Shane Smith and Joe Rogan dive into North Korea’s 1970s kidnappings of South Korean filmmakers—turned propaganda victims—and compare it to Putin’s Cold War revival, including state subsidies and nuclear threats. Shane argues cultural exports (like basketball or American media) could undermine regimes better than military force, citing ISIS’s 50,000 foreign fighters despite global cooperation failures. They explore viral cancer treatments, from HIV-modified therapies to rabies in cervical cancer patients, linking scientific breakthroughs to financial freedom and societal impact. Smith’s Vice News launch defies skepticism, prioritizing truth over profit, while Rogan praises unfiltered dialogue. Both agree life’s brutality demands humility, purpose, and free speech—celebrating failure as a teacher before wrapping up with raw, no-compliment "bro talk." [Automatically generated summary]
When you get lit up colors, that's what I thought the future was going to look like when there was computers in like 2015. I thought it would be like the inside of like a spaceship.
I want you going to those fake restaurants and having these people take you around and trying to present you with this image of what North Korea is like.
Like, oh, it's just like everyone else.
Come here.
And you were like really, you know, talking about it pretty openly on camera while you were there.
That made me really, like, start to look into it.
And this is before all this shit has gone down with the interview, of course, and before people really...
I think, like, after his dad died, that's when people really got a sense of, like, well, this is not going to end here.
Like, this crazy communist...
This is, like, the last real crazy communist dictator.
But I think if you look at what's happening in Russia, it's not so far away because obviously the thing about North Korea, which is weird, is it's like going back to 1938. It's like going back in time.
But the thing about Russia, if you go to Russia now, they're like, there is no economic crisis.
America did this to us.
The oil is falling because America did this to us.
It's total Cold War rhetoric and Putin is...
You know, the new czar.
He's taken over all power, and he runs the press, and he runs everything.
I mean, it's just so blatant that this guy is a dictator.
When you see what happens when there's any sort of dispute over there, and even with these oligarchs, they take them, they put them in jail, and they take their businesses.
And he's done this more than once, right?
He did it to a guy recently, and he only wound up taking one of his oil businesses.
Yeah, and he's done it famously with Gazprom and Rosneft, where one guy became the richest dude in the world and three other guys got either assassinated or went to jail.
So I think that when you look at it, it's a tough place to do business, Russia, unless you've got a key card to the Kremlin, you're not going to get anything done.
You know, we look at sort of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and go, oh, you know, they finally came to their senses and joined the world and whatever.
You know, Yeltsin drank a bit too much or whatever.
But that's seen as a huge humiliation.
We were, if not number one, we were number two for a long time.
And then we went to B and also ran.
And there was a lot of resentment there.
B, then, as oil came on the ascendancy, they're like, okay, we're going to throw our weight around.
So they were subsidizing oil.
For example, Cuba was subsidized oil.
One of the reasons why they're like, oh, let's be friends again, is there's no more oil subsidies, and it's the same thing in the region.
And then I think what happened is Putin came along and said, Russia's the best again, and we're going to fuck with people, and we're going to take back our land that they took from us, and we're going to take back this, and our military's the best, and we're going to put more money in the military, and we're going to reactivate these bases.
And people went, yeah, good, why not?
By the way, you've got to remember, too, that they grew up...
If you think about how long people have been alive for, it really is amazing that we've only dropped two nuclear bombs since 1947. I mean, just those two, and that was it.
Well, even us at our craziest and even the Russians at their craziest.
You know, we never did it.
But the problem is, is we were rational actors.
We were like, even if we hated each other, and even if there was propaganda, we're still rational actors.
The problem, the worry is, you have irrational actors, like Pakistan has over 100 warheads.
And they're rapidly becoming an irrational actor because they're losing control over their country to the Taliban, whose agenda is clearly stated that they want to fuck us up.
So, I mean, that's where it gets terrifying.
Yeah.
It's the new year, Joe.
We shouldn't get straight into...
The vector for warhead number 6179 is Carmel, California.
But, you know, I used to be afraid of why, you know, I go to all these war zones and I still am, but, you know, war is bad.
Everyone always says, well, we go to war and they picture sort of manly G.I. Joe type shooting each other and it generally doesn't look like that.
It's lots of collateral damage and women and children being fucking blown to shit and then guys go in there and get PTSD and get their ass shot off.
But, you know, the thing is, one of the things that I recently came back from that fucked me up, like really, I mean, to the point where I'm having kind of an existential crisis going, well, what's it all mean?
Is I went to the South Pole because we did this piece on Greenland melting, which won us the Emmy last year.
We got a lot of, whatever, discussion around it on both sides of the debate, although why it's a fucking debate, I don't know.
But anyway, the Arctic is melting.
One of the things that's happening, the reason why the Cold War is heating up again is under the Arctic ice, there's tons of oil and gas.
And Russia didn't have any other money besides oil and gas.
So Russia literally went, put the flag in the Arctic circle.
We talked to the guy who did it and said, well, we own all this now.
We're taking all the oil and gas.
Of course, every country that borders them is a NATO country.
And if you attack one, you attack them all.
So this is why the Cold War is heating up.
People are afraid.
Anywho...
So we go, the Arctic is melting, Greenland's melting.
Everyone now is like, yeah, yeah, okay, we'll give you that.
We'll give you Greenland's melting and the Arctic's melting.
But Antarctica is actually gaining in ice.
So, like, it's kind of evening itself out, which is crazy to begin with.
But we're like, okay, instead of saying...
You're crazy.
We're going to say, okay, fuck it.
We'll go.
We'll go down and we'll see what the fuck it is.
So we go down with NASA. We go down with, you know, the top scientists in the world from, I mean, from, well, from about 20 different countries, but the top guy is a French guy.
And we go to the South Pole and we're like, so, you know, Arctic is melting and Greenland's melting, but Antarctica is not.
Like, we have ice gain.
And they're like, You're fucking stupid.
Like, what the fuck?
And because what was happening was there's sea ice, right?
Which is like if it's like a lake.
You know, it freezes and then it melts.
It freezes and then it melts.
And the lake doesn't go up or down because it's the same water.
It's like an ice cube that's already in the glass.
It looks like a lot of people won't die because they'll move, right?
We have legs and we can move, we can build new cities and shit.
The problem is, is, you know, we go to Antarctica and all these...
They're all scientists.
They're all old dudes.
And they're like, you know, very clinical.
Yes, well, we'll lose three meters and then mean this and this and this.
And then you go to Bangladesh, which is sort of at sea level.
And they're just, you know, I think last year alone there was like 20 million climate change migrants.
So then you go to the city and it's just, I mean, it's fucking, you know, it's just everything breaks down.
Nothing works.
There's 20 million people in the city that's built for 2 million people.
It's just crazy.
And you're like, when you see it, you go, oh...
Rich people or whatever will be able to move up the hill or Colorado or whatever the fuck it is.
And everyone else is just like, well, you guys have to stay in the garbage heaps and see how you can do it.
And when you see it going forward, like I'm a positive guy.
I believe things genuinely have gotten better throughout history and quality of life has gotten better and health has gotten better and all this shit.
But you're basically saying, well, if there's going to be hundreds of millions of people forced to move because of this, then that's going to cause chaos.
Chaos generally isn't good for anyone who isn't a young 20-year-old dude with a club in his hand.
Some of the greatest conquerors and the most barbaric conquerors ever.
That genetics doesn't just stop.
Those people keep fucking, even if they're not in jail.
Whoever lived or whoever was the product of sex with one of those men, if those women lived and their children lived, even if the Viking didn't live, you're talking about some insane genetics problem.
