
#157 Peter Berg - Exposing Big Pharma, Lone Survivor, and Hollywood’s Dark Side
Shawn Ryan Show- 339 views
- 9 Jan 2025
Peter Berg is an American director, producer, and writer. He began his career as an actor, before transitioning to directing with his feature debut "Very Bad Things" (1998) and has since helmed notable films including "Friday Night Lights" (2004), "Hancock" (2008), "Lone Survivor" (2013), "Deepwater Horizon" (2016), and "Patriots Day" (2016). His episodic television work spans many critically acclaimed series like "Friday Night Lights" and “Ballers”. Berg has also tackled complex and dark subjects like the Sackler family’s big pharma influence through “Painkiller” and the complex realities of settling the American West in his upcoming series “American Primeval”.
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Peter Berg Links:
Website - https://www.film44.com/
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American Primeval - https://www.netflix.com/title/81457507
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Peter Berg. Welcome to the show.
Pleasure, man. Thank you.
Man, I can't even believe you're sitting here. I've watched so many of your movies and series, and to have you sitting here is pretty surreal.
Well, I feel the same way. I've watched a lot of your shows, and I figure it's good for you to expand your reach and get a direct to come on here because I think I asked you if you'd had any other directors, and you said not yet. So I'm glad to be here. I'm a big fan of yours. Good job, man.
Man, thank you. I am curious. I have to know this. How the hell did... You got to be a super busy guy with who you appear to be surrounded by. How did this pop up on your I was trying to think about when I first came to know of you.
I know a lot of Seals, and it might have been Marcus or Morgan Littrell that somehow got you on my radar. And a couple of other guys that are living in California that I know, but just your name came up. I'm always interested in anything a seal is doing, particularly in ex-seal, I know how challenging it can be for so many team guys to figure out the next chapter of their life. And we get a lot of guys in LA who are trying to figure it out and trying to get into writing or directing or stunts. And I pay attention to that, try and help. And I heard about you and how you had found this whole new career for yourself. And having gone through the military experiences you have, I found really fucking impressive. And that caught my eye also. So I don't think people understand how hard that transition is. I mean, obviously, military guys do, but civilians don't. They don't think about it. If they do, they think about it. But to go from the job that you've had, and I've been fortunate to have a pretty decent look at for a civilian, to understand how difficult it is to let go of that world and move into civilian life.
I think it's important that people do make an effort. I do, and I just have a lot of respect for what you've done. I am.
Thank you. A lot. That means a hell of a lot coming from you. So I really appreciate it. Well, I got all kinds of stuff that we're going to talk about when it comes to that, but everybody starts off with an introduction here. So Peter Berg. You'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 producer, earning accolades across multiple platforms. Your approach to filmmaking is deeply personal, often focusing on real stories that highlight human endurance, teamwork, and the fight against adversity. Your films are known for their gritty realism, emotional depth, and action that feels both authentic and exhilarating. Among your many creative endeavors, Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, and Deepwater Horizons stand out as highlights in your career. More recently, you tackled the Opioid Epidemic. That's super close to me, and I'm sure you know why, which we'll get into. The Opioid Epidemic. Head on with your epic show Pain killer. Just one week after it's released, Pain killer ranked number one in the top 10 English language series genre and currently has over 54 million hours viewed.
On January ninth, you're about to introduce your latest project, American Primeval: Into the World on Netflix. I look forward to discussing that today. Thank you for giving us a sneak peek. It looks so awesome and so realistic, and the sounds in it are... It's amazing. I think you'll like it. I can't wait. I can't wait for that to come out. And clear eyes, full hearts. Can't lose. Can't lose. Let's dig in. Also, everybody gets a gift. Just a little something for the flight home.
Open it now, right?
Yeah, go ahead. Open it up. Oh, the gummy bears.
The gummy bears, yeah. Okay. They're not going to get me high? I'm not going to get me nice or anything?
No, you'll have to go back home to California to get those.
Okay, I can get them. I love gummy bears.
Yeah, those are good. A little something for the flat.
Here's yours. I got you this because I said I might need it. I'm not good with three hours. That's from what I understand, some of Tennessee His finest from right here, right in Franklin.
Oh, man, this is awesome.
Yeah.
Franklin Distillery.
Yes, sir. Perfect. Thank you. Then I got you. This is a limited edition. This is an American Primeval crew hat, which generally we had to earn up on the mountain. But I figured you've definitely done your fair share of earnings. So that's a gift from me and the entire crew of American Primeval. Mevo.
Man, thank you. I'm going to have you sign this. This is going to be a relic in the studio. I'd be honored. Thank you. This is very cool.
Yeah, that's rare. That's a collector's piece.
Perfect.
Cool, man.
I'll get it. Yeah, we'll have you sign it after the interview here. Then one last thing. I got a Patreon account. They're my top subscribers, top supporters. They're the reason I get to be here and you get to be here. They've been with us since the beginning. One of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. And you had a ton. So this is from Tori Miller. With so many great movies that you've directed and several based on true events, which movie was the most stressful to film and made you feel that you got it right when it finally released?
Right. So I've been asked this question before, and I'll give the real answer. I could just say, Well, Lone Survivor is my favorite, or Friday Out Life is my favorite. But the truth is, they're all incredibly fucking hard to make. Every single movie that any director makes, any TV show, is really, really hard. You go into it believing you're going to touch God and achieve real greatness, and you're going to change lives, and you're going to tap into the divine creative forces of the universe, and you just don't always do it. Sometimes you fail miserably, sometimes you succeed. But the reality is they're all really, really challenging. And you end up looking back, at least I do, and loving certain things about every one of them, even the ones that suck. Because you don't go into it thinking, hey, man, I'm going to make a really shitty movie and I don't care. No, you go into it like, I would imagine an athlete goes into a a team guy goes into a building, a dentist goes into a mouth with a drill, you go in expecting to have a good result. If you're a competitive, ambitious human being.
And so I try for them all to work, every single movie. And I love all of them. They're all really stressful. If you really push I'll probably say, Lone Survivor is my favorite, and that was the most emotional. But I love them all.
Yeah. You've made some just amazing stuff. But yeah, I would say, I mean, that had to be a lot of pressure, considering the events that happened that the movie's about. And then in just our conversation before we actually officially When I actually started the interview about showing the families. I mean, that's tough.
We're talking a little bit about it. For some reason, I always say I want to make a love story. Just film a love story with a girl and a boy on a beach drinking wine, kissing and crying and doing all the things that people I'll do falling in love on a beach. And then I always end up on top of a mountain with a bunch of stunt guys fighting for their lives and pyrotechnics, bombs going off and weather and animals. And I can't seem to just make the love story. So I tend to be drawn towards more challenging projects. And in the case of Lone Survivor, right from the get-go, when I met Marcus Littrel, and I first looked into his eyes. I read the book quickly, and he was in town interviewing directors, and a lot of directors wanted that story. So I met with him, and literally from the moment I sat down with him and looked into his eyes, I was caught up in this spell of emotion and pain and sacrifice. And this energy that Marcus had got me and And still to this day, it still gets me. Just FaceTiming, I have such a connection to him.
But making Loan Survivor started with going to the Deetz family, the Axelson, the Murphy family, and asking for their blessing and telling the story. And all three of those meetings were very emotional. I remember going to Danny's parents house in Colorado and his father taking me into his bedroom, which they left as it was, almost from a young age, or Hot wheels and posters of girls and toys and all kinds of things. And there was also his uniform that had been recovered.
And his father- That they recovered? Holy shit.
His father sat me down on Danny's bed, which is his bed from childhood, and He had a piece of paper, and he started reading from the paper, and he started talking about... I remember hearing after-action report, autopsy. He started reading, and he said, Left knee, Bullet. Left thigh, bullet. Groin, bullet. I realized he was reading his son's autopsy report. He started shaking, and he said, Abdomen, bullet. 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 Deutz was shot, but a lot. And he put the paper on my lap. And the autopsy report was his father's tears in it. And he said, That's who my son was. That's how tough my son was. You make sure you get that right. And I thought to myself, Okay, what the fuck have I got myself into with this? Not a joke, very, very real to some very good, decent human beings, parents and wives and siblings. And it was a tremendous amount of pressure to make sure that when I was done and I showed that film to not just the families, but the entire SEAL community.
I think Admaud McCraven was running either so or the Seals. I'm not sure what he was running when we finished, but I had to show it to him and all of those folks and the families and everyone in between. And every day I was making that film, I was thinking about the Murfrees, the Deets, the Axelsins, Marcus, and so was the whole crew. So was Mark Wauberg. It became something much more than a movie for us. We didn't quite realize the power of the brotherhood of the SEAL community, of your community. At first, maybe certainly some of the actors didn't, but very quickly everyone did. And that movie had a special gear that is very hard to find. And I think if you ask Mark Wauberg or Taylor Kitsch or Ben Foster, anyone that was involved in that film, we see each other, text each other and No, that was it. That was one that would be hard to replicate and a feeling that's very hard to get. And the pressure to get it right was there every day, including the trial on set every day, reminded me that if I didn't get it right, he was going to kill me.
