March 18, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:18:20
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Shane on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a while Working? | |
| Live? | ||
| We're live. | ||
| Do you want to talk about that? | ||
| Or no? | ||
| The Shane thing? | ||
| Did you have something to say? | ||
| Everyone sent me the clip, and I think you said something about taking a knee in the middle of a gunfight, and he said, yeah, that was Ben. | ||
| He's a fucking savage. | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Refresh my memory. | ||
| We're in Afghanistan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the guys I'm with, the Afghan soldiers I'm with, get ambushed by the Taliban. | ||
| And I just went down on one knee and carried on talking. | ||
| And Shane said, yeah, he's fucking savage. | ||
| Apparently that's a compliment. | ||
| I wasn't sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a safety mechanism, yeah. | ||
| You think you're protected by looking at it on a screen rather than realizing it's actually happening in real life right now. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Try to keep this like a fist from your face. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I think focusing on that helped me, you know. | ||
| How did you get out of it? | ||
| I mean, to this day, I'm not even sure. | ||
| I think the Marines just started identifying Taliban targets and picking them off. | ||
| And then the Taliban ran out of ammunition and the actual ambush lasted like six, seven hours of non-stop fighting. | ||
| Yeah, and then we ran into an old building, which became their base for six months, just an abandoned building. | ||
| And they shelled that all night and the fighting carried on the whole next day. | ||
| But that first day in the ditch, I remember saying to myself, you're an idiot. | ||
| You never say no to anything. | ||
| You always just, you know, join up and sign up for these insane trips. | ||
| And if you survive today, and you're probably not going to survive, but if you do survive today, don't ever go out with these idiots ever again. | ||
| And the next day they said, oh, we're going to launch this operation, take this mask. | ||
| And I went out with them all over again. | ||
| It just felt like a good night's sleep. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a real thing with violence, right? | ||
| Until you've actually experienced it firsthand personally being enacted on yourself, it almost doesn't seem real. | ||
| Even when bullets are zipping by your head, yeah. | ||
| Is that just a weird compartmentalization thing that people are capable of? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| I mean, I think with me it's slightly different. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So the MDMA therapy made you sort of look at your rational perspective, like how are you rationalizing your time in these very, very dangerous places? | ||
| In ways that I hadn't even thought about before. | ||
| It was going on in your subconscious. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| You're sort of making these agreements and arrangements in order to be able to still do that. | ||
| Yeah, and if it continued, then it was going to end badly. | ||
| Want some coffee? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| There was only one way it was going to end, and I hadn't seen that coming at all. | ||
| I hadn't connected the dots like that at all. | ||
| How did you wind up stopping? | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| I mean, this is the big thing. | ||
| I haven't stopped, and I don't think I'm going to stop. | ||
| I did the MDMA therapy thinking this would give me an excuse to stop, and I thought that's what I wanted. | ||
| Three quarters of the way through the first session, I was planning the next program. | ||
| I mean, people say you're an adrenaline junkie. | ||
| That's not true at all. | ||
| It's not a thrill to be there. | ||
| It's horrible to be there. | ||
| It's an endurance test every single time, but I still think it's important. | ||
| Do you think it's important because the information that you can get to people, there's no other way they can get it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I wonder what impact that has these days. | ||
| But you hope that... | ||
| It has an impact. | ||
| Everything has an impact. | ||
| I'm sure it has an impact. | ||
| But, I mean, the example I always use, and some of my colleagues have been broken by this, is the Syrian war has been very well covered. | ||
| Every crime has been very well documented, often with video footage of exactly the crime being carried out. | ||
| Has it made any difference whatsoever? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The Syrian one is one where you hear rational people say that Assad is not our enemy. | ||
| What do you feel about 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? | ||
| We've tried every model. | ||
| We've tried invading Afghanistan, taking over, trying to rebuild the entire culture and armed forces and government ourselves. | ||
| That has failed miserably. | ||
| We've tried Iraq. | ||
| Libya tried leading from the back, you know, limited intervention, hoping that the guys on the ground could do the fighting for us. | ||
| And then Syria, we've tried almost no intervention whatsoever. | ||
| And all three have failed. | ||
| So I think now you've got people... | ||
| I mean, the thing I always think, most people would say we should have intervened in Rwanda. | ||
| I think almost everyone would say... | ||
