Name: How a Regular Person Turns Into an Assassin
Uploaded: 2025-08-19T04:15:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How a Regular Person Turns Into an Assassin' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How a Regular Person Turns Into an Assassin' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

Yeah, it must be just such a high when you're approaching, like, people who are,
I guess, kind of underworld characters, maybe?
Yeah, that's what they are.
Black market operators, underworld characters, people who their whole lives
have been trying to stay out of the limelight
and, you know, hiding and doing illegal stuff where they don't want journalists
poking around.
And are you ever amazed?
Did you ever meet someone and you were like, I cannot believe this person is
involved?
Oh, my God, constantly.
Seriously, all the time.
And you think that after, I've been covering black markets for 20 years, that
you think that after some time I'd sort of have an idea of who's involved.
It's not only, you know, your neighbor that looks like a completely normal dude
that's involved in some sort of illegal activity that you had no idea about.
You're like a Mets fan or whatever, probably?
But that is also happening all around.
I mean, I filmed episodes, we did an episode about assassins that was just a
couple of miles from my home in L.A.
And I interviewed an assassin, a guy who's paid to kill.
Nuh-uh.
Just a couple of miles in L.A.
An undisclosed location, but in L.A., not far from my house.
It's insane.
And where did you, do you go alone?
No, I go with my team, but no security.
Usually people, usually I'm the only woman.
You know, there's, we have some female members of our team, but on the majority
of cases, it's just me and my camera team who are all male, producer, director.
So we're six people usually.
Very often I'm the only woman.
And it's never with security.
That's a question we get asked a lot is, do we travel with security?
And I think that what security would do for us is completely counterproductive
to our job.
We're trying to convince people to trust us, to show them that we respect them.
And if I show up with security, I'm basically telling them, I don't trust you
and possibly I don't respect, why should you trust me, right?
Yeah, like I've thought about having security sometimes, even just out in the
world.
And I just keep shying away from it because I just, like, I just don't like the
energy of that.
But then also the world gets scary.
But I think in your place, yeah, you're coming with a bridge of like, I want to
be able to communicate.
Yeah.
I'm going to put my cards on the table that I'm here in peace.
Right, exactly.
When you pull up on an assassin, like they're like, where do you meet them at?
Where do they go?
Yeah.
So again, it's many months, sometimes years of trying to get, I've been wanting
to do a story about assassins.
It's sort of of all the black markets, right?
Yeah, this is a former police officer in South Africa.
South Africa is one of the biggest countries in the world in terms of assassinations
and assassination attempts and actual assassinations and people being killed.
And you can hire an assassin in South Africa for like $1,000.
And so we, and from LA, from interviewing that assassin, we went to South
Africa to see why was it this crazy world.
And what could we learn from that?
And, um, and, uh, you were asking, uh...
Yeah, but like when you go to meet an assassin, like is that...
Oh, how did that, how did I get a meeting with him?
Yeah.
So in the case of the American assassin, um, for many months, years, I've been
wanting to do that story.
If you think of a black market, you think assassins is sort of the worst of the
worst thing, right?
Um, not easy, right?
It's not as if you can go online and do a Google search for an assassin.
Like, yeah, I need, yeah.
Right.
But I had a con, I have a contact here in LA that I've done many stories with
who really connects me to people in the underworld.
He's a member of the underworld himself.
And, uh, he's a really colorful character.
Um, I've done many stories, um, with his help.
And I contacted him and, and he said, look, I'm going to see what I can do.
No.
That's just an old Gavin Newsom joke.
Um, sorry.
And I shouldn't joke around.
Sometimes I do joke around a little bit.
Let's go back to the story.
You can definitely joke around.
Okay.
Sometimes I feel like, yeah.
Please do.
These are serious topics, but it's not, doesn't mean, I hate it when people
interview me and they think they can't have fun.
Okay.
Talking about such serious, I don't take myself too seriously.
So please.
Okay.
Have fun.
Thank you.
So you, you have this contact into the underworld.
Right.
And, um, and he connects you or does he connect you on text?
Does he connect you in person?