My thing is to go to weird countries and shoot the newsy bits, not eat the shit, because I get the shits anyway, so if I'm eating fermented puffin, I'm not getting on that plane.
Because it comes from matjess, or whatever it's called, which is the fermented herring, which they had to make illegal in Sweden because it stank so bad.
So like, oh, we need to figure out a way to carry water with us.
And they figured out a lot of ways, but wine was one of them.
Oh, we can carry this.
For, you know, years we can carry this.
And they didn't have corks.
They just put a bit of olive oil on top of it, which would seal it.
And I was like, that means that if you go logically, they were drinking a shit pile of wine because they were like, well, I'm not going to trust the water because I don't know that the animals haven't died in it.
That's really crazy if you stop and think about it.
Like the people that were traveling and drinking wine exclusively for hydration and what the difference it must have been on the way they thought and behaved.
Well, when you see those lakes in Texas, if you've been to Austin, they have Lake Travis and Lake Austin, and Lake Travis, they don't artificially feed.
Lake Austin looks badass, but Lake Travis is vanishing.
They took a lot of animals that were almost extinct in Asia, and now they're thriving in Texas.
Yeah, species of deer.
There's many species of deer that they have that they take from other countries and they bring to America and they put them in these game parks, especially in Texas, and then they can hunt them anytime they want because they become like a commodity instead of it being like there's seasons for deer and there's seasons for elk and there's seasons for everything else, but these animals that are non-native, you can hunt them anytime you want.
So they bring them over there just specifically for that purpose, so they're thriving.
You know, it's like, yeah, you want the animals to be thriving, but it's kind of weird that the only way they're thriving is if dudes can get out there and shoot them.
Therefore, they don't have to kill the rhinos for the horn.
It'll just be a market.
And everyone's, you know, freaking out saying, no, no, no.
But as long as dudes who are poor can make a ton of money for killing a thing to take the horn, they will.
Whereas if you just say, okay, well, you know, we'll give you the fucking horn and you can do whatever you want.
You have as many boners as you want, go nuts.
That's the only way to save them, is capitalism is killing them, so capitalism has to save them.
Initially, you go, well, that doesn't sound right.
But when you think about it, you're like, well, okay, yeah.
Then the problem is, well, somebody will be, like, someone will regulate it.
And, like, a company, you know, GM will make the money out of the illegal rhino horns, but they'll still be illegal rhino horns because the guys will get disenfranchised and they'll get screwed out of it somehow.
But in any way, the argument that you have to make it as economically viable to do the thing, because otherwise they'll just get killed out.
The guy, all of a sudden, became gay, from this Parkinson's disease, started having risky gay sex with men, leaving ads to meet up places, meeting guys and having sex with them, had no idea who they were, and gambling.
Couldn't stop gambling.
He was just completely addicted to gambling all day long.
He just wanted to gamble.
And one in court, the American equivalent of somewhere around $600,000.
They made these satire cartoons about Muhammad and about Islam.
Yeah.
And they were murdered.
Ten people and two police officers, twelve people were murdered by these Islamic hit people.
And there's been all these protests in France and all these marches and everybody's freaking out worldwide.
But I've seen some people take the stance that those cartoons were offensive and they were punching down.
That was satire.
They were punching down and that those cartoons were racist and that, you know, don't they understand that it's offensive?
I read this, a tweet, actually.
Don't they understand that it's offensive not just to Muslims but to one quarter of the people on the planet?
That was what they wrote.
As if that, in any way, when do we put our foot down and say, I know you're a tolerant person, whoever's saying this, you're trying to preach tolerance.
You're talking about tolerance for something that kills people that draw cartoons.
Look, Charlie Hebdo and cartoons and humor in general is meant to be a mirror onto ourselves and we take ourselves so seriously and When you start, I believe if you start any type of censorship, you're fucked.
Because when, you know, somebody won't like something and then the other person won't like the thing that you like.
And once you start down that path, And you say, well, you know, Joe, I hate that you like Palestine.
Well, Shane, I hate that you like Israel.
Whatever it is, someone's always going to have.
And the minute someone gets that, then censorship starts.
And the minute censorship starts, it never stops, first of all.
Censorship by fear, and we were just, you know, we started the whole conversation about this.
Censorship by fear was Nazi Germany.
Censorship by fear was Stalinist Russia.
Censorship by fear was Maoist China.
And if you wrote or thought or said anything against the state, you got killed.
And now what we're saying is if you do or say or do anything against a perceived thing about a religion...
Then they're going to come get you, right?
And people are like terrified, oh my god, we're not going to show the cartoons, we're not going to show, we're not going to...
What do you think?
There's that many terrorists out there, they're going to kill everybody who retweets a fucking cartoon.
And that's the insidiousness of terrorism.
Because then you're like, if you make fun of anything, if you make fun of any political leader or political group or terrorist group or anyone with a gun, they can come out and shoot you.
And I think that's the whole thing of like, no, they're allowed to fucking say, guess what?
You're allowed to say whatever the fuck you want.
And then I'm allowed to say whatever the fuck I want against you.
But the minute you say you're not allowed to say what you want and if you do, I'll shoot you, then you can fuck off.
And that's what World War II was fought over.
That's what World War I was fought over.
And if we don't say there can be no censorship, then we should have just given up and said, yeah, fuck, we'll just write whatever Hitler wants us to write, because that's what censorship is.
What's happening now is we're reaching a critical mass, right?
You're reaching a point where, which by the way, if you look at terrorism, it's been incredibly successful because you're reaching a critical mass where people are saying...
Now it will be like this, you know, for example, the fight, the reaction was always, well, Islam is a religion of peace.
Now that's become a joke because everyone's like, well, it's a fucking religion of peace.
Why does this continue happening, right?
And so progressives or whatever are trying to say, hey, well, maybe...
Because they realize that the logical conclusion of this...
Right?
It's going to be...
It's going to be bad.
It's going to be okay.
There is going to be an effective...
As this polarizes, Islamic fundamentalism gets bigger.
And then our reaction to that fundamentalism gets worse.
Because look, I believe I'm a progressive guy.
I don't know what that means, but I'm non-political on either side.
And I believe I look at things critically.
But at a certain point, you're like, well, this is getting bad now, and public opinion is getting heated.
And the end result of that is going to be you're going to have heated public opinion on one side, a bunch of guys with a bunch of guns on the other, and it's not going to end well.
So people, it's a type of appeasement, right?
It's a type of, well, I looked at it, it's not so bad.
But that type of appeasement by progressives, by really liberal people, which the same type of people that will shit on Christians but use the term Islamophobic for any criticism of any jokes, in fact, any jokes, in fact, about Islam or Muslims can be seen as Islamophobic by the same type of people that would have no problem shitting on Christians.
It's this weird social brownie point thing that they're doing, where they're looking at it as an opportunity to criticize racism or criticize punching down with humor, you know?
I think, you know, for me, I think it's we're afraid of the outcome because if we keep going on this trajectory, the outcome is going to be problematic.
But I also think one of the things that's going on is there's a bunch of people in this culture that have this bizarrely utopian version of what they would like us to be.
Like the way we should react to anything.
People that think that they're a fox.
Someone that decides to...
Have whatever, any strange idea they may have in their head.
We're supposed to be as even-keeled with them as possible.
And we could go on until the cows come home about politics in this country.
What...
One thing I would like, if you want, it would be long-winded and boring for most people, but I read a book, if anyone wants to read maybe the most fascinating book ever written about the situation that we're dealing with right now with the rest of the world and Islam, is called The Siege of Mecca.
