#157 Peter Berg - Exposing Big Pharma, Lone Survivor, and Hollywood’s Dark Side

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Pleasure, man. Thank you.
Man, I can't even believe you're sitting here. I've watched so many of your movies and series, and to have you sitting here is pretty surreal.
Well, I feel the same way. I've watched a lot of your shows, and I figure it's good for you to expand your reach and get a director to come on here because I think I asked you if you'd had any other directors, and you said not yet.
So I'm glad to be here. I'm a big fan of yours, and good job, man.
Man, thank you. Thank you.
I am curious. I have to know this.
How the hell did my—like, you've got to be a super busy guy, and with who you appear to be surrounded by, I mean, how did this pop up on your radar?

I was trying to think about

when I first came to know of you.

You know, I know a lot of SEALs

and it might've been Marcus or Morgan Luttrell

that somehow got you on my radar.

And a couple of other guys that are living in California that I know, but just your name came up. You know, I'm always interested in anything a SEAL is doing, particularly an ex-SEAL.
I know how challenging it can be for so many team guys to kind of figure out the next chapter of their life. And we get a lot of guys in L.A.
who are trying to figure it out and kind of trying to get into writing or directing or stunts. And I pay attention to that and try and help.
And I heard about you and how you had kind of found this whole new career for yourself. And having gone through, you know, the military experiences you have, I found it really fucking impressive.
Wow. And that caught my eye also.
So I don't think people understand how hard that transition is. I mean, obviously military guys do, but civilians don't.
They don't think about it. If they do, they, you know, kind of think about it.
But to go from the job that you've had, and, you know, I've been fortunate to have a pretty decent look at, you know, for a civilian, to understand how difficult it is to let go of that world and move into civilian life. I think it's important that people do make an effort.
I do, and I just have a lot of respect for what you've done. I am.
Thank you. A lot.
That means a hell of a lot coming from you. So I really appreciate it.
Well, let's... I got all kinds of stuff that we're going to talk about when it comes to that.
But everybody starts off with an introduction here. So, Peter Berg, you were born in the heart of New York City in the 1960s.
You moved to Los Angeles in your early 20s and have realized your dreams of becoming a celebrated film actor, writer, director, and producer, earning accolades across multiple platforms. Your approach to filmmaking is deeply personal, often focusing on real stories that highlight human endurance, teamwork, and the fight against adversity.
Your films are known for their gritty realism, emotional depth, and action that feels both authentic and exhilarating. Among your many creative endeavors, Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, and Deepwater Horizon stand out as highlights in your career.
More recently, you tackled the opioid epidemic. That's like super close to me, and I'm sure you know why, which we'll get into.
The opioid epidemic. Head on with your epic show, Painkiller.
Just one week after its release, Painkiller ranked number one in the top 10 English language series genre and currently has over 54 million hours viewed. And on January 9th, you're about to introduce your latest project, American Primeval Into the World on Netflix.
I look forward to discussing that today. Thank you for giving us a sneak peek.
That, like, it looks so awesome and so realistic. And, like, the sounds in it are, it's amazing.
It's amazing. I think you'll like it.

I can't wait.

I can't wait for that to come out.

And clear eyes, full hearts.

Can't lose.

Can't lose.

Let's dig in.

So also, everybody gets a gift.

Just a little something for the flight home. Open it now, right? Yeah, go ahead.
Open it up. So Rob, vigilance.
Oh, the gummy bears. Yeah.
Okay. They're not going to get me high? I'm not going to get me a rest or anything? No, you'll have to go back home to California to get those.
Okay. I can get them.
But. I love gummy bears.
Yeah, those are good. A little something for the fun oh well here's here's yours i got you i got you this because i said i might need it oh i'm not good with three hours that's from what i understand some of tennessee's finest uh from right here right in frank, man, this is awesome.
Yeah.

Franklin Distillery.

Yes, sir.

Perfect.

Thank you.

And then I got you, this is a limited edition.

This is an American Primeval crew hat, which generally we had to earn up on the mountain.

But I figure you've definitely done your fair share of earnings. So that's a gift from me and the entire crew of American Primeval.
Man, thank you. I'm going to have you sign this.
This is going to be a relic in the studio. I'd be honored.
Thank you. This is very cool.
Yeah, that's rare. That's a collector's piece.
Perfect. Cool, man.
I'll get it. Yeah, we'll have you sign it after the interview here.
And then one last thing. I got a Patreon account.
They're my top subscribers, top supporters. Okay.
They're the reason I get to be here and you get to be here. They've been with us since the beginning.
And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. And you had a ton.
So this is from Tori Miller. With so many great movies that you've directed and several based on true events, which movie was the most stressful to film and made you feel that you got it right when it finally released? Right.
So I've been asked this question before, and I'll give the real answer. Like, you know, I could just say, oh, well, Lone Survivor is my favorite, or Friend at Life is my favorite.
But the truth is, they're all incredibly fucking hard to make. Every single movie that any director makes, any TV show, is really, really hard.
You go into it believing you're going to touch God and achieve real greatness, and you're going to change lives, and you're going to tap into the divine creative forces of the universe, and you just don't always do it. Sometimes you fail miserably.
Sometimes you succeed. But the reality is they're all really, really challenging.
and you end up kind of looking back, at least I do, and loving certain things about every one of them, even the ones that suck. You know, because you don't go into it thinking, hey, man, I'm going to make a really shitty movie and I don't care.
No. You go into it like, you know, I would imagine, you know, an athlete goes into a game, a team guy goes into a building, you know, a dentist goes into a mouth with a drill.
You go in expecting to have a good result. You know, if you're like a competitive, ambitious human being being and so i try for them all to to work every single movie and you know i i love all of them they're all really stressful um if you really push me i'll probably say like lone survivor is my favorite and that was the most emotional yeah um but i I love them all.
Yeah, you've made some just amazing, amazing stuff. And, but yeah, I would say, I mean, that had to be a lot of pressure, you know, considering the events that happened that the movie's about.
And then in just our conversation before we actually officially started the interview about showing the families. I mean, that's tough.
I mean, that is... Yeah, and we're talking a little bit about it.
And for some reason, I always say, like, I want to make a love story. Just film a love story with a girl and a boy on a beach, drinking wine, kissing and crying and doing all the things that people do, falling in love on a beach.
And then I always end up on top of a mountain with a bunch of stunt guys fighting for their lives and, you know, pyrotechnics, bombs going off and weather and animals. And I can't seem to just make the love story.
So I tend to be drawn towards more challenging projects. and in the case of Lone Survivor, like right from the get-go when I met Marcus Luttrell

and, you know, first looked into his eyes

and... And in the case of Lone Survivor, like right from the get-go, when I met Marcus Luttrell and first looked into his eyes, I read the book quickly.
And he was in town interviewing directors, and a lot of directors wanted that story. So I met with him.
And literally, from the moment I sat down with him and looked into his eyes, I was kind of caught up in this spell of emotion and pain and sacrifice. And this energy that Marcus had kind of got me, and still to this day it still gets me, just FaceTiming him.
I have such a connection to him. But making Lone Survivor and, you know, started with going to the Dietz family, the Axelson, the Murphy family, and asking for their blessing and telling the story.
And all three of those meetings were very emotional. I remember going to Danny's parents' house in Colorado

and his father taking me into his bedroom, which they left kind of as it was, almost from a young age, or, you know, Hot Wheels and posters of girls and, you know, toys and all kinds of things. And there was also his uniform that had been recovered.
And his father- That they recovered? Holy shit. His father sat me down on Danny's bed, which is his bed from childhood.
And he had a piece of paper and he started reading from the paper. And he started talking about, I remember hearing after action report, autopsy.
And he started reading and he said, left knee, bullet, left thigh, bullet, groin, bullet. And I realized he was reading his son's autopsy report.
And he started shaking and he He said, abdomen, bullet. and I could see the tears falling out of his eyes and hitting that paper and he finished I can't remember how many times Danny Dietz was shot but a lot and he put the paper on my lap and his autopsy report was his father's tears in it and he said that's who my son was that's how tough my son was you make sure you get that right and i thought to myself okay what the have i gotten myself into with this um not a joke very very real to some very good decent human beings, parents and wives and siblings.
And it was a tremendous amount of pressure to make sure that when I was done and I showed that film to not just the families, but the entire SEAL community, I think Admiral McRaven was running either SOCOM or the SEALs.

I'm not sure what he was running when we finished, but I had to show it to him and all of those

folks and the families and everyone in between.

And every day I was making that film, I was thinking about the Murphys, the Dietzes, the Axelsons, Marcus. And so was the whole crew.
So was Mark Wahlberg. It became something much more than a movie for us.
We didn't quite realize the power of the brotherhood of the SEAL community, of your community. You know, at first, maybe certainly some of the actors didn't,

but very quickly everyone did.

And that movie had a special gear that is very hard to find.

I think if you ask Mark Wahlberg or Taylor Kitsch or Ben Foster,

anyone that was involved in that film,

we see each other, you know, text each other, and like, no, no, that was it. That was one that would be hard to replicate and a feeling that's very hard to get.
And the pressure to get it right was there every day, including the trail on set every day, reminding me that if I didn't get it right, he was going to kill me. So that every day I would, by the end, at first I was really scared, and then sort of halfway through I would see Marcus in the morning, I'd be like, I know, I have to do a really good job today or you're going to kill me.
Anything else? He'd be like, nope, that's it. I'd it.
And then I go about it.

Man.

And then he had Morgan kind of lurking his back up.

Yeah.

Because for me, Marcus was a scary one,

but Morgan was a really scary one who really didn't have to say much.

But have you met Morgan?

Do you know him at all?

I've never met him. He's such a great guy in Washington now, doing really well.

I just spoke to him last week.

Having those two guys suddenly in your life

and then just the general SEAL community was a gut check

and definitely focused a little bit harder every second than I have in some other films. The second half of basketball season is here, and the race to the playoffs is heating up on PrizePix.
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That's 866-781-8900 or go to AmericanFinancing.net slash SRS. Yeah, wow.