So every day I would... At first, I was really scared. And then halfway through, I would see Marcus in the morning. I'd be like, I know. I have to do a really good job today or you're going to kill me. Anything else? He'd be like, No, that's it. I got it. And then I'd go about it. Man. And then you have Morgan lurking his back up. Because for me, Marcus was a scary one But Morgan was a really scary one who really didn't have to say much. Have you met Morgan? Do you know him at all? I've never met him. He's such a great guy in Washington now doing really well. I just spoke to him last week. Having those two guys suddenly in your life, and then just the general seal community was a gut check I'm definitely focused a little bit harder every second than I have in some other films.
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That just gave me goosebumps when I walked in here and saw the rounds from the Chinook, the crash. I was not expecting to see that.
Yeah. It's Pretty heavy. There's some heavy stuff in this room that's very historic. But I remember we got the after-actions report when we got into country, and they showed us I think it was some a recruiting video that- I put up. Yeah. I saw it. I remember seeing... I was new, fairly new, and I remember seeing Danny Deetz upside down on the mountaintop, and his Cami blouse was pulled up. A lot of the guys in my platoon were in a team with Danny, and They were like, Holy shit, he just got that tattoo, and I was with him when he got it on his rib cage. It was just like... That's when it became very real for me.
I can't imagine how personal and how much emotion you guys must have felt seeing those videos. I saw those videos.
It was rage. I mean, I would watch them every time we went out on an op. That was my warm-up. This is why the fuck we're doing this because of this. Then I can't wait to get into some of the opiate stuff, too, with you. That's something we can relate on a lot lost my best friend to opiates who was struggling. You were just talking about the transition from military, four military guys getting back into civilian, and everybody goes down the spiral and And he didn't make it out. It was because of opiates. I mean-Actually, it was because of that operation. So that was my best friend's team.
He was part of the recovery operation?
He was part of the recovery operation. I'll tell you this. I've never talked about this. But that was his sister platoon. He was in Iraq. They were doing Having a great deployment, which means they were going after a lot of bad guys. He had... His name's Gabe. I don't know if I should be doing this, but fucking, I'm going to do it. Because he had one of the worst runs I've ever heard. He was engaged and had a mess up at a strip club and got a stripper pregnant. Broke off the engagement, was going to do the right thing. He was going to do the right thing in his mind, which was to marry her, marry the stripper, have the baby, and he deployed to Iraq. Well, they were getting after it, and she went into labor. There were some complications. So he left Iraq to come home and to be with her while the baby was born. Gets home, goes to the hospital. The baby's dead, the mama's dead. He doesn't tell anybody. He goes back to SEAL Team 10 and says, Hey, I want to go back with the guys over in Iraq.
They say, Oh, you didn't hear the guys are coming home early. He had screened to go to a development group, and they said, Hey, you need to reenlist. So how about you jump in with your sister platoon who's in Afghanistan right now. He's like, Well, I don't have any of my gear. It's all in Iraq still. And they said, Don't worry, you don't need your... You're not going on operations. You're just going to go over there, reenlist, get it done, jump back on the bird, come home. So he wears his dress Kamis, gets on the bird. They land in Germany for a layover, find out that Marcus is on the run. Then he lands in Bagram. So they know that three guys have died and that Marcus is on the run. They land in Bagram, and he finds out that the Hilo went down, which was all the rest of his friends. Wants to go on the recovery op with Dev, they wouldn't let him on at first. And he was basically like, I don't... They're like, You don't have any kid. He can't go. He's like, I don't give a fuck. I'll scrounge up some shit.
So in his dress cam, he goes and piecemeal some shit together from the techs. It's like a helmet that doesn't fit with a uncle, a piece of night, night vision, a shitty rifle without any optics on it. And he's in this like a old flat jacket that... I mean, you knew the gear we were using back then because you made the movie, but it was like the old shit that didn't even have any magazines on. It's found a couple of magazine pouches, put it on, goes on the fucking op. The dev guys are all like, Who the fuck is this? Why is the tech coming on this. And goes on the op. But I mean, that goes on the op to recover the bodies. They get in a firefight out there and He also had a role in Bengasi. He also had a role in the Coast bombing at the agency, but never fucking told anybody. And he told me when he was in Buds, he was in Buds with, I know James was one, I think Axelson was the other. And 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.
So it was on one side, Axelson's on the other. And this is like 30 minutes after the towers go down.
What a time to be on the grinder. Yeah.
And so they give a speech, and they're basically saying, Hey, Blake, it's been peace time for a long time, and your guys's generation is going to war. And look to your right and look to your left. There's a good chance that one of these guys are going to be dead in the near future, James Matt Axelsen. 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. And then he later died of addiction with opiates. And so I've never told anybody that.
I've never told- I appreciate.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it just goes back for me to what we were talking about, the complexity of the difficulty of surviving for anyone that went through Budge during 11, okay, you're going to be busy. And good luck surviving that. Just literally coming it back alive like and Axel said, couldn't. And then if you do come back, the complexities of having to carry Forget about the woman and the baby. I mean, that's horrific. And that would do most people in. Then whatever you saw in theater and people, these guys are coming back and having to try and move on. And I know some professional athletes, and I've seen the complexities of an athlete retiring. I own a boxing gym in LA, and we get a lot of military and And pro athletes that come in there and train, especially when they've gotten out. And I see firsthand how hard it is for pro football players. We have a couple in there now. We've had a lot of team guys come in and they're trying to just stand on their feet like children again, like babies in a new world. And I can't imagine how hard it was for your friend to come back with the way of those experiences in a world that's not necessarily receptive, and we can't see the injuries, right?
So I could be talking to you and you look pretty good, and you're handsome and you're ex-fucking Navy SEAL, and everybody loves this Navy SEAL, and so you're cool. Well, inside it can be a different story. And I remember when someone gave me this statistic about how much money the government spends making a seal, all the training Everything, three phases, and then all the specialized training. And then I heard pretty high numbers. However, what it costs to make a seal versus how much money they put in to keep an eye on a seal when he done.
They don't care about us while we're done.
I tend to agree. I mean, certainly, they don't act like they care. They might say they care, but if you just look for actions, that's where it gets hard for me to sort out. Yeah.
They try to hide it. They try to hide it. They don't like talking about it because it fucks up recruiting numbers. Yeah, for sure. The upper echelon of the SEAL teams fucking hate this show because we dive into it. Yeah, I would imagine. We expose it. I don't care if it hurts the recruiting numbers. I believe they have a responsibility.
I understand that. I got to go when I was writing Loan Survivor, I got to go to Iraq with Team 5 to a place called Raouh. I don't know if you're ever out there. It was a Marine Corps base by the Syrian border. And I got to spend a month as a civilian, embedded with a bunch of guys from Team 5. And that was without a doubt, one of the greatest experiences in my life on many levels. And I took a lot from it and have a lot of memories. But to this point, one memory that really stuck with me when I look now back and I try to understand the transition for Seals, but not just Seals. It could be anyone that was in the military, but it could be for Rangers or Delta or Marsack or any particularly special operators that have to get out. Something I remember from my time in Iraq was I got to go with the Seals, and they were going to go into a house and 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 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 a young little guy, and he was doing security on his corner. And I was with him. And he wasn't really talking to me. He was looking out on the street. And there were three Iraqi young men that had come and were staring at us. And he knew enough Arabic to say, go, get out of here. And he yelled it at him, and they stared at him, and he yelled it again. And they walked away. And afterwards, after the whole lap, we were back at the base. I said, well, what would you have done if they didn't leave? And he said, I would have killed him. I said, What? He said, Well, the way I look at it is if I'm working and I see them, I own them. I own their shoes, I own their pants, I own their shirt, and I own their organs. I I own their heart. Their heart is mine. So I do whatever the fuck I want with that. I own them.
And I remember thinking, well, this guy is going to have trouble getting out of the military. How do take, and I totally understood that mindset of like, fuck it, I will survive. My job is to protect this corner. My guys are in that house. I will fucking protect this corner. I understood that. But then thinking, well, this guy's going to have to get out one day, and he's going to be in traffic, and someone's going to cut him off, or he's going to be in Starbucks, and someone's going to say some shit. And the complexity of that mindset to have to adjust to being able to be... I remember someone once talked about Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones guy. You met in the house in 1975 when the Rolling Stones were the biggest in the world. And Mick Jagger told his story about how he had to come home from a world tour where they were selling out stadiums all around the world. He's Mick fucking Jagger. And he comes home and his wife, Jerry Hall, this woman, and he has a baby. She hands him the baby. She says, Clean up the Baby, and there's dog shit in the yard.
And Mick Jagger is like, But I'm Mick fucking Jagger. I just came back from the... And I've always thought that moment, just a little moment, where I felt what it means to have that power in a place like Iraq, when now you got to come home and you have to turn it in, you have to retire, and you have to move forward. I don't think civilians understand that.
Yeah, they don't. They don't. But I think that's I think that that's a big reason why opiates become such a problem in the community.
And they're right there. And so then, yeah, you get- It numbs that out. Turn it off.
