The Joe Rogan Experience - #221 - Shane Smith

Episode Date: May 28, 2012

Joe sits down with Shane Smith.

the Joe Rogan experience my man my man got here saw the whiskey on the table right away cracked it open we're not even looking at 2 p.m. and he was down. I have to drink off my Vegas. Is that what it is? Dude. How bad was it for you? It was a bad time.

It's a bad time. Where'd you guys go? You went to the fights. We went to the fights. It was awesome. And then that night we went out to, we had 10 vice guys there and three of them I got calls the next

day because the limos had their wallets in them. Three separate guys. Three separate cars. They lost their wallet. Pickpocket dudes must thrive on that. When they see those stumbling guys on Monday morning that are barely together. So wrecked from the weekend.

Well, the car drivers were nice. They were like, hey, I'll come around and bring it back. Right, right, right. They'd be happy and they're going to get a tip anyway. The Vice videos that you guys did for Dan Hardy were fucking awesome, man. That's really good stuff, man. It's really creatively shot. It's intriguing.

The music was good. The choices of when to put music and when to put no sound. It was really interesting, man. I thought it was great. The whole scene where he's driving. I was like, this is fucking cool. I love Dan Hardy. Yeah, he's awesome.

He's quite a personality. I love the other guy, too, Dwayne Ludwig, his opponent. So it was hard to watch one guy lose and one guy win. It always is. But it's nice to see Dan Hardy successful again. I love a story like that, man. I love when a guy takes like this Jamie Varner kid that fought this weekend. Did you see that?

Yeah. He went to some small shows, lost all his motivation, started getting beat by guys that should never beat him. And then all of a sudden, he just, for whatever reason, we'll have to figure it out when you talk to him, decided to get his shit together again and just train like a fucking madman. They give him another shot in the UFC, and he just goes and knocks out Edson Barboza, who's like one of the top ten killers at 155 pounds in the world.

The last time Barboza was in the ring was in Brazil where he fucking wheel kicked Terry Edom in the head and knocked him unconscious. I mean, he's a dangerous, dangerous dude. And Jamie Varner fucked him up, man. It was crazy. I love a story like that. I love a dude who just gets it together.

There you go. It's like one of my favorite things in life. I love a guy who can keep it together, but, man, I love a dude who loses it and gets it back. That's fascinating to me. I'm trying to think of a boxer that lost it and got it back. There's not very many.

The Cinderella story is that they had the boxing film recently about the old guy. That's pretty good. The old time guy who had to fix his arm by picking up the crates. Which guy was that guy.

Which guy was that? Ah, fuck now. How long ago was this movie? Like 10, in the last 10 years. It's Russell Crowe. Is that Russell Crowe? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Braddock.

James Braddock. Yeah. They got a shit together. I didn't see that. No. I saw a clip of it and it looked so hokey Hollywood. I was like, get the fuck out of here. It was hokey.

I hate when a guy who's that good, like Russell Crowe, gets stuck in a movie like that. You're using one of the best actors ever and you got him in this goofy ass movie. This fucking fake ass boxing movie when guys throw fake ass looking punches. There's not a whole lot of guys who have ever pulled off a real good fight scene in a movie. It's hard. It's hard to fake that shit. You know, there's not a whole lot of guys have ever pulled off like a real good fight scene in a movie. Right. It's hard. It's hard to fake that shit. That's the beauty of watching it in real life.

Yeah. It's so crazy. If you've never seen it before, folks, you owe it to yourself for once in your life if you're a UFC fan to get tickets and go to see a live event if it comes anywhere near you. Because it's fucking crazy. Yeah, it's fucking crazy when you're right there too i mean i've i've been like inches away from some of the craziest moments in in combat history combat sports history and the best seats believe it or not are not floor it's about halfway up where you're almost just a little bit over the top of the the yeah you're right you're right the

best seats are not the most expensive ones yeah the uh above angles a great angle especially like that first riser i think yeah the first riser so uh what happened you just kept going you just kept going all through friday all through saturday all through sunday yeah i came straight here damn dude any sleep um in the limos you know it was we were we would pass out and then sort of keep going but yeah a little bit of sleep dude i'm old now so i can't you're a fucking savage you're still out there going wheels off man you still go wheels off the tracks into the woods you still do it huh yeah that's fun isn't it yeah it's the i wish that alcohol didn't have such a penalty

such a steep penalty on your body yeah i love getting drunk yeah you know i mean i'm really responsible about it i uh i try not to do it you know to the point of excess or that i don't ever drive but i do like getting fucked up that's why why I like doing shots in Vegas after a show. It's like, let's just get fucked up. Or when last time Eddie and Tom Segura and I got fucked up in Australia. We're like, we're in Australia. I ain't got no responsibility. Let's get fucking blasted.

Right. You know? But damn, the price is just ruthless on your body. I'm pretty drunk still. It's kind of drunk driving here. What? For real? Yeah, because I woke up and went straight here so i feel like i felt like i was still pretty up from last night you really think that you could have got pulled over and arrested

probably not i probably would be fine but it felt like i was buzzed still from last night damn dude you're going wheels off too too. Both of you motherfuckers putting me to shame. I'm not putting you to shame on anything, dude. You just... I don't know what I'm allowed to say on the air. You can say anything

about whiskey. Don't say too much. Don't get crazy. What are you going to say? I was going to say you gave me something before. Jack Daniels...

The walls have ears, sir. Jack Daniel's honey is my new thing. Doing shots of that is my new thing. It's delicious for poison. As far as poison goes, it's the best stuff. What's your poison, man? Well, I love whiskey, but I like shitty Irish whiskey like Bushmills. Really?

That's the kind of stuff you like? Yeah. The more expensive scotch is, it more tastes like socks. I like to just drink all shitty whiskey. Really? That's interesting. Is that common? I don't know.

I thought the smooth stuff was the stuff that was really old and super expensive. No, it's really smoky. That's really smoky stuff. I like peat, which is Irish whiskey. It tastes like peat. They boil it over peat bog. The only time I've ever had really good whiskey is there was a guy named Josh Lieb. He was one of the writers on News Radio.

Right. Very funny guy. Very nice guy. And he was just a really interesting character. And he was into, like, really old whiskey. And I was like, how much does that cost? And he was like, it was like something saying, like, $100 a glass or something like that. I'm like, what? Really? I'm like, how much does that cost? And he was like, it was like something saying like $100 a glass or something like that. I'm like, what?

Really? I'm like, what the fuck does it taste like? And he let me try some of it. Because he was like, wow, that is a kind of a strange thing to have created. It's a very, very distinct sort of taste. But I wouldn't say it's good. Right? Yeah, no.

None of it's good. No. Just cheap whiskey is good. The feeling of it is good. Yeah. So where are you coming back from man what's the latest world travels well we've been shooting a lot so we shot um january and february in afghanistan whoa which was seriously heavy because we did a story on child suicide bombers and so we got incredible access to kids

who actually were caught before they could ignite their vests. And then we met the senior Taliban guy in Kabul who is supposedly supposed to be in Pakistan, but we actually interviewed him in Kabul. Everyone's freaking out about that because they didn't know he was in Kabul. So you sat down with this guy? Yeah, yeah.

Whoa. What was that like? He's, you know, they don't have a good outfit for sort of looking benevolent. Like, he looked like the devil. He looked really bad and evil. And I asked him about child suicide bombing because they're using younger and younger kids now because they get past the checkpoint. And he said, yeah, you know, they actually admitted on air that they were using children as suicide, as transportation devices for dynamite.

Wow. I mean, that's the best way to describe it? Transportation devices for dynamite. They've essentially said, you know, not only are we willing to kill our own, we'll kill innocent. We'll kill children to further our agenda. That's scary shit. That's fucking scary shit, man. What was it like talking to that guy?

That's fucking scary shit, man. What was it like talking to that guy? Well, you know, so he was arrested for kidnapping Westerners and UN people. And he had been imprisoned and somehow gotten out in Pakistan. So the Pakistanis let him out. And then he had snuck back into Kabul. So you're meeting a guy who's been arrested many times for kidnapping Westerners for political means. So that's weird. Two is you go out and he's surrounded by his Taliban soldiers.

So he's got like, you know, 20 or 30 guys in the courtyard all sort of, you know, checking you out. And then if you say anything wrong or do anything wrong, then, you know, they'll just take you away. They don't give a shit. Right. So it was a bit nerve-wracking, and he's a seriously bad dude. I mean, he was a commander in the Mujahideen, and then he became Taliban and then was one of the senior commanders when they were in control of all of Afghanistan and then had to flee to Pakistan and now is back.

Do they know who let him out and why? Well, the Pakistani government has been sponsoring Taliban almost since its inception. Isn't that incredible that they can get people into jail over there and then they can just sort of let them out? Sure. They're really bad guys that people have tried so hard to capture. They're resisting this whole idea. Well, it's also 100% corrupt.

I mean, you can buy your way out of jail in Pakistan, buy your way out of jail in Afghanistan, but if you're on the right side of the ISI in Pakistan, which the Taliban are, then you can do whatever you want. Well, the ISI were the ones protecting bin Laden. So what is, how does something like this, I mean, whatever you can say whatever you want. Well, the ISI were the ones protecting bin Laden. So how does something like this, I mean, whatever you can say about it, how does something like this get arranged? Well, in Afghanistan we're lucky because there was a guy named Saad Mashani who runs Tolo News, which is the sort of main news, you know, pro-Western, say, news in Afghanistan.

And so he, you know, had a lot of, he can get you sort of see anybody in Afghanistan. And so he got us in to talk to the suicide bombers, the kids, and he got us in to talk to the secret police about that, and he got us in to talk to the Taliban. Wow. So you set up this meeting with this guy. How long was the entire meeting? Maybe an hour.

So how long were you in his presence? The whole time you were in his presence, just an hour? Yeah, an hour. Just straight in, start, get out. How do you get out of that kind of conversation? That seems like a conversation that should take 100 years. Do you have to tiptoe when you're discussing things do you yeah biting your tongue well i had to ask him a lot of unpleasant questions yeah that's what i'm saying

how did you do that well you know for example i'd say um you know you were a muhajirin general you know what it's like to lead troops you know know, these, you know, people trained to fight. How do you feel about sending, you know, six-year-olds, you know, to be transportation devices for bombs? And so you couch it in such a way that, like, you're a general. Right, right, right, right. Because generally a lot of the Taliban fighters themselves, you know, don't condone the suicide bombing, but he did. He said, well, he wouldn't answer it.

He said, there's a Pashtun saying, there's a tiger above me and a river below me, i.e., like, I'm screwed if I do and screwed if I don't. So he wouldn't talk to us about it. Wow. Yeah. How often are they having suicide bombs go off over there? About 200 times a year. So nearly every day there's a suicide bomb, and they're getting more and more effective.