So, yeah.
So the thing is with this contact, it's not, we always have to meet in person
because obviously you can't, I can't text him.
Even WhatsApp and signal doesn't work.
I can't just text him.
I want to see, did you, do you have an assassin for me?
Uh, so there's always an in-person meeting, which involves a lot of cigarettes.
We smoke a lot of cigarettes.
He smokes a lot of cigarettes.
I get nervous and I always smoke a lot of cigarettes when I'm with him.
It's actually one of the, I find I'm not a smoker myself or I smoke socially
once in a while, but I don't smoke every day or even every week.
But I find it, it's the best, whatever you are in the world, if you have
cigarettes with you and you're trying to interview some of these characters,
you offer them a cigarette or you ask for one of their cigarettes.
It immediately puts you on the same playing level, level playing field.
It really just helps.
It helps calm my nerves.
It probably helps calm the nerves of the person I'm with.
So with this guy, it involves waiting for many hours for him to show up because
he's never on time.
And then when he shows up, it's like many cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes.
And then I usually tell him like, Hey, we're looking into doing a story about
this and that.
And in that case, it was assassins.
And he said, I actually know one.
He's a hitman.
I've known him for a long time.
And he organized this meeting and he actually drove me to meet the guy.
And he told me all off the bat, be careful.
This guy is, I think he's sort of bipolar.
I've seen this guy be super happy and suddenly pull out a gun and point it at
somebody.
He's, he's a little crazy.
And I said, but do you really think this guy is actually an assassin?
Because a lot of people just like to brag, right?
Oh, yeah.
Is he an actual assassin?
He said, dude, I've seen him being paid $180,000 or whatnot for, for a hit.
He's, he's known in my community.
People know him.
This is a guy that's well known.
And, and so that was it.
And so we met.
And so we get there.
He's on, he's at night on this closed place, but very close to my home.
And he's waiting outside the car.
And the moment I get there, you could see he's like jittery and nervous.
And not happy.
And he was there because his friend asked for this favor.
And, um, in his case, sometimes it's easier for me to sort of have that human
connection
and try to talk about how I want to understand what they do.
His case, he was just not, he was like, okay, here are the ground rules.
And he said, immediately see this.
He first thing he pulled out his gun and said, showed me his gun.
He's like, if this is a fucking setup, if the police shows up, I'm going to
point this,
I'm going to shoot you, all of you, you and your team are all dead.
It's like, okay.
Um, and so the rest of the interview was me being super afraid that what if
police shows up?
Because I'm there, but what if they just, what if a car just drives by?
Yeah, what if some chubby cop's hiding from his shift over here right off the
edge of this
DSW shoes or something?
Exactly.
So I was so scared.
I was so scared.
And I think it was the shortest interview we've ever done.
I think it lasts like 15, 20 minutes.
But also because, you know, there's the question, the initial questions is what
do you do?
How often have you done it?
Why do you do it?
How do you live with yourself doing this kind of thing?
I always, the accountability questions, I always ask them.
But the part that he didn't like, it wasn't actually like, do you know that you're
doing
harm to people?
This is, what you're doing is horrible.
Like, do you feel guilty about this?
The questions he didn't actually like was when I started asking him, he says, I
only kill
men, no women, and children.
And I asked him, but do you have children?
And basically, obviously, I was trying to get to the point that even if the
child isn't
killed, their parent, their dad is killed.
That's horrible.
But he's already better than Netanyahu, no?
He was like, don't ask me questions about my children.
Don't, you're trying to get all, all soft on me.
He got, he was like, his macho persona was getting, you know, he didn't like
that.
He didn't like talking about his children?
No.
Because it probably made things very personal for him, maybe?
Yeah, yeah.
I think, I think part of his persona being a hitman is that he, you know, you
can't
show emotion.
Right.
That's what, and so I was threatening to him in the sense that I was trying to
get emotion
out of him, and he was not okay with it.
And he's like, is this over?
And, and yeah, and then we left, so.
And how did, did he say how he lived, how did they live with what they do, or
what?
Like, is it money?