Now, that is, i mean that's you know we it's interesting you know i mean the kind of some things we can relate to that being one of them i mean we my platoon was the guys that went in and relieved them after that.

And I told you about the rounds up there. That just gave me goosebumps when I walked in here and saw the rounds from the Chinook that crashed.
I was not expecting to see that. Yeah, yeah.
It's pretty heavy. There's some heavy stuff in this room that's very historic.
But, yeah, yeah i remember you know when we we got the after actions report when we got into country and uh they showed us uh it was i think it was uh it was some kind of a recruiting video that um okay they put out yeah i saw it and uh you could i remember seeing i was new you know fairly new and i remember seeing danny deets uh upside down on the mountaintop and his cami blouse was pulled up and uh a lot of the guys in my platoon were in a were in a team with danny and they were like holy like he just He just got that tattoo, and I was with him when he got it on his rib cage. And it was just like, that's when it became very real for me.
I can't imagine how personal and how much emotion you guys must have felt seeing those videos. I saw those videos.
Rage. I mean, I would watch them every time we went out on an op.

That was my warm-up.

Yeah, man.

This is why the fuck we're doing this, because of this.

And then, you know, I can't wait to get into some of the opiate stuff, too,

with you. That's something we can relate on.
I lost my best friend to opiates who was struggling. You know, you were just talking about, you know, the transition from military, foreign military guys getting back into civilian, and everybody goes down the spiral, and he didn't make it out.
It was because of opiates. I mean...
Actually, it was because of that operation. So that was my best friend's team.
He was part of the recovery operation? He was part of the recovery operation. He was...
I'll tell you this. This was...
I've never. But that was his sister platoon.
He was in Iraq. They were having a great deployment, which means they were going after a lot of bad guys.
He had, his name's Gabe. I don't know if I should be doing this, but fuck it.
I'm going to do it. He had one of the worst runs I've ever heard.
He was engaged and had a mess up at a strip club and got a stripper pregnant. Broke off the engagement.
do the right thing um he was gonna do the right thing in in his mind which was to marry her marry the stripper have the baby and uh and he deployed to iraq well uh they were getting after it and she went into labor.

There were some complications.

So he left Iraq to come home and to be with her while the baby was born.

Gets home, goes to the hospital.

The baby's dead.

The mom is dead.

He doesn't tell anybody.

He goes back to SEAL Team 10 and says, hey, I want to go back with the guys over in Iraq. They say, oh, you didn't hear? The guys are coming home early.
He had screamed to go to development group. And they said, hey, you need to reenlist.
So how about you jump in with your sister platoon who's in Afghanistan right now?

He's like, well, I don't have any of my gear.

It's all in Iraq still.

And they said, don't worry, you don't need gear.

You're not going on operations.

You're just going to go over there, re-enlist, get it done, jump back on the bird, come home.

So he wears his dress camis, gets on the bird.

They land in Germany for a layover, find out that Marcus is on the run. Then he lands in Bagram.
So they know that three guys have died and that Marcus is on the run. They land in Bagram, and he finds out that the helo went down, which was all the rest of his friends.
Wants to go on the recovery op with Dev. They wouldn't let him on at first, and he's like, you don't have any kid.
You can't go. He's like, I don't give a fuck.
I'll scrounge up some shit. So in his dress cam, he goes and piecemeals some shit together from the techs.
Gets like a helmet that doesn't fit with a monocle. He's a night vision, like a shitty rifle without any optics on it.
And he's in his, like, old flat jacket that, you know, I mean, you knew the gear we were using back then because you made the movie, but it was like the old shit that didn't even have any magazines on. It's found a couple of magazine pouches, put it on, goes on the fucking op.
The dev guys are all like, who the fuck is this? why is the tech coming on this and goes on the op but I mean that's goes on the op to recover the bodies they get in a firefight out there and he also had a role in Benghazi he also had a role in the coast bombing at the agency. But never fucking told anybody.
And he told me when he was in Buds. He was in Buds with, I believe, I know James Sahl was one.
I think Axelson was the other. And this was, he was in Bud's when 9-11 happened.
And through Hell Week. And he told me he was sitting on the grinder, or standing on the grinder.
Sahl was on one side, Axelson's on the other. And this is like 30 minutes after the towers go down.
What a time to be on the grinder. Yeah, and so they give a speech, and they're basically saying, hey, Blake, it's been peacetime for a long time, and your guys' generation is going to war.
And look to your right and look to your left. There's a good chance that one of these guys are going to be dead in the near future.
future james uh matt axelson and when he landed when he landed in bagram it was that master chief that gave that speech that greeted him coming off the bird wow and uh wow yeah yeah and then he later died of uh of addiction with opiates. And so I've never told anybody that.
I've never told a... I appreciate.
Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, it just kind of goes back for me to what we were talking about, the complexity of, you know, the difficulty of surviving.
For anyone that went through BUDS during 9-11, okay, yeah, you're going to be busy. And good luck surviving that, just literally coming back alive like Saw and Axelson couldn't.
And then if you do come back, the complexities of having to carry, forget about the woman and the baby. I mean, that's horrific.
And that would do most people in. Then whatever you saw in theater and people, these guys are coming back and having to try and move on.
And I, you know, know some professional athletes and I've seen the complexities of an athlete retiring. You know, I own a boxing gym in L.A., and we get a lot of military and pro athletes that come in there and train, especially when they've gotten out.
And I see firsthand how hard it is for pro football players. We have a couple in there now.
We've had a lot of team guys come in, and they're trying to just stand on their feet like children again, like babies in a new world. And I can't imagine how hard it was for your friend to come back with the weight of those experiences in a world that's not necessarily receptive, and we can't see the injuries, right? So I could be talking to you, and you look pretty good, and you're handsome, and you're an ex-fucking Navy SEAL, and everybody loves a Navy SEAL, and so you're cool.
Inside, it can be a different story. And I remember when someone gave me the statistic about how much money the government spends making a seal, right? All the training, everything, you know, three phases, and then all the specialized training, and then I heard pretty high numbers, however, what it costs to make a seal versus how much money they put in to kind of keep an eye on a SEAL when he's done.

They don't care about us when we're done.

I tend to agree.

I mean, certainly they don't act like they care. They might say they care, but if you just look for actions, that's where it kind of gets hard for me to sort out.

Yeah.

They try to hide it.

You know, they try to hide it. They don't like talking about it because it fucks up recruiting numbers.
Yeah, for sure. The upper echelon of the SEAL teams fucking hate this show because we dive into it.
Yeah, I would imagine. We expose it.
And it, you know, and I don't care if it hurts the recruiting numbers. Yeah.
I believe they have a responsibility. I understand that.
I got to go when I was writing Lone Survivor. I got to go to Iraq with Team 5 to a place called Rawah.
I don't know if you were ever out there. It was a Marine Corps base kind of by the Syrian border.
And I to spend a month you know as a civilian embedded

with with a bunch of guys from team five and that was without a doubt one of the greatest experiences my life on on many levels and I a couple of I took a lot from it and have a lot of memories but to this point one memory that really stuck with me when I tried to understand when I look now back and I try to understand the transition for SEALs, but not just SEALs. It could be anyone who was in the military, but certainly it could be for Rangers or Delta or, you know, MARSOC or any particularly special operators that have to kind of get out.
Something I remember from my time in Iraq was I got to go with the SEALs and they were

going to go into a house and, you know, kick in a door and get a guy. And so they all went in and they wouldn't let me go in until it was secure.
And so I was sort of out on the street and I was on a corner with this one young SEAL. I think it wasn't quite a new guy, but he was young, little guy and And he was doing security on a corner.
And I was kind of with him. And he wasn't really talking to me.
He was kind of looking out in the street. And there were three Iraqi young men that had sort of come and were staring at us.
And he knew enough Arabic to say, you know, go, get out of here. And he yelled it at him, and they stared at him, and he yelled it again.
And they sort of walked away. And afterwards, after the whole out,

we were back at the base. I said, well, what would you have done if they didn't leave?

And he said, I would have killed them. I said, what? He said, well, you know, the way I look at

it is if I'm working and I see them, I own them. I own their shoes.
I own their pants.

God bless. I said, what? He said, well, you know, the way I look at it is if I'm working and I see them, I own them.
I own their shoes. I own their pants.
I own their shirt. And I own their organs.
I own their heart. Their heart is mine.
So I do whatever the fuck I want with that. I own them.
And I remember thinking, well, this guy's going to have trouble getting out of the military. Like, how do you take, and I totally understood that mindset of like, fuck it, I will survive.
My job is to protect this corner. My guys are in that house.
I will fucking protect this corner. I understood that.
But then thinking, well, this guy's going to have to get out one day, and he's going to be in traffic, and someone's going to cut him off, or he's going to be in Starbucks, and someone's going to say some shit. And, like, the complexity of that kind of mindset to have to adjust to being able to be, like, I remember someone once talked about Mick Jagger, right? The Rolling Stones guy.
You met in how in like 1975 when the Rolling Stones were the biggest band in the world. And Mick Jagger told a story about how he had to come home from a world tour where they were selling out stadiums all around the world.
And he's Mick fucking Jagger. And he comes home and his wife, Jerry Hall, this woman, and he has a baby.
She hands him the baby. She says, clean up the baby, and there's dog shit in the yard.
And Mick Jagger's like, but I'm Mick fucking Jagger. I just came back from, you know, the, oh.
And I've always thought that moment, just a little moment where I felt what it means to have that kind of power in a place like Iraq. Well, now you've got to come home and you have to turn it in.
You have to retire and you have to move forward. I don't think civilians understand that.
Yeah, they don't. They don't, you know, but I think that's a big reason why opiates become such a problem, you know, in the community.
And they're right there. And so then, yeah.
It numbs that out. Turn it off.
Numbs it out. And then it's the only thing that seems to turn the switch off for a lot of people.
And the immediate easy fix, it numbs you out to where you don't give a fuck anymore. Yeah.
And then, you know, down the spiral we go. Well, that was what Painkiller, you know, was for me.
The show I did about Purdue Pharma, you know, and the Sackler family. It's interesting.
Just today, what's the date today? What is it? The 16th. The 16th.
So today on the way over here, someone sent me a New York Times article about a new twist in the opioid epidemic.