Dums it out. And then it's the only thing that seems to turn the switch off for a lot of people. And the immediate easy fix, which It dums you out to where you don't give a fuck anymore. And then down the spiral we go.
Well, that was what Painkiller was for me. The show I did about Purdue Pharma in the Sackler family. It's interesting. Just today, what's the date today? What is it? The '16th. The '16th. So today on the way over here, someone sent me a New York Times article about a new twist in the opioid epidemic. These companies that serve as the middlemen between the doctors and the... I'm sorry, between the prescribers and the insurance companies. They're these companies that control what the insurance companies will allow to be prescribed. If the doctor says you should be able to take 250 milligrams of OxyContin a day, these companies are in charge of regulating whether the insurance companies will pay for that. So they've got this incredible power. And there's three main companies. Can't remember the names of them, but it's just today in the paper. And now it came out in the Times today that the Sacklers and other drug companies were prescribing these guys to restrict the amount of pills that were allowed to be prescribed. So they would get paid off, and they would allow these incredible prescriptions to be put through and the insurance companies to pay for them.
So it's just more of a game within a game within a game.
When you made that, that exposed a lot of shit to the public that people weren't really thinking about. When you make something like that, do you have any fear?
A little bit. For a minute, I did.
You're fucking with some really powerful people.
So at first I didn't. It's like people Well, when you went to Iraq, were you scared? And I said, Well, not really, because there were 20 Navy Seals around me all the time, and I felt pretty safe. When I got back and I really looked at the map and figured out, I felt a little more nervous. But in the moment, I didn't feel nervous. Probably should have felt a little more nervous, but I felt very safe with the guys. The Sacklers, at first I'm like, Well, yeah, these guys are fucking scumbags. Fuck them. Let's make a movie. Let's tell the truth. I have friends that have died from drug addiction, and I don't give a fuck, and let's go. I'm not scared. The more research I did, the more nervous I got because they're just like, these are like real mobsters. These are the real Pablo Escobar, the real drug dealers that are putting up numbers much larger than the Medi and cocaine cartels, the companies like Purdue and the Sackler family. So the more I learned about just how powerful and quiet they were, And what masterminds it's secrecy. If you try and search Richard Sackler, they're so fucking scrubbed that you'll get virtually nothing on them.
And they just constantly cycle that. I've yet to find anyone who's better scrubbed as far as Internet than Richard Sackler, the kingpin of the Sackler family. But so the more I learned, the more nervous I got. And there was a I was literally paranoid. I'm checking my back and making sure doors are locked and having access to security if I felt threatened. And then I realized, if they want to get me, they're going to get me. By the time we really got going, the wave was really getting big and people were finally starting to say the name Sackler and realize just how dirty and corrupt this family was. And I felt a little, I think all of us involved felt at least secure in it. It was so public at this point that if they did come after us, everyone was going to know. It's like I didn't have to leave a note like, hey, man, if something happens to me, it was Richard Sackler. People already would get that. And everyone's like, dude, I don't know if I want to stand so close to you. I invite my friends out to dinner. And they're like, yeah, no, we're good.
We're all busy for a while. Let's see how the show plays out. People They'll distance themselves with a joke in me for a minute. But I'm not necessarily the biggest conspiracy guy. I'm always up to entertain a good conspiracy story. I'll talk about Lee Harvey Oswald for a long time, the magic bullet theory and all that. And I don't even know whether it's a conspiracy or it's just the realization of how the world does business. And if you really want to understand what the fuck is going on, not just in pharmaceuticals, but I think in almost any business, certainly the business of war, right? The amount of guys that are making money off of war, that's a different story. But the way money rules the world, it's all about money, and the Sacklers knew it. And the Sacklers knew that they had this incredible product that could do this incredible thing, take away your fucking pain. For anyone that's dealt with pain, whether it's the emotional pain that your buddy went through after losing his child and girlfriend and seeing what he saw in that helicopter, he He's in pain. Give me that pill. Give me 40 milligrams of that liquid honey that happens to have a little battery acid in the middle of it.
I'll take it. And the Sacklers knew it, and they knew how monetize it, and they knew how to game the system. And I think the worst thing that I found, the thing that really floored me was this guy, Curtis Wright. Do you know who Curtis Wright is?
Curtis Wright, no.
So one of the challenges the Sacklers had with OxyContin and Purdue had, they needed to get the FDA to approve it. They had spent so much money developing this drug, and they were having financial problems prior to OxyContin being approved by the FDA, that they were all in on OxyContin, and they needed the FDA to approve it. You think about the FDA and big government organization, and it is probably a big organization that probably does need a haircut, and I bet they're going to get one now with the new administration, which is probably a good thing, I think. But you think, oh, wow, the FDA has to approve OxyContin. And that's probably a team of 50 scientists, and they're going to have to... It was really just one guy. And it was this nerdy dude named Curtis Wright, and he was the obstacle. He kept saying to the Sacklers and to Purdue Pharma, I can't improve this drug. This is heroin in a little M&M rapper. Like, what are you fucking crazy? No. And they kept trying. He went through multiple applications, and this one guy was saying no. And that was putting the entire Sackler family and Purdue Pharma in real risk of financial ruin.
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, and they spent a couple of days in a hotel room. No one knows what happened in that hotel room. When they came out, Curtis Wright had signed the approval with the words that OxyContin is believed to be non-addictive, is believed, is believed, which is weird language. It's not OxyContin is not addictive. It is OxyContin is believed to not be addictive with No one ever used that language. It doesn't make any sense. Curtis, he approved it. The drug gets going and it becomes a grand slam home run and the money is off the chart. About a year and a half later, Curtis Wright leaves the FDA and goes and works for Purdue Pharma. Oh, shit. He was making, they say, 70,000 at the FDA, hundreds of thousands at Purdue. They bought him. And when I heard that, I'm like, okay, that is how the fucking world operates. And it's not a conspiracy, it's a fact. And it's public. People know about it. Human beings like your friends and friends that I have are dying and are still dying.
People are getting addicted. Families are being thoroughly fucked up and derailed. It's crazy. And this is how it goes. And so it was Making Painkiller was just an emotionally powerful experience. I don't think there was a day filming it when someone on the crew didn't come up to me and say, Hey, can I talk to you for a second? My best friend died. My My cousin died. My mother died. Just in your studio today, someone that works for you came up to me and started sharing me a story about their relationship to a family member and the drug. It's It's omnipresent and it's horrible. And what I get from it is like, let's open up our eyes and be real honest about how this world operates. And usually it's money.
What were some of the things? What was the initial thing that got you paranoid about the Sackler family?
I remember I was trying to interview members of Purdue Pharma. Because like I said, you can't get the information on the Sacklers. So I was trying to interview members, people who had worked for the company, and we couldn't get anyone to talk. And then a journalist from the New York Times had written a book that It was one of our pieces of source material for the book, a book called Empire of Pain. The author of that book called me and said, There's a woman who will talk to you. And she used to work for Richard Sackler as one of his five secretaries. And I'm like, great. He's like, She's going to call you at whatever time in two days. Be ready. She's going to call you. So I was in pre-production on the film. My phone goes off. It's FaceTime. And I answer the phone and it's this woman. And she's in a car and she's pulled over on the side of the road. And she starts talking to me about working for Richard Sackler. But she's getting real close to the phone and she's whispering. And she keeps looking around. And she told me she'd left work and driven to the parking lot of a little strip mall.
And she was 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 And after that call, I came back and I said, Guys, we just got to watch our backs and be smart because we are poking a bear. I don't know, man. They still could get me. And if they do, if I go quick or I go weird, check out the Sacklers.
I will.
I do feel pretty safe here with you, though, I got to say. We're in good company. Yeah, I feel safe.
But Did you struggle with addiction at all?
I was lucky. I never had addiction. I have family members that have used 12 Step to their... I have one sibling, and she's done an incredible job. She's 30 years sober, and A has been a godsend to her. And we've talked about addiction, and And I've asked her, I'm like, what do you think it is? I've asked her, do you think I'm an addict? Because I do drink. There's not a drug I haven't tried, pretty much. I don't think I've done bath salts or angel dust. Okay? I take those two, maybe a few others, but I've tried them. And I don't know, man, I always had that ability to see through the shot, see through the line. If someone put a line of coke in front of me back in the day, I might do one. But then I think about the other, and I have that... It's not that I didn't want to do it and that I didn't see what was good and what felt good about it. But I was able to see, well, let's jump ahead 24 hours, 48 hours, and think about the cost, the hangover, the self-loathing, the self-discust, the bad choices that start to accumulate.
And I was able to, I'm good. And my sister said to me that that ability to have that pause is something that can separate a true addict from someone that's not. And I think about that because it's not any superhuman quality It's nothing that I take credit for. I'm like, oh, I can do this any more than I think most of the addicts that I know suffer. It's not about weakness. It's not mental weakness or physical weakness that's causing someone to go back to that drug or back to that behavior, whatever it is, that's so fucking self-destructive. It's a disease, I believe. I'm fortunate that I don't think I have it. And do you? Have you experienced it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Is that common knowledge? Forgive me for not knowing.
