If you go through Wa, you need to keep your head down, but also you'll notice that there are kids, the age of, you know, young teens with guns that you would genuinely see in a museum, wearing fatigues that make them look like they're wearing their dad's pajamas.

It's pretty nuts. It's like it's genuinely like going back in time.

How can I help? How can I be useful in ending needless suffering? Do not be afraid of work that has no end.

We have to organize a social movement.

We have an opportunity a social movement.

We have an opportunity to lead by example, versus just talking, hot air. I think the more people in this fight, the more we grow, eventually it could change.

The people are the ones that can make the change.

Welcome back to Change Agents, an Ironclad original, proudly presented by our friends just

down the road at Montana Knife Company.

This episode today, we're going to go deep into the world of Asia Meth super cartels.

I'm going to be doing this with journalist Sean Williams. He is the co-creator of

the underworld podcast. We get to that at the end of the episode. And they explore organized

crime around the world, specifically on that podcast. You might be asking yourself,

why would I care about the meth trade in East and Southeast Asia? How big could it possibly be?

Well, the number that the UN estimates is $80 billion.

And we actually talk about how it goes beyond just the Asian epicenter, the tentacles that spread it around the world.

Much of the drug trade that we're going to be talking about today is centered around a remote remote autonomous area of Myanmar, known as the

Waugh State. It's about the size of the Netherlands, and is home to about a million people.

The narco state has its own government, military, and even power grade, which is, of course,

funded by the drug trade.

How did you get interested in Asian cartels?

I had kind of danced around Southeast Asia for years, doing various different projects for years and years.

...