Ben Anderson, war correspondent and PTSD sufferer, recounts surviving a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan (2015) while filming, questioning his role amid ignored atrocities like Syria’s civil war—where 500,000+ died despite documentation. He praises MDMA-assisted therapy, with 72% of veterans becoming PTSD-free after three sessions, contrasting it with failed pharmaceutical treatments like Zoloft. Anderson critiques superficial war journalism, highlighting Yemen’s civilian death toll (tens of thousands) and U.S. drone strikes without accountability, while advocating for immersive reporting and welcoming refugees like Afghan interpreters. Psychedelics, he admits, revealed life beyond trauma—balancing duty with personal healing may redefine his legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
War journalists are very fascinating people to me because oftentimes you guys move towards the gunfire with the camera to get the shot.
And, you know, I've talked to folks before who have worked as a war journalist, and they say you almost don't think you're so concentrated on getting the shot, you don't think about the fact that you might get shot.
I was with the US Marines for Operation Mushtarak, like the biggest operation of the Afghan war.
And there was a town called Maja that was controlled by the Taliban.
And I met up with this one group of Marines.
I used to love going out with the Marines, because if you were willing to run the same risks as them, they'd let you film everything.
And their mission was to get dropped by helicopter in the middle of this town at 3am on day one, and then just fight their way out from the middle of the town.
And as soon as the sun came up, all of the speakers on the mosques were saying, the infidels are here, the infidels are here, get your weapons, get your weapons.
And General McChrystal had introduced this rule of courageous restraint, saying you're not allowed to shoot unless you're shot at, or unless you see someone preparing a hostile act.
And the Taliban had figured out how to use this, so...
I'm sitting in this field with about 28 marines, watching the Taliban drop off guys in buildings all around us with their weapons wrapped in blankets, knowing the marines can't shoot them.
So they're setting up the perfect ambush.
And as soon as we started walking across the field, it started and it's like nothing I've ever heard or experienced before.
We ran and dived into a ditch.
The guys either side of me got hit, one of them badly.
A guy was killed on the other side of the field, almost straight away.
And I was there alone, filming it myself.
And because I was watching the whole thing through this tiny little screen on my camera, it felt like I wasn't, you know, in as much danger as they were.
And I was so afraid.
And the adrenaline runs out after a while and you just become...
I mean, then I'd resign myself.
I thought we were all going to get killed.
We were completely surrounded and outnumbered and there were RPGs and snipers.
And I watched it back and the footage is pretty good.
You know, I'm changing shots, I'm zooming in, I'm focusing.
Yeah, it wasn't even a good night's sleep, but yeah.
But yeah, once you survive a few, I mean, I remember when I started doing this, you had an idea of what good odds and bad odds were, and that, you know, you're willing to accept lesser and lesser odds as time goes on because nothing happens, and it's easy to get careless and stupid.
I mean, I took part in this MDMA therapy for PTSD recently, and one of the revelations that came out as a result of that was...
I got into this 20 years ago, thinking I could help people in Syria, Palestine, Congo, wherever, by raising awareness about what's happening.
After a while, you lose faith in that idea.
So then you start feeling a bit guilty and thinking, am I just here for my own benefit?
Am I just here to profit in some way and not actually helping whatsoever?
So I think that guilt made me think You're not important enough to have something as dramatic as getting shot or blown up happen to you.
I know that sounds so stupid and never thought that until, you know, it came out as part of this therapy, but I think I really had started thinking that.
I think we're dealing with the legacy of the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars, in that even if you want to help, what's the point?
You can't.
You're only going to make it worse.
I think a lot of people feel that way, and I think that leads some people to think Assad is not a good guy.
He probably does have the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, but we should deal with him anyway, because that's better than Iraq or Afghanistan.
Is it because when we do get rid of a leader like Libya with Gaddafi or Iraq with Hussein, that what happens is you get this power vacuum and then it becomes far worse?
Well, it's so hard when you look at the rest of the world and you see these horrific conditions and you see warlords in power and you see atrocities being committed and we're sitting over here in the valley watching on internet and drinking Starbucks, you know?
It almost seems like what you were talking about, but in a far lesser extent, the feeling that you get when you're in these war zones that it's almost like it's not real, that you're covering it through this lens so you're immune from it.
It almost feels like we view the massive conflicts of the world that way.
We're watching it on television.
We're seeing it on our phones or our laptops.
It's real.
I know it's real.
It's a real issue, but it's not real in terms of it's not knocking on my door.
Yeah, and the reason I started doing this when I was a kid, as soon as I started reading about these situations, and I remember reading that my government, the British government, was arming You know, often the wrong side in these conflicts.
I remember thinking, how is this not front page news?
How is everyone not talking about this every single day?
And I still feel like that now, even though I'm clearly out of step with, you know, most of the population.
Is it hard for you when you come back and you see the Trump gossip and all the nonsense and all the things that we engage in on a daily basis here in America that are really trivial at best?
I mean, you know, is it hard for you to...
I mean, you get to see the worst shit happening in the world all the time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, one of the main symptoms I had of the PTSD from covering this for so long was it was numbness to physical danger when I was there, but it was numbness when I got back home.
So you'd come back and, you know, at one point you used to think, if I come back with the footage I have of whatever conflict, it's going to have some kind of impact.
It's going to...
Create some kind of ripple.
And you come back and you think there's going to be nothing.
I read a really interesting article about him just a few days ago.
Where was it?
I forget what...
It was, you know, the...