| I mean, Bill Clinton would say that's his biggest regret, I think, in this presidency. | ||
| Most people would say we should have intervened in Rwanda. | ||
| I think if Rwanda happened tomorrow, you'd have a lot of people here saying, it's not worth it. | ||
| We won't help. | ||
| We can't make the situation better. | ||
| So why even try? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Or it's just Trump gossip. | ||
| Well, more so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| American foreign coverage was never great. | ||
| No. | ||
| Now it's almost gone. | ||
| I mean, Yemen, we'll see. | ||
| I mean, because of the Khashoggi murder, maybe something's going to happen with Yemen. | ||
| And there is a lot we can do there because we are directly supporting one side. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's almost like we feel about it that way. | ||
| And the numbers as well. | ||
| In Syria, it could be 800,000 dead. | ||
| Do people really think what that means? | ||
| What does 800,000 dead actually mean? | ||
| I think with certain numbers, it just becomes digits, and it just doesn't make sense. | ||
| If you hear five guys get killed in a shootout, you go, wow, those five guys are dead. | ||
| You start thinking about it. | ||
| You hear 500,000 people died on the other side of the planet. | ||
| It almost doesn't register. | ||
| But for you, it registers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you're so immersed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it hard for you to relate? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The film's going to go out. | ||
| A few people are going to tweet. | ||
| A few people are going to send me a message. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Are we in an information overload state? | ||
| I mean, if you go back to, you know, the early days of the internet, Facebook, it was going to be the free flow of information, you know, no borders. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you can doubt it. | ||
| It's made us dumber now. | ||
| There's so much. | ||
| It's not just how much there is. | ||
| It's also how much bad stuff gets traction and how much really important stuff doesn't get traction. | ||
| I mean, one of the great things about the Trump era is some of the best writing, you know, I think, for years. | ||
| But how many people are reading it? | ||
| Yeah, I would like to know how many people read Matt Taibbi's articles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From the beginning to the end. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I would like to see them. | ||
| When you think about the amount of time that guy puts into an article. | ||
| Yeah, it's such a strange time because it doesn't seem like any other time. | ||
| It doesn't seem like any other time in terms of our consumption of information or how much information we're consuming. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| The sheer volume of it, it's almost insurmountable. | ||
| The sheer volume of data that comes in every day, it doesn't go away. | ||
| It's just new data comes in. | ||
| It just keeps coming in and piling up. | ||
| You know, it's like porn, right? | ||
| You never could watch all the porns. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| But they keep making them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You open up Pornhub and you go, what the, how many of them are there? | ||
| And that's, you know, that is really data. | ||
| I mean, but then all these crazy internet videos and stories and there's just, every day it's something new. | ||
| It's constant. | ||
| But you'd have thought that would have led to a situation where some things are indisputable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because there is video evidence. | ||
| But the opposite is the case. | ||
| Nothing is verifiable now, no matter how much evidence exists. | ||
| My concern is that that's leading into this trend of deep fakes and this new audio editing ability that they have. | ||
| They can take your voice and your mouth and put some stuff in there that you never said. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And, you know, it could be news. | ||
| I mean, you could do that. | ||
| It could be Assad. | ||
| It could be Obama. | ||
| It could be anyone. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| And it might get debunked in the New York Times the next day. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| How many people are reading that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very few. | |
| How many people are even aware of it? | ||
| Yeah, very few. | ||
| Yeah, everything is taken out of context. | ||
| No one reads the full context. | ||
| Anything that is a small video clip, no one's going to see the full film. | ||
| And I think that's what Trump has mastered. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He doesn't care if he gets taken apart the next day in the New Yorker. | ||
| He knows his base aren't reading the New Yorker. | ||
| They're not even aware of that article. | ||
| Well, it doesn't seem to be bothering him either. | ||
| He's one of the rare guys. | ||
| I've been paying attention to him a lot over the last few months. | ||
| He doesn't seem to be getting older like a lot of them do. | ||
| It's the concern that makes them old. | ||
| It's the stress of the job that makes them old. | ||
| He seems to be sleeping in late. | ||
| I go traveling and I come back and I read the headlines. | ||
| Trump's having a meltdown, screaming in the White House. | ||
| And I see him on TV. He looks as happy as a pig in shit. | ||