These companies that serve as the middlemen between the doctors and the, I'm sorry, between the prescribers and the insurance companies.

They're these companies that control what the insurance companies will allow to be prescribed.

So if a doctor says you should have 250, you should be able to take 250 milligrams of Oxycontin a day,

these companies are in charge of regulating whether the insurance companies will pay for that.

So they've got this incredible power. And there's three main companies.
Can't remember the names of them. But it's just today in the paper.
And now it came out in the Times today that the Sacklers and other drug companies were bribing these guys to restrict the amount of pills that were allowed to be prescribed. So they would get paid off, and they would allow these incredible prescriptions to be put through, and the insurance companies to pay for them.
So it was just more of a game within a game within a game. Damn.
When you made that, I mean, that exposed a lot of shit to the public that people weren't really thinking about. I mean, when you make something like that, do you have any fear? A little bit.
For a minute, I did. You're fucking with some really powerful people.
So at first, I didn't, right? It's like people say, well, when you went to Iraq, were you scared? And I said, well, not really because there were 20 Navy SEALs around me all the time, and I felt pretty safe. When I got back and I kind of really looked at the map and figured out, I felt a little more nervous.
But in the moment, I didn't feel nervous. Probably should have felt a little more nervous, but I felt very safe with the guys.
The Sacklers, at first, I'm like, well, yeah, these guys are fucking scumbags. Fuck them.
Let's make a movie and let's tell the truth. You know, I have friends that have died from drug addiction and I don't give a fuck and let's go.
I'm not scared. The more research I did, the more nervous I got because they're just like, these are like real mobsters.
These are the real Pablo Escobars, the real drug dealers that are, you know, putting up

numbers much larger than the Medellin cocaine cartels, the companies like Purdue and the

Sackler families.

So the more I learned about just how powerful and quiet they were and what kind of masterminds

of secrecy, like you still, if you try. If you try and search Richard Sackler, they're so fucking scrubbed that you'll get virtually nothing on them.
And they just constantly cycle that. I don't still, I've yet to find anyone who's better scrubbed as far as internet than Richard Sackler, the kingpin of the Sackler family.
So the more I learned, the more nervous I got. And there was a moment where I was literally paranoid, and I'm like checking my back and making sure doors are locked and having access to security if I felt threatened.
And then I realized if they want to get me, they're going to get me. And kind of by the time we really got going, the wave was really getting big.
And people were finally starting to say the name Sackler and realize just how dirty and corrupt this family was. And I felt a little, I think all of us involved

felt at least secure in that like,

it was so public at this point

that if they did come after us,

everyone was gonna know.

It's like, I didn't have to leave a note.

Like, hey man, if something happens to me,

it was Richard Sackler.

People kind of already would get that.

And everyone's like, dude,

I don't know if I want to stand so close to you.

I'd invite my friends out to dinner and they're like, yeah, no, we're good. We're busy for a while.
Let's see how the show plays out. People kind of distance themselves.
You're joking me for a minute. But, I mean, I'm not necessarily, like, the biggest conspiracy guy.
Like, I'm always up to entertain a good conspiracy story.

Like I'll talk about Lee Harvey Oswald for a long time

and the magic bullet theory and all that.

But I don't even know whether it's a conspiracy

or it's just like the realization

of how the world does business.

And this, if you really want to understand

what the fuck's going on, not just in pharmaceuticals, but I think in almost any business, certainly the business of war, right? The amount of guys that are making money off of war, right? That's a different story. But the way that money rules the world, it's all about money, and the Sacklers knew it.
And the Sacklers knew that they had this incredible product

that could do this incredible thing, take away your fucking pain.

Like, for anyone that's dealt with pain,

whether it's, like, the emotional pain that your buddy went through

after losing his child and girlfriend

and seeing what he saw in that helicopter, he's in pain. Give me that pill.
Give me 40 milligrams of that liquid honey that happens to have a little battery acid in the middle of it. I'll take it.
And the Sacklers knew it. And they knew how to monetize it, and they knew how to game the system.
And I think, like, the worst thing that I found, the thing that really floored me was this guy, Curtis Wright. Do you know who Curtis Wright is? Curtis Wright, no.
So one of the challenges the Sacklers had with OxyContin and Purdue had, they needed to get the FDA to approve it, right? They had spent so much money developing this drug, and they were having financial problems prior to OxyContin being approved by the FDA that they were all in on OxyContin, and they needed the FDA to approve it. Like, you think about the FDA, a big government organization, and it is probably a big organization that probably does need a haircut, and I'll bet they're going to get one now with the new administration, which is probably a good thing, I think.
But you think, oh, wow, the FDA has to approve OxyContin. That's probably a team of 50 scientists, and they're going to have to go.
It was really just one guy. And it was this kind of nerdy dude named Curtis Wright, and he was the obstacle.
He kept saying to the Sacklers and to Purdue Pharma, I can't approve this drug. This is heroin in a little M&M wrapper.
Like, what, are you fucking crazy? No. And they kept trying.
He went through multiple applications, and this one guy was saying no. And that was putting the entire Sackler family and Purdue Pharma in real risk of financial ruin.
And so at some point prior to getting the approval, some members of Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright to a hotel room in the Virginia area, somewhere near D.C., and they spent a couple of days in a hotel room. And no one knows what happened in that hotel room.
When they came out, Curtis Wright had signed the approval with the words that Oxycontin is believed to be non-addictive.

Is believed. Is believed.

Which is weird. the approval with the words that Oxycontin is believed to be non-addictive, is believed,

is believed, which is weird language.

It's not Oxycontin is not addictive.

It is Oxycontin is believed to not be addictive, but no one ever used that language.

It doesn't make any sense.

Curtis, he approved it.

The drug gets, you know, going and it becomes a grand slam home run and the money's off the chart. About a year and a half later, Curtis Wright leaves the FDA and goes and works for Purdue Pharma.
Oh, shit. He was making, they say, $70,000 at the FDA, hundreds of thousands at Purdue, they bought him.

And when I heard that, I'm like, okay,

that is how the fucking world operates.

And it's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.

And, you know, it's public, people know about it.

Human beings like your friends and friends that I have are dying and are still dying. People are getting addicted.
Families are being thoroughly fucked up and derailed. And this is how it goes.
And so it was making painkiller was just an emotionally powerful experience. I don't think there was a day filming it when someone on the crew didn't come up to me and say, hey, can I talk to you for a second? My best friend died.
My cousin died. My mother died.
Just in your studio today, someone that works for you came up to me and started sharing me a story about their relationship to a family member and the drug.

And it's omnipresent, and it's horrible.

And what I get from it is like, let's open up our eyes and be real honest about how this world operates.

Yeah.

And usually it's money.

What were some of the things, what was the initial thing that kind of got you paranoid about the Sackler family? I remember I was trying to interview members of Purdue Pharma. Because like I said, you can't get the information on the Sacklers.
So I was trying to interview members, people who had worked for the company, and we couldn't get anyone to talk. And then a journalist from the New York Times had written a book that was one of our pieces of source material for the book, a book called Empire at Pain.
The author of that book called me and said, there's a woman who will talk to you. And she used to work for Richard Sackler as one of his, like, five secretaries.
And I'm like, great. He's like, she's going to call you at whatever time on, you know, in two days.
Be ready. She's going to call you.
So I was in pre-production on the film. My phone goes off.
It's FaceTime. And I answer the phone, and it's this woman.
And she's in a car, and she's pulled over on the side of the road, and she starts talking to me about working for Richard Sackler, but she's getting real close to the phone, and she's whispering, and she keeps looking around, and she told me she'd left work and driven to the parking lot of a little strip mall, and she was, you know, willing to tell me enough about him. She told me some things about him, but I could feel her legitimate paranoia and fear of talking about him.
And after that call, I came back and I said, guys, we just got to watch our backs and be smart because we are poking a bear. And that, I don't know, man, they still could get me.
And if they do, if I go quick or I go weird, check out the Sacklers. I will.
I do feel pretty safe here with you, though, I got to say. We're in good company.
Yeah, I feel safe. But did you struggle with addiction at all? I was lucky.
I never had addiction. I have family members that have used 12-step to their— I have one sibling, and she's done an incredible job.
She's 30 years sober, and AA has been a godsend to her. And we've talked about addiction, and I've asked her.
I'm like, what do you think it is? I've asked her, do you think I'm an addict? Because I do drink. There's not a drug I haven't tried, pretty much.
I don't think I've done bath salts or angel dust. Okay? Take those two, maybe a few others.
But I've tried them. And I don't know, man, I always had that ability to sort of see through the shot, see through the line.
You know, if someone put a line of Coke in front of me back in the day, I might do one. But then I think about the other and I kind of have that, it's not that I didn't want to do it and that I didn't see kind of what was good and what felt good about it, but I was able to sort of see, well, let's jump ahead 24 hours, 48 hours, and think about the cost, the hangover, the self-loathing, the self-disgust, the bad choices that start to accumulate.
And I was able to kind of, I'm good. And my sister said to me that that ability to have that pause is something that can separate, you know, an addict, a true addict from someone that's not.
And I think about that because it's not any superhuman quality. It's nothing that I take credit for and be like, oh, I can do this.

Any more than I think most of the addicts that I know suffer.

It's not about weakness.

