The Joe Rogan Experience - #164 - Shane Smith (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 6, 2011

Joe sits down with Shane Smith.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Just doesn't feel like an official show unless you hear that stupid song. Oh, you're getting crafty with that. Left right ear. I like how you did that. You're crazy, bro. Shane Smith's in the house, ladies and gentlemen. This guy, this one guy in front of us right now,

I have probably enjoyed your online videos more than anything I have ever watched online. And that is the God's honest truth. Amen. I've been turning people on to you for a long time, man. And I don't remember which was the first one that I saw. Somebody sent a link to it on the message board. I don't remember which one it was.

It was the Vice Guide to Travel. Might have been Thailand. Mine was not. It was you chilling in a bathtub with some ladyboys. And I was like, this dude's a bad motherfucker. He's got a big smile on his face, and he's chilling in a bathtub with these ladyboys. And then, of course, I saw the Liberia one,

and then I'm like, who the fuck are these guys? And then I started going, these guys are fucking nuts, man. They're just going to the weirdest situations. And they're giving you like a real take on it. It seems like people you know went to Liberia and saw the situation and broke it down intelligently. But it seems like people you know. Whereas like if I watch a 60 Minutes piece on Liberia and they send a correspondent, I don't know that dude. I don't know that dude. I don't know that dude. The difference with

what you guys are doing is, whether it's Hamilton Morris doing drugs or whether it's you going somewhere or your boy just went to the Congo. I feel like those are regular people. They're not bullshit artists. I'm not getting that. That's a rare thing, man.

That's the... I don't know how to close that's good right there that's right that's the uh we call it immersionism where we don't really have a a story before we go like for example liberia started as an article in the mag which was general butt naked in the two-pack army because they had stolen a container like a ship with the container and the container that had uh two-pack shakur t-shirts. And so it became the uniform of the army. So exactly. So that's right up by his alley.

We're like, wow, that's freaky. Right. So we didn't really have a story, but when we went there, we just started hanging out with all these warlords and they, and each one would tell you a story that was worse than the next.

And everyone's like, Oh yeah, we all ate flesh. And how many people have eaten, you know, human flesh in library? Oh, 70%, oh 70 you know 85 of the women have been raped like it's just it's like such a shocking thing and you're just talking about cannibalism all the time it's just a given oh yeah no problem they used to eat people in the in the in the presidential palace and and you're sitting there going and And not just people, babies, children.

They would steal people's babies. Yeah. So the, well, Butt Naked, the guy that we spent a lot of time with, they believe that if they split the back of a living, innocent child open and take out the still beating heart and eat it, that they couldn't be hurt in battle. Oh my God. So they would, and they would fight naked. That's why he's called General Butt Naked. So they would eat the heart, drink the blood, and then take off all their clothes and then just run into battle shooting the shit out of them.

And this guy's still alive. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing that he tells this story. Wouldn't you want to keep that secret? Well, he's now named Joshua Blua blahi and he's a he's a preacher and they had a tribunal uh a council to sort of see all the war crimes and stuff and he admitted to sort of killing you know and eating you know you know 25 000 to 30 000 people oh my god and uh but they they said oh you're a you're a preacher now and he's's like, yeah. And he's like, okay, well, it's okay then.

Holy shit. In 2011 in the world, in the earth that we live on, that's actually going down. Someone has killed 25,000 people and eaten babies. But it's okay now because you're in a cult. Yes. That's a great cult to be in, man. I would say that's a good one to join. If you're in a situation where you've eaten about 20,000 people and you're like, fuck, I need a way

to not go to jail. How do I explain this? Oh, I'm a preacher now. He was a priest in the Crown tribe before, which is they believed in human sacrifice. He was fighting on the Liberians at the Crown side against the American-sponsored

side. He had been a ritualistic cannibal before. Jesus. And then there was not a lot of food during the Civil War, so people just started eating bodies for food. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So would they hunt people and eat them?

No, there's enough people dying. Like, there's a lot of dead people just lying around. Wow. Yeah, yeah. What a fucking crazy place on earth i mean you want to talk about like mad max wasn't that bad right like people what people are worried about with like mad max that like living in thunderdome that's not as bad i would way rather live in thunderdome than liberia two men into one man leave it seems pretty straightforward i'd rather live on Brokeback Mountain. Yeah.

Dude, that sounds completely insane. And Liberia started out as a U.S. slave colony, right? No, it was actually they took freed slaves. And they brought them back to Africa. They brought them back to Africa. Yeah. And they called it Liberia for freedom. And Monrovia, the capital, is named after President Monroe.

And they wrote the Constitution in America, and then they brought the freed slaves over, and then the slaves promptly enslaved the native Africans using the plantation method that they had learned in America. Oh, my God. And so for the next sort of 150 years, the American Liberians, so they would have names like Charles Taylor, for example, or very sort of westernized names, would sort of, you know, had enslaved the sort of locals until the guy named Samuel Doe, who was an African Liberian, overthrew the government.

that started the Civil War. And then Charles Taylor, who was educated here in America, you know, went after him. And that's when all this cannibalism and lunacy started. And Charles Taylor now is on trial or being convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But all the other generals like Butt Naked and Bin Laden and Rambo, they're all still there, just sort of hanging out in Liberia. That is incredible. Yeah. When was it established as a country? So it was established in the 1840s. So slavery was made illegal in 1865?

Is that what it was? So it was sort of, you know, repatriated slaves from the north, and then when they outlawed slavery, they would keep going. So I think it was made an international state in the 1860s and then it was it was sort of american um sort of run it was it was our sort of quasi foray into colonialism and in africa in in africa and then it turned into a it turned into a complete and utter disaster holy shit you want to talk about there's no way to make anything worse is there a way is there a worse spot on earth no that sounds like the worst spot on earth yeah yeah i mean when

you're in there's a place called west point which is the the sort of slum of monrovia which by like it doesn't have electricity grid monrovia the city or water or anything but there's a bad part yeah it's all bad it's all like a slum it's all bad in hell it's all bad but. Yeah. It's all bad. Imagine that. It's like a slum in hell. It's all bad. Hell has a slum. But there's this one part called West Point. It's called West Point. And you go there and it's, I mean, it's shocking.

It's, you know, eight, nine, ten-year-old kid just smoking heroin you know you know slashes across milky eyes everywhere you know stomps everywhere all these people have fought in wars prostitution is just everywhere drugs everywhere and there's just shit in the streets there's no like it's just it's literally chaos it's it's it's worse than chaos you're like well even in mad max there would be some yeah there would be well, even in Mad Max, there would be some, yeah, there would be some, you know, two men enter a woman. There would be some law. There would be some sort of. Border town.

Yeah, something. But there's none. It's just fucking crazy. Like, it's just, it's full on. And you can't fix that because those people are fucked. They're programmed that way. They're like wild dogs that want to eat people. Well, the thing is, is that what I don't understand.

You know what I mean? You can't fix a wild dog that wants to eat people. Most of them were child soldiers so they've grown up just killing yeah the shit out of people their whole lives and so this is what i understand is you know kill kill kill kill kill kill kill okay stop and then they don't give them any money or jobs unemployment's at 75 percent so there's these dudes who have one skill which is to kill people they don't have any jobs and they're just sort of sitting around starving you're like well they're just going to start fighting again and that's why what all the generals said is like one of the guys rambo was like i am a product of war i'm a son of war what do you expect me to do you know that's all i know how to do that has gotten to be the craziest place

on earth it's amazing just even thinking about it thinking that that's possible that humanity can slip in in the same you know time frame as you and i sitting in this you know this room with air conditioning and this is this broadcasting the signal it's going out to hundreds of thousands of people this is the future there's just like a million minicams but this is like this is like post japan yeah this is like the mad max of podcast podcasting yeah this is like uh the studio where the dude who made those uh replicants and blade runner it's like where he would work yeah last of the v8 interceptors so that's got to be as bad as things can go i mean you can't think of anything worse. Cannibalism, smoking heroin in the street as a baby, everyone's missing arms and shit.

I mean, it has to be the worst humanity can get. And it coexists with this. It's amazing. The one story, you know, we were going to church where Butt Naked was going to preach. And the one story that freaked me out the most was we went to the cemetery in the downtown, you know, of Monrovia, and there's all the graves were empty, and they had been opened up,

and what had happened is no one had anywhere to live, so they opened up the graves, you know, took out the skeletons, and just lived in the graves. About 4,000 people were living in the graves, right? 4,000 people. Just living in the graves. And then, so, but he's telling me this story, and he's saying, you know, I was taking the bus back from Guinea, and I was going, and, you know, I got off the bus, and they had sort of, you know, cooked sticks of meat.

And so he had it, and he goes, oh, this is human flesh. And, because he knows what human flesh tastes like, because he ate a lot. So he goes to the guy, and he says, you know i'm gentle butt naked but you know i'm now converted um that you're someone selling this meat as you know beef or whatever but it's actually human flesh and uh they said you know it's human flesh and he's like well because i ate human flesh a lot before and so as he's telling me the story i'm just like all of that is just an aside the the the the punch line was when he said oh they

were actually stealing cadavers you know from the hospitals and just cutting them up and making you know meat for the for the buses that go through the border but so that's the punch line but meanwhile like i'm sitting in this graveyard which had 4 000 people living in the graves and he's telling me, well, I knew it was human flesh because I ate it a lot. And you're sitting there going, wait, all the givens of telling this joke or this story, every given is like, okay, so we're living in a cemetery, we're eating human flesh, and then I found out that they're grave robbing to make kebabs in the street and you're sitting there going christ at that point you're just going okay i mean just any kind of aside any story and you're just sitting you're all you're at the end of humanity like we're all fucking doomed you know that is the low point it's got to be it's the lowest point on earth why does it not get more press why is that not like a bigger like i watched your thing on the congo and that really fascinates me because now people are at least sort of forced to be paying attention to that part of Africa because it's the source of all the minerals that we need for electronics.

