Anthony Bourdain joins Joe Rogan to recount his chaotic shift from chef to globetrotter, filming 240 days a year with a crew relying on "fixers" for permits and bribes. He witnessed seal hunts in Alaska, El Bulli’s closure, and Mexico’s drug wars—deadlier than both Gulf Wars combined—while avoiding cartel violence due to ethical concerns. In Cuba and China, he navigated censorship, filming near Tibet and dodging regime criticism despite personal views. Dismissing orchestrated regime changes, he leans toward Oswald’s "lucky shot" in JFK’s assassination over conspiracies, critiquing Stone’s film while pondering Kennedy’s health. His stand-up comedy, blending dark humor with serious themes, reveals the tension between art and manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
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If somebody had told me that my favorite show, if you came up to me like 10 years ago and said in 10 years your favorite show is going to be about a dude who eats in different places, I would have told you to go fuck yourself.
I would have said that's the most retarded show I've ever heard in my life.
When I was not looking at anything, I had no higher ambition than to keep cooking where I was cooking, really, and maybe hopefully have the, you know, I wanted some kind of minor, I wanted to earn my advance back on the book.
It's very interesting because it's very rare that someone gets to live a full and intense anonymous life and then all of a sudden be thrust in the public consciousness, but actually it's interesting.
I guess I've been in the restaurant business for a long time.
I think...
You know, the level of bullshit that I can sort of live with in my life on a day-to-day basis is pretty minimal now.
So I was just, you know, I came out to television and everything else always with the attitude that, hey, I could be back next to the deep fryer tomorrow.
The camera people and assistant producers, me hanging around in some terrible hotel lounge, probably in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, someplace like that.
We're getting really fucked up on cocktails.
You know, just talking shit the way people do.
And I think one of the camera guys said, man, we are so fucking good.
We are so good at what we do that I'll bet we could make food porn in black and white.
And we all looked at each other and, you know, yeah, dude, well, let's just do it.
Well, they let us make that show.
And we got away with it.
And I think we did it really well.
It's a really pretty show.
But if you...
Generally speaking, I don't know of many other people on television lucky enough to be able to go to their network and say, we're going to do an entire hour of food-related television in black and white, and it'll be an homage to Italian directors that none of our audience, or few of our audience have seen.
Oh, and there'll be subtitles.
Who gets away with that?
So we're having fun.
And I think if anything makes the show special, it's that it's really first and foremost about me and the crew enjoying what we're doing both creatively and just having a good time.
It just presented Romania in a comical light that they did not appreciate, you know, because we had a really terrible time there.
You know, everybody was...
We try to shoot stuff naturally, you know?
We don't like things to be set up for us, and so one of the first rules of the show is, wherever we go, we don't want to see native dancers in indigenous garb, you know, some dog and pony show.
We want to sort of run and gun.
We were foiled in every possible way in Romania.
I mean, the government and the tourist people just sort of stepped in, and we were supposed to shoot with a humble butcher and his family.
Somebody arrived at the humble butcher's house beforehand and said, your house is not pretty enough for American television.
We're moving you to a more attractive-looking farm.
And by the way, your kids are going to dress up in indigenous garb and dance and pretend they're happy.
So it was this whole eerie, creepy, theatrical, you know, from beginning to end, you know.
I mean, I'd been to France a couple of summers as a kid.
I'd been to the Caribbean.
That was about it.
I mean, if only sure of anything, at age 44, standing in the kitchen.
It was that I'd never see, you know, Saigon or Hong Kong, much less, you know, I probably had no expectation I'd ever see Rome.
So I'm just, again, I'm just kind of living that out.
And as long as me and the crew, as long as we're having as much fun as we are, at least finding ways to make, like, more and more fucked up television.
I often talk about a band that's toured together for a really long time.
We rotate our personnel.
But there's a core group, and maybe the bass player will go away for a while, but he'll be back, and whoever fills in for him is somebody else that we've worked with for years around the world.
So we all like each other, and everybody's really, really good at what they do, and that's fun.
Traveling with camera guys who are really good at their job, that's a satisfying thing.
There's this entire profession of people, a very strange mix of other professions who come together.
Basically, they're called fixers.
You want to make a movie in Moscow, you need a fixer, somebody who knows what permits you need, how to arrange them, hires drivers, knows who to bribe, that sort of thing.
There's one of those everywhere.
Everywhere on earth, there's somebody who is available to fix for you.
And if not, we reach out to bloggers, particularly food bloggers.