Is it once you get into that, you can't get out of it?
Was there any?
Yeah.
So in his case, it was money, and again, it was a 20-minute conversation.
I couldn't get much out of him.
But fast forward to South Africa, where I did interview a guy, an assassin, for
two
hours, and his story is fascinating, actually, because he, he got, he was, his
parents
were killed, uh, when he was eight or nine years old.
He was an orphan, and he was bouncing around from like family member to family
member.
Nobody wanted him.
He ended up on the streets when he was like 14 years old, no work, no education,
and eventually
started selling drugs for, as a drug dealer on the streets.
And eventually, somehow, even with that, there wasn't enough money, and he
figured out that
he could make more money.
Somebody offered him more money to go and kill a few people, and he did, or a
person,
I don't know, and he did, and it worked, he did, he was high, he said.
He was very, very high.
He says the only way he could do it is by being high.
But he did it, and, um, and he was able to do it, because a lot of people aren't,
and,
uh, thankfully.
And, uh, and so, while talking, it starts, he says, "But I only kill bad people."
It's like, what does that mean?
What about bad people according to who?
Oh, but to whom?
Well, they're bad people.
They're people who are stealing, or who have raped, or whatever in his mind he
had justified
for doing what he was doing.
And then again, I, I talked about, do you realize that what you're doing,
because he
also said he doesn't kill women and children, but do you realize that what you're
doing to
those women, and particularly to those children, is exactly what was done to
you, right?
As a kid, you were left an orphan because of it.
It changed your whole life.
You're traumatized by it.
And, uh, and he had a moment where he's like, "I had never thought about that.
I had never in my life thought about that."
And we finished the interview, and he comes up to me, and he's almost in tears,
and he was
like, "I, this, you have no idea what this has done.
This conversation, nobody has ever been interested in my life or why I do what
I do."
And I've never been able to speak about myself, and it was a therapy session
for him.
And that doesn't mean that I'm healing people.
I'm not, but what I am, I think, is at least trying to understand and trying to
show people
who watch Trafficked, why people turn to become criminals, because no one, I
believe,
is born wanting to be a criminal.
And I think it's just a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.

How a Regular Person Turns Into an Assassin

Yeah, it must be just such a high when you're approaching, like, people who are,
I guess, kind of underworld characters, maybe?
Yeah, that's what they are.
Black market operators, underworld characters, people who their whole lives
have been trying to stay out of the limelight
and, you know, hiding and doing illegal stuff where they don't want journalists
poking around.
And are you ever amazed?
Did you ever meet someone and you were like, I cannot believe this person is
involved?
Oh, my God, constantly.
Seriously, all the time.
And you think that after, I've been covering black markets for 20 years, that
you think that after some time I'd sort of have an idea of who's involved.
It's not only, you know, your neighbor that looks like a completely normal dude
that's involved in some sort of illegal activity that you had no idea about.
You're like a Mets fan or whatever, probably?
But that is also happening all around.
I mean, I filmed episodes, we did an episode about assassins that was just a
couple of miles from my home in L.A.
And I interviewed an assassin, a guy who's paid to kill.
Nuh-uh.
Just a couple of miles in L.A.
An undisclosed location, but in L.A., not far from my house.
It's insane.
And where did you, do you go alone?
No, I go with my team, but no security.
Usually people, usually I'm the only woman.
You know, there's, we have some female members of our team, but on the majority
of cases, it's just me and my camera team who are all male, producer, director.
So we're six people usually.
Very often I'm the only woman.
And it's never with security.
That's a question we get asked a lot is, do we travel with security?
And I think that what security would do for us is completely counterproductive
to our job.
We're trying to convince people to trust us, to show them that we respect them.
And if I show up with security, I'm basically telling them, I don't trust you
and possibly I don't respect, why should you trust me, right?
Yeah, like I've thought about having security sometimes, even just out in the
world.
And I just keep shying away from it because I just, like, I just don't like the
energy of that.
But then also the world gets scary.
But I think in your place, yeah, you're coming with a bridge of like, I want to
be able to communicate.
Yeah.