And it's a true story.
It's a journalist who wrote it about in 1979, which was the difference, I believe the year 1400 in the Islamic calendar.
There was a siege of Mecca and a bunch of dudes who were Wahhabists took over Mecca during Hajj and the royal government, the royal family couldn't go get them because it's illegal to fight in Mecca.
And so there was a standoff, and they were fighting, people shooting each other, and snipers.
It's like an action movie.
The French Secret Service gave them drugs to drug them.
And at the time, it was the same time that was happening the hostage crisis in Tehran.
So the Ayatollahs, the smart dude, goes, yeah, the Americans, the CIA, have taken over Mecca, which, of course, is, like, the worst thing you could possibly fucking do.
So there's this whole uproar.
They burnt the...
Embassy in Pakistan, they do all these things because everyone's like, fuck the CIA, they've taken over Mecca, you know?
And what ended up happening, it's a long story, but an incredible action movie is an incredible story.
But what happened was the royal family had to go to the clerics and say, you've got to give us a fatwa that we can go into Mecca and fight because you're literally not allowed to bring a gun and a sword and that thing.
And so you have to give us a special fatwa to go get these terrorists.
And they're like, well, we kind of believe in what they're saying because the terrorists were actually just Wahhabists saying we need to be more Wahhabists, which is fundamental Islam.
So they said, we'll give you the fatwa if you then basically give us money to do what they're asking for, to be Wahhabists.
So anyways, it happens.
They go and they kill the guys.
A guy named Juhayman.
But then what happens is, from then on, billions and billions of petrodollars, which we pay the Saudi government, then goes to the ulma, the clerics, who then send that money to every country, America, UK... You know, France, you know, Pakistan, and they build the biggest mosques.
And because Mecca is like the Vatican would be, and the Uelma are like the Pope, they build the biggest mosques and they, you know, spend the most money, and then they say, okay, now you teach Wahhabism.
And, you know, when you look at what's happening with ISIS, you say, how the fuck?
Can these guys recruit 50,000 foreign fighters in four fucking months?
It doesn't make any sense.
They're coming from America, they're coming from France, they're coming from England, because these guys go to these mosques where they're Wahhabist teachings, right?
And then when you look at it, and when you look at what's happening with things happening in France, with things happening in the UK, with things happening in Pakistan, where we're saying we're not going to go with the Taliban even in Pakistan, now we're We're going with ISIS or the Taliban's aligning with ISIS. And you say, how the fuck can that happen overnight?
How can it happen that all these people are saying, fuck, yeah, that's great, ISIS? It's because we have the Pope and the Vatican saying that that's good, that Wahhabism is good.
So as long as that continues, the problem on that side is going to get worse, right?
And then as long as that problem gets worse, we're going to fucking...
React stronger and stronger as is only human and that's the problem is is we're heading for Some sort of boiling over we're heading for some sort of you know thing and I think and this is me giving people the benefit of the doubt is that some people are saying well fuck if If if we just let into everything now and say those you know everyone's shooting us if we say the wrong thing fuck you let's go and Then it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
Which might be inevitable if Mecca keeps on funding Wahhabist Sunni doctrine.
I mean, if Michael Jordan would have gone there, and I hope Michael Jordan, you listen to this, if Michael Jordan would have gone there, it would have been world peace.
And so it's like if Jordan had gone there, or even if the Bulls would have gone there and there had been a real fucking thing and a cultural outreach and whatever, it would have at least sped it up, right?
Because that was ping-pong diplomacy.
They were like, well, we don't actually eat each other's babies.
We play fucking ping-pong like Sting.
Like, you know, everybody's kind.
You know, when I went, I grew up at the end of the Cold War.
And I was fascinated by propaganda.
I was fascinated by Eastern Europe.
And as soon as it opened up, I went to Prague, and Prague was always inundated with Americans.
So then I went to Budapest, and then I went to Kiev.
But it was like...
Yeah, it's not that much fucking different.
They had a car, and they had an apartment, and they got two weeks, and they went to Lake Baltum.
It was a shitty car, and it was a shitty fucking guy from point A to point B. And they kind of were pissed off at their government, but they were kind of like, well, whatever, fuck, there's food in the fucking store, you know?
And it was kind of shittier.
It was a shittier, grayer, you know, scarier, I guess, because of the police version.
But in reality, it's like people are fucking people at the end of the day, except for North Korea.
I mean, North Korea, it's just fucking crazy.
But I think that the more—it's not actually us.
We're not doing shit over there.
They still think we're the devil.
But Chinese people who used to come look—you know, they were wearing the Maoist suit and with the stars everywhere, and they looked the same, and they talked the same, and they were still revolutionary— Are now coming in Hawaiian shirts and with a Canon fucking S5 and a fucking thing.
But, you know, from what I know about going there a lot, the military runs everything.
It's called Military First.
The Army runs everything.
Whenever the army runs everything anywhere, guess what?
It's not a ton of fun.
Kim Jong-un is...
He looks like his granddad.
You know, he's the dad.
They got him out of power.
They killed number two.
They fucked with his wife.
They did all this shit.
Oh, he's got gout.
Take him away.
They were just saying, hey, you know who's running shit?
The army's running shit.
Because if the army isn't running shit in North Korea, it's over.
Because the minute the army isn't running shit, they're going to all be in line saying, can I please work at Hyundai for some money because I'm fucking hungry.
My question was, I wonder if, like, because Russia suffered the defeat in the Cold War and economic disparity and it was hard times, they've gone through some brutal infighting and all the shit that happened, the people that did survive, They're a different, it's like a different lineage.
Yeah, and then we get so unrealistic as to the nature of man and the ways of the world and the way things work right now.
Not a utopian vision of what could certainly be possible, but the fact, like I saw a t-shirt, you don't like cops, next time you get in trouble call a crackhead.
Well listen, people that are complaining and bitching about cops, I guarantee you, if someone was breaking into your fucking house, you're gonna call 911. You're right, but whenever I go to any of these places and you see dudes sleeping in the sand, eating dirt, cuddling their Kalashnikov for warmth, and then you look at...
Look, I'll be the first to put my hand up.
You look at me and I'm like, well, will I have In-N-Out Burger or Wendy's?
Will I have the super-sized Coke or the Valium?
And I'm just like...
You know, I used to, when I was young, I used to think I was a tough guy.
And when you see these dudes who literally know nothing but an AK-47 and will eat sand, you're like, yeah, I don't want to fight that guy.
And by the way, the majority of people I know in our country, why?
Because our country's great.
You don't want to fight these motherfuckers because they are fucking badass.
And it's like, I think we've had this discussion before, but when you look at boxing and shit, the tougher the neighborhood, the poorer the neighborhood, the better the boxer because they're fighting for something.
They want to get the fuck out.
You don't see a lot of Harvard boxers sitting there going one, two, three, kerumph.
I think if you look at the two longest wars in American history, if you look at Iraq and Afghanistan...
And then I remember when Russia invaded Crimea, which is 90% Russian.
You know, Fox News was saying this is the first time they've ever gone without a shot and we should go in and what are we going to do?
And you're like, hold on a second, hold on a second.
You're talking about going into Russia, which is Russian, to fight Russians about taking over a part of Russia, you know, that traditionally was a part of Russia.
You know, we had a hard time in Iraq with not the greatest army in the world with a lot of terrorists.
We had a hard time in In Afghanistan with the Taliban, who aren't even an army in any real sense of the word, you're going to go take on the Russians in Russia's backyard.
You're going to get a fucking bloody nose like you have never experienced before.
If you're going to do it, you better be ready to go all in.