It's not mental weakness or physical weakness that's causing someone to go back to that drug or back to that behavior, whatever it is, that's so fucking self-destructive. It's a disease, I believe.
And I'm fortunate that I don't think I have it. Yeah.
You know, and do you? Have you experienced it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Is that common knowledge? Forgive me for not knowing. Yeah, it is.
I had a hell of a run in Colombia with cocaine I appreciate the bottle but I've been sober for three years good for you man I've been on booze for three years I was really riding the line there opiates, coke, benzos, booze, sleeping pill, all of it combined together. And then I did a psychedelics treatment.
You had a little journey. You weren't on a journey.
I had a little journey. Went down to Mexico to do some drugs that got me off the drugs.
What were some of the drugs? I'm sure everyone knows this, and you've talked about it. Yeah, that's fine.
Forgive me. So I had really cleaned it up.
So I moved down to Medellin. Yeah, that's a tricky spot for anyone that's even tempted to flirt with the devil.
You're going to find it down there.

Well, that's kind of why I went.

You found what you were looking for.

I definitely found it and overdosed a couple times, almost died.

I remember calling my mom on Mother's Day.

You know, I've always heard you don't have to worry about how much coke you've had until things start slowing down. And they said, when you're on speed and things start slowing down, that's when you're riding the line and uh that happened to me a

couple times down there where it'll it was like it was like that scene in old school where like you know the the voice is like i started hearing that how much coke had you done do you think and And how long was the binge?

About five years.

And a lot.

I mean, I just, it's just i mean it's you know at that time like really good coke in miami was like 150 bucks a gram yeah and uh down there i was getting it for five bucks a gram and it was so much stronger right Yeah, I mean, it's fresh from the, it's just right, right. I mean, it's Columbia.
But would you do like, because I never did, but I heard about like three-day, four-day binges that people would go on, and you're not sleeping, and you're just doing yeah did you ever experience anything

like that i mean it was all the time it was all the time and uh i would go you know i don't know i never really kept track but i mean i never stopped like i would i would go hard in the paint for a week.

Oh, my goodness.

And then I would go all the way up

until the point where, like, I would get, like, this really bad heartburn, you know, just drown Tums and Pepto and anything. Like, I just wanted to keep.
How did you get yourself out of that? Well, I actually got run out by the federal police. And so I like really, I always take care of everybody around me.
And I do it with my team now. I've just always done it.
I've always been. And so when I went down there, I had a penthouse in a neighborhood called El Poblado.
And so anybody that was around me, I would take care of. So like number one guy, doorman, who has access into the building that I'm in, the door guy.
And so all the door guys, like, if I went to go get booze, they got booze. If I went to go get Coke, they got Coke.
When I would leave Columbia to come back to the States, I would give them all my clothes, my shoes, my sunglasses, everything, like a computer. It doesn't, anything.
If I went to go get a phone, I'd got them a phone. So I really took care of those guys because I knew that they controlled access into the building and up to my apartment.
And so they had kind of tipped me off, and one of them in particular tipped me off and had told me that they had set up a observation point in a building across from mine. And that they may have bugged the recessed lighting in the hallway outside of where I was at.
But this was real or was this like coke paranoia? No, this is real uh yeah and so when i got one to that i uh i hightailed it out of there i never went back cleaned it up cleaned up the coke tried to clean it up then i started going to costa rica but costa rica was like fucking disneyland yeah compared to what i was doing pira Vida. It was a joke.
It was just a bunch of gringos down there

wanting to have sex with Latin Costa Rican girls.

I was just like, this is fucking stupid.

JV.

I need to be...

Because the real issue was adrenaline addiction

from all my time in.

Right, but that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You get to play God.
You talk about adrenaline. What are you going to do with that energy when you get out? You're going to go to Medellin and shack up.
Yeah. Right? People would come down to visit me and to think it would be a good time, which I thought, I'm not condoning this not condoning this.
It was a fucking, it was horrible. I speak against it all the time now.
But they couldn't, you know, they'd last maybe two days, and they'd come down to visit me for a month, and then I'd get a note, you know, on my table that's like, dude, I'm out of here. It's like, this is fucking crazy.
And because it wasn't, I mean, it's just different. It's just crazy down there.
I mean, I used to go to this club. It was called Fahrenheit.
And in the club, they had, like, these tables where they would line, like, put lines and mounds, like, little mounds and key bumps and shit on table of Coke, and then lacquer over the top. You know right now, some of your viewers are just Googling Fahrenheit and booking plane tickets right now.
Well, that was a long time ago. I'm sure they're looking.
Don't do it. Yeah, but don't do it.
It doesn't lead anywhere good. Right.
Okay, so what would happen? You go to Fahrenheit. How would that play out? I mean, that was just one hangout.
But what I really liked doing was, I mean, what I really liked was the adrenaline. You know, and it just, you know, the adrenaline from the teams and my time at the agency, like, it just, I mean, it was just always like shit was happening.
And then when I left, I couldn't fucking feed that anymore. And I had nowhere to get it, you know.
And so I was like, I'm going to go down here. But what do you think, did you get into 12-step? No.
What saved you? What got you to walk away from the drugs and the alcohol? That Mother's Day thing really got to me because I was like, man, I'm going to fucking OD down here, and my body will just decompose because nobody really gives a shit about me down here. Nobody knows I'm here other my parents and they'll just eventually get a call like hey your son's body's fucking decomposing in this penthouse he od'd on coke you know and like the career that i've had before that it was just like oh there's my son the former seal former ca contractor who's fucking died of a cocaine overdose i was ashamed and and so i went home, and I mean, I still struggled with the benzos because down there, I would just, you know, you can get whatever you want.
So if I was getting, you know, eventually if I was getting too, going too hard down the coke train, I would just pop a Valium and then put whatever. But then I had a suicide attempt and uh that was really like the breaking point for me when I got when I got back home just nothing was I couldn't get anything going and and uh and uh pulled the car in the garage and reclined the seat back and I woke up wasn't I should have never woken up, but anyways.
That's what you call a positive fail, my friend. Yeah.
I'm glad you fucking failed. Me too.
I really am. I really am.
Me too. But so, yeah, so then I you know, then I, but then I found, you know, psychedelics through this show and went down there and haven't had kicked everything.
So the psychedelics helped you? Are you in 12-step? Do you use 12-step? Peter, it was like a light switch, man. What psychedelics did you do? I did Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DNT.

You smoked a toad?

I smoked a toad.

I smoked it four times, my friend.

Really?

Yes, sir.

I want to hear about this.

I love that toad.

Did you die?

Yes, sir.

Tell me about it.

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I was going to recommend that you just smoked a tub before you told me that you did.

How many times have you smoked the tub?

Well, one day I did it 13 times.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

You had to really get to it.

You had to dig deep. You know, But four times I think I've done it.
Like 13 hits off the pipe at one staying under? It was an all-day event. I started at 9 a.m.
You come out of it to go back. And you had a good shaman that was guiding you.
Yeah, amazing, amazing. And the first time was the scariest and probably the one that I got the most out of.
I mean, like I said, you know, between that and the Ibogaine, I haven't, this February, it'll be three years since I've had it. I mean, those are the two most powerful, I mean, Ibogaine I've never done, but I know what it is.
I'm scared of it, actually. Yeah.
And I've met the toad. Wow, you really, I can see how that would have taken care of a problem.
Cleaned me out. Still clean.
How many times did you do the Ibogaine? One. That's enough, right? Yep.
Different experience than the 5-MEO? Totally different. How would you explain the differences? Well, I mean, the Ibogaine's like a 12-hour experience.
They say the Ibogaine is the godfather. Yeah, it's like that's the most powerful.
Yeah. I always heard that 5-MO is the god molecule, but Ibogaine is the godfather.
Yeah. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think so.

What was the Ibogaine like?

Man, it was about 12 hours long. I couldn't walk afterwards.
In a nutshell, it's like a life review. it's like a life review

of

looking at your life

through

from life review it's like a life review of looking at your life through from an outside perspective like a non-bias non for me like a non-emotional uh perspective and so a lot of the things uh that kind of happened i guess you just You process them in a different way.

Like from way back, from a little kid? Everything, everything. And it wasn't all traumatic shit.
To be honest, it was like these TV screens, like thousands of them, kind of like going off into a distance and just disappearing. and if I, and every screen was a different portion, like, like, like segment of my life.

And I could see him through my peripherals and like see him, you know, kind of moving through.

And I could think like, oh yeah, that's, you know, when me and my dad did this thing and that is in Iraq.

And that's when I was a teenager wrestling.

And this is, there was no, like, chronological order. There was no nothing.
And if I tried to pay too much attention into one screen, then they would all disappear. And so it wasn't even like I was reliving experiences.
But that's kind of, you know, how it went for me. I didn't like it wasn't

a scary experience other than at the very first,

I saw my head split open and another one mushroomed out.

That's a little scary.

Yeah, but it wasn't like you hear some of the horror stories

about people reliving things or meeting demons.

On Ibogaine?

Yeah, I didn't meet any demons. It was just a life review, kind of.
And then when I came out of it, it's like I had this new sixth sense that said, hey, all this shit you're doing, it's fucking poison. Knock this shit off.
Quit drinking. I quit caffeine for a long time.
I quit smoking marijuana for a long time. I, um, I was still taking Adderall, uh, to concentrate and, uh, hadn't had any of that.
And, and, uh, like the, the, the fruit that came from that experience just, I mean, it totally like revolutionized thisized this show and my business. I was kind of scared to leave the military genre.
Not leave it, but explore new territories, and, like, that somehow that just, like... Do you credit the Ibogaine more than the 5-MEO with your sobriety? Yes.
Because I've heard that. I've heard that from ex-military guys, ex-team guys who've taken Ibogaine, and they physically look different.
I've seen them since. And the look in their eye, it's almost like their facial construction is different.
Their cheekbones feel different. Their eyes feel different.
Their posture. And they're sober.
Yeah. It seems to be one of the more effective medicines.
Yeah, I mean, they've done studies on it now. It's, I mean, it's really changing a lot of lives, you know, and it is the cure for opiate addiction, for alcoholism.
And so if you are out there riding the fucking line, like we were just talking about, and you're looking for a way out, I'd highly recommend it. Yeah, man, same here.
And I do hope that whatever happens with Kennedy and the new administration, that people start looking at this and that any of it, whether it'samine psilocybin 5-mio ibogaine that people start at least being educated on what it it can and cannot do and that the government starts making these these medicines available i'm all for it my my experience on um 5-mio i never did ibogaine. I don't know if I have the guts for it.
I was scared to smoke the toad. I remember my friend took me, and my friend's a pretty high-functioning business guy, successful, and the fact that he had done it, and a couple other people I know that are pretty high-functioning have done me you know willing to take the chance that I didn't I was a little concerned that I was going to break my brain on something that powerful but because they had done it I felt confident and I got to the place in California where I was going to do it the first time and they were already doing it and I was looking at them and it's a little if you watch somebody that's going going through it, they're making some noises and moving around a little bit.
And I was not quite sure what kind of experience they were having. And the guy who was actually a psychiatrist who is now the administer of this.
And he used to do antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, and he would write scripts for it, and he started learning about some of these psychedelics, and he completely changed his practice and only does 5-MeO and Ibogaine now, and I thought that was interesting. But he took me aside, and he sat me down.
He said, okay, Pete, you're about to ingest 5-MeO-DMT.