Not expose, but a really good look at him.
And I think he's just spent his career believing, rightly, that the government lies about all kinds of things.
And that's got him into a point where he thinks, well, they always lie, no matter what.
So...
And it's happened to a lot of journalists.
Robert Fiske...
Seymour Hersh, Martha Gellhorn, one of my favourite war correspondents of all time.
I re-read some of her stuff recently and the first batch of war reporting she did I think is the best war reporting I've ever read.
Spanish Civil War, Vietnam.
And then she spent 25 years writing novels and then later on wrote about, I believe it was the Yom Kippur War and was denying that massacres had happened and saying, you know, Arabs lie, they always lie, there was no massacre.
And we now know there was.
A massacre.
Or there were massacres in the aftermath of these wars.
So I don't know what happens.
I mean, maybe if you just do this for too long, you just become so cynical that you're open to these things.
But it's, yeah, I'm amazed that Seymour Hersh is open to that idea.
When the very people that are calling it, the very people that have boots on the ground and that are in these war zones and calling these things, when they become cynical and they become jaded, that's when it gets really, really sketchy.
And we rely so heavily on people like you.
I'm not going over there.
Jamie's not going over there.
Look at him.
You know what I'm saying?
And you wouldn't be able to really get...
I know people that have gone to Venezuela and they come back and they go, I don't know what the fuck is going on over there.
I don't know who to believe.
I don't understand it.
Venezuela is a very strange one.
And I get messages all the time.
I've had Abby Martin who goes over there and she has one take on it.
And I have other people that I talk to that have a different take on it.
And I do not know.
I don't know who to believe.
And I think you'd have to go over there and do...
You'd have to spend a lot of time to try to figure this out and it would have to be the entire focus of your life to really try to parse it out.
I mean, one of the drawbacks of doing what I do is I'm covering seven or eight things at once.
So I feel like I'm not expert enough in even Afghanistan where I've covered that more than any other.
But Venezuela is an interesting one because there's such a left-right divide on that.
And if you support the opposition, then you find yourself alongside John Bolton and Donald Trump, which means that a lot of people are going to automatically attack you.
And I think it's, you know, we can say without a doubt that Maduro has destroyed the economy there.
Maduro has imprisoned, beaten, killed journalists.
There is a movement there that do want genuine elections.
But some people will say, well, just because George Bush in another area or John Bolton in this era support the opposition, therefore the opposition must be illegitimate and the information coming out must be false.
And I wish people did rely on people who actually went there, but it doesn't feel like that.
It feels like they rely on the guy behind the glass desk on the news with a loud opinion rather than the people who are actually there.
Well, we still have this idea in our head that the person who's reading the news is the authority, that Don Lemon has the inside scoop or whoever it is, you know?
Well, we just need someone who's relatable, who can read a teleprompter, who fits the profile that they're looking for, whether it's Fox News or CNN. And also, the information is there.
And, you know, I agree with you that I don't necessarily think we're getting stupider or dumber in this country or in the world in general because of the internet, but we're definitely getting weirder in our perceptions of actual world events.
And I think every time something...
Like mass shootings, for instance, like New Zealand.
Every time one of these horrific tragedies takes place, you see more and more division.
I watch people fight over it on Twitter.
People blaming left-wing people.
People blaming right-wing people.
People trying to find some reason.
And this one is particularly disturbing because it appears that...
At least one of the guys...
I don't know their names.
I don't know if they even released...
Have they withheld the names of these guys who have done this?
There's some game where if you look under the table, you see someone doing that, they're allowed to punch you or something, something stupid like that.
But it's also one of those things where we see so many of these now that we're starting to get numb.
Whether it's a Jewish synagogue, whether it's a Muslim temple, whether it's a gay club, whatever it is.
It's like you see so many of these mass murders now.
Whether it's a school or a movie theater, it's like, fuck, man.
It's just, it all, like you were talking about, When you're filming the news, you're there, you're watching the bullets fly by, you hear them fly by your head, and you are just watching it through the lens.
We're many, many, many, many levels removed from that.
And we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do.
And we're not there.
We're not where the bullets...
And the people that are there, where the bullets take place, they try to give you a description of it.
And even they barely can comprehend what happened.
Maybe it would be better if there was a website where we curated all of the bulletproof – that's a terrible way to describe it – but rock-solid investigative journalism that are 100% ethical.
that you could completely rely on for an accurate assessment of what's happening.
Because it is difficult for people.
And when people...
They rely on biased websites, which many of them do, whether it's biased to the left or biased to the right.
Things get even more muddy, and there's so many of them.
It's so easy to reinforce your confirmation bias, whether it's left-wing or right-wing.
And especially now, it used to be if you were conservatively and you'd read the Wall Street Journal, if you were liberal leading New York Times, now, no matter how far off the scale you are, you can find a pretty professional looking website that will write a story backing up your prejudice.
And people aren't looking at a story thinking, okay, I want to find out what happened here.
They're thinking, I know what my gut feeling tells me.
I need to find, not even a story, a headline that justifies my gut feeling about this.
And also, you know, I mean, I know the footage is available of, you know, this guy's head cam as he shot everybody, but footage like that has been widely available for a long time now.
And I think that's had a massive numbing effect.
I mean, you know, the picture of the Syrian refugee washing up on the beach.
You know, it felt like that was going to have an effect.
It felt like that was the picture that was really going to change things.
I mean, just to be not completely pessimistic, when you're doing stuff for Vice and HBO, you do get young people reaching out to you and saying, I had no idea.