Because somebody's blogging about food, whatever city you're talking about in the world.
Chefs, people who I... The chef's mafia is pretty extensive.
If you know you're going to some place in...
I don't know, Southeast Asia.
Chances are you know a chef of New York who knows somebody out there, so you already have friends when you arrive.
At this point in my life, it breaks up the tedium.
Really?
You know, and like laying there, especially after a couple of glasses of whiskey or something, you hit turbulence and you see everybody else in the cabin freaking out.
It's more entertaining than the in-flight movie, and it does break up the sort of soul-sucking monotony of too long in a plane.
Woke up or went home one evening, looked out the window, and there's the airport bursting into flames and rockets and stuff coming in.
And we realized we're not getting out anytime soon.
So there was, of course, on the part of the security guys who got involved in trying to get us out of the country, yeah, we had to think about all of that sort of possible target sort of stuff.
Again, it's silly, and I don't think any of us took it seriously ever.
I mean, who would target a host of a dipshit little travel show, you know?
Yeah, long story short, Liberia was, I'm going to say founded, but the nation was created by freed slaves, part of a Back to Africa movement.
And they arrive, people essentially who'd been taken from all over Africa, you know, were returned to Liberia, a country that none of them really had roots in.
And they became sort of an aristocracy and based their country entirely on the American model.
You know, very red, white, and blue.
So it was in many ways this little America in Africa.
That's why monkeys, especially chimps, there was no love between me and the monkeys because that story, this giant crazed Valium, he just kicked Valium or something, the monkey, the chimp, and then gnawed somebody's face off, right?
The closest threat from the animal kingdom we've had, we were in Ghana, I think.
And the idea was we were going to go all the way out in the middle of nowhere, this tiny little game park or camp, and the whole idea was we'd have to get up super early and drive like four hours in bouncing Land Rovers in the hope that maybe if we're lucky we're going to see a herd of elephants and get to shoot some.
We wake up really early in the morning and the camp is infested with elephants.
If you could be infested with elephants.
They were just everywhere wandering around right outside.
So of course we did what any shooter would do.
You run outside and you start shooting the hell out of these fucking elephants.
It's a good shot.
So we're doing this.
We're like, dude, okay, let's get a good shot.
You close in on it that way, and I'll close in on it that way, and we'll basically herd the elephant towards the camera.
At which point the game warden wakes up, shows up our guide, and says, Step away from the elephant, walk slowly backwards.
We'd done everything wrong.
These were young male elephants.
They are the fastest moving creatures, I think, in the wild once they get going.
And they hate bright shirts, which, of course, we were wearing.
They're spooked by people holding implements, which, of course, that's what we were doing.
And they particularly don't like being herded by people one thousandth their weight.
I mean, one of our guys, both of them actually, when we were shooting in Kurdistan, they're hanging out the hatches of these Russian cargo helicopters.
Hatch open.
They're all the way out.
You know, you're getting these cross drafts and humps from, you know, updrafts where suddenly you're at zero grab, you know, so you're, you know, they do crazy shit for a good shot.
No Reservations has always been about me having a good time or trying to have a good time, and this one's more...
We're trying to actually be a little useful, like provide some information and experiences that you could do, whereas No Reservations, that's always been a secondary consideration.
We do a lot of shit on No Reservations that you just can't do.
You know, they're out of reach of anybody's expectations, I think, any reasonable ones.
So this is more about if you're stuck in a place or you find yourself at a place for like 24 or 48 hours, it's just, you know, good shit to do.
When I was a kid, I had a friend whose cousin was selling it for like...
Over the course of one school year, he completely changed.
He lost about 15, 20 pounds.
His face got sunken in, and him and his girlfriend would just hide in their attic apartment, do coke, and watch TV. And I was like, okay, whatever the fuck that is, I'll pass on that.
It's all about the grappling, which, you know, it makes it tough, though, because we'll go out to dinner at, like, a really nice French restaurant, and she'll wear, like, a low-cut gown, and, of course, she's got, like, blue and yellow fingerprints all over her body, and these giant bruises that she's all very proud of, you know?
Everyone in the restaurant's looking at me like, you son of a...
What happens with Anderson is, Anderson, he's calculating you.
He's figuring out, he's stepping inside the danger zone and outside and trying to figure out what your instincts are, what your reflexes are.
And then he realizes that after 15, 20 seconds, you're going to slow down.
You know, like 45 seconds in the first round, guys start to slow down.
Two minutes, three minutes in, they really start to slow down.