And people are starting to realize that. And I didn't realize it until fairly recently. I wrote a message board post asking people, like, is there a way to get a karma-free cell phone? That was the question. Like, is there a cell phone where you can go, I don't feel bad about buying this. No one had to work slave labor.

There was no child labor involved. But there's not. There's not. Coltan is, it's like Tanzanite. You know, it comes from, you know, one or two places in the world. And the biggest, I think 85% or 90% of it comes from Congo,

which is the most fucked up country next to liberia or maybe even more and they've been having just a raging civil war uh where you know they take again they kidnap people and turn them into child soldiers and stuff um and all of that is just to get coltan which is what they need to make tablets or cell phones or what have you so if you have an ip or a Blackberry, then guess what? You're helping sponsor the longest running civil war. And I think it's now, I think it's the seventh bloodiest war in history. Wow. Yeah.

But my thought was like, if this was happening in France, this would be goddamn front page news every day of the week. It's racist. It's weird. It's, you know, it's you know it really is like really out front i mean that's like that's as out front and racist as you can get i think it's definitely there's there's there's you know a race issue there it's also i think that there's a bit of africa fatigue um because you know it's always interesting way to put it

it's always heavy it's always you know and i I've been going to Africa for a long time. We do stuff for one. And, you know, what they're doing there is really positive and really good. There's lots of good stuff going on. But there's also, I mean, you know, there's really bad stuff going on. And I guess people, like, after a while, it's the same thing, too. People are, like, listening to Iraq and listening to Iraq. And then all of a sudden someone says, well, 50 people died in a traffic bomb today.

And people go, oh, well, because they've heard it so many times before. And so I remember the first time I went to Sudan, we got quite a big scoop when we went there because everyone was saying it was racial. It's Arab on black, Arab on black. And when we went there, they're like, we're all black. I mean, they just want the oil.

They did this exact same thing in the south. They killed 2 million people, displaced 5 million, all for the oil. And now they found oil in Darfur. And they want to kick everybody out. It's very simple. And no one had reported on that it was about oil. No one. Not anyone in the Western press.

Al Jazeera had done one story on it. And it was all race, race, race, race, race. And you're like, it's about oil. Like, you know, the whole Darfur conflict was about oil. So anyway, it's weird what happens in Africa and the press and how it doesn't really cover it. It's insane. It's insane. Watching your Congo documentary made me think, you know what?

This is the only documentary I've ever watched on the Congo outside of ones that go deep into the wildlife. Sure, yeah. You know, what a lot of people don't know about the Congo is it was grasslands for fairly recently, and then it filled in with jungle, and it's like one of the strangest ecosystems in the world. Yeah. It's the place where they have that one gigantic chimpanzee. Yeah.

Do you know about that? Yeah. Have you ever been? Have you gone to the Congo? I've that one gigantic chimpanzee. Do you know about that? Yeah. Have you ever been? Have you gone to the Congo? I've been to the Congo, yeah. Did you actually go in? You actually went into the jungle? Yeah, yeah.

Whoa. The fuck is that like? The first time we went, do you know David Cho? Do you know that guy? David Cho. He's an artist. He's like a famous graffiti artist, and then he became a sort of fine artist or whatever.

Okay. He's a really good artist, a cool guy. He does a series for us called Thumbs Up, and he hitchhiked across America. Jesus Christ. And then he hitchhiked across China, and I think he's hitchhiking across North Africa next. Anyway, he went because there's the German Zoological Society, the National Geographic Society, and all these people are looking for this dinosaur deep in the middle of the Congo.

Oh, I've heard of that. There's this part that nobody's ever really gotten into, and only the pygmies can go through, and they all speak to each other in song, and no one can understand them. And he was trying to get to the pygmies. He was trying to get to see the dinosaur because he believes the dinosaur exists.

And so when he went in there, it just sort of gets harder and harder and weirder and weirder and weirder. And then people are making, oh, you want to see the dinosaur you want to see the dinosaur they make them drink this fucking potion and then they come out all dressed as dinosaurs but like palm prawns and shit and he's like hallucinating going well what the fuck is going on you know and so so he didn't he didn't get in to see the dinosaur because he went crazy before that but that's sort of like that's sort of like the Congo. It is the heart of darkness.

The deeper you get into it, it just gets freakier and freakier and weirder. And just, you know, you can't even... Like, for example, you know, again, to go back to your Mad Max thing, you think that there's going to be some sort of rule, some sort of warlords will come up with some sort of law or something. You know,

Barter Town has to have a fucking law. There's no law. Like, it's chaos. It's just, it's like, ah, there's a thing, I'll eat it.

You know, there's something, kill it. You know, like, and, you know, it's just, it's staggering. Like, it's literally chaos.

It's literally anarchy. to people when you leave them alone? This is it. If you scratch, this is why religion, you know know i was driving here and there's all these churches and i was thinking about it i was like they have these churches and religion and society and laws and all this stuff because left to our own devices man we are bad we're just like we're bad kill it fuck it and eat it we're just like chimps i mean that's really what the problem is we're like 96

whatever percent chimps this this chimp in the congo has been fascinating to me because it's a it's a giant chimp it's like six feet tall they have pictures of it walking upright and they kill leopards they have a video of one eating a fucking leopard and they don't the locals call them lion killers they have two words for chimps tree beaters and lion killers and they get gray hair and their backs stick up like a dog when they get excited like what a wild fucking animal man that's a real animal they know it exists they have they have uh fecal matter samples they have dna tissue hair video pictures they know like this is a real legit chimp and they can't get to it it's just too fucking far into crazy town you know you'd have to you'd have to hike a month into the jungle you know to get to this one fucking pack of who knows how many of these things are left and who knows how many

have those you know in the conflict who knows how many of those have been killed because there's a big picture of one of them that you can see if you look up uh bondo ape online and look in the photo section of google there's one where there's two dudes that look like you know regular size guys you know 150 160 pounds and they got this giant dead chimp, and they killed it in the Congo. They shot it. Yeah. And it's, they're like one arm around one of them. I mean, the thing looks fucking huge.

It looks like it's 300, 400 pounds, and these guys are sitting there posing with it with a big bullet hole in its chest. I think there's another sponsor of the show. It's like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It's coming. All blue. It's coming, man. 2015.

3D. It's just fascinating to me that this can exist. Pasadena can exist at the same time as the Congo. And it's all on the same timeline. I mean, if you look at historical timelines, how many times has this existed before when Atlantis was around? What the fuck was the rest of the world like? Is that humanity?

Are we just shining spots and then just everything else, just a full spectrum all the way down to Congo? When you take away any sort of rules, when you take away shit, we are bad, bad people. That's why people, as they get older, become Republicans. That's what it is. They start understanding human nature. Don't let the children come knife me. You fucking people need discipline don't let them put a knitting needle

in my liver yeah show me a man who's a young man who's not a liberal and i'll show you a man with no heart show me an old man who is not a conservative i'll show you a man with no brain right right there you go there's a certain element of human nature i don't know who said that but there's a certain element of human nature it is a good quote yeah yeah i don't know who said that, but there's a certain element of human nature. It is a good quote. Yeah, I don't remember who wrote it, though. You're supposed to remember. It's much more authentic. Just say, you know.

Some smart dude. Yeah, I don't know who actually said this one, and then you actually saw it. Left to our own devices, but I wonder if that's going to change now because of the internet.

I wonder if, you know, we think about what a short period of time it's been around since the mid-90s to now. It's a blip in human history. The dissemination of information is so much easier now. I wonder if that's going to change things.

I wonder if that's going to spread the better life or spread the idea of the better life across the world. Do they have the internet in the Congo? No. Nothing? No. Shit. No, no. Cell phones? Not really. No? No. Wow. No. Holy shit. the internet in the congo no nothing no shit cell phones not really no no wow no holy shit um

yeah i mean i don't know it's weird because you know i was in libya uh during the revolution and and they all had cell phones and that's how they were communicating and that's how they did it actually they did a lot of their organization through twitter and stuff and uh but they were still pretty hardcore like it it was just a tool it didn't it wasn't changing anything for the better it was just making them more efficient well i guess not for the better because i i think that it was essential in in sort of arab spring you know to have ways of communication that the government couldn't shut down. Didn't they eventually wind up

killing the whole internet? They did, yeah. They did, but they opened sites that you could get through dumb phones even. Ah. And then the rebels freed up the cell phone tower so that people could communicate. Wow.

Yeah, but Egypt shut down the whole internet when you see that and then you come back to america and you see occupy wall street do what do you what do you think do you like oh shit do you guys know what the rest of the world is like what are you gonna do you're gonna shut this thing down i think occupy wall street is funny we did a lot of stories on it um you know just because you know i always say uh europe gets up my nose because their politics is kind of like first year university. It's like they read a book, you know, and so therefore I know politics. But American politics is like high school, you know, and so they're like, well, we just want to, you know, the rich people should give more to the poor people and everyone should just share it more.

And you're like, well, that's redistribution of wealth. That's communism. That's each according to his own. And you sit there and say, well, if you're taking money, if the state gets to take money from everyone and decide who gets it, well, you can just look at the Soviet Union or China before they became the most capitalist country on earth. So is that what you're saying? You want communism? No, we don't want that. We just want it to be nicer. Well, you can just look at the Soviet Union or China before they became the most capitalist country on earth.

So is that what you're saying? You want communism? No, we don't want that. We just want it to be nicer. We want it to be fair. Yeah, you hear the, why do you need all that money? When I'm just looking for a job, why do you need a hundred million? I would be more into it, for sure, because I like chaos and I like riots and stuff. No, but during a de-stratification, we're a young, new media company,

so during de-stratification of power, you get in. So you like chaos. Chaos is what we feed on, what makes us. Do you worry about your safety when you go into these situations? Not really. Really? Do you just get hammered and fucking plow through? How do you deal with being in Libya in the moment of...