And that's, you know, one of the things that NATO has a thing, that if you attack any NATO country, all of NATO then has to go And go with you.
Obviously, we're a part of NATO. So that means if anyone fucks with an island of Finland or someone fucks with fucking Norway's fishing rights, whatever, we all got to go in.
And then you're like, well, we better be ready for that.
And we better understand what the fuck that means.
Because guess what?
The Russians have been doing fucking...
Power squads with AK-47s ready to go while we've been sort of eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke and sand.
Well, you know, Russia and China have always had a different philosophy, which is have a lot more of it.
You know, so they have more tanks that are shittier, but they've got to shoot ten of them.
And China used to, that was their thing, waves.
You know, they'd have waves of people and they would literally, your machine guns would overheat kind of thing.
So if you look at it, we have the best military in the world, most technologically advanced military in the world, but I don't know what the standing army is, and I'm going to get in shit no matter what number I say, but let's say it's 3 million, right?
You know, then you look at Russia, it's probably 30, and if you look at China, it's probably 300. A million?
I think at one point in China, everybody has to be in the military.
They have a billion three people, so...
I'm getting woozy.
But yeah, but the thing is, is you can have however many people you want in the most technologically advanced military in the world, but if you're fucking with China, you're in trouble.
And if you're fucking with Russia, you're in trouble.
Then it goes to, well, we have a lot more nukes than them, and then obviously that's not a question you want to have.
Do you think there is an issue, though, the difference between going to war with someone who doesn't look like what we perceive to be the quintessential or the typical American?
What's the number one, by far way worse than America, in Russia today?
Terrorism.
They have terrorist attacks.
You know, they had the theater where they were all killed in the theater.
They just had the subway station.
They blew up two subway stations in Moscow recently.
They had the school where they killed all the kids, right?
Dagestan's coming up into Russia.
They have 9-11s, right, on a yearly basis, right?
Then you look at China and say, what's the biggest external threat happening in China right now?
Terrorism.
So Western China, the Uyghurs, or the Uyghurs, are fucking going apeshit in Northern China and Outer Mongolia, and it's causing a huge, massive, massive problem within China, where hundreds and thousands of people are being killed in slaughters and bus stops and train stops.
They just had one recently.
And what's interesting is you say, okay...
The three major powers in the world, America, China, and Russia, right, all share the exact same number one enemy, which is terrorism within their countries, aligned terrorism.
It's the same group, same groups.
And then you say, okay...
Why the fuck wouldn't we just get together and say, hey guys, we have exactly the same, and India, by the way, is in there as well.
Why the fuck don't we get together and say, hey, this is a huge problem for all of us.
Massive fucking problem for all of us.
And Europe.
Put everybody in there and say, why the fuck don't we get together and say, hey, we've got to solve this one way or t'other?
Because the deaths by terrorism, I believe, are number one China, number two Russia, number three America.
So why the fuck don't we get together and say, let's do something about this collectively?
But the thing is, because of exactly what you're saying, because of destratification of that power system, That's why you have ISIS. That's why you have all this shit.
Everyone just thinks ISIS is a bunch of dudes who went out, fucking had a joint and said, you know what, why don't we fucking take al-Qaeda's thunder?
No.
What happened is you have a huge fucking group from all over the world, international fucking consensus coming in there and saying we're going to make a caliphate.
And by the way, that caliphate, because they're Wahhabiists, say we want to take over Mecca.
Once they take over Mecca, if they take over Mecca, hopefully they don't, then you have a real problem.
Because then you have ISIS saying, we are the Pope and fucking Rome.
That's why Saudi Arabia is shitting their pants now, is because they were funding all these Wahhabist things, and then ISIS goes, yeah, we're Wahhabists, but we're the real Wahhabists, and we're coming to take Mecca.
Why?
Because if you run Mecca, you run the Sunni world, right?
Oh, God.
And so...
Saudi Arabia has a lot more to worry about ISIS than America does because they're real close to fucking Mecca and they want to take it.
So we embedded for four weeks with them all over in Iraq and in Syria.
And we released a documentary that won a ton of awards.
It was viewed tens of millions of times.
And basically we didn't have any commentary.
We just pressed record.
And I really enjoyed it because of that.
Because it wasn't like, look at these fucking cocksuckers, whatever.
It was like, hey, your veil's not...
Because what they did is they showed us what life under the Islamic State is.
And it's like Nazi Germany.
It's like you have to have the veil and you can't be too happy and you can't fucking eat too much licorice and all this shit.
And, you know, won a ton of awards for it.
We embedded with ISIS. I personally interviewed a couple guys from ISIS. There was a Canadian guy who was thought to be dead, who's not, and I interviewed him.
And what's interesting is, I mean, the numbers vary, you know, but the top end, what the number the guy was giving me is they have 50,000 foreign fighters.
Now, we know that they have 50,000 fighters.
The argument is, is it like 20,000 or 30,000 foreign and, you know, 20,000 Iraqi Syrian or what the mix-up is?
But these are on-the-ground fighters.
These are not like support troops or, you know, logistics or intelligence.
These are the fucking fighters.
So this is why people should sit up and take notice.
I mean, for us to mobilize 50,000 fighters is a huge fucking deal.
But they have people coming from America.
We talk to French people in ISIS. We talk to Americans.
I talk to Canadians personally.
I don't understand.
You're from America or you're from Canada, you're from France, you're from Germany, you're from the UK. You're fighting...
In my mind, anyway, for maybe the worst political organization around.
But in their mind, because they've grown up with these Wahhabist mosques, that's the right thing to do because they need to be Wahhabists in Mecca for it to be true Islam.
And that's why I think people should take the next look at ISIS. Because ISIS is not going away anytime soon because these people ideologically believe that they are right.
And the question shouldn't be, what the fuck's happening with ISIS? The question should be, how the fuck could ISIS recruit 50,000 people in fucking six months?
Well, if you think about what the image of the United States is and how we've invaded these foreign countries, these Islamic countries, and the hatred that a lot of the Islamic radical fundamentalist guys have towards the United States government, if we had a similar enemy to the United States, as overpowering as we are, Yeah.
those white dudes that live in South Dakota and North Dakota and fucking New Mexico.
But I think that you brought up a fucking good point, which is, here's Iraq, right?
And for a long time we were supporting Iraq.
And then we'd support Iran, their biggest enemy.
And then we'd support Iraq again.
And then we'd support Iran.
Why?
Because we wanted cheap oil.
Fine.
That's geopolitics.
Actually, who gives a fuck?
Actually, you know, we're hegemonic power.
That's what we have to do.
Whatever.
The problem is, is you say, okay, we made up shit.
This is where it gets a bit wonky.
Right?
Because you're like, if you just told the American people, we need the fucking oil, and this guy is fucking with our oil, I think that would have been better than weapons of mass destruction and going into the UN and trying to get everybody behind it.
We understand we are a geopolitical player.
We're the policemen, the world's policemen.
You don't have to make this shit up.
But what happened is, they said, Al-Qaeda is being supported by Saddam Hussein.
Now, anyone with a half a brain knows...
That Al-Qaeda's fundamentalist religion and the Ba'ath party was a secular.
They were anti-religious.
They were like a political thing.
They didn't want religious extremism.
So they weren't helping Al-Qaeda.
Were they bad guys?
Is Saddam Hussein a bad guy?
Yes.
I didn't like him.
He's not my friend.
I don't like him.
But was he fucking Osama bin Laden's best friend?
No.
They were enemies.
In any case, we make shit up and we go in there.