And they just had the first civilian suicide bomb, so not military targets, and it was a complete disaster. They actually did a – they had seven suicide bombers. Not a lot of people maybe know this in America, but there was an empty building across the way from the American embassy and they had these seven suicide attackers actually dressed in burqas with their weapons under the burqas take over the building. And they held the American embassy hostage with like a full-on firefight

in the middle of Kabul for over 24 hours before they could kill these seven dudes. It was crazy. We have footage of it all and it's totally fucking insane. Holy shit. Yeah. But what the Taliban guy says, which is pretty interesting, is that they use suicide attackers and suicide bombers because that's what's going to get America out. And you go, well, you know, fuck you. But in reality, that's true because what happened is America went in to get al-Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

And now our government is negotiating with the Taliban to see exactly how much power they'll have when we leave. So you're like okay well jesus christ what a clusterfuck yeah this none of this is being reported in the mainstream news it's not being certainly not being talked about like that you see karzai sits down with obama and they all seem to be playing nice-nice with each other. And this is all what's going on behind the scenes. Just constant suicide bombing. Yeah, I mean, it's been reported that they've started to negotiate with the Taliban. And I was surprised that there hasn't been sort of more outrage because people, I guess, are so sick of the war, they're just like,

well, fine, you know, they're negotiating with them. So who is negotiating? The United States is? Yeah, and NATO, yeah. And what are they negotiating? Power. When the Americans leave, how much power they'll have, how they're going to share power, et cetera, et cetera.

Wow. Yeah. Isn't that the whole purpose of this, is to try to stop those guys? Yes. And then they're negotiating with them about how much power they get. Yeah. Isn't that the whole purpose of this is to stop those guys? Yes. And then they're negotiating with them about how much power they get. Yes. So what does that mean? That means we lost the war.

Are Americans ever going to say we lost a war? We're like that dude. You could beat our dick into the dirt for 100 years. And we're like, that wasn't even a war. It was a conflict. It was a police action. Yeah. We will never admit that. we don't even admit we

lost vietnam you know we pulled out of vietnam it's like whatever we got tired of kicking your ass so this is a weird country man yeah you know afghanistan they for sure 100 lost afghanistan i mean what did you do yeah what happened you went in to try to get the taliban out now you're negotiating to give them power back. Ten years, all that money, all those lives lost. And for what? What's the end result? Because actually when you're there, you realize, oh, the minute the Americans leave, there will be a civil war.

So it's going to be back in the exact situation of a civil war with a massive Taliban presence in Afghanistan. So 12 years down the drain. My God, what a mess. How horrible must it feel to the families of people who lost children over there? Exactly. And then you just realize this whole thing was a clusterfuck. The thing that gets me is just how does anybody look at Vietnam and not learn? How do we not learn? It's like this is the same shit.

It's the exact same shit. We get manipulated into these wars by, by special interests. And this is exactly what it is, folks. And you've been tricked into thinking that this was some fucking, some justice mission. You know,

exactly. It's madness. What do you think they're over there for? What's the, what's the number one resource they're trying to grab over there? Who? The United States. Well, I think they got into a war.

I shouldn't say the United States. What I should say is the corporations that are trying to profit from this. Look, I think they had to go in because they couldn't just go into Iraq. Iraq was about oil. They couldn't just go into Iraq. They had about oil. They couldn't just go into Iraq. They had to say, well, we have to go get the guys who did this, 9-11. And then they went in. But they could have gone in with a surgical team, got the guys, and got out.

I mean, you don't have to take over the whole country. Right. Why do you think that they had to say, we're going to go into Iraq, excuse me, Afghanistan as well? Why? Well, because Iraq was a complete construct. They made it all up. That's 100%.

They're trying to tie Iraq with 9-11. You're like, well, it had nothing to do with it. Iraq 100% to do with oil. With oil. Well, they manufactured why we went there. 9-11 was like, yes. They already had plans to go in there before, but 9-11 said, yes, we're going to go in there after al-Qaeda.

But they knew that they had to actually go to the place where it was. They had to do the true thing so that they could get what they wanted, which was Iraq. Oh, so you feel like Afghanistan was almost like a secondary operation. 100%, yeah. Whoa. And then it became the primary operation because it was such a clusterfuck. Well, what about all the resources that they keep finding over there? Like they just found trillions of dollars in minerals.

Do you think that that plays a part in the idea to occupy as well? Maybe. I mean, I think that now what's happening is Chinese companies are coming in as they do because they're sort of not blame free, but they're sort of like, oh, we have been conflicted by this conflict. So they try much like they've done in Africa you know wherever America sort of you know piss people off or done bad things and China just comes in

and says oh we'll trade with you that's got to be a trip man well because America goes and sees things and you know for better or for worse let's try to fix it and then there's problems and then they put sanctions on people. China just says, I don't give a shit what you do.

You can do whatever you want to do. Just give me your tritium or whatever it is. Wow, China just rocks it Game of Thrones style. They go old school empire ways. We don't impose any. We got our own fucking problems. We got a billion people living on one patch of dirt. Exactly.

Wow. Yeah, they're always going to beat Americans with that attitude, as far as business goes and getting into creepy places. Right. They'll just sneak right in. So they're in Afghanistan, you think, trying to get these minerals? Yeah, well, for sure. Chinese companies are in there.

I mean, there's a lot of companies in there. But the problem is going to be stability, because the minute Americans pull out, it is going to be stability because the minute americans pull out it's going to be full-on civil war so you can't really go and get minutes when people are shooting rockets at you now knowing what a clusterfuck it is knowing how crazy it is was it like being over there you as a person as an outsider a canadian in fact out there watching this fucking chaos and filming it what was that like for you you know i i got on the plane to come home and i was on my ipod i need a fucking drink now i was on my ipod

or the ipad and you know there's a plane you know it was like soaring through the air and you can see space and all this stuff and because when you're in afghanistan it sort of feels like 5 000 years ago because everything's sort of, you know, these sort of mud huts, and it's sun-baked, and it looks like it hasn't, a lot of it looks like it hasn't changed in 5,000 years. So you're really sort of, wow, this is modernity. You know, this is the modern age.

This is the 21st century because we have all these crazy things that you can sort of tweet from Afghanistan whatever, technology but then these at the same time you have this sort of devolution where we're sending kids

to blow our shit up because it's effective and so there's been a lot of what I've seen this past year of shooting, which is it feels like half of humanity is just going completely backwards. Now seeing that and then flying back into New York City, what the fuck does that contrast feel like you take these mad trips and then when you come home and you see like what's possible at the apex of civilization right now as far as like you know cities and a place where you can go safely and a place that doesn't have you know guns and bombs blowing up constantly i mean no wonder why they that's where the terrorist attacks occurred no wonder why that's

where the september 11th attacks occurred right right? For sure. I mean, it was, you know, incredibly successful. You know, when you fly in, you still see the Twin Towers out there. Actually, we start our piece with that because we say, actually, the most successful suicide bombing of all time was 9-11 suicide attack because it started the Iraq war. It started Afghanistan, you know, both of which are still going on, and completely polarized the world. And actually, suicide attacks were, and when we did the research, it was a few months ago, and I've had a few ales, so don't quote me on the exact percentages, but the percentages are insane. It was like suicide attacks were three to five percent of all terrorism before 9-11 and now they're like 97 percent of all jesus christ because it's so successful what what is it like as a sane rational person traveling around to the

most fucked up places on earth and seeing humanity at its worst what the fuck does that feel like that's a hard question it's so you're such a nice guy you're such a jovial guy every time i see you you're smiling and hugging people you seem like such a warm and friendly person for you to get thrust constantly into these horrific situations where you get to see people just handed the shittiest fucking hand of cards in the history of life. Like, here you are, 2012, the internet's here, the fucking, you know, the age of information is here, but you're involved in some sort of crazy religious war, and people are blowing themselves up when they're six. You're in the worst spot.

Yeah, well, I mean, the reason why I'm happy is because you're thankful for what you have when you see what everybody else doesn't have. Were you happy before you did all this? Yeah, I'm a pretty happy guy, yeah. So it just enhanced your happiness to see how fortunate you are and your circumstances. Yeah. Fuck, man. That's a serious trip to be spending uh a large percentage of your time

on this earth yeah seeing the the terrible spots most people are trying to fly into hawaii for the weekend and chill and you're you know what i mean you're spending your your your job is to go to some of the scariest parts on earth yeah um yeah it doesn't seem that freaky at the time because you just you want to get the story and like yes we got into you know somalia we're going you know we're going to hang out with the pirates you're like yes we've been working on that for a while did you guys go to the somalia and hang out with the pirates yeah oh my god and then you but you then you get in there you get in there and you're like you're nervous and you know i'm fucking you didn't think they would kidnap you well we paid them to kidnap us because it's you pay the kidnapping fee how much is the kidnapping fee 15 grand so you pay them what they would charge for a kidnapping but not to kidnap

you whoa yeah which is fine i mean it's like just saying well you know 15 grand seems pretty reasonable that's all it is yeah but isn't it more for other people if they catch like some billion people we did a bunch of shooting we shot a lot in kenya with uh with uh sort of you know refugees and you know we shot around puntland and now we're shooting a mogadishu to round it up but uh it depends on the on the but anyway so when you're there all you're thinking about is you know we gotta get the shot are we gonna get this we gotta get that and it's only when you come back and you're sort of having dinner somewhere and they're like where

were you oh i was with the pirates in mogadishu jesus christ but you don't really think about it so much at the time when a lot of people are horrified about the somali pirates and they're like this is a terrible situation but what they don't understand is that those people really got fucked into that situation. They had almost no choice. The Somali pirates started out when these Somali soldiers would go after people who were dumping toxic waste off their shores. It was killing all their fish and poisoning their people. And they were a fisherman's culture. I mean, could you imagine you're a culture of fishermen,

and they don't have a history of going after people and kidnapping people. They're just trying to fucking make a living, and all of a sudden some assholes are driving around in their boats, floating around a couple miles out, just dumping horrible shit into their ocean. And it's fucking up the whole ocean. And they get to see it right before their eyes. The Mother Earth becoming poisoned.

The fish poisoning and people getting poisoned and sick. So they started kidnapping them. They started kidnapping those people and demanding ransom from these companies that had poisoned their water. And then they started saying, you know what, fuck it. Let's just kidnap anybody who drives by. That's what we do now. And that's what it became.

Those asshole corporations that were dumping their shit off the Somalia coast, they made monsters. You know, those people should be fucking held responsible for a cleanup just as much as they should be responsible for a toxic cleanup. They should be responsible for a cultural cleanup. You know, if they could actually find out who dumped all that shit and all the different corporations involved it's probably a whole lot of them they could probably get a fuckload of money out of it if the world had any code sort of a real court you know well the problem is is a lot of it was radioactive waste yes so it irradiated the sea and irradiated the beaches and before that the Chinese Japanese

Portuguese and Spanish fishing companies completely chinese japanese portuguese and spanish fishing companies completely overfished it and then irradiated it so they were totally fucked there's actually a great movie called uh fishing without nets which is um about that about like they were all fishermen and now there's no fish so they just take the same boat out and then they then they go wow we're right we're working on a story there right now about the American government is financing sort of Islamist extremists to fight al-Shabaab, who are the bad boys over there. And so we're trying to figure out if that's true.

So the story is that the American government is funding Muslim extremists who are going to fight these bad guys in Afghanistan. Al- bad guys show up exactly the same as what happened in afghanistan when they had deed against the soviet and then they became the taliban yeah jesus christ yeah we just don't ever learn how but how does one fix this mess that we're in how does how does one put the world on its back you know straight on its axle or on its axis? Or does that ever happen? Is this just the way people roll? We're just fucking constantly involved in chaos and love at the same time?

Well, you know, a lot of people meddle in other people's stuff. And then we have to go in. We have to save them. And you're like, you know, we have to save them and you're like you know we have to save them from whom themselves you know like oh you know saddam was such a bad guy as opposed to who you know supposed to like charles taylor like right you know so there's a lot of geopolitics and you know sort of geopolitical you know gamesmanship has been you cause of a lot of these problems. But now it's 99% always economics. So if you look at we have resource-based wealth.