Yeah, it is. I had a hell of a run in Colombia with cocaine. I appreciate the bottle, but I've been sober for three years. Good for you, man. Well, I've been on booze for three years, but yeah, I was really right in the line there. Opioids, coke, benzos, booze, sleeping pill, all of it combined together. And then I did a psychedelic treatment.
You had a little journey. You weren't on a journey. I had a little journey.
Went down to Mexico to do some drugs that got me off the drugs.
What were some of the drugs? I'm sure everyone knows this, and you've talked about it.
Yeah, that's fine. But forgive me. It was... So I I had really cleaned it up. I had... So I moved down to Medellín.
Yeah, that's a tricky spot for anyone that's even-For a while.tempted to flirt with the devil. You're going to find it down there.
Well, that's why I went.
You found what you were looking for.
I definitely found it. And overdosed a couple of times, almost died. I remember calling my mom on Mother's Day. You know, I've always heard, you don't have to worry about how much coke you've had until things start slowing down. And they said, When you're on speed and things start slowing down, that's when you're right in the line. And that happened to me a couple of times down there where it was like that fucking scene in school where the voice is like, what? I started hearing that.
How much coke had you done, do you think, and how long was the binge?
About five years. And a lot. I mean, at that time, really good Coke in Miami was like 150 bucks a gram. And down there, I was getting it for five bucks a gram.
And it was so much stronger, right?
Yeah. I mean, it's fresh from the... It's just right... I mean, it's Columbia.
But would you do... Because I never did, but I heard about three-day, four-day binges that people would go on, and you're not sleeping and you're just doing more. Did you ever experience anything like that?
I mean, it was all the time. It was all the time. And I would go... I don't know. I never really kept track, but I never stopped. I would go hard in the pain for a week. Oh, my goodness. And then I would go all the way up until the point where I would get this really bad heartburn, and I would just drown Tums and Pepto and anything. I just wanted to keep...
How did you get yourself out of that?
Well, I actually got run out by the federal police. I always take care of everybody around me. I deal with my team now. I've just always done it. I've always been. When I went down there, I had a penthouse in a neighborhood called El Pablado. So anybody that was around me, I would take care of. Number one guy, door man, who has access into the building that I'm in, the door guy. And so all the door guys, if I want to go get booze, they got Booze. If I want to go get Coke, they got Coke. When I would leave Columbia to come back to the States, I would give them all my clothes, my shoes, my song, everything, like a computer. It doesn't If I wanted to go get a phone, I'd got them a phone. So I really took care of those guys because I knew that they controlled access into the building and up to my apartment. And so they had tipped me off, and one of them in particular had took me off and had told me that they had set up a observation point in a building across the mine and that they may have dug the recessed lighting in the hallway outside of where I was at.
But this was real or was this like coke paranoia? No, this is real. Okay.
That sounds fucked. Yeah. When I got one to that, I hightaled it out of there. I never went back, cleaned it up. Cleaned up the coke, tried to clean it up. Then I started going to Costa Rica, but Costa Rica was like fucking Disneyland compared to what I was doing.
Kira Vida, you weren't about to pure data.
It was a joke. It was just a bunch of gringos down there wanting to have sex with Latin Costa Rican girls. I was just like, this is fucking stupid. J. V. I need to be... Because the real issue was adrenaline addiction from all my time in. That's what I was chasing.
But that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You get to play God. When you talk about adrenaline, what are you going to do with that energy when you get You're going to go to Medellín and shack up.
Yeah.
Right?
People will come down to visit me and to think it would be a good time, which I thought... I'm not condoning this. It was horrible. I'm not going to speak against it all the time now. But they couldn't... They'd last maybe two days, and they'd come down to visit me for a month, and then I'd get a note on my table that's like, Dude, I'm out of here. It's like, This is fucking crazy. And Because it wasn't... I mean, it's just different. It's just crazy down there. I mean, I used to go to this club. It was called Fahrenheit. And in the club, they had these tables where they would put lines and mounds, like little mounds and key bumps and shit on the table of Coke, and then lacquer over the top.
You know, right now, some of your wide viewers are just googling in Fahrenheit and booking plane tickets right now.
Well, that was a long time ago.
I'm sure they're looking. Don't do it.
Yeah, but don't do it. It doesn't lead anywhere good. Right.
Okay, so what would happen? You go to Fahrenheit, How would that play out?
I mean, that was just one hangout. But what I really liked doing was... I mean, what I really liked was the adrenaline. The adrenaline from the teams and in my time at the agency. It was just always like shit was happening. And then when I left, I couldn't fucking feed that anymore. And I had nowhere to get it. And so I was like, I'm going to go down here.
But what do you think? Did you get into 12 Step? No. What saved you? What got you to walk away from the drugs and the alcohol?
That Mother's Day thing really got to me because I was like, Man, I'm going to fucking OD down here, and my body will just decompose because nobody really gives a shit about me down here. Nobody knows I'm here other than my parents, and they'll just eventually get a call like, Hey, your son's body is fucking decomposing in this penthouse. He ODed on coke. And the career that I've had before that, it was just like, Oh, there's my son, the former CEO, former CIA contractor who's fucking died of a cocaine overdose. I was ashamed. And so I went home. And I still struggled with the benzos because down there, I would just... You can get whatever you want. So eventually, if I was getting to going too hard down the coke train, I would just pop a volume and then...
Yeah. But whatever.
But then I had a suicide attempt, and that was really the breaking point for me when I got back home. Just nothing was... I I couldn't get anything going and pulled the car in the garage and reclined the seat back, and I woke up. I should have never woken up, but Anyways.
That's what you call a positive fail, my friend. Yeah. I'm glad you fucking failed.
Me too.
I really am. Me too. I really am.
Me too. Yeah. So then But then I found psychedelics through this show and went down there and having had kicked everything.
So the psychedelics helped you? Are you in 12 Step? Do you use 12 Step?
Peter, it was like a light switch, man.
What psychedelics did you do?
I did Ibegaine and 5MAO-DNT.
You smoked a toad?
I smoked the toad.
I smoked it four times, my friend. Really? Yes, sir.
I want to hear about this.
I love that tone.
Did you die?
Yes, sir.
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I was going to recommend that you'd just smoked the tard before you told me that you did it. How many times have you smoked the tard?
Well, one day I did it 13 times.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You had to really get to it.
You had to dig deep. You got to dig deep.
But But four times, I think, I've done it. Like 13 hits off the pipe? It wasn't staying under? It was an all-day event. I started at 9:00 AM. So you come out of it, you'd go back. And you had a good shaman that was guiding you?
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. The first time was the scariest and probably the one that I got the most out of. I mean, like I said, between that and the Abogaine, I haven't... This February, it'll be three years since I've had it dropped.
Those are the two most powerful... I mean, Abogaine, I I've never done, but I know what it is. I'm scared of it, actually. I've met the Toad. Wow, I couldn't see how that would have taken care of a problem.
Cleaned me out Still clean.
How many times did you do the Abogane?
One.
That's enough, right? Yeah. Different experience in the 5MEO?
Totally different.
How would you explain the differences?
Well, I The Ibegaine is like a 12-hour experience.
They say the Ibegaine is the godfather. Yes, that's the most powerful. I always heard that 5-MEO is the god molecule, but Ibegaine is the godfather. Yeah. Is that accurate?
Yeah, I think so.
What was the Ibegaine like?
Man, it was about 12 hours long. I couldn't walk words. And it was, in a nutshell, it's like a life review. It's like a life review of looking at your life from an outside perspective, like a non-bias, for me, like a non-emotional perspective. And so a lot of the things that happened, I guess you just you process them in a different way.
From way back, from your- Everything. A little kid? Everything.
And it wasn't all dramatic shit. To be honest, it was like these TV screens, like thousands of them, going off into a distance and just disappearing. And every screen was a different portion, segment of my life. And I could see them through my peripherals and see them moving through. And I could think like, oh, yeah, that's when me and my dad did this thing, and that is in Iraq, and that's when I was a teenager wrestling. There was no chronological order. There was nothing. And if I tried to pay too much attention into one screen, then they would all disappear. It wasn't even like I was reliving experiences, but that's how it went for me. I didn't like It wasn't a scary experience other than at the very first, I saw my head split open and another one mushroomed out.
That's a little scary.
Yeah, but it wasn't like you hear some of the horror stories about people reliving things or meeting demons.
On Abigain? Yeah.
I didn't meet any demons. It was just a life review. Then when I came out of it, it's like I had this new sixth sense that said, Hey, all this shit you're doing, it's fucking poison. Knock this shit off. Quit drinking. I quit caffeine for a long time. I quit smoking marijuana for a long time. I was still taking Adderall to concentrate and hadn't had any of that. And the fruit that came from that experience, it totally revolutionized this show in my business. I was scared to leave the military genre. Not leave it, but explore new territories and like that. Somehow that just- Do you credit the Iba game more than the 5MEO with your sobriety?
Yes. Because I've heard that. I've heard that from ex-military guys, ex-team guys who've taken Iba game, and they physically look different. I've seen them since. And the look in their eye, It's almost like their facial construction is different. Their cheekbones feel different. Their eyes feel different. Their posture, and they're sober. It seems to be one of the more effective medicines Yeah, they've done studies on it now.
