you know, inside the tobacco companies that showed that like the, they knew that it was a carcinogen. They knew it was addictive and they were, they were hiding and, and not being straight up with Congress. So I work at a nonprofit, which is a super fortunate place to be because we're not profit. Like, you know, I worked on this documentary, that documentary could make a gazillion dollars and I'm not going to make it die more. Right. It's just not like what the drive is. Right. Right. You know, like, and so, um, and it's also because investigative journalism isn't profitable.

2:08:17Um, letting me, yeah, no dude, letting me spend a year and a half diving into like, is Facebook and the social media company targeting your weakness? It is not profitable. Um, and so we have to get foundations and others to give us money, to give us the time and people, people donate to us to give us the time to look into this stuff so I can just share with the public. It would be hugely profitable if I wanted to take that, my same skills and go work for a hedge fund. I can make four or five times what I make. Right. Um, and, but, but people are willing to, to, to, to pay me to do it, you know, like a modest salary.

2:08:53Like I'll, I'll do it, man. Like, cause I love stories, dude. I love stories. I love, like I used to sit in and I was a little kid and I used to tell my, my grandma, my mom's mom, just tell me a story from your mind, you know, and she would just wax. And now meeting people, you know, like, I just like to hear their stories, like what's their background, where'd they come from? You know, it doesn't have to be like totally revelatory. It's just like, we're all so complex. We're all so interesting, you know, but when I can spend time diving into something like Susie Kelly story, where like this crazy technology company identified that her brain had this weakness and targeted her, then I want to spend a bunch of time and share it with people, right?

2:09:30Because we know it's not just happening to Susie. Yeah. I mean, and it's so sick that that would happen. It was almost if you saw someone who was disabled and somebody, someone had a broken leg and someone kept kicking a minute, you know? Yeah. And, and, and that's, and I do that. I think that's a really good analogy. And then like, they were kicking them because it was making them money. Right. Yeah. And you're like, what are you doing? How are you? And I don't, I don't get it. I'll just tell you that like fundamentally on a personal level, I don't get it. Cause I couldn't do that. You know, like yeah that's the thing that's tough it's like and then sometimes i feel like am i normal or am i the weirdo that gives a fuck about stuff you know i'm saying is that ever crossing your mind yeah dude it does it does um and i don't know i think i think whatever i think we're all broken in our own way and whatever my little broken way has made me an investigative journalist um but whatever it feels fun though could be paul revere or whatever even though somebody said he was trying to meet men that's the only reason he was going through town or whatever that's what have heard but um but to be that kind of guy who's like you know trying to you know like yeah we've always loved the underdog dude we are you know underdog that's who you you want the underdog yeah you know yeah yeah like everybody's like everybody wants a nude picture of like um pam anderson or something you know i wanted a new picture of aaron brokovich on my wall you know no kidding yeah yeah that was a badass that uncovered a lot of stuff and got a lot of good out there in the world and pretty dimey too in her time.

2:10:58I'll say that. And I think it's a compliment, Aaron, but, um, what else do we have? Anything else that we wanted to talk about? I don't, I feel like we covered a really good bit, Nate. So we can, people can donate to the center for investigative research reporting. Yeah. So the center for investigative reporting, that's a legitimate company. Yeah, man. It's a legitimate nonprofit. And, uh, you know, people can even just check it out. We got a, we got a, uh, radio show we do. That's just all investigated journalism. Really? Yeah. We print, you know, we work with other folks and we have the documentary.

2:11:28I mean, at the end of the day, dude, just trying to get good information into people's hands and like call to account, like people that are targeting other people. Yeah. If you don't have food, you'll get so caught in the moment. You don't even have a chance to look ahead at that point. It's going to be moment to moment. I mean, that's all right, dude. That's totally right. So then it's a wrap. Then, then you're just trying to get food for you and your family and you start doing weirder and weirder stuff. And even people that, you know, Do you ever record McCarthy? He wrote like The Road. Yeah, dude.

2:11:57He wrote some real. No Country for Old Men. Yeah. Strange stuff. Super. And I love it. But like The Road, he basically breaks it down to like, are you willing to kill? If it comes down to it, would you kill somebody else to eat them? Right? And like you're a good person if you're willing to just like be like, damn, I'm just going to have to starve to death because I'm not going to murder somebody else to eat them. Or are you going to murder somebody else to eat them? like kind of bifurcates humanity along that along that track yeah uh and people get weird man people get weird when the basic necessities aren't there yeah you'll say that you wouldn't right but you would also say you would know i wouldn't eat out of a dumpster because the dumpster outside right now i would not go eat out of it but give me three days without food right if you're about to eat a dude in best buy right like yeah you're gonna eat out of that dumpster oh yeah yeah that's what's crazy.

2:12:47You would eat that alley sashimi, baby. You'd eat whatever out of there. Yeah, for sure. And he'd be, you'd be stoked. And dude, you know, like, yeah. Those are crepes. That's what I keep yelling. Those are crepes. I'm going to go forage it with you. I'm going to be in just garbage. You'd be like, dude, that's a crepe. And I'd be like, really? I'm in. I think you got to trick yourself. It's all crepes, bro. Yeah. We're both just going to like mentally just redesign whatever garbage we're eating. That's a wet napkin, homie. What are you talking about, brother? Don't tell me that. It's got to be nutritional value.

2:13:18That's a damn crepe. Nate Halverson, thanks so much. The Grab, it's coming out on Netflix. No, it's coming out on June 14th in theaters. Yeah, and then people can rent it online and then it'll be on one of the streaming platforms in the fall. Okay, so The Grab, it's coming out on June 14th in theaters. Yeah, it's really interesting, man. Just thought-provoking to get me to start thinking like, yeah, what are, because you just think, oh, that's just a farm in my neighborhood or you just think like oh um that's just the way things are that's just the way things go you don't sometimes see like maybe the um chess board that's being put together or that's already been you know the plays that have already been played um Nate Halverson thanks so much for being an investigator and for spending time with us hey Theo thanks so much for me on Yeah, you bet, man.