Shane Smith, Vice’s founder, compares the Arctic’s melting ice to a geopolitical poker game, with Russia, China, and the U.S. staking claims on exposed oil reserves—like Utah’s 18B barrels of ecologically destructive shale—while climate change denial crumbles under droughts killing Texas cattle and rising oceans. Smith argues democracy fails when governments waste billions (e.g., Afghanistan’s $100B on useless projects) or exploit crises like post-9/11 asset seizures, leaving citizens powerless without systemic transparency. Rogan and Smith debate whether tech—like a 13-year-old’s hypothetical uranium reactor or Vice’s investigative journalism—can outpace collapse, but agree corporations (e.g., Exxon) and politicians prioritize profit over solutions, with only grassroots pressure offering hope. [Automatically generated summary]
They've had cars before because they had the Tesla sports car, which was also a battery-controlled car.
But that was a tricky car because all the batteries were in the ass end of the car and it's a really light car.
So it's like one of those old Porsches.
The old Porsches have the engine hanging out back and...
It changes the dynamics of the handling.
When you go around corners, the ass end wants to pop around.
It's called oversteer.
Some people like it.
It's kind of fun to drive like that, but you have to get used to it and know what it's going to do.
If you're used to driving a regular car, and you're used to going sideways in a Corvette or something like that, and you get in one of those things, it's a very different sort of dynamic.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Shane Smith is here.
Why fuck around any longer?
Oh, we have a show Friday night at the Ice House.
It's called Thunder Pussy.
If you've never been to a Thunder Pussy show, it's not a regular comedy show.
You can get a bunch of fucking windows open.
What Thunder Pussy is, is...
It's a show where no one plans what they're going to say.
Everyone goes on stage fucked up, the audience calls out ideas, and everyone just starts talking shit.
Powerful Shane Smith, world traveler, internationally known, locally accepted, bad motherfucker, out doing ridiculous shit all over the world and not slowing down anytime soon.
So you can, what's happening now is you can actually, you know, when a lot of the earlier explorers were trying to get to China by going around the north, you know, and now that's opening up.
So it's opening up north of Scandinavia so that Russia can actually go right around Scandinavia because they never really had a freshwater year-round port.
And so that's a big deal for them.
But, you know, Same thing for Canada, same thing for the States, China.
They're all trying to get up there and lay rights to all the minerals and all the oil that's up there.
Huge reserves of oil, shale oil and weird oil that you have to fucking...
What's the kind in Utah that they found where you have to burn it and it creates all this horrible carbons being emitted into the environment in order to process it?
If it's tar sand, I don't know about Utah specifically.
I know about Canada.
It's very, very bad because they take the whole Lake Athabasca sort of watershed and they use the water to boil out the oil and then you have all of this sort of Chemical sand that they have to chuck, you have all the waters destroyed, and then obviously you got the oil.
You know, oil sands, tar sands aren't anything new.
Shale oil isn't new.
It's just, oh, you know, we can, we can, it's now economically viable to actually get this shit out, because it was too expensive before.
It's the same thing with using CO2 and water to sort of frack or to pump out the rest of the oil in wells because we didn't get all the oil out before, only what was pressurized.
There's a thing that comes up when you talk about anything that causes some sort of environmental hazard where you have two different types of people that automatically jump on the argument.
There's a type of people that are like, oh my god, we have to save owls and olive trees or whatever the fuck is growing up there.
And then there's these other people.
These other people that almost universally are not financially successful, but support hardcore Republican ideals, including the sacrificing of the environment for some sort of an economic gain.
I don't understand it, and I just did a piece on Greenland that's going to be airing on our HBO show tomorrow, and I've been doing a lot of press around.
It's interesting because I did a piece on Sea Level Rise last season, and Generally, about 90% of our comments are like, you guys fucking rock.
It's great.
And then there's 10%.
And like 80% of the comments all of a sudden on the environmental stuff were negative.
And I was like, how is this even happening?
And...
There's a study that was done that if the first four comments on an environmental thing or any news piece are negative, then people negate the actual piece.
So they spend hundreds of millions of dollars for bloggers and people to just go out and do comments so that anything launches, they sit there and they say that this is bad or not true or whatever.
For me, look, here's the deal.
I talked to scientists all the time for this Greenland piece, I talked to the chief climatologist at NASA. And I said, okay, so how much of this is man-made?
Because I went to Greenland and it's melting.
And Greenland is going to melt and it's 24 feet of sea level rise.
So if the sea level rise is 24 feet, then 80% of the world's cities go underwater.
So I said, okay, you know, how much of this is man-made?
And he's a conservative scientist.
He's like a NASA guy.
He's not like some crazy tree-hugging guy.
And he's like, well, 100%.
I said, hold on, what do you mean 100%?
It's natural.
No, it's 100% if you look at it.
And I actually, when I was talking to him, he's like, if we cut our carbon emissions by 80%, It's still going to continue for the next 500 years, global warming, or at least, but we just slow down the pace of it.
And I'm like, well, how much of Greenland's going to melt?
He goes, well, all of it.
It's just a question of how fast.
Is it going to be 500 years?
Is it going to be 50 years?
Is it going to be 150 years?
And so I actually kind of got mad at the scientists because I'm like, he's saying this as if it's boring.
And I'm saying, hold on, this is a global scientific consensus.
Yeah.
And then I'm like, well, people in America don't understand that.
I don't understand that.
And I do this for a living that, you know, because we did a thing on the Texas drought because we, you know, there was a drought here in California.
Everybody's like global warming, global warming.
And in Texas, they've had a drought for three years and they denied climate change.
Like Rick Perry said, it's not true.
Governor of the state.
And then you sit there and say, okay, well, how is that possible?