And that's when Anderson starts to pile it on.
He's like calculating your abilities.
And then he can just get right in front of you and put his hands down and there's nothing you can do about it.
It's got to be the most horrifying feeling in the world to be locked in a cage with a magician.
You know, a dude who can hit you and you can't hit him and he's very confident and he's locking in on you and you know he's got you timed and figured out.
You know, I mean, you want to talk about a guy who was this incredible speaker, who was so fast and so fluent, so sharp, and the way he could talk and the way he could break things down and the way he, I mean, his ethics, he stood up for this fucking Vietnam War and he said, you know what, man, no Vietnamese ever did nothing to me.
Embarrassingly, I didn't know much about Hunter S. Thompson until I was in Seattle once.
I was staying in a hotel room.
And I had a layover, and nothing to do, just flipping through the pay-per-view movies, Gonzo, Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, I think it's called.
I watched the documentary, and I went, holy shit.
You know, when they show how he fucking, when Ed Muskie was running for president, he started writing fake stories about the guy being on Ibogaine and bringing in exotic Brazilian doctors.
And he made up names for new drugs that, you know, a dude was on something called Wallet.
Yeah, I think it's where the anger came from, which was also what was so funny about Thompson.
Yeah, you know...
He describes a bad-ass trip once, I think, in Las Vegas, where he describes a really bad-ass trip as being one where you look down your leg and see your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.
You know, it is basically when they feed the geese, who generally, if it's any sort of a quality operation, the geese or the ducks come over to the feeder, but basically you tilt the thing's head back, you put a long funnel down its throat, and put a couple of handfuls of ground corn in, which they readily eat.
It just looks like they're having food jammed into them.
And if you play footage of someplace in Eastern Europe that is mass producing this stuff very cruelly, there's some really terrifying footage that makes for a very lurid picture of the process.
Add to that that it's got a French name and only a bunch of wealthy, high-end restaurants serve it.
Their ultimate goal, but basically bolstered by their victory with foie gras here, they will then be able to raise money towards the next victory, which ultimately leads to their aim, which is to give chickens the vote.
I feel that urge often, but, you know, it's really, maybe every couple of months I'll get that sudden, you know, I'd really like a salad.
Maybe every two months.
Or actually, if you're in, like, the Czech Republic, anywhere in Eastern Europe, basically, for more than two weeks, you're really starting to think long.
Or Argentina or Uruguay, you don't see a green vegetable for, like, weeks.
I remember up there, we were all in our latest sort of, you know, Everest-ready, you know, down parkas, you know, they laughed their asses off at us when we got off the plane.
We said, you know, are we dressed well enough to go out in the canoes?
And they just laughed their asses off.
Had to slip a big, like, caribou smock over yourself on top of the down jackets to, you know, to operate.
All our cameras locked up, like froze up and locked up within seconds of each other after, I don't know, maybe we shot for an hour, an hour and a half.
Seeing a whole family basically shoot a seal, drag it onto their kitchen floor on a tarpaulin, and then everybody in the family, mom, dad, grandma, junior, they all whip out knives and start tearing this thing apart.
And it looks like Night of the Living Dead, but it is, in fact, one of the most genuinely heartwarming times I've had on the show.
They're surviving.
They're incredibly happy when they're doing this.
And juxtaposing those pictures in your mind of what are clearly a close and happy family having a good time with all of this blood, that kind of takes some getting used to.
But I think when you travel a lot, you get used to the notion that people are different or live in very different circumstances.
You know, because we're interested principally in food on the show, I think people everywhere have been particularly nice to us and let us see a particularly...
I don't know, a side of their personalities, a side of their cultures that I think a lot of other hard journalists don't get to see.
People's defenses are down.
You know, they don't...
They're less likely to put up a front or be someone other than who they really are over the table.
Right away, you break bread with somebody.
You drink the local drink, whatever it is.
You eat whatever's offered.
You try to be a good guest.
I think you're going to connect with people over food in a way that you couldn't if you're just some guy with a microphone and a camera.
People, cameras and things, you know, You know, changes the situation.
But the fact that, you know, I travel largely on my stomach, I think gives me a, you know, like I said, an advantage.
It's basically a big stew of hooves and snouts and black beans.
And it's really delicious.
It came originally from slave food.
It was the scraps from the table of the wealthy Portuguese that their slaves would collect and try to make into something edible or even delicious.
And over time they created this dish that...
You know, it was the food of the very poor at one point.
Now it's like the national dish.
Everybody in Brazil at one point or another.
