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

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Speaker 5 Peter Berg, welcome to the show.

Speaker 6 Pleasure, man. Thank you.

Speaker 5 Man, I can't even believe you're sitting here. I've watched so many of your movies and series,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 to have you sitting here is pretty surreal.

Speaker 6 Well, I feel the same way. I've watched a lot of your shows, and I figure

Speaker 6 it's good for you to expand your reach and get a director to come on here because, you I think I asked you if you'd had any other directors and you said not yet. So I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 6 I'm a big fan of yours and

Speaker 6 good job, man.

Speaker 5 Man, thank you. Thank you.
I am curious. I have to know this.
How the hell did my, like, you got to be a super busy guy and

Speaker 5 with

Speaker 5 who you appear to be surrounded by. I mean,

Speaker 5 how did my, how did this pop up on your radar?

Speaker 6 I was trying to think about when I first

Speaker 6 came to know of you.

Speaker 6 I know a lot of SEALs,

Speaker 6 and it might have been

Speaker 6 Marcus or Morgan Luttrell that somehow got you on my radar.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 a couple of other guys that are living in California that I know, but just your name came up.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And we get a lot of guys in LA 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.

Speaker 6 And I heard about you and how you had kind of...

Speaker 6 found this whole new career for yourself. And having gone through, you know, the military experiences you have, I found that really fucking impressive.

Speaker 6 Wow. And that caught my eye also.
So, you know,

Speaker 6 I don't think people understand

Speaker 6 how hard that transition is. You know, 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

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I think it's important that people do make an effort. I do, and I just a lot of respect for what you've done.

Speaker 5 Man, thank you.

Speaker 6 A lot.

Speaker 5 That means a hell of a lot coming from you. So I really appreciate it.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 Peter Berg, you're 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

Speaker 5 producer, earning accolades across multiple platforms.

Speaker 5 Your approach to filmmaking is deeply personal, often focusing on real stories that highlight human endurance, teamwork, and the fight against adversity.

Speaker 5 Your films are known for their gritty realism, emotional depth, and action that feels both authentic and exhilarating.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That's like super close to me.

Speaker 5 And I'm sure you know why, which we'll get into. The opioid

Speaker 5 epidemic head on

Speaker 5 with your epic show, Painkiller. Just one week week after its release, Painkiller ranked number one in the top 10 English language series genre and currently has over 54 million hours viewed.

Speaker 5 And on January 9th, you're about to introduce your latest project, American Prime Evil into the World on Netflix. I look forward to discussing that today.

Speaker 5 Thank you for giving us a sneak peek. That,

Speaker 5 like,

Speaker 5 it looks so awesome and so realistic. And

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 clear eyes, full hearts. Can't lose.
Can't lose. Let's dig in.
So,

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 also,

Speaker 5 everybody gets a gift.

Speaker 5 Just a little something for the flight home.

Speaker 6 Open it now, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, go ahead. Open it up.

Speaker 5 Sir, visualize. Oh, the gummy bears.

Speaker 6 Okay,

Speaker 6 they're not going to get me high. I'm not going to get me or anything.

Speaker 5 No, you'll have to go back home to California to get those.

Speaker 6 Okay, I can get them.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 I love gummy bears. Yeah, those are good.
A little something for the flight home.

Speaker 6 Well, here's here's yours.

Speaker 6 I got you this because I said I might need it. Oh, yeah.
I'm not good with three hours.

Speaker 6 That's, from what I understand, some of Tennessee's finest uh from right here right in franklin oh man this is awesome yeah

Speaker 6 franklin distillery yes sir perfect um thank you and then i got you this is 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 you've definitely done your fair share of earning so that's a gift for me and the entire crew of american primeval man thank you I'm going to have you sign this.

Speaker 5 This is going to be a relic in the studio.

Speaker 6 I'd be honored.

Speaker 5 Thank you. This is very cool.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's rare. That's a collector's piece.

Speaker 5 Perfect.

Speaker 6 Cool, man.

Speaker 5 I'll get it. Yeah, we'll have you sign it after the

Speaker 5 after

Speaker 5 the interview here. And then

Speaker 5 one last thing. I got a Patreon account.

Speaker 5 They're my top subscribers, top supporters.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 you got it right when it finally released?

Speaker 6 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 Outlife is my favorite.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And you end up kind of looking back, at least I do,

Speaker 6 and loving certain things about every one of them.

Speaker 6 Even the ones that suck.

Speaker 6 You, 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.

Speaker 6 No, you go into it like, you know, I would imagine, you know, an athlete goes into a game,

Speaker 6 a team guy goes into a building

Speaker 6 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 and so I try for them all to to work every single movie and you know I love all of them they're all really stressful

Speaker 6 if you really push me I'll probably say like Lone Survivor is my favorite. And that was the most emotional.

Speaker 6 But I love them all.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 you've made some just amazing, amazing stuff. And

Speaker 5 yeah, I would say,

Speaker 5 I mean, that had to be a lot of pressure, you know, considering the events that happened

Speaker 5 that the movie's about. And then in just our conversation before we

Speaker 5 actually officially started the interview about about

Speaker 5 showing the families.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 that's tough. I mean, that is.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, we're talking a little bit about it. And for some reason, you know, 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.

Speaker 6 drinking wine, kissing and crying and doing all the things that people do, falling in love on a beach.

Speaker 6 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 I can't seem to just make the love story so I I tend to be drawn towards more challenging projects and in the case of Lone Survivor

Speaker 6 Like right from the get-go, when I met Marcus Luttrell

Speaker 6 and, you know, first looked into his eyes, I knew, I read the book quickly, and he was in town interviewing directors, and a lot of directors wanted that story.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 sacrifice.

Speaker 6 energy that Marcus had kind of got me and

Speaker 6 still to this day it still gets me. Just FaceTiming.
I have such a connection to him. But making Lone Survivor

Speaker 6 and, you know, started with going to the Dietz family, the Axelson, the Murphy family, and asking for their blessing and telling the story.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 all three of those meetings were very emotional.

Speaker 6 I remember going to

Speaker 6 Danny's parents' house in Colorado and his father taking me into his his bedroom

Speaker 6 which they left kind of as it was almost from 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 did that they recovered

Speaker 6 holy shit

Speaker 6 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 an after,

Speaker 6 I remember hearing after action report, autopsy. And he started reading and he said, left knee, bullet, left thigh, bullet, groin, bullet.

Speaker 6 And I realized he was reading his son's autopsy report. And he started

Speaker 6 shaking and 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.

Speaker 6 And he put the paper on my lap. And it was the autopsy report with 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.

Speaker 6 And I thought to myself, okay, what the fuck have I gotten myself into with this?

Speaker 6 Not a joke. Very, very real to some

Speaker 6 very good, decent human beings, parents and wives and siblings.

Speaker 6 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 McCraven was running

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 and the families and everyone in between. And every day I was making that film, I was thinking about the Murphys, the Diets, the Axelsons, Marcus,

Speaker 6 and so was the whole crew. So was Mark Wahlberg.

Speaker 6 It became something much more than

Speaker 6 a movie for us.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And that movie had a special gear that is very hard to find.

Speaker 6 And 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.

Speaker 6 That, that was one that will be hard to replicate and a feeling that's very hard to get.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So that every day I would know, 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.

Speaker 6 I have to do a really good job today or you're going to kill me. Anything else? He'd be like, like nope that's it I got it and then I go about it

Speaker 6 man and then he had Morgan kind of like lurking as backup yeah because you know for me Marcus was a scary one but Morgan was a really scary one

Speaker 6 who really didn't have to say much but was have you met Morgan do you know him at all I've never met him and he's such a great guy and you know

Speaker 6 in Washington now doing really well I just spoke to him

Speaker 6 last week and,

Speaker 6 you know, having those two guys suddenly in your life and then just the general SEAL community

Speaker 6 was

Speaker 6 a gut check and it definitely focused a little bit harder every second than I have in some other films.

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Speaker 6 Yeah, wow.

Speaker 5 Now, that is uh, that's heavy. I mean, that's you know, we

Speaker 5 it's interesting, you know,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 6 That just gave me goosebumps when I walked in here and saw the rounds from the Chinook that crashed. That I was not expecting to see that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, it's uh

Speaker 5 pretty heavy there's some heavy stuff in this room uh that's very historic but but um 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

Speaker 5 it was some kind of a recruiting video that um a kind of put up yeah i saw it and uh you could

Speaker 5 i remember seeing i was new but you know fairly new and i remember seeing danny diets uh

Speaker 5 upside down on the mountaintop and his cami blouse was pulled up and uh

Speaker 5 a lot of the guys in my platoon had were in a were in a team with danny and they were like holy shit like he just got that tattoo and i was with him when it 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 uh how

Speaker 6 personal and how much emotion you guys must have felt seeing those videos. I saw those videos.
Sprage.

Speaker 5 I mean, I would watch them every time we went out on an op. That was my, that was my

Speaker 5 warm-up.

Speaker 5 You know, I would, this is why the fuck we're doing this because of this. And, um,

Speaker 5 but uh, and then, you know, I can't wait to get into some of the opiate stuff, too.