It's not really scary until you see it in the edit room you know like it's it's it's just you're there but you know how it is you fly in somewhere and you're kind of amped and then shit happens and people start shooting and you're talking to dudes and they're going and we're gonna fucking kill those guys and you're like i'm just thinking like what am i gonna ask this dude next you know right and then like you get the shot of the shooting or whatever the fuck it is jesus christ and then you're just there and like fuck it we need to eat something what are we gonna eat and i've got the shits and i gotta go you know and you're just and then get the fuck out go go go and then you're just on a plane and then you just collapse because

you're tired and then when you actually watch it in the edit suite you're like oh fuck that was a bit hairy yeah i was hanging out with a cannibal. Yeah. Well, actually, I was just in Siberia, and that was actually, it was really, we got really fucked up. And it's a long story, I tell you. But I realized then, that was one, because Siberia is so big, it takes like two days to get anywhere. So when you're running, you have time to reflect on everything and why you're there and all this stuff. And we were running across Siberia in this sort of smuggler's route. And then I was a bit scared because I'm like, like the FSB were after us, who's now the KGB.

The militia were after us. Like the local police were after us. And the North Korean sort of thugs were after us. Jesus Christ. Why were they all after you? So we broke this story. We're going to put it on my new HBO show. So I went to North Korea twice,

and then I did two documentaries in North Korea, and I had like 250 million video views or something. It was like a big Internet thing, and we won a bunch of Webby's. So that was one of my big documentaries. So I've been fascinated with North Korea ever since. I i watched the thing on north korea it was amazing thanks and so but you never really get to talk to north koreans right and so i'm like i'd like to just fucking talk to these guys and see what the real deal is like because everyone you talk to there

is just like kim jong-il is god and you know kim il-sung is god and everything's great and we love it here so we heard about these slave labor camps where kim jong-il is exporting his people to become slaves or he'll arrest them or taking concentration camps within north korea and he and he he sends them to siberia out in the middle of fucking nowhere and they do like logging and mining and shit for 10 years for no pay. And then they pay Kim Jong-il. And then Kim Jong-il, you know, supports his regime with that money. So he's selling slaves. Holy shit.

Yeah, big story. And so we went to Siberia. And it's really hard to get there. I came in through China and then into Khabarovsk. And then I was just taking like train after train after train after train. Like two-day train after two-day train after two-day train. And then you finally get out in the middle of nowhere. And it's all North Korea.

Like they built it to look like North Korea. Siberia? In Siberia, yeah. And so it's Russia. But they have these like little North Korean towns with just North Korean writing. And some of the people, the North Koreans, they don't actually know that they're not in North Korea. What? They think they're in North Korea, but they're in Siberia.

What? Yeah. Wow. So anyway. Holy shit. So we broke this story. No one else has done it yet, except for the guy who was with us, Simon Etrovsky,

who did it in Russia. And he's freaking out because they're making, so they do do large which goes to make like basically every like desk or computer table in the world so everybody has this furniture and Ikea or everywhere and um uh it's all done by slaves oh right North Korean slaves but you know we heard you could actually go talk to them you know because it's not in North Korea and they can't do anything, you know, so if you can talk to them. So they're just trapped by location?

There's no way to get out of there? There's no way to get out. There's no way to get out, but they're trapped. Well, they have, like, their own, you know, security and police. So you're not allowed to leave? No, no, no, you're not. You are an actual slave? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holy shit. So we went there. What percentage do you think believe it's North Korea? You know, we talked to a bunch of people there when we finally talked to the North Koreans. And it was pretty interesting because, you know, you don't get to talk to them in North Korea. And there they were saying, we're here to work for the motherland, and we're trying to increase our standard of living, and we're trying to make things better in the country,

we're trying to help the hunger, which is really interesting because they'll never say that in North Korea. Everything's perfect in North Korea. The rest of the world is fucked. And so they're actually saying, North Korea's fucked. We're here to try to alleviate the suffering of our people. So now you've already got insight into the real people know that it's fucked. The real people know that there's no food. The real people.

Whereas they don't say that. You never hear that anywhere else in North Korea. But anyways, I don't know the percentage. I mean, we talked to a few people who were like, you know, why are there sort of american imperialists here in our country we're like well we're in russia you know like so wow it was fucked up wow but anyways the russians they were after you for well the russians didn't want so we went to this place we weren't supposed to go there there's no cops up there it's so far away so but there's some mob dudes and so

we met the mob dudes and the mob dudes were taking us around they were super nice and um they took us around so the north koreans couldn't fuck with us too much because we were with the mob and then uh so we get on the train to go back to sort of civilization and all the north koreans got on and then when we got to the next sort of town there was fsb who's the xkgb the militia local police, and then these thugs that the North Koreans worked with. And they all came after us. And, like, Simon Otrowski, I've got to say, he's fucking, that's a real hero because the FSB was like, you're coming with us. And Simon's like, no, I'm not.

I'm not going anywhere. And he had these sort of Russian Federation sort of press credentials that he had made up for us. And he's going, the Ministry of Propaganda knows that we're here. We're totally allowed to be here. You're not allowed to do anything. You have to call the ministry in Moscow. And he was, like, really, you know, being tough with these guys.

These guys are, like, bad boys, you know, KGB types. And so he wouldn't go anywhere with them. So while they went to call and the FSB guys, we said, well, we're going to go check into our hotel. We went to go check into our hotel and then did a, like, we went behind the thing and jumped into another car that we had called. So we our hotel and then did a like we went behind the thing and jumped into another car that we had called so we jumped like did a running jump where we just chucked our shit into another car then the other car went out and then we met another car at

the edge of town and went out but there's no real roads in siberia it's only the the um the railway the trans-siberian so we're like if we get on if we jump the train they're gonna know we're just gonna get us at the next stop. So we had to drive in this Jeep like across Siberia with no roads, like in through ruts and hunting tracks and shit. Holy shit. To the Chinese border. How long did it take? Two days. And we got to the Chinese border.

There's this little known place called, not Kambros, but I'll remember later. But it's sort of half in Russia, in China and in between there's an island and It's like a mega sort of trading sort of shitty mall thing where you can just buy like Chinese products and people go and trade And there's no real border So we knew about that because we hang out the mob and the mob told us that's how they smuggle shit So we went to this little mall thing and you just walk in on one side You're in Russia and walk out the other side and you're in china and that's how we got out otherwise we would have been fucked did they talk about the machine when you were there the mob no inside joke so yeah we hung

out the mafia dudes and the mafia dudes were awesome they're the guys who told us about the smugglers road to get out they're the guys who told us how to get across the border they're the guys who saved us from the north koreans and from the fsb what is the smugglers road to get out. They're the guys who told us how to get across the border. They're the guys who saved us from the North Koreans and from the FSB. What is this smugglers route like? Is it like all just dirt, bumpy roads? Yeah, yeah. Just going 20 miles an hour the whole way? Yeah, yeah.

Fuck. And like hunting tracks. And what about gas? They carry it. They brought it all with them. It's like Mad Max. They have big fuel tanks in the back. Jesus fucking Christ.

It's fucking Mad Max. They have big fuel tanks in the back. Jesus fucking Christ. It's fucking hardcore. Wow, that's as hardcore journalism as journalism gets. Actually, the piece, it's funny because it took so long to get there that we're just on the train forever, so we're just getting wasted on the train. It starts off really sort of stupid. Like I was saying, Heart of Darkness, it was like when you go into the Congo. As you go into Siberia, it just gets weirder and weirder and drunker and drunker.

And so dudes are just like literally blind drunk and fucking like there's people doing murders on the train. They have cops. Jesus Christ. No, it's crazy. Like it's so – you can see it. Like you see it on the footage. I don't know if we have any. Did we bring that footage?

Yeah, I got the footage right here. Oh, fuck. Yeah, pull some of that shit up. I got to see this. And is this the stuff that's going to be in the HBO footage? Yeah, I got the footage right here. Oh, fuck. Yeah, pull some of that shit up. I got to see this. And is this the stuff that's going to be in the HBO show? Yeah. Which one should I play first, you know, or just? I don't know.

I don't know anything. Play Siberia if they have it. Oh, wow. You guys are like super tech. It's him, not me. Wow. This is like the road warrior of love Which one was it?

I love it here Dude, we can't read that Let's see Are they labeled? Yeah, it says this is North Korea Well, that's North Korea North Korea is fucked Well, let's see the Siberian one

Because that's what we were just talking about. Labor camps created. It doesn't say Siberia. It says port bombing, rebels. What would it be labeled as? Nokia. I think it... NOCO.

NOCO? NOCO. NOCO slave camps? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Bomb-co slave camps, is that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Bombing Liberia. There's Billy the fish. We finally found our North Koreans deep in the bush, and

we're busy talking to them when things started to get a bit hairy. These guys are coming back here. The dude with the crowbar is coming back. These guys are coming back here. The dude with the crowbar is coming back. He says, what is that? Your off switch. He says, I use it for fixing tractors.

I like the fish more and more. He took the crowbar from him and said, what is that, your off switch? That dude was a mob dude. Now they're giving Mr. Kim shit. And they're quite angry. So that's just when we had first met the North Koreans and they end up surrounding us

there and we can't leave. And then the fish takes out his shotgun. The fish was the most awesome dude ever. He's like the local mafia dude just with all gold teeth and like an Adidas track suit. And he's just like, this is Russia.

You can't fuck with me. Oh, there's another one. I don't know what that one is. Dipkong. Dipkong, Russia. This is, yeah. Going into the middle of the forest. This is a logging camp

run by North Koreans. You can see there's a North Korean flag and North Korean propaganda in here. There's some North Koreans waving at us over there. All this wood is going to England. When we get off this train, we're going to go out into the camps where they actually log out in the middle of Siberia. Holy fuck. Freaky, freaky business. This is like four hours, four days from anything.