So we went to talk to people and they're like, yeah, climate change has been denied.
I mean, it's been disproven.
And that I find insidious because they know it's not true.
The fossil fuel companies know it's not true.
The car companies know it's not true.
The politicians know it's not true.
They know what the global consensus is, the scientific consensus.
And yet they fund and say that it's not happening.
And that's bad because they're fucking all of humanity and the future of humanity for short-term profits.
And that's what's insidious about climate change denial.
And it's the no-nonsense mentality and I've documented this.
This is like something that I've really been studying for quite a while.
There's people that, in spite of all the evidence in front of them, they want to believe the official story on almost everything and almost always take the conservative viewpoint.
And a lot of times that conservative viewpoint is who they are, the very type of people who they are, it's against them.
And yet they still support it.
A lot of them are hard-working, blue-collar people, and they have this idea that somehow or another in the future, They want to be able to make money freely.
So, you know, I don't want the government stepping in and stopping all this shale because I could step in and maybe do a little shale mining myself and start making millions of dollars and right now they're not.
Right now they're the ones who are being punished by a lot of these ideas and they're pushing forth themselves.
And if you talk to the disillusioned veterans, veterans of which I have tremendous respect for, by the way, but coming back from these wars that were fought for economic reasons, for oil.
And if you go back and read Smedley Butler's War is Just a Racket from 1930-something, he was a major brigadier, major general character.
I forget what his exact title and rank was, but he was a well-respected military man who spent his whole life in the service of the country and then realized when he was retiring that he only existed to go out there and make sure things were safe for bankers, clear the air for oil manufacturers, but he was a well-respected military man who spent his whole life in the service of the country He thought he was over there promoting freedom and keeping America safe.
And he wrote this fascinating and very damning piece and this is in the 1930s.
So it's always been like that.
It's always been this double hustle that even the people involved in it don't realize they're a part of the hustle.
The very most important part, the machine, the hammer itself, doesn't realize it's part of the hustle.
It's that thing, too, though, man, that I'm a good person, and I'm a no-nonsense good person, and that's the same shit that gets preyed upon with this whole global warming denial thing.
But I don't understand, because whenever I talk to someone, I'm like, okay, I'm a gambling guy.
Even if it's a 1% chance.
So you're so sure.
It's 100% sure.
It's 100% it's a fucking hoax, right?
What if it's 1%?
What if it's 5%?
What if it's 10%?
Don't you want to fucking hedge your bet?
And say because total global environmental disaster and breakdown versus, okay, we're all okay.
Don't you want to hedge your bet?
Wouldn't you want to hedge your bet against a complete environmental disaster?
I would.
I'm a gambler, man.
I'll bet 1% to say, okay, it's like insurance when you play background or when they've got a 21. Okay, I'll take that insurance because even if it's 1% true, I'm convinced it's 100% true, but even if it's 1% true, don't you want to hedge your bet?
Well, it's interesting in Texas, because you have a loss of a whole way of life.
Because all the cows are dying.
They've had a three year drought.
They've either sold them off or they've died.
And so you sit there and say, okay, in the face of all your fucking cattle, which was Texas for the longest period of time, you know, dying because of this prolonged drought.
Now you have people who were like incredible deniers and people saying, no, no, no, no, it's not true.
Saying, actually, there might be something to this shit.
And I don't know what it is, but we got to look into it.
I mean, we can't just pray for fucking rain anymore.
There's been Congress, there was a Republican congressman that we talked to who said, like, I was just a climate change denier because Al Gore was for it.
Therefore, I was a guinit.
And then when I did the research, I realized, holy shit, there's something to this.
And he got drummed out of the party and lost his seat.
But it doesn't mean that human intervention and what we've caused can't play a big part in accelerating that and accelerating it in an unmanageable way.
And he didn't really have an answer to that.
Because he was a no-nonsense guy.
He was just a young military kid who has this idea in his head that, you know, there's a lot of hippie bullshit being flown around there about the environment.
Well, the interesting thing about Al Gore, and I find it very interesting, not that I'm an Al Gore lover, I came up actually hating Tipper Gore because she was censorship, etc., etc.
But you've got to look at Al Gore and say, he wasn't...
Like a big liberal.
He was like a sort of tobacco guy from the South, like, you know, centrist.
You know, in most countries in the world, he'd be sort of center-right.
Conservative dude.
He came out of politics being an environmentalist.
Now, he didn't do that...
I don't know the guys very well, but, you know, he came out freaking out about the environment.
Why?
Because all the shit that he learned in...
All the behind-the-scenes shit that we don't know about freaked him out so much that he said, I'm going to actually go out and do this movie and say the environment is fucked.
Hey, by the way, this isn't like a Greenpeace dude.
This isn't a hippie.
This is a tobacco, southern dude, conservative in America, but you know, whatever, conservative in the world.
And he comes out and says the environment's fucked.
What's interesting is he wins a Nobel Prize, does a good movie, all this stuff, but then gets vilified to the point that now Al Gore is a joke.
And when we say, oh, you know, fuck, you know, he's this and it's Al Gore.
And by the way, isn't that a great fucking triumph?
Why isn't there more fucking outrage about the NSA listening to every fucking phone call, every tweet, every fucking email, everything, and saying, we live in a goddamn police state.
We signed away...
Well, we never even signed it away, but...
Our rights and freedoms.
Look, I came to this country because it's the land of the free home of the brave, fucking beautiful country.
I love it here.
Gorgeous place.