| I don't believe any of that shit they write. | ||
| I think they write things like that. | ||
| I think he yells at people, but I think he yelled at people when he was a real estate mogul. | ||
| I think he wants to get shit done. | ||
| He's a billionaire. | ||
| He likes progress. | ||
| He likes to make money. | ||
| He doesn't like incompetence. | ||
| He yells at people. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I feel like we're at this cusp of something very strange happening. | ||
| Like, we're in the middle of it right now, but we're at the cusp of something very strange. | ||
| Where all it would take is one massive world event to completely remap how we view each other and how we view things. | ||
| It's very disconcerting to me. | ||
| It feels like without that one big world event, we're not that far away from that right now. | ||
| There are parallel universes right now that exist on things that you would have thought everyone can accept as a basic fact. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I mean, Syria. | ||
| You know, the white helmets. | ||
| There are some fairly serious people saying the white helmets are, you know, some kind of media front for al-Qaeda or al-Nasra. | ||
| Would you explain the white helmets for people? | ||
| So when there's a bombing and a building collapses, they go in and drag people out and get their medical attention as quick as possible. | ||
| And people think that they're somehow or another involved in it? | ||
| They're a front? | ||
| Yeah, and the footage is faked in order to drum up sympathy for the rebel-held areas. | ||
| I mean, I've heard serious people say that. | ||
| Serious people? | ||
| Yeah, not loons on Facebook. | ||
| Like journalists? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, Seymour Hersh, I think, has walked it back a little bit since, but he said that in the early days. | ||
| Why do you think he believed it? | ||
| 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 think that's true of a lot of conflicts. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Automatically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even if it's correct. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I think it used to be that those guys would spend 20 or 30 years traveling, and then they'd get the cushy job behind the glass desk in the studio. | ||
| Now it seems like you can go straight to the cushy job behind the glass desk. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There are fantastic documentaries, articles being written about all of these conflicts. | ||
| People aren't reading them. | ||
| Well, with something like Venezuela, the real problem is you have two sides. | ||
| You have two different versions of what's happening. | ||
| And if you're not educated in that country and you don't understand their politics, it's very difficult to figure out who's telling the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Same with Syria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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? | ||
| I haven't seen the names so far, I don't know. | ||
| One of them seems like he's trolling. | ||
| Like he thanked PewDiePie and said that Candace Owens was his biggest inspiration and he's doing that... | ||
| I guess we could agree some people are saying that that okay sign is a white power sign. | ||
| I know we had this dispute with Tim Pool where he was saying, I guess it is a game that some people do play. | ||
| What is it called the game? | ||
| The look? | ||
| I don't know if there's an official name of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I saw the Stephen Miller photo where he's doing up his blazer and supposedly doing the white power sign. | ||
| I thought, really? | ||
| Is that really evidence enough? | ||
| No. | ||
| There was a woman in court, too, that was doing that where she had her hand like this and people were saying that. | ||
| But that's what people are arguing about, rather than... | ||
| Right, which is ridiculous. | ||
| Like, ah, evidence! | ||
| Evidence! | ||
| But this guy, in custody, is clearly making that symbol. | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| So, like, what is he? | ||
| You know, he's like some troll murderer? | ||
| Some troll mass murderer? | ||
| I mean, he's both. | ||
| He's both fucking with everybody and a cold-blooded Ruthless killer of people that were praying. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think let's not lose sight of that. | ||
| You have to have some serious hatred to walk into a mosque and gun down 42 people and 7 people in the other way. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrific. | ||
| Across the board, top to bottom, it's horrific. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But also, as you said... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| spent as much time as they spend arguing on Twitter, reading. | ||
| I know people say fake news. | ||
| There are people who you can trust. | ||
| If they write a 10,000-word piece on Syria for the New Yorker, for example, you know that they're being fact-checked. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just find that website. | ||
| Read the comments. | ||
| These are my people. | ||
| They think like me. | ||
| 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 that's as far as it seems to go. | ||
| Now, you as a journalist, as a person who risks their life to bring this information to people, how does this make you feel? | ||
| I mean, is this part of the reason why you needed to do that MDMA therapy? | ||