It's really changing a lot of lives. It is the cure for opiate addiction, for alcoholism. If you are out there riding the fucking line like we were just talking about, and you're looking for a way out, I'd highly recommend it.
Yeah, man. Same here. I do hope that whatever happens with Kennedy and the new administration administration, that people start looking at this and that any of it, whether it's ketamine, psilocyidine, 5-MEO, Ibegaine, that people start at least being educated on what it can and cannot do and that the government starts making these medicines available. I'm all for it. My experience on 5-MEO, I never did Ibegaine. I don't know if I have the guts for it. I was scared to smoke the toad. I remember my friend took me, and my friend's a pretty high functioning business guy, successful. And the fact that he had done it, and a couple of other people I know that are pretty high functioning have done it made me willing to take the chance that I didn't... I was a little concerned that I was going to break my brain on something that powerful. But because they had done it, I felt confident. And I got to the place in California where I was going to do it the first time, and they were already doing it. I was looking at them. And it's a little... If you watch somebody that's going through it, they're making some noises and moving around a little bit.
And I was not quite sure what experience they were having. And the guy who was actually a psychiatrist who is now the administer of this, and he used to do antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, and he would write scripts for it. He started learning about some of these psychedelics, and he completely changed his practice and only does 5-MEO and Ivogean now. And I thought that was interesting. But he took me aside and he sat me down. He said, okay, Pete, you're about to ingest 5-MEO DMT. It's the most powerful psychedelic, certainly one of them in the world. It's going to last 30 minutes or so, and you're going to have this very powerful experience, and you might feel as though you're dying, but you won't. He's telling me all this stuff, and I'm looking at him. He's like, Do you have any questions? I said, Well, I heard this about other psychedelics. Should I set an intention? 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. What's my goal? What should I do? I remember he looked at me and he put his hand on my shoulder.
He said, Good luck with that, Pete. Good luck. You try and set all the intentions you want. And that free me out a little bit because I could tell. You know what I mean? He was like, good luck with your little intentions. And I remember smoking it and the feeling of For me, what they say, they call ego death, right? And I've talked to other people about it. Mike Tyson's talked about it. It's certainly nothing that I'm the only one that's experienced. But when you experience it, you really know you've experienced It's interesting because you try and explain it to people and you find that words fail you because we don't literally have the words in the English language to explain this experience because people just haven't experienced it, so they don't have words for it. But it is death, right? Of some sort. That's a word that people can relate to. For me, the way I explained what I first experienced was as the medicine was taking over my mind, I felt myself trying to hold on to thoughts like, okay, I'm in Malibu, California. I'm in California. I'm on the West Coast of America.
I'm in America. I'm on the Western hemisphere. I'm on the planet Earth. I was trying to hold on to it, and suddenly my ability to think was just turned off about that thought. And then I went to, well, I'm Pete. My dad's Larry. My grandfather's Harry. My great-grand. That's off. I'm wearing shoes. I'm wearing socks. Every thought I could have would suddenly be slammed off, almost like the steel curtain was shutting down. And I could feel myself trying to hold on to any thinking, any rational thinking. And every thought was just, and then this giant wall of darkness came over me, and it was a sound, and it was like, over. And I remember thinking very clearly, I'm dead. And my first thought was, it's all over It's all nothing. Everything is nothing.
I thought that, wow, everything is nothing.
And all of this sudden, because these are just words now, I became aware that something was still going on. I was still functioning. There was brain function. But it wasn't any brain function I've ever encountered before. And then I just started going into something that felt so expansive and such an energetic experience that was moving and unfolding in multiple directions, all everywhere, everything at once energy. And that energy overtook me. And I remember I sobbed and I laughed and I screamed. And when I came out of it, the people who were organizing this, the doctor and his assistants, one of the women had a pet wolf. And I didn't know there was a wolf in the house. And I came two and I was on my hands and knees and I had snot and tears all over me. And I really had this cathartic release of feelings that I just don't have the ability to access on a regular basis. And I looked up and there's this white wolf staring at me, about as close as you are, a little further away, locked into my eyes. Damn. And I'm staring at this wolf, and I start pointing.
And I'm trying to determine whether it's real, which it was. And I look up at John, the guy, and I'm trying to ask him if this is real. And I remember he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, Pete, try not to make sense of anything right now. Just stay in it. And It was an incredibly life-changing experience for me.
Sounds like a David Yaro photo.
Wow. It was so powerful. And For me, because I'm not religious, I was raised a bit atheist. I'm a Catholic Jew, and my parents didn't believe in organized religion, so I just never really had access to it. This felt like an incredible religious experience to me. And for me, and I have people like, Pete, stop fucking talking about 5MEO, but I love talking about 5MEO. And if someone's done it, I'll talk to them about it for hours. Because for me, the big secret that we all keep, that we all walk around as humans on this planet and we never acknowledge, well, there's a lot of them, but the real big one for me is a concept of infinity, right? It's a 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. Very hard to get our mind around. I shared a car in Greece with Elon Musk alone for 35 minutes in traffic. And I was like, it's a long story, but I ended up in a car alone with Elon Musk and his driver and his security guy.
And this is after I done it. And I'm like, I'm fucking... I got Elon Musk for 35 minutes. What do I want to ask him? And I said, Elon, what are your thoughts? Can you explain to me in a way that I could understand your concept of infinity? Because I can't understand How do you process the concept of an infinite universe? And he looked at me and said, Pete, I don't have a clue. I don't think I ever will, and I don't think we ever will. And I remember, wow, okay, he doesn't get it. I'm not so I don't get it either. That tracks. But when I was under it, the 5MEO, I felt as though I was beginning to experience the maybe very beginning of a look at a glimpse of what an infinite energy might feel like. And that felt religious to me. It felt like, and it sounds so stupid for anyone, and I get it, don't judge. Don't judge. Try it, maybe. That's where I went. It really has helped me so much in every aspect of my life as a father, as a filmmaker, as a friend, in business negotiations.
It's given me access to a different perspective. And I would imagine for you, it doesn't feel like people are like, Well, could I get addicted to it? I I don't know of anyone that gets addicted to things like iBogen or 5Mio. It's like, no, I'm good. It takes balls. It's like I parachute. I've done some jumps. And every time I jumped, it It's like you don't really want to. At that last second, you're like, How many jumps have you had, would you say?
Not very many.
Okay. Not very many. I had 13. On my 13th, I had a malfunction, so I haven't gone since. But every jump, no matter who, and I've been in a plane down in San Diego, where that skydive San Diego, which is a great place, Jeff Bramston. 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 maybe not today. At least most people do. I'm sure there are a few secos that don't. But that's how I feel about like 5M. It's like, I'm glad I did it, but man, if I'm going to do it again, it's...
I'm hesitant to do it every time.
Have you done it once?
No, I've done it, I think, four times. Right? It takes- And four different sessions.
It takes a certain type of courage. Yeah. Take that hit.
You don't know where you're going. No.
No.
So are you saying you're not an atheist now?
No, I'm not an atheist, but my belief... Okay, Don't judge.
I'm not here to judge. All right.
So the second time I did it, I went into this again. This time, I skipped the crying. And one thing's interesting is doing it a couple of times, I think you go a little bit further. Does this sound utterly insane? No. People are going to be like, Oh, he's just fucking drug-whacky dude.
No, we talk about this all the time on this show.
Because I really believe in this. And by the way, I don't believe in cocaine. I don't believe in recreational LSD. I think weed is problematic. I certainly don't. Opioids? Fuck no. This is a totally different animal to me, including alcohol. That's all over there. This one time, that's not completely different.
This is a medicine. So all the coke and all that shit, I think we covered it. It's not good.
It's like a suicide attempt. Dark suicidal energies. This is a whole nother experience. So the second time, I very quickly went into this energy that feels like I'm deep in the universe and I'm experiencing something that feels like this multidirectional energy that It's just expanding, that I feel maybe part of the energy that built the universe. Something had to build it, right? Got all these planets floating around. And you start getting into the sun and what the fuck the sun is and how that thing is still burning and how we're in this. Something's, right? And so there was some energetic. Even if a God caused an explosion and that created the massive universe, not just our little solar system, but the infinite universe, which we are such a small part of.
They say there's more planets than grains of sand in the world.
God would have to be really busy, and he's probably not just our God. The way I look at it. But I'm feeling something, and we don't have words for this, but it's a real energy. Words won't do it justice. And as I'm coming out of this energy, I start to see images of iconic religious structures being built. The pyramids, the Vatican, the Notre Dame Cathedral, Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Literally, I'm seeing man building these temples, and it's coming, so I'm coming out of the energy into man's building of religious artifacts and temples and structures. And I'm seeing men building these temples, acknowledging their religion, their gods. But to me, it felt very reductive after being in a much larger energy. This actually felt smaller to me, if that makes sense. And then I saw these religious, the pyramids, Mecca, Notre Dame Cathedral, I remember very clearly. And I came out of it and there was a guy with me who was my attendant. I don't know if you had someone watching you. Just make sure you don't take up all your clothes and run down the street, which I didn't. But I looked at him.