We fucked shit up so bad for so long that when we leave, right after the day we leave, a fucking cadre of motherfuckers come out called ISIS, which make Al-Qaeda look like a fucking tea party and take over the country.
We fuck it up so bad that when we leave, the boogeyman is twice as big, and by the way, we made him.
Now, that is a failure, not of our truth, but of the fucking State Department and of a political fucking...
Because these guys...
There was a time when the British could actually say, you know, we can make decisions that are...
We are making decisions that are terribly wrong, and the saddest part about that is people are paying for that on our side and on their side with their fucking lives.
What does anybody in their right mind think the reaction of those people is going to be unless they're so completely detached from those people on the ground that you don't take that into account at all when you make your decision?
And then everybody's sitting there going, well, fuck, we'll just go bomb ISIS, those ISIS motherfuckers cutting people's heads off.
Fuck ISIS, fuck ISIS. And you're like, I agree, fuck ISIS. I'm a journalist.
They're going to cut my head off, so I don't like them.
But at the same time, you're sitting there going, okay, why is no one asking?
Why is no one asking, how the fuck did these motherfuckers become popular?
How the fuck did they recruit guys from Virginia?
How did they recruit guys from France?
How did they recruit guys from England?
Where the fuck are these guys coming from?
And how did they take over Syria and fucking Iraq when you have every army in the world there and every fucking commando unit and every intelligence agency and these fucking bunch of new guys, new kids on the block took over everybody's shit.
And the reason why is because A... There's institutional fucking money funding them because we fucked up shit bad on our side.
Now, we should take the learnings that we've done and say, look, ISIS isn't going anywhere.
And unless we fucking, you know, go apeshit, guess what?
It's going to make Al-Qaeda look like a tea party.
Because there's nothing better in life, and I don't know if you agree with me, but when you get older...
Besides family, because family for me is number one.
You have your kids, which are everything.
But you get a bit older, you know a bit of shit.
You have a drink, you have a steak, you talk to somebody and you say, look, this is important shit.
The greatest thing that we have, you and I, is that we can talk about this shit and people actually listen to us.
Because I believe that people all over America, North America, Europe, are having the exact same discussions.
And unless everybody goes, you know what, that's fucking true.
These guys are being cocksuckers and fuck ISIS and we gotta stop this fucking sea level rise.
That's the beauty about what we can do, is that we live in a world where we can talk and have a few drinks and say what we believe in.
And literally, I get it every time, like, you know, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, Facebook, Twitter, everyone's saying, okay, good, I'm fucking down, what do we do next?
I don't fucking know.
I'm not Jesus Christ.
We're just sitting here saying, this is what I believe and this is what I think.
The greatest thing about our lives...
Is that we live a life where we can have a discussion, and it actually matters, and people will listen and say, what do we do next?
Well, I think that's one of the things that's held back all cultures, is the ability to communicate with each other and find out that we're more alike than we are different.
We're all just human beings.
And it was really difficult to have those conversations before.
It was really difficult to reach people all over the world.
Back in the day, this would be NBC. People would come in and they'd talk their shit and they'd say whatever they say and then they'd leave.
Walter Cronkite.
You literally built that here.
Now it's a lot less prohibitively expensive than building NBC. But that's why whenever I come here and I try to come here every time I come to L.A., It's because this is the future of...
It's NBC, but it's NBC for our people.
It's not NBC for everyone.
NBC used to...
There was three channels.
But one of the things I love about coming here, and this is why I get rankled about censorship, is Joe Rogan has to be able to say whatever the fuck he wants, no matter what.
Shane Smith has to be able to say whatever the fuck I want, no matter what.
You can say, I'm wrong...
You can say, fuck you, Shane, I hate you.
You're not allowed to shoot me without me trying to shoot you back.
But while we have freedom of speech and while we have communication, while we have all this shit, we should celebrate the shit out of it and we should tell everybody else out there that they should celebrate the shit out of it because that's what true freedom is.
Unless we're allowed to say whatever the fuck we want to say, there is no such thing as freedom.
Well, there is, sadly, you know, there is Africa fatigue, much like there's Afghanistan fatigue or Iraq fatigue.
I mean, how about, let's take Iraq, for example.
We left Iraq and said mission accomplished.
We won.
Good.
Goodbye.
And we left.
The story didn't end, but we left.
Boom.
ISIS. Bang.
Biggest story in the world.
Oh, where the fuck did these guys come from?
Well, if you would have not just left, you would have known.
And I think that there's Africa fatigue for sure.
Ebola actually continues to rise.
The deaths continue to rise.
We haven't contained it.
It's now in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and it's fucking getting worse in Liberia.
It's out of the news cycle, so therefore it must be fucking over.
We must have sent a pill that worked.
No!
The deaths fucking increase.
The opportunity for contagion increases.
That's why we're doing our 24-hour news network, because you're like, who gives a fuck about the news cycle?
They found the plane, so therefore, who cares?
When we left Iraq, that's when the problem started, and nobody paid any attention while ISIS built up.
You know, you look at West Africa and you say, Ebola is fucking still raging.
But now it's fucking, the nurse didn't get it into Houston, so we're okay.
I mean, there is Africa fatigue, there is Iraq fatigue, there is Iran fatigue, and it's like, now we're going to enter into domestic elections and we'll be fascinated with what goes on there.
Because as you start looking at all the various aspects of our culture that we could change, it could be better, and we look at life and death, just look at the deaths that we have in this country because of cigarettes.
I don't have any problem with people smoking cigarettes if you truly want to, but the fact that that's sort of this ignored thing.
If everyone stood back, if everyone, like the entire government, had a whole anti-cigarette week, Where they said, and every day on the news they broadcast a special about this is a person who started smoking when they were 16, here they are when they're 15, getting half their throat removed and show that shit on television.
How long would it be before the numbers just radically dropped?
And the number of people that you saw dead every year radically dropped from cancer.
That was Obamacare, which, by the way, calling like affordable health care Obamacare is funny because you're just labeling Obama.
And if you look at it just as if you take a step back, and by the way, I don't want to get embroiled into it because I... I'm not an expert, but globally, you're like, universal healthcare is like a thing.
Like, people should be universal healthcare or whatever.
Now, granted, I come from Canada, where universal healthcare when I grew up was good.
However, that said, I'm not a huge believer in the government...
Running anything because governments, I believe, because I grew up in a government town, are inefficient and they spend 80% of the money on themselves and 20% on the thing.
So I'm not like a huge believer in government doing anything.
That said, universal health care for the richest country in the world seems like fucking we should have it.
That became the greatest single debate and probably the worst thing for...
Definitely Obama, but for sure maybe up there in top five for the Democratic Party.
And essentially it was like a thing that if you looked at it in the world context, every rich industrial country has universal health care.
It's just a boring, it's a fucking given, it's a nothing.
And that became such a fucking huge thing because it was the government interfering into...
Your private life, right?
And because of that, the extrapolation became a thing.
And I found that to be an amazing litmus test on the American psyche because you sit there and say, I mean, quite frankly, who the fuck cares?
You know how much money we're misspending on healthcare?
I get taxed more in America than I did in Canada, in communist Canada.
I get taxed more in America and the fucking money gets thrown down the toilet.
I would be a fucking tea party motherfucker on the taxation side because you tax me the same in Canada but the schools suck and the hospitals suck, whatever.
But you have to have universal healthcare.
You cannot be the richest country in the world and have fucking people dying on the street and just rotting there because, well, fuck, you know, they couldn't afford it.
Now, was it implemented?
Well, no.
Was it messaged?
Well, no.
But the political war that went over over something as stupid as fucking universal healthcare...