I'm going to put my cards on the table that I'm here in peace.
Right, exactly.
When you pull up on an assassin, like they're like, where do you meet them at?
Where do they go?
Yeah.
So again, it's many months, sometimes years of trying to get, I've been wanting
to do a story about assassins.
It's sort of of all the black markets, right?
Yeah, this is a former police officer in South Africa.
South Africa is one of the biggest countries in the world in terms of assassinations
and assassination attempts and actual assassinations and people being killed.
And you can hire an assassin in South Africa for like $1,000.
And so we, and from LA, from interviewing that assassin, we went to South
Africa to see why was it this crazy world.
And what could we learn from that?
And, um, and, uh, you were asking, uh...
Yeah, but like when you go to meet an assassin, like is that...
Oh, how did that, how did I get a meeting with him?
Yeah.
So in the case of the American assassin, um, for many months, years, I've been
wanting to do that story.
If you think of a black market, you think assassins is sort of the worst of the
worst thing, right?
Um, not easy, right?
It's not as if you can go online and do a Google search for an assassin.
Like, yeah, I need, yeah.
Right.
But I had a con, I have a contact here in LA that I've done many stories with
who really connects me to people in the underworld.
He's a member of the underworld himself.
And, uh, he's a really colorful character.
Um, I've done many stories, um, with his help.
And I contacted him and, and he said, look, I'm going to see what I can do.
No.
That's just an old Gavin Newsom joke.
Um, sorry.
And I shouldn't joke around.
Sometimes I do joke around a little bit.
Let's go back to the story.
You can definitely joke around.
Okay.
Sometimes I feel like, yeah.
Please do.
These are serious topics, but it's not, doesn't mean, I hate it when people
interview me and they think they can't have fun.
Okay.
Talking about such serious, I don't take myself too seriously.
So please.
Okay.
Have fun.
Thank you.
So you, you have this contact into the underworld.
Right.
And, um, and he connects you or does he connect you on text?
Does he connect you in person?
So, yeah.
So the thing is with this contact, it's not, we always have to meet in person
because obviously you can't, I can't text him.
Even WhatsApp and signal doesn't work.
I can't just text him.
I want to see, did you, do you have an assassin for me?
Uh, so there's always an in-person meeting, which involves a lot of cigarettes.
We smoke a lot of cigarettes.
He smokes a lot of cigarettes.
I get nervous and I always smoke a lot of cigarettes when I'm with him.
It's actually one of the, I find I'm not a smoker myself or I smoke socially
once in a while, but I don't smoke every day or even every week.
But I find it, it's the best, whatever you are in the world, if you have
cigarettes with you and you're trying to interview some of these characters,
you offer them a cigarette or you ask for one of their cigarettes.
It immediately puts you on the same playing level, level playing field.
It really just helps.
It helps calm my nerves.
It probably helps calm the nerves of the person I'm with.
So with this guy, it involves waiting for many hours for him to show up because
he's never on time.
And then when he shows up, it's like many cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes.
And then I usually tell him like, Hey, we're looking into doing a story about
this and that.
And in that case, it was assassins.
And he said, I actually know one.
He's a hitman.
I've known him for a long time.
And he organized this meeting and he actually drove me to meet the guy.
And he told me all off the bat, be careful.
This guy is, I think he's sort of bipolar.
I've seen this guy be super happy and suddenly pull out a gun and point it at
somebody.
He's, he's a little crazy.
And I said, but do you really think this guy is actually an assassin?
Because a lot of people just like to brag, right?
Oh, yeah.
Is he an actual assassin?
He said, dude, I've seen him being paid $180,000 or whatnot for, for a hit.
He's, he's known in my community.
People know him.
This is a guy that's well known.
And, and so that was it.
And so we met.
And so we get there.
He's on, he's at night on this closed place, but very close to my home.
And he's waiting outside the car.
And the moment I get there, you could see he's like jittery and nervous.
And not happy.
And he was there because his friend asked for this favor.
And, um, in his case, sometimes it's easier for me to sort of have that human
connection
and try to talk about how I want to understand what they do.