| Not just the fact that you were, you know, you really are without... | ||
| Better use of, without a better term, shell-shocked, right? | ||
| I mean, you're there. | ||
| You're there. | ||
| There's something that comes out of that that's got to be very, very difficult to recover from and overcome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's also the fact that you're going over there and bringing this shit back and it doesn't seem to... | ||
| People don't seem to give a fuck. | ||
| And that used to be what kept you going, is you thought, like, some of my work is going to make some kind of difference. | ||
| And when that starts to fade and you start to think that's not going to happen, that's... | ||
| I'm sure your work makes a lot of difference to the people that pay attention to it. | ||
| I think we're overwhelmed by bullshit. | ||
| I think it's everywhere. | ||
| When I mean bullshit, I mean nonsense. | ||
| Kim Kardashian's psoriasis is in the front page of CNN or something like that. | ||
| It's not nonsense to her, but you know what I mean. | ||
| There's stuff that people are concentrating on. | ||
| It's like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's... | ||
| One of our docs on HBO, if it got 4 million views, I think that would be considered very good viewing figures. | ||
| 4 million in a country of 360 million people. | ||
| Well, it's very difficult to get people to watch documentaries on real-world events. | ||
| You get them to watch documentaries on a sex cult from Oregon or something like that, like Wild Wild Country, that probably got 10 million. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| You know, this New Zealand thing really had me rattled. | ||
| And you know what is also strange? | ||
| People seem to demand a response. | ||
| They demand people in the public eye to talk about it and, you know, say thoughts and prayers or something like that. | ||
| But as soon as you say thoughts and prayers, they'll say, fuck your thoughts and prayers here. | ||
| We've had that for years and nothing's actually happened. | ||
| Yeah, it's very strange. | ||
| But like, I don't know if they're concerned that you're not horrified. | ||
| They want to make sure you are. | ||
| Who the fuck isn't? | ||
| How could you not be? | ||
| I don't understand this. | ||
| Or is it just they're frustrated and confused themselves or just lashing out at any target they can find or anyone they can find? | ||
| 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. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not sure it did. | ||
| It might have for a couple days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then more news. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I really do believe you do have an effect. | ||
| I think Vice certainly has an effect. | ||
| I think a lot of this has an effect. | ||
| I think it's very difficult to feel that effect if you're not experiencing it personally. | ||
| I mean, to just look out onto the landscape and say, how much of an effect is this having on people? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Like, where are you getting the feedback from? | ||
| How are you gauging whether or not this is changing people's perceptions? | ||
| Well, sometimes the feedback you do get is on Twitter, where you'll get a few lunatics will say, oh, you faked this footage. | ||
| So then you think, wow, we're really having no impact. | ||
| But I think that's an argument for just not reading the comments. | ||
| Well, there's a little bit of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If your player gets fouled, it's a blatant foul. | ||
| He should get sent off. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Blatant tribalism. | ||
| Very few objective people. | ||
| Very few legitimate centrists. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think that's happening. | ||
| Or your family. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's that big a deal. | ||
| Or your occupation, depending upon your occupation. | ||
| I mean, good luck finding a job in tech if you're right-wing. | ||
| Good luck working in the arms industry if you're left-wing. | ||
| It's like, there's... | ||
| It's a weird, weird time, Ben. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I always used to read about the Nixon era, thinking that must have been a fascinating time to be alive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then to actually live through a similar period, now you're thinking it's not fascinating. | ||
| It's just depressing every single day. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think there's a way to turn this around? | ||
| Is this going to eventually even out? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Right now, I don't see what that looks like. | ||
| What that looks like is the best way to describe it. | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| I mean, my attention span, I think, has been shortened. | ||
| I'll sit down to watch a movie at home, and within 10 minutes, I'm reaching for my phone. | ||
| I'm not a heart surgeon. | ||
| There's no emergency. | ||
| I might just be checking Twitter again. | ||
| It's a perfect storm of distractions. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got to have real discipline, though. | ||
| I mean, you're fighting against a fucking heroin addiction, man. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And everyone else is addicted too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So you're not part of the conversation if you're not... | ||
| Man, I walked into a restaurant the other night and everyone was looking at their phone. | ||