Speaker 5 I'm, um, um, with you, that's something we can relate on i lost my best friend to to opiates and uh who was struggling you know you were just talking about you know the transition from military four military guys getting back into civilian and everybody goes down the down the spiral and and he didn't make it out and it was it was because of opiates i mean actually it was because of that operation So that was my best friend's team.

Speaker 6 He was part of the recovery operation?

Speaker 5 He was part of the recovery operation. He was,

Speaker 5 I'll tell you this. This was, I've never talked about this,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 6 he

Speaker 5 was, that was his sister platoon. He was in Iraq.
They were doing,

Speaker 5 having a great deployment, which means they were going after a lot of bad guys.

Speaker 5 He had

Speaker 5 his name's Gabe.

Speaker 5 I don't know if I should be doing this, but fuck it. I'm going to do it.
And because this, he had one of the worst runs I've ever heard. And

Speaker 5 he was engaged and

Speaker 5 had a mess up at a strip club and got a stripper pregnant. Broke off the engagement.

Speaker 5 Was going to do the right thing.

Speaker 5 He was going to do the right thing in his mind, which was to marry her, marry the stripper, have the baby. And

Speaker 5 he deployed to Iraq. Well, they were getting after it, and she

Speaker 5 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 mama's dead.

Speaker 5 He doesn't tell anybody. He goes back to SIL Team 10 and says, hey, I want to go back with the guys over in Iraq.
They say,

Speaker 5 oh, you didn't hear the guys are coming home early. He had screened to go to development group and they said, hey, you need to re-enlist.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 how about you jump in with your sister platoon who's in Afghanistan right now?

Speaker 5 He's like, well, I don't have any of my gear. It's all in Iraq still.
And they're said, don't worry. You don't need gear.
You're not going on operations.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They land in Germany for a layover, find out that Marcus is on the run.

Speaker 5 Then

Speaker 5 he lands in Bagram.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 they know that three guys have died and that Marcus is on the run.

Speaker 5 They land in Bagram. And he finds out that the Hilo went down, which was all his, you know, the rest of his friends.

Speaker 5 Wants to go on the recover, on the recovery op with

Speaker 5 dev.

Speaker 5 They wouldn't let him on at first, and he was like, basically, he's like, I don't, they're like, you don't have any kid. You can't go.
He's like, I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 5 I'll scrounge up some shit.

Speaker 5 So in his dress cam, he's...

Speaker 5 goes and takes like piecemeals some shit together from the techs gets like a helm like a helmet that doesn't fit with a with a a monocle piece of night, uh, night vision, like a shitty rifle, you know, without any optics on it.

Speaker 5 And he's in his like a old flack 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.

Speaker 5 It's found a couple of magazine pouches, put it on, goes on the fucking op.

Speaker 5 The dev guys are all like,

Speaker 5 who the fuck is this?

Speaker 5 Why is a tech coming on this and uh goes on the op

Speaker 5 and uh but i mean that's

Speaker 5 goes on the op to recover the guy the bodies you know they get in a firefight out there and um and um and and he also had a role in benghazi he also had a role in the coast bombing at the agency um

Speaker 5 but never fucking told anybody You know, and he told me when he was in buds,

Speaker 5 he was in buds

Speaker 5 with, I believe, I know James Sull was one, I think Axelson was the other.

Speaker 5 And this was, he was in buds when 9-11 happened and through Hell Week. And he told me he was sitting on the grinder or standing on the grinder.
Sell was on one side, Axelson's on the other.

Speaker 5 And this is like

Speaker 5 30 minutes after the towers go. Wow.

Speaker 6 Was it time to be on the grinder?

Speaker 5 Yeah. And so they give a speech and they're basically saying, hey, Blake,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 There's a good chance that one of these guys are going to be dead, you know, in the near future. James Matt Axelson.

Speaker 5 And when he fucking landed, when he landed in Bagram, it was that Master Chief that gave that speech that greeted him coming off the fucking bird. Wow.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And then he later died of

Speaker 5 addiction with opiates. And so I've never told anybody that.
I've never told.

Speaker 6 I appreciate.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And

Speaker 6 I mean, it just kind of goes back for me to what we were talking about, the complexity for...

Speaker 6 of, you know, the difficulty of surviving for anyone that went through buds during 9-11 okay yeah you're gonna be busy and good luck surviving that just literally coming back alive like Saw and Axelson

Speaker 6 couldn't

Speaker 6 and then if you do come back the complexities of having to carry forget about the 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 these guys are coming back and having to try and move move on.

Speaker 6 And I

Speaker 6 know some professional athletes and I've seen the complexities of an athlete retiring.

Speaker 6 I own a boxing gym in L.A. and we get a lot of military

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 pro athletes that come in there and train and just especially

Speaker 6 when they've gotten out.

Speaker 6 And I see

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 children again, like babies in a new world. And

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Inside it can be, you know, a different story.

Speaker 6 And I, and I, I remember when I, someone gave me the statistic about how much money the government spends making a seal, right?

Speaker 6 All the training, everything, you know, three phases, and then all the specialized training. And then, I don't know, I heard pretty high numbers for

Speaker 6 what it costs to make a seal versus how much money they put into kind of keeping an eye on a seal

Speaker 6 when he's done.

Speaker 5 They don't care about us when we're done.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 for me to sort out. Yeah.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The upper echelon of the SEAL teams fucking hate this show because

Speaker 5 we dive into it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I would imagine.

Speaker 5 We expose it and it it it you know in the end um

Speaker 5 you know i don't care if it hurts the recruiting numbers yeah they they have i believe they have a responsibility

Speaker 6 i understand that you know what i went um

Speaker 6 i got to go when i was writing lone survivor i got to go to iraq with team five to a place called rawah i don't know if you're ever out there was a marine corps base kind of by the syrian border and i got to spend a month you know as a civilian embedded with with a bunch of guys from team 5.

Speaker 6 And that was, without a doubt, one of the greatest experiences of my life on many levels. And a couple of, I took a lot from it.
I have a lot of memories. But to this point,

Speaker 6 one memory that really stuck with me when I tried to understand, when I look now back and I tried to understand the transition for SEALs, but not just SEALs.

Speaker 6 It could be anyone who was in the military, but certainly could be for Rangers or Delta or, you know, Marsock or or any particularly special operators that have to kind of get out

Speaker 6 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 he's he was doing security on a corner and I was kind of with him and and

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And he knew enough Arabic to say, you know, go, get out of here. And he yelled it at them and they stared at him and he yelled it again

Speaker 6 and they sort of walked away. And afterwards, after the whole lot, we were back at the base, I said, well, what would you have done if they didn't leave?

Speaker 6 And he said, I would have killed them.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I own them.

Speaker 6 And I remember thinking,

Speaker 6 well, this guy's going to have trouble getting out of the military. Like, how how do you take, and I totally understood that mindset of like, fuck it, I will survive.
My job is to protect this corner.

Speaker 6 My guys are in that house. I will fucking protect this corner.
I understood that.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And like the complexity of that kind of mindset

Speaker 6 to have to adjust to being able to be like I remember someone once talked about Mick Jagger, right? The Rolling Stones guy.

Speaker 6 And you remember how in like 1975 when the Rolling Stones were the biggest band in the world.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And he comes home and his wife, Jerry Hall, this woman, and

Speaker 6 has a baby. She hands him 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,

Speaker 6 and I got it. 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.

Speaker 6 Well, now you got to come home and you have to turn it in, you have to retire and you have to move forward.

Speaker 6 I don't think

Speaker 6 civilians understand that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they don't.

Speaker 5 They don't, you know, but I think that's a

Speaker 5 I think that

Speaker 5 that's a big reason why

Speaker 5 opiates become such

Speaker 5 a

Speaker 5 Such a problem, you know, in the community.

Speaker 6 I mean, and they're right there.

Speaker 5 And so then, yeah, it numbs that out.

Speaker 6 Turn it off. It numbs it out.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 then

Speaker 5 it's just,

Speaker 5 it's the only thing that seems to turn the switch off, you know, for a lot of people. And

Speaker 5 the immediate, easy fix, you know, just, it numbs you out to where you don't give a fuck, you know, anymore. Yeah.
And

Speaker 5 then,

Speaker 5 you know, down the spiral we go.

Speaker 6 Well, that was what painkiller, you know, was for me.

Speaker 6 The show I did about Purdue Pharma, you know and the Sackler family it's interesting just today

Speaker 6 what's the date today what is it 16th the 16th so today on the way over here someone sent me New York Times article about a new twist in the opioid epidemic these companies that serve as the middlemen between the doctors and the

Speaker 6 the

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And now it came out in the Times today that the Sacklers and other drug companies were were bribing these guys to restrict the amount of pills that were allowed to be prescribed. So

Speaker 6 they would get paid off and they would allow

Speaker 6 these incredible prescriptions to be put through and the insurance companies to pay for them. So it's just more of a game within a game within a game.

Speaker 5 Damn, dude. And when you made that, I mean...

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 that exposed a lot of shit to the public

Speaker 5 that people people weren't really thinking about. I mean, when you make something like that, do you have any fear?