And all of a sudden, you've just got trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, North Korea. Wow. North Korea camp, North Korea camp, North Korea camp. And then when we got off, they were really not happy to see us. How did you find out about all this? happy to see us. How did you find out about all this? This dude, Simon, he's a Russian journalist and he had heard that Russians couldn't get

jobs in the Far East because of slaves. He was like, what? He went out and checked it out. But no one had really ever done the story except for him. He just did it on a small program there. He didn't go as deep as we went. He wanted

to go back. Of course he didn't go as deep as we went he didn't so he wanted to go back and and of course he didn't go as deep as you went who the fuck would yeah and so and so we went and and uh it was fucked up like north korean slaves in siberia it was it was a messed up messed up uh trip why isn't geraldo rivera covered this where are you geraldo i don't think anyone cares they're like okay okay but they should care just because it's so crazy. I mean, it's just... It's pretty crazy. Oh, so the reason why... So we get to the Chinese border,

and we're like, finally, we got out. And right when we were there, so we were in the Amur region, the far eastern Amur region, and Kim Jong-il, who hasn't left North Korea in like seven years, met Medvedev in the Amur region. So right when we were there,

Kim Jong-il was in the same region to talk about new labor and trade agreements, which means more fucking slaves. So that's why they were so freaked out is because they don't, obviously Russia doesn't, they think, oh, we're Europe, we're smart, we're like everybody else.

They don't want people to know that they have North Korean slaves. So they were trying to shut it down. And and meanwhile we were there right when Kim Jong-un was there we didn't know it until we got into China it was it was crazy wow imagine if they caught you there we've been bad fuck do you worry about that when you're doing these sort of stories I mean is that in the back your head or you just go go go I think that you know people always say like what's the scariest place you've ever been to and it's funny because i think that in places like russia or iran or even afghanistan places like that if you're going to get caught they're going to you're going to go to like jail and it'll be unpleasant

but somebody's going to make some deal to get you out somebody's going to sort of you know do a trade or put pressure on or do whatever to get you out whereas if you go to like mexico you know and you're doing some narco shit they'll just kill you like fuck it if there's any question mark at all just kill them you know like you know when i did narco cinema and i just come out of iraq you know there's 50 000 narco related killings a year in Mexico. And you're just like, that's way more than Iraq. So when you start to do, one of the stories we want to do now is fundamentalist Mormons from America went down there when they were sort of forced to give up polygamy.

They went down to Mexico? Mexico, yeah. Well, Mitt Romney's grandfather was one of them. Oh, my God. Somebody get that to someone in a debate. Yeah, exactly. So he went down there. So they have these, like, militias and shit, right?

And now what's happened, because they're fairly wealthy, the cartels have started kidnapping them, right? So there's a war going on between the cartels and the Mormon polygamist extremist militias, right? The Americans. Holy shit. So they have like American colonies of Mormons down there? Correct.

How many people? Well, so that's the thing. There's a few of them. They're quite big colonies, but we don't know exact numbers, but somewhere around 20,000, 30,000. Can I grab one of those? 20 or 30,000. I don't know the exact numbers.

We were supposed to go down and talk. So they've basically started their own little mini civilization. Yeah, exactly. But when you're in Mexico, two stories,, like, you know, everyone's like, oh, you know, Iraq is scary. And you're like, actually, Jamaica was scary because when I went down to Jamaica, you know, I went down and I met Dudas, who's like ran the shower posse. He's one of the biggest drug dealers in America. And in fact, America was going to call out all Jamaica's loans, bankrupt the country unless they gave them Dudus.

But Dudus, he was like the most powerful man in the country, so they didn't want to give him up. So there was like raging gun battles in Kingston and shit. So I interviewed him, but then there was this war between Movado, a dance hall guy in Vibes Cartel, and Gullah and Gaza Crew. And they were fighting each other, and Dudus had this peace concert and shit. But anyways, they used to have this party called Pasa Pasa in Kingston and uh it's in it's in Tivoli and and it was run by Dutas this coke the biggest coke dealer and when you go down there

on every street corner there's dudes with ak-47s and you're like a pork ball you're like what the fuck you doing here this isn't for you to be here and meanwhile like America's trying to extradite their god Dudus and so I was down there and and and I was with some dance hall guys and they were like speeding through and they wouldn't stop at red lights I'm like what are you doing like damn a lot of guns shot down here you know like like people were just getting shot and like like super violent and by the way if they killed you it wouldn't be a bad thing. They'd be like, good fucking, you know,

you killed the guy, he shouldn't be here. So, you know, Jamaica, Mexico for sure when you're doing anything with narco because they'll just kill you just for being there. Why the fuck are you here? And then the favelas in Brazil because it's the same thing. They're just like, why the fuck are you here?

There's no reason for you to be here, you know? Yeah, that's amazing, man. Now, when you go and you do these uh these mexico trips do you do you have like someone who guides you and keeps you safe like how do you uh because i told we had anthony bourdain on he said one of the things you got to get a local guy when you go to these crazy spots you get a local guy who's like you know a handler and that guy takes care of everything you tell him you pay him do you guys do that yeah yeah yeah you definitely have to have local guys i don't believe in security or definitely not like you know for sure not like western bodyguards or like pilgrims or any of those big obvious visible big guys talking into their wrists and shit that's just

stupid because they're just gonna attract attention what the fuck is going on here let's get them you know yeah uh but definitely you need local fixers in mexico we have 34 offices around the world so we we have our own guys local guys pretty much everywhere and then you have like local fixers who you know know the terrain know the language know you know what's going on and you know how to get you out of shit and you guys started this you were doing a magazine called Voice? Yeah. And then you took it over and took the O out and just called it Vice?

Yeah, it was called Voice of Montreal, and it was sort of a welfare project in Canada run by Haitians, and they were doing a Black History Month thing, and they figured they could get more money out of the government by doing an English language cultural publication. And so we were all working there.

I wanted to be a writer, so I was like, I finally got a job. And meanwhile, Quebec was trying to separate from the rest of Canada, so English language publications became illegal. So no audience. And so anyway, eventually they couldn't pay us our wages and stuff. So we said, okay, well, we own it now.

So we dropped the O and just called it Vice. And, like, everyone was like, what a great name. How did you think it up? Great fucking name. How did you think it up? And we're like, we just dropped the O, you know. It's a perfect story. Yeah.

And then we moved to the States. And then we started expanding. And now we're in 34 countries. And where are you guys based out of? You're based out of New York? New York and London are our two hubs, and our biggest office next year is going to be in China. And how long have you been doing this? 16 years. Holy shit.

Yeah, I'm old, man. God damn. And now it's music. You even have a clothing line and everything now. It's like a huge... God damn. Now it's music. You even have a clothing line and everything now. It's like a huge. Yeah, we have a record label and films and TV and mag and online and all our different verticals and events. That's awesome.

And was this a plan from the very beginning to branch off in all these different directions, or it just sort of naturally happened? Yeah, no, we never had a business plan. We never knew anything. We never thought about it really. What happened was we wanted the outlawed english basically in quebec so we we went national in canada we're the biggest magazine in canada but that was like being the biggest magazine in reykjavik or something we're the number one podcast in canada really hey canada all right

love canada i do too i love canada i'm gonna swear I'm gonna move if shit gets bad yeah Vancouver I came real close in 2004 I was looking at space in Vancouver really yeah I was thinking about it I wouldn't

I wouldn't go to you gotta go to the cause it's gonna get real bad you gotta get to like north of where I grew up in Ottawa there's like a million lakes you can just buy a lake

for like a hundred bucks you gotta buy a lake and you know build a cabin on the lake because when she gets bad you gotta get far away from the cities when gets that bad though you might want to just die yeah you want to live like in liberia you know i don't want to i don't want to i want to live i'd rather take a bullet yeah i'd rather take a bullet than live like that us a stump od on flintstone yeah i don't think you can brian yeah you can i think that's a stump OD on Flintstone yeah I don't think you can Brian yeah you can I

think that's a rumor so you so you guys started now how did you get started from going from a magazine to these incredible in-depth on-scene investigative pieces that you're doing well it was the first one heavy metal in baghdad so um we for about a decade we were kind of a style mag so we were really just interested in cocaine and supermodels and denim and so like but why these jeans are weird and uh we had it was because it was fun it was a lot of fun and we were kids and and uh and then when we started expanding around the world we're like oh this shit is fucked up And it was because it was fun. It was a lot of fun, and we were kids. And then when we started expanding around the world, we're like, oh, this shit is fucked up.

Like, holy fuck, have you seen this? And we'd write about it, and people were like, I've never heard about that. What the fuck's going on? We're like, yeah, it's crazy. So that happened as well as the sort of failure of mainstream media during the Iraq war with everyone saying weapons of mass destruction and just lying and they knew that there was no weapons of mass destruction and all this shit. And so we did

a thing where we snuck into Iraq and we went to hang out with the only heavy metal band in Baghdad across the Qaeda. And it was supposed to be like a seven minute piece And we went to hang out with the only heavy metal band in Baghdad, Cross the Cowda. And it was supposed to be like a seven-minute piece. It was the first piece we launched VBS with. And, you know, eventually we shot them over three years and we turned it into a feature film that won Critics' Choice in Toronto, won Best Documentary in Berlin Film Festival.

Like, it got picked up by the BBC, by Canal Plus. My friend Eddie raves about it. Eddie Bravo raves about that movie. And so everyone's like, oh, that's like news. We're following a band. But you saw the whole thing unfold, how everything was fucked up and shit. And people could relate to it because they're like,

oh, I'm in a band. And then their practice space gets bombed by a Scud missile. They're going to be killed because they wear like iron maiden t-shirts or like they headbang which is seen as jewish so therefore they'll cut your head off and shit and so that was the first thing and it was so successful that and we loved doing it that we started saying well why don't we the whole everyone's like what's your been your demo and what's your business plan all this shit we're just like we have none.