His name was Connor, and I remember coming out of it. And I looked at him and I said to him, Connor, organized religion is somewhat fucking absurd. And he looked at me and he nodded just like you did. And I couldn't understand in that moment, having felt something that to me felt beyond organized religion. These structures, and I've been to the mall, I've been to Notre Dame, I've been to the Vatican. I haven't been. I've been into Saudi Arabia, but I couldn't go to Mecca. I wanted to. I've been to Japan and to India and seeing Buddhist and Hindu temples, and I appreciate that, and I certainly respect it. But in that moment, I felt that if that type of organized religion wasn't speaking to me, but I did believe that there's definitely a force greater than anything we can see or feel or touch out there. That, to me, was the most honest religious experience I've ever had. Interesting. That's where I am.
It sent me down a path because I was First time I did it, I didn't really believe in anything either. I grew up Catholic, and that went out the window pretty much as soon as I joined the SEAL teams with that culture and what we were doing. But did you have your eyes closed or a blind pulled on?
Yeah, I did. They were closed.
Because I did it. I wanted to see.
They just closed. They didn't cover them up. I couldn't see anything. Were Were your eyes open?
Yeah, I came back after I died, after the ego.
What did your death feel like?
My death felt like, man, it was the most anxiety, most fear I've ever felt in my It felt like all the negative toxicity, like shit that I've experienced, rage. It felt like it was just rushing through my veins out of my my fingers and my toes. It felt like I had this... It wasn't really a visualization. It felt more like an intuition, but it I feel like there was this black tar dripping off of my heart. Wow. And I had my-Wow.
That must have been terrifying.
It was. Like you, I had all these thoughts and shit about Things- Because that's your ego trying to hold on to logic? The last thing that I was grasping onto was my wife and my son. And I was just like, I knew I was 100 % certain, you're fucking dying, Sean. There's no coming back. You're done. And I was just fighting like hell because I just I didn't want to leave my wife and my six-month-old son in this fucked up place. And so that was the last thing that I was holding on to. And then when I let that go, that's when the crossover happened. And when the crossover happened, I sat back up and we were on the beach or close to the beach. We were up on a mount, like a hill, and you could see out into the Pacific. There were some islands out there, and I remember everything looked exactly the same It was just more vibrant. But every time I do psychedelics, I'm like, it's a lot of intuition going on. I was really reluctant to do this because I was like, this shit's for the hippies. I'm not a hippie.
I've heard hippies talk about energy and all this stuff. But when I opened my eyes, I saw you could intuitively feel and see this flow of energy from the ocean into the beach, up the trees, into the grass, through me. You could see it intuitively, and you just knew that it was there. I felt like if there would have been some negative energy out there, it would have been like a spotlight in the darkness. You just would have been able to identify it immediately because everything was just so positive. Then I felt the presence of Gabe, who we talked about. I felt that it was the feeling that everything, all the trauma, everything that had happened throughout my life was supposed to happen, and that it was okay, and that none of it even fucking mattered because this is such a minuscule sliver in time that we're experiencing right now. And So it made me believe again in a higher power. Yeah. And then it's- Same here. Honestly, it sent me on a journey. And I mean, now I'm a Christian, and I've had another experience after that that That turned me into a Christian that fucking slapped me in the face like, hey, pay attention.
It's amazing. I mean, the stuff that... It's And you also realize how minuscule you are. We are. And you're okay with it, which is the ego death, right?
Right. And that's where I say it's changed me in all aspects. I don't get upset about things that I used to get upset about. I'm not quick to get to conflict. I found my work has just gotten better. I'm a deeper moviemaker. When I was editing Pain killer, the opioid film, I had two editors, and one I had never worked with. They were editing while I was still in Canada filming, and I came back and 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. I had just done The Toad, and they were both really good guys, but I could tell one of them had an energy of heaviness, darkness, And I found out that he and his wife had taken their son, I think three-year-old son, into the doctor, the ear doctor for a procedure. This was three months prior to us starting to work. And they put this son under some local anesthesia, and the son died. Their kid died. And I found out that that was my editor and that that had happened to him. And just came in after I'd found that and we were working.
And then I realized he had a picture of his son, little picture under his computer that I noticed for the first time. I don't know him that well. And I started asking him about his son. I heard about this, and I'm really sorry. And I just want you to know that I'm aware, and if there's anything we can talk about or you want to talk about, I want to be available to you for that. And we started talking and started asking him questions about his son and what life his son had had and what young man he was at that age and what he had experienced. And we started talking. We started talking for a while and he stopped. He said, I haven't talked about my son like this. And I Realize, I don't know that I would have had this conversation prior to experiencing that medicine. We started talking about it and I said, Well, how are you and your wife coping? He said, Horrible. Horrible. He said, We're going to grief counseling, but it's not working. They've gone to some 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 and axes and group therapy.
I asked him if he had thought about exploring psychedelics, and he said his wife is talking about And I said, Well, have you heard about 5M? He sat up. He said, My wife has been asking me about this. And I said, What's it like? What do you think? And I thought about it. And I said, Here's what I think.
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And I was like, Forgive me if I'm overstepping. He said, no, I want you to say it. I said, okay, because I really didn't know him that well. I said, in my mind, the way I'm thinking about you and your family, if this is your son right now in your mind, and he's right here, and wherever you look, your son, your dead son is right there, and you can't... Right? Wherever you look. I said, I believe that this medicine could maybe take your son and put him here for a minute. It's never going to go away, but give you a little bit of space to maybe process something like that in a way that you're not able to. And I stand by that. And it's advice I would give to myself, to you, to anyone. The only thing I think is that young people might... I don't think it's I had to do for someone much in their 20s still. I would encourage people to wait till their 30s just because I can't back that up scientifically. It's more a hunch. But if someone came to me and they were 19 or 20, I've talked to my son about this, and he's in his early 20s, and I'm very honest with him about all of this, everything I tried to be honest with them about.
But I said, I don't think you should do this until you're 30.
Yeah.
What do you think?
I think it depends on life experiences because it is so healing. So I think if you have a kid who is... I can't back this up either. I know where you're going. With a grain of salt.
I think I know. Yeah.
But there's kids that have been through lots and lots of sexual trauma, rape.
I just had a guy in here, and I'm not going to mention his name because this conversation was offline.
But his son was in an accident and somebody was killed. And his son did this. It sounds like it healed him because he carried a lot of fucking guilt.
How old was the son?
17 or 18, I think. And got him through. Because you do I mean, for me, you just... Man, I'll tell you, it changes your perspective so much that it's like, oh, fuck, so-and-so died. You know what I mean? That sucks. That a short life could have had a lot more life to live, died in his 20s, died at 25, a lot of seals, whatever. Death. It sucks, right? That's how humanity perceives it. It's fucking horrible. You only get to live once. After doing the 5MEO DMT, this shit is what sucks. They're in a better fucking spot. It's almost like you get a window or a veil is lifted and you see what it's actually all about, even though you can't Like you said, there's no words in the English language to describe it, but it's a hell of a lot better than here.
I would agree with you. For someone like your friend's son, I think it could be really helpful if someone has gone through that really fucked up trauma that's out of the realm of just talk therapy is not going to fix that. I think what would be important is that whoever administers the medicine, the toad, I mean, I began for a 17-year-old, I don't know, but maybe. Did he do I begin?
I believe it was-5M, yeah.
But whoever is the administrator, the the guide, stays on board with that person for days, weeks, months, helps process that. So it's not like... It at least keeps an eye on that younger mind, just to make sure that he's able to talk about things. Because I remember, I was trying... You can relate to the idea that we don't have words in the English language for some of these feelings. And so it's hard to explain what you experienced. And I was talking to someone about it, and he told me about this tribe in Brazil that does a lot of ayahuasca-type psychedelics. I think it's slightly different than ayahuasca, some like the Yamamado tribes, these wild tribes that have been doing psychedelics for generations, and how they have different words, words that we don't have in our language, and he was trying to get me to understand how we don't have words for so much. He talked about this word that this tribe had for the feeling you get in your stomach when you hear a cliff diver jump like 100 feet or 200 feet into the water. That concussive sound, you know that? It gives you a feeling.
It's hard to explain. But if you've ever heard somebody really get punched in the with a bare fist. That's a sound that's a sound. It's different, not like a movie, right? And that sound of a body hit in the water is a stirring sound. And there's a term for that in this language because that's important to them. Let's remember that feeling that you get. And I think it's interesting that we're so new to this world and it's become vogue, and I know a lot of people are doing it and they think it's cool or rich people in the Hamptons of New York or Beverly Hills are having like, psychedelic parties and all that and expanding their consciousness and microdosing mushrooms. Great. I don't judge that, but there is something very real to it, and particularly for people who are going harder and have, I don't know, man, That trauma to dig up and to look at, this shit is real.
I think the world would be a better place. I wish this fucking politicians would use it. But have you ever heard anything Have you ever heard anything bad coming from it?