It's the most powerful psychedelic, you know, certainly one of them in the world.

It's going to last 30 minutes or so, and you're going to have this very powerful experience,

and you might feel as though you're dying, but you won't.

And he's telling me all this stuff, and I'm kind of looking at him.

He's like, do you have any questions?

I said, well, you know, and I'd heard this about other psychedelics, you know,

should I set an intention, right?

Like, I'm kind of looking at him. He's like, do you have any questions? I said, well, you know, and I'd heard this about other psychedelics, you know, should I set an intention, right? Like I want to make peace with my father or I want to remember my grandfather or I want to spend time with my dog Schlemmer who died when I was eight.
Like, you know, what's my goal? What should I do? I remember he looked at me and he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, good luck with that, Pete.
Good luck.

You try and set all the intentions you want.

And that kind of freaked me out a little bit because I could tell, like, you know what I mean?

He was like, okay, good luck with your little intentions.

And I remember smoking it and the feeling of, for me, what they say they call ego death, right?

And I've heard, I've talked to other people about it. Mike Tyson's talked about it.
You know, it's certainly nothing that I'm the only one that's experienced. But when you experience it, you really know you've experienced it.
And it's interesting because you try and explain it to people and you find that words fail you because we don't literally have the words in the English language to explain this kind of experience because people just haven't experienced it. So they don't have words for it.
But it is death, right, of some sort. That's a word that people can relate to.
And for me, the way I explain what I first experienced was as the medicine was taking over my mind, I felt myself trying to hold on to thoughts like, okay, I'm in Malibu, California. I'm in California.
I'm on the West Coast of America. I'm in America.
I'm on the Western Hemisphere. I'm on the planet Earth.
I was trying to hold on to it. And suddenly my ability to think was just turned off about that thought.
And then I went to, well, I'm Pete. My dad's Larry.
My grandfather's Harry. My great friend, that's off.
I'm wearing shoes, I'm wearing socks, I'm wearing that, and every thought I could have would suddenly be slammed off, almost like a steel curtain was shutting down. And I could feel myself trying to hold on to any kind of thinking, any kind of rational thinking.
And every thought was just, do, do, do, do, do. And then this giant wall of darkness came over me.
And it was a sound and it was like, over. And I remember thinking very clearly, I'm dead.
And my first thought was, it's all over. It's all nothing.
Everything is nothing. I thought that.
Wow. Everything is nothing.
And all of this sort of sudden, because these are just words now, I became aware sort of that something was still going on. I was still functioning.
There was brain function. But it wasn't any brain function I'd ever encountered before.
And then I just started going into something that felt so expansive and such an energetic experience that was kind of moving and unfolding in multiple directions, everywhere, everything at once kind of energy. And that energy overtook me.
And I remember I sobbed and I laughed and I screamed. and when I came out of it, the people who were organizing this, the doctor and his assistants, one of the women had a pet wolf.
And I didn't know there was a wolf in the house. And I came to, and I was on my hands and knees, and I had snot and tears all over me.
And I really had this cathartic release of feelings that I just don't have the ability to access on a regular basis. And I looked up and there's this white wolf staring at me, like about as close as you are, a little further away, locked into my eyes.
Damn. And I'm staring at this wolf, and I start pointing,

and I'm trying to determine whether it's real, which it was. And I look up at John, the guy, and I'm trying to ask him if this is real.
And I remember he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, Pete, try not to make sense of anything right now.
Just stay in it. And it was an incredibly life-changing experience for me.
Sounds like a David Yarrow photo. Wow.
It was so powerful. And for me, because I'm not religious, I was raised a bit atheist.
I'm a Catholic Jew, and my parents didn't believe in organized religion, so I just never really had access to it. This felt like an incredible religious experience to me.
And for me, and people are like, Pete, stop fucking talking 5-MEO, but I love talking about 5-MEO. And if someone's done it, I'll talk to them about it for hours.
Because for me, the big secret that we all keep, that we all walk around as humans on this planet, and we never acknowledge, well, there's a lot of them, but the real big one for me is a concept of infinity, right? The concept that if you look out into the sky at night, that in theory, it goes on forever in all directions. It never stops.
It has no barriers. It has no ending, right? Very hard to get our mind around.
I shared a car in Greece with Elon Musk alone for 35 minutes in traffic. And I was like, it's a long story, but I ended up in a car alone with Elon Musk and his driver and his security guy.
And this is after I'd done it. And I'm like, I'm fucking, I got Elon Musk for 35 minutes.
What do I want to ask him? And I said, Elon, what are your thoughts? Can you explain to me in a way that I could understand your concept of infinity? Because I can't understand it. How do you process the concept of an infinite universe? And he looked at me and said, Pete, I don't have a clue.
I don't think I ever will, and I don't think we ever will. And I remember, wow, okay, he doesn't get it.
I'm not so, you know, I don't get it either. That tracks.
But when I was under it, the 5MEO, I felt as though I was beginning to experience the maybe very beginning of a look at a glimpse of what an infinite energy might feel like. And that felt religious to me.
It felt like, and it sounds so stupid for anyone, and I get it. Don't judge.
Don't judge. Try it, maybe.
That's where I went. And it really has helped me so much in every aspect of my life, as a father, as a filmmaker, as a friend, in business negotiations.
It's given me access to a different perspective. And I would imagine for you, it doesn't feel like people are like, well, could I get addicted to it? And I don't know of anyone that gets addicted to things like Ibogaine or 5-EMEO.
It's like, no, I'm good. It takes balls.
It's like, I've parachute, I've done some jumps, and every time I've jumped, it takes, it's like, you don't really want to, right? That last second, you're like, how many jumps have you had, would you say? Not very many. Okay.
Not very many. I had 13.
On my 13th, I had a malfunction, so I haven't gone since. But every jump, no matter who, and I've been in a plane, you know, down in San Diego or, you know, that Skydive San Diego, which is a great place, Jeff Bramston.
That's where all the SEALs train and civilians. I go to civilian.
But a bunch of tough people jumping out of planes. And I know every one of them that second, right before they jump, they feel that, maybe not today, at least most people do.
I'm sure there are a few SECOs that don't. But that's how I feel about 5MU, is like, I'm glad I did it did it but man if I'm going to do it again

it's

you know. I'm hesitant to do it

every time. Have you done it once?

No I've done it I think four times

right. It takes.
And four different

sessions. It takes a certain

type of courage

to take that hit.

You don't know where you're going. No.

And so you went in so are you saying you're not an atheist now? No, I'm not an atheist. But my belief, okay, don't judge.
I'm not here to judge. All right.
So the second time I did it, I went into this again. This time I skipped the crying.
And one thing that's interesting is doing it a couple times, I think you go a little bit further. Does this sound utterly insane? No.
I think people are going to be like, oh, he's just fucking drug wacky dude. Nah, we talk about this all the time on this show.
Because I really believe in this. And by the way, I don't believe in cocaine.
I don't believe in recreational LSD. I think weed is problematic.
I certainly don't. Opioids, fuck no.
This is a totally different animal to me, including alcohol. That's all over there.
We're talking about something completely different. This is a medicine.
So all the coke and all that shit, I think we kind of covered it. Like it's not good.
I mean, it's a suicide attempt. Dark, dark, dark suicidal energies.
This is a whole nother experience. So the second time, I very quickly went into this energy that feels like I'm deep in the universe and I'm experiencing something that feels like this multidirectional energy that's just expanding, that I feel maybe part of the energy that built the universe.
Something had to build it, right? Got all these planets floating around and you start getting into the sun and what the fuck the sun is and how that thing's still burning and how we're in this, something's, right? And so there was some energetic, even if a god caused an explosion and that created the massive universe, not just our little solar system, but the infinite universe, which we are such a small part of, right? They say there's more planets than grains of sand in the world. So God would have to be really busy, and he's probably not just our God, the way I look at it.
But I'm feeling something, and we don't have words for this, but it's a real energy. Words won't do it justice.
And as I'm coming out of this energy, I start to see images of religious, iconic religious structures being built. The pyramids, the Vatican, the Notre Dame Cathedral, Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Literally, I'm seeing man building these temples, and it's coming. So I'm coming out of the energy into man's building of religious artifacts and temples and structures.
And I'm seeing man building these temples, acknowledging their religion, their gods. But to me, it felt very reductive after being in a much larger energy.
This actually felt smaller to me, if that makes sense. And then I saw these religious, the pyramids, Mecca, Notre Dame Cathedral, I remember very clearly, And I came out of it, and there was a guy with me who was sort of my attendant.
I don't know if you had someone watching you. Just make sure you don't take up all your clothes and run down the street, which I didn't.
But I looked at him. His name was Connor.
And I remember coming out of it. And I looked at him, and I said to him, Connor, organized religion is somewhat fucking absurd.

And he looked at me and he nodded just like you did.