I want to be a photographer or a doctor or...
Maybe that's an effect that's going to be felt down the road.
I don't know.
It feels like there is a generation of people growing up thinking, I'm not going to play by the normal set of rules.
I am going to actually try and do something about this.
And then, you know, I had Renee DiResta on recently, and she's done a lot of work covering all these various Russian troll farms and how they essentially organize conflict online.
And, you know, they set up these things where you have like a pro-Texas movement, and they set them up across the street from a pro-Muslim movement, and they do it on purpose.
And then they have these pro-LGBT movement things online that they organize to attack certain people in certain groups, diminish certain aspects, and defy parts of the Democratic Party.
It's crazy.
Yeah, when you hear about shit like that on top of all this you like well, okay Just the the actual news itself is so difficult to disseminate It's so difficult to figure out what should I pay attention to what's real?
And then you have this kind of shit happening on top of that.
You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa fuck You know, I know you know there's a piece came out in the New Yorker I don't mean to keep on going on about The New Yorker, but a piece came out about The New Yorker today by Ed Caesar, a friend of mine, about Brexit and about Aaron Banks.
And I haven't read the piece yet, but I know what he's been working on.
And, you know, there may be evidence that the Russians directly influenced the Brexit vote.
Are the Brexit voters really going to look at that article and think, oh, maybe I was misled.
Maybe I read 10 articles on Facebook that made me vote wrongly.
How many people actually have their minds open enough to consider that?
I mean, especially with American politics, it feels like football.
If your player fouls someone, of course it's not a foul.
Everyone seems to be digging their heels in on one side or the other.
And it seems that a lot of them have just picked a team.
I don't necessarily think they've curated these opinions and cultivated these ideas over many years of soul searching and reading and trying to understand who they are and how they interface with the world.
So if your family has always been Republican, then suddenly saying, maybe I'm going to vote for Hillary instead of Trump feels like coming out or something.
Well, the Nixon thing, it must have been insanely difficult to get information, right?
You relied on Rolling Stone, New York Times, whatever, Washington Post, whatever newspaper was covering, whatever story.
You relied on all those.
But you couldn't get it any other way.
Now you can get it from everything, right?
I mean, there's people on the ground that are tweeting about things, and then they become local celebrities, or they become sort of like temporary internet journalists slash celebrities.
Fucking weird, man.
Your perspective and your life experience is so much richer and deeper in this than anybody else's.
And we now know it is addictive, so how you turn that around, I mean, it feels like there's a little bit of a movement of people to switch that stuff off and just read a book or go for a walk.
It's not like we did all the work to curate all this technology and put it together and figure out how to implement it in our daily...
No, we just went to the fucking Verizon store and picked up a new phone.
I mean, that's what most people are doing.
And because of that, it's almost like being a trust fund kit or something like that.
It's just all given to you.
It's all handed to you.
I feel the same way sometimes about weapons.
I feel like the discipline required to learn how to use one and create it and build it and then understand the responsibility of actually using it on a human being, all that shit's out the window.
You just go to the store and buy it.
You know, there's no requirements of you other than you never killed anybody yet.
Have you driven over anybody in your car?
No.
Have you robbed a bank?
No.
Okay, here you go.
You've beaten your wife?
No?
Okay, here's a gun.
It's fucking strange.
And this, as a human being, the lack of discipline and accountability that we have in this ultimate access to all these things constantly, and many of them become just massive distractions.
And, you know, this in some ways is the utopia that people have dreamed of for generations.
We're free of war.
You're not going to get attacked in your house tonight.
You're not going to starve.
You have everything you could possibly need.
So you'd think we would become the perfect human beings in the absence of all those things that would have killed us in the past or would have made life hard in the past.
Well, I don't think we operate very well without legitimate conflict.
Without legitimate conflict in terms of actual things you need to worry about.
When I used to live in the East Coast, one of the things that was really noticeable was that when it snowed out, people were nicer.
They helped people when they were broken down the side of the road.
They were nicer to each other.
There was a sense of vulnerability that we were all deeply entrenched in this winter nature thing, and we've got to work together, otherwise we can't survive.
So then you wonder, when the kids of today grow up, what are they going to be like when everything has just been at their fingertips from day one forever?
Yeah, I almost feel like we need some sort of organized discipline.
Like maybe mandatory volunteer work cleaning up impoverished communities or mandatory volunteer work doing things.
But I don't want people to have to do things.
I'm conflicted on that too.
I don't want people to have to do that.
There's countries that have mandatory military service.
They seem to have an amazing feeling of...
of patriotism in those countries and appreciation in those countries because they actually do have to join the military for two years or whatever it is.
You've actually never met anyone that is X, Y, or Z, which is...
I moved to Brooklyn five years, six years ago, and I moved to Clinton Hill, Fort Greene.
And I got a few friends that have been there forever, and I said, look, this probably sounds like a really stupid thing to say, but it feels kind of segregated here.
And they were like, duh, of course it does.
And I couldn't believe it.
You know, I'd grown up on the Spike Lee movies.
I mean, I guess they do show a kind of segregation.
But I thought, you know, this was the place where everyone lived together on the same block and went to each other's bodegas and restaurants.
I lived on the dividing line between the bit that was getting gentrified and the projects.
You go two blocks that way, pretty much all black.
You go three blocks that way, pretty much all white, with yoga studios and bougie coffee shops and pet spas.
And the two communities just did not mix.
It wasn't necessarily that they hated each other, or they just did not mix.