No, and I looked it up. I think I heard somebody died No, I remember there was a doctor or a shaman who, I think in Mexico, this is all searchable, was putting people under and molesting. But that was One person, he was busted. Because I searched it all, dark side, downside, addiction, deaths, and very, very little. I couldn't find anything directly related, but I remember this one story of some shaman who was putting people under and doing that. But I don't know. I haven't heard much. Have you?
Yeah, I just heard this last week. Actually, it was the guys that got me into this. They didn't talk me into. They shared their experience on how it helped them. I was I got to do this. But they came up. We went to an event together. We were all talking about psychedelics. I guess there's somebody that... I haven't looked into this yet, but apparently, there's something out there on it. This guy did it. It seems to have experienced a 10-year time period within 30 minutes.
I began or MEO? Meo.
Okay. And I don't know. Like I said, I didn't have a storyline or anything when I did it, which doesn't sound like you did either. But he had built a relationship, had a kid. All this shit happened in his mind in 30 minutes. That was 10 years worth of time. And then when he came out of the experience, only 30 30 minutes had passed. And he still misses whoever he met in that experience because he had built a 10-year relationship with those people. And so all he wants to do. Is that fucking wild? That's crazy.
I know.
I've never heard that.
That's a movie, man. Because there's eternal sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I don't know if you ever saw that film, Jim Carrey. It's a good movie where he wants to erase part of his brain to get a girl out of his mind. It's just a bad relationship. But see, that's fascinating to me. And I can totally see how that could happen. I think that one of the things that 5M did for me was just that, what's the adage? We use 2% of our brain. It's like, to me, I've made analogy to people. Do you want to understand a little bit about what it's like? Think about your dreams. And when you wake up from a dream and you've had some insane dream that you're speaking languages and your mother is there, but her head is an your estrange head and your son is like a stockbroker and he's making deals, but he's only two. And you're like, where the fuck did that come from? How did my brain... I shut down part of my in to sleep and something else woke up. And as a writer, I can relate to that feeling of accessing parts of your your brain that you just can't get to sitting here talking.
And I've had that experience many times. I don't know if you've had it writing, but where you sit down and things start coming out of you and you look, you think that 15 minutes have gone by and you look up in three hours have gone by and you don't remember it. And you look down, you've written 10 pages, but you've accessed something that you can't get to normally. And I call it flow state or some optimal creative. Like, Rogan thinks that this state is an actual entity, like an external goblin that comes in and enters you. There's this guy, Steve Pressfield, who I who's like a guru for writers. And he talks about this, too. Like that, be able to truly access aspects of your mind that you normally just can't get to. So that 5MEO can put you in this state where it just shuts down your default network. So everything that we normally think of, like, oh, I'm wearing a sweater, you're wearing a sweater, I'm wearing pants, you're wearing pants, carpet here, all your things that are up on the wall. That's all our rational... Turn all that shit off. And the next thing you know, you've created 10 years of a life, and you really think you've got a son and a wife.
It's crazy, isn't it?
I've never heard that, man. I've never heard that, man. Apparently, it still has feelings But I'll tell you- He's mourning his child that never existed.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. Maybe tapped into another life. Who the hell knows? Maybe. But also another thing that it did is it sent me down. 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. Tell me.
Give me like the- Basically, I'm going to butcher it. But I mean, lots of people read this. Some people read it every... I think Tom braided reads it every year. But it talks a lot about... 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 talks about... I don't want to make this book sound like something it's not. But one thing that it does do is it talks about how we've all been indoctrinated. But it doesn't do it in a conspiracy-ish fucking way. It's just the way it is. And a lot of people read this after psychedelics. And when you read it, you're like, oh, yeah. Like, okay. Like, yeah, this is true And in between that and what I experience through psychedelics and how healing it is and how it's fucking illegal here, why? I don't know. It's helping so many people with addiction and drama.
Fda, baby. Yeah.
And it sent me down this rabbit hole to think that everything we know and have been told is a fucking lie. And I do believe that. I do want to ask you about something. Don't Did we go to the moon?
Pardon me? Did we go to the moon? I don't know, man. I wasn't there. I wasn't there. I know about the picture Capricorn 1 was a movie when I was a kid that was about the fact that the theory that we never did. I don't know, man. I like to think that we did because that's how I was raised. And if that didn't happen, then I got to really unpack a whole bunch of other shit. But I don't know. I can tell you I never went to the moon.
What about the Stanley Kubrick stuff? Have you looked into that?
Which stuff?
Did he stage it? He filmed it?
Yeah, that's Capricorn One. That's the movie. That's what it is? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Damn. I don't know.
I love this subject.
I know. I'm going to assume we did, but I wasn't there. I just want to believe we did.
Me too. I don't know, though. There's some pretty compelling evidence.
People are full of shit, and there's a lot of reasons that we would have lied. And governments are horrific, and governments will do things that we can't believe to advance agendas. And I've seen all of this, and I've gotten a front row seat to some really fucked shit 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. And I believed our leaders when they said that we were the good guys and they're the bad guys, and not always the case. I did just come back from Israel last week.
How was it?
Dude, it's fucked up. No. Two weeks before I went to Israel, I was in New York, and I was going to have lunch with a friend of mine, and she brought a friend of hers who I didn't know. During the course of the meal, Israel came up and she started ripping into the Israelis and, Fuck the Israelis and fuck Zionism. And she's looking at me, she's really getting mad. And I'm like, I'm I'm curious. Are you Arab? Are you Muslim? She said, I'm Palestinian. I said, okay. I can imagine this is a really fucking hard time. She goes, Yeah, it is. And I said, I get it. She starts ripping Israel. They all need to fucking go. I go, Okay, I hear you. I'm curious, how do you process the Nova Music Festival and what happened? 300 Israelis were killed at that music festival. And she looked at me and she had this look in her eyes. I haven't seen. I don't know ever. And she said, I thought it was fucking hilarious. I loved it. And the feeling I had was like, sickness, anger, She's like, I'm looking into the eyes of this 30-year-old girl.
And I said, I got to go. I said, I'm going to leave. I said, okay, I just want you to know I don't agree with anything you said. My pulse was going. I didn't even know what I felt Other than I had to get out of there, walk away. And then I decided to go the next week to Israel. I wanted to see it. And I wanted to just see it for myself. And I went to that side of that festival, and I went to one of the kibbutches that was attacked. And I wanted to go into Gaza, asked if we could go in. I was told we couldn't go in. It wasn't safe. We got close and could see in to that world, the Gaza Strip, behind the wall. And I just spent... I was there for five days, and I really just tried to see it because we read about it, we see it on our computers. We certainly get into whatever social media feeds. I've had all this in front. I wanted to see it. And I think my biggest takeaway is as simple as this sounds, is that these people fucking hate each other.
I mean, hate each other. I've never seen that hatred. I remember when I was in Iraq with Team five when 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. Not the hunt, but in those trucks, looking out, and they'd be looking in with this look that felt... I hadn't seen that look a lot. You You know what I'm talking about? Like, die. But when I was in Israel, the anger and fear was so palpable. And I know it's on the other side. And I don't know, man. I just think where my mind starts going is, okay, Israel did this shit. Palestinians did this shit. It's been going back and forth since 1941 or 1907, depending on how far back you want to go, because I've tried to go back and, well, okay, it was their fault and it was their fault. And the English gave it to the Israelis and that fucked everything up. And then it's this Rubik's Cube that you never solve. Bottom line is, they fucking hate each other. They cannot work it out. It's like two kids that are fighting.
They just can't stop. They're never going to stop. And I came out of there with the sense of... And looking at so many Israelis I met, the energy you get is, please, we need help. And yes, they're horrific what's happening over there. These kids dying in Gaza and these innocent people dying. Horrific what happened. It's horrific. And I'm not like, at this point, I don't know what to justify and who's right and who's wrong at this point. It's just if it's going to stop, they need help. That was my take. They need someone to come in and say, you go over the fuck here, you go over the fuck here, stop.
Yeah.
And I hope that can happen.
It's a very complicated situation.
Yeah, it's super complicated. But at the end of the day, if you just look at it just practically, they can't fix it without other people, in my opinion, getting involved. It's like there has to be help from us. There has to be help from Saudi Arabia, from UAE, from Qatar, from Egypt, from Jordan. They got to help. Europe's got to help because they can't fucking figure it out. That was what I got. And it's really fucking sad to me.
How much time did you spend over there?
Was it for five days? Five days? Yeah. I recommend for people to go there if they want to understand what it really feels like and get a better sense, maybe a deeper sense of just how dark and complex the problem is. So I recommend going over there. Damn.
How long though was that?
I got back like 10 days ago.
Oh, man. So this is fresh.
Yeah. And absolutely brutal to go tour the Kibbutz is the tour that I had was a young 28-year-old guy. His brother was killed. His mother was kidnapped. They kept the kibbutz exactly as it was October seventh. So the blood's all over the place and the glass and the kid's shoes and the baby shoes and babies were taken and absolutely horrific. And like you see in that video of Murphy and Deetz and using that. I mean, you can't go there without getting activated. And then you go to the music festival and it's, fuck it, man. Fuck it. Game on. Okay, you're going to do this? Game on. You support that, right? And I do. But then you start understanding the pain on the other side and your head starts to explode. And that's why I've come to the conclusion, they can't. They need referees. It's like the nastiest hockey fight you've ever seen in your fucking life with no refs. People are bringing guns onto the ice and the knives onto the ice, and no one's there to stop it.