One in every three countries with resource-based wealth has a civil war every four years, whereas the remaining countries don't have any civil wars or haven't had a civil war for 100 years. The percentages are insane. So now, like Afghanistan, you were just saying, but a lot of the African countries now, they're like, oh, you know, rare earth metals that didn't used to be worth money are now in every cell phone. So, you know, the war in the Congo is now the 10th bloodiest war in history. And it's all because of coltan, which is needed to make iPads and iPhones.

It's so ironic that at the height of technology, the iPad 3, front-facing camera, HD screen, if you follow that all the way down, there's an African boy that's picking out this mineral out of a hole in the earth. It's really, that spectrum is quite fascinating I mean it's almost from I mean that spectrum goes back to just the invention of tools and you know figuring out iron and shit and fake point pulling stuff out of the earth all the way to the height of technology we're weird man we are fucking strange human beings are so bizarre how much do you look at life i mean your your experiences are far more extreme than mine and most people on this planet i think how do you

do you look at this sometimes like it's a big work of fiction do you look at life sometimes like this is just fucking so nutty it doesn't seem like it could be real i mean if anybody has seen the nuttiest you might have you might have witnessed some of the nuttiest shit on earth and come back to talk about it. I mean, you've got, in one life, think of all the fucking places you've been. Does it feel real? What we always say about vice,

what's the political sort of stance of vice? We say we don't have one. The modern condition is absurd. There's the absurdity of fucking of us. We don't have one. The modern condition is absurd. There's the absurdity of fucking this mother. It's crazy. Like, it's fucking nuts. And then when you go out and see exactly how nuts it is, it keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier.

Cities get bigger. Stories are more insane. You know, we were just shooting in Karachi, which is a completely failed city. They have 100 plus kill killings a night you can hire a killer there to kill someone for 10 bucks actually we rode around with one of these contract killers and uh it was it's just shocking you rode around with a contract killer yeah what the fuck is that like? Well, Saru Shalvi, my partner, did that story because I

wouldn't have lasted long in doing that story in Karachi. Why wouldn't you have lasted? Well, Karachi is run by gangs, by like Haqqani Network, who are Taliban-related sort of mafia gang family.

And then they have, you know, various Balochistan gangs, and then they have, you know, various Balochistan gangs, and then they have, you know, the heroin trafficking gangs. And they're all fighting each other continually. It's insanely violent, and, you know, and basically you can't, if you're Caucasian, you can't sort of, there's no tourists there, for example. Like, there's no reason for you to be there.

It's just complete Wild West shit. It's so hard for people in Pasadena to believe, you know, driving around in Pasadena, that this coexists on the earth at the same time. You have to picture it's like Escape from New York or something. I mean, Karachi is bigger than New York. And it's just. What part of the world is it again? It's Pakistan, but it's on the ocean.

And it's a huge city. And it's just complete fucking anarchy. Complete fucking chaos. Whoa. Whoa! It's a war. It's a war zone. How many millions of people live in this city?

18 to 20 million. Jesus Christ! But all just going crazy. 18 to 20 million people live in wild west how do we not know about this how do we not know about this that's incredible well people know that karachi's bad but not like like you described it you described it like a movie like if steven spielberg decided to make a movie about that and told you that that city's going down right now on earth you'd be like bitch you don't think i'd know about that it is a movie i mean you don't you think that's something that would be like really really popular

if if no one ever talks about that if they made a movie right now about that part of the world described the way you describe it like a like some crazy horror movie about civilization gone wrong that's what it is a mad max reality reality that's existing, coexisting right now, just as big as New York. Yeah. We'd go, no way. You know what I mean? We'd go, no way.

Yeah. Yeah, Karachi is complete chaos. Scary as hell. Scary as hell. The Pakistanis are like, no one goes there. Why would you go there? No one goes there, but 20 million people live there. Yeah, yeah. That is crazy. It's crazy. Just shit burning in the streets. are like, no one goes there. Why would you go there? No one goes there, but 20 million people live there.

Yeah, yeah. That is crazy. It's crazy. Just shit burning in the streets. People, pop, pop, pop, people getting killed. Oh, my God. Like running gun battles through the streets. So you couldn't go.

So you said, what does your correspondent look like? Sure, she's Pakistani. She's Pakistani. He, yeah, yeah. Oh, he, he's Pakistani. He also snuck into the gun markets, the Taliban gun markets, when the Americans said that the war was over and the Taliban were coming across into the Northwest Frontier Province and getting a thousand handmade guns. They make their own

guns by hand, like little kids make the guns. And a thousand were going over every day. And we're like, well, if the war is over, why is it that there are a thousand were going over every day and we're like well if the war is over why is it that there are a thousand guns across the border every day and so we broke that story that was sarush and he uh he just went back to pakistan and his story of karachi is fucking insane he's got unique access with you know does he have video does he have footage oh yeah yeah when can we see this he has a video uh i think that's to go up within the next month. I'll buy stuff. You've got to let me know the moment that comes up.

I've got to see that. He has a video of him riding around with this contract killer, obviously. He's just sort of going from thing to thing with his gun. And they wear these moped helmets. So you can't see who they are. And that's an insane thing, too. They kill people for $10? $10. and it's, you know, that's an insane thing too. Kill people for 10 bucks? 10 bucks.

There's a increase or maybe it's just an increase of awareness or our awareness, but there's an increase in sort of assassination availability and sort of there's been a price decrease or whatever, you know, because now we go and we see like in Karachi, they have contract killers everywhere.

We were shooting a lot recently in Juarez and in northern Mexico and there they have centenarios that get paid 200 bucks a month and their job is just to kill people like they're just the fucking muscle that's their assassins you? And when we were there, Juarez is actually the most dangerous town in the world for journalists. It's the same as... So there's El Paso on the Texas side, same city,

and it's one of the safest cities in America. And then you go right across the border and it's one of the most dangerous cities in the world, but it's the most dangerous city in the world for journalists, number one one why is that because it's the drug cartels that run it and they're smugglers and so they don't want anyone to ever film their shit so instead of like coming up to you when you have your camera and saying hey why are you carrying that camera what are you shooting they just see a camera go bang no point in asking a question and they make

a lot of if you write about something they cut off your head and they write the story on your flesh with blood and all this stuff and so that you know journalists just don't go there anymore wow that is kind of crazy that we're right next to a third world country involved in like the biggest drug war in the history

of the world yeah most Americans are blissfully unaware well we shot we shot a big piece on that. Of course you did. Did you get embedded? Well, we got embedded with people who are fighting. This is a pretty freaky story, though. I don't know how much of it I'm allowed to say.

Oh, really? Give him another drink. Give him another drink. I can say a lot. But it's a very complex story and we're going to cause some waves. But basically, we were down in Mexico. We've done some stuff with the cartels. Incredibly difficult.

Most difficult stories to get right now today are cartel stories because they just kill everybody. But we started hanging out with the people who were fighting the cartels, who are Mormon colonies that's originated in America so that they could keep practicing polygamy, went to northern Mexico, and they formed polygamist Mormon colonies there. And because the colonies did well, the cartels started targeting them and started kidnapping them and killing them. And so the Mormon colonies started arming themselves

and fighting against the cartels so there's been a war between the Mormon colonies and the and the and the narcos and we went down there to live in the colonies and we were hanging out

with the LeBaron's who I don't know if you've ever heard of but they have a crazy story of they had a one of their brethren believed that he had the power of blood atonement so he was killing all the people in the church that were trying to you know mess with him so he had about 30 or maybe had 50 children nearly nearly 50 children and he had them work as assassins for him in this in this bloody war that they had down there this is all happening not in the 1880s this is happening in the 1980s this is happening in like blues brothers 80s oh my god and so they have this crazy war but they arm themselves right because they're all fighting it within the family and then because

of that when the narcos attacked them they were sort of armed and ready to go and badasses. So they started fighting them. But they're actually just one colony over from the other people that they came down with who are the Romneys. So Mitt Romney's father was born in one of these colonies, the land. And then they now this is the Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico. Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico? Mitt Romney's father was born in a polygamous colony in northern Mexico, Chihuahua in colonial Dublin

and actually he ran for president and they said they brought up the fact that he might have been an illegal immigrant and that he was born in a polygamous colony in Mexico.

Right. So his presidential candidacy didn't last long. We say that in the piece. But his sons can sneak in. Actually, we say that out of all the candidates, Republican candidates, Mitt Romney had the staunchest, you know, stand against immigration. And, you know, it's, you know, and he sort of ignores his roots and he never talks about it. And you say, well, I understand why. It's completely logical because, you know, he wanted to veto the DREAM Act and he said publicly he'd veto the DREAM Act, although his father is the poster child for the DREAM Act.

But you say he would veto the DREAM Act because he wants to get away from these stories because the stories, when you dig into them, are fucking insane. Of course he doesn't want to talk about it because polygamy battles with drug lords, and complete kidnapping and insanity do not a good presidential candidate make. How is this not mainstream? How is this, is it going to come out during the presidential campaign? Yeah, it's going to come out. We have great footage.

Mitt Romney, is he the official nominee yet on the Republican side? I mean, he obviously... He will be, yeah. He will be, but he's not official, right? No, no, but he will be. But, yeah, for sure it's going to come out. I mean, the thing is, you know, it can't not come out. People have written a little bit about it, not very much about it.

When you see a guy that's that flawed and has such an obvious story that's so beyond fucked, does it make you feel like this has all been set up? Does it make you feel like they put him in there because they knew he couldn't win? It doesn't make sense to me that that's the best that the Republicans can do. I've met a lot of smart Republicans. I've met a lot of bad motherfuckers who are just conservative and right wing, and maybe they're a little too Bible-y. But I've met some pretty strong-minded

very articulate republicans how come they never get there how come we're dealing with these these like second rate hacks these guys who just fucking change their opinion when the wind blows like how does a guy like that get to a position to be running for president because that seems like that's a weak example of what a politician a leader leader can be. We've seen the JFKs. We've seen the Bill Clintons. We've seen the people that have these strong voices. When you have a guy who's as wishy-washy as Mitt Romney, who comes from a fucking religious cult that was in northern Mexico,

I'm like, really? That's the best you can do? A multi-multi-millionaire whose father was from another country but is against immigration? What? Father was from another country but is against immigration. What? I mean, look, the rumor is that they knew that the economy is going to keep going down and jobs aren't going to get better, et cetera, et cetera.

So they said, okay, we'll just put up an also ran and then we'll get the next two terms after that because the economy is going to be shit anyway. Put Jeb Bush on tap. There you go for 2016 but i mean mitt romney you know that it's it's it's funny because they want the anti obama you know so they just want to sort of they don't understand yeah obama's the first example i've ever seen in my life of it where it's pretty clear it doesn't matter anymore whatever it takes to get into office is, once the politician gets there,

that's all out the window. All it is about there is keeping everything moving the exact same way it's moving right now, making sure these corporations make fucking billions of dollars, making sure that the rights of the civilians get shrunk more and more every day until it gets to this global scenario that we have where the whole world is controlled by money and money is the government and that's that's it seems to be where we're moving towards

an actual real government especially this idea of america what it was supposed to be you know a government by the people we were going to set it up we were going to govern ourselves we're going to have a very strict set of laws and checks and balances in place to make sure this doesn't get out of hand and become what it used to be doesn't work that way how do we fix this shane smith how do we fix this you're the world travel i think it's going to get worse because actually money does rule everything and i think that you probably always has but you know if you look at communism, the synthesis of communism is that the market regulates itself, and you have a small thing for infrastructure.