Why is there more outrage at the NSA? Watching everything we do and doing it illegally?
they hired like a tech company to come in and they put cameras everywhere and hidden microphones and they can triangulate like gunshot sounds and they got like cameras everywhere and they know where everybody is so like oh yeah we know this guy we know where he's going he's probably going to commit a crime so we're going to pick him up it's like what's that tom cruise movie minority minority report like they figure out like everything before it's going to happen but but i'm like hold on as i'm watching it i'm like that's not even the scary part
that's pretty scary but they have recorded and filmed everything that's going on in that fucking town 24 hours They know everything that's going on there, right?
And it's been such a success.
It really just put it underground, but whatever.
It's been a success because the crime rate dropped that Chicago, New York, all these big cities are doing it now.
So not only are you going to have the NSA listening to your phone calls and your fucking, you know, whatever, your social media, everything.
But you're going to be filmed and listened to everywhere you go.
And that's not 1984. That makes 1984 look like a fucking children's fairy tale.
You're always going to be watched every fucking thing that you ever do.
If that's not the definition of a police state, I don't know what is.
You're a smart dude because I was just at this tech conference and there's all these CEOs and this thing and we were talking about it and I got into a fight with one of these big dudes there, an old dude, big powerful guy, and he said, you know, who wouldn't jail Snowden?
I said, me, I wouldn't jail him.
What's the difference between Snowden and Woodward and Bernstein?
Woodward and Bernstein...
And the presidential papers, like they were the punks of their generation, but now they're heroes because it's the baby boomers and Snowden's...
But the interesting thing about that is, A, the fact that a lot of people whistleblowing is seen as un-American.
I see it as that's what's going to keep democracy safe.
But this sort of overreaching, and I said, look, I didn't come to America for it to live in a police state, and this is the definition of a police state, is that they can watch everything that we do.
And it was all these tech guys, and the tech guys just sort of rolled their eyes and said, it's already happened.
The tech is already there.
The government has already made the deals.
It's a de facto thing.
You can't change it.
And then I got kind of worried because you're exactly right.
You're 100% right.
The tech is so pervasive that you can't fuck with it.
Because what's going to happen is the same thing that has sort of happened with cellular...
I mean, obviously, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, just as a caveat here.
What's going to happen is the same thing that's happening with cellular communication.
At one point in time, cellular communication was a giant brick that you had to hang on to.
You used to have a fucking suitcase you carried around with them, you'd hold them in your...
And now you can go to the Amazon and people have cell phones.
You can go to the poorest third world countries and people have cell phones.
I think that right now, the information, the access to all this stuff, the ability to know what's going on everywhere all the time is terrifying to us because we don't possess it.
The only people that possess it are the people like the NSA or the people that are monitoring Camden.
Eventually, that technology will become so pervasive it'll be like Wikipedia.
Because I think that when I extrapolate, when I get really high and I think about this, especially when I get into the tank, I come into this one conclusion.
And this one conclusion is that money in its current form It's not resource-based.
The economy is essentially based on confidence and numbers.
Well, that's just information.
And at a certain point in time, technology is going to hit a bottleneck.
And that bottleneck is going to be money.
The bottleneck is that technology, as it progresses, So what are your thoughts on Bitcoin?
Well, I think that's a part of it.
I think that's just one part of it.
You know, I think Bitcoin is being for sure tampered with.
For sure fucked with.
I think all these people like this guy that had the Mt.
Gox and fucking $300 million goes away and it's crashed.
That is most likely a bunch of things.
I'm sure incompetence.
I'm sure shitty programming.
Probably sabotage.
Let's be honest.
If they really thought that it's possible for a new currency to come along...
Antonopoulos is coming back on again, too.
Yeah, he's coming back on soon, in April.
Without a doubt, someone would step in and try to do that.
Why would they not try to do that?
Were they going to just sit by and twiddle their thumbs and hope that their money is good enough to compete?
Get the fuck out of here.
These are criminals.
These are fucking swashbucklers and buccaneers.
They're assholes.
They're digital buccaneers.
And just like the same people send people out to diminish climate reports by leaving shitty comments, they're going to also go after Bitcoin any way they can.
What I find interesting about this is it's just an example of this whole second economy, the grey economy, the black economy, black market, that some people have estimated is up to a quarter to a half of what the global economy is because if you put in all the drugs that are dealt in the world, All the arms that are dealt in the world, right?
All the secondary quote-unquote gray electronics, the seconds, the stolen IP that's coming out of China.
All of that stuff, because if you go to India, everything is a $20 pirated smartphone, right?
Hundreds of millions of these fucking things have been sold.
All of this gray economy is being run somehow, and there's Bitcoin, and there's Silk Road, and there's all these different crazy fucking things that are out there running this shit.
And that's why I was talking.
I agree with you.
I agree with what you're saying because All money is now is just data.
This bank has this many credits and that bank has that and we swap them up.
It's not based on a gold standard.
It's not based on anything.
And so Bitcoin or virtual currencies are interesting, but they can be hacked as we just saw in Japan.
But also, what can you actually buy and sell with them?
Because what they're doing is they're actually using the old drug dealers or slash terrorists.
I've got some corn in Tunisia and you've got some flax in Pakistan and those will just be wiped out and somebody then in Afghanistan will get a case of AK-47s.
And that's what Bitcoin and that's what Silk Road and that's what a lot of these things ended up doing.
Yeah, I mean, what we're dealing with right now is a few people that have this power.
And I think it's gonna come down to a point in time where as this technology increases, if you just looked at it, don't look at it in the context of culture, don't look in the context of what we're accustomed to as far as our, you know, expectations of privacy, but instead look at it as it's a wave that's moving in a certain direction.
Well, where's it going?
What's it doing?
It's moving in a direction.
What's the direction?
Well, the direction is information being passed freely.
What's money?
Information.
What's going to happen?
It's going to hit a roadblock.
And the roadblock is people want to keep a hold of their money.
They want to control the money.