Saturday, you invite the family over and you sit around eating this huge, huge amounts of feijoada and getting really, really, really fucked up on cachaça.
You're in water the depth of a rice paddy, you know?
I mean, three feet of water, and you're driving around, you're looking at basically rice paddy deep water to the left, and you see a 500-pound freshwater fish, you know, breaking the surface.
It's...
Wild.
I mean, there are all of these fish and creatures and fruits and vegetables down there that never make it out of that area.
So it's really, ingredient-wise, it's really another planet.
It's where the food is sort of spiciest and richest and most interesting.
You know, it just...
There's no culture like it on Earth.
Aside from the fighting, I don't know how anyone could, actually.
I don't understand how anyone works or wants to work.
When you get used to just hearing that music, being in a country that beautiful, food that good.
Everybody in that country looks like, you know, attractive or not, everybody in Brazil seems to look like they either just got laid and they're coming from getting laid or they're on their way to getting laid.
Oh, that's awesome.
You know, going to the beach in Brazil is amazing because you see people of every size, you know, every hue.
Just kind of...
The beach culture is so awesome.
I don't think there's any country where people seem to like music and dance as ferociously.
But you could do worse than, you know, to keel over after a really good meal, to die with a big hunk of pork in your mouth in Spain would not be a bad way to go out.
Yeah, I mean, it was basically considered the best restaurant in the world for a long time, and certainly he was a guy way out in front of everybody else.
Yeah, that was some good food porn we did, and I think that was a show I'm really...
Every once in a while we get an opportunity to do a show that might actually mean something in a few years, and I think we shot some history with that show.
The restaurant closed the same night, I think, that we aired the show, or closed to it.
That's a true artist.
It was a limited period of time and that era is over and we managed to get it on tape.
If you start talking about yourself like that, then you start talking about yourself in the third person, and after that, there's really nothing left to do but get arrested like having beaten a transsexual hooker to death, you know?
I don't see telling stories on television or talking about yourself on television as being essentially any different or certainly no better than actually working for a living.
Anyone could know you as that guy that you work with with a great personality, who's funny, likes to talk shit about things, kind of an interesting guy.
You know, he could be a TV star.
Somebody just put a camera on him.
This guy needs his own reality show.
You know, I mean, how many people do you know like that?
I've known thousands of them.
My friend Johnny B, I used to, my best friend was a professional pool hustler, was halfway homeless, always sleeping on my couch, other people's couches, and he was a genius.
He could throw math problems at him, he would recreate him.
You know, the whole dynamic of the show, they're trying hard.
by now they know the terrible rules of television.
It's not about looking good.
They got that early on.
But now they know how to play ball.
They got a good thing.
They got a good gig.
And they're milking it for as long as they can.
But look at the Real Housewives chain.
Does anyone go on the Real Housewives thinking that they're going to look good?
That's not what the show's about.
It's about people sitting on couches with a bag of chips saying, man, those people are even way more fucked up than me, and what have they done to their faces?
It's all about, you know, showing off from work every day, knowing that your job is to, you know, I mean, everyone who watches will feel better about themselves, you know, and be snickering at me, you know, at my cartoonish behavior.
It is fascinating that the trend of reality television took off, that this idea of just following housewives, or following guys driving on slippery roads.
Well, I'm waiting for the day that I get the phone call from my agent saying, you know, we really think celebrity rehab is a good career move for you right now.
You know, that says something.
At what point does this seem strategically like a good career move, you know, celebrity rehab?
Yeah, I mean, I went into the experience, you know, it's this cottage, not a cottage, it's a shack up on stilts, as I recall, out in the middle of the jungle in the Amazon.
We're like four hours, six hours by boat from any place, like, resembling a place with a hospital.
No lights.
So I went into the experience with the expectation that it would be like the book where I'd be crawling around naked in the jungle, you know, shitting and puking for six hours before I discover my spirit animal.
So this is what I thought I was going into.
But honestly, I mean, you know, I got off, seriously, but it wasn't like acid.
Back in the day, we did marinate the mushrooms in honey, I think.
We marinated them in honey overnight or longer, and then would mix it in a big pot of hot tea, and the whole kitchen would be drinking this tea all that long.
They would dry them up and preserve them in honey, and they believed that that's one of the ways that people started getting into alcohol, because honey can ferment and become mead, and that eventually, this is one of Terrence McKenna's theories, that people went from being intoxicant-oriented, like with psychedelic mushrooms, to alcohol-oriented, and that somehow another fucked society up.