Same thing with capitalism, David Ricardo, Adam Smith. The free market sort of doesn't need government. And I believe that both were apologies for what was happening in the Industrial Revolution because everyone was looking around saying, this is fucked. Kids working in coal mines, all that shit. But the reason why I say it's going to get worse, and I'm actually an optimist, I'm not a doom and gloom guy, but is that money runs everything, but the problem is the money is running out. So you have kids.

In Spain you have, under 27 years old, 50% unemployment. So you have all these young kids and there's nothing scarier than a young kid with no future. You've just taken away his future. They're, you know, 17, 18, 19 year old kid. What, what the fuck does he have to lose? And you've seen the riots in Athens. You've seen the riots in London. You've seen the riots in Paris. You've seen the riots in, I mean, Tahrir Square. You've seen them all over the world. There's even riots in Montreal this year. There you go.

And young people are getting more and more frustrated. I should say protests in Montreal. They didn't really riot. And then the problem is that, you know, well, look, they have riots here now. They have Occupy Wall Street here. And it's not going away. It's just, you know, sort of getting more and more subversive and here you know and it's it's not going away it's just you know sort of getting more and more subversive and they're you know doing their own uh content networks and everything now but you know when you have young kids rioting with nothing to lose

then you're going to look for radical economic solutions and radical economic solutions mean radical political parties radical political parties hate each other. And it's the same sort of scenario you have that started World War II, incredible depression. You know, somebody comes up with what seemingly is sort of fixing the depression. Oh, we're all going to do that. No, we're going to do the antithesis of that. So you have communists versus fascists, et cetera, et cetera. the antithesis of that, so you have communists versus fascists, etc., etc., and both extreme sides of the spectrum, and then they end up warring, fighting. And what's happening now is Europe is just fucked,

and it's going to get worse and worse and worse, and there's going to be more and more radical politics, more and more kids in the streets. And that's when I get worried and say, hold on a second what are we going to do? Wait until there's you know militias running down Berlin main street

fighting other fucking police and whatever civil war until we step in and say hey can we not fix this? Because it's just getting fucking worse and worse and worse. And sure you see bad shit in Afghanistan, you see bad shit in South America. We just saw it in Caracas where it's insane, higher murder rate than America, you know, with 20 million people population, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But Europe is about to fucking explode. It's about to explode. This all has to do with the adoption of the euro. Is that what fucked this whole sister situation up? Cause the, the whole, cause Europe is all connected. All the countries are connected now.

I think, I think it's, we've been in a depression because what's the difference between a recession and depression and depression goes on for, you know, it's a cyclical economic downturn. It lasts, you know, a longer time than a recession.

Well, because of quantitative easing, all these things, economic things, we sort of kept it at bay. But right now, Europe's already back in recession. China's slowed down. India's slowed down. America's very shortly going to slow down behind them. There's no way we can't. And you go, okay, well, it's another five years. So that means, okay, well, it started started in 2008 it's going to be you know eight years nine years before we get out of this so economically we had all these things that we tried to fix and it didn't work so now there's just no money no money no jobs in the system so young people are the ones who get forced out the problem is is young people are the first ones who are going to get out and get a stick and start bashing shit up because why wouldn't they of

course yeah i mean i've said that's the biggest problem with this country is that you know young people are the first ones who are going to get out and get a stick and start bashing shit up. Because why wouldn't they? Of course. Yeah, I mean, I've said that's the biggest problem with this country is that, you know, everybody wants to fix everything that's happening everywhere, but they don't want to fix what's going on in the impoverished areas of this country. There was something that was released today that a study, or I read today, rather, a study on a message. It was on my message board, but I forget what the study was, but it said that 72% of black people in this country are born to single parents and raised by single parents. That's fucked.

That's just fucked. You know, if we want to, like, start fixing things, we've got to fix this country, too. I mean, this country could fall apart just as easily. When you look at giant patches where kids are growing up without any hope, and that's the most fucked thing, when a child, like as you said, has no future. They feel they have no future, and they're angry. They feel robbed. Well, you know, you're saying, well, how did it feel to come back to New York from Afghanistan? Well, it reminded me so much of 9-11, but it was like this stark thing.

Whereas what fucked me up more was when you're in Mexico, like five miles from the border, and shit is fucked up. Like some of you are just saying some of the crazy shit you've seen. Generally, it makes you feel better about your life. You feel, oh, I'm happy. I have all these health and things. But I went to a church run outside of Juarez by a sort of born-again pastor who was an ex-junkie and he takes in sort of the the refuse of of of Juarez into this church and it's like a lot of you know people with with severe psychological problems people with severe um uh drug addictions and a lot of, there was two feral children, not children, they were adults

now, but they had grown up feral, like on the streets, sort of thing, one sort of barked like a dog, and, but you go and they live in these cells, because some of them have to be locked in, and like, there was, you know, people with open colostomy bags and stuff, with flies buzzing around their innards and stuff and this thing and you're walking around and it was like just crazy fucking just degradation like feral people you know and and and like a nightmare like it was crazy you know and and they they all he has the pastor gets them to paint and all their paintings are fucking insane like so heavy and depressing

and a lot of them are missing limbs because of you know gangrene and and so when you come from shooting there and then when i was just in vegas for the fights and you walk around and we went out like to you know nightclub after the fights and it's just chanel and louis vuitton and this and that and like everybody you know on the stores on the way to the nightclub and then everyone dressed up. As human beings, we just want to forget. We just want entertainment, TV, more entertainment, spectacular shit, just fucking lots of stuff

because we like to bury our heads in the sand because that's just right here. That shit is happening just fucking, you don't have to go to Afghanistan. It's five miles from our border. That's what you think when you come back from places like that. By the way, all the guns, when we were there, it's the largest hall of ammunition. It was over 250,000 rounds of ammunition, 7.6 ammunition. It was coming from America.

And I was like, oh, that's, you know, strange. They're like, no, all the guns are coming from America. All the guns, all the ammunition is coming from America. All the drugs comes up from here. And all the money comes from America. Well, what was that one crazy DEA idea? They were going to sell guns. Fast and the Furious.

Yeah, they sold guns. With markers. Yeah, so that they could find out who was using the guns. And those guns were directly used to kill agents. Yeah. Well, they figured that was a scam. It was a scam. Yeah.

And that they just pretended that it was a mission. It was a scam. Yeah. And that they just pretended that it was a mission. Yeah. Or, I mean, just the fact that they could ever justify selling fucking guns. Lots of guns. To Mexican drug dealers. They had the.

How could they possibly think that that would. They had a killer caught with the CIA, the old director of the CIA's ceremonial pistol. Whoa. Like, you know, it has like director of the CIA on it. Holy shit. Holy shit. Just the fact that they could say that that was an operation. And they could say

this is what we're going to do. The way we're going to track the network, we have to actually sell them real guns. Yeah. The Mexicans laugh at it. It's hilarious. They're like, this is what the Americans are doing, just giving free guns to the narcos. In order to find out what rapists are like,

I'm going to have to go get my duck sucked a lot. I'm going to really have to find out what it's like to rape people. So I'm going to have to do some raping. What? The fuck? How is no one getting... Why is no one going to jail for that well i mean god knows that the whole i mean the majority of the police down in mexico are corrupt so every time the americans try to do something with them like it just gets you know well how's

no one in the american dea going to jail for that i don't know man that's just seems like the most ridiculous idea of all time yeah the worst guy the worst guy i've ever heard about is a guy named aldrich keen and he's a narco that was fighting one of the mormon colonies but um he's famous for uh you know, he's obviously a drug dealer, and so he went into a drug rehab center. Or he didn't, but he had his people massacre them all, 18 different people in a drug rehab center, just for being in a drug rehab center, you know.

So he's a very bad guy. And he kidnapped and killed some of the Mormon, the LeBaron family. But he is famous for getting caught on the other side of the border, on the American side of the border, with a Mexican military convoy filled with something like 15 tons of pot. And they had a firefight with the American Border Patrol and then they came back into Mexico and they knew who it was. They knew he had had a

firefight, but he went back to where he lives, which is eight miles down the road from the Mormons and the Mexican government didn't do anything. Whoa. I got a frog in my throat. Jesus Christ. Fuck.

Yeah, Al Rakeem. What a ballsy move. You want a water or something, man? Yeah, maybe. Reach it. There you go. If you need more, we have a fridge right behind you. I'll grab you one.

Or I'll get some cigarettes. Does that'll help? Yeah. You think that'll help? Maybe. Maybe. What a ballsy move. That guy gets in a fucking armored carvoy with weed and drives it to America.

And has a firefight with him. Holy shit. Now, how are these Mormons getting around in Mexico? Do they all take convoys now? Are they heavily armed and shit? They're heavily armed, yeah. So do they drive around with tanks? What do they do?

Because I know a lot of the drug cartels, they have tanks now. They have trucks with guns and stuff. So the Mormons drive around like they're in war. Yeah. Wow. What a nutty thing it around like they're in war. Yeah. Wow. What a nutty thing it must be for them, huh? Yeah. Living in Mexico.

They are at war. And they can't get out of there. Are they trying to plan to get out of there? They can get out of there. A lot of them have American passports. But they don't want to do it. But it's not like hanging with Mexicans. These are like big, super tall, cowboy hat wearing sort of Texas dudes.

But they're in Mexico. They're in Mexico, yeah. And they're going to war with these drug cartels. I would think that if you're ever in a place where you're at war with drug cartels, it's time to get the fuck out of Dodge. Yeah, well, we asked them that. What'd they say? Well, this is my country.

This is my home. It's hard to leave your home. Wow. Fuck that it is. That's some silly nonsense to me. Yeah. You know, I think people have to get over that idea. You should live anywhere.

Get your loved ones together and move where it's safe. The fuck out of here. If you have money, I mean, if you have enough to do it, I can understand if you have to fight for your property,

but that's a lost cause, that place. Yeah. But, you know, they don't leave. I mean, I had the same answer when I was in South Africa

and we were shooting and there's like a lot of violence in South Africa. And I kept saying to people people why don't you leave this is our home those people are idiots that's crazy that's just it's so ridiculous if you know there's a better spot on earth where this kind of kind of shit doesn't happen you can live your life home is home invasions and and assassinations and institutionalized rapes and all these things are just part of the daily equation then it's then fuck it i'm not doing that yeah yeah i agree yeah the fuck man how do we get the rest of the world anywhere near where we are here right now is that possible

can the human condition evolve so much that we could get everybody on a higher level all across the world? Or is this just a part of the program? The spectrum always goes from the worst case scenario to the best case scenario and every shade in between. Is that just how things keep moving? Is that just the conflict, the yin and yang? Is that the pull and push of life? That's the best question I've heard in a long time, but I think it's unanswerable. If anybody would have seen it,

the spectrum as broad as humanly possible, I would think it would be you. I mean, the thing is, you see some things that are great, like we did a story on these scientists who are developing machines that can sort of harvest the atmosphere. So they can take out carbon and all the harmful things in the atmosphere

and then sort of reduce it to CO2, which you can make. You can actually activate algae for biofuel or you can combine them with other elements and lots of solar to make hydrogen cells and it might sound like you know we're clinging at straws here but when you start to think wow you know if we had unlimited if we have unlimited solar power you have unlimited carbon a it stops well warming but b you can make you know hydrogen cells or biofuels and then you say wow that would be interesting because you could actually you could put hydrogen cells or biofuels. And then you say, wow, that would be interesting

because you could actually put hydrogen cells into, like, every new car. So every new car had to have that, so that's a whole new industry that we would run because of the patents. The only effluent that comes out of hydrogen cells is pure HO2, which we're running out of water. So you say, hey, it could build a new economy, build this new world. And so when you start talking to the scientists who are really smart guys and realizing, well, you can sort of regulate the amount of harmful toxins in the atmosphere, there is sanity. There are people coming up with ideas. This could start a whole

new economy, sort of set us out on this great right track. And you're like, wow, and you feel really good. And maybe we are going to be smart. Maybe we are going to put these machines next to every factory. Maybe we are going to do this great stuff. And then the problem is you go to Africa or Southeast Asia. And we did a story on a lot of people are going,

Europeans and Americans are going to Thailand, you know, to get medical vacations, they call them. So you go there and you get a facelift and two weeks on vacation on Boracay or whatever. And so, you know, then you can get transplants, you can get this, you can get that. So more and more people are going for medical procedures. So it started a war between the ambulance gangs to take bodies, you know, because let's say you hurt yourself, well, more often than not you're not going to arrive alive because they want to harvest your pieces. So Bangkok body snatchers. So there's like street gangs that fight each other

over the sort of dead and dying. So say if someone falls and breaks their leg, they're not going to take you to the hospital. They're going to take your organs. Well, if you're injured, they're going to make sure that you don't arrive alive. And then they harvest your organs. So they kill you.