All we do is stories that we like. So if there's a story like General Butt Naked and the Tupac Army, that's a fucking jaw dropper. We're going to go shoot that, you know. And so we started shooting it and people were like, I've never heard anything like this. What the fuck? And so more and more and more people started watching and we started doing it more and more. If I have any criticism is that sometimes it's hard to find shit like you have a bunch of different shows on vice.com there's so many

different ones like i was trying to find hein mo's adventure the dude who lives up in the arctic who lives in like east alaska and i couldn't find i had to google it and then find it through google yeah we suck we're only good i couldn't find it on your website. It's not on Netflix anymore either. We're only good at one thing. We're good at making content. We're not good at anything else. Yeah, but someone should be good at doing that for you.

Well, this dude here, look at this fucking thing. Yeah, this is the master. We need to steal him and have him come over. He's not going to the Congo, bro. Trust me. You don't want anybody crying in your lap. No, I would be the crier. I would be the... You can throw me out there first, so I'd be'd be eating first i guess he would definitely be eating first

he's fleshy and he won't even run he'll just i'll cry he's like a rabbit with epilepsy i'll just fall and start shaking in a little fluffy bundle i'd probably survive though they'd be like oh i'm not gonna eat that you'd come back with abs hardened doing chin-ups in the jungle. It would totally change his life. Well, the most hugely strong dudes I've ever seen in my life actually were in Liberia because they don't have water. So they do this thing where they go way out into the outskirts in the jungle, and they fill up these two-ton wooden carts with water. And one guy pushes, and one guy pulls, or two or three.

And they just up and down these hills all day long. They don't eat anything. And they just push two down these hills all day long. They don't eat anything. And they just push like two tons up a hill, two tons down a hill. And they're just fucking massive. It's like Conan. He pushed the wheel for 10 years. Well, that's these kind of dudes. Just fucking massive dudes.

Wow. Anyway. What a fucking insane place on earth that is. Yeah. I just can't. I'll never be able to get over the fact that that exists right while this exists you know and we could be that's one no one wants to put their head there but you could have been born there man that could have been your shitty roll of the dice true you

could have been shit out in the bottom of a hut and in the middle of liberia yeah just as easily as you could have in montreal yeah fuck so you start out you do this baghdad thing then how did how does it branch out into what you have now because now you guys have you know i mean thailand and liberia and i saw the chernobyl thing that was fucking nuts man did you worry about that i mean you're you're there in some serious fucking radiation yeah i was drunk that that whole trip because uh does the drug does the alcohol supposedly protect you from radiation? Well, two things I heard. God knows if they're true, but I heard them, so I believe them as fact.

One, that the doctors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived because they got so bummed out by skin falling off and shit that they would get wasted. And alcohol is a diuretic so it forces you to piss it flushes out the radiation in your system right and also the firemen in chernobyl lived because they were they would get drunk every night and so when we were there they actually said take your medicine and it was like brandy you know so we were just drinking this like homemade brandy the whole time we were there and i was loaded uh and we were like brandy. So we were just drinking this homemade brandy the whole time we were there, and I was loaded. And we were laughing with the Geiger counter

as it goes up to like 1,500. Oh, my God. And you're just like, 1,500, 1,500, 1,600. And meanwhile, just because you're drunk. And then when you go back, they have a Geiger counter to test your shoes, and they're just like, you know, straight to red. So I just sort of threw everything out, you know,

bought like a silver Ukrainian suit. What's a normal level? What's like a healthy level? I think it's like 0.25 millirengans is hot, and we were at like 1,500. Oh, my God. Have you had any side effects? Have you been going to the doctor

like regularly? Like are you freaking out about it at all? I do not go to the doctor. Pour some wine on your feet? Yeah. I'm Irish, so I'm just like,

have a whiskey and you'll be fine. But, you know, I was just in Japan actually and what's going down there, you want to talk about Mad Max, is, like, that's fucking crazy shit. And we're actually going to go back and shoot.

We were doing the preliminary thing there. And, like, the actual reactors, the steel, the containment of the reactors is now melting into the sort of groundwater and melting into the soil. And there's, like, major cities there of, like, 500,000 people that are completely fucking irradiated. And they're not telling people the truth, and the kids. And there's like major cities there of like 500,000 people that are completely fucking irradiated. And they're not telling people the truth. And the kids know that it's wrong.

They're really frustrated and they're really angry. And the government's just like denying shit. And both Chernobyl and in Japan, I was shocked because everyone, because, you know, energy. People are going, oh, you know, nuclear power, nuclear power. You know, it's the future. It's great and whatever. You just go there and you go, if it fuck are going, oh, you know, nuclear power, nuclear power, you know, it's the future, it's great, whatever. You just go there and you go, if it fucks up even this much, if it fucks up just a tiny

bit, like, you know, in the Ukraine, an area the size of France is still completely irradiated, you know, and you're just like, well, I mean, what the, like, how is this even a fucking option? Yeah. How is it a possibility that you could have one mistake or a natural disaster like a tsunami? You know, the fact that they only planned for what was an 8.2 or something like that. That's as bad as it could get. And they got a 9.

And it just wrecked everything. And then the power goes out and they can't cool everything off. And then they're pouring ocean water on it. And that water is now back in the ocean. pour an ocean water on it and that water is now back in the ocean they did there's a an online um presentation that shows the irradiated water and how it's moving through the pacific ocean it's fucking terrifying yeah it's it's it's uh it's beyond terrifying and what's happening in japan now is uh i mean it just shows you like well what are they what can they do how are they going to evacuate a million people where the fuck are they gonna evacuate them to and how big is japan like what is the total size

of it is it possible that the entire japanese island will get irradiated well no because it's i now i'm gonna show myself up here for being a bad boy but i think it's like seven major islands um so you know there's you know sepporo's on the north one and so they have different islands but it is definitely it's sort of this area that's about an hour and a half two hours north of tokyo but it's actually sort of heavily populated around there two hours drive yeah so and that's you could be that close to a horrible nuclear disaster like that? Two hours drive? Yeah. That doesn't seem safe.

Well, Japan, when we first started having our office there, was like the future. It was like, wow, they're way ahead of us in technology and everything else. And now when you go there, there's no air conditioning, so everybody's really hot. The lights are at half like, half light. And, you know, even stupid shit like we were at karaoke,

and, like, it'll just go and slow down because the power's all fucked up. And it feels kind of like a ghost town. Lots of people have left. That's so creepy. And, yeah, it's like, oh, it's gone beyond future. It's gone to, like, it was the future, and now it's, like, post-future. And if that's the post-future, then we should drink a lot today because it's gonna not be pleasant yeah it's gonna be akira i'm going there for the first time in february for the ufc

going to tokyo are you really yeah i flew over i flew over with a bunch of wrestlers there was a big i was just there uh two days ago or three ago. And there was just a bunch of huge, huge fucking wrestlers. Those boys are big. The wrestling dudes. Not the UFC dudes. I'm just drawing an image. Japanese wrestlers? No, they were like WWE dudes.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, most of those guys were real wrestlers originally. Really? A lot of them were, at least. But there's no real outlet for amateur wrestlers if they want to go into professional sports except for MMA. MMA to me seems like real fighting, the ultimate fighting. It's a big difference.

It doesn't seem to me to be real. The real amateur wrestling is a great sport, but unfortunately it never got popular enough to be a professional sport. They've tried it a bunch of times. There's a lot of wrestlers in MMA. You can learn striking, but it's hard to learn the wrestling well it's a great base and it's also those guys are tough as shit if you go through wrestling practice wrestling practice i only

wrestled one year in high school and it's one of the toughest things athletically i ever did the practices are absolutely brutal you know especially if you're a very strong guy it's it's a it's a just a grueling kind of a workout, and they're mentally tough because of it. I went and hung out with a bunch of jiu-jitsu guys with Daniel Gracie in Brazil. In Rio? Well, Rio and, yes, Rio. And we went to the favelas to where they train by running barefoot up mountains and beating the shit out of tractor tires.

And they have full contact training where they knock each other out in practice and shit. He took me all around, and those dudes are tough. Like, I don't know how anyone can beat a Brazilian because they're fucking tough motherfuckers. Well, there's a lot of Brazilian champions now. One of the ultimate fighters this last season that happened last weekend, this past weekend, one of them was a Brazilian kid. We've got three Brazilian champions now, and who knows how many more. Yeah, we were doing the Vale Tudo stuff, which is anything goes.

No weight class, no age, no gender. So you guys covered that stuff? Yeah, we did. They usually have weight classes in Vale Tudo fights, but you guys will fight bigger guys. Well, we were going to the Vale Tudo, like the full-on, like anything goes Vale Tudo fights, but you guys will fight bigger guys. We had the, well, we had, we were going to the Vale Tudo, like the full-on, like anything goes, Vale Tudo stuff. What's interesting is that that's how the Gracie started,

is they would fight anybody from any style, any weight class, anything, and they would have a, you know, $100,000 prize if you could beat a Gracie. And that's how the whole sort of valetudo thing started in MMA. Yeah, it's really fascinating when you find out that jiu-jitsu really was started by two guys. I mean, it wasn't started by two guys. It was judo in Japan and Japanese jiu-jitsu and submission wrestling has been existing in many forms for a long time. But Brazilian

jiu-jitsu, the really technical version of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, was really started by Elio Gracie and Carlos Gracie, two bad motherfuckers from this one family in Brazil that created an army of super killers. Yeah, Daniel Gracie was three-time world jiu-jitsu champion. And so he's more of a jiu-jitsu guy yeah well big big motherfucker jiu-jitsu is a much safer way to compete you know when you start getting involved with head trauma that's when things get get sketchy yeah you

know the the returns aren't the same no no and you're gonna lose everyone's gonna lose but if you lose it as you-jitsu tournament, occasionally your arm popped. You could even have to have a surgery on a knee or something like that. But if you lose in an MMA fight, that's a completely different animal. It's a hard world. It is. So Mayhem lost that last fight? Yep.