There's going to be no control over the money.
The whole thing is about access.
The whole thing is about access to this information.
And as this whole thing grows and expands and becomes more powerful and more prevalent and more pervasive, it's going to reach a bottleneck.
What sparks out of that is riots in Europe, Arab Spring all across the Middle East, riots in Southeast Asia, riots in South America, riots around the world by Gen Y, because they completely disenfranchised no future.
You take someone's future away, what they're going to do, they're going to smash shit up.
Why wouldn't they?
That's what revolution has been historically.
Okay.
So now, you know, China's fucked.
They're slowing down and they're in real trouble.
India's rupee is collapsing.
You know, it's not a question of if it's a question of when.
What happens when you have another economic downturn and the people who have been sort of treading water and just are starting to see some light go down again?
What happens then on an economic level when you have these young people who have been fucked for the past eight years say, okay, fuck, I'm going to have to tighten my belt for another eight.
When you talk about one house being worth $5 million and one house being worth, in Detroit, $500, and this is a valuable place to live, and this guy gets paid $100,000 for the same job that this woman gets paid $30,000 for, and they both work the same amount of hours.
At a certain point in time, it's like, what is our economy?
In 2006, if everything was rosy and people were buying houses and everything was great, you'd buy a house, you'd sell it a year later, you'd make 50 grand.
You talk to people that are economic experts and they give you some sort of an explanation of how people extracted money from the system, how the banks banked on the fact that the loans they were giving...
And then somehow they made money.
What does that mean?
What does it mean?
The same people are working.
There's the same amount of stuff.
There's the same amount of cars.
There's the same amount of buildings.
There's roughly the same amount of furniture.
What the fuck is going on that all of a sudden everything's terrible and no one can get a job?
What I love about it is recently somebody came up.
It's a very good idea, by the way.
To try to explain economic disparity.
And there was a time when the aristocrats who were, you know, benighted by God, and they owned everything and everybody else worked for them.
That's how it worked.
They could fuck the firstborn daughters before they got married.
They could do whatever they want.
They were the law.
They collected the taxes.
It was a mafia system.
We collect the tax here and pay up to the king over there.
What's interesting is they just did a thing on there's more economic disparity today than during the Downton Abbey era of the aristocracy owned everything and everybody else was like, you know, screw, which is when the, you know, Soviet revolution started and the big socialist wave around the world because the aristocrats owned everything.
And there's more economic disparity today than there was then.
I mean, what the fuck are they doing where they have a trillion dollars or whatever the fuck a Lehman Brothers guy has who has one of those giant 100-acre estates on the Hamptons?
Well, so for example, the piece I did in Afghanistan is we've spent $100 billion in reconstruction there, and the majority of it, if not all of it, has just been flushed down the toilet.
For example, a billion dollars were spent on helicopters that don't fly.
You know, billions of dollars are spent on culvert denial systems.
This is a long story, but basically to try to stop IEDs from being put into culvert...
They were never built.
We're paying money directly into the Taliban's hands.
We build power plants that are never used because they're inefficient and too expensive because they use diesel.
You can't power power plants with diesel.
And by the way, guess who collects the fees are the Taliban because the places where we go in to collect the fees are too dangerous to actually go into.
So we're just throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down the top.
That's just Afghanistan.
Not to mention Iraq, not to mention, by the way, DOD, not to mention here in America, etc., etc., So you sit there and you say, we're paying all this money in tax.
Taxes are going up, up, up, up, up.
And where the fuck is the money going?
The money's going into the fucking toilet many cases.
And you sit there and you say, that's not fucking good, man.
And what's happening now is the government is acting with impunity, with no...
And like you said, I'm like, what about climate change?
What about war?
What about all of a sudden you're like, well, people feel disenfranchised.
They can't do anything about it.
A. B. It's their money that people are spending and...
And we're going, well, fuck, they shouldn't be spending $78,000 hammers.
That's not fucking cool.
Well, the basis of democracy is you don't do that.
The basis of democracy is you can't do that.
But what's happening now, and this is what I find another problem in our modern age, is, okay, this is a fucking huge problem.
Yet we feel we can't do anything about it.
And I've said this before, and now I'm into my drink, so I'm going to say it again.
That's why these podcasts are important.
That's why media is important.
That's why journalism is important.
Look, you started out in a different way.
You came at this from a different way.
I came at this from a different way.
The reason why we're doing this now is because we're frustrated and we're saying, look, I don't want to talk about, you know, shoes fucking every day of the week.
You don't want to just do stand-up or your MMA shit, both of which are amazing, but you want to do something, holy fuck, dudes, I'm going to fucking talk about shit because this shit is important.
The reason why we have to do that is because we can't be complacent.
We can't just sit there and say, you know what, fuck, it's too much money or it's too much shit because they are taking money to do bad things with it.
They're taking our fucking freedoms and spying on us with the NSA. And it's guys like you and guys like me and guys like, by the way, everybody out there and the fucking Death Squad and Red Band and all these motherfuckers.
And we have to be the ones to get out there on a grassroots movement and say, fuck you.
Stop fucking tapping my phone.
Stop taking my money to fucking throw down into the Taliban's hands in Afghanistan.
Stop this shit because unless we do, then there's going to be no more democracy in America.
But I also think it's going to stop because you're not going to be able to just write it off.
It's going to be everyone.
The same reason why you can spy on people in Camden, New Jersey, that is the echo of a future event that's going to happen that's going to remove all privacy.
We don't have to worry about feeding ourselves or housing our families.
But what happens at a certain point in time when you make enough money that you don't have to worry about your bills, you, at least I, start contemplating what is important.
Correct.
What's important, this is so corny, but what's important is love.
What's important is friendship.