Yes, they let you die. They let you die? Yeah. They don't kill you? They let it slowly take you? They don't give you medical attention? We never saw anybody sort of overtly being killed. We've heard about it, but... You don't want to say it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, they don't seem like they're ethical. So I wouldn't imagine that would be outside the realm of possibility. But I understand exactly where you're going with that. So on one side you have this sort of hope.

You know what, we're going to get our shit together. We're going to have new fucking energy systems that aren't going to arm crazy people and all this stuff. And then you go see that and you're like, wait a minute, we're parasites. We're bad, bad people. You're like, wait a minute, we're parasites, we're bad, bad people. Yeah, I did this thing before my Showtime special in 2005 where I talked about human beings being a really complicated form of bacteria. I've had this idea a few times while tripping and inside tanks and even on planes. I've had this feeling like if you looked at the earth as a life force and you looked at human beings, you would say, well, that's a growth.

You would say, look, it's everywhere. It sucks all the fish out of the ocean. It throws waste in there and kills all the rest of the life. It fucks everything it touches. Everywhere it lives, there's brown smoke. You burn down giant chunks of it it grows right back and even gets bigger it's like this is like some crazy growth i'm like if you didn't understand human if we you were so alien that human beings weren't identifiable as an individual

you would you would look at them as a giant huge swarm of life on top of this other life you wouldn't see individual people you would see it just like mold and i said that maybe we're here to eat the sandwich maybe we are like mold on a sandwich that maybe we're just a really super complicated thing that's here to fuck things up that's why at the pinnacle of technology the best we have to do is the shit that fucks things up the most like nuclear power nuclear waste you know and and all sorts of other crazy experiments that are probably going on right now that we're not even aware of anti-matter type shit they're working on anti-matter weapons and an area 51 what does

that mean i don't even know i don't even know but it can't be good it's like what nuclear power doesn't kill everybody quick enough you fuckhead you need to develop something that kills everyone instantaneously we have enough bombs to blow up the whole world like how many times over and they're like yeah but it doesn't do it quite as good as i think can be done so they continue to make nuttier and nuttier weapons you see that uh the jet drone they've developed that goes something like 18 times faster than the speed of sound. Some insane amount. Just to get over there and fuck things up as quick as possible. We don't need any better weapons.

We have weapons that we don't even have the first clue about now. Well, it's what I've... Our nature as animals, as intelligent animals, is to keep trying to make things better. It's like if we stopped right now with cell phones and said we good we good with this we can talk we can text this is good enough right can we just stop right there no one would

take that people would go crazy four years from now they'd be fucking so math or iPhone this fucking clunky old hunk of shit like why can't they have something better than this now people would be angry we we have a deep desire for technological innovation. At the end of that is destruction. At the very peak of technology, the best we're capable of is blowing shit up. It makes you wonder if that's really what we're here for. It makes you wonder if we are not some weird technological caterpillar that's becoming a butterfly. And all of our desires and ego and the need to get pussy and drive a fast car all that

shit really is just pushing the society and the society is pushing technology and it's technology one day someone's gonna press a fucking button and the whole thing see now i'm not gonna be so smiley anymore maybe that's the way it's supposed to be though well my theory is my theory is that that's uh no that that's that's how the universe gets born and dies with us and that the bang bang is really just a bunch of scientists with autism on anti-anxiety medication and they make a big bang machine and one of them presses it and the whole universe starts all over again and it starts again with planets forming and then life forms and then dinosaurs the dinosaurs get

hit by an asteroid billions of years go by the whole deal and then one guy presses a button on a big bang machine he makes boom and it starts all over again why not if the unit if it's possible for the universe to be the universe that's possible too it's possible that it's just a bunch of scientists with autism and every 14 billion years they blow the whole fucking thing sky high and it starts from scratch uh well definitely uh we're gonna have to eat drink and be merry then because we're all going that's what i'm talking about what do you think when you talk to these people that are like i mean for you you are a realist you're a dude who's seen the dark parts of the world when you talk to people and they you know they start hitting you with some fucking power positive thinking type shit and hit you with the secret or eckhart to people and they you know they start hitting you with some fucking power positive thinking type shit

And hit you with the secret or Eckhart Tolle and you know like do you do you want to like when that whole the secret? Thing was going on do you want to say listen your fucking environment is real okay? You don't create it with your mind It's real there really are parts of the world that suck and positive thinking is not gonna get you out of Mogadishu, right? Well We are on Pasadena. I mean like you know positive thing got you here yeah there you go uh you know new york tends to be a bit more cynical and la tends a bit to be a bit more it's the weather positive thinking weather and pretty girls that's what it does it for real yeah and space space um the fact that it's not you don't get rained on hardly ever. It's never cold. That's huge.

That East Coast winter thing is that's bullshit. That's retarded. Everybody gets angry. Yeah. Your face hurts. You know, that's just no good. You get stuck on the highway. Ever get stuck on the highway.

Yeah. The whole fucking highway shut down. Black ice. That's always fun. Black ice. That shit doesn't happen here. Doesn't happen here at ice. That's always fun. Black ice. That shit doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen here at all. So people are more relaxed.

Yeah, more positive. It really is that. Plus, the people that landed on the East Coast were all animals who were so fucking fed up with Europe that they got on boats. They got on boats, and they went across an ocean. Before, there was TV, okay? And they decided to move to this new country that they didn't have probably even have good pictures of right you know someone just told them there's a land of plenty and they decided to get in a boat and give it a shot those people are psycho right i mean those are some really adventuresome fucking people well those were the

those were the first ones those were all adventuresome but the ones you said okay you're gonna go out that way we don't know how it is, and we don't really know if you're going to get there. And by the way, there's all kinds of tribes that are going to try to scalp you and rape your daughters and all this shit as you go through there. And there's mountains that are probably impassable. And you're going to have to eat your kids.

Just go. Go west. And it was when we say frontier, it was like the frontier. It was, we don't know what's next. We don't know what's beyond there. And so for those people to say, I'm like an Irish fucking potato picker, and I lived in New York for three years, and that was no good.

So I'm going to go out, and I'm just going to go out into fucking absolute wilderness where everybody hates me, and the animals want to eat me, and I'm just going to keep going until I hit the other ocean it's crazy and it's amazing how quick it happened yeah it was just like bing whoosh within a couple hundred years a giant fucking swarm of millions of people had completely populated this one continent that before that you know the last time people came across here was the ice age there wasn't really a lot of human beings living here what most people don't know was in north america just a little over 10,000 years ago, half of it was covered by a mile of ice. I mean, wrap your head around a mile of fucking ice above your head.

And that covered half this country. This is this country that we don't understand, like, the history of humanity in the world. We don't understand the history of humanity in the world. We have a very patchy sort of knowledge of everything past the Ice Age. Everything about people 10,000 plus years ago, it's a lot of... There's some bullshit. There's a lot of bullshitting because there's a lot of information they're not willing to look at. Some new stuff's come along, new construction that they found in Turkey. to look at some new stuff's come along new construction that they found like in turkey this go becky tepley that's at least 14 000 years old massive excellently cut stone columns

civilization clear civilization back in a time where they're attributing all that area only has hunter and gatherers there is no civilization there's no cities where's the fucking city man you're gonna you gotta explain this not only it has drawings of statues that are carved into it, like these 3D images of animals that don't even exist in that area, that part of the world. So it's real possible that shit like the ice being over half of this country, that that's moved around for tens of thousands of years. And there's probably been these pretty kind of nifty,

sophisticated civilizations. But maybe they get to a point, not even as far as we've gotten right now, but maybe get to some previous point and just implode like those crazy assholes in Pakistan or implode like Nazi Germany or implode like a million different examples from Genghis Khan to the Catholic Church.

Look at all the crazy shit that's gone on in this country. 100%. Yeah, it easily could be like that always, and that we've gotten to these really amazing Atlantean-type civilizations and just fucking chaos. Boom, somebody comes in strapped up with dynamite. Who the fuck knows? And just aces the

whole thing there's one part of the world somewhere in the Middle East I forget where it is where there's there they found glass in the desert they found like this area and a satellite image god I wish I had more information about this from the tip of my tip of my tongue but the the it was either some sort of an asteroid impact or like hundreds of thousands of years ago, somebody had a fucking gigantic explosion there. Like if it was like some sort of civilization and they flattened that motherfucker out,

that's not outside the realm of possibility. That someone figured out something, some sort of massive way to fuck things up. We're the only ones that have ever figured that out throughout history. It's very possible that somebody else might have done. We might have done this whole dance to the top a couple of times before tumbling. This is just the highest we've ever gotten and kept it together.

We're very good at destroying shit, that's for sure. I've got this guy coming on June 7th, for those of you who have been asking me about this, John Anthony West. who have been asking me about this, John Anthony West. And he's this Egyptologist who is famous for his work in uncovering the fact that there's not just one Egyptian civilization that they're dealing with. You're dealing with older and older civilizations that go back to 30-plus thousand years. There's actual hieroglyphs that show that Egyptian civilization goes back that far. Like they even name the pharaohs.

But for some reason, modern day Egyptologists have looked at all this stuff and said, oh, that's a myth. Like everything was real up until about 5,000 years ago. All the rest of that stuff, they just made that shit up. Because it doesn't coincide with our own ideas of how long civilization has been around for. You know, it just seems to me that when you look at how sophisticated we are today and how close we are to fucking it up and how badly it is fucking up and all the places in the world that you described, it seems like the odds that we haven't done this already,

it just seems really small. I think we've got a lot of amnesia when it comes to the past of humans. I think you also have to factor in physical things that we can't control like the earth volcanoes earthquakes asteroidal impacts shit like that you know when i'm driving here today i was driving on the the 118 and it's beautiful you're going through the hills the mountains and i'm looking up and i'm just saying it is amazing that we are basically in the whole world is a convertible right there's no top yeah and we're just just we just have sort of accepted that we're just head to the universe just nothing but

space and fucking giant rocks can fall from the sky and crush your country and we've just sort of completely forgotten about that i mean there's there's impact holes that you can visit. I mean, if you look at the general life of the universe, the universe being billions of years old, right? Now look at all the holes on Earth. And then you just think, how long have we been around? 4.6 billion years.