And I couldn't understand in that moment having felt something that to me felt beyond organized religion.

These structures, and I've been to them all. I've been to Notre Dame.
I've been to the Vatican. I haven't been.
I've been into Saudi Arabia, but I couldn't go to Mecca. I wanted to.
I've been to Japan and to India and seen Buddhist and Hindu temples, and I appreciate that, and I certainly respect it.

But in that moment, I felt that if that type of organized religion wasn't speaking to me, but I did believe that there's definitely a force greater than anything we can see or feel or touch

out there. And that, to me, was the most honest religious experience I've ever had.

Thank you. see or feel or touch out there.
And that, to me, was the most honest religious experience I've ever had. Interesting.
So that's kind of where I am. That's, I mean, it sent me down a path because I was, first time I did it, it was, I didn't really believe in anything either.

I grew up Catholic, and that went out the window pretty much as soon as I joined the SEAL teams with that culture and what we were doing.

But did you have your eyes closed or a blindfold on? Yeah, I did.

They were closed.

I did it.

I wanted to see. They just closed.
I did it. I wanted to see.

They just closed. They didn't

cover them up. I couldn't see anything.

Were your eyes open?

Yeah, I came back after I died.

What did your death feel like?

My death felt like

man,

it was the most anxiety,

most fear

I've ever felt in my life.

it felt like

Thank you. It was the most anxiety, most fear I've ever felt in my life.
And it felt like all the negative toxicity, shit that I've experienced, rage, it felt like it was just rushing through my veins out of my fingers and my toes. And it felt like I had like this, it wasn't really a visualization.
It was more like, it felt more like an intuition, but it felt like there was this black tar like dripping off of my heart. Wow.
And I had my- Wow, that must have been terrifying. It was.
And I just, like you, I had all these thoughts and shit about things. Because that's your ego trying to hold on to logic.
And the last thing that I was grasping onto was my wife and my son. And I was just like, I knew I was 100% certain.
Like, you're fucking dying, Sean. Like, there's no coming back.
You're done. And I was just fighting like hell because I just, I didn't want to leave my wife and my six-month-old son in this fucked up place.
And so that was like the last thing that I was holding on to and then when i when i let that go that's when the crossover happened and uh when the crossover happened i like sat back up and uh we're on the beach or close to the beach we're up on a like a mount like a hill and you could see like see out you know into the pacific and there were some islands out there and i remember everything looked exactly the same it was just more vibrant but like every time i do psychedelics i'm like it's very it's a lot of intuition going on and and you know and i was really reluctant to do this because i was like, this shit's for the hippies.

I'm not a hippie.

Yeah.

And I've heard hippies talk about energy and all this stuff.

But when I opened my eyes, I saw, I just, you could intuitively feel and see this flow of energy from the ocean into the beach, up the trees, like into the grass, through me. And it was, I could just, you could see it intuitively and you just knew that it was there.
And, you know, if I felt like if there would have been some negative energy out there, it would have been like a spotlight in the darkness. Like you just would have been able to identify it immediately because everything was just so positive.
And then I felt the presence of Gabe, you know, who we talked about. And I felt that I just, it was the feeling that everything that,

all the trauma, everything that had happened throughout my life was supposed to happen and that it was okay.

And that none of it even fucking mattered because this is such a minuscule sliver in time that we're experiencing right now. And so it made me believe again in a higher power.
Yeah. And then it's honestly, it set me on a journey.

And I mean, now I'm a Christian and I've had another experience after that that turned me into a Christian that like fucking slapped me in the face. Like, hey, pay attention.
And it's amazing. I mean, the stuff that that, it's, and you also realize how minuscule like you are.

We are.

And you're okay with it, you know,

which is the ego death, right?

Right, and that's where I say like,

it's changed me in all aspects.

Like I don't get upset about things

that I used to get upset about.

I'm not quick to like get to conflict.. I found my work has just gotten better.
I'm a deeper movie maker. When I was editing Painkiller, the opioid film, I had two editors and one I had never worked with.
And they were editing while I was still in Canada filming. And I came back and then I had to come and work with them, you know, every day.
And I was just getting to know them. And one of them had an energy.
I had just done the toad. And they were both really good guys, but I could tell one of them had an energy of heaviness, darkness.

And I found out that he and his wife had taken their son, I think three-year-old son,

into the doctor, the ear doctor, for a procedure.

This was like three months prior to us starting to work.

And they put the son under some sort of local anest anesthesia and the son died. Their kid died.
And I found out that that was my editor and that that had happened to him. And this came in after I'd found that and we're working.
And then I realized he had a picture of his son, a little picture kind of under his computer that I noticed for the first time. And we're, you know, I don't know him that well.
And I started asking him about his son. And I heard about this and I'm really sorry.
And I just, you know, want you to know that I'm aware. And if there's anything we can talk about or you want to talk about, I want to be available to you for that.
And we started talking and started asking him questions about his son and what kind of life his son had had and what kind of young man he was at that age and what he had experienced. And we started talking.
We started talking for a while, and he stopped. He said, you know, I haven't talked about my son like this.
And I realized I don't know that I would have had this conversation prior to experiencing that medicine. And we started talking about it, and I said, well, you know, how are you and your wife coping? He said, horribly, horribly.
He said, we're going to grief counseling, but it's not working. They'd gone to some, like, chainsaw counseling where they go into the woods with chainsaws and just start cutting trees as a way of trying to release anger and energy, I mean, and axes and group therapy.
And I asked him if he had thought about exploring psychedelics. And he said his wife is talking about that.
And I said, have you heard about 5MU? He sat up. He said, my wife has been asking me about this.
And I said, he said, what's it like? What do you think? And I thought about it. And I said, you know, here's what I think.
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He said, no, I want you to say it. I said, okay.
Cause I really didn't know him that well. I said, in my mind, the way I'm thinking about you and your family, if this is your son right now in your mind, and he's right here, and wherever you look, your son, your dead son is right there, and you can't, right, wherever you look.
I said, I believe that this medicine could maybe take your son and put him here for a minute and give you, it's never going to go away, but give you a little bit of space to maybe process something like that in a way that you're not able to. And I stand by that.
And it's advice I would give to myself, to you, to anyone.

The only thing I think is that young people might, I don't think it's good to do for someone, you know, much in their 20s still.

I would encourage people to wait until their 30s.

Yeah.

Just because. I can't back that up scientifically.
It's more of a hunch. But if someone came to me and they were like 19 or 20, or my son, I've talked to my son about this, and he's in his early 20s, and I'm very honest with him about all of this.
Everything I try to be honest with them about but I said I don't think you should do this until you're 30. Yeah.
What do you think? I think it depends on life experiences because it is so healing. I think if you have a kid who is, i'm not like i can't back this up either right i know i know whatever with a grain of salt i think i know yeah but you know i mean there's kids that have been through lots and lots of sexual trauma yeah rape and yeah yeah and i was just had a guy in here and i'm not going to mention his name because this kind of conversation was offline.

But his son was in an accident, and somebody was killed.

And his son did this.

And it sounds like it healed him because he carried a lot of fucking guilt. How old was his son did this and it's, it sounds like it healed him,

you know?

And so,

cause he carried a lot of fucking guilt.

How old was his son?

17 or 18,

I think.

And,

and,

you know,

kind of got him through.

So,

you know,

because you do realize,

I mean,

for me,

just,

you just,

you,

man,

I'll tell you,

like it, it changes your perspective so much that, you know, it's like, oh, fuck, like, so-and-so died. You know what I mean? That sucks.
That a short life could have had, you know, had a lot more life to live, died in his 20s, died at 25, a lot of seals, whatever. Death sucks, right? That's how humanity perceives it.
It's fucking horrible. Like, you only get to live once.
After doing the 5-MEO DMT, this shit is what sucks. They're in a better fucking spot.
You know, they're like, it's almost like you get a window or a veil's lifted and you see, like, what it's actually all about. Yeah.
Even though you can't, like you said, there's no words in the English language to describe it. But it's a hell of a lot better than here.
Yeah, I would agree with you. For someone like your friend's son, I think it could be really helpful.
If someone has gone through that kind of really fucked up trauma that's sort of out of the realm of just talk therapy is not gonna fix that. I think what would be important is that whoever administers the medicine, the toad, I mean, Ibogaine for a 17 year old, I don't know, but maybe, did he do Ibogaine? I believe it was the 5.
I believe it was the 5. 5-M-L? But that whoever is the administer, the guide, stays on board with that person for days, weeks, months, helps process that.
So it's not like, you know, at least keeps an eye on that younger mind. Yeah.
Just to make sure that, like, he's able to talk about things. You know, because I remember I was trying, you can relate to the idea that we don't have words in the English language, right, for some of these feelings.
And so it's hard to explain what you experienced. And I was talking to someone about it.
And he told me about this tribe in Brazil that does a lot of, you know, ayahuasca-type psychedelics. I think it's slightly different than ayahuasca.
Some like the Yamamoto tribes, some of these wild tribes that have been doing psychedelics for

generations and how they have different words, words that we don't have in our language.

And he's trying to get me to understand how we don't have words for so much.

And he talked about this word that this tribe had for the feeling you get in your stomach

when you hear a cliff diver jump like 100 feet or 200 feet into the water, that concussive sound, you know, that whoo, it gives you a feeling. It's hard to explain, but, like, if you've ever heard somebody really get punched in the face, you know, with a bare fist, that's a sound.
Different, not like a movie, right? And that sound of a body hitting the water is a stirring sound. And there's a term for that in this language because that's important to them.
Let's remember that feeling that you get. And I think it's interesting that we're so new to this world and it's become sort of vogue, and I know a lot of people are doing it and think it's cool, or rich people in the Hamptons of New York or in Beverly Hills are having psychedelic parties and all that and expanding their consciousness and microdosing mushrooms.
Great. I don't judge that.
But there is something very real to it, and particularly for people who are going harder and have, I don't know, man, that kind of trauma to dig up and to look at,

this shit is real. I think the world would be a better place.
I wish the fucking politicians would use it. But have you ever heard anything bad coming from it? No, no.
And I looked it up. I think I heard somebody died.
No, I remember there was a doctor or a shaman who I think in Mexico, this is all searchable, was putting people under and molesting. Oof.
Right? But that was one person. He was busted.
Because I searched it all, like dark side, downside, addiction, deaths, and very, very little. I couldn't find anything directly related, but I remember this one story of some shaman who was putting people under and doing that.
But I don't know. I haven't heard much.
I just... Have you? Yeah, I just heard this last week.
I had... Actually, it was the guys that got me into this.
They didn't talk me into it.