Speaker 6 A little bit. For a minute, I did.

Speaker 5 You're fucking with some really powerful people.

Speaker 6 So at first I didn't, right?

Speaker 6 It's like people said, 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.

Speaker 6 When I got back and I kind of really looked at the map and figured out, I felt a little more nervous.

Speaker 6 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 um

Speaker 6 the sacklers at first i'm like well yeah well these guys are scumbags them let's make a movie and let's let's tell the truth you know i have friends that have died from drug addiction and i don't give a 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.

Speaker 6 These are the real Pablo Escobars, the real drug dealers that are putting up numbers much larger than the Medellin cocaine cartels,

Speaker 6 the companies like Purdue and the Sackler families.

Speaker 6 So the more I learned about just how powerful and quiet they were and what kind of masterminds at secrecy, like you still, if you try and search Richard Sackler, they're so fucking scrubbed that you'll get virtually nothing on them.

Speaker 6 And they just constantly cycle that. And I don't still,

Speaker 6 I've yet to find anyone who's better scrub as far as internet than Richard Sackler,

Speaker 6 the kingpin of the Sackler family.

Speaker 6 But 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.

Speaker 6 like like making sure doors are locked and you know having access to security if I felt threatened and then I realized like if they want to get me they're going to get me yeah um

Speaker 6 and kind of by the time

Speaker 6 we really got going there 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 if they were it was so public at this point that if they did come after us, everyone was going to know.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And everyone's like, dude, I don't know if I want to stand so close to you.

Speaker 6 I invite my friends out to dinner and they're like, yeah, no, we're good. We're

Speaker 6 busy for a while. Let's see how the show plays out.
People kind of distance themselves.

Speaker 6 Joke at me for a minute. But

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 I'm not necessarily like the biggest conspiracy guy. Like, I'm always up to entertain a good conspiracy story.

Speaker 6 Like, I'll talk about Lee Harvey Oswald for a long time and the magic bullet theory and all that. But I

Speaker 6 don't even know whether it's a conspiracy or it's just like the realization of how the world does business.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 6 The amount of guys that are making money off of war, right? That's a different story. But the way

Speaker 6 money rules the world,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Like, for anyone that's dealt with pain, whether it's like the emotional pain that your buddy went through after losing his...

Speaker 6 child and

Speaker 6 girlfriend and seeing what he saw in that helicopter.

Speaker 6 he's in pain give me that pill give me 40 milligrams of that yeah liquid honey you know 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

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 5 Curtis Wright, no.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 one of the challenges the Sacklers had

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 named Curtis Wright. And he was the obstacle.
He kept saying to the Sacklers and to Purdue Pharma, I I can't approve this drug. This is heroin in a little M ⁇ M wrapper.

Speaker 6 Like, what are you fucking crazy? No. And they kept trying, he went through multiple applications and this one guy was saying no.

Speaker 6 And that was putting the entire Sackler family and Purdue Pharma in real risk of

Speaker 6 financial ruin. And so

Speaker 6 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 DC,

Speaker 6 and they spent a couple of days in a hotel room. And no one knows what happened in that hotel room.

Speaker 6 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 language.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Oh, shit. He was making, they say, 70,000 at the FDA.
hundreds of thousands at Purdue. They bought him.

Speaker 6 And when I heard that, I'm like, okay,

Speaker 6 that is how the fucking world operates.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 it's not a conspiracy, it's a fact. And it's public.
People know about it.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And so it was making Pinkiller

Speaker 6 was,

Speaker 6 you know, 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?

Speaker 6 My best friend died. My cousin died.
My mother died.

Speaker 6 Just in your studio today, someone that works for you came up to me and started sharing me a story about their relationship and to a family member and the drug. And

Speaker 6 it's omnipresent and it's horrible. And it's, you know, what I get from it is like, let's open up our eyes and be real honest about how this world operates.

Speaker 6 And usually

Speaker 6 it's money.

Speaker 5 What were some of the things, what was the initial thing that kind of got you paranoid about the Sackler family?

Speaker 6 I remember I was trying to interview members of Purdue Pharma

Speaker 6 to come, 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.

Speaker 6 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 of Pain.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But she's getting real close to the phone and she's whispering. And she keeps looking around.

Speaker 6 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 we we just got to like

Speaker 6 you know watch our backs yeah and be smart because we are poking a bear yeah and that

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 I will.

Speaker 6 I do feel pretty safe here with you, though, I got to say.

Speaker 5 We're in good company.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I feel safe.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 did you struggle with addiction at all?

Speaker 6 I was lucky.

Speaker 6 I never had addiction.

Speaker 6 I have family members that have, they've used

Speaker 6 12-step

Speaker 6 to their, to their,

Speaker 6 you know, I have one sibling, and, you know, she's done an incredible job. She's 30 years sober, and A has been a godsend to her.
And we've talked about addiction, and

Speaker 6 I've asked her, I'm like, what do you think it is? Like, you know, I've asked her, do you think I'm an addict? Because I do drink.

Speaker 6 There's not a drug I haven't tried.

Speaker 6 Pretty much. I don't think I've done bath salts or angel dust.
Okay.

Speaker 6 Take those two, maybe a few others, but I've tried them.

Speaker 6 And I don't know, man, I always had that

Speaker 6 ability to sort of

Speaker 6 see through

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But then I think about the other.

Speaker 6 And I kind of have that 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,

Speaker 6 well, let's jump ahead 24 hours,

Speaker 6 48 hours, and think about the cost, the hangover, the self-loathing, the self-disgust, the bad choices that start to accumulate and the fear. And I was able to kind of, I'm good.

Speaker 6 And my sister said to me that that ability to have that pause

Speaker 6 is something that can separate, you know, an addict, a true addict,

Speaker 6 from

Speaker 6 someone that's not.

Speaker 6 And I think about that because it's not any superhuman quality. It's nothing that I take credit for.
I'd be like, oh, I can do this

Speaker 6 any more than I think most of the addicts that I know

Speaker 6 suffer not for it's not 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.

Speaker 6 It's a disease, I believe.

Speaker 6 And I'm fortunate that I don't think I have it.

Speaker 6 And do you?

Speaker 6 Have you experienced it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Is that common knowledge? Forgive me for not knowing that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 5 I had a hell of a run in Colombia with cocaine. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I appreciate the bottle, but

Speaker 5 I've been sober for three years.

Speaker 6 Good for you, man.

Speaker 5 And, well, I've been on booze for three years, but yeah,

Speaker 5 I was really right in the line there. Opiates, Coke, benzos, booze,

Speaker 5 sleeping pill, all of it combined together. And then

Speaker 5 I did a psychedelics

Speaker 6 treatment. You had a little journey.
You weren't a little bit more.

Speaker 5 I had a little journey.

Speaker 5 Went down to Mexico to do

Speaker 5 some drugs that got me off the drugs.

Speaker 6 What were some of the drugs? I'm sure everyone knows this and you've talked about

Speaker 5 me. It was,

Speaker 5 so I had really cleaned it up.

Speaker 5 So I moved down to

Speaker 5 Medellin.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's a tricky spot for anyone that's

Speaker 6 even tempted to flirt with the devil. You're going to find it down there.

Speaker 5 Well, that's kind of why I went. And you found what you were looking for.
I definitely found it and overdosed a couple times, almost died.

Speaker 5 I remember calling my mom on Mother's Day.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 I've always heard

Speaker 5 you don't have to worry about, you don't have to worry about how much Coke you've had

Speaker 5 until things start slowing down. And

Speaker 5 they said, when you're on speed

Speaker 5 and things start slowing down,

Speaker 5 that's

Speaker 5 when you're right in the line.

Speaker 5 And that happened to me a couple times down there where it was like

Speaker 5 that fucking scene in old school where, like, you know, the voice is like,

Speaker 5 I started hearing that.

Speaker 6 How much coke had you done? You think, and how long was the binge?

Speaker 5 About five years. And

Speaker 5 a lot.

Speaker 5 I mean, I just, it's just, I mean, it's, you know, at that time,

Speaker 5 like really good Coke in Miami was like $150 a gram. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And down there, I was getting it for five bucks a gram.

Speaker 6 And it was so much stronger, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, it's fresh from the, it's just right, right.
I mean, it's Columbia.

Speaker 6 But would you do like,

Speaker 6 because I never did,

Speaker 6 but I heard about like like three-day, four-day binges that people would go on. And you're not sleeping and you're just doing well.

Speaker 6 Did you ever experience anything like that?

Speaker 5 I mean, it was all the time. It was all the time.
And

Speaker 5 I would go,

Speaker 5 you know, I don't know. I never really kept track, but I mean, I never stopped.
Like,

Speaker 5 I would go hard in the paint for

Speaker 5 a week. Oh, my goodness.
And then

Speaker 5 I would go all the way up until the point where like

Speaker 5 I would get like this really bad heartburn and I would just drown Tums and Pepto and anything. Like I just wanted to keep.

Speaker 6 How did you get yourself out of that?

Speaker 5 Well, I actually got run out by the federal police.