You know, the first coffee houses in England were quickly declared illegal by the government.
They saw these as hotbeds of sedition and they closed them down.
Why?
Because up until that point in history, most Europeans and most people in England would wake up in the morning and drink mead.
That's all they drank all day long.
It was basically crude beer, homemade beer.
So up until this point in history when people started drinking coffee in these coffee houses, everybody in Europe could be counted on to be fucked up all day long.
So nobody was...
So coffee houses were the first place in Europe where people would sit around in a state of sobriety.
And as people tend to do, when you're sober, you notice shit.
And they're like, hey, have you noticed our government's really fucking us?
The government was right, of course.
Because this was the first time that people were actually drinking a beverage and hanging out with their wits about them.
It seems like the smarter you are and the higher you are in the public eye, the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to behave like the stupidest person to ever be on Law and Order.
I think the In-N-Out Burger guys, there was a religious component to the company at some point, an underlying philosophy.
But the point is they've apparently created this really pretty cool business model for fast food.
And it's an issue that I think about a lot because, I don't know which economist, somebody said, somebody smarter than me, Another 15 years, we're going to be a country...
Everybody in the country will all be selling cheeseburgers to each other.
A lot of Saudis have a very different view of the world than I do, for sure.
Yeah.
But no, I think everywhere I've been, again, it's kind of about the people have been incredibly hospitable in places that I didn't expect up front they would have any particular love for Americans.
Vietnamese were incredible from the first time I went there.
You know, a lot of bad history there.
I even asked at one point, I turned to somebody I was with, I said, aren't you guys pissed?
If you want to shoot in this area, you're going to need somebody, a local godfather or the...
The head of the crew or whoever controls that area in the real world, we have to contact them and say, listen, we're going to make a point of coming at you, showing you respect, offering you a few dollars, because it's never about the money.
And we'll get to wander around and shoot your whole area of your city without fear of being shot or stabbed or robbed.
And we do that again and again.
And again, we just show the respect of acknowledging For better or worse, you are the boss of this neighborhood.
We're going to show you respect in front of your neighbors.
And you will keep us from getting shot while we're shooting in your neighborhood.
Again, it's just about...
We're not paying people.
People are proud of their food.
Chances are they're proud of their neighborhood.
They're proud of their friends.
If somebody expresses interest in telling their story or showing the world what they do, particularly if there's food involved and local beverage...
One of the most heartwarming, really cool, homey moments was when you were in Naples and that guy took you into his house for Sunday dinner and it was sort of a last minute thing.
What I do generally is if I know I'm shooting in Rome or anywhere in Italy or Eastern Europe, you know, in dumpling land, you know, I'll make sure that the next show is in, you know, someplace really impoverished.
My friend Bud, who owns that show, Rides, they filmed the construction of her Lamborghini, and he came back.
The first thing he said is, those fucking people know how to live.
He goes, let me tell you something.
First of all, they go to work about 10, 10.30.
No one's there at like 7 a.m.
They get in, they work for a little bit, then they eat a spectacular lunch, where they have chefs come in and make them the most incredible pasta, and then they sleep for a couple hours.
That's awesome.
And then they're done.
No one's working like 12 hours a day at the Lamborghini factory.
They're just artists making these incredible...
Why can't we...
Is it possible to sustain 300 million people and have that sort of a work ethic?
Goddamn, this would be a way better place.
For a regular job.
If you're working on your own shit, you should be able to do whatever you want.
My wife's Italian, as you know, and I spend a lot of time there, and I look around at guys in their 20s and 30s, and I'm constantly asking myself, how do you live this way?
Who's giving you money?
Nobody seems to really...
People do work hard in Italy, but you just tend to not see it.
And you're having this big motherfucking lunch every day, and maybe a little gelato at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
You're getting your weeks of vacation a year.
In France and in Italy, too, you get sick in the middle of the night.
You pick up a phone and call a doctor, and 15 minutes later, some young intern arrives on a motor scooter and shoots you up with whatever drugs you need to feel better.
That's what happens when you have a small culture.
When you have a culture of too many millions of people, you have the diffusion of responsibility thing, the numbers are too big, and there's no way you can rock that.
One of the things I love doing in New York is driving.
Everyone else hates to drive in New York.
I love driving in New York.
I love how traffic...
These cars should be smacking up against each other, particularly the way the taxis drive when they're bombing up an avenue looking to hit the lights, changing lanes without even touching the directionals.
There's something really mystically cooperative about the way it all works.