How many holes are there? This is going to happen again, you motherfucker. We're forgetting that this shit happens. There's hundreds of thousands of them. They're as big as states, and they're flying through the air, know they're as big as states and they're flying through the air and they're gonna land yeah and they're gonna fuck up everything you're really depressing me you can throw that no it's not bad man i think

i think if that's if we're gonna go that's that's a fucking amazing way to go that's that's gonna be quick it's gonna be quick and it's gonna be crazy and you don't have to worry about anybody suffering you know it's like we're not afraid to sleep but everybody's afraid to be quick and it's going to be crazy. And you don't have to worry about anybody suffering. You know, it's like we're not afraid to sleep, but everybody's afraid to die. And both of them are inevitable. It's going to happen. You're going to die. It's not like we're going to live forever if the asteroid doesn't come. We're going to die for sure.

That might be a crazy way to do it. I'm not saying it's good, but it might not be bad. It might be the way it has to happen for the next ultra intelligent thing to come along that wouldn't have existed before the dinosaurs, wouldn't have existed before us. I'd rather go out by an asteroid than a series of sort of dirty bombs by some sort of cult or religious terrorism. Did you see the latest footage from Syria, all the murdered children? Yeah.

What the fuck is going on over there? Well, it's the same thing, you know, that happened in Libya. It's the same thing, you know, that might happen in Egypt. You know, when people fight, it's, you know, what you said about Vietnam. Don't they remember Vietnam? And, you know, when you go to these places and you see what injuries look like which are colostomy bags and you know legs that are gone and arms that are gone you say well you know why would you ever do this again and then you know a generation forgets and then they go do

something else they go just go do it again how do we how do we stop the cycle is it possible without mushrooms I don't think so mushrooms the mushrooms the only way? That's what I'm thinking. I think the asteroids have to do it. Asteroids? I'd rather have the asteroids do it than... Do you know the concept of asteroids coming from mushrooms? No. Excuse me, mushrooms coming from asteroids?

Asteroids coming from mushrooms. Maybe the world comes from mushrooms. This is getting to be really trippy. Well, this is from McKenna. McKenna's theory... Well, panspermia is a real theory of life. The theory that amino acids and certain nutrients and things and water, in fact, comes from comets and asteroids. And that life is transferred from planet to planet by asteroidal impact.

This is a legit scientific theory. Well, McKenna's theory about psilocybin was that psilocybin is completely alien to any other form of life that we have here on Earth. There's nothing like it biologically or biochemically it's i think it's i'm not i'm not saying exactly right but i believe it's like four fox for a loxy nn dimethyltryptamine it mimics the human neurotransmitter dimethyltryptamine which is a potent psychedelic drug it mimics that but it also has like the phosphorus in the four position, which apparently no other compound on Earth does.

And the idea is that spores can exist in a vacuum and that spores could easily have traveled through the vacuum and the radiation of space and landed from another planet here, created this life form that wants you to eat it. So it pops up and looks like a dinner plate, and it pops up all over the place. Everywhere you go, it's not hiding at all. And karmically, it's literally at the bottom of the food chain.

It lives on shit. It's just a humble little thing that wants you to come along and eat it. And when you eat it, you're granted spectacular visions. Spectacular visions and feelings of love and God and unity and the thoughts of the universe being entirely connected in one big mathematical equation computations and cells and organisms and fucking all the way down to atoms and subatomic particles and then branching out again and all this shit comes from something that grows out of shit all this shit comes from something that comes from space and the idea is that that our concept of life and our concept of intelligence is very narrow.

And we egocentrically have assumed that all intelligence must be contained inside a brain. Some sort of an intelligent, upright body that we can respect that's going to come intelligence in spectacular visions and knowledge all comes out of a dimension that you cannot access without these molecules that exist in these plants. And it opens literally chemical doorways in the mind. It's a pretty fascinating idea, the fact that that is alien invasion, that mushrooms are an alien invasion. I've got to read this. Who's McKenna? Terrence McKenna? Yeah.

He's a crazy psychedelic chemist slash botanist slash I think his degrees were all in ethnobotany. And I think his main study of work was the concept of the stoned ape theory. That and his idea of time wave zero, which the idea was that time was like a mathematical progression of waves and that like novelty and terrible times would all just, they would all almost be predictable. It was some sort of a mathematical equation getting to infinite novelty, which is like this year, supposedly.

Really? Which is probably horseshit. But his other fascinating theory was the mushroom theory, the stoned ape theory. And that was the theory that that's how human beings actually evolved from lower primates was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. And his theory, actually, I don't know if it's been supported by a lot of different scientists. I know there's some debate on whether or not his timelines are right,

but it's based on the idea that a bunch of monkeys ate some mushrooms and that helped them evolve. It's interesting how many theories there are about how he got from sort of that to this. Yeah, well, it's crazy. We go to visit them in the zoo. I took my kids to the zoo the other day, and I'm staring at my cousins in a cage. Well, here in the home of Scientology, they believe that the aliens came and the fetons went into the monkeys, and that's what we are. We're just vessels for alien souls.

Well, that's the sexiest idea. The sexiest idea is the Anunnaki stuff, the stuff that we were created by by aliens and we're a genetic engineering program and you know you look at like stuff from the sumerian text from like 6 000 years ago that depicts the anunnaki coming here and how do you not know that that's not science fiction maybe that's like their version of uh sure outer space yeah or uh the outer limits or something like that well it's it's insane how many people are like, this was how it happened. It's aliens, it's mushrooms, it's this, it's that. Well, the weird thing is the doubling

of the human brain size. I don't know what the fuck happened, man. But I think it's probably a lack of information more than it is... I think it can't just be mushrooms that we did. If we did, that would be amazing. If it was like, all you have to do is just regularly eat mushrooms, your brain would just grow. If we did, that would be amazing. If it was like, all you had to do was just regularly eat mushrooms,

your brain would just grow. If we just got on mushrooms, within a hundred years, we'd look like those gray aliens, just giant heads. We wouldn't need any muscles because we would use our minds to control matter. We'd just be moving shit around constantly with our minds. I feel a mushroom trip coming on today, I think.

You think so? I think I'm ready to do it today. Well, you got that, um, you got one over here man you want a cigarette um that's gonna fix it yeah today i was thinking how much i love you i hate cigarettes and i'm handing them to you i'm like i just want you to like me i just want you to be happy shane i love you too you're you're blowing my mind today um a lot of people blowing my mind today. You're blowing my mind always. A lot of people have been passing around this speech that you gave. I forget. It was some conference lately where you were talking about the future of television.

Can you explain it? Because I haven't actually watched it yet, but I'm interested in what you have. Yeah. It was a speech for Internet Week about, you know, everyone's online versus cable. And, you know, what I was saying was, so I didn't know what to do. I didn't have anything planned that was very smart. So I was flying back actually from Afghanistan. No, I was flying back, yeah, from Afghanistan and I ducked into Pakistan to see the Karachi shoots. I was flying back from Pakistan.

And I was thinking about all the kids that I had seen who were going insane and the guys who would kill for ten bucks and this is fucking just crazy fucking dudes. And I was like, look, the youth everywhere in Asia and

Africa and Europe here, everyone's fucking revolting but what what are we making like so and then I went to do the upfronts which is where all the TV shows get sold and online shows get sold and you have like the voice which is the biggest show which is just American Idol it now TV is derivative of TV TV is just making shittier and shittier shows based on itself and then the on the internet which could be this, it could be revolutionary because it's better. Because you could be watching something, then text somebody, then get information, then Google this and fucking what's going on here and here.

And instead of trying to be and say what the fuck is going on. And by the way, young people are revolting all around the world. And this is how they get their news now. They get it through blogs and online shit here and there. They don't even watch TV anymore. But instead of doing something innovative and challenging and revolutionary, we just do shittier versions of TV shows with half the budgets. And so it's these shitty sort of Google shows.

You know what really pisses me off? It's like America's Funniest Home Videos with a sort of annoying host. And you're like, why don't we use the internet? Why don't we use, you know, the social networks and, you know, video and all the stuff we can do now to actually do something that's good and revolutionary and start changing shit? Because when he asks and says, well, how do we fucking stop all this shit? Well, the first way you stop about it is stop it is to find out about it

so we have to know about it and then we know about it and then we can do shit like we can not buy certain things you know dollar advocacy you know consumer advocacy is the most powerful you know tools we have etc etc but first of all is knowing about it and so i just sort of got really pissed off that the internet has become so derivative and so shitty and just trying to mimic TV and TV is shit. Yeah. So let's try to fucking make something that actually people understand what the people like, whether people that helps people or they understand of shit. Like, for example, like Kony 2012, you're like, well, it shows that it's viral, shows that people actually want to know this shit and shows it. But like it was it was OK.

It was a sort of half-assed. What did you think about that whole situation? That is another example of one of the reasons why I believe that life is a work of fiction. A fucking guy decides that he's going to make this viral video against James Coney. Whacking it, whacking it, whacking it. Is that his name, Charles Coney?

James Coney. James Coney. He's going to make this viral video, expose the world to this horrible person. But they're getting a disproportionate amount of the money goes to them. And then they get accused of being unscrupulous, whatever the words you would use. They didn't do anything illegal. They're a little funky with the money. Then the guy shows up naked in the streets, beating off, acting gay.

Did you see the video yeah uh that's like craziness yeah well you know they didn't i'm sure they didn't think you know they went there's these you know kids they go over and they shot it you know fair fox to them you know it's i've been there it's a bad part of the world and and you know what it's interesting on a few points one because it shows that the fucking like everyone says kids don't care we don't people don't care about anything outside of america like it's a big in media they always say don't do anything you know outside of america people just don't give a shit about it well i think it shows that people do give a shit about it and these guys weren't expecting

it to become a huge thing and you know so obviously when weird shit happens to you you have different ways of coping this guy coped by going fucking completely apeshit which actually seems appealing sometimes like when life's really hard you're just like i'm gonna take off my fucking clothes oh there's fucking serial killers and assassins everywhere oh i'm I'm going to get your fleshlight. Fucking go to fucking hell. That guy was on the street in his underwear. He got naked. He was flailing his arms around and acting super gay. Yes. I wonder what he was on.

What makes you act gay? Besides being gay. Mostly cocks, balls. Booty holes. Red band fleshlights what is uh well yeah cody i mean the thing is is it became huge and i think it shows that there's a massive audience anyway so that it's possible yeah and the whole thing is is let's make shit that actually isn't shit let's make stuff that you know uh is telling the stories and that's what we're doing and i said you know look if it's vice who's doing it,

then we're really in fucking trouble. Because I didn't come up, you know, with any sort of save the world complex. Yeah, but you're not compromised yet. And as a human being, when you've gotten to the point where you see this information, you're not compromised. So you're releasing it, and you're focusing on it. And you have an honest eye for what...