But talking about amazing pieces of journalism over the last few years, there's Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece about New York school system, public school system, the most segregated school system in America.
And she had to get her daughter into a public school.
And the choice was the very good, well-supported school in the gentrifying, mostly white area, Or the bad, failing public school in the non-gentrified, mostly black area, where her kid's education might suffer.
And I think I'm remembering it correctly, but her and her husband had a real fight about it because she said, no, we've got to put our kid in the bad, failing school and help it get better.
And it's going to take years, and our daughter may suffer in the short term, but that's what we have to do if we're living in this neighbourhood.
Oh, she was in town hall meetings where, you know, progressive white liberal parents, who would be very left-wing on every other issue, were really fighting to make sure their kid went to the good majority white school.
And, you know, they want a bit of diversity, but not too much diversity.
Atlanta's interesting, you know, because Atlanta has a lot of, there's a lot of...
Well, there's a lot of everything in Atlanta, but it's a very black city in a lot of ways, but it's also a very white city.
You see a lot of black and white people hanging out together in clubs and bars and restaurants and stuff, and it's really much closer to a 50-50 split than a lot of places, at least in some of the neighborhoods that I've been to.
And he talks to a bunch of graduates who, you know, are about to get approached by the big banks and financial institutions.
And he says, listen, you think you're going to do this for two or three years and a few million dollars and then do something worthwhile with your life.
But what's going to happen is you're going to get seduced, and you're going to get the mortgage, and suddenly 20 years of your life will have gone by, and you'll think, what the fuck have I just done with life?
Yeah, these guys figured out what was going on, and then they started a trading floor where there was so much cable that no one could benefit from those, you know, those nanoseconds of advantage.
And, of course, the other banks tried to close it down, and it wasn't that popular.
Jamie was telling me that there's a game called Fortnite that all the kids play, and they're moving to Columbus, Ohio, so they could be closer to the server.
I think the franchise fees for the next season of Call of Duty are $25 million of a team, which is like four guys on a team playing the game, and someone's got to pay for that.
I mean, I thought Mikey Garcia would outbox him for a few rounds at least, early on, and then maybe, you know, Spence's size and power would make a difference, but he outboxed him from...
The thing that gets me with MMA is, because I come from, you know, boxing is my sport, when you see a guy go down, and he's clearly out, and the guy jumps on him and pounds him.
Jorge Masvidal, he knocked out Darren Till, and he KO'd him.
He clipped him with the left hand on the way down, he hit him with another left hand, and then Darren Till is flat-lined, completely out, and Masvidal uncorks a bomb right on his face while he's out cold.
You just get the sense that boxing was never him, and he found a way at the end to be him and do something he loved, and he's thriving at it, which is a rare thing for Xboxes.
I'm sure there's no thrill for you, but do you think that being in these incredibly tense environments ramps life up in a way that you don't get outside of it?
Just very genuine, really there when you're talking to him.
But that's sort of his take on it.
And if you're listening, I know I talk about that book too much.
I just love it.
But his take on it was that these people are experiencing life in this incredibly extreme environment, and then they come back to the rest of the world, and it just doesn't feel real anymore.
So it's not thrilling when you're there, but it is real drama.
You're seeing life and death drama right in front of your face.
So when you come back, you think you really want to see this person, see this film, try out this new restaurant, and then you get back and you just don't care.
I mean, when I was getting the PTSD treatment, numbness was the word that came out more.
Numbness to everything.
Numbness to the danger when you're there, but numbness back here for the things that should be pleasurable and should be providing some kind of relief as well.
So you're lying in a bed, you've fasted for 24 hours before, the therapist knows you and knows your issues, so knows how to politely, gently nudge you towards the right topic of conversation, but always makes you actually get to the conclusions.
I mean, the best example I can give of how this works, the first veteran I met had been through it.
He had one session, and he'd lost some friends in Iraq, and he'd felt guilty about it, and always thought, maybe if I'd done something different, I could have saved them.
And he imagined being them in the first MDMA session.
And they were saying to him, why are you ruining your life?
You're alive.
You're healthy.
We want you to have a fun, productive, full life and enjoy your friends and enjoy your family.
A lot of people that come back from the war that lost friends have that horrible feeling that it should have been them, that they're not as good as the person who died, or that somehow or another them being alive is the reason why their friend was dead.
I think the numbness to danger and to pleasurable things back here.
I mean, my cameraman in Mosul, we were there when the Iraqi army beat ISIS, and it was house-to-house fighting.
We were stepping on bodies to get through rooms.
And at one point, we were with three or four Iraqi soldiers trying to get to the river to cut off these two ISIS positions, and they got a radio message saying, there's a suicide bomber and a gunman running down the street towards you now.
So we stepped into this, what used to be a shop that was all blown up and smashed a bit.
And I sat down as the two soldiers tried to shoot this suicide bomber as he was running towards us.
And someone said, IED, IED.
And right next to me under the rubble was an IED.
The day before, I think, or two days before, two French journalists and Kurdish journalists had been killed when they stepped on an IED trying to get out.
And Javier Manzano, my cameraman, just said, he looked bored.
And he filmed it.
We got that moment on camera and I remember just looking so bored and I couldn't give a shit about the suicide bomber, the IED. I was just bored out of my brain.
And that's when I thought this is not a natural reaction to what's going on around you right now.
I hadn't really thought that much about PTSD. I just thought I'd become so used to this.