Yeah, it just becomes like, we're going to fucking argue about everything now.
Every single fucking thing.
We're going to argue about, can we fund the government?
We're going to argue about fucking, are we going to pay our own debt?
We're going to argue about, you know, what shoe we put on the right foot versus the left foot.
And that's the problem is, if you talk to Petraeus, who now is up against charges, but Secretary Gates, anyone, they will all tell you the greatest...
The greatest problem for American security is the inaction of the government.
The government cannot enact fucking anything.
And that is the problem that you have today is you have something like Affordable Health Care Act just becoming a huge politicized issue where someone should have just said, look, it's going to cost us 0.01% of the fucking thing to make universal health care, which we can't fucking hold our heads up if we don't have it.
Just fucking do it and we'll shut up and fucking get on with fucking whatever the fuck else it is.
Became the number one political issue of last year.
Yeah, we would find out that Inuits have been peeing in the funnel and everybody would get really pissed.
This is bullshit.
There's no fix, but I think we've been in constant turmoil for so long.
I wonder if...
When something happens, like ISIS, or something along those lines where there's a real military movement against this big machine in America, I wonder if it excites some sort of primal DNA. Yeah, I got it.
Because I know that hunting does.
And you know what else does?
Farming, man.
Growing your own vegetables.
There's something about plucking your own vegetables and slicing into it and making a salad with that tomato.
What I was going to say was that someone took a cheap bottle of vodka and poured it through those Brita water filters and did it like seven or eight times, and it came out as good as any vodka you could ever buy.
Because it's a fucking drunks drink, and you can drink...
When you're at Vegas and you're playing, you can drink 50 vodka sodas and just be like, there's the water in there, it's the purest of the spirit, and if you drink 50 fucking jacks, you're fighting the croupier, you're shitting on the floor, you're running around...
Vodka soda is like you rehydrate.
It's a drunk drink.
You can drink a vodka soda forever.
Also, do you ever get sick?
Like, you know when you're drinking a lot of whiskey?
At the end of it, you're like, I never want to drink another whiskey again.
Vodka soda, you wake up the next day and say, oh, vodka soda.
Like, that's scary because I'm now so old and I've drank so much booze that I'm like, well, can you drink 5,000 of those?
Because if you can drink 5,000 of them, I'll go, which is a vodka soda?
Well, they actually, so they re-engineer the virus.
The virus, for example, the measles virus actually comes from 1953, and it's the kid whose throat culture they took that we've been using as a measles virus for the last however long.
These guys in Houston are using a cold virus, which we're all immune to.
The HIV one, they actually reprogram so that it doesn't eat our T cells.
But what's incredibly interesting about that is these guys figured out that what happened was cancer puts our immune system to sleep.
And so that viruses activate our immune system.
So the virus just goes into the cancer, says here it is, and then the immune system goes and eats it.
So for the past six months, I've met the top five or six medical teams in the world as they explain this shit to me, and I'm thick as fuck, so I didn't get half of it.
But what's interesting about it is the first step to curing cancer caused by the shit that used to kill us, because measles used to kill like 150 million people a year.
It was the fucking worst thing you could Now the measles brings all the fucking white cells and eats the cancer.
It's absolutely fantastic.
And that's my happy thing before we get drunk on the moonshine.
And I don't mean on purpose meaning there's some sort of a grand scheme, sort of an overlying conspiracy to the way the world runs.
But I often wonder the way people behave, even the way you see people behave when they know they're in a relationship where their husband's never going to leave or their wife is never going to leave or they know they're in a job.
Like, there's certain college professors when they get tenure.
Become preposterous human beings.
And one of the reasons is that they can't get fired.
They have this really ridiculous power, and people tend, when they have power, to explore the limits of it.
It's almost inherent.
I've been listening to the last, and this is like maybe the fourth or fifth time in just the last year that I've listened to this Dan Carlin series on the Mongols.
Dan Carlin's podcast is the greatest podcast the world has ever known.
It shouldn't be called a podcast because it's too good.
I'm going to check it out.
It's essentially a dramatic version of history, and not just the Mongols, but everything from World War I. There's so much shit that this guy covers in such an incredible dramatic fashion.
As I'm listening to these tales of carnage and conquest, I'm wondering, what the fuck is it that compels people to operate in this way?
What is it about someone who gets in power and abuses that power, whether it's a priest or whether it's a politician or a police officer?
Like, is it just something that, like, ingrained in us to resist, like, to have the strength to resist opposition so that when the opposition isn't there and you have ultimate power, you spool up your power to ultimately resist opposition again.
It's like you gather up your resources when you have control.
And I think that's the one thing that troubles most of us.
Most of us rational thinking people who live in urban environments who don't have to worry about anything other than like normal petty bullshit, the occasional crime.
What we're worried about is like, what the fuck is going on in...
The Congo.
What the fuck is going on in Afghanistan?
What the fuck is going on in Crimea?
What are these worlds that we don't ever want to see in fucking Tribeca?
It was a big epiphany for me when I said, I have a penis.
No...
It was, I woke up one night and, you know, I used to sleep fucking, you know, 12 hours a night.
Now I wake up, I don't know why.
But I woke up, and it was my daughter's first day of school, right?
And so, you know, I got to take my daughter to the first day of school.
And I was thinking about school, and I'd always been like, you know, I went to sort of public school, rough schools, and I think that's where I got to where I am, because school is just bullshit.
It's a curriculum everywhere you go.
But you learn the pecking order.
You learn a lot of other shit besides fucking one plus one equals two.
You learn where you are and what you do, and you learn how to fight.
You learn how to not fight.
You do whatever you want.
In any case, so I was thinking a lot about my daughter going to school because she has a different life than me.
Because I grew up poor and she has a different life than me.
And then I was thinking, you know, my daughter now is about to go to school for 25 fucking years.
You go to school for 25 years.
Why?
Because you want to have a career.
What's a career?
Well, a career hopefully...
Is something that you like doing, and you make some money, and maybe you make a difference, or at least you convince yourself you make a difference.
And, you know, you make enough money to maybe buy a house, and maybe you can retire somewhere warm, because fucking cold makes your arthritis ache.
I'm literally thinking about, like, life, you know?
Because, you know, like, I went to school, and then I worked, and then you got a career, and then you tried this, and you did all this shit.
And I've been at war, I realize.
I've been at war since I was five years old.
I fought every kid in the schoolyard, and then I tried to get fucking this, and I tried to play football and whatever the fuck else.
I was always at war.
I was at war with my brother.
We fought every day of our lives.
And when I got out of school, I started a company.
That company, I was always at war, right?
All of a sudden, I woke up one day, okay?
I went to school.
I got my career.
I got to work with my best friends.
I became a billionaire, right?
Doesn't happen.
I got the A+. I got the fucking A+. And I'm sitting there going, okay, I don't have to go to school anymore.
I don't have to work anymore.
I don't have anything to do anymore.
I can move to fucking my private island, put my Amadeus wig on, put the fucking ponytail butt plug up the ass and ride my fucking horse into the sunset.
But I can't look my fucking kids in the face unless I say, guess what?
We gotta fix Washington.
It doesn't work.
We have to fucking do something about global warming or we're all fucked.
Now, me and you, we're still gonna be okay.
We'll be alright because...
Much longer to live.
But our kids, and by the way, and I love your kids, and you have beautiful kids, and I have beautiful kids, and I love our kids.
I don't give a fuck about me.
I had a lot of fun.
I did a lot of coke and drank a lot of booze and had a lot of sex and all that shit.
But you're like, guess what?