Speaker 5 And I

Speaker 5 so I like really

Speaker 5 I always

Speaker 5 take care of everybody around me. And

Speaker 5 I do it with my team now.

Speaker 5 I've just always done it. I've always been.
And so when I went down there, I had a kind of a, I had a penthouse in

Speaker 5 a neighborhood called El Poblado.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so anybody that was around me, I would take care of. So like number one guy,

Speaker 5 doorman, who has access into the building that I'm in,

Speaker 5 the door guide.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 Columbia to come back to the States, I would give them all my clothes, my shoes, my song, everything, like a computer,

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 they had kind of tipped me off. And one of them in particular particular tipped me off and

Speaker 5 had told me that

Speaker 5 they had set up a observation point in a building across from mine and

Speaker 5 that they may have bugged the

Speaker 5 recess lighting in the hallway outside of my...

Speaker 5 where I was at.

Speaker 6 But this is real or was this like Coke paranoia?

Speaker 5 No, this is real.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And so when I got one to that, I

Speaker 5 hightailed it out of there. I never went back, cleaned it up, cleaned up the Coke, tried to clean it up.

Speaker 5 Then I started going to Costa Rica, but Costa Rica was like fucking Disneyland compared to what I was doing.

Speaker 6 Puravita. You weren't about to pursue it.
It was a joke.

Speaker 5 It was just a bunch of gringos down there. One

Speaker 5 half sex with

Speaker 5 Latin Costa Rican girls. And I was just like, this is fucking stupid.
TV.

Speaker 5 I need to be...

Speaker 6 Because because the real issue was adrenaline addiction from from all my time in and um right but that goes back to what we were talking about earlier like you get to play god yeah 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 uh

Speaker 5 to think it would be a good time, which I thought, you know, I'm not condoning this. It was a fucking, it was horrible.
I speak against it all the time now, but, but

Speaker 5 they couldn't,

Speaker 5 you know, they'd last maybe two days and they'd be, they would 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.

Speaker 5 It's like, this is fucking crazy. And

Speaker 5 because it, it wasn't,

Speaker 5 I mean, it's just different. It's just crazy down there.
I mean, I used to go to this

Speaker 5 club. It was called Fahrenheit.
And in the club,

Speaker 5 they had like like these tables where they would line, like put lines and mounds, like little mounds and key bumps and shit on the table of Coke and then lacquer over the top.

Speaker 6 You know, right now, some of your

Speaker 6 viewers are like just googling Fahrenheit and booking plane kickers right now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Well, that was a long time ago. I'm sure they're looking.

Speaker 6 Don't do it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but don't do it. That doesn't lead anywhere good.

Speaker 6 Right. So, okay.
So what would happen?

Speaker 6 You go to Fahrenheit. How did that play out?

Speaker 5 I mean, it was just, that was, I mean, that was just one hangout.

Speaker 5 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 then my time at the agency, like it just,

Speaker 5 I mean, it was just always like shit was happening. And then when I left, I couldn't fucking feed that anymore.
And

Speaker 5 I had no, nowhere to get it, you know, and so that's, I was like, I'm going to go down here. I'm like.

Speaker 6 But what do you think?

Speaker 6 Did you get into 12-step?

Speaker 6 What saved you? What got you to walk away from the drugs and the alcohol?

Speaker 5 That Mother's Day thing really got to me because I was like, man,

Speaker 5 I'm going to fucking OD down here.

Speaker 5 And my body will just decompose because nobody really gives a shit about me down here. Nobody knows I'm here other than my parents.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 CIA contractor, who's fucking died of a cocaine overdose. I was ashamed.

Speaker 5 And, and so I went home and I, I mean, I still struggled with the benzos and because down there would, I would just, you know, you can get whatever you want.

Speaker 5 So if I was getting, you know, eventually if I was getting too

Speaker 5 going too hard down the coke train, I would just pop a volume and then

Speaker 5 put whatever. But

Speaker 5 then I had a suicide attempt and 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

Speaker 5 pulled the car into the garage and reclined the seat back and

Speaker 5 I woke up.

Speaker 5 Wouldn't I should have never woken up. but anyways.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 Me too. But

Speaker 6 so, so,

Speaker 5 yeah. So then, you know, then I,

Speaker 5 then, uh, but then, but then I found, you know, psychedelics through this show and, uh, went down there and haven't had

Speaker 5 kicked everything.

Speaker 6 I mean, so the psychedelics helped you. Are you, are you in 12-step? Do you do you use 12-step?

Speaker 5 Peter, it was like a light switch, man.

Speaker 6 What psychedelics did you do?

Speaker 5 I did ibogaine and 5-MeODNT.

Speaker 6 You smoked a toad? I smoked a toad. I've smoked it four times, my friend.
Really? Yes, sir.

Speaker 5 I want to hear about this.

Speaker 6 I love that toad.

Speaker 5 Did you die?

Speaker 6 Yes, sir.

Speaker 5 Tell me about it.

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Speaker 6 I was going to recommend that you smoke the tug before before you told me that you did. How many times have you smoked the tug?

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 5 one day I did it 13 times.

Speaker 6 Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 You had to really get, you had to get some, get to it.

Speaker 5 You got to dig deep, you know, but

Speaker 5 like 13 times I think I've done it.

Speaker 6 It won't like staying under an all-day event. You started at it.

Speaker 6 And you had a good shaman that was guiding you. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Amazing. Amazing.
And

Speaker 5 like I just, 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, this February, it'll be three years.

Speaker 6 I mean, those are the two most powerful. I mean, I'm gaining I've never done, but I know what it is.
I'm scared of it, actually. Yeah.
And I've

Speaker 6 met the toad.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 6 You really, I can see how that would have taken care of a problem.

Speaker 5 Cleaned me out.

Speaker 6 Still clean. How many times did you do the Ibogaine?

Speaker 5 One.

Speaker 6 That's enough, right? Yep.

Speaker 6 Different experience than the 5-MEO?

Speaker 5 Totally different.

Speaker 6 How would you explain the differences?

Speaker 5 Well, I mean,

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 the Ibogaine is like a 12-hour experience.

Speaker 6 They say the Ibogaine is

Speaker 6 the godfather. Yeah, it's like that's the most powerful.
Yeah. I always heard that 5MEO is the God molecule, but Ibogaine is the Godfather.
Yeah. Is that accurate?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 I think so.

Speaker 6 What was the Ibergane like?

Speaker 5 Man, it was,

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I mean, it was about 12 hours long. I couldn't walk afterwards.
And it was, you know, in a nutshell, it's like a life review.

Speaker 5 It's like a life review

Speaker 5 of

Speaker 5 looking at your life through

Speaker 5 from an outside perspective, like a non-biased, non-for me, like a non-emotional perspective. And so a lot of the things

Speaker 5 that kind of happened, I guess you just.

Speaker 6 you process them and advance from way back from your every little kid.

Speaker 5 And it wasn't all traumatic shit. You know, it was um

Speaker 5 like to be honest it was like this it was like the

Speaker 5 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 them through my peripherals and like see them you know kind of moving through and i 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.

Speaker 5 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.
Um,

Speaker 5 and so it wasn't even like I was reliving experiences, but

Speaker 5 that's kind of, you know, how it went for me. I didn't, I didn't like

Speaker 5 it wasn't, it wasn't a scary experience other than at the very first, I saw like my head split open and another one mushroomed out.

Speaker 6 That's a little scary.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but

Speaker 5 it wasn't, you know, like you hear some of the horror stories about people reliving things or meeting demons.

Speaker 6 I didn't on Abigain?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I didn't meet any demons. I didn't, it was just a life review kind of.

Speaker 5 And then when I came out of it, it's like I had this

Speaker 5 new sixth sense that said, hey, all this shit you're doing, it's fucking poison. Like, knock this shit off.
Quit drinking. Quit, you know, I quit caffeine for a long time.

Speaker 5 I quit smoking marijuana for a long time. I, uh, I was still taking Adderall to concentrate.
Right. Right.
And I hadn't had any of that.

Speaker 5 And, and, uh, like, the, the, the fruit that came from that experience just, I mean, it totally like revolutionized this show and my business.

Speaker 5 I, I was kind of scared to leave the military genre, not leave it, but explore new territories. And like that, somehow that just like...

Speaker 6 Do you credit the Ibogaine more than the 5 Meo?

Speaker 6 Yes. 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.

Speaker 6 And the look in their eye,

Speaker 6 it's almost like their facial construction is different. Their cheekbones feel different.
Their eyes feel different. Their posture.

Speaker 6 And they're sober.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 It seems to be one of the more effective medicines.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, they've done studies on it now.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's really changing a lot of lives.

Speaker 5 You know, and it is the cure for...

Speaker 5 for opiate addiction, for alcoholism. And so if you are out there riding the fucking line, you know, like we were just talking about, and you're looking for a way out, I'd highly recommend it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, man, same here.

Speaker 6 And I do hope that whatever happens

Speaker 6 with Kennedy and

Speaker 6 the new administration, that people start looking at this and that

Speaker 6 any of it, whether it's ketamine, psilocybin, 5MEO, IBAN, that people start at least being educated on what it can and cannot do and that the government starts making these medicines available.