And one of the things that came up in one of the last sessions I did was I didn't think I was important enough to get shot and hurt and have medics rush over to help me and maybe a helicopter take me out.
I know that sounds ridiculous now, but I think part of me thought, yeah, you're not important enough to have something so dramatic happen to you.
You're just witnessing other people in these dramas.
So you take 125 milligrams, and then when that hits about an hour, I think it's a good dose.
But then when it hits you, you take another 75. So overall, that's a good dose.
And that keeps you up for, you know, six, seven, eight hours.
And then, you know, the therapist would ask very brief questions, just knowing what direction to push me.
And I remember the first session, I mean, I thought because of what I now know was PTSD, I thought because of the job I do and because there is this kind of darkness in there, I didn't get involved with anyone seriously for a very long time and even thought, I'm not going to have a family and kids and house and dog.
I hadn't even thought about it, just assumed that's not for me because of the job I do.
And very early on in that first session, after I resisted it for about an hour and a half, I was really resisting it for a long time and thinking it was even a placebo, But there was this wave of relief of just, of course you can.
You look at everything as if we're just talking about having coffee or water.
Everything is just easy to think about and address and talk about.
And I think I'll probably explain it badly, but I think the science of it is you have five networks in your brain and And I was basically in fight or flight mode so much that that was the only mode I knew.
So even when I'm back in New York, if someone walks up too close behind me, I'm expecting a confrontation.
I'm in fight or flight mode all the time.
So your brain is ignoring the other parts of your brain that provide context.
And that say, that bang outside is just a car backfiring.
It's not an IED or someone shooting.
So the MDMA just allows all the parts of your brain to communicate again.
You're not just in that fight-or-flight mode.
So once you get out of that fight-or-flight mode, you can then address things that you couldn't even begin to address before.
It's so difficult for people to change perspective, just to have a break from the normal sort of momentum of your life and to be able to stop and analyze.
I thought I would retire after this therapy, but I think I said it before, in the first session I was planning the next film, the next series.
This is still what I want to do.
I've just got to do it smarter.
I've got to take breaks.
I've got to recover in between trips.
There isn't this pressure to be where people are getting their heads blown off every single time.
The last film I did was about Yemen, and we spent a week on the front lines with the various fighting groups and got the usual crazy fighting footage.
But the powerful stuff was a woman who had her leg blown off by an airstrike in an IDP camp, in a miserable IDP camp where the Saudis and Emiratis are claiming they're providing people with everything they need.
And then at the end, a child malnutrition clinic right on the front line where a nurse just...
Begged all parties to end this war.
And she was literally on the front line, surrounded by a minefield.
Couldn't get doctors, couldn't get supplies.
Had a few dozen kids in this clinic that she was just managing to keep alive.
You know, these wailing, emaciated babies with their ribcages caved in.
And, you know, the reason you do this is to cover the effects of war.
It's not to get crazy footage of explosions and shootouts.
It's the effect of war on civilians.
So maybe the answer is to do that and, you know, not feel this pressure to just get the crazy fighting footage all the time.
In our country, Yemen is in many ways mostly synonymous for drone attacks.
Drone strikes is, when we think about Yemen, we think about the drone strikes that we hear about on wedding parties, the number of people that are accidentally killed.
The civilian casualty rate is some preposterous number.
Yemen, the actual fighting is much more low intensity.
It's fairly small groups of guys at some distance just lobbing shells at each other and there's snipers and there are gunfights but it's not as big scale as Iraq or Afghanistan.
But there are regular airstrikes that are killing civilians and while the two sides are fighting this slow and bloody war, the infrastructure is being destroyed and the civilians are Unable to get basic food and medicine.
That's the really shocking thing there.
And also, I mean, I knew that the coalition, as it's called, the fighting groups backed by Saudi Arabia and UAE were American-backed.
But you see American stuff everywhere.
I mean, MRAPs, you know, these million-dollar bomb-proof trucks.
I've only ever seen American soldiers and Marines driving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, again, the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan is that now we're killing guys like him with drone strikes or special forces, raids here and there, and it's happening almost in secret and no one's saying, this appears to be illegal.
I mean, some people are.
You know which media outlets you can go to to read about this, but...
I think most people are thinking if that's the alternative to invasion and trillions of dollars and American soldiers coming back with no legs for a war we don't understand, I think a lot of people are willing to accept it.
I don't agree with it, but that seems to be what's happening now.
The other thing about that is with a lot of these, even though it does seem to be illegal, people sort of shrug their shoulders and then no one pursues it and then it just kind of goes away.
And the usual thing with, I mean, certainly in Iran, but this is common all over the place, if you're a dual citizen working as a journalist in, for example, Iran, they'll accuse you of being a spy.
And they said at one point, they said, do you honestly expect us to believe you travel the world collecting all this information and you don't share it with your government?
I said, yeah, that's exactly how it works.
And they thought I was insulting their intelligence by saying that.
I did a series, one of the first series I did was called Holidays in the Axis of Evil.
So I spent my first four years as a journalist undercover, wearing a secret camera.
And luckily I appeared on a couple of docs with a guy who was not very good.
And so I looked genuine next to him.
So the controller of BBC Two said, give this guy a series.
And I was racking my brains trying to think, wanted to be a foreign correspondent, wanted to cover conflict.
Then George Bush made the Axis of Evil speech.
And John Bolton added three countries to the list.
So it was Iraq, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Cuba were the six evil countries.
So we went to all six countries.
Me and one cameraman, handheld camera.