| No one was looking at each other. | ||
| I'm like, I'm in a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Like, this is a movie. | ||
| Some post apocalypse. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if instead of looking at their phones, if everyone was just looking at the sky, you'd be like, oh my God, there's a real problem. | ||
| These people are sick. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's something wrong, you know? | ||
| If everyone is just sitting there with their hands open, like, staring up at the sky... | ||
| And sitting next to each other, you'd be like, these people are sick. | ||
| There's something wrong. | ||
| They need help. | ||
| Instead, they're looking at nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're checking their feed over and over again. | ||
| Someone's complaining about Captain Marvel being a woman. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And are the experts, are they the ones getting followed on there? | ||
| They're not... | ||
| Who are the experts? | ||
| I mean, the experts in whatever. | ||
| Are we looking at them? | ||
| It should be this free flow of information where you can find out anything in your hand. | ||
| What an incredible thing to have. | ||
| But it's not that. | ||
| It's definitely not that. | ||
| Well, I think there's two things. | ||
| I think one... | ||
| We didn't earn it, it's just given to us, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And again, that's not what we're doing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, and I think that applies to all aspects of life. | ||
| That when there's no real danger, people become extremely frivolous. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing how quickly we become lazy and complacent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And actually, the flip side of the negative stuff I was saying earlier, on good days, I'll come back from Yemen, Syria, wherever. | ||
| I'll go out and I'll get a cup of coffee and I'll read the newspaper and I'll get a donut and I'll think, man, I'm the luckiest man alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just the fact that I can do this. | ||
| Because you do experience these horrific environments so you can appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the fact that we can, you know, I mean, within a few hours here we can have one of the best meals possible in the world. | ||
| You know, it's, you know, That's fairly incredible. | ||
| So on good days, you can appreciate that. | ||
| But again, this is you coming from these bad things, so it puts it in perspective. | ||
| Sorry, I was trying to back you up. | ||
| If you're not protected from all that stuff, then you can get to appreciate the basics again. | ||
| I was on this trip in Prince of Wales. | ||
| We camped out on this island. | ||
| It rained every day for six days, seven days. | ||
| I mean, we were soaked. | ||
| You're soaked. | ||
| Everything's soaked. | ||
| Your sleeping bag's soaked. | ||
| Your tent's soaked. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Came back home and... | ||
| It felt so good. | ||
| Like, I'd never felt the sun like that before. | ||
| Like, the sun was just this magic love glow that the sky was pouring down on the city. | ||
| Everything felt so happy. | ||
| And I realized, like, you can't really appreciate this until it's taken away from you. | ||
| When it's taken away from you, then you understand what it is. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No mystery. | ||
| They don't understand bullshitters either. | ||
| Because when I was a kid, people used to lie about shit, and you really didn't know. | ||
| You're like, man, I don't know. | ||
| He seems like he's full of shit. | ||
| You'd have to go to an encyclopedia and actually read the information. | ||
| Now you can go, okay, what year did this happen? | ||
| And you pull up your phone, get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| People lie about being in the Olympics. | ||
| They lied about this. | ||
| They lied about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's good in that we have ultimate access to information for people that use it and understand what it is and appreciate it. | ||
| It is good. | ||
| But to your point, if there was a way to actually filter and say, this is verifiable, this contains seven things which are absolutely bullshit. | ||
| We have no doubt about that whatsoever. | ||
| If that could exist, wonderful. | ||
| But, I mean, Vox have tried it. | ||
| A few people have tried it. | ||
| It still feels like you end up being described as being on one side of the fight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We don't have that over here. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| And to your point about going up and cleaning up an impoverished area, at least then you'd get to meet other people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| People outside of your circle and your bubble. | ||
| I mean, the amount of times here when you talk to people about Muslims, LGBT, whatever it is, and you think, oh, it's because you've never met anyone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Different language, different everything. | ||
| Right, there's this utopian perception that there is a place where everybody's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I thought it might be New York, it might be Brooklyn. | ||
| Yeah, it's probably the only place that's close. | ||
| Right? | ||