What's important is, you know, it's nice to walk down the street and say hi to your neighbor if your neighbor's happy.
If your neighbor is being held at fucking gunpoint and they're dragging him in the house, it's not so fun to say hi to your neighbor.
And then we sort of separated into this sort of Suburban thing.
But now, it's like, you're exactly right.
It's this community.
We're part of this community.
What I find interesting, and every time I do this podcast, I'm always blown away by it, is there's so many people out there that think exactly the same way.
And we all sort of believe the same things and think the same things, and we're all interested in the same things or pissed off about the same things.
Yet, like that's millions and millions of people, literally millions of fucking people.
You had to wait for representatives to do you justice.
You had to vote for people that were going to disappoint you.
You had to get yourself to the polls and hope that all your bitching and moaning at work and all your, you know, reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, somehow or another made a difference.
What I have been very fortunate is that I grew up like this in a time where you could access enormous amounts of information.
And during the last 20 years, because of this access to enormous amounts, my...
My perspective on the world has changed radically.
My view has broadened in an insane way that's impossible to describe.
But I think that I represent one portal that almost everyone who's a part of the system, whether they grew up in a way where they were forced to sort of integrate and they did things that I didn't do because they had a better upbringing, whatever it was.
They also see it.
But my position, my job, is the lightning rod.
I'm the guy who's got a door open.
I'm like, come on, let's go.
I mean, that's all it is.
What you guys are doing is way crazy than what I'm doing.
What I'm doing is talking about what you guys are doing.
You're off going to fucking North Korea and having lunch with these fucking psychopaths.
And you're going to visit slave camps where they think they're in North Korea, but they're actually in Russia.
Every single nation that fishes, so I'm from Canada originally, And there was a time when the ships, the joke was the ships couldn't get through the Grand Banks off New Brunswick because there were so many fish.
There's no fish left anymore.
And by the way, you're people who deny everything.
It wasn't the Portuguese, the Japanese, the Canadians, the Americans who fucking persigned it for fucking 50 years and ate all the goddamn fish and threw everything else out.
No, it wasn't that.
It was the fucking seals.
Anyway, we have destroyed the fish stocks.
There's no more fucking fish.
Now everything has to be farmed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There's no more fish in the Grand Banks.
It was the biggest fish stocks in the fucking world.
If you go to any store, this is an interesting thing that I, you go to any store in the world, any store, you can be in Congo, you can be in Australia, you can be in Vietnam, Myanmar, you can be here in America...
You know what they're gonna have on the shelf of any shitty bodega in the fucking world?
Tuna.
Canned tuna fish.
So it's like a staple.
And when you realize the stakes that we're talking now, like I was doing this piece on fake food in China.
It's on every single country in the world that has tuna.
Well, there's no more tuna.
We ate it all because everybody eats tuna.
When you start saying that everybody has to have that one thing, because you're like all these biggest corporations in the world, what do they sell?
Light bulbs, tampons, toothbrushes, shit that everybody needs.
Every single person in the world needs a fucking toothbrush or light bulb so they make billions of dollars.
Tuna, right?
There's no more tuna.
So what the fuck do they do?
They say, well, just take everything.
Take the kids, take the eggs, take the fucking, you know, the adults, take the breeding females, take everybody, chop it up, put it in a fucking tuna can.
Wow.
And that's the problem, is food, and by the way, this is happening now with beef.
I know you're into grass-fed beef.
Beef now is a huge problem.
Price is, you know, skyrocketing.
Why?
Because now everybody wants beef.
People have a bit more bucks or whatever.
And so now beef prices are going through the roof.
But there's a definition of insanity, which is we go to bed every night with the same thing facing us and the same conditions facing us the next day, and we wake up thinking it's going to be different.
I travel a lot to hardcore Islamic countries, and they're like, yeah, you're going to jihad and suicide bombers, and you're going to go to paradise, you're going to have virgins, and you're like, yeah, it's fucking crazy.
And you come back to America, and they're like, those motherfucking Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they're crazy motherfuckers.
They believe they're going to fucking die in jihad and go to heaven.
I think Turkey, I mean, the oldest known civilization that's built complex structures is in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, this new thing that they found over the last decade, incredible structures.
The people that are still there, I think, are the townies of the world.
That's what I think it's like.
It's like when you go back to where you grew up, and all those assholes that stay, they're just so backwards and outdated.
I go to where I grew up, and I see my friends that still live in the same town.
I'm like, fuck, man.
You guys gotta get out of here.
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Yeah, these fucking fags wanna get fucking married and pay taxes.
But what I'm talking about is that there are certain people that live in an area and that area has an ideology that's very rigid and they never get out of it.
The interesting thing about Islam, though, is it was created, much as you say, as a...
It was basically a...
By the way, watch a jihad be announced or a fatwa on me.
It was created because Muhammad went to Judea and said, oh, there's this new Christian thing going on.
So it was this monotheistic thing, saying, oh, there's this new one God religion, I'm going to take that on.
So Judaism, actually in the Koran it says the people of the book, there's the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, and they're all the same because they're monotheistic.
And you say, oh, okay, well that's interesting, people of the book, you know, we're all in it together.
Why the fuck have you been, you know, fighting us, you know, the whole time?
The Sunni and Shia that we didn't know about in Iraq.
When people started blowing each other up in Iraq and we found out that it was Islamic people attacking rival Islamic sects, we were like, wait a minute!
And so the people of the book, etc., etc., and you sit there and saying, your definition of heaven is different than my definition, or your definition of this is different...
Or Jesus was a prophet, but Muhammad was a real prophet.
And you say, okay, because of all that, we're going to kill the fuck out of each other for a long fucking time.
And at that point, you're like, well, this is just fucking stupid.