Shane actually saw it and that's when he first reached out and I started talking to Vice about eventually joining them.
But kind of documentaries from the streets up.
So we were just trying to say, you know, despite all the rhetoric about Iran, this is what the people are actually like.
And it was kind of youth-led.
We interviewed a bunch of students who were involved in some famous protests in 1999 where the police came in and smashed the dormitories and burnt them down and beat them.
And I think because we interviewed them, we were then tracked and arrested.
I mean, if there was a turning point in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Iran...
Ryan Crocker, who was the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan.
Straight after 9-11, he was sent to Geneva, where a number of countries affected by the refugee crisis were meeting to discuss how to deal with it.
One of the countries was Iran.
So they'd have this meeting, and then he and his Iranian counterpart would disappear for, he says, seven or eight hours over tea to discuss the future of American-Iran relations.
They knew that they were going to get rid of the Taliban.
So the Iranians said, okay, here's a map of the Taliban leaders' homes.
If you take out those homes on day one, Taliban are finished.
And Ryan Crocker said, oh, thank you.
Can I take notes from this map?
They said, the map is yours.
We made it for you.
Gave him the map.
Let the Americans use Iranian airspace.
Handed over some prisoners.
They were absolutely key in us overthrowing the Taliban so quickly.
And Ryan Crocker was making good progress in then talking about the future of Iraq post-Saddam.
One night he gets a knock on his door and two of his staffers come in and say, boss, you're really not going to like what's just happened.
He said, what's just happened?
And it was the axis of evil speech.
So the moderates, so-called in Iran, Who had fought hard to get permission to negotiate with the great Satan, the US, said, you've made us look stupid.
You know, it was hard for us to get this chance.
We helped you in Afghanistan.
We were willing to discuss future relations between our two countries.
And then fairly soon after that, obviously there's the invasion of Iraq and Iran is sponsoring the insurgency and giving them sophisticated IEDs and all that, rather than, you know, potentially helping.
And the idea that the Saudis and Emiratis can somehow bomb the Houthis in Yemen into submission and push back Iranian influence on their southern border is ridiculous.
That's just never going to happen.
And I think even if you ignore the obvious moral argument, just from a pragmatic point of view, the idea that we should back this unconditionally is ridiculous.
See, this is just part of the real problem when you're dealing with world events, is trying to parse all this stuff out and look at so many different stories from so many different parts of the world and so many different areas of conflict, and it's almost impossible to pay attention to it all.
I mean, if people in Brazil are living through the current chaos, I can understand why they might go to a Duterte-type figure to say it's going to be messy, but he's going to clean it up.
We did a film there recently, and I might get the numbers slightly wrong, but the amount of people that were murdered in Brazil in 2017, I believe it was, was more than double the amount that were murdered in Syria.
And after the World Cup and Olympics, the trafficking gangs and the police militias just retook all of those areas that were pacified to protect the tourists during the World Cup and Olympics.
So that violence has just come right back to the forefellers.
Well, we drove, when you land at the airport, you drive through the favelas on the way to Rio, and you're like, whoa, this is a different kind of poverty.
It used to be that the violence was separated from the really rich areas, but there are now a lot of wealthy Brazilians leaving because it's affecting everywhere now.
I mean, one of the experts we interviewed in the last film said, I believe it was one in three Rio residents will get caught in crossfire at some point over the course of a year.
I have not watched it, but I've heard that those two guys had testified saying that nothing had ever happened to them before this, and then now they're down on their luck, and now they've changed their tune in saying that it was...
And one of them certainly I think has what looks like the symptoms of PTSD and the other one I think went through therapy before he was able to talk about this stuff.
So I don't think they're doing it for financial gain.
Michael Jackson looked like a monster eventually, but we always go back to him as a boy when he was singing ABC. I mean, he was this adorable little kid, incredibly talented and so dynamic and exciting to watch.
Like, God, he's so talented.
Look at him.
And then in Thriller, I mean, everybody loved him.
And to the conversation we had earlier, I remember that great documentary where a guy protests in front of the statue, and another guy comes up and tries to beat him up, just for daring to suggest that this hero of his would be capable of that.
People just can't fathom it because they've been so well-groomed.
But, you know, do you plan on doing this MDMA therapy on a regular basis?
And what sort of an impact do you think?
I mean, when you go over the results of the first therapy, where it almost immediately alleviates you of a lot of your feelings, but you still are thinking about planning your next adventure and your next project...
This is one of the, you know, one of the lesser symptoms of doing this is you turn up to a party or a dinner or something, you know, with people that are enjoying themselves, they're smiling.
I kind of think, you know, if you're doing this for a living, like, you shouldn't be sharing stories with other people who cover that country, other people from, you know, from your background, from your country.
You should be talking to the people from that country.
And a lot of journalists, I mean, it's possible in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq, to have a pretty good life.
You stay in the five-star hotel, you eat well, drink wine every night, and you, you know, you get information from each other.
And it's completely upside down in the States because the TV news journalists aren't deeply involved and just want to get that quick shot of them looking like they're somewhere Middle Eastern-y.
It seems like you see that rarely, if ever, these days.
It's more and more rare.
It seemed to me that during Desert Storm in the 90s, there was always someone that was over there, and it seemed like there was real threat, and it was really going on.
But now, everything seems to be done from the desk, and you don't really see a lot of...
I just think the risk is too high, full stop, for the entire crew.
And certainly when the story's really big and you send one of the very well-known correspondents there, then yeah, they can't be running around filming house-to-house fighting.