Yeah, he got beat up. He gassed. I don't know what happened. It could have been that he hadn't fought in a long time. It could have been that it was a giant adrenaline dump. But he got tired really quickly. And Michael Bisping fought a real good fight. And Michael Bisping looked better than he's ever looked before.

And he beat the shit out of Jason, especially standing up. Standing up, he really just boxed his face in. Have you talked to him since then? No, I'm going to let him chill out. You know, I know Jason, you know, is a big disappointing loss for a guy like him. So just going to let him just relax. And maybe he'll come back on the podcast once he's, you know,

he's going to be bummed out for a while, but he'll be back. You know, the thing about fighting is a lot of it is psychological. A lot of it is just being able to perform in the moment. And a lot of people are dwarfed by that moment. They just tense up and their adrenaline gets to them and they get nervous and they just can't do it. Well, it's also like fighting when you're used to winning. You're just like, I'm always going to win. And then when someone beats you down, you're like, what?

Look at George Foreman. He was the baddest man on the planet. He was the bad, and then when he, after he got beat, he's like, okay, I'm done. That's it. Like, forget it. Yeah, Ali beat him, and then he came back, and he fought someone else. He fought one other guy and had, like, this crazy rock-up-sock-up robots fight. Yeah.

And then he took, yeah, well, they both got knocked down like three times each and then he's like, fuck this. And then he became a preacher and then big and fat at 36 years decides to make a comeback. Really fat too. Everybody thought it was a joke.

I like that style of boxing too. When he, he looked like a weeble, you know, where he just, he had his left right out and he'd just sort of rock back and forth

and he was just waiting for that right hand to come out. The thing is, when it came, it was like getting hit by a telephone pole. It was like somebody thrusted a telephone pole on you. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So when you were in Thailand, did you get to go and check out any of the Muay Thai fights? I did, actually.

I interviewed the beautiful boxer. Do you know about her? Is that the she-male? Yeah. She used to be a guy? Used to be a guy, became a shemale, and then became the champion Muay Thai boxer for her weight class. And she used to do this.

Her signature move was she'd run up your legs, the knee in the face. So in the classic Muay Thai, they sort of plant, and she would do this thing where she'd run up your legs and kick you in the face so so if you know you in the classic muay thai they sort of plant and she would do this thing where she'd run up your legs and kick you in the face and then was she fighting men or men men only men yeah and then when the men would go down she'd kiss them on the lips as a as a fuck you because like they wouldn't they didn't want her to fight stuff she had a she had a big uh a target on her back and was she uh post-op oh i don't fucking know what it feel like i think the story is see the story is there was one one of these women that was a fucking killer until she got the surgery and then essentially they take your balls away and when they take your balls

away you no longer have testosterone and she lost her muscle tone and and you know she essentially became a real girl and she was fighting guys and they were kicking her in the fucking head all of a sudden yeah yeah yeah she she became champion i don't think she she was real really she was a celebrity i don't think she was really fighting that much anymore um but she might have had the operation isn't it funny that you have to keep calling her she i get them all confused because there was a lot of them. I was interviewing a lot. I was surrounded by she-males for a time in my life in Thailand. Wow. So when she originally started fighting, she was fighting men.

But then after she got the operation, even though you're calling her a she, she's still fighting men. Yeah, yeah. What the fuck is that? I mean, we think that that's like the whole point of getting the operation. You're a woman now. She started getting into Muay Thai because she was getting picked on for being a she-male. And then so she wanted to beat the shit out of everybody, and she did.

But I think by the time I met her, I think she was probably, maybe, I asked the question, but I don't remember the answer. But I think she was post-op, but she had just had the operation, but she wasn't fighting anymore. She got the money to do it through fighting. Wow. So she financed her surgery, her transgender surgery, sexual reassignment surgery through kicking people. Kicking people's asses. And tough. Those guys are tough as fucking hell.

Fuck, yeah. That's one of the most brutal martial arts in the world, and they start really, really young. That's a strange thing to cover just in and of itself. I have a friend who went over there, and he was over there for a long time, like several, several months just training in Muay Thai. Sam Shepard, he wrote a book about it. Right. You know, and he was on a – Not the Sam Shepard.

No. Oh. No, a different one. Different guy. An MMA author. All right, right. Who's the Sam Shepard? Is that a –

He's like a famous writer, playwright, you know. No, I better not be saying this guy's wrong last name because I'm drunk. I'm going to get another drink. It's right there, buddy. So when you were in Thailand, tell me, is there a reason? Do they have some sort of a rationalization for why there are so many ladyboys there?

What causes one place to have such an exorbitant amount of men that dress like women? I asked that. Sam Sheridan. Sam Sheridan. You dumb motherfucker. You dumb as fuck, dude. I asked that a lot, why there's so many ladyboys there.

And they were like, well, you know, we're very feminine and it's Buddhist, so it's not frowned upon. And I'm like, yeah, but even if it wasn't frowned upon in other places, they have like 100% more ladyboys than anywhere. Yeah, what is that? I don't know. There's no one has a reason? I don't know. It's weird. And they're the best looking ladyboys.

Yeah. The most authentic. There's this one town, the most authentic. Well, German ladyboys are just so sad. If you want an authentic ladyboy, go to Thailand. Yeah, if you see like a German, you know, a fucking Austrian ladyboy. Or American. Yeah.

American are the worst. Big, huge fucking football players. Yeah, they want to suck your cock. You're like, wish they were a girl. That's a strange thing, man, because it's not gay and it's not straight. It's like you're doing. They're women in men's bodies. What the fuck is going on?

They want to be free. Some of them don't even. They just get off on dressing like women. Sure. You know, Oscar De La Hoya, that's his kink. Likes to dress like a woman. Really? That's his kink, yeah.

Wow, Jimmy Hoffa. He actually admitted to it. Not Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa. No. Who's the guy? Sam Shepard. J. Edgar Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover. That was De La Hoya, like, kept it a secret forever and paid the girl off and sued everybody who tried to say any differently that's probably why he's such a good boxer he knows how to avoid duck haymakers that ain't me in the girl's underwear he uh apparently he's just kind of kinky he just likes dressing up like a girl but he fucks these girls so it's like hmm okay i don't know what that's all about i mean you're entitled to it i don't even know everyone was always like didn't son did you fuck them did you fuck them and i'm like you understand that

there's like two good dudes with cameras and lighting rigs and shit yeah it's like we're there to shoot something i don't even actually much respect know why we were there we were shooting females are always a good story a but b i think we were shooting beautiful boxer and we're like oh you know an hour and a half south of Bangkok, there's Pattaya, which is the shemale capital of the world. It's like and it became big because all the dudes from Vietnam would go there on R&R. And so they would all fuck shemales. And now. Jesus Christ.

Well, now, like whatever the seventh fleet or whatever the fuck it is comes in and they all have their R&R, and it's all shemales. So we heard that there was this place where there's, like, this shemale beauty pageant, and then they have, like, a shooting range downstairs where you can shoot machine guns and shit. So we're like, okay, we can go get, like, ten, you know, shemales dressed up like Marilyn Monroe and shoot machine guns with them. Like, we have to do that. So we did that, and then we decided to

interview them and by then i had a few ales so they're like get in a hot tub and i'm like okay yeah well that's what was the craziest shit when you were that's one of the first things i ever saw you do you're in this hot tub with these ladyboys i'm like who is this wild motherfucker he doesn't that's not so wild that's pretty wild dude i like i'd like to have a bath yo you were smiling with them and laughing and having a good time and yeah i wonder why people asked you if you fucked them because it seemed like you fucked them so if i had a guess he'd be like yeah man i i have a friend who's a comic and he uh was uh doing this show with a lady boy and she was really hot and she offered to blow him and he's like all right and i'm like dude you got blown by a guy he goes maybe yeah but i never i never saw a dick i'm not really sure to

me a hot chick blew me and it was awesome yeah well there was a while there that i was interested i was interested in in weird shit and there was a i did a a piece on uh. They grow up masturbating to cartoons. You know, like the porn is cartoons. Yeah, tentacle, baby. What is that about? I don't know. It's hot. Have you seen their...

They have a really good artist there. It's pretty good. But they grow up... Cartoons are like porn, right? So now they have these brothels, like whorehouses, right? But they're dolls, real dolls. so like 20 grand 30 grand and but they they're like cartoon characters so you can fuck a cartoon right and so i did this uh thing where i went and uh i'm like oh that's crazy japanese people are crazy so i i went to these ghetto doll brothels i went to these these brothels where you

you dress them you dress them up and then you and then you fuck them and so i shot the whole thing and it was just a stupid little funny piece like oh japanese people are crazy and it was so it got picked up so much like it was like huge and so i did a follow-up where they actually will deliver dolls to your house so you you you you go online and you you say i want them to look like this cartoon character i want them to look like a school girl i want them to look whatever you want to look like and then they they bring the dolls to your house and then you spend like a weekend with them like having a party you know that sounds amazing drinking doing whatever i would fucking do that in a second and so i so i did it so i filmed it you know and um and uh again like it

was just hugely popular and then i met this dude so i was you know the guy gaspar in a way you know that director no he did a film called irreversible you know that film yeah yeah it's got like the most you know anyway it's a he's a shocking director like i saw that film and i was like that's the most fucked up thing i've ever seen in my life like really fucking heavy it's the heaviest for you to say that you got to watch it it's insane irreversible irreversible so he was shooting his his next film called enter the void in a place called uh kabuki cho which is run by the mafia and kabuki like you know the Japanese opera shit well kabuki cho now is just like orgy houses sex houses s&m houses what is enter the void is that the voice the one that talked about

the dmt and then irreversible was his first one which was i think better than enter the void irreversible is like so like it's amazing the most creative thing about enter the void was the way it was shot yeah you know when so he he actually had cameras in Kabuki Cho just like hanging from light. And they would spin and he would just let them run. And he wouldn't even be on the set. He'd be like in a bar like four blocks away. And he had to pay off the yakas and stuff. So I ended up doing sort of the making of it.