And so at this point, you're like, I can either ride off into the sunset And say, fuck it, I'll sit on an island beach and I'll drink fucking mezcal every day.
Or you can go out there and say, no matter what, I'm going to kick against the pricks.
I'm going to say, this ain't fucking right.
By the way, what you're saying is bullshit.
I'm going to go talk.
By the way, I'm going to go interview Putin.
I'm going to interview Putin.
I'm going to say, what the fuck are you doing?
And by the way, guess who I'm interviewing after Putin?
I'm interviewing Obama.
And I'm going to say, what the fuck's going on?
Why?
Because why the fuck not?
And that's why I always get excited about coming on this show, is because this show is Democracy in Action.
You have millions of fucking people listening, and guess what?
Unless we say something, unless we wake up from our Valium and booze-induced stupor, nothing's gonna fucking happen.
So why the fuck are you doing it?
That's the question you should ask yourself in 2015. Not am I going to lose weight.
Not am I going to read more fucking books.
Not am I going to go wear Skechers instead of Nikes.
It should be, why the fuck do I get up in the fucking morning?
And now we're very lucky motherfuckers that we're post-economic and we can fucking say, I'm going to get up in the morning because of this.
Well, I think one of the things that's changing in our world is that more people have the ability to communicate.
They might not be able to communicate on the scale that is like a podcast like this, but they have the ability to express themselves to us and maybe, you know, if you were on Twitter or Facebook or you...
You ran into them in some form of social media.
You might read what they said and take it into account.
So something about them trying to express themselves has some sort of a meaning.
One of the things that has the most impact for those people is someone who can reach millions of people who represents their point of view.
No, no, I'd be terrible because I have other shit I want to do.
I'm not gonna stop commentating for the UFC. I love that.
I'm not gonna stop doing stand-up.
I love that.
I'm not gonna stop podcasting.
I'm not gonna stop hanging out with my kids and taking care of my family.
Where's my time?
It doesn't exist.
But this is just, it's not just as good as being a president, but it's as far as like what I can do with who I am and what personality I've sort of developed along this path of life.
If I wasn't me and I saw me and I said, hey man, you should talk about this shit because this is kind of weird.
But what I will say is, it's true, it's true, money won't buy you happiness, but guess what?
Your family not having to worry about where the next rent check's coming from, you know, being able to fucking feed your kids, all that shit, that is important.
Incredibly important.
It takes the stress away.
But more importantly, it goes, okay, now, take all that shit out of the equation, what the fuck are you going to do today?
Right?
With everything you know, look at you.
You're a powerful guy.
You got all these people listening to you.
What are you going to do?
Guess what?
Joe Rogan can say, fuck you.
I'm going to drive my fucking car.
I'm going to go bow hunting.
I'm going to fucking go to Vieques and fucking lie on the beach.
What are you doing?
You're fucking sitting here with me doing a back-to-back podcast, talking about shit, challenging people, putting information into people's minds.
I don't have to ever work again.
Why am I sitting here on the fucking Rogan podcast?
Because this is important, and we always get to this at the end of the day, is there is a movement of like-minded people who have the A +, who go, I don't give a fuck about the A+. I don't give a fuck about the money.
I don't give a shit about you were the fucking biggest star.
I forget the network, but come on.
What's the network?
unidentified
ABC? CBS? NBC! I wasn't ever the biggest star at NBC by a long shot.
As I've gotten older, one of the things that I've really come to grips with in this really strange way is that for this brief glimpse that we're awake and alive, we're really just a blip in this infinite number of blips.
And what I... Everybody worries about their own finite nature.
It's one of the things that troubles all of us, and I'm one of those people.
It's impossible to avoid.
I think anybody that's not troubled by the idea that you only have a certain amount of days and hours and minutes on this earth before eventually this vehicle shuts down and stops working.
What are the things that are important to you while you're here?
And what's important to you while you're here is trying to spread what I would call harmony.
What I would try to call this community.
Communion with each other.
The ability to develop really honest, friendly relationships.
And I think a lot of what we have, whether it's issues with I think a lot of the issues that we have across the board with human beings with various ideologies is a lack of communication, a lack of understanding that at the end of the day we're like each other more than we're different and what separates us and what you're talking about and the good thing about having financial independence is that once you have financial independence It releases you
in a way that's indescribable to people that are caught up in the constant, very common web of...
And writing checks and all that stupid shit that people do all day.
And as soon as you can step away from that, then you start to look at your life and going like, is my life like this?
Just constant worry about this impending tide of bills and pushing them back?
Yes.
So, the one thing, the responsibility that I think a person like you has, or a person like I have, is that once you are slightly ahead of that wave, to let people know what it's like.
Let people know what's going on up here.
And also let people know, like, you're being misled.
Vice News and Vice are now fighting each other for being how big they are.
And so now people are like, I want to see Pupu Kaka and the Bum Bums or I don't want to see your music shit or your travel shit.
And I'm like, well then just turn it into Vice News, don't turn it into the other shit.
But the fact is this news became so fucking big that it's now coloring the rest of the brand because the rest of the brand used to be It used to be everything.
And now everybody just wants fucking news.
Which, by the way, I love news, but I still like all the other shit too.
I'll get a hundred things saying you're changing the world, you're changing news, and one thing saying you fucking cocksucker.
I'm like, cocksucker?
I'll fucking meet you at 59th and 7th.
I'll kick your ass.
So A, B, and this hits on, well, I don't know about you, but about me and my life, is that you sit there and you say, you know...
I had a small company before and it was 10 people in a room and you're like, Joe, you got the fucking photo and fucking Ted, do you have the thing?
And fucking Rosalie, do you know?
And now we're doing something on the order of 14,000 posts a day.
And everyone's like, Shane, did you fucking see what fucking Weiss Bulgaria put up and that goddamn bullshit?
And Germany just said that this and that and whatever else.
And you're like, I'm sorry, but I'm lucky if I see seven posts a day and we do 14,000.
And that's the problem with running something is that you go...
When it was just me, it's easy.
When it becomes, I don't know how many people we even have, 4,000 employees, some shit, you're like doing 14,000 posts.
It sucks.
And I've got to say, like, when it...
When it is just you, it's you.
But then it's not Vice.
Then it's not a thing.
It's just me.
And, you know, what I'm trying to do now or what Vice is trying to do now is to have much more of a cohesive point of view.
And ironically, how we're going to do that is we're buying TV networks around the world.
We're going to make TV shows that then we then push out for the first time ever day and date with With online and mobile.
No one's ever done it before.
And we believe we'll have the largest audience in the world online, collectively online, mobile and TV. And then the question is, okay, great.
What are you going to put in there?
We don't want to put in shit just between the ads.
We're like, okay, who wants...
All of the people, the Spikes and the Harmonies and the Us and whoever else, now we're saying like, We can put whatever the fuck we want out to the largest audience in the world.
We just don't want to put shit out there because why the fuck are we getting out of bed in the morning?
And that is going to be our 2015 and that is why I believe I'm positive.
Because I'm going to give it a shot.
I might fuck up.
I might not do a good job.
But at least I'm going to have that shot and we're going to go out and we're going to try to do something that doesn't suck.
When we announce anything big, we'll announce it on Joe Rogan.
Why?
Hold on, why?
Because literally, we've said it before, and I would challenge somebody to watch the trajectory of these podcasts, because we're going to launch one of the largest TV networks in the world.
We'll launch it on the Joe Rogan show.
Why?
Why?
Because we're the same!
Why the fuck would we launch it on today's show or whatever the fuck it is or who the fuck cares?
