Shane Smith recounts Vice’s undercover access to a Taliban commander admitting child suicide bombers, despite claims they forced U.S. withdrawal—while trillions in Afghan minerals remain untapped. He details Juarez’s narco violence, including Al Rikin’s massacres and the DEA’s botched Fast and Furious operation, exposing systemic hypocrisy in the "war on drugs." From scopolamine’s mind-control horrors to Ibogaine’s desperate addiction cures, they link geopolitical corruption to societal apathy, questioning whether profit-driven wars and unchecked chemical exploitation define modern power. [Automatically generated summary]
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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 this Jamie Varner kid that fought this weekend.
Did you see that?
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, left to figure it out.
When he talked to him, decided to get his shit together again and just trained 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 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 that have ever pulled off a real good fight scene in a movie.
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.
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 he's back.
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, in Afghanistan we're lucky because there was a guy named Saad Mashuni who runs Tolo News, which is the sort of main news, you know, pro-Western news in Afghanistan.
And so he, you know, had a lot of...
He can get you to 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.
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 screw him if I don't, so he wouldn't talk to us about it.
About 200 times a year, so nearly every day there's a suicide bomb, and they're getting more and more effective.
They just had the first civilian suicide bomb, so not military targets, and it was a complete disaster.
They actually 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.
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.
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 haven't been conflicted by this conflict.
Much like they've done in Africa, you know, wherever America sort of, you know, pissed people off or done bad things, and China just comes in and says, oh, we'll trade with you, you know.
Well, because America goes and sees things, and for better or for worse, let's try to fix it, and then there's problems, and then they put sanctions on people.
And China just says, I don't give a shit what you do.
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'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?
I was on my iPod or the iPad and, you know, there was a plane, you know, it was like soaring through the air and you could 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 really sort of, wow, this is modernity.
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 or 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, 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...
What's possible at the apex of civilization right now as far as cities and a place where you can go safely and a place that doesn't have guns and bombs blowing up constantly.
No wonder why that's where the terrorist attacks occurred.
No wonder why that's where the September 11th attacks occurred, right?
You know, when you fly in, you still see that the Twin Towers aren't 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, you know, completely polarized the world.
And it 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 3-5% of all terrorism before 9-11, and now they're like 97% of all.
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.
Yeah, well, I mean, you, the reason why I'm happy is because you're thankful for what you have when you see what, you know, everybody else doesn't have.
We shot a lot in Kenya with refugees and we shot around Puntland and now we're shooting Mogadishu to round it up.
It depends on the show.
But anyway, so when you're there, all you're thinking about is, you know, we've got to get the shot, or we've got to get this, or we've got to 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?
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 these are, they're a fisherman's culture.
I mean, could you imagine you're a culture of fishermen?
And, you know, 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, you know, 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.
They're the mother earth becoming, you know, 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 have 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.
If they can 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 sort of a real court.
We're working on a story there right now about the American government is financing sort of Islamist extremists, you know, to fight al-Shabaab who are, you know, the bad boys over there.
Meddling other people's stuff and then we have to go and we have to save them and you're like you know we have to save them from who 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 you know so there's a lot of geopolitics and you know sort of geopolitical you know gamesmanship It has been the cause of a lot of these problems, but now it's 99% always economics.
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 a hundred 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, rare earth metals that didn't used to be worth money are now in every cell phone.
So 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.
That spectrum is quite fascinating.
That spectrum goes back to just the invention of tools and figuring out iron and shit, 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 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 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.
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?
I mean, don't you think that's something that would be really, really popular?
No one ever talks about that.
If they made a movie right now about that part of the world, described it the way you described it, like some crazy horror movie about civilization gone wrong.
There's an 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 in northern Mexico.
And 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.
They're assassins, you know?
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.
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.
But it's a very complex story, and we're going to cause some waves.
But basically, we were down in Mexico.
We'd 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 originated in America so that they could keep practicing polygamy.
They 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 narcos.
And we went down there to live in the colonies and we were hanging out with the LeBarons, who I don't know if you've ever heard of, but they have a crazy story of they had one of their...
He believed that he had the power of blood atonement, so he was killing all the people in the church that were trying to mess with him.
So he had about 30 or maybe had 50 children, nearly 50 children, and he had them work as assassins for him in this bloody war that they had down there.
Actually, we say that out of all the Republican candidates, Mitt Romney had the staunchest stand against immigration 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 he wanted to veto the DREAM Act and he said publicly he vetoed 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, you know, complete kidnapping and insanity do not a good presidential candidate make.
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 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 were 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.