There's an ebb and float in New York City traffic that when you get up into that wave, it's...
New York City is just such a fascinating experiment to stack people on top of each other all in this one place and have pretty much anything you need right there.
They're great chefs because they're able to choose people, make personal and professional relationships with those people such that they can execute their vision, their artistic vision, again and again and again, exactly the same every single day, rain or shine.
So by the time the chef becomes the chef that you know, by the time you know their name, chances are they're not working the line anymore, but that they spent most of their adult lives standing there doing something that is very similar in many ways to work in a production line in an auto factory.
You're putting the nuts and the balls in the same places, presumably every time and just as well.
Well, because they're both guys who've been around a long time and done really important things, both off TV and on TV. But it's interesting that they love him for his personality.
For a long time, a lot of chefs got into the business because they were awkward.
They felt awkward.
They were shit at words or generally didn't feel comfortable in a straight business environment.
Chats are they're kind of running away from something.
They sense something about themselves that said, all of the things that tell you subconsciously, bad communicator, you know, shouldn't be out there talking to regular people on a regular basis, trying to do normal business.
Those are things that drove people to cook.
And yet suddenly they find themselves, you know, with media coaches and people trying to train them to be themselves on camera.
And it's a huge industry and a strange, strange one.
Well, traditionally in European culture, if the family could only afford to send one kid to college, they'd pick the smartest son and they'd invest what little money they had in that enterprise.
The other one would join the family business or go to hotel school to learn.
You'd learn to be an apprentice to some craft, some trade.
And for a lot of people, that was hotel school.
So a lot of the great chefs that came out of that kind of situation, certainly when I started cooking, it was the misfits who ended up in the restaurant business.
Life hadn't exactly turned out the way they'd expected, or maybe there's a quick, a temporary, there's always a job for you if you're presentable, reasonably intelligent.
There's always a job for you on the floor of a restaurant as a waiter.
Yeah, that is a unique position to be a bartender, to be the sober person serving everyone drinks while they're all just falling apart and talking to you.
Well, ultimately, if you're in the bar every night, you know, bars are great once a week.
Bars are great once a month.
You know, once a month, if you stay healthy, and you're feeling good, your immune system's up, you've been eating vitamins and eating well, you just get fucked up.
Yeah, I mean, I think we should, if we're going to do it, if we're going to allow people to smoke weed, then we shouldn't be making money off it as a nation.
We should be selling serious weight to, like, Europe.
I have met people and done scenes of my show with people who have done very, very bad things in their lives.
No question about it.
They were not currently, at the time of the show, other than, you know, there were some low-level guys, for sure, who clearly were drug dealers.
They said as much.
They said, could you please shoot just this side of the street, because this side is my drug operation.
Well, you make concessions, compromises, you know, morally and otherwise, when you take advantage of a situation like that.
The only way you're going to shoot the neighborhood is to have a A local drug dealer, hold your hand.
That's what you do.
Or you choose not to, depending.
And in Mexico, the level of violence is so spectacular, and they see presumably the major dealers out there are killing large numbers of people on a regular and ongoing basis.
Yeah, you've got to ask yourself that all the time.
But in the same way, when people are trying to be really nice to you in countries where you're not free to speak your mind, Cuba would be an example.
You know...
China, up near the Tibetan border.
You have to understand, when you're talking to people on camera who've let you into their homes and they've fed you and they've been maybe a little more frank with you on a personal level than they are probably supposed to as government functionaries, When they're good to you and everything they said was going to happen happened the way it was supposed to and they weren't too clumsy and they didn't try to ham fist you.
Basically, if we get to go back to New York, they have to stay there.
So if I go back and start criticizing as severely as I might, It's something I always have to weigh.
All the people who are good to me in these countries, they're going to be in a very bad place if I go back to New York and make this show all about China and Tibet.
I may have my opinions on it, but for the sake of the people I leave behind, I'm not shooting my mouth off.
I can say what I want about China any time I want.
And I suffer no consequences.
Anyone who is ever nice to us...
We'll be suspect if I were to start really going off on a tangent on the issue on the show that these people helped me make.
Same in Cuba.
You do make certain compromises because people are as straight with you as they can be.
They do the best by you.
There are people who are nice and with senses of humor, trying to do the best they can, whether you agree with their system or despise it.
At the end of the day, you've got to ask yourself, do I really want to put, you know, it might make more entertaining or truthful television, but they're going to be in a fucking cell for the crime of being nice to me or being honest with me.