Speaker 6 I'm all for it.

Speaker 6 My experience on

Speaker 6 5MEO, I never did Ibogaine. I don't know if I have the guts for it.
I was scared to do to smoke the toad.

Speaker 6 I remember

Speaker 6 my friend took me, and my friend's a pretty high-functioning business guy, successful. And

Speaker 6 the fact that he had done it and a couple other people I know that are pretty high functioning have done it made me... you know, willing to take the chance.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And it's a little, if you watch somebody that's going through it, you know, they're making some noises and moving around a little bit.

Speaker 6 And I was like, not quite sure what kind of experience they were having. And

Speaker 6 the guy who was actually a psychiatrist who was now the

Speaker 6 administer of this and he used to do antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and you know he would write scripts for it and he started learning about some of these psychedelics and he completely changed his practice and only does 5MeO and Ibogaine now and I thought that was interesting.

Speaker 6 But he took me aside, he sat me down, he said, okay, Pete, you know, you're about to ingest 5MeO DMT.

Speaker 6 It's the most powerful psychedelic, you know, certainly one of them in the world.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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, I'd heard this about other psychedelics.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Like, you know, what's my goal? What should I do? And I remember he looked at me and he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, good luck with that, Pete.
Good luck.

Speaker 6 You try and set all the intentions you want.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I remember

Speaker 6 smoking it and

Speaker 6 the feeling of,

Speaker 6 for me, what they say, they call ego death, right?

Speaker 6 And I've heard, I've talked to other people about about it mike tyson's talked about it um you know it's not 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 it's interesting because you try and explain it to people and you find that your 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.

Speaker 6 So they don't have words for it.

Speaker 6 But it is death, right, of some sort. That's a word that people can relate to.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 I'm in

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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 grandfather. That's off.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I could feel myself trying to hold on to any kind of thinking, any kind of rational thinking.

Speaker 6 And every thought was just,

Speaker 6 and then this giant wall of darkness came over me, and it was a sound, and it was like

Speaker 6 over.

Speaker 6 And I remember thinking very clearly, I'm dead. And my first thought was, it's all over.

Speaker 6 It's all nothing.

Speaker 6 Everything is nothing. I thought that.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 6 Everything is nothing.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 all of this sort of sudden, because

Speaker 6 these are just words now, I became aware sort of

Speaker 6 that something was still going on. I was still functioning.
There was brain function.

Speaker 6 But it wasn't any brain function I'd ever encountered before.

Speaker 6 And then I just started going into something that felt

Speaker 6 so expansive and such an energetic experience that was kind of moving and unfolding in multiple directions,

Speaker 6 everywhere, everything, at once kind of energy.

Speaker 6 And that energy overtook me. And I remember I sobbed and I laughed and I screamed.
And when I came out of it,

Speaker 6 the people who had

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I looked up and there's this white wolf.

Speaker 6 staring at me, like a little, about as close as you are, a little further away, locked into my eyes damn and i'm i'm staring at this wolf and i start pointing and i'm 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

Speaker 6 just stay in it

Speaker 6 um

Speaker 6 and it was um

Speaker 6 an incredibly life-changing experience for me.

Speaker 5 Sounds like a David Yarrow photo.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 6 It was so powerful. And

Speaker 6 for me, because I'm not religious,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 This felt like an incredible religious experience to me. And for me, and people are like, Pete, stop fucking talking about 5MEO, but I love talking about 5MEO.

Speaker 6 And if someone's done it, I'll talk to them about it for hours.

Speaker 6 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 the concept of infinity, right?

Speaker 6 The concept that if you look out in 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?

Speaker 6 Very hard to get our mind around.

Speaker 6 I shared a car in Greece with Elon Musk alone for 35 minutes in traffic. And I was like, to long story, I ended up in a car alone with Elon Musk and his driver and his security guy.

Speaker 6 And this is after I'd done it. And I'm like, I'm fucking, I got Elon Musk for 35 minutes.

Speaker 6 What do I want to ask him? And I said, Elon,

Speaker 6 what are your thoughts? Can you explain to me, like, in a way that I could understand your concept of infinity? Like, because I can't understand it.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I remember,

Speaker 6 wow, okay, he doesn't get it.

Speaker 6 I'm not so, you know, I don't get it either.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Try it, maybe.

Speaker 6 That's where I went. And it really has helped me so much

Speaker 6 in every aspect of my life as a father, as a filmmaker, as a friend, in business negotiations.

Speaker 6 It's given me access to a different perspective.

Speaker 6 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 Ibogen or 5MEO.

Speaker 6 It's like, no, I'm good. It takes balls.
It's like I parachute. I've done, you know, some jumps.
And every time I've jumped, it takes, it's like, you don't really want to, right?

Speaker 6 At that last second, you're like, and how many jumps have you had, would you say?

Speaker 5 Not very many. Okay.
Not very many.

Speaker 6 I had 13. On my 13th, I had a malfunction, so I haven't gone since.
But every jump.

Speaker 6 No matter who, and I've been in a plane, you know, with some down in San Diego where, you know, that Skydive San Diego, which is a great place, Jeff Bramston.

Speaker 6 That's where all the SEALs train and civilians. I go as a 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.

Speaker 6 Maybe not today. At least most people do.

Speaker 6 There's a few seconds that don't. But that's how I feel about like 5MEO is like, I'm glad I did it.
But man, if I'm going to do it again, it's,

Speaker 6 you know.

Speaker 5 I'm hesitant to do it every time.

Speaker 6 Have you done it once?

Speaker 5 No, I've done it, I think, four times. Right?

Speaker 6 It takes

Speaker 6 it takes a certain type of courage

Speaker 6 to take that hit.

Speaker 5 You don't know where you're going.

Speaker 6 No. No.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 2 so you went in.

Speaker 5 So are you saying you're not an atheist now?

Speaker 6 No. I believe in that.
I'm not an atheist, but my belief, okay.

Speaker 6 Don't judge.

Speaker 5 I'm not here to judge. All right.

Speaker 6 So the second time I did it,

Speaker 6 I went into this again. This time I skipped the crying.
And one thing that's interesting is doing it a couple of times, I think you go a little bit further. Does this sound utterly insane? No.

Speaker 6 People are going to be like, oh, he's just a fucking drug wacky dude.

Speaker 5 Nah, we talk about this all the time on this show.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Opioids, fuck no. This is a totally different animal to me,

Speaker 6 including alcohol. That's all over there.

Speaker 6 This whole time I sound completely different.

Speaker 5 This is a medicine.

Speaker 5 So like all the Coke and all that shit, like we, I think we kind of covered it. Like it's not good.

Speaker 6 I mean, I'm, I, it led to suicidal energy. Dark, suicidal energies.
No, this is a whole nother experience. So the second time,

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 multi-directional energy that's just expanding, that I feel may be part of the energy that built the universe. Something had to build it, right? Got all these

Speaker 6 planets floating around and you know, you start getting into like the sun and what the fuck the sun is and how that thing's still burning and how we're in this, you know, something's

Speaker 6 right.

Speaker 6 And 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?

Speaker 5 So they say there's more planets than grains of sand

Speaker 6 in the world. So it's a

Speaker 6 God would have to be really busy and he's probably not just our God, the way I look at it.

Speaker 6 But I'm feeling something, and we don't have words for this, but it's a real energy that it were words do it it 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 um the vatican the um the notre dame cathedral

Speaker 6 Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Literally, I'm seeing man

Speaker 6 building these temples and it's coming, so I'm coming out of the energy into man's building of religious

Speaker 6 artifacts and temples and structures. And I'm seeing men building these temples, acknowledging their religion, their gods.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 the pyramids,

Speaker 6 Mecca,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I looked at him and I said to him, Connor, organized religion is somewhat fucking absurd.

Speaker 6 And he looked at me and he nodded just like you did.

Speaker 6 And I couldn't understand

Speaker 6 in that moment having felt something that to me felt beyond organized religion.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And that to me was the most honest religious experience I've ever had.

Speaker 5 Interesting.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 5 that's kind of where I am. That's, I mean,

Speaker 5 it sent me down a path because I was,

Speaker 5 first time I did it,

Speaker 5 it was, I didn't really believe in anything either. I grew up Catholic and

Speaker 5 that, you know, went out the window pretty much as soon as I joined the SEAL teams with that culture and what we were doing.

Speaker 5 And but that, but, but I just, I, did you have your eyes closed or, or or a blindfold eye?

Speaker 6 I did they were closed because I did it I did it.

Speaker 5 I wanted to see

Speaker 6 they just closed I did they didn't cover them up. I couldn't see anything.