And I followed him for a while because it was like my friend Harmony Corrine, who does, you know, he's a filmmaker. He did a gummo and he wrote kids. He's like, you want to talk about, because I was doing a film show at the time for FC, and he was like, you want to talk about the craziest film shit ever? You got to go to Tokyo and see Gaspar Noé because he's paid off the mafia and he's just got these fucking cameras swirling on bungee cords and shit and everyone's fucking everybody else.

So I went there and and i met these um directors through him that do this thing called genki which means good or clean and it's uh it's it's a porn it's kind of porn um where they fuck food so for example they'll get a fish yeah to felch like milk out of a girl's ass and then they eat the fish or they'll fuck eels or like they'll fuck like that's like when you see the videos of girls with eels up their asses and there was one where like a mud skipper came out have you ever seen a mud skipper no what's a mud skipper is like this it looks like an alien it's kind of like this translucent thing with big black eyes that sort of see through with red veins.

And you're just like, no way is anyone putting that up my ass. That's like an alien motherfucker. Wow. And so they're doing all this crazy eel porn and octopus porn and fish felching. And you're just like, this is the most fucked up shit I've ever seen in my life. And they're like, I know it's called ginky you're just like jesus i thought the fucking cartoon dolls were bad but shoving you know mudskippers has all this traveling and all this crazy shit that you've seen has this given you

any unusual insight and to human nature because to think, you've seen some shit. You have a much different perspective on the human race. If you were a scientist, you know, and you were an objective scientist, you were studying Earth, you would have a much different view of human beings than the average person. Well, you know, I think that uh you know this is i wish i could have a better analogy to make myself look better but there is this there is definitely a sort of good and evil there is a sort of yin and yang that's what i was embarrassed to saying but really like in liberia for example

you have these guys who grow up like killing and eating people on the other side of it there's just churches everywhere like churches and fucking every car has got a you know believe in christ uh you know bumper sticker or whatever and so there's like these people just super good and like trying to be good and you know and then other people are just like the worst like the worst people on earth and so there's there's definitely a good and evil vibe and we have tremendous capacity for good but we also have tremendous capacity for evil. Like people do some fucked up shit, like bad stuff,

like eating a baby's heart. It doesn't get worse than that but people do really bad stuff and when they want to send a message, oh, just cut his arm off or there were AIDS brigades in Africa where they would have whole brigades of people with AIDS. And then they would go and then intentionally infect other people because they wanted to effectively have genocide. And you're sitting there going, this is what human beings are capable of?

We are really bad. We're the worst. Also, I think when you go to a lot of places you're like we're just destroying like we're literally the stupidest race or not race a species because we're destroying what we live in you know don't shit where you eat well we're we're like having projectile fucking diarrhea where we everywhere the ocean yeah rainforests just killing everything everything we kind of have the Midas touch we kill it and we make money at the same time and then it's dead and so you know every time we go anywhere now it

gets everyone else asks us our politics and I say look it's just the absurdity of the modern condition it's just fucking insane like I was in China I made a two andand-a-half-week traffic jam, right? And every year they have to sell 3% more cars just to break even, and you're in a two-and-a-half-week traffic jam. Two-and-a-half weeks? Yeah, it went from Mongolia to Beijing. It was a famous thing. It created a whole micro-economy, and there were people going out there selling food and clothes

and shit to people who couldn't. How fast are you going on this road? No, you're not. At all? Yeah. You're not moving at all? It was literally a two-and-a- Well, you're not. At all? Yeah. You're not moving at all? It was literally a two-and-a-half-week traffic jam. Stop dead?

Stop dead. Wow. What the fuck? And so you're like, well, how many fucking cars do we need? And you've been around. You go to Brazil, you can't go. I was in Tehran, which I don't know why. I didn't think it was a real car place.

But, you know, you'd go out out you'd sit in traffic for three hours and you just go home because you couldn't get there so you're like well it's it's ceased to work yet we're still fucking making more and more and more and more and more and so i think you know when you go to japan and everyone you know is getting cooked on the inside and no one's admitting it when you go to you know russia where they're where the mob is running everything and there's North Korean slaves, you go to Africa which they're having war over every single mineral or anything that they can find that they're going to kill somebody else about. And you just start to say, okay, I mean,

we're literally hovering on this sort of edge of... It's funny because I'm a really sort of optimistic guy, and lately I've been sort of saying to people, we should get a bolt hole. I was talking to you before, we should get a bolt hole. We should, you know, get that lake in Canada and get up there where there's fresh water.

Because sometimes, I was in South Africa and I was flying back in the plane and I watched Collapse. Did you ever see that movie? Yeah. I watched Collapse and okay, the guy's a bit of a fruitcake or whatever, but I was watching and I was going, shit. Because what I just saw in South Africa too had freaked me out so much.

South Africa's a fucked up place. What's fucked up about South Africa? When you say South Africa's a fucked up place, after you just got done talking about Liberia. Well, South Africa, because it's the richest country in Africa, and it's always heralded as sort of, you know, look at what's happening in South Africa.

It's so good and so great and whatever. And we actually went down to shoot there, and, you know, it's incredibly corrupt. You know, the police captains are always being arrested. But basically, it's completely, incredibly racist, incredibly segregated. People living behind barbed wire and electric fences. You know, there's a famous book called Disgrace, which won, I don't know, the Nobel Prize or the Booker Prize,

one of them, about a guy from Cape Town, a professor who gets disgraced by fucking one of his students and goes out into the townships and they end up getting their farm taken over and his daughter gets raped and he gets set on fire and all this shit and and you know i was reading that before going there and i was like well that's just crazy shit it doesn't happen and when you're there you're like oh that happens every fucking day like it's full fucking on and so as we were shooting we were shooting the africans neighborhoods and the africans areans are fighting the coloreds who are the mixed races, who are fighting the blacks, who are fighting the whites, and then the whites are just sort of in their compounds,

electric wire and security and machine guns, and you're just like, holy fuck, dude. I'm like, why don't you go to Australia? Why wouldn't you just get the fuck out? So they choose to stay for what reason? Well, they're African. We're African. We've been here.

Since the Dutch settled. Exactly. When was that? What year was that? for what reason? Well, they're African. They're like, we're African. We've been here, you know. Since the Dutch settled. Exactly. When was that? What year was that? In the 1600s. And, you know, the Bantu,

there was the Bantu migration and the Zulu migration and they both sort of happened relatively late because South Africa is sort of hard to get to from the rest of the continent. And then so the Dutch

got there, you know, a bit after like 400 years or something. Now, don't everyone say that I'm wrong. I i'm not i don't know the actual exact times but so they've been there a long time and and uh but there's definitely a strategy of sort of you know and intimidation and there's a lot of there's a lot of institutionalized rape like there and and whenever you see that like when you're like rape when rape is part of the equation and home takeovers and all this shit i'm out like you know that's that's it's just like not on so um this the the crime rate in south africa is just ridiculous compared to the rest

of the world well it's just another example of africa africa just as a whole is pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. It's the craziest spot on earth, right? But South Africa, you're sort of like, well, South Africa is like, I always thought of it as sort of, you know, Canada in Africa. Right. Because it's just sort of, you know, it's rich or richer and, you know, it has these sort of, you know, modern cities and, you know, just sort of, you know, and I grew up in the era of I'm not going to play Sun City and, you know, fuck apartheid and all that shit, which I agree with, fuck apartheid and all that stuff.

It's just now when you go there, it's so segregated and so there's so much hatred and so much fucking violence and crazy shit going on every day and people driving in Mad Max electrified cars with machine guns and living behind electric fences and shit. And you're like, fuck, is this where it's headed? Because this is the whole thing about Occupy Wall Street. If you get to have too much discrepancy with money,

so these people have tons of money and they're living behind barbed wire, electric wire compounds with security guards and machine guns and the other dudes are out fucking eating rats and smileys and whatever you know then you're like you know okay well there's going to be a fight there's going to be continual you know i'm going to take what you have you know when we were in when we were in somalia it's interesting because we went there with this story that was the pirate stock exchange right which we thought is a funny idea because what it is is poor people pay for shares right in an rpg or a machine gun and if it's part of a successful hijacking, they get their dividends back. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's the pirate stock exchange, right? Holy shit. However, when we went there, so that's the story, but when we went there, we found out, we're like, the pirates are like,

well, the Portuguese and Japanese and Spanish illegally overfished the area, took all the fish, killed all the fish, so they have all the fish. So they have no fucking fish. And then an Italian waste management company dumped radioactive waste all up and down the coast illegally.

So they irradiated the beaches, killed all the fish, and they're like, what else the fuck are we going to do? So they became pirates. So that's the story. And this is what we always like about going to story because you go to do a story like the pirate stock exchange, which is just kind of like wild and weird. And then it turns out like we're not so far removed from this shit because, you know, we're part of the problem.

We caused the problems that led to the piracy because people aren't actually going to go out and be pirates if you give them any other opportunity. But if you fuck their shit up and there's no food and there's up, and there's no food, and there's no money, and there's no beaches, there's no water, there's no nothing, what the hell else are they going to do? Didn't they call themselves the Voluntary Coast Guard of Somalia? Yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's all different pirate groups.