Well, it's also when we went around the world and expanded the company, you just see all this shit happening, and you're like, what the fuck? why isn't anybody fucking saying this shit and then but but i always say that like if we're if we're a new source then it's the world's in trouble because we were a style mag you know we all we gave a shit about was fucking you know famously say you know cocaine supermodels rare denim and sneakers and then when you go around the rest of the world you're like holy fucking shit and you sort of you know come out of the pond and go okay well we got to do something about this well i think that's probably they're here to get you yeah they've had enough i think uh it's probably you know the only way journalists ever become journalists in the first place they they

they have something that they feel needs to be said, right? They have this desire to send a message, and that comes from seeing things that are wrong, seeing things that need to be reported on, things that, you know, and it turned you into a journalist. I mean, essentially, the reality of the world turned you into a journalist, and you're the perfect example of what a journalist should be because you're not compromised, because you can do these stories, and you can, I mean, if you had someone overseeing you, someone from NBC or CBS, do you think you could have gotten any of this stuff done? Well. If you said to them, hey, I'm going to go to Pakistan and I'm going to meet with the Taliban. I don't think, yeah, we wouldn't be allowed to do a lot of the stuff that we do because we just go.

You don't get permits. You guys just go. Generally don't get permits. Do you just go. Generally don't get permits. Do you ask the people if you could put them in a movie or on television or the internet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people themselves. Do they sign anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They sign things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But people generally want to tell their stories. But I mean ask government permission or police permission or all the things you're supposed to. Or also, you're generally supposed to go with security teams. And we're like, well, I did a security team once because we were doing a show with MTV, and they made us get one in Beirut.

And I'd been to Beirut like 20 times. Beirut's not that bad. There's some times and parts of it that are bad. And we were walking Target because you just have all these dudes talking. And so I said, I'm never going to have security ever again because that's the sure way that you're not going to get a story or the real people aren't going to talk to you or everyone's going to think what who are the fuck these guys right so we go and you just you just we call it immersionism you just go immerse

yourself you know in in in the place and then just you know press record don't go in with any sort of preconceived ideas or notions or political paradigms or I'm going to prove this because generally you're not going to prove that. Like, for example, if you went to Somalia and said, I'm going to prove that these guys are barbarian pirates and then you're going to shut yourself off to exactly what you said, which is, well, actually, we illegally irradiated their whole coast and illegally overfished it so that they're starving. And they're like, well, we're going to tax the people who did this to us. Yeah, they're called the People's Coast Guard, the Voluntary Coast Guard of Somalia.

That's what they call themselves. What the fuck, man? Dude, if anybody knows how to fix this, it's you. No. You see it all. I think it's the Internet. I think it's the only hope we have. The Internet and technology, the technology like what you were saying about pulling carbon out of the atmosphere

and cleaning the air and reusing the fuel. That makes sense. I mean, if technology can put it out there, it seems like we should be able to harvest it. Maybe not now. Maybe 100 years from now, whenever the fuck it actually becomes viable. Well, somebody asked me at Internet Week. The guy said, well, what if I'm not angry? You know, I'm, whatever, 22, and i'm not angry you know i'm whatever 22 and you

know i'm not angry and i want to go get an mba and make money and i said great you know i think that that there was the sort of our grandparents generation that that you know were they didn't know better so they were like oh space age food you know tv dinners and let's produce all the food let's make it all with computers and or whatever, you know, assembly lines. And so it started to be bad for us, you know, and started to, you know, all these things. Agent Orange, let's, you know, do all these terrible things. But they didn't know any better. The technology was sort of their, you know, savior.

But the baby boomers, you know, they were the first generation that knew better, but still became the largest energy consumers, the largest garbage producers, all this thing. Gen X has sort of slipped by, but guess what? The bill's here and it's going to be Gen Y. Like, they have to pay. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card now. So as you're seeing economically and, you know, socially and culturally and politically, we're shifting. And if you just want to sort of say, I'm going to stick my head in the sand, which we've

done for a little while, I don't think you're going to be able to anymore. I agree with you, and I agree that things are shifting, and I also think that that's why these attacks on the Constitution have been permitted and are being pushed through. I think they've seen the prognosis and they've seen the future. And the future is the trends that we see on the Internet. It's a trend towards a more libertarian line of thinking. It's a trend towards a smaller government, more accountability, less bureaucracy. The idea of creating jobs doesn't mean you create some new fucking laws that you have to saddle everybody with and a bunch of people to enforce those laws and that's what they a lot of these politicians like to think of as

creating jobs you know it's not you're creating problems and you cunts that are keep attacking the constitution and pulling amendments apart and and and really defacing the whole idea what this country was founded on they're doing it just because they sense the future the future is not it's not it's not going to work the way it works now. It's just not. We're not going to deal with this whole idea of representative government. We're not going to deal with special interest groups. That shit is nonsense.

That's got to go away. Yeah. I think if you look at what's happening, too, if you look at Syria, for example, if you look at what happened in Egypt or Libya, I spent a lot of time in those countries. Just before the revolution, I got arrested in Libya. And then when I went back and I said it, I would have never called this. Not a lot of people did.

I would have said the opposite because it was so restrictive and it was so hardcore and everyone was so pro-regime. But because of the internet, because of Twitter, because of Facebook, because of all these social tools, you had all these young people able to communicate and say, actually, I'm pissed off too. Oh, we're all fucking pissed off. Hey, let's change.

And I think that change isn't going to be pretty in a lot of cases and it's going to be problematic. But you do have young people who are taking up arms. Now now you also have young people who are just smashing the shit out of cities like they did in paris and especially in london uh last summer but you know what happens when when you know occupy wall street becomes egypt you know to try to smash the status quo what happens when occupy wall street becomes sy becomes Syria or becomes Libya? And, you know, it's not in the foreseeable future, maybe, but I couldn't, I didn't call Libya or Egypt or Syria either. You know, there's a lot, a lot of unrest out there, and there's a lot of

people communicating that unrest. And in fact, if you see that in America, it's growing. And if I was, you know, campaigning this summer, then I would be focusing on, oh, we have a huge fucking groundswell and a global groundswell of dissatisfaction with the only group that's actually going to get off their ass and do something about it. You must have at least some emotional attachment to Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks case. When you see this case and this Bradley Manning kid, who I believe is still in solitary confinement. I don't even know if he has a court date. I don't know. They just locked this kid in a box and cut him off from humans. I'm sure he's completely crazy at this point.

I don't think you cannot go crazy in solitary confinement for five years, I think. Well, it just shows that conspiracy theorists aren't crazy. They're not crazy at all. Because the majority of these are proof that there are, you know, very sordid and unseemly things going on every day. A hundred percent. And the information that that guy released alone makes him a hero. That guy released things that are anti-American.

He released things that are, they're war crimes. He saw war crimes. We're not war criminals. We're Americans. We're American. This is how most proud Americans feel. We're American and we're not cunts. That's it.

We don't take any bullshit, but we're not cunts. That's when you get a guy who feels that and he's an american and he's a soldier and he wants to you know he's a voluntary soldier signed up to represent this government and he sees his government doing horrible shit that's not being reported it's being covered up covering shit up when you do crimes is not how crimes get resolved well since when did telling the truth and and keeping governments and big business in check become anti-American? That guy's a goddamn patriot.

He's a patriot and he's locked in a box. And then Julia Assange gets in trouble. This WikiLeaks thing is so fascinating, man. People were accusing me of getting my information wrong. But no, he's not even accused of rape. He's accused of having sex without a condom. I wasn't lying. He apparently, you know,

they were sleeping together and he stuck it in this chick. I don't know the fucking full story. But the bottom line is, that's why they're trying to export this guy. Like, if that's not the craziest thing, we're gonna regulate voluntary sexual... I mean, two people are naked in bed. We're gonna decide what didn't didn't happen between a guy

and a girl. And you're gonna spend that much fucking money to monitor this guy and make sure he checks in constantly. And he's put videos online of his daily routine. He has to drive to the police station and check in before he can do things. He's under house arrest. The whole thing is madness. Well, the thing is, is the fact that they keep going on on the story and saying, is the fact that they keep going on on the story and saying, yeah, we don't want them for actually blowing the whistle on every crime that's been going on in the government.

We want them for this sort of weird, you know, quasi thing that happened in Sweden that wouldn't be considered anything anywhere else. Well, yeah. I think someone described it as surprise sex. Like, that's not even rape, technically. It's like they had had consensual sex but with a condom and then they were lying in bed i don't know the fuck really happened so i shouldn't even be saying this but the idea that they're they're wasting so much resource on a

sexual issue that's not even a violent one not even rape but it's kind of smart actually because it's it for example it's you know it's the one thing that you you know you can't say well they just drummed it up and it's bullshit and then because yeah well rape is very serious it's the worst it's the worst so you're in you're in a catch-22 of saying well they just drummed it up to get this guy for blowing the whistle but at the same time they drummed up the one thing that you're sort of taboo to go again it's the number one thing yeah and but they didn't they couldn't even get a good version of it i mean the story is so weak like if it was you know he roofied her and he did this he tied her up and took pictures and we have the pictures oh well

the guy's obviously a cunt that released important information but i think the sad thing about it is that you look at you know deep throat you know who you know announced who he was and all that stuff, and he did it to save the government and all that stuff. He's a hero, right? Right. Well, it depends on who won. If Bradley Manning could come out to be a hero, Julian Assange could come out to be a hero,

if there was some crazy revolution in the future, we realize this is the turning point of American society when they said, we're not going to take this bullshit anymore, when they watched that collateral murder video and realized, what are we doing to our children when we're forcing them to even think like this? This is acceptable. You have this one shot at life, and this is how you're going to spend some of your time, shooting missiles down at innocent people wandering through the street.

But my question is, when did it change from journalism and the fourth estate job being to make sure that politicians weren't lying to make sure the corporations weren't doing these bad things and i think watergate changed it right well i think actually distribution i think changes because four companies run all news media and they're all major global corporations that all have huge advertising. And so they're conflicted and they don't go after politicians. And I remember during the Iraq war, you know, people knew that, you know, that this was all a construct. They knew that, you know, there weren't weapons of mass destruction. They knew that everyone was used to joke. I used to hang out with other journalists and they'd say, of course. I mean, Al-Qaeda is the opposite of the Ba'ath Party.

How far do you take that? How far do you take the whole idea of conspiracy? I don't know if it's a conspiracy. There's certainly a conspiracy to go to Iraq, right? Yeah, for sure. But that's been admitted to now. but that's been admitted to now. And I think that because of 9-11, the press got co-opted and it became un-American to say anything bad about the government or the military.

And I think that that was one of the sort of turning points, A, because that's bullshit, and B, because young people got completely disenfranchised by news media because we saw it all happen. We say, wait a minute, this doesn't sound right. And then afterwards they're like, yeah, there was no weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, there was no Al-Qaeda here.

And you're like, well, but we knew that. But we kept saying it. The news media became part of a government propaganda program. And everybody just went along with it. And that's fucking scary, because no matter who's in government, if they can just put together propaganda, how is that different than Nazi Germany?

How is it that different than any of these totalitarian regimes where they say, yes, Kim Il-sung is God or whatever. Like, how is that any different? Because you can use the fourth estate as your PR agency. Well, there was, the CIA had released some sort of a statement right after the war with Iraq had started that they were going to start releasing fake stories to throw off the enemy. And once you admit to doing something like that, that's incredibly slippery ground. Like, that's the only way to defeat the enemy is you have to put out fake stories and lie to everyone.

And we're supposed to give you that power. Like, what kind of checks and balances are in place before that stuff gets distributed? You know, what the fuck is going on here? Well, it's also, you know, Memorial Day, and you said it exactly right, is that, you know, what are we doing? Sending, you know, going in with, what's our mission to go into Afghanistan? What's our mission? Well, we have a mission with Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Taliban, Taliban. Okay, now we're letting Taliban in because, well, we've lost.