And you see these films like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot about Afghanistan, and I just don't recognize that world, you know, partying every night at whatever bar or restaurant.
I just think if you're there, you're obviously in the wrong place.
And just spending enough time there where you then end up being in the right place at the right time to show something really happening.
I mean, in Mosul, we filmed the Iraqi army attacking a house where ISIS was shooting from the house and there were three or four families in the house.
So the Iraqi army shot at ISIS, so the ISIS guys went down and encouraged the families to run towards us.
And just seeing that moment of civilians fleeing and escaping ISIS for the first time after three years.
And when they turned the corner and saw us, they knew they'd made it.
And they just collapsed to the ground.
They were kissing the ground.
They were hugging each other.
You know, those are the moments you're trying to capture.
I mean, they'll eventually walk out of Mosul itself, and then there are people that can take them to the IDP camps around there and we'll get them the basic services they need and medical services, but there's not much of that there.
And that was the shock in Yemen, was the places that the Saudis and Emiratis said were being so well supplied with food and water and tents and medical facilities just weren't at all.
I spent Friday and Saturday in Houston with a group of Afghan interpreters who I'd been with in Afghanistan who got these special immigrant visas and came to America with their families.
I cannot think of a better group of people who are contributing to life here.
I mean, on the Saturday morning they were running a food bank.
They've got jobs.
They're paying taxes.
Yeah, I mean, I think we should welcome them with open arms.
And I think, you know, despite our moral obligation to do that, I think we would benefit from doing it.
And, you know, we turned away Jewish refugees during World War II. You'd think we'd learn from that and say, never again.
You know?
I mean, if you're an American Christian...
I think Christianity is fairly clear on what to do with refugees, you know?
So to not only say no to refugees, but also to vilify them and say, oh look, a lot of them are fighting age males.
They're clearly ISIS sneaking in.
I mean, that's a level of viciousness and ignorance that I just can't fathom.
It's like, it's one of these things where we don't, you don't know, you're reading these stories, and there's people who are telling you that these are fighting age males, and that we could very well be letting ISIS into our country, we very well could be letting in these terrorist cells and allowing them to come in, but we also could be letting families in that This is a country that's made of immigrants.
It's one of the weirdest things in this country that this is a country so obsessed with borders and immigration, but yet it's comprised entirely of immigrants.
The idea of, I mean, it would be nice if the whole world was up to the same standards of health and And prosperity and you didn't have to worry about where you could go.
If the whole world was essentially like the United States, where you could go to where the good parts were.
You know, if you live in Detroit and you save up your money, you can move to Florida or wherever you want to go.
I mean, you can do that.
This is the beautiful thing about living inside of a country.
It would be fantastic if the whole world was like that.
You could just kind of go wherever you would prosper and wherever things would be well.
The thing about refugees in other countries where we don't understand their language or their culture and then you get scared because you hear that they're Muslims and we're worried about Muslim terrorists and Again, it's one more piece of information that just overwhelms you.
In the Catholic Church and child abuse scandal, did a lot of people say, therefore all Christians are suspicious and all Christians are secretly pedophiles?
The languages and the fact that we're, you know, there's also this, there has to be this feeling that we've invaded their country, several countries, and been there for a long time.
There's a deep-seated resentment that there's the thought of every time you accidentally blow up a wedding party with a drone, every time you kill civilians, any time there's any collateral damage, you're creating untold numbers of people that hate the United States.
Having traveled to most of those countries, I don't see that.
Yesterday, I was interviewing the Afghan interpreters, and I said, what do you think about negotiating with the Taliban?
I mean, in one case, a good friend of mine called Sroge, who's now living in Houston, I said, you know, these guys killed your brother because you were working for the Americans as an interpreter.
So how do you feel about the Americans now doing a deal with the Taliban?
And what about if the US leaves and the Taliban finishes off the government and then comes after your family?
He said, you know what?
America's not going to let that happen.
America has so much power and knows what to do that they will make sure that any agreement they reach with the Taliban will be enforceable and it will be safe.
Maybe I'm biased because a lot of the people I'm talking to had interactions with Americans, but they would even say as many mistakes as were made in the prosecuting of the war, with airstrikes and night raids and all that, the American soldiers and marines we met, we knew were good people.
And like I said with Shroach, my interpreter, it's incredible how many people still believe that to this day.
There are conspiracy theories.
So, for example, in Iraq you'll hear a lot of people say, well, ISIS must have been part of America's plan.
Incompetence cannot explain what happened in Iraq.
The massive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have done massive damage to the US on the world stage.
There's no way the US benefits from what's happened.
I mean, you know, the Taliban would have done a deal in 2002 where they got almost nothing.
Eighteen years later, a trillion dollars later, tens of thousands of lives later, we're now negotiating with the Taliban where they might get a very good deal.
That's a massive humiliation for the US. And also Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, others know that the US is not going to intervene in lots of countries.
So they're doing whatever they want and almost gloating about it, knowing full well that America just doesn't have the public support to intervene anywhere else for a very long time.
What's the predominant conspiracy theory that they want to prolong this war because of the military-industrial complex because they're spending tons of money and gaining contracts?
Hamid Karzai has said to me, do you think America failed in Afghanistan?
And I said, of course I do.
Like, every film I've made explains exactly how.
And he says, no, I think this is exactly what they want.
They want us being attacked on all sides by extremists, so we will bow to their every wish.
And what do you say to that?
I mean, you know, he's met far more senior people than me, so it's hard for me to argue with him, but yeah, I don't give that theory any thought whatsoever.