Yeah, I've been hesitant to cover the subject because it's so fucking complicated. It's just...
Well, if you look backwards, it's really complicated. Well, you did that. Well, you did that. Well, you did that. Well, you did that. Okay. That's never going to get unpacked, in my opinion. Looking forward, big brother issue from 40,000 feet. Someone has to step in and organize a large group effort to stop this shit. So that's what I hope happens. Yeah, me too. Because it sucks.
Me too.
It sucks for everyone.
The world is a fucked up place.
Yeah, but there's some good stories, too.
Well, let's move into what you're doing now, American Primeval. Yeah. How did that come across?
So American Primeval, that's the new show. Did you ever see Jeremiah Johnson when you were a kid? Yeah. So when I was a kid, Robert Redford played this wilderness guy who went out into I went out West from the city and had to learn how to survive and ended up marrying an Indian woman and a kid. And he was ended up... At first, he was totally inept and couldn't function. And Indians wouldn't even waste an arrow on him he was so useless in such a non-threat. And by the end, he was a great warrior, and he had the respect of multiple tribes. And that was one of my favorite movies as a kid. And I was like, Something that got me going and wanting to make movies and tell stories and stuff. And I always wanted to do something like that, an adventure story. Not like a Western in the traditional sense. And I like Westerns. Like, What's Casting the Sundance Kid was one of my favorite or the Unforgiven. I loved the Cowboys, some of John Wayne's earlier. I loved all those movies. But I wanted to do something that was a little more like raw and just pure survival and didn't have towns with saloons and whorehouses and sheriffs and people.
I wanted to be up in the mountains with the savages. And so I got a friend, this guy Markel Smith, who wrote The Revenant. Did you see The Revenant? Yeah. And I love that. And I'm like, hey, man, let's go back into this world. And he actually came to my office and I have a collection of axes in my office. I think he'd like you to prove of it. And I pulled out this ice ax, and I walked up to him and I go, I just put the ax in his lap. I said, Let's do a show that's this. And I said, Let's just channel this, this ice ax. And he smile. He said, Okay. And he wrote And it's this epic saga set in 1857. In this corner of America, it's Southwestern Wyoming and Southeastern Utah. It's that intersection. Or in 1857, it was fucking wild. There was no civilization, but it was one of the last areas that were really wild in America. And there were multiple Native American tribes. There were the Mormons who were setting up in Salt Lake City, and they were violent, had a real violent side to them because they'd been fucked over from New York to Georgia to Illinois, where their leader, Joseph Smith, was killed.
So this dude, Brigham Young, flees West with 2,000 Mormons and sets up his last stand in Salt Lake City thinking no one's ever going to come. And he starts growing the Mormon Church, and he builds his army to defend. So he's out there. The gut US government sending the army to fuck with the Mormons and get them out because Brigham Young is trying to turn Utah—true, this is true—into a Utah state. Utah wasn't a state, it was a territory. And Brigham Young is like, All right, we'll take it. This will be a Mormon state, Utah. And it was President Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln, who's like, Yeah, no, you're not doing that, bro. You're not doing that. So he's sending the army out there to get the Mormons out. So they're fighting. All the Indians are And you've got all these trappers who are just hunting, trapping bear and other pelts. So it's just a fucking savage place. Our show follows a woman who's got a handicapped son who's just trying to get through that land to California to find the kid's dad, so you think. She's got a secret. And the story is her journey through that part of America.
Damn. And it gets nasty.
It looks like it.
It looks nasty.
I started it.
Did we send you the shows?
You sent them to me.
All right, good. We'll sit down and take a peek. And it's the Organizing an event is worth anybody checking out. It's a very underreported mass murder, arguably the first mass killing in American history. It's called the Norman Meadows Massacre. And It happened in 1857, and a group of pioneers called the Fenther Party, that were going from Arkansas to California, had to move through Norman land, Utah land, to get to California. But in 1857, the Normands had basically issued a proclamation saying that no one can come through our land without a permit from Governor Brin and Young. They had done this because they were getting so disrespected by the pioneers who would come through and be like, hey, bro, can I have some of your wives? Or maybe I'll just take one of your wives, and they'd steal women. Normands were polygamous, and they all had 10 or 15 wives, which was problematic. But these pioneers would come through and harass the Normands, rape women, kill cattle. They'd let their cattle graze on the Normands' crops. So there was all this mutual disrespect. So by the time this party came through without a permit, the Romans warned them off and said, You got to go back.
You got to go around, which would add two weeks to the journey. And these pioneers were like, Fuck you, we're not going around. So the Romans came back and killed all of them. So a group of Romans And what was fucked up is they dressed up as Paiute, which was a tribe out there, Indians. They dressed up as the Indians and actually brought a couple of Indians with them so that any witnesses would think it was an Indian murder. And it was really a Roman murder. It was a killing done by Germans, and they killed about 165 of these pioneers, men, women, and children. And really horrific moment in the history of the Roman Church. It's a horrible moment in general. And that's what we use as the inciting incident, is what we call it, where the moment it kicks something off. So the show is going along, you don't realize it's going to hit you. And then the Romans met on Massacre comes at you hard, and that's the event. And so it was interesting going to Utah, meeting the different Mormons that were historians of this moment in time, and getting them to talk about it.
It was just a dark moment in Roman history, which I never knew about until- You got them to talk about it? Yeah. And there was one guy, one Norman, wrote a book called the Meadows Massacre, and he took me to the site. And he wrote it because there's a monument in Utah now where the massacre took place, and the Romans built the monument to all the folks that were killed. And his book, it's really interesting because it's about this crime, this horrible moment in Roman history. And what he does in the book and what he said to me was, okay, as a Norman, if you want to show this moment in our history, you have every right to do it. It happened. But I would ask you to read my book and do your research and at least understand how it got to that point. Because like any moment of violence, if you backtrack it and think, well, which is what's so tricky about the Israel situation. Well, you can't unpack it and get to the roots very hard. In the case of Meadows Massacre, what the book did well is it let you understand how things got so tense that this 145 person massacre could occur.
And I thought that was really interesting. And in learning about that and learning about American history and the continual line of violence that plagued our planet, but certainly plagued our country, history, you start to understand man and our human nature and why we're so inclined to violence. And that's a theme of the show. One thing so interesting that saved the Roman 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 Roman Church. There'd be no BIO. There'd be no Salt Lake City, as we know. It would have been over. And that It would have been a great act of violence. But the Civil War was just popping off at that moment in 1857, 1858. So Buchanan and then Lincoln had to pull all the troops away from Brigham Young, and they were about to I can get him. Civil War, we need these troops back east. No shit. And that saved Brigham Young. The Civil War saved the Morgan Church.
Wow. I had no idea.
Interesting.
That is Where'd you film it?
In Santa Fe. In Santa Fe, on location. I wanted to do a film with no sound stages. I was like, let's go out there. Let's go up on the mountain. Let's shoot in the weather. Let's make a survival show. That's what I asked for. And that was maybe one of the stupider things I've ever asked for because we're up there for 135 days on the mountain through the winter, through the summer. Or snowstorms, rainstorms, lightning strikes, fucking rattlesnakes. We need to have rattlesnake wranglers cruising through the set constantly, and they'd find the little ones, which I didn't understand. Those are the real dangerous ones. Did you know this? The little rattlesnakes, the younger and smaller the rattlesnake, the bigger the venom load. So you see a big rattlesnake, you don't want to mess with it. You see a little rattlesnake, everybody clears out.
No shit.
I didn't know that. Snakes. Our actor broke his leg. We had to film around that. Stuntman got all fucked up. It was a wild shoot. And I'm like, You asked for it, you got it. But a good challenge, a really good challenge. Man, it looks...
The preview is awesome. It looks super realistic, and I'm sure it's going to crush it on Netflix. It's on Netflix.
Netflix on, I think, January ninth.
Yeah, January ninth. Well, Peter, we're wrapping up the interview.
You're a good dude, man.
So are you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for opening up about everything.
Same to you. Thanks for sharing the story of your buddy.
Wow. He lives on. He was an amazing dude, But man, we covered a lot of ground there. And you thought you didn't have it in you. Here we are.
I wasn't sure.
But hey, it was a pleasure to meet you. Pleased to see you again. Best luck with the film. Appreciate it. Hi, I'm Joe Saul Seahai, host of the Stacking Benjamin's podcast. Every week, we talk to experts about saving, investing, personal finance trends. Crypto. Can't do it. You could have done all that research, all the breadcrumbs, and thought, this company is never going bankrupt. Foiled again. You never knew personal finance could be this fun. Throw down the gauntlet. I'm bringing it today. I'm only going to be off by six figures instead of seven. Every boy has a dream, Doc. Every boy has a dream, for sure. Stacking Benjamins. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.