That's something we get to ask ourselves all the time.
They saw us show other parts of the world in a relatively nonjudgmental way, and they, foolishly or not, shrewdly or foolishly, there will be differences of opinion, I'm sure, for whatever reason, they trusted us to come and they pretty much let us wander around shooting.
They tried, of course.
There was definitely concern over who we'd be talking to and what they might say.
But, you know, everybody has to be careful about what they say.
Everybody changes their behavior when they talk to you to a certain extent.
You don't bring up certain subjects because they're going to worry.
We're not making any show ever where the nation or the local police or any other person has final cut or approval over what we're showing.
No, you obviously have approval over what we're allowed to shoot, but how we edit that back in New York and what we say, you're on your own, it's done.
You've signed a release, that ain't ever, ever, ever going to happen.
You know, it's easy for me to say I really don't want to see a brand new Holiday Inn on the waterfront of the Malecon in Havana because it's one of the most beautiful stretches of anywhere, anywhere.
But that's easy for me to say.
I'm not Cuban.
I didn't lose my home.
You know, I have to say I had no moral problems going to Cuba.
Let's put it that way.
But I've since met a lot of Miami Cubans who take a very different view of going to Cuba.
And it has been pointed out to me.
One guy came up to me and we were shooting at his restaurant.
It was just a complete coincidence after our Cuba show had aired.
This guy was pissed.
It had clearly been a big issue at his house.
He was really struggling to contain his anger and be courteous, which he was incredibly courteous.
And he said, I just need you to look at this picture.
And he takes me back and she has a picture of his dad, who ran a—basically, he sold fish.
So I'd always thought that the people who lost their homes and ran off to Miami were all the rich—the bastards, basically.
What this man was telling me, my father was an ordinary businessman who worked hard selling fish, catching fish and selling fish.
And they took his business and ended his livelihood.
It was a very hard show to balance, let's put it that way.
It's got to be so strange to just hop from one culture to the next, one unique insight into this totally different environment, and then another one just as extremely different.
Remember that guy who ran for president a while back?
He predicted all of this in 2007 on...
It was one of those CNN or one of those fucking shows where he got on and he talked about the United States' agenda as far as acquiring natural resources all over the world.
And Libya was right in the pile.
Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
It was all these different countries and he described it all in 2007. And slowly but surely all these things are getting implemented.
I think what we're seeing in Egypt and Libya and Syria and Tunisia, I think actually what we're seeing is something we didn't predict.
We didn't make it happen.
It's happening.
It's in many ways frightening to us.
I mean, I think the fact that all these governments are toppling is not necessarily good for our American business interests.
I happen to think it's a really good thing.
I'm happy to see it.
Like, I don't really care what kind of psychos take over Egypt.
Just the fact that, you know, even if bad guys end up running Egypt again, The fact that it was possible that they could topple those particular bad bastards who'd been around forever.
It was unthinkable a year ago to your average Egyptian that things would ever change, ever, in their lifetime or their children's lifetime.
And it wasn't unthinkable that these dynasties would ever fall.
So it's really kind of awesome, just the fact that it sends a message that it could happen.
I think it's a good one.
I don't think it falls into the plan.
I'm waiting for that big payday from Iraq.
Are we supposed to be pumping their oil straight into American coffers right from now?
I think it depends on who you're paying attention to or who you want to believe when it comes to that world.
But there's a lot of people that believe that we've hit some sort of a peak oil stage.
And what they're trying to do is just control all the areas which will be absolutely necessary when oil gets to the point where we're going to have to start rationing things.
You know, you go to China, certain major chain hotels...
You go to a Hilton in New York, it's like not the...
To my mind, it's not the greatest hotel ever, okay?
You go to a Hilton in Shanghai, it is fucking luxe, okay?
Any chain hotel...
In Shanghai or Beijing, a Western chain hotel, the level of excellence and technical superiority required or expected there is so higher than in New York.
At that level, the sort of people who would stay at one of these hotels in Shanghai are a lot richer and more demanding than their equivalent in New York.
So the level of luxury and development that you see in places like China, where, you know, Jesus, this is a dysfunctional government, you would think.
They're communists, for fuck's sake.
How come they've got this great rail system?
How come their hotels are nicer than ours?
How come internet coverage is better?
How come I can get five bars on my cell phone anywhere in China, like the deepest, darkest valley?
Ass end of nowhere.
You start to get this terrible...
I'm an American.
I'm a New Yorker.
We're the greatest country in the world.
I believe this absolutely and positively.