And all the nonsense that we enjoy is a part of us.
It's a part of our animal life.
And we hide a lot of these things because of our culture.
We hide a lot of these things because of, you know, we want to have jobs and we want to have, you know, there's another bottle of that Jack over there.
Oh, shh.
There's another bottle of Jack-O-Lantern Sody Pop with extra vitamin C. Of course.
It's a part of what we are, and we're shielding ourselves from our sexuality and our reality by hiding and bullshitting.
All that bullshit and hiding.
The things that I don't have to do because I'm a comedian, the things that Brian doesn't have to do, we can say crazy shit about what we've done and what we do and drugs and...
Sex and nonsense.
We can talk about all that because there's no expectations on us to be normal.
We're comedians.
We're entertainers.
We're crazy people.
But for the average person, the average person with a fucking corporate job can't make a YouTube video about doing DMT and getting blown by angels.
The fact that we have people who have to be squeaky clean, which nobody is, by the way.
And the fact that you have to be...
To me, if you're squeaky clean, you've got 20 fucking dead bodies in your goddamn basement because I don't trust those motherfuckers who are squeaky clean.
The Republicans are all getting in line to say, I'm a Reagan Republican.
Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.
Why isn't the Democratic Party lining up saying, I'm a fucking Clinton centrist, fucking took the worst deficit in American history to the biggest surplus in American history, best president fucking serving in the 1900s?
There's a book by Plato called The Gorgias where the mean guy in it says, I only became a good politician when I put all the passions behind me because he's like 70 and he couldn't get his dick hard anymore.
Well, Obama just did a video with Zach Galifianakis that he's getting a lot of heat from, and that's kind of showing a really cool president, in my opinion.
The government actually worked, which it doesn't do now.
Why wouldn't Obama?
Why wouldn't the Democrats say, I'm a fucking Clintonist?
They don't.
Because...
The Republicans did such a fucking great job at, by the way, an amazing politician and a consensus politician being destroyed because he liked to fuck.
But anyway, all this sort of PR shit that goes on.
If you fuck with me and don't vote for this, I'm going to PR attack you and I'm going to get my super pack to attack you on this shit and I'm going to do this, whatever.
And the thing is, what's interesting is they're taking real life shit that's happening in American politics and they put it into a thing that we can understand.
Well, that's, I think, also one of the reasons why nobody wants to get behind the Clintons, is you start looking into their past, the Whitewater stuff.
Well, the only way you can do that is to kill people that know bad shit about you or scare the fuck out of them so they can't come up with all that bad shit.
What kind of a fucking stressful job, even if you were the most perfect Yoda, Buddha, angel that made it to age 45 and never did a crime and never smoked a joint and never did a bump, whatever, you know, even if you were, what kind of crazy pressure would that be to all of a sudden, you're the guy who's deciding whether or not military action takes place.
Dude, if you make a YouTube video that people don't like, they want you to die.
Could you imagine what it must feel like to be the guy who invented Obamacare?
I have personally seen people freak the fuck out.
get purple-faced, sweat flying off their head, talking about the nonsense that is Obamacare.
I don't understand it.
I don't know who's right.
I don't, I'm not a small business owner in that sense, where they have a higher, you know, a bunch of people and pay for their, I don't know what's good and what's bad.
I don't know even, I don't even understand why it was instituted in the first place.
I mean, we've never had an American president assassinated by anyone in a foreign country, and the closest to it was from a foreign country, blaming Lee Harvey Oswald, who had gone to the Soviet Union, for killing Kennedy.
But other guys who've killed presidents before, whether it is Abraham Lincoln, or how many presidents have been assassinated?
Because we use Google, because we use fucking Facebook, because we buy Nikes, because we buy Ford, because whatever.
What's going to happen is people realize, whatever I buy, that's the real power.
And when I say that, what I mean is, if you look at pre-2008, number one sellers, Escalade, Hummer, all the big SUVs.
Post-2008, Prius.
Because all of a sudden, gas fucking tripled in price.
So the only thing that really moves policy is how people vote with the dollars.
Because if you fucking start voting with dollars, with Unilever, with Procter& Gamble, with Ford, with GM, with Exxon, then you're going to move policy.
You can move policy decisions tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Because these guys have lines to power and they say, fuck, these people aren't buying Fords anymore, they're not buying Exxon gas, they're not buying whatever.
Well, do you remember when you were talking about the gas hike?
You remember there was right when Bush was leaving office, when George W. was leaving office.
And right when he was leaving office, it became like this weird feeling.
Like the gas was so expensive that it became like this weird feeling.
People who weren't conspiracy theorists were going, wait a minute, are we getting fucked?
Like is he leaving and in the process, does he have like...
Some crazy three-month grace period where they just start sucking money out of people because it just started going up and up and up.
And you're like, well, sorry, we have to pass on this loss to the consumer.
Oil is more expensive these days.
Wait a minute.
Why is oil more expensive?
What exactly is going on?
Why is it coincidentally coinciding with you leaving office?
We couldn't dig into that then.
That would be very difficult to pull off today.
If the same situation was happening today, It would be much harder to pull off.
10 years from now, more difficult.
20 years from now, impossible.
That's what I think.
I think that all this creepy shit that they've been able to do and fuck people over and clandestine operations like that, I think you can't hide it anymore.
That's why they're so mad at guys like Edward Snowden.
That's why they're so mad at guys like Julian Assange.
Those guys, they broke the first holes in the dike and the water's coming through.
Because we are Saudi Arabia's friend, and we use them to go up and down, Bin Laden, who comes from one of the fucking richest families in Saudi Arabia, said, fuck you.
We're the land of Mecca and Medina.
We are the land of fucking Islamic purity.
We're not going to kowtow to the Americans.