His case, he was just not, he was like, okay, here are the ground rules.
And he said, immediately see this.
He first thing he pulled out his gun and said, showed me his gun.
He's like, if this is a fucking setup, if the police shows up, I'm going to
point this,
I'm going to shoot you, all of you, you and your team are all dead.
It's like, okay.
Um, and so the rest of the interview was me being super afraid that what if
police shows up?
Because I'm there, but what if they just, what if a car just drives by?
Yeah, what if some chubby cop's hiding from his shift over here right off the
edge of this
DSW shoes or something?
Exactly.
So I was so scared.
I was so scared.
And I think it was the shortest interview we've ever done.
I think it lasts like 15, 20 minutes.
But also because, you know, there's the question, the initial questions is what
do you do?
How often have you done it?
Why do you do it?
How do you live with yourself doing this kind of thing?
I always, the accountability questions, I always ask them.
But the part that he didn't like, it wasn't actually like, do you know that you're
doing
harm to people?
This is, what you're doing is horrible.
Like, do you feel guilty about this?
The questions he didn't actually like was when I started asking him, he says, I
only kill
men, no women, and children.
And I asked him, but do you have children?
And basically, obviously, I was trying to get to the point that even if the
child isn't
killed, their parent, their dad is killed.
That's horrible.
But he's already better than Netanyahu, no?
He was like, don't ask me questions about my children.
Don't, you're trying to get all, all soft on me.
He got, he was like, his macho persona was getting, you know, he didn't like
that.
He didn't like talking about his children?
No.
Because it probably made things very personal for him, maybe?
Yeah, yeah.
I think, I think part of his persona being a hitman is that he, you know, you
can't
show emotion.
Right.
That's what, and so I was threatening to him in the sense that I was trying to
get emotion
out of him, and he was not okay with it.
And he's like, is this over?
And, and yeah, and then we left, so.
And how did, did he say how he lived, how did they live with what they do, or
what?
Like, is it money?
Is it once you get into that, you can't get out of it?
Was there any?
Yeah.
So in his case, it was money, and again, it was a 20-minute conversation.
I couldn't get much out of him.
But fast forward to South Africa, where I did interview a guy, an assassin, for
two
hours, and his story is fascinating, actually, because he, he got, he was, his
parents
were killed, uh, when he was eight or nine years old.
He was an orphan, and he was bouncing around from like family member to family
member.
Nobody wanted him.
He ended up on the streets when he was like 14 years old, no work, no education,
and eventually
started selling drugs for, as a drug dealer on the streets.
And eventually, somehow, even with that, there wasn't enough money, and he
figured out that
he could make more money.
Somebody offered him more money to go and kill a few people, and he did, or a
person,
I don't know, and he did, and it worked, he did, he was high, he said.
He was very, very high.
He says the only way he could do it is by being high.
But he did it, and, um, and he was able to do it, because a lot of people aren't,
and,
uh, thankfully.
And, uh, and so, while talking, it starts, he says, "But I only kill bad people."
It's like, what does that mean?
What about bad people according to who?
Oh, but to whom?
Well, they're bad people.
They're people who are stealing, or who have raped, or whatever in his mind he
had justified
for doing what he was doing.
And then again, I, I talked about, do you realize that what you're doing,
because he
also said he doesn't kill women and children, but do you realize that what you're
doing to
those women, and particularly to those children, is exactly what was done to
you, right?
As a kid, you were left an orphan because of it.
It changed your whole life.
You're traumatized by it.
And, uh, and he had a moment where he's like, "I had never thought about that.
I had never in my life thought about that."
And we finished the interview, and he comes up to me, and he's almost in tears,
and he was
like, "I, this, you have no idea what this has done.
This conversation, nobody has ever been interested in my life or why I do what
I do."
And I've never been able to speak about myself, and it was a therapy session
for him.
And that doesn't mean that I'm healing people.
I'm not, but what I am, I think, is at least trying to understand and trying to
show people
who watch Trafficked, why people turn to become criminals, because no one, I
believe,
is born wanting to be a criminal.
And I think it's just a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good th