You know, when you see this, and you see these parts of the world that you can get to in an airplane in a day, and you see how fucked they are, and then you see shit like occupy wall street you realize like what a thin veneer of civilization we have over you know just a boiling kettle of chaos that is most of the world well when i was in uh libya recently during the revolution they were like we just want freedom there's's actually one kid in the thing who's just like, my dream is to play for the Dallas Mavericks.

Whoa. And yeah, he was like a 17-year-old kid who was operating a grad missile launcher. It was like a truck with a calliope on the back. Yeah. So he was just in this truck with like 50 missiles. And he's like, I want to play for the Dallas Mavericks. Oh, my gosh. And so. Somebody call Mark Cuban. There you go. That was his dream. with like 50 missiles and he's like i want to play for the dallas maravillosa oh my god and so and so

uh somebody called mark cuban there you go that was his dream and i asked all these dudes that are all kids and i was like why are you fighting and they're like i want to fight for freedom i'm just fighting for freedom we want to be like everybody else and it was it was pretty inspiring because these guys have never known freedom gaddafi's been in there since 1969 or was in there so they were just always under him he's the worst dude ever like he's the worst motherfucker he actually put me in jail so I hate him he put you in jail yeah the first time I went I got arrested I went for a youth conference which is the only way to get into Libya and then I went to shoot the party of the for the Lockerbie bomber

guy and I got put in jail so got got put in jail in Libya. Yeah. Fuck. What is that like? Well, to be brutally honest, it was really nice because they actually jailed me and they're sort of only place that foreigners were really allowed to go, which was this really nice hotel. Oh really?

Yeah. But it was scary because they're just like, we're going to fuck you up and you can't say anything. What the fuck are you doing? And there was a lot of yelling and slapping and swearing and shit. But it was just a bummer. Slapping? Yeah.

They slap you around? They like to slap your face. Really? As if that's going to make you. I'm waiting for them to sort of put electrodes on my genitals or shove a glass rod up my ass. They're slapping me. I'm like, okay, good. If that's all I get, I'll be fine anyways they arrested me i got out i filmed part of it and i put it in the show and then

a lot of libyans had seen that and i met a lot of libyans when i was there so when the revolution happened they invited me to come over so i went to benghazi and then i went to mizrata where the fighting was we were completely surrounded and we were fighting pushing to tripoli and you know i was everyone was just like we're fighting for freedom we're fighting for freedom and it was like they were so positive and they were like risking everything and like there was one kid who had his leg blown off and he snuck out of the hospital they were going to send him to Germany and get him a new leg and and he wouldn't do it he snuck out so he could get back and fight with his brothers and like you know he was fighting

with a fucking spear gun and shit you know against tanks and and you know they were doing it for freedom and i when i came back i flew through some hub i'm in chicago i'm in st louis and just everyone was just fat like eating cheese dogs and just sort of like you know i was like would these dudes fight for freedom like would these dudes really sort of get up and give anything and fight with a spear gun against the tank to fucking we've been complacent for so long you know we think that we have freedom already and we think that everything's fine and this is america it would i think there at least they understood that they were being repressed by a dictator i think over there they at least you know i just wonder how bad it would have to get for people to sort of you know say fucking i'm going to get off my couch

and do something which actually says something about America like I'm Canadian I came down here because it's still I'm the perfect example of the American dream you can come here you can do well it is the best country in the world you know it's the freest you know media country in the world you can do whatever

the fuck you want and I love it but at the same time, you know, you know, we're not necessarily the most adept at fixing problems. No, we just rape. We just take their shit.

We take other people's shit. We go over there and we put them in hock, you know, and then we take their resources. Where's this going, man? You're scaring the shit out of me. Everybody's scared. The whole,

the news scares the shit out of me. The internet scares the shit out of me. You're scaring the shit out of me. Let's talk about shemales again shit out of me the internet scares the shit out of me you're scaring the shit out let's talk about shemales again we'll lighten it up i fucked a cartoon there's no way it ends well though it just seems like unless the aliens land or we invent something crazy every time everyone asks me they're like you know you've seen some bad shit uh you know what what what what do you think uh you know you, like your question. I just have this flash, I don't know why, it's a subconscious flash of,

there's a movie called Angel Heart. Do you remember that movie? Yeah, sure. And there was an old blues singer and he was trying to get information from the blues singer and the blues singer was like, I don't know,

I just drink the two boots cocktails and whatever they put in, that's all I need. And so whenever I feel really bad, I'm just going to have some of this whiskey that you have here. And you have one of these and you go, actually, it's not so bad. It's a lot better than people. The world is a nice place. You can have a hamburger on a Sunday.

The thing is, it's the best that people have ever lived, supposedly. I don't know about overall, but at least America. This is the best humans have ever lived ever. Yes. But it seems like it's not going to last. Well know it seems like it can't yeah i i don't know if it's by sort of fact of getting older but and you're like well it can't last or it's not like it used to be but my problem is when i come back from you know india or africa or or siberia wherever and you go to new york and you're like

what the fuck do you want to eat you can eat the best whatever it is you want you know by the way i was just in india the best india food i've ever had is in new york the best french food the best time and you're in new york you can eat this you can do this you can go party online long you want you do whatever you want and you sit there and go this can't go go on. It's too good. New York is too fucking good. We shouldn't be allowed to have this much fucking fun. So I do have a bit of eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we may die. I definitely have a bit of that. Because when you see the alternative, like when it's going to be the road,

you're probably right. You're probably just going to go, well, I had a good time. I'm going to leave you with this because I know you've got to get out of here. But do you feel like a certain amount of responsibility for illuminating people and all these different things that you find? Because you guys are covering shit that not too many people are covering. You know, you joke around that you're not a real journalist, but I didn't know about Liberia the way I know about it because of your, you know,

I didn't know about Coltan, you know. You guys are letting people know a lot of shit. Do you feel responsibility? i i think so i think you know there was a time when we realized you know there was about 15 million people watching us every month and you know we distributed about two million magazines and we realized that we had a a big platform and that all we were talking about was like Nike, you know, limited edition Tokyo fucking come to Garcon trainers. And so at some point you're like,

look, you know, there's a lot of shit going on when we did garbage Island. That was a big thing for us because we went out into the Pacific and there's an Island. Would you guys the first to cover that? We were one of the first, I mean, we went out with the scientists that found it.

It hadn't really been done by a major media outlet by the time. We've talked about it several times on this podcast. It's fucking insane. Yeah. And bigger now, right? Yeah. Well, it's just growing. And so when we went out there, you realize, holy fuck,

there's an island the size of Texas made out of plastic. Jesus Christ. Like, it's just. Texas. Yeah. Think about Texas. Going 70 miles an hour takes you a day to drive through it yeah and that's all plastic plastic and so well now it's even worse because it's actually dissolving into sort of those little beads that they make all plastics from and the krill and the shrimps and everything are eating that plastic so it's entering into the food chain which is corrupting the whole food chain

but at that point you're like well what am i gonna do talk about fucking shoes i mean yeah the whole food chain's getting fucked here like you know there's no by the way i always say if the world was going along tickety-boo that people wouldn't be looking to me for news i mean like you know it's so fucked that people had to go to vice which was again about cocaine and supermodels and denim to go oh fuck that's where i get my news then the world's really fucked you know so so do they have any ideas on how to clean that up is there any well no i mean it's just uh you have to stop making plastic and chuck it in the ocean you know like yeah how are you gonna do that we're so disgusting we eat all the fish we poison it we

throw our fucking nuclear waste in it we we shit all over it we send some shit into space we just if we could pollute space the sky would be littered the sky would look like it is littered but it'd be really it would look like stars at night just floating above us slamming into each other but listen thank you very much for coming down here this has been fucking awesome man you got to do this again next time you're in L.A. Anytime, man. I need to hear more shit. When is your show debut on HBO? So we're just shooting it now. We're actually having a party tomorrow night to celebrate.

We've got some pretty great segments. I can't believe I'm going to miss it to go to the fucking Today Show. Today Show is very big, though. You're going to be a very popular young man. I don't want to be any more popular. I'm good. You're very popular. This whole thing has been like the most insane thing on Twitter.

You're like the god of Twitter. Oh, hardly. You're the sort of sexy, beefier version of Ashton Kutcher. Nice. I'll take that as a compliment, but I don't want to. He's a nut bar. You think? Yeah. He's a young, handsome man that married a famous old lady.

Yeah. You think he's nuts? And he was getting some crazy pussy in a hotel room where he'd make them give up their phones and give me your cell phones and hand them all to my bodyguard? You're all down with the Hollywood gossip. I just meant he was the first guy to get to the million Twitter followers. Oh. That's all I know about.

Oh, you don't know about all the... But you're getting up there fast. You're like the fucking man. Well, you know, Twitter's an interesting little resource. The ability to communicate with all these interesting people and people connecting me to you on Twitter.

And, you know, they've connected me to Hamilton Morris on Twitter, a lot of different people on Twitter. He's awesome. Yeah. It's Dennis McKenna. I got connected to him on Twitter. It's an amazing thing.

The resource of the internet is just fucking fantastic. And you guys are part of that, Twitter. He's awesome. Yeah. It's Dennis McKenna. I got connected to him on Twitter. It's an amazing thing. The resource of the internet is just fucking fantastic. And you guys are part of that, a big part of that. Well, thanks for having me. It was great. Please. This is one of my favorite podcasts of all time. This is fucking awesome.

And please keep me in touch with anything you do. We'll promote the shit out of it. Oh, for sure. And let us know when your HBO thing is ready to launch. All right. So let's pause for a minute. We'll let these guys go. And then Brian, you and I will wrap this up. All right. See you. All right a minute. We'll let these guys go, and then, Brian, you and I will wrap this up.

All right. See you. All right, man. So everybody at home watching online, just go take a leak. We'll be right back.