| At least it has a reputation for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because at least in Brooklyn, people walk around. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In New York. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's an incredible piece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, that's the real conflict as a parent. | ||
| Do you have children? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure, right? | ||
| When you're thinking of your children, you're always thinking of their safety. | ||
| You're always worried about them and you want to protect them. | ||
| So putting them in a situation where they wouldn't be as protected is never your first instinct. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They want a black friend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's when people think of Brooklyn, they do think of it as being like the most diverse place. | ||
| Yeah, and it's, yeah, I mean, street by street, segregated. | ||
| Atlanta's pretty diverse. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When I go back to London, that's one of the few things I'm proud of about London versus certainly New York. | ||
| It's not a big deal for a group of friends, a family, a couple to be genuinely mixed. | ||
| You would know, I'd ask you, is that because London didn't experience slavery the way the United States did? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously we have a, you know, colonial history. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| But that wasn't in the country itself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And for a very long time, we've had a huge Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Jamaican community. | ||
| And it's, you know, I mean, here, if you have black friends or you date a black girl, you know, people think you're trying to prove you're woke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There it was just normal. | ||
| Normal, yeah. | ||
| And I'm saying London. | ||
| I'm not saying England's perfect London. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I experienced that when I was in London as well. | ||
| It seemed like way more integrated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, I mean, still, five, six years after I moved to New York, there's still a surprise every day to reinforce. | ||
| Well, New York is a different animal now. | ||
| New York is so fucking expensive. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| And my friend Judah, Judah Freelander, who lives there, he's lived there for a long time. | ||
| He's like, it's so changed. | ||
| It used to be like a lot of artists and a lot of creative people. | ||
| And he goes, now it's all finance people. | ||
| Everywhere you go, it's finance. | ||
| Everybody just wants the most expensive suit and the most expensive watch and they live in this ridiculously expensive apartment. | ||
| And I thought that went out in the 80s. | ||
| I thought that was like Wall Street, American Psycho. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cocaine, greed. | |
| Yeah, but that still very much exists. | ||
| That's still prevalent. | ||
| Well, I was talking to this guy yesterday who is a 26-year-old who's graduating with a degree in finance and trying to figure out what he wants to do. | ||
| And he's thinking about moving to New York and getting a job in Wall Street. | ||
| But he's hesitant because he's a nice guy. | ||
| He doesn't want to go dark. | ||
| And I'm like, you could go to the dark side. | ||
| These people are, look, not all of them, but a lot of them are just straight up materialists. | ||
| They're just chasing money. | ||
| When you're in the money business and you're just chasing money, your reward is things. | ||
| Your reward is things. | ||
| Objects and status and clothes and houses and shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sometimes you talk to those guys and you say, so what do you do? | ||
| I work in finance. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but what do you actually do? | ||
| I work in finance. | ||
| I'm very well rewarded, as you can see. | ||
| Yeah, but what do you actually do? | ||
| Oh, I look for fluctuations in international grain markets. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| What an amazing thing to dedicate your life to. | ||
| And if you just said what they do rather than what the reward was, you think, this is ridiculous. | ||
| What a waste of your time. | ||
| It is, but the status of being super wealthy for a lot of them is worth it. | ||
| Because they don't have a passion, right? | ||
| They don't have a thing. | ||
| They're not trying to write a book. | ||
| They're not trying to make a painting or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| You know, they're just trying to make the money. | ||
| And they're making the money, so everything is great. | ||
| They're doing coke and shots. | ||
| I mean, if I pulled up here in a, you know, a purple Lamborghini with a diamond studded watch. | ||
| I'd be like, look at this motherfucker. | ||
| He must be robbing people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But not that many people would be that impressed. | ||
| I think most people would think, what a douche. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's certain circles, right? | ||
| It's whatever circle that you're in. | ||
| Certain circles, like in finance circles, it is about those things more than it's not, because those things represent success in your industry. | ||
| Your friend should read a piece. | ||
| It may have even been a book by Michael Lewis. | ||
| 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? | ||
| This is the exact advice I gave him yesterday. | ||