Because the public are just, you know, you know, I've had so long of seeing people come back in body bags or without legs and thinking, I don't even know what victory looks like now.
I don't even know what the point of this is anymore.
Yeah, I would imagine that you see so much and you see so much anguish and so much pain and suffering and death and war and so much of it seems pointless that after a while you might want to just detach, disconnect.
Once you've experienced what you've experienced, it's probably very, very difficult to look at the world through a normal lens and be satisfied with normal results.
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about this every day right now because, like I said, in that first MDMA session, I thought, this is what you want to do.
This is what you care about.
This is where your heart is.
So I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep on doing it, just maybe do it in a different way.
I'm also really tempted just to try and take, you know, three months off and go to Costa Rica and surf and do yoga and read nice books and just then see how I feel.
One of my favorite quotes is...
Is Nietzsche.
He says, credit no thought not had in the open air while walking in beautiful landscapes.
I felt like my mind, and I read a couple of books that weren't war-related, and I focused on them, I took it in, you know, I was in it for the experience, and I loved it.
I was talking to someone the other day about maybe a documentary about the gym that Danny comes from, which is a door that leads to the basement of a bodega in Bed-Stuy.
The numbness that people – well, people in extreme poverty and extreme stress, they do experience that sort of numbness, especially if you're in a dangerous neighborhood and just – you're overwhelmed.
Like you were saying about how the adrenaline eventually wears off and then you're just kind of – you're in this weird gray state.
We've talked about it with the therapists who are leading this.
I think that's their dream, is to get in and do this in a prison, because I guarantee the majority of those guys in there are suffering from PTSD and reacting to it.
I mean, there was this story about Kim Kardashian trying to pay this guy's rent because he got out of jail and she's going to pay his rent for five years to sort of get him on his feet.
Before I was born, but you just don't see, you know, like streetwise policemen who are part of the local community getting intelligence, knowing what's going on.
And often you'll see, I mean, I remember the riots in Brixton, which were right near where I lived, and the police would stand back, let the riot unfold, and then just study video afterwards.
We recognize that guy, we'll arrest him three days later.
Well, not just MDMA. MDMA is a great doorway because of its work with people with trauma.
But psilocybin is as well.
And, you know, psilocybin obviously comes with these profound breakthrough psychedelic experiences that not just completely remap your perceptions of life, but show you a whole world that you didn't think could possibly exist.
And then all the other ones, you know, Ibogaine, for all these people that are hooked on pills, it was one of the most effective drugs or known molecules on earth for alleviating people of opiates.
You know, people are just in constant states of conflict.
I mean, that's a big thing that's going on in this world.
And one of the things that psychedelics do is they give you a brief break from that conflict and then give you these thoughts that you probably would have never achieved without these drugs.
I think there's a real case for us being able to set up some sort of clinics, some sort of supervised psychedelic experiences where one after another people start changing.
And then it trickles down.
They start changing the people around them.
People say, well, what happened to Mike?
Like, oh, Mike did mushrooms at this...
New clinic that they're opening up and they're changing.
He's a new guy.
He's a different person.
He's so nice.
And then they joined too.
And I mean, I just think there's so much room for that in this world.
It's so difficult to change who you are.
People rarely change.
They become a slightly different version of who they were 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, they're very wise, MAPS is, in their approach to this one particular modality, because if they can actually achieve this, you're going to also achieve it and help people that are in the community that's least likely to accept psychedelics, right-wing, pro-war, you know, MAGA people.
Those people, I mean, those are probably the least likely, if you wanted to generalize, to accept psychedelics.
Yeah, and that, I don't have any experience with it, but I know people that have had very negative experiences where just the world becomes, all the bright colors are gone, and the world just becomes weird.
And actually, the first session when I was really resisting it and fighting it, I just imagined Rick's face and the Mithoffer's faces in South Carolina and just the kindness and benevolence.
I just thought of those faces and that's what allowed me to just let it wash over and hit me.
But Johnson& Johnson just got permission to use, to market their version of ketamine.
And right now, the dose of ketamine I had is like $90.
They're going to sell it for $15,000.
That's the danger of it getting properly legalized and, as you said, turned into a successful business.
So they want to have it very much controlled, but it looks like they want to stop the therapist giving it in the study, in their own office, I mean, which is what's going on now, and have it controlled under, you know, A hospital sort of situation?
Yeah, and there is a very good...
And it's not even underground, because I'm not even sure it's illegal here, right?
It's hard when, you know, I've had a few friends take their life.
Three in the last year.
And, you know, you see a guy like Neil and, you know, he's constantly pursuing all these different therapies and constantly trying to find something that alleviates this depression.
And you just keep hoping.
You keep hoping.
You keep searching.
You keep hoping that one of these things sticks.
One of these things really sticks.
I mean, he's very, very proactive.
He's always searching for new things.
He's very open about it and talking about it.
But the ketamine does seem to have helped him quite a bit and he was telling me like man He's like this is so fucking crazy I'm going to this doctor's office and having these full-blown Psychedelic experiences at the doctor's office.
I took a tablet you put it under your tongue and let it dissolve for for ten minutes And then I laid on a sofa in a therapist office for two hours And I was out on the street again two hours later.
And before the MDMA therapy, I thought if the price is you're on your own and you're not enjoying the things that most people enjoy, then that's the price you pay.
You know what you want to do and you'll do it whatever the price is.
And so I'm open to the idea of that not being the case.