Speaker 5 Oh, were your eyes open? Yeah, I came back when I after I died, you know, after they what did your death feel like? My death felt like

Speaker 5 man, like it was the most anxiety, most

Speaker 5 fear I've ever felt in my life. And

Speaker 5 like I, it felt like all the negative like toxicity, like shit that I've experienced, you know, rage, like it felt like it was just rushing through my veins out of my fingers and my toes.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it felt like

Speaker 5 it, I, I had like this,

Speaker 5 it wasn't really a visualization. It was more like, it felt more like an intuition, but it, it felt like, uh, it felt like there was this black tar like dripping off of my heart.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 5 And, and uh and i had my wow that must have been terrifying it was and uh and i just

Speaker 5 like you i had all these thoughts and about

Speaker 5 things because that's your ego trying to hold on to logic and the last thing the last thing that i was grasping on to was my wife and my son

Speaker 5 and uh i was just like

Speaker 5 I knew I was 100% certain, like, you're fucking dying, Sean. Like, there's no coming back.
You're done. And and I was just fighting like hell because I just

Speaker 5 I didn't want to leave my wife and my six-month-old son in this fucked up place

Speaker 5 and uh 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

Speaker 5 we were on the beach or close to the beach. We were up on a like a mount, like a hill, and you could see like see out, you know, into the Pacific.

Speaker 5 There were some islands out there, and I remember everything looked exactly the same. It was just more vibrant.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 I was really reluctant to do this because I was like, this shit's for the hippies. I'm not a hippie.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I've heard hippies talk about energy and all this stuff. And, um but when i opened my eyes i saw i i just you could intuitively feel and see

Speaker 5 this

Speaker 5 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 and intuitively and you just knew that it was there

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 and and

Speaker 5 you know if i felt like if there would have been some negative energy out there

Speaker 5 it would have been like a spotlight in the darkness like you just would have been able to identify it immediately uh because everything was just so positive and uh

Speaker 5 and then i felt the presence of uh gabe you know who who we talked about

Speaker 5 and um

Speaker 5 And I felt that

Speaker 5 I just, it was the feeling that everything that, all the trauma, everything that had happened

Speaker 5 throughout my life was supposed to happen and that it was,

Speaker 5 it was okay

Speaker 5 and that none of it even fucking mattered because this is such a minuscule sliver in time that we're experiencing right now. And that

Speaker 5 And so it's it's

Speaker 5 so it made me believe again in a higher power. Yeah.
And then

Speaker 5 it's honestly, it sent me on a journey. And I mean, now I'm a Christian and I've had another experience after that

Speaker 5 that turned me into

Speaker 5 a Christian that like fucking slapped me in the face, like, hey, pay attention. And

Speaker 5 it's amazing. I mean, the stuff that that

Speaker 5 it's, it's.

Speaker 5 And you also realize how minuscule like you are.

Speaker 6 We are.

Speaker 5 And you're okay with it, you know, which is the ego death, right?

Speaker 6 Right. Well, 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 get to conflict.

Speaker 6 I found my work has just gotten better. Yeah.
I'm a deeper movie maker.

Speaker 6 When I was editing

Speaker 6 Painkiller, the opioid film,

Speaker 6 I had two editors, one I had never worked with, and

Speaker 6 they were editing while I was still in Canada filming, and I came back, and then I had to come and work with them every day. And I was just getting to know them, and one of them had an energy.

Speaker 6 I had just done the toad,

Speaker 6 and they were both really good guys, but I could tell one of them

Speaker 6 had an energy, a heaviness, darkness.

Speaker 6 And I found out that

Speaker 6 he and his wife had taken their son, I think

Speaker 6 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 local, some sort of local anesthesia,

Speaker 6 and the son died. Their kid died.

Speaker 6 And I found out that that was my editor and that that had happened to him.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 this came in after I'd found that and we're working and I then I realized he had a picture of his son little picture kind of under his computer that I noticed for the first time

Speaker 6 and we're you know I don't know him that well

Speaker 6 and I started asking him about his son and we and I you know I heard about this and I'm you know really sorry and I just you know want you to know that I'm

Speaker 6 I'm aware and if there's anything we can talk about or you want to talk about or not, I just want, I want want that to I wouldn't be available to you for that

Speaker 6 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 you know young man he was at that age and what he had experienced and we started talking

Speaker 6 we started talking for a while and he stopped he said you know I haven't talked about my son like this

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 and I uh realized I don't know that I would have had this conversation

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 He said, we're going to grief counseling,

Speaker 6 but it's not working. They had 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.

Speaker 6 I mean, in axes and I mean, and group therapy. And

Speaker 6 I asked him if he had thought about exploring psychedelics. And he said, his wife is talking about that.
And I said, well, have you heard about 5MU? He sat up.

Speaker 6 He said, my wife has been asking me about this.

Speaker 6 And I said,

Speaker 6 he said, what's it like? What do you think? And I thought about it. And I said, you know,

Speaker 6 here's what I think.

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Speaker 6 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift. One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.
I know, I'm putting them back. Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 5 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 6 It's an easy shopping trip. We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 5 Thanks, random singing people.

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Speaker 6 And I was like, you know, forgive me if I'm overstepping. He's like, no, I want you to say it.
I said, okay, because I really didn't know him that well.

Speaker 6 I said, in my mind, the way I'm thinking about you and your family,

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 this medicine could maybe take your son and put him here for a minute

Speaker 6 and give you, never gonna,

Speaker 6 it's never gonna go away. but give you a little bit of space

Speaker 6 to maybe process something like that

Speaker 6 in a way that you're not able to. And I stand by that.

Speaker 6 And it's advice I would give to myself, to you, to anyone that...

Speaker 6 The only thing I think is that young people might, I don't think it's good to do for someone, you know, much

Speaker 6 in their 20s still.

Speaker 6 I would encourage people to wait till their 30s. Yeah.
Just

Speaker 6 because

Speaker 6 I don't I'm not I can't back that up scientifically. It's more of a hunch.

Speaker 6 But if someone came to me and they were like, you know, 19 or 20, or you know, my son, I've talked to my son about this, and he's in his early 20s, and I, I, I'm very honest with him about, you know, all of this, everything I try to be honest with them about, but I, I said, I don't think you should do this until you're 30.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 What do you think? What do you think?

Speaker 5 I think it all, I think it, uh, I think it depends on life experiences. So,

Speaker 5 because it is so healing. So, you know,

Speaker 5 I think if you have a kid who is, I'm not like, I can't back this up either. So, I know, I know you're with a grain of salt.

Speaker 6 I think I know.

Speaker 5 Yeah. But, you know, I mean, there's kids that have been through lots and lots of sexual trauma, rape.

Speaker 5 And I wish this had a guy in here, and I'm not going to mention his name because this kind of conversation was offline, but

Speaker 5 his son, you know, was in an in an accident and and somebody was killed. And

Speaker 5 his son did this

Speaker 5 and it's, it sounds like it healed him, you know, and so because he carried a lot of fucking guilt.

Speaker 6 How old was his son?

Speaker 5 17 or 18, I think. And

Speaker 5 and, you know, kind of got him through. So,

Speaker 5 you know, because

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 after doing the five meo dmt

Speaker 5 this is what sucks they're in a better spot you know they're like

Speaker 6 and you get it's almost like you get a window or a veils lifted and you 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 to describe it but it's a hell of a lot better than here for yeah i i would agree with you like 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 going to

Speaker 6 fix that. I think what would be important is that whoever administers the medicine, the toad,

Speaker 6 I mean, Ibogaine, for a 17-year-old, I don't know, but maybe.

Speaker 6 Did he do Ibergain?

Speaker 5 I believe it was the.

Speaker 5 Ivan, you know.

Speaker 6 But that whoever, you know, is the administrator,

Speaker 6 the guide, stays on board with that person for days, weeks, months, helps process that. So it's not like

Speaker 6 at least keeps an eye on

Speaker 6 that younger mind

Speaker 6 just to make sure that like he's able to talk about things.

Speaker 6 I remember I was trying, you can relate to the idea that we don't have words

Speaker 6 in the English language, right, right, for some of these feelings. And so it's hard to explain what you experienced.
And I was talking to someone about it,

Speaker 6 and he told me about this tribe in Brazil that does a lot of, you know, ayahuasca-type psychedelics.

Speaker 6 I think it's slightly different than ayahuasca, some like the Yamamato 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.

Speaker 6 And he's trying to get me to understand how we don't have words for so much.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 That concussive sound, you know, that

Speaker 6 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 that

Speaker 6 different, not like a movie, right? Like what it really, and that sound of a body hitting the water is a

Speaker 6 stirring sound. And there's a term for that in this language because that's important to them.

Speaker 6 Let's remember that feeling that you get.

Speaker 6 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, you know, rich people in, you know,

Speaker 6 the Hamptons of New York or in Beverly Hills are having like psychedelic parties and all that and expanding their consciousness and micro-dosing mushrooms.

Speaker 6 Great. I don't, I don't judge that, but it...
There is something very real to it. And particularly for people who are going harder and have,

Speaker 6 I don't know, man,

Speaker 6 that kind of trauma to dig to dig up and to look at

Speaker 6 this shit is

Speaker 5 it's real i think the world would be a better place you know which is fucking politicians would use it but um

Speaker 5 but uh have you ever heard anything have you ever heard anything bad coming from it

Speaker 6 no no and i looked it up um

Speaker 6 i think

Speaker 6 i think i heard somebody died

Speaker 6 There was a, no, I remember there was a doctor or a shaman who, I think in Mexico, this is all, you know, searchable,

Speaker 6 was putting people under and like molesting.