But at the end of the day, I just start thinking to myself, if you know that the New York subway system...
To say that you know that the New York City subway system is certainly not the best in the world.
So, in your experience in all these other countries, when you see all these different regimes getting toppled, you don't think there's any American influence in these things happening?
If history has taught us anything, and if you read all of the documents from all of the controversial periods of CIA operations, we just don't seem to be very good at these things.
So you think the speculation about the CIA being involved, like they're probably just very, very peripherally involved and there's just shit happening no matter what.
I'm sure there are major CIA operations going on right now, without a doubt.
But I think this notion that there's an office somewhere where the whole fate of the world is sort of decided, what countries are going to evade over the next 10 years.
We're just not that good, and we're definitely not that secure.
There's always, you know, three people know about something.
There's the greatest argument about the 9-11 conspiracy theory, idiots, the Kennedy assassination, Looney Tunes.
Basically, in this country, if more than three people know about a thing, one of them is going to be on the stand crying about it, the other guy's going to be writing a book about it, and maybe two guys will keep their mouths shut.
I read best evidence, and that's one of the reasons why I first started believing there was some sort of a conspiracy.
That was one of the first things that I saw that made me really reconsider.
But later in life, the thing that really got me was the Northwoods document.
If you've never heard of that, it's something that they drafted in the 1960s, or 1960, 61 or 62, where Kennedy actually vetoed it, and all the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed it.
And then we're going to have fake American terror attacks.
We're going to get a plane.
They were going to have a drone plane explode it and say a bunch of people died.
And they were going to attack Guantanamo Bay.
And they were going to arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay.
This is, to me, what's interesting about Kennedy's assassination, the conspiracy.
It's a...
There was so much wacky shit going on around that time, so much of it embarrassing, criminal, scary, funny, really silly going on at that time, that in fact the least interesting thing about the entire...
You know, big picture of the Kennedy assassination is the actual assassination itself because what everybody else was up to at the time and covering up was just, like, right out of a movie.
The CIA is meeting with, you know, Johnny Rosselli and all these, like, mafia guys to whack out Castro.
There was just so much other embarrassing shit going on that in many ways those stories and where they lead are a lot more entertaining and complex and fun than a story of a guy shooting a president.
I think if you talk, and I have talked to people who served in combat for a long time, the story of the buddy who gets around through the front of his helmet, it travels around subcutaneously around the skull and enters out the back without hurting the guy.
I'm talking about a lot of issues in a lot of things, but as you know, because we've worked a lot of the same theaters, and I do about 40 of them a year, if you don't get a laugh every 60 seconds, you've got a problem.
You want to laugh every 60 seconds, and if they don't...
If not in 60 seconds, the one that comes in two minutes is going to be really fucking funny because they had to wait for it, and I've really learned a lot of things.
I mean, I've done so many gigs now, and I didn't understand.
When you kill, when you have a really good night, I come away kind of depressed by it.
Really?
Right.
The pressure of not knowing whether you're going to do well, it's like being in a ski jump.
It's all decided.
How am I going to do on this jump?
You don't know when the thing's going beep, beep, beep before you head down the chute.
You just don't know.
You know, you go in feeling really bad one night, and you kill, and then another night you go in, you're all pumped up, you think you're 100%, and it's just like, you're out there like...
But it's just weird, just like the bartender I was talking about before, you start to learn...
And when you're interviewed a lot or when you're doing the same routine a lot, You know, you start to, someone will ask you off-camera or off-stage a question to, you know, something that you just, and you're doing bit.
You're doing bit.
You know, you slide into it and say, you know, well, I was actually talking about this last night on the stage at the Pats Theater, but.
You're very humble in the way you approach things.
And that's one of the reasons why you're such an interesting guy and one of the reasons why your opinion is so respected.
But when you're talking about this, all you're doing is getting the thought to them as efficiently as possible in a method that you're already successful at.
It's still what they need.
It's what they want to hear.
It's just even though you've already answered it exactly this way before, you tend to think there's something wrong with that because it's not honest.
This is why I was enjoying your Carlos Mencia shit so much, because you come up to this point after two years, you realize, well, I've done all the major cities now with this routine.
And it's been quoted and repeated in the local press.
And chances are, if I said it in the first place, live at some point earlier in my career, I may have written it or put it in the show.
So you reach this point, it's like, oh shit, I need another completely new hour.
When you have the perfect word to say and the heckler gets shut down and everybody starts laughing, tell me that doesn't feel like the most awesome shit ever.