They shared their experience on how it helped them.

And I was like, I got to do this.

But they came up.

We went to an event together.

We were all talking about psychedelics. And I guess there's somebody that did it.

I haven't looked into this yet, but apparently there's something out there on it.

This guy did it.

It seems to have experienced a 10-year time period within 30 minutes.

I began or MEO?

MEO.

Okay.

And he had, I don't know. like I said, I didn't get any,

I didn't have like a storyline or anything when I did it,

which doesn't sound like you did either.

But he had built a relationship, had a kid,

like all this shit happened in his mind in 30 minutes

that was 10 years worth of time.

And then when he came out of the of the of the experience only 30 minutes had passed and he hid like he still misses like whoever he met in that experience because he had built a 10-year relationship with those with those people. And so all he wants to do...

Isn't that fucking wild? That's crazy. I know.
I've never heard that. That's a movie, man.
That's like, because there's like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. I don't know if you ever saw that film.
Jim Carrey, it's a good movie where he wants to erase part of his brain to get a girl out of his mind. It's like just, you know, bad relationship.
But, see, that's fascinating to me. And I can totally see how that could happen.
I think that one of the things that 5MEO did for me was just that, kind of what's the adage that we we use 2% of our brain or, you know, and it's like to me, I've made the analogy to people like, do you want to understand a little bit about what it's like? Think about your dreams. And when you wake up from a dream and you've had some insane dream that you're speaking languages and your mother is there, but her head is an ostrich head and your son is like a stockbroker and he's making deals, but he's only two.
And you're like, where the fuck did that come from? How did my brain, I shut down part of my brain to sleep and something else woke up, right? And as a writer, I can relate to that feeling of accessing parts of your brain, right, that you just can't get to, you know, sitting here talking. And I've had that experience many times.
I don't know if you've had it writing, but where you sit down and things start coming out of you and you look, you think that, you know, 15 minutes have gone by and you look up and three hours have gone by and you don't remember it and you look down and you've written 10 pages but you've accessed something that you can't get to normally and they call it, you know, flow state or, you know, some flow state or some sort of optimal creative. Rogan thinks that this state is an actual entity, like an external goblin that comes in and enters you.
There's this guy, Steve Pressfield, who I like, who's like a guru for writers, and he talks about this too, like being able to access, truly access aspects of your mind that you normally just can't get to, right? So that 5-MeO can put you in this state where it just shuts down your default network. So everything that we normally think of, like, oh, I'm wearing a sweater, you're wearing a sweater, I'm wearing pants, you're wearing pants,

carpet here, all your things that are up on the wall.

That's all our rational brain.

Turn all that shit off, and the next thing you know,

you've created 10 years of a life,

and you really think you've got a son and a wife.

It's crazy, isn't it?

I've never heard of that, man.

Apparently, he still has feelings, but I'll tell you the- Like he's mourning his child that never existed. Yeah, yep.
Wow. Yep.
Maybe tapped into another life. Who the hell knows? Maybe.
You know? It also, another thing that like it did is it set me down. This stuff just set me down a rabbit hole.
Have you ever the four agreements by don miguel ruiz no i've heard of it oh man you got what tell me give me like the basically i'm gonna butcher it so but um i mean lots of people read this some people read it every i think tom brady reads it every year but it it talks a lot about like it, it's four agreements that you make with yourself. And I can't even, I haven't read it in years, so I don't know them all off the top of my head.
But it kind of talks about, like, I don't want to make this book sound like something it's not. But one thing that it does do is it talks about how we've all been indoctrinated.
But it doesn't do it in like a conspiracy-ish fucking way. It's just the way it is.
And a lot of people read this after psychedelics and it's, when you read it, you're like, oh yeah, like, okay, like, yeah, this is true. And in between that and kind of in what i experienced through psychedelics and how how healing it is and how it's fucking illegal here why i don't know it's helping so many people with addiction and trauma fda baby yeah and it sent me down this rabbit hole to think that everything we know and have been told is a fucking lie, and I do believe that.

I do want to ask you about something.

Did we go to the moon?

Pardon me?

Did we go to the moon?

I don't know, man.

I wasn't there.

I wasn't there.

I know about the picture.

Capricorn One was a movie when I was a kid that was, you know,

about the fact that, you know, the theory that we never did.

I don't know, man.

I am the one that we never did. I don't know, man.
I like to think that we did because that's how I was raised. And if that didn't happen, then I got to really unpack a whole bunch of other shit.
But I don't know. I can tell you I never went to the moon.
What about the Stanley Kubrick stuff? Have you looked into that?

Which stuff?

Did he stage it?

He filmed it?

Yeah, that's Capricorn One.

That's the movie.

That's what it is?

Yeah, I mean.

I don't know, man.

Damn.

I don't know.

I love this subject.

I know.

I'm going to assume we did. Yeah.
But I wasn't there. Yeah.
I just want to believe we did. Me too.
I don't know, though. There's some pretty compelling evidence.
Yeah, I mean, people are full of shit, and there's a lot of reasons that we would have lied and governments are horrific and governments will do things that we can't believe to advance agendas and I've seen all of this and I've gotten a front row seat to some really fucked up shit that our governments do and when I I was young, I didn't know about it,

and I didn't think about it,

and I thought there were good guys and bad guys.

And I believed our leaders when they said that we were the good guys and they're the bad guys,

and not always the case.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I did just come back from Israel last week.

How was it?

Dude, it's fucked up.

You know, I was two weeks before I went to Israel, I was in New York,

and I was going to have lunch with a friend of mine, and she brought a friend of hers, who I didn't know. And during the course of the meal, Israel came up, and she started ripping into the Israelis, and fuck the Israelis, and fuck Zionism.
And she's looking at me. She's really getting mad.
And I'm like, I'm curious. Are you Arab? Are you Muslim? She said, I'm Palestinian.
I said, okay. I can imagine this is a really fucking hard time.
She goes, yeah, it is. And I said, I get it.
And she starts ripping Israel. They all need to fucking go.
I go, okay, okay, I hear you. I'm curious, how do you process the Nova Music Festival and what happened?

You know, 300 Israelis were killed at the music festival.

And she looked at me and she had this look in her eyes that I haven't seen.

I don't know ever.

And she said, I thought it was fucking hilarious.

I loved it.

And the feeling I had was like sickness, anger, confusion. Like I'm looking into the eyes of this 30-year-old girl.
And I said, I got to go. I said, I'm going to leave.
I said, okay, I just want you to know I don't agree with anything you said. My pulse was going.
I didn't even know what I felt other than I had to get out of there, walk away. And then I decided to go the next week to Israel.

I wanted to see it.

And I wanted to just see it for myself.

And I went to that site of that festival,

and I went to one of the kibbutzes that was attacked.

And I wanted to go into Gaza, asked if we could go in. I was told we couldn't go in.
It wasn't safe. We got close and could see into that world, the Gaza Strip, you know, behind the wall.
And I just spent, I was there for five days, and I really just tried to see it, you know, because we read about it, we see it on our computers,

we certainly get into our, you know,

whatever social media feeds.

I had all this information.

I wanted to see it.

And I think my biggest takeaway is,

as simple as this sounds,

is that these people fucking hate each other. I mean hate each other.
I've never seen that kind of hatred. I remember when I was in Iraq with Team 5 and we were driving through towns, people would look at us.
We'd be in those RG trucks. Can't remember what they were called.
Not the hunt, but in those trucks looking out, and they'd be looking in with this look that felt, I hadn't seen that look a lot. You know what I'm talking about.
Like, die. But when I was in Israel, the anger and fear was so palpable.
And I know it's on the other side. And I don't know, man.
I just think where my mind starts going is, okay, Israel did this shit. Palestinians did this shit.
It's been going back and forth since 1941 or whenever the, 1907, depending on how far, however far back you want to go. Because I've tried to go back and, well, okay, it was their fault and it was their fault.
And the English gave it to the Israelis and that fucked everything up. And then World War, and it's this Rubik's Cube that you never solve.
Bottom line is, like, they fucking hate each other. They cannot work it out.
Like, it's like, you know, two kids that are fighting. They just can't stop.
They're never going to stop. And I came out of there with the sense of, and looking into so many Israelis I met, the energy you get is, please, we need help.
And yes, they're horrific what's happening over there, right? These kids dying in Gaza and these innocent people dying and horrific what happened. It's horrific.
And I'm not like, at this point, I don't know what to justify and who's right and who's wrong at this point. It's just, if it's going to stop, they need help.
That was my take. They need someone to come in and say, you go over the fuck here, you go over the fuck here, stop.
Yeah. And I hope that can happen.
It's a very complicated situation. Yeah, it's super complicated, but at the end of the day, if you just look at it, just practically, they can't fix it without other people, in my opinion, getting involved.

It's like there has to be help from us.

There has to be help from Saudi Arabia, from UAE, from Qatar, from Egypt, from Jordan. Like, they got to help.
Europe's got to help. Because they can't fucking figure it out.
Yeah. That was what I got.
And it's really fucking sad to me. How much time did you spend over there? Was it for five days? Five days.
Yeah. And, you know, I recommend for people to go there if they want to understand what it really feels like and get a better sense, maybe a deeper sense of just how dark and complex the problem is.
So I recommend going over there. Damn.
How long ago was that? I got back like 10 days ago. Oh, man.
So this is fresh. Yeah.
And brutal, absolutely brutal to go tour the kibbutzes.