Speaker 6 Right. And, but that was, you know, one person, he was busted.
That, because I, you know, searched it all, like dark side, downside,

Speaker 6 addiction deaths, and

Speaker 6 very, very little. I couldn't find anything directly related, but I remember this one story of some

Speaker 6 shaman who was

Speaker 6 putting people under and like, you know,

Speaker 6 doing that. But I don't know, man.
I don't, I haven't heard much. I just.

Speaker 5 Have you? Yeah, I just heard this last week. I had, actually, it was the guys that got me, that got me into this.

Speaker 5 They didn't like talk me into. They shared their experience on how it helped them.
And

Speaker 5 I was like, I got to do this. But they came up, uh, we went to an event together.
We were all talking about psychedelics. And

Speaker 6 they,

Speaker 5 I guess, there's somebody that did, I haven't looked into this yet, but apparently, it's, there's, there's something out there on it. This guy did it

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 seems to have experienced a 10-year time period and within 30 minutes.

Speaker 6 By beginning or MEO?

Speaker 5 M-E-O. Okay.

Speaker 5 And he,

Speaker 5 I don't know, I like I said, I didn't get any, I didn't have like a storyline or anything when I did it.

Speaker 5 It doesn't sound like you did either, but

Speaker 5 but he, 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

Speaker 5 the experience, only 30 minutes had passed and he had like

Speaker 5 he still misses like whoever he met that was in that experience because he had built a 10-year relationship with those with those people and so all he wants to do

Speaker 6 is that fucking wild crazy i know i know i never heard that that's a that's a movie man that's like because there's like a eternal sunshine of the spotted spotless mind i don't know if you ever saw that film, Tim Carrey, it's a good movie, where he wants to erase part of his brain to get a girl out of his mind.

Speaker 6 It's like just, you know, bad relationship.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 see, that's fascinating to me. And

Speaker 6 I can totally see how that could happen.

Speaker 6 I think that

Speaker 6 one of the things like that 5MEO did for me was just that.

Speaker 6 kind of what's the adage that like we use 2% of our brain or you know and and i've i it's like to me i've i've i've made the analogy to people: like, do you want to understand a little bit about what it's like?

Speaker 6 Think about your dreams.

Speaker 6 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, you know, son is like a stockbroker and he's making deals, but he's only two.

Speaker 6 And you're like, where the fuck did that come from? What, how did my brain,

Speaker 6 what, you know, well, I shut down part of my brain to sleep and something else woke up, right?

Speaker 6 And as a writer, I can relate

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I don't know if you've had it writing, but where you sort of sit down and things start coming out of you. And you look, you think that, you know,

Speaker 6 15 minutes have gone by and you look up and three hours have gone by and you don't remember it.

Speaker 6 And you look down, you've written 10 pages, but you've accessed something that you can't get to normally. And they'll call it, you know, flow state or, you know, some sort of optimal creative.

Speaker 6 Like Rogan thinks that this state is an actual entity, like an external like goblin that comes in and mentors you.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 There's this guy, Steve Pressfield, who I like, who's like a guru for writers. And

Speaker 6 he talks about this too, like that,

Speaker 6 being able to access,

Speaker 6 truly access aspects of your mind that you normally just can't get to, right? So that 5MEO can put you in this state where it just shuts down your default network.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 of a life and you really think you've got a son and a wife. It's crazy.

Speaker 5 That's

Speaker 6 never hurt you like that, man.

Speaker 5 Apparently, he still has feelings, but I'll tell you this.

Speaker 6 Like he's mourning his child that never existed. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yep. Wow.

Speaker 5 Yep. Maybe tapped into another life.
Who the hell knows? But,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it did also, another thing that like it did is it set me down it this stuff just sent me down a rabbit hole have you ever read the four agreements by don miguel ruiz no i've heard of it oh man you got it what tell me give me like the basically

Speaker 5 i'm gonna butcher it so but um

Speaker 6 i mean

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 it's 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

Speaker 5 I don't want to make this book sound like something it's not.

Speaker 5 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, um,

Speaker 5 and a lot of people read this after psychedelics, and it's, it's, when you read it, you're like, oh, yeah, like, okay, like, yeah, this is,

Speaker 5 this is true. And

Speaker 5 in between that and, and kind of, and, and what I experienced with psychedelics and how, how healing it is and how it's fucking illegal here, why, I don't know.

Speaker 5 It's helping so many people with addiction and trauma.

Speaker 6 FDA, baby. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And it sent me down this rabbit hole to think that

Speaker 5 everything we know and have been told is a fucking lie. And I do believe that.

Speaker 5 And I do want to ask you about something. Did we go to the moon?

Speaker 6 Pardon me?

Speaker 5 Did we go to the moon?

Speaker 6 I don't know, man. I wasn't there.
I wasn't there.

Speaker 6 I know about the picture.

Speaker 6 Capricorn One was a movie when I was a kid that was

Speaker 6 about the fact that

Speaker 6 the theory that we never did.

Speaker 6 I don't know, man.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I can tell you, I never went to the moon.

Speaker 5 What about the Stanley Kubrick stuff? Have you looked into that?

Speaker 6 Which stuff?

Speaker 5 Did he staged it? He filmed it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's Capricorn One. That's the movie.

Speaker 5 That's what it is. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 I don't know, man. Damn.
I don't know. I love the subject.
I know. I don't.

Speaker 6 I'm going to assume we did. Yeah.
But I wasn't there.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I just want to believe we did.

Speaker 5 Me too.

Speaker 6 I don't know, though.

Speaker 5 There's some pretty compelling evidence.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, people are full of shit. And

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 I've gotten a front row seat to some really fucked shit

Speaker 6 that our governments do. And when 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.

Speaker 6 And I believed our leaders when they said that we were the good guys and they're the bad guys. And

Speaker 6 not always the case. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 You know, I did just come back from Israel last week. How was it?

Speaker 6 Dude, it's fucked up. You know I

Speaker 6 now I I was

Speaker 6 I was it's

Speaker 6 I was two weeks before I went to Israel I was in New York and I was gonna have lunch with a friend of mine and she brought a friend of hers and who I didn't know and during the course of the meal

Speaker 6 Israel came up and she started ripping into the Israelis and fuck the Israelis and fuck Zionism

Speaker 6 and she's looking at me she's really getting mad and I'm like

Speaker 6 I'm curious

Speaker 6 are you Arab? Are you Muslim? She said, I'm Palestinian.

Speaker 6 I said, okay,

Speaker 6 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. And fuck the, I go, okay, okay, I hear you.

Speaker 6 You know, I'm curious, how do you process

Speaker 6 the Nova Music Festival and what happened? You know, 300 Israelis were killed at that music festival. And she looked at me and she had this look in her eye that I haven't seen.
I don't know ever.

Speaker 6 And she said, I thought it was fucking hilarious. I loved it.

Speaker 6 And the feeling I had was like

Speaker 6 sickness, anger, confusion. Like, I'm looking into the eyes of this 30-year-old girl.

Speaker 6 And I said, I got to go. I said, I'm going to leave.
I said, look, I said, look, I just want you to know, I don't agree with anything you said, but my pulse was going.

Speaker 6 Like, I was, I didn't even know what I felt other than I had to get out of there, walk away.

Speaker 6 And then I decided to go the next week to Israel. I wanted to see it.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I wanted to just see it for myself. And I went to that site of that festival, and I went to one of the kibbutz

Speaker 6 that was attacked. And I

Speaker 6 wanted to go into Gaza, asked if we could go in, and was told we couldn't go in. It wasn't safe.

Speaker 6 But got close and could see in to that world, the Gaza Strip, you know, behind the wall.

Speaker 6 And I just spent, I was there for five days, and I really just tried to

Speaker 6 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 were. I had all this info, I wanted to see it.
And I think my

Speaker 6 biggest takeaway is,

Speaker 6 as like simple as this sounds, is that

Speaker 6 these people fucking hate each other.

Speaker 6 I mean, hate each other. I've never seen that kind of hatred.

Speaker 6 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.
I can't remember what they were called.

Speaker 6 not the hunt, but in those trucks, you know, 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.

Speaker 6 But when I was in Israel, the anger and fear was so palpable.

Speaker 6 And I know it's on the other side. And

Speaker 6 I don't know, man. Like, I just think like

Speaker 6 what

Speaker 6 where my mind starts going is, okay.

Speaker 6 Israel did this shit.

Speaker 6 Palestinians did this shit. It's been going back and forth since 1941 or whenever the, you know, 1907, depending on how far, whatever, however far back you want to go.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And then World War, and it's this Rubik's Cube that you never saw.

Speaker 6 Bottom line is, like, they fucking hate each other. They cannot work it out.

Speaker 6 Like, it's like, you know,

Speaker 6 two kids that are fighting. They just can't stop.
You're never going to stop. And I came out of there with the sense of,

Speaker 6 and looking into so many Israelis I met,

Speaker 6 the energy you get is, please, we need help, right? And yes, they're horrific what's happening over there, right? These kids dying

Speaker 6 in Gaza and these innocent people dying.

Speaker 6 horrific what happened.