I think it's going to get worse because, actually, money does rule everything, and I think that it 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 and Adam Smith, you know, the free market sort of does 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, you know, kids working in coal mines, all that shit.
But the reason why I say it's going to get worse, and I'm not 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, right?
So you have kids, you know, 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, you know, 17, 18, 19-year-old kid.
It's just sort of getting more and more subversive and they're doing their own content networks and everything now.
But 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, etc., etc.
And both, you know, extreme sides of the spectrum.
And then they end up warring, you know, fighting.
And what's happening now is, you know, 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, that's 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.
I've said that's the biggest problem with this country is that 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 I read today, 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.
If we want to start fixing things, we've got to fix this country, too.
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.
You're saying, well, how does 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.
You were 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 refuse of Juarez.
into this church and it's like a lot of you know people with severe psychological problems people with severe 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 we're 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 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 and You know,
on the stores, on the way to the nightclub, and then everyone dressed up, and you're like...
As human beings, we just want to forget.
You know, we just want entertainment, TV, more entertainment, just spectacular shit, just fucking lots of stuff, because it's...
We like to bury our heads in the sand, because that's just right here.
Like, that shit is happening just fucking...
You don't have to go to Afghanistan.
It's five miles from our border.
And so...
You know, that's what you think when you come back from places like that.
And by the way, all the guns, when we were there, it's the largest haul of ammunition.
It was over 250,000 rounds of ammunition, 7.60 ammunition.
And 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 coming from America, all the drugs comes up from here, and all the money comes from America.
The worst guy I've ever heard about is a guy named Al Rikin.
And he's a narco that was fighting one of the Mormon colonies.
But he's famous for, you know, he's obviously the drug dealers.
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.
This is 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.
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 we're clinging at straws here, but when you start to think, wow, if we have unlimited solar power and you have unlimited carbon, A, it stops warming, but B, you can make hydrogen cells or biofuels.
And then you say, wow, that would be interesting because you could actually put hydrogen cells into 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.
You know, there are people coming up with ideas.
This could start a whole new economy, you know, sort of set us out on this, you know, 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 to next every factory.
Maybe we are going to do this great stuff.
And then the problem is you go to Africa or Southeast Asia and, you know, we did a story on, you know, 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, 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 there.
Alive because they want to harvest your pieces.
So Bangkok body snatchers.
There's like street gangs that fight each other over the sort of dead and dying.
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 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 some crazy growth.
I'm like, if you didn't understand...
If you were so alien that human beings weren't identifiable as an individual...
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.
Maybe we're just a really super complicated...
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 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 antimatter weapons in 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.
Did you see that 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.
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.
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 of positive thinking type shit and hit you with The Secret or Eckhart Tolle and, you know, like, 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?
And so for those people to say, I'm going to leave, I'm like a...
I'm 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.
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 is that 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 country, 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.
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 like in Turkey.
This Gobekli Tepli that's at least 14,000 years old.
Massive, excellently cut stone columns.
Civilization.
Clear civilization.
Back in a time where they're attributing that area only as hunter-gatherers.
There is no civilization.
There's no cities.
Where's the fucking city, man?
You gotta explain this.
Not only that, it has drawings or 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 To the Catholic Church.
Look at all the crazy shit that's gone on in this country.
I've got this guy coming on June 7th, for those of you 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.
Egyptian civilization goes back that far.
Like they even named 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 and 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, like, it just seems really small.
And I think we've got a lot of amnesia when it comes to the past of humans.
And 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 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, the whole world is a convertible.
There's no top.
And we're just 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.
unidentified
And we've just sort of completely forgotten about that.
I think if we're going to go, that's a fucking amazing way to go.
That's going to be quick.
It's going to be quick, and it's going to be crazy, and you don't have to worry about anybody suffering.
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.
When people fight, what you said about Vietnam, don't they remember Vietnam?
When you go to these places and you see what injuries look like, which are colostomy bags and legs that are gone and arms that are gone, you say, well, why would you ever do this again?
And then a generation forgets and then they go do something else.
McKenna's theory, well, panspermia is a real theory of life.
You know, 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 astroidal 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.
I think it's...
I'm not saying exactly right, but I believe it's like 4-Fox-4-Loloxy-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 our 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 gonna come here from another planet and show us how to use a laser gun.
You know, but in fact, intelligence can exist in plant form, and that 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, you know, that is alien invasion, that mushrooms are an alien invasion.
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 novelty and terrible times would almost be predictable.
It was some sort of a mathematical equation of getting to infinite novelty, which was like in this year, supposedly.
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 then helped them evolve.
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.
I was flying back actually from Afghanistan.