You know, and the tour that I had was a young 28-year-old guy whose brother was killed,

his mother was kidnapped.

They've kept the kibbutz exactly as it was October 7th.

So the blood's all over the place and the glass and the kid's shoes and, you know, and you know babies were taken and you know absolutely horrific um and and you know like you've seen that video of murphy and deets uh and you know using that i mean you can't go there without getting activated and then you go to the music festival and, you know, it's fuck it, man.

Fuck it.

Game on.

Yeah.

Okay, you're going to do this?

Game on.

You support that.

Right?

And I do.

But then you start, you know, understanding the pain on the other side and you just, your

head starts to explode.

Yeah.

And that's why I've come to the conclusion, like, they can't, they need referees. Yeah.
It's like the nastiest hockey fight you've ever seen in your fucking life with no refs. Yeah.
You know? Yeah. And people are bringing guns onto the ice and knives onto the ice, and no one's there to stop it.
Yeah, I've been hesitant to cover the subject because it's so fucking complicated. It's just, it's...
Well, if you look backwards, it's really complicated. Well, you did that.
Well, you did that. Well, you did that.
Well, you did that. Okay.
That's never going to get unpacked, in my opinion. Looking forward, big brother issue from 40,000 feet,

someone has to step in and organize a large group effort to stop this shit.

So that's what I hope happens.

Yeah, me too.

Because it sucks. Me too.
It sucks for everyone. The world is a fucked up place.
Yeah, but there's some good stories too. Well, let's move into what you're doing now, American Primeval.
Yeah. How did that come across? So American Primeval, that's the new show.
Did you ever see Jeremiah Johnson when you were a kid? Yeah. So when I was a kid, Robert Redford played this wilderness guy who went out west from the city and had to learn how to survive and ended up marrying an Indian woman and a kid.
and he was ended up, first at first he was totally inept and couldn't function, and Indians wouldn't even waste an arrow on him because he was so, he was, you know, so useless and such a non-threat. And by the end, he was a great warrior and he had the respect of multiple tribes.
And that was one of my favorite movies as a kid. And that was something that got me going and wanting to make movies and tell stories and stuff.
And I always kind of wanted to do something like that, an adventure story. Not like a Western in the traditional sense.
And I like Westerns, like What's Casting the Sundance Kid was one of my favorite, or The Unforgiven. I loved The Cowboys, some of John Wayne's earlier film.
I loved all those movies. But I kind of wanted to do something that was a little more, like, raw and just pure survival and didn't have, like, towns with saloons and whorehouses and, you know, sheriffs and people.
I wanted, like, to be up in the mountains with the savages. And so I got a friend, this guy, Mark L.
Smith, who wrote The Revenant. Did you see The Revenant? Yeah.
And I loved that. And I'm like, hey, man, let's go back into this world.
And he actually came into my office, and I have a collection of axes in my office. I think he'd approve of it.
And I pulled out this ice axe, and I walked up to him, and I go, I just put the axe in his lap. I said, let's do a show that's this.
And I said, let's just channel this, this ice axe. And he smiled.
He said, okay. And he wrote it.
And it's this kind of epic saga set in 1857. In this corner of America, it's southwestern Wyoming and southeastern Utah.
It's that intersection. Where in 1857, it was fucking wild.
There was no civilization. But it was kind of the last, one of the last areas that were really wild in America.

And, you know, there were multiple Native American tribes. There were the Mormons who were setting up in Salt Lake City, and they were violent, had a real violent side to them, because they'd been fucked over from New York to Georgia to Illinois where their leader, Joseph Smith, was killed.
was killed, so this dude, Brigham Young,

flees west with 2,000 Mormons

and sets up his last stand in Salt Lake City,

thinking no one's ever going to come.

And he starts growing the Mormon church, and he builds his army to defend.

So he's out there, the U.S. government sending the army

to fuck with the Mormons and get them out.

Because Brigham Young's trying to turn Utah, true, this is true, into a Utah state. Utah wasn't a state.
It was a territory. And Brigham Young's like, all right, we'll take it.
This will be a Mormon state, Utah. And it was President Buchanan who preceded Lincoln who's like, yeah, no, you're not doing that, bro.
You're not doing that. So he's sending the army out there to get the Mormons out.
So they're fighting. All the Indians are fighting.
And you've got all these trappers who are just, you know, hunting, trapping bear and other pelts. So it's just a fucking savage place.
And our show follows a woman who's got a handicapped son who's just trying to get through that land to California to find the kid's dad, so you think. She's got a secret.
And the story's her journey through that part of America. Damn.
And it gets nasty. It looks like it.
It looks like it. I's nasty.
I started it. Did we send you the shows?

You sent them to me.

All right, good.

We'll sit down and take a peek.

Because they get...

And the organizing event is worth anybody checking out.

It's a very underreported mass murder,

arguably the first mass killing in American history, that's called the Mormon Meadows Massacre. And it happened in 1857, and a group of pioneers called the Fancher Party that were going from Arkansas to California had to move through Mormon land, Utah land, to get to California.

But in 1857, the Mormons had basically issued a proclamation

saying that no one can come through our land

without a permit from Governor Brigham Young.

They'd done this because they were getting so disrespected by the pioneers

who would come through and be like,

hey, bro, can I have some of your wives? Or maybe I'll just take one of your wives and they'd steal women. Mormons were polygamists and they all had 10 or 15 wives, which was problematic.
But these pioneers would come through and harass the Mormons, rape women, kill cattle. They'd let their cattle graze on the Mormons' crops.
So there was all this mutual disrespect. So by the time this party came through without a permit, the Mormons warned them off and said, you've got to go back.
You've got to go around, which would add like two weeks to the journey. And these pioneers were like, fuck you, we're not going around.
So the Mormons came back and killed all of them. So a group of Mormons, and what was kind of fucked up is they dressed up as Paiute, which was a tribe out there, Indians.
They dressed up as the Indians and actually brought a couple of Indians with them so that any witnesses would think it was an Indian murder. And it was really a Mormon murder.
It was a killing done by Mormons. And they killed about 165 of these pioneers, men, women, and children.
And really horrific moment in the history of the Mormon church. And it's a horrible moment in general.
And that's kind of what we use as like the inciting incident is what we call it, where, you know, the moment that kicks something off.

So the show's kind of going along,

and you don't realize it's going to hit you.

And then the Mormon's mental massacre

kind of comes at you hard, and that's the event.

And so it was interesting, like, going to Utah,

meeting the different Mormons

that were historians of this moment in time, and getting them to talk about it. It was just a dark moment in Mormon history, which I never knew about until— You got them to talk about it? Yeah, and there was one guy, one Mormon wrote a book called The Meadows Massacre, and he took me to the site.
And he wrote it because there's monument in utah now where the massacre took place and the mormons built the monument to all the folks who were killed and his book it's really interesting because it it it's about this crime this horrible moment in mormon history and and what he does in the book and what he said to me was, okay, as a Mormon, if you want to show this moment in our history, you have every right to do it. It happened.
But I would ask you to read my book and do your research and at least understand how it got to that point, right? Because, you know, like any moment of violence, if you backtrack it and think well which is kind of what's so tricky about the israel situation well you try to unpack it it just you know and get to the roots very hard and in case of the meadows massacre what this guy what the book did well is it sort of let you understand how things got so tense that this 145-person massacre could occur. And I thought that was really kind of interesting.
And in learning about that and learning about American history and the continual line of violence that's, you know, plagued our planet, but certainly plagued our country, you start to understand man and our human nature and why we're so inclined to violence. And that's sort of a theme of the show.
And one thing so interesting that saved the Mormon church, arguably, is that in 1857, the army was ready to come in big numbers and just fucking kill the Mormons. And that would have been no Mormon church.
There'd be no BYU. There'd be no Salt Lake City, as we know.
It would have been over. And that would have been a great act of violence.
But the Civil War was just popping off at that moment in 1857, 1858.

So Buchanan And that would have been a great act of violence. But the Civil War was just popping off at that moment in 1857, 1858.

So Buchanan and then Lincoln had to pull all the troops away from Brigham Young. And they were about to fucking get him, right?

Civil War, we need these troops back east.

No shit.

And that saved Brigham Young.

The Civil War saved the Mormon church.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Interesting.

That is interesting.

Where'd you film it?

In Santa Fe.

In Santa Fe, on location.

I wanted to do a film with no sound stages.

I was like, let's go out there.

Let's go up on the mountain.

Let's shoot in the weather. Let's fucking make a survival show.
That's what I asked for. And that was maybe one of the stupider things I've ever asked for because we're up there for 135 days on the mountain through the winter, through the summer, snowstorms, rainstorms, lightning strikes, fucking rattlesnakes.
We'd have rattlesnake wranglers cruising through the set, you know, constantly. And they'd find the little ones, which I didn't understand.
Those are the real dangerous ones. Did you know this? The little rattlesnakes, the younger and smaller the rattlesnake, the bigger the venom load.
So you see a big rattlesnake. You don't want to mess with it.
You see a little rattlesnake, everybody clears out. No shit.
I didn't know that. Snakes.
Our actor broke his leg. We had to film around that.
Stumpman got all fucked up. It was a wild shoot.
And I'm like, you asked for it, you got it. But a good challenge, a really good challenge.
Man, it looks, the preview is awesome. And it looks super realistic.
And I'm sure it's going to crush it on Netflix. It's on Netflix, correct? On Netflix on, I think, January 9th.
Yeah, January 9th. Well, Peter, we're wrapping up the interview.
You're a good dude, man. So are you.
I appreciate it. Thank you for opening up about everything.
Same to you. Thanks for sharing the story of your buddy.
Oh, it's...

He lives on.

So he was an amazing dude.

But, man, we covered a lot of ground there.

And you thought you didn't have it in you.

Here we are.

I wasn't sure.

But, hey, it was a pleasure.

Glad to see you again.

And best of luck with the film. Appreciate it.
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