Speaker 6 It's horrific. And I'm not like, at this point, I don't know what to justify and 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.

Speaker 6 They need someone to come in and say, You go over the fuck here, you go over the fuck here, stop.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And I hope that can happen.

Speaker 5 It's a very complicated situation.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's super complicated, but at the end of the day, if you just look at it, just practically,

Speaker 6 they can't fix it without other people,

Speaker 6 in my opinion, getting involved. It's like there has to be help from us.

Speaker 6 There has to be help from Saudi Arabia, from UAE, from Qatar, from Egypt, from Jordan. Like, they got to help.

Speaker 6 Europe's got to help

Speaker 6 because they can't fucking figure it out.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 That was what I got.

Speaker 6 And it's really fucking sad to me.

Speaker 5 How much time did you spend over there?

Speaker 6 It was up for five days.

Speaker 5 Five days? Yeah.

Speaker 6 And,

Speaker 6 you know, I recommend for people to go there if they want to understand

Speaker 6 what it really feels like and get a better sense, maybe a deeper sense

Speaker 6 of just how...

Speaker 6 dark and complex the problem is.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I recommend going over there.

Speaker 5 Damn.

Speaker 6 Damn.

Speaker 5 How long ago was that?

Speaker 6 I got back like 10 days ago.

Speaker 5 Oh man. So this is fresh.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And, you know, brutal, absolutely brutal to go tour the kibbutzes.

Speaker 6 You know, and the tour that I had was a

Speaker 6 young 28-year-old guy whose brother was killed. His mother was kidnapped.

Speaker 6 They've kept the kibbutz exactly as it was October 7th.

Speaker 6 So the blood's all over the place and the glass and the kids' shoes and, you know, the baby shoes and, you know, babies were taken and, you know, absolutely horrific.

Speaker 6 And,

Speaker 6 you know, like you see in that video of Murphy and Dietz

Speaker 6 and, you know, using that. I mean, you can't go there without getting

Speaker 6 activated. And then you go to the music festival and,

Speaker 6 you know, it's, fuck it, man. Fuck it.
Game on. Yeah.
Okay, you want, you're going to do this? Game on. You support that,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And that's why I've come to the conclusion, like, they can't, they need

Speaker 6 referees. Yeah.
It's like the nastiest hockey fight you've ever seen in your fucking life. with no refs.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 You know? Yeah. And people are bringing guns onto the ice and knives onto the ice, and no one's there to stop it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I've been hesitant to

Speaker 5 cover the subject because it's so fucking complicated.

Speaker 6 It's just, it's

Speaker 6 well, if you 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,

Speaker 6 that's never going to get unpacked, in my opinion. Looking forward,

Speaker 6 big, big brother issue, like

Speaker 6 from 40,000 feet someone has to step in

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 organize a large group effort to stop this shit

Speaker 6 so that's what I hope happens yeah me too having because it sucks me too it sucks

Speaker 6 for everyone the world is a fucked up place yeah but there's some good some good stories too

Speaker 5 well let's move into what you're doing now American Primeval.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 How did that, how did that come across right there?

Speaker 6 So American Prime Evil, that's the new show.

Speaker 6 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 into the country

Speaker 6 went out west from the city and like had to learn how to survive and ended up marrying an Indian woman and a kid. And he was...

Speaker 6 ended up at first he was totally inept and couldn't function and Indians wouldn't even waste an arrow on him because because he was so

Speaker 6 he was

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And that was like something that got me going and wanting to make movies and tell stories and stuff.

Speaker 6 And I always kind of wanted to do something like that. you know, an adventure story.
Not like a Western in the traditional sense.

Speaker 6 And I like westerns, like Butch Casting and Sundance Kid was one of my favorite or the unforgiven.

Speaker 6 I loved The Cowboys, some of John Wayne's earlier fun. I loved all those movies.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 I wanted like to be up in the mountains with the savages. And

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And he actually came into my office, and I have a collection of axes in my office. I think you'd approve of it.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And I said, let's just channel this, this ice axe. And he smiled.
He said, okay.

Speaker 6 And he wrote it. And it's this kind of epic saga set in 1857

Speaker 6 in this corner of America. It's

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 one of the last areas that were really wild in America. And, you know, there were multiple Native American tribes.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So this dude, Brigham Young, flees west with... 2,000 Mormons and sets up his last end in Salt Lake City thinking no one's ever going to come.

Speaker 6 And he starts growing the Mormon church and he builds his army to defend. So he's out there.
The U.S.

Speaker 6 government's 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 trapping bear and other pelts. So it's just a fucking savage place.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And the story is her journey through that part of America.

Speaker 5 Damn.

Speaker 6 And it gets nasty.

Speaker 5 It looks like it.

Speaker 6 It looks nasty.

Speaker 5 I started as

Speaker 6 it's.

Speaker 6 Did we send you the shows?

Speaker 5 You sent them to me. All right, good.

Speaker 6 We'll sit down and take a peek because they get, and

Speaker 6 it's the organizing

Speaker 6 event is worth anybody checking out. It's a very underreported mass murder.
arguably the first mass killing in American history that it's called the Mormon Meadows Massacre. And it happened in 1857.

Speaker 6 And a group of pioneers called the Fencher Party that were going from Arkansas to California had to move through

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And 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?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So by the time this party came through without a permit, the Mormons warned them off and said, you got to go back and you got to go around, which would add like two weeks to the journey.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And what was kind of fucked up is they dressed up as Paiute, which was a tribe out there, Indians.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And it was really a Mormon murder.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So the show's kind of going along and you don't realize it's going to hit you. And then the Mormons Meno Massacre kind of comes at you hard.

Speaker 6 And that's the event. And so it was interesting, like

Speaker 6 going to Utah, meeting the different Mormons that were historians of this moment in time

Speaker 6 and getting them to talk about it. It was such a dark moment in Mormon history, which I never knew about.

Speaker 5 until... You got them to talk about it?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and there was one guy,

Speaker 6 one Mormon wrote a book called The Meadows Massacre, and he took me to the site.

Speaker 6 And he wrote it because there's a monument in Utah now where the massacre took place, and the Mormons built the monument to all the folks that were killed.

Speaker 6 And his book, it's really interesting because

Speaker 6 it's about this crime, this horrible moment in Mormon history. And

Speaker 6 what he does in the book, and what he said to me was, okay,

Speaker 6 as a Mormon, if you want to show this moment in our history, you have every right to do it. It happened.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 6 if you backtrack it and think, well, which is kind of what's so tricky about the Israel situation, well, if you try to unpack it,

Speaker 6 it just, you know, and get to the roots very hard.

Speaker 6 In the case of the Meadows Massacre, what this guy, what the the book did well is it sort of let you understand

Speaker 6 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

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 learning about American history and the

Speaker 6 control of the continual line of violence that's you know plagued our planet, but certainly

Speaker 6 plagued our country you start to understand man and you know our human nature and why we're so inclined to violence and that's sort of the theme of the show and then

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 There'd be no BYU. There'd be no Salt Lake City, as we know.
It would have been over.

Speaker 6 And that would have have been a great act of violence. But the Civil War was just popping off at that moment in 1857 to 58.

Speaker 6 So Buchanan and then Lincoln had to pull all the troops away from Brigham Young, and they were about to fucking get him, right?

Speaker 6 Civil War. We need these troops back east.
No, shit. And that saved Brigham Young.
The Civil War saved the Mormon church.

Speaker 5 Wow. I had no idea.

Speaker 6 Interesting.

Speaker 5 That is interesting. Where'd you film it?

Speaker 6 In

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Let's fucking let's make a survival show. That's what I asked for.

Speaker 6 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, you know,

Speaker 6 snowstorms, rainstorms, lightning strikes, fucking rattlesnakes. We had to have rattlesnake wranglers cruising through the set, you know, constantly.

Speaker 6 And they'd find the little ones, which I didn't understand. Those are the real dangerous ones.
Did you know this?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 You see a little rattlesnake, everybody clears out.

Speaker 5 No shit, I didn't know that.

Speaker 6 Snakes, our actor broke his leg. We had to film around that.
Stuntman got all fucked up.

Speaker 6 It was a wild shoot. And I'm like, you asked for it, you got it.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 6 a good challenge. A really good challenge.

Speaker 5 Man, it looks, the preview is awesome.

Speaker 5 Like, it's it looks super realistic. And I'm sure it's going to crush it on Netflix.
It's on Netflix, correct?

Speaker 6 On Netflix on, I think, January 9th.

Speaker 5 Yeah, January 9th.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, Peter, we're wrapping up the interview.

Speaker 6 You're a good dude, man. So are you.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 5 Thank you for opening up about

Speaker 5 everything. Same to you.

Speaker 6 Thanks for sharing the story of your buddy. Oh, it's

Speaker 5 he lives on.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 he was an amazing dude. but

Speaker 5 man, we covered a lot of ground there. And you thought you didn't have it in you?

Speaker 5 Here we are.

Speaker 6 I wasn't sure.

Speaker 5 But hey, it was

Speaker 5 pleasure to see you again. And

Speaker 5 best of luck with the film.

Speaker 6 Appreciate it.