That's where it all comes from.
It all comes from Saudi Arabia because of oil and because we force them to, you know, lower oil prices, which makes us money, which then they see as we're in cahoots, and then boom.
When you find out about these, you know, small countries that were doing terrible up until oil production, and then they became like this most incredible magical land where everything is essentially free.
If you fly into Abu Dhabi, which has the two largest mosques in the world, you fly in and there's a picture from 1957. And it's a mud fort and like four huts.
If you flew over Manhattan, you know, if Manhattan was abandoned in the desert, it would be like ten times more insane than finding the pyramids because the structures, there's so many of them.
There was a thing I was watching, so therefore it has to be true because it was on TV, about Bronze Age swords that were so insanely strong.
Because I always thought they were shitty lead swords or copper swords or whatever.
They had Bronze Age armor and Bronze Age swords and they would shoot like a Bronze Age armored vest with like a modern day rifle and it couldn't penetrate it.
Really?
And I was like, how the fuck is that even possible?
Some people are easily led, and instead of finding some nice religious leader who's put together a nice community and they all have picnics and shit, they found an asshole.
I mean, that's really essentially what happened.
They got roped into some shithead's gravity, and now he's dead.
Yeah, they definitely shouldn't protest his funeral, man.
But it would be like the number one show on TV, but people would come home at like 3 in the morning, and he was a clown who would buy like the advertising spots for like a grand.
And so it was this huge show that millions of people would watch, but all the advertising would be about the Brooklyn clown.
It's actually really cheap to get advertising late at night.
That's what I was trying to do.
It's like Tito's Tacos.
Seriously, you know how many tacos it costs?
You were saying the fastener guy can get in there and get the thing.
This guy was super smart because he's like, oh, here's this time slot that everyone's getting home to watch the real world.
So then, Poole takes this big fucking slide afterwards, but everybody sort of hopes and prays that this guy gets his shit together and comes back to Poole.
He's like the savior of Poole, this fucking crazy guy who rips off old ladies.
The story the Shawshank Redemption the truthful story is actually quite fascinating You know that the actual truthful story of him spending all that money on pool You're blowing my fucking brain acts because pool players are a fucking bunch of maniacs crazy guys out there scrambling and hustling and wearing fucking wearing overalls and pretending they just hopped off a farm just anybody I don't know Yeah, I mean that that's what half of those guys grew up doing, you know
Half of those guys, that's where they get their experience.
And so all of a sudden, they're wearing tuxedos and they're playing on TV. And it was one of those weird TV channels, too.
I can break and run out, but I might not do it the next game.
I might miss it.
You really need to put in the numbers, the hours, because what you're doing when you're playing, when you get really good, is you are so in tune with the amount of effort that it takes to knock your stick into this ball that you're literally counting the revolutions with feel that the ball's going to make.
It's like archery in a lot of ways, in that when you're actually executing, it requires absolute complete concentration.
And there's something that's very attractive to me about anything that requires absolute complete concentration, whether it's martial arts, whether it's pool, whether it's archery.
I think there's something deeper that's going on.
I think my brain is recognizing that it needs some intense stimulation.
I mean, these gamblers and fucking murderers and all these people that they were interacting with, it was so much of it was just a character study And that was the fascinating thing about that movie.
The pool playing, like I said, was dog shit.
Paul Newman looked like he couldn't make a ball.
Jackie Gleason could play.
He could play better than all of them.
Better than Tom Cruise, better than Paul Newman.
Paul Newman, who was just a brilliant actor, just didn't put the time in.
You would have to put a lot of time in to look like a real pool player.
Because there's like a gentleness to the stroke of a real pool player.
He plays a mute janitor who picks up a sort of French prostitute and takes care of her in her young kid.
And it's this French classic film with Jackie Gleason as the star who never says a fucking word.
And by the way, it's like Burt Lancaster did the same thing with The Leopard in Italy where it was a huge successful film where he spoke in Italian and he did it phonetically.
And then, but Jackie Gleason has this, like, huge French, like, you know, film, like, that's, like, French fucking, like, cultural, where he's the star of it as this janitor in a building, and he never says a word.
When I lived in New York, I had a friend who, one of his friends knew the guy, it was a fucking cockeyed connection, and But they were all in the music business, like rock and roll guys, like one of them was in this band.
He knew a dude who somehow or another knew someone who bought Jackie Gleason's old home.
And Jackie Gleason, this is the story.
Jackie Gleason is obviously third hand.
Could be total horseshit.
That's it.
The story was, and it's a fun story, that Jackie Gleason was drinking with Nixon.
And him and Nixon were buddies.
And they're talking football and throwing back some fucking Jack and Cokes.
And Nixon's like, you want to see a fucking UFO? They get in Air Force One and they fly to some military base where they've got a crashed flying saucer.
And Jackie Gleason from then on becomes a crazy UFO believer.
And Jackie Gleason has this backyard in upstate New York and he has a fake UFO designed and built in his driveway to replicate the thing that he saw.
He hires a bunch of people to try to recreate something.
He puts it together in his head, sort of like a crime sketch.
I'll make up a story, not even realize I made it up, put it out there, and then I'll find it on Wikipedia and I'll use it as a reference to prove when I tell the story again.
There was another size Jenkins, extremely serious, armchair UFO researcher, and prided himself on a huge collection of UFO-related books, which numbered into the thousands.
See, I call bullshit.
You know why?
I doubt there's thousands of books written on UFOs.
What a beautiful thing it would be if they really did have like a hangar 18. You know what I want when we're old and we're sitting on the cove drinking our drink, looking at the water, just me and you, gray, old silverbacks, and someone's going to go, you know what?
Fucking Jackie Gleason went to Area 51 and saw that shit.