No, I was flying back 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 10 bucks.
This is 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 are we making?
I went to do the Upfronts, which is where all the TV shows get sold and online shows get sold.
And you have The Voice, which is the biggest show, which is just American Idol.
TV is derivative of TV. TV is just making shittier and shittier shows based on itself.
And then 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 budget.
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 the social networks and 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 to 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, et cetera, et cetera.
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 as shit.
He's gonna 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 were a little funky with the money.
Then the guy shows up naked in the streets, beating off, acting gay.
Well, you know, they didn't, I'm sure they didn't think, you know, they went, there's these, you know, kids that go over and they shot it in Fairfax to them.
You know, I've been there.
It's a bad part of the world.
And, you know, it's interesting on a few points.
One, because it shows that the fucking, like, everyone says kids don't care, 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.
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've been to Beirut like 20 times.
Beirut's not that bad.
There's sometimes parts of it that are bad, but...
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, who are the fuck these guys?
So we go and we call it immersionism.
You just go immerse yourself.
You know, 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, you know, 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 The people who did this to us.
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 there was the sort of our grandparents' generation that, you know, They didn't know better, so they were like, oh, space-age food, TV dinners, let's produce all the food, let's make it all with computers or whatever, assembly lines.
And so it started to be bad for us.
It started to do all these things.
Agent Orange, let's do all these terrible things.
But they didn't know any better.
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 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 a lot of these politicians like to think of as creating jobs.
You're creating problems.
And you cunts that keep attacking the Constitution and pulling amendments apart and really defacing the whole idea of what this country was founded on.
They're doing it just because they sense the future.
The future is 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.
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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you also have young people who are just smashing the shit out of cities like they did in Paris and especially in London last summer.
But, you know, what happens when...
When Occupy Wall Street becomes Egypt to try to smash the status quo, what happens when Occupy Wall Street becomes Syria or becomes Libya?
It's not in the foreseeable future maybe, but I didn't call Libya or Egypt or Syria either.
There's 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.
If I was 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.
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, the thing is, is the fact that they keep going on on the story and saying, yeah, we don't want him for actually blowing the whistle on every crime that's been going on in the government.
We want him for this sort of weird, you know, quasi thing that happened in Sweden that wouldn't be considered anything anywhere else.
But it's kind of smart, actually, because, for example, it's the one thing that you can't say, well, they just drummed it up and it's bullshit, because, well, rape is very serious.
So 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 against.
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 announced who he was and all that stuff, and he did it to save the government and all that stuff.
Julian Assange could come out to be a hero if there was some crazy revolution in the future.
We realized 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's job being to make sure that politicians weren't lying, to make sure that corporations weren't doing these bad things?
Well, I think, actually, distribution, I think, changed it because four companies run all news media, and they're all major global corporations that all have huge advertising.
They're conflicted and they don't go after politicians.
I remember during the Iraq War, people knew that this was all a construct.
They knew that there weren't weapons of mass destruction.
Everyone used to joke.
I used to hang out with all the journalists and they'd say, of course.
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 is...
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 to say, wait a minute, You know, 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, you know, 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?
How is that any different?
Because you can use the Fourth Estate as your PR agency.
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?
And it was the story that we broke in Sudan that time.
Darfur is oil.
And resource wealth, we did 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 Afghanistan now.
And so America's 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.
Well, I would say that, you know, look, it's been documented that they were part of the original outflux into America from Vietnam during the Vietnam War as a way to keep urban populations sort of at bay.
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.
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 it's just flooding out, it's destroyed.
Russia has now got 7% in Pakistan, which is a Muslim country, extremist Muslim country, has something like 12% in Karachi anyway, heroin addiction.
It's flooding out of Afghanistan.
We could have gone in and taken all the fields that we didn't.
All I know is like 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, you know, pictures of the American troops guarding Poppy.
Well, if you see the war on drugs in Afghanistan, and then you see the war on drugs in Mexico, you're like, well, it's completely corrupt from start to finish.
So they're so addicted to heroin that when they can't get it because it got expensive now because so many people are buying it that they make their own synthetic heroin.
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.
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?
We heard stories of people coming into their apartments on security cameras and 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, etc., etc.
And they couldn't figure it out until the FARC, the guys who were Colombians who were making cocaine, were using the same...
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 kiss you and they would spit scopolamine and you'd inhale it.
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, 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 that laying around?
A plant that grows.
And if it gets into your body, people just order you around.
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 administered the Ibogaine and we were taking our 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 crazy West African voodoo ex-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.
Listen, man, let's wrap this up and let you get some sleep.
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.