And by the way, you only live once.
We work with our friends.
We do it with our friends.
And by the way, we are the new audience.
And one thing I'd like to say for anyone who gives a shit, because I think for 100 people who say fucking Rogan and Shane doing stuff is good, when people say you're so self-congratulatory, the reason why...
It's because Joe's a real guy.
He's a real fucking dude who came fucking up.
I'm a real guy.
And half of it is us looking around going, can you fucking believe this shit?
Can you believe where we are today?
We're sitting here having a conversation with two mutual fucking dudes we just have anyway.
And millions of people are listening to us and guess what?
We're going to announce fucking the next wave of media in the world together.
Why?
Because we can.
And guess what?
If we don't celebrate that we're the first fucking generation that's ever doing that, then we should fuck off.
Just to be a human being, the fact that you and I are having this conversation, two freakazoids who would never be on anything any fucking other way, even if we get in the shit for it, I'm going to say it every time.
Because if I'm going to ever do anything and announce anything I'm going to do on The Rogan Show, why?
But I see what you're saying, and it sort of aligns with what I'm saying, is that we find ourselves in very unique positions that we didn't expect to be in.
And those positions happened because everything aligned with information.
If you and I had a conversation at a restaurant, it would be 15 to 20 minutes of your insane trips about the world.
We would laugh.
We would tell jokes.
But there's an awareness of the fact that this is being broadcast that makes us stay on point and focus on some, and occasionally a little dick sucking every now and then.
I would say the hundred people saying I love the Rogan podcast versus the one dick sucker.
The one thing I would just like to say is what I'm doing is saying that this is the first time in media history where conversations like this can happen.
I mean, Duncan and I and Ari and I, we've done many podcasts on planes.
When we're sitting next to each other, one of us will hold the phone up in between the armrests and we'll just talk and we'll have a podcast on a plane.
But I do, because anyone who couldn't but all of a sudden was given the opportunity would.
And that's exactly the situation I find myself in.
All of it has played out for all of us in a very unique way that none of us could have planned out, including just the average person that is on Facebook or Twitter that sends a message that you respond to or I respond to or anybody, Duncan, or anyone responds to.
We're in this weird era of communication that's never existed before.
And we're a part of it as much as anyone else.
And we're a part of it in that we represent that even though you do make a lot of money or you do pay a lot of taxes, you still are just a regular person.
And you will continue to do those stories that you find fascinating and in need of illumination.
All these stories, whether it's your story, you went to North Korea, you were rich as fuck, you didn't have to go there.
You did that because this was compelling and this was also something that you felt like needed to be illuminated.
I bet a good percentage of the shield he puts up is just to try to keep his job as a gay albino in a fucking white man's world.
You know what I mean?
But the reality is that guy can't do this.
If Shane Smith wants to go out and have his own podcast, and you do it in a sumo diaper, one of those crazy sumo diapers, and you have all these Thai ladyboys around you, and you're drinking fucking drinks with umbrellas in it, and you're smoking big spliffs, But you're still talking about the world and important points.
People will still listen.
You know why?
Because you're being what is absolutely 100% lacking in all of corporate controlled media.
But what I will say is, and this is a big deal for me anyways, personally, is we were in negotiations with Time Warner and we were in negotiations with a lot of people.
Quite frankly, let's be honest, because this goes back to one day you wake up and say, I got the money, I won the game, what the fuck am I doing?
Why am I fighting so hard for control?
I vote 95% of the board on the largest single shareholder advice.
Why did I do that?
Why didn't I take money off the board and spend it?
By the way, I'm not setting myself up.
I don't know the answer to that question.
But at least for now, I run fucking Vice.
Now, I don't run it perfectly because a lot of shit gets through that shouldn't get through and a lot of things happen that shouldn't happen because I don't have enough time in the day and there's a bottleneck and I have to get better at that.
But the thing is, I was able to launch...
Vice News by myself.
I was able to launch a Vice News.
We're up for Peabody's and Pulitzer's.
I just won the Knight Foundation Award for Journalism, which is great.
In any case, I'm trying to do a humble brag, but what I'm trying to say is I could do that.
I could say, you know what, I'm going to override my board, I'm going I'm going to override everybody.
I'm going to override my investors.
And I'm going to invest in news when everyone says you shouldn't because there's no money to be made in news, which is true.
But guess what?
We did it.
Why?
Because it's fucking important.
You're a guy...
You don't have to do any of this shit.
You're in fucking Hollywood.
You're a celebrated motherfucker.
You can come out here and you can not do fucking anything and fucking kill it.
Now, what I'd like to say is...
You got two medium old guys here who like a fucking few drinks.
And by the way, we're regular dudes who just grew up and said, hey, I watched Scooby-Doo when I was young, and then I did this, and then I did that, and now we're just sitting here.
That said, I believe that we're in the majority.
I believe that us and people like us are in the majority, and we look at shit now and say, hold on a second.
All these old motherfuckers are dying off.
We control this country now.
Not only this country, but probably...
You know, the West, you know, with our money and with our politics.
Why are we still doing all this shitty stuff?
The only guy that does it week in, week out and says, why are we still doing this shitty stuff is fucking Joe Rogan.
Now, Anderson Cooper, what he does is sits there and says, here's the storm here or whatever there.
And I think that that's one of the weird things about life is that no one comes out of the box with any sort of understanding of what the grand spectrum of this experience is about.
In understanding of that or in consideration of that, the scariest thing in life is really ignorance, power and ignorance together.
And when you're 18 and you're a young man, your idea of what you can accomplish once you start getting laid, once you win your first fist fight, once you're at the top of the world.
It's like you get into this experience in life where because of the limited amount of information that you've been exposed to, the limited amount of people that you've met, the limited amount of friends that you've had, you start forming your world.
And your world is so small.
It's so tiny.
But you think, because of the limited amount of experience that you have, you think that this is what's up.
When I was young, I would tell you I knew what the fuck I was talking about.
I would tell you I understood mortality.
I would tell you all this shit.
But the fact of the matter is, no matter how bad the fight or how drunk I was driving my car home or jumping off the bridge into the water In the back of my mind, I believed I would never die.
And even because I hung out with this gang of kids and a bunch of them died from drug overdoses and a bunch of them died from car accidents.
It's just sad shit.
There's nothing sadder than a teenager dying.
But the thing is, quite frankly, they all died from the boring shit.
They all died from you got wasted and you fucking hit the car.
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You got fucking wasted and you overdosed or whatever the fuck it is.
And, hold on, and this goes back to our first point, you gotta be healthy, you're right.
You gotta, you know, have friends, family, somebody out there, you know.
You gotta enjoy your shit, you know.
Enjoy your food, enjoy your fucking sleep, enjoy your book, whatever the fuck it is.
But the other thing is, if you don't have future, if you don't have like, tomorrow's gonna be good too, you know, then you're fucked and that's why we all have to participate in that shit.
Because if you didn't, you would never learn the lessons that you learned.
I mean, I'm not claiming that I've gone the perfect path, but...
Every fucking disaster I've ever been a part of, every mistake I've ever made, it's made me humble, reconsider, be more considerate, be more introspective, be more observant, be more objective.
Just look at it from, you have to fuck up.
You can't, like, everybody that fucks up, they feel like they're a bad person because they fucked up.
It's hard, and you have to have a little bit of luck as well.
And everyone else tells their kids, it's fine, it's good, it's going to be great.
And my old man was like, actually, it's going to be fucking hard, so you better really fucking try to hit it, because if you get fucked up, it's only going to travel with you.
And at that point, you sit there and go, honesty goes a long way.