We're saying, okay, well, we have to have power sharing with them. And so you say, well, and everybody knows it's going to go right back to civil war. So you're like, well, why did we come here? Why did we do all this? Like, what the fuck? So you don't think that it's some sort of a grand conspiracy to extract minerals and all that stuff. You think it's much more of a clusterfuck shit decision by government and then being in place because of momentum and because of the fact there's contractors and they all want to keep getting paid. Resource wealth for sure.

And it was the story that we broke in Sudan that time. You know, Darfur is oil. And resource wealth, you know, we did it in the Congo. We've done it in a lot of stories all over the place. I wouldn't say, I would say they got caught in the quagmire of Afghanistan much like the Soviets did. They went in there, they were trying to do something and they just got sucked in and then it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

And look, it's so bad on every level. I mean, America's in there trying to fight this war on drugs, war on drugs, war on drugs. They've been in there 12 years. There's never been more heroin for cheaper or higher quality ever. In fact, it's so good that they put the Golden Triangle out of business. It's all coming from Afghanistanistan and so america is the biggest drug dealer in the world because we're just sitting there running this country that just ships out all the heroin in the world how much of a piece does the cia have of that who knows what i would say that you know look it's been documented that they were part of the original uh outflux into america from during the Vietnam War as a way to keep urban populations sort of at bay. That's well documented.

That was like a real social experiment? They would bring heroin into the ghetto? Yeah. Really? That's well documented, yeah. But is it well documented, the intentions? Yeah, because there was civil unrest in the major urban centers, so they allowed heroin

to go in because it took away all sort of, well, everything except for heroin addiction. Yeah. So, I mean, if it's been a part of their policy in the past, obviously they're going to be incredibly sensitive to it. But I don't think that you can say that they're not involved, or at least the State Department's not involved because the statistics speak for themselves. There's two times more, by a factor of two, so 100% more heroin addiction, heroin addicts in America since the start of the Afghani war. Heroin's never been cheaper. It's never been better quality. And we've been running it so like

it's it's just flooding out it's destroyed the you know russia has now got seven percent in pakistan which is a you know muslim country extremist muslim country has something like 12 in in karachi anyway uh heroin addiction and it's just it's flooding out of of afghanistan and that's we we could have gone in and taken all the fields that we didn't. Well not only did we not take the fields, we guarded them. Sure, yeah, yeah, definitely. Most people want to come up with some sort of crazy explanation or excuse

for why they did that. Well it's because they fear that they're going to it's the only way they're really making money. They're making money two ways which is the American government and heroin. And so they're like, well if if we really take away heroin production, then they're really going to hate us. Does any of that stuff make its way into pharmaceutical grade opiates,

like oxycodone, things along those lines? Who knows? I don't know. All I know is every time we do a story on the heroin situation in Afghanistan, it's fucking shocking because you're just like, the Americans let them. There's actually pictures of American troops guarding Poppy. This is fucking crazy. It's the war on drugs, sort of.

Except over there. Over there we're a war against the war on drugs. Well, if you see the war on drugs in Afghanistan, and then you see the war on drugs in Mexico, you're like, wow. It's completely corrupt from start to finish. This war on drugs in Mexico. Yeah. You're like, wow. It's completely corrupt from start to finish. This war on drugs is complete horseshit.

What's the craziest slippery war ever? When you have the war on drugs and then you have armed soldiers guarding poppy fields. What side are you on in this war on drugs? Because it seems like you're on the pro-drug side. You're guarding the drugs. How could you have a war on drugs when you're guarding the drugs? And you're sending all the weapons to Mexico that they need.

And all the money. And you don't even go to jail for it. And 90% plus of the heroin comes out of Afghanistan. And what did you say about how much has the percentage of it increased since we have occupied Afghanistan? Just in America.

Just in America, it's doubled. But that's just in America. But in Russia, it's gone through the roof. It's doubled in the UK. But Russia and Pakistan and the Middle East, countries like Iran, everywhere on the path has just heroin addictions has soared. In fact, heroin addiction is so huge in Russia. Did you see the thing we did on crocodile yes what the fuck man so they're so they're so addicted to heroin that if they like when they

can't get it or because it got expensive now because so many people are buying it that they make their own synthetic heroin and uh and it's called crocodile because it makes you look like a crocodile because it makes your skin like scales. And then the scales fall off and you just have like bone there. It's insane. If you haven't seen it, if you haven't seen the images online of people that are addicted that have that disease, it's incredible. It's so frightening. It's frightening.

It's so frightening that people would do that to themselves. I'm going to literally shoot drugs that make my skin rot and fall off the bone. He's not exaggerating. There's like people with big arms have like big gaping holes. You see the bone. You see the bone. And they can walk around. They're not even infected.

Well, some of it, yeah. Some of them get infected? It was weird. It looked like it was burnt off. Like it was fused. Because it kills all the flesh and it falls off. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

That's insane. What happens then? They just die. I mean, you can't just have your bones just exposed like that, right? Does it ever fill up if you quit? I don't know the answer to that question. Does anybody ever get off that shit? It's even more addictive than heroin.

Jesus Christ. You guys had that shit about the Colombian drug that you blow in people's faces yeah that is terrifying well the freaky thing about scopolamine is you don't believe it's true until you see it because the stories are it's the zombie drug right and it's we heard stories of you know people coming into their apartments on the security cameras and like clearing out their whole apartments and you see them on security cams doing it, you know, and they don't have any recollection. They wake up in the morning, their bank accounts are drained, et cetera, et cetera.

And they couldn't figure it out until the FARC, the guys who were Colombians who were making cocaine were using the same process to refine borondanga flowers to make scopolamine and what was happening was generally it started out as hookers and hookers would put a condom inside their mouth like this so it wouldn't go down and then they put a little scopolamine in their lips and then when they go to like kiss you whatever they go and they would spit scopolamine and you inhale it and then you go holy shit that's scary and then you go into this trance-like state, and then it's auto-suggestion. So you say, okay, we're going to go now to your apartment, yes,

and we're going to go to the apartment, and then we're going to clean out all your shit, and we're going to go to your bank, and we're going to... And they have security footage of them going to the bank and signing shit, and it's not like one or two people. This is like happens all the fucking time. Oh, my God. And so that's a fucking terrifying drug terrifying because you're just gone you're in a sort of zombie like narcotic state and you just do what people tell you to do that's the real

ultimate date rape drug yeah that's the real shit we gotta make sure people don't get a hold of that that's a life rape can you imagine dating one of those girls? Oh, my God. Someone spits something in your mouth and makes you be their zombie. Those girls have to be undateable. There's no way you can date that guy. What, a girl that would do that to somebody? Yeah, like if you knew that's what she did as a job and you ever got in a fight with her. First of all, he said hooker.

He said she was a hooker. I know. Imagine dating one of those hooker girls. Yeah, you shouldn't date hookers. That's just me. I'm silly, though. Especially ones that take over your brains. Yeah.

I'm so terrified of shit like that. Why would that exist? Why would there be something that allows you to be turned into a fucking zombie to someone else's suggestions like that? You know, when you see the different things in nature, like different parasites that control different organisms and make them do fucked up things. And it really is kind of bizarre when you stop and think about it.

Like, what kind of a system, what kind of a world do we live in where there's, like, there's that laying around, a plant that grows, and if it gets into your body, people just order you around and you don't have it. That's crazy. Yes.

You become a fucking robot. You become an automated little slave for them. Drugs are crazy. We just did a story on, you probably know a lot more about it than I do, yes you become a fucking robot you become an automated little slave for them drugs are drugs are crazy we just did a story on you probably know a lot more about it than i do but uh ibogaine yeah yeah and we were doing a story on the underground heroin clinics where you know people uh like it's actually started by a lot of ex-junkies who were like 40 year junkies like couldn't get off tried you know hundreds of times to get clean they would do ibogaine and then it interrupts your addiction you know for like two

weeks whatever so it's long enough that you sort of get a you know you don't have to go cold turkey and so we went to these clinics where they administer ibogaine and stuff it was fucking fascinating it was crazy did you do it no because I saw them do it. They were taking massive doses, though. They're taking, like, it's 48 hours, lots of vomiting, like crazy fucking shit. I have a couple friends that have done it. One that did it recently and one that it changed his whole life. I have a buddy of mine. He got his back uninjured, got hooked on pain pills, started taking, you know, you name him, he was taking them.

Couldn't get off them. It was ruining his life. Goes down, gets an Ibogaine. Boom. Clean. 100%. Now brings people down there. Started his own center down there.

Brings people down there to introduce him to Mexico. Yeah. But I'm like, fucking Mexico, man. Mexico's scary as fuck. Well, it's because it's still legal there. It's illegal here. It's a Schedule I drug just like heroin. Yeah. Well, everything in Mexico is decriminalized now, right?

Most people don't know. Then they decriminalize acid, mushrooms, pot, coke, everything. But this is to fight the cartels. Exactly. But yeah, Ibogaine, that's the strongest drug I've ever seen because people under it were like, holy fuck.

Yeah, my business partner did it, changed his life. Well, he's done it a couple times. He's done a couple different things, right, that changed his life. He's done ayahuasca, done Ibogaine. He's really into going to these weird places and going on big trips. But Ibogaine is interesting because we follow some junkies straight through the whole process. And it was pretty remarkable because it worked. Yeah.

It was nuts. Yeah. Aubrey, my friend who's done it, he described the process. And I didn't want to do it even slightly. It sounded like hell. Yeah. You can talk me into doing some DMT maybe. It's 15 minutes. I'll send you the piece into doing some DMT maybe. It's 15 minutes.

I'll send you the piece. There's so much vomiting, it's fucking crazy. Days of vomiting. That could not be good for you. Well, you've got to think, though, man, if someone's hooked on heroin, anything. They'll take anything to get them out of that. I've watched people slip into addiction several times in my life, and it's just like being turned by a vampire.

It really is. It's a feeling that you've lost someone they're slipping away they're slipping away from themselves from their family from everybody they're slipping away because of a compound some sort of a chemical it's really what a bizarre thing that we have this this this addiction quality you know we say that in the piece we say that this mother gives her son to these sort of New York fruitcakes, nice guys but like weird guys who do sort of West African voodoo when they administer the Ibogaine.

And we were taking her son to Mexico to one of these clinics because we couldn't legally do it in America. So we brought the whole crew down to Mexico to shoot it. And it was like how bad is heroin that a mother is going to give her son to these you know crazy West African voodoo junkie dudes to take off to Mexico and administer

the strongest drug in the world to so he's going to puke and fucking go nuts for two days that's how bad heroin is and that's what the government sells America fuck yeah And that's what the government sells. Da-da-da-da-da. Dang. America.

Fuck yeah. Listen, man. Let's wrap this up and let you get some sleep. All right. You're the fucking man, dude. Anytime you want to do this, anytime you're in town, you got an open invite. We'll open this bitch up at 4 o'clock in the morning for you. Whatever you want, man. You're fucking awesome.

Continued safety and success in your travels. And thanks for illuminating giant parts of the world that I personally wouldn't have been aware of if it wasn't for you and what you guys are doing. You're fucking awesome, man. Thanks, buddy. Good seeing you. Good seeing you. All right, my friends, thank you, everyone, for tuning in.

This week we got tomorrow Mike Dolce, famed MMA nutritionist. He's going to come in. This week, we got tomorrow Mike Dolce, famed MMA nutritionist. He's going to come in. And then Wednesday, Bobcat Goldthwait is coming in. So we got a fun, packed date. Follow Shane on Twitter.

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