You know what I get more than anything from this show is one time when I got wasted, as opposed to now, I was like, you know what?
We're just trying to get to the fucking cove.
I must get...
Five tweets a day of like, I'm trying to get to my cove.
I'm trying to get to my cove.
And by the way, I just came back from a long trip doing a shoot and I spent three days on a boat in the middle of a cove and I'm like, I'm trying to get to my cove.
I'm trying to get to my cove.
I just kept repeating that because I'm just trying to get down there, get to the cove and fucking chill the fuck out.
Well, I think everybody ultimately has this ideal image in their head of some golden retirement or some point in time where everything's going to be still.
Do you ever consider that, that everybody has this sort of crazy role in this weird machine that is life, this weird complex algorithm that's the human race?
You know, money is the modern-day report card, and I have now a lot of money, but I'm actually giving all that away.
I'm putting it in trust.
Because you're like, well, I didn't actually do it for money.
I don't actually give a shit about money.
And I didn't actually do it for fame.
Because I don't know about you, but when people come up to you in the street and say, hey dude, fucking awesome.
You're like, I don't know you, I don't know anybody, I don't know whatever.
But what I will say is, you sit there at some point and go, this shit, I spent 40 years turning the other way and saying, I don't give a fuck, or I'm going to just get drunk, or I'm going to drink a beer, or I'm going to go get laid, or I'm going to just fucking do what I do.
Because getting through the day is hard.
And at a certain point, you get a little bit older.
You have kids.
For me, it was kids.
And you go, yeah, I can't do that anymore.
I got to sit there and say, this is bullshit.
You know what they're fucking doing over there in Iraq?
It's bullshit.
What they're doing in Afghanistan is bullshit.
What they're doing here fucking in the Gulf of Mexico with Correction is bullshit.
And so now I'm like, you know what?
I waited for somebody else to fucking say this shit, and nobody's saying it.
And I'm not the best person, and I'll tell you right now, I'm not the best person to be saying this shit, but we have to start saying shit, otherwise we're fucked.
Look, no one's the best person, but you are about as good an example as you're going to get, because you bridge the gap.
You're a regular human who lived a regular life, who got to a point in your life where something mattered to you much more than it mattered before, when you had children.
And then you took a stand.
A lot of people would go the other way.
A lot of people, when there's the coward point of view, is you get to a point where you have children, and then you just want to shut up.
But isn't the ultimate goal to, like, see how much you love your kids and say, man, if the whole world could love each other the way I love my kids, we would have no fucking problems.
Any problem we would have, we would work out.
But isn't the reality that people don't even do anything when they have no strife?
When they have no thing they're battling against?
They don't really fucking strengthen their resolve.
They don't really get their shit together.
It seems like we almost need resistance in order to get anything done.
We almost need someone to oppose us in order to strengthen ourselves to a position where we move forward.
And I also think that If left to our own devices, you're like, it goes back to that zero-sum game like we were talking earlier about saying what we've gotten to is this realpolitik zero-sum game.
There isn't a zero-sum game when you have kids.
There isn't just there's a winner and a loser and I kill you and then you are dead.
When you have kids, everything becomes like, well, I won, but guess what?
They don't have any water to drink.
So, I don't know, I shifted.
My whole brain shifted when I had kids, because I was a different guy.
And then all of a sudden I had kids and I was like, actually, motherfucker, I already knew that that was bullshit, what you were doing.
I knew fucking, you know, $78,000 hammers were bullshit, but I used to go, ha ha ha, $78 fucking hammer.
And now I'm like, no, fuck you.
$78,000 hammers, that's bullshit.
I don't want to fucking pay my taxes for that shit.
And I just got angry.
Because all the bad shit, all the stuff that you roll your eyes, all the shit you say, you know, this is fucking bullshit, this is stupid, we shouldn't be doing this, I got serious.
Because then you're like, okay, it's fine.
Guess what?
Climate change is undeniable.
The fucking oceans are rising.
You want to have a debate?
You want to have a fucking war?
You want to have a fucking...
The fact that it's even a debate is a fucking joke.
And guess what?
We don't have the time anymore because our kids are fucked.
So guess what?
I can't fuck around anymore, snorkel all night, fucking wear my fancy jeans and get wasted.
I gotta go out there and fight these motherfuckers because otherwise my kids don't have a fucking future.
Did you see that NASA report when they looked at climate change and a bunch of different factors and they were talking about the future of the human race?
If you talk to most scientists, and by the way, real scientists, not these dudes in the play of Exxon, it's like a given.
This is why I get pissed off.
It's because I'm like, you know who's done a bad job?
It's the scientific community at messaging the fact that, okay, if there's a fucking loophole, if there's like, well, it's this or this within 6%, and then everybody else goes, well, 6% is this and this, you're like, hold on a second.
We are 60 years ahead of our worst case projection.
The worst case projection of the IPCC 10 years ago.
We're already 60 years ahead.
60 years ahead.
And I was talking to the global scientific community and I'm like, what the fuck?
He built a reactor when he was 13. 17, he came up with a way to find radioactive waste.
Anyway, so he came up with this...
Which is true, that 90% of uranium isotopes, you know, 235, etc., which we can't dispose of.
The majority of their energy is still left in there, over 90%.
So he's like, okay, we've come up with these reactors where we can take the old energy rods that we can't even dispose of, deplete them, and then that will fuel the Earth's energy needs for the next 10,000 years.
Because all of those energy rods from the Soviet Union, from us, uranium-235, we can all do it.
That seems to be something that you find more of in the tech community.
And I think it's because you're dealing with some really hyper-intelligent human beings.
And along with that hyper-intelligence and that connection to each other that they have because of the internet, I think you see people that have a better moral company.