| The exact advice. | ||
| I was like, man, you've got to do something that actually makes you happy. | ||
| Don't get sucked into that. | ||
| And he was saying, I was thinking of trying it for a few years. | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Once you get a mortgage, once you get a car, Ooh, nice BMW. How much does it run you a month? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a strange thing, too, the stock market, the moving around of numbers and looking for fluctuations in the market. | ||
| And the fact that what drives me crazy is when you hear that people have gotten servers that are That's another Michael Lewis book, yeah. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Flash Boys, yeah. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not just there, but that's one of the places. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Texas also. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So another place where they moved to? | ||
| Same deal? | ||
| Yeah, to be closer to the server so that they could ping lower. | ||
| Because it's like a real business. | ||
| But at least these guys are playing a game. | ||
| It's a skill. | ||
| I mean, they're... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess it's a skill. | |
| Someone made $100,000 yesterday playing. | ||
| So I turned on ESPN last night trying to watch the boxing. | ||
| There was boxing at Madison Square Garden last night. | ||
| And ESPN, the main channel, had gamers. | ||
| In a stadium, playing football, but on a computer. | ||
| They have an esports arena in Vegas, right? | ||
| At the Luxor? | ||
| It's like an esports arena. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| You were in Dallas for the Earl Spence-Mikey Garcia fight? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Earl Spence is the real deal. | ||
| 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... | ||
| When I looked at them in the weigh-ins, I was like, yikes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a lot bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two weight divisions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Mikey started his career at one... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| 135? | ||
| He was featherweight champ. | ||
| I think it was his first belt. | ||
| Oh, so it was lighter than that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it was at 126? | ||
| See, pull that up, Mikey Garcia. | ||
| See, they fought at 47. Yeah. | ||
| And Earl Spence looks every bit of 147. I mean, he's a big fella. | ||
| He looks like he could fight 154 easy. | ||
| You know, Mike Garcia just looks so much smaller than him at the win. | ||
| But it wasn't just the size. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Earl Spence Jr. is just the real deal. | ||
| That was the surprise for me. | ||
| Yeah, he was incredible. | ||
| He's fucking good. | ||
| He's so smart, too. | ||
| Like, when you hear him talk, he's so smooth and... | ||
| Do you remember the... | ||
| Smiley? | ||
| Winky Wright, Felix Trinidad fight? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| It reminded me of that. | ||
| Yeah, look at the size difference. | ||
| And he would have put on a load of weight in the next 36 hours as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's taller, he's wider, he's more muscular, and he's probably pretty dehydrated making that weight. | ||
| Look at Roberto Duran having the time of his life. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I love Roberto Duran. | ||
| Yeah, he was dancing at the weigh-ins and shit. | ||
| Certain fighters were dancing and he was dancing too. | ||
| It's pretty funny. | ||
| What is he doing now? | ||
| Is he helping them promote these things? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| He was on this one. | ||
| Yeah, he was there. | ||
| We saw him ringside. | ||
| He's so beloved. | ||
| What a crazy story that guy had, right? | ||
| Like, to go for that No Mas fight, he was shunned. | ||
| I mean, hated. | ||
| Mass shame across the whole world for years, until he beat Davey Moore. | ||
| That's one of my favorite fights of all time. | ||
| I mean, it's brutal, but just to see that tenacity just slowly coming. | ||
| And I read a story that Tyson was at that fight. | ||
| With all of his friends from Brooklyn. | ||
| And they couldn't afford tickets, so they just rushed the security gate, knowing that three or four of them would get caught. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| And the others would get in, and that's how he got in, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I remember watching that fight thinking that he was going to lose. | ||
| And I was a big Roberto Duran fan. | ||
| And I was thinking, God, man, he's probably going to lose. | ||
| He was supposed to lose, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was a massive underdog. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And he fucked Davey Moore up. | ||
| Davey Moore wound up dying in a crazy accident where he was working on his car in his driveway and it fell on him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He either fell on him or ran him over. | ||
| Like one of those things. | ||
| Like he was trying to fix his car. | ||
| Something fucked up like that. | ||
| And Duran laced him at one point when you still had the leather laces on the class. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He thumbed him too, they think. | ||
| That's what, you remember his eyes swole up pretty bad. | ||
| That's one of the fights that makes me feel a bit guilty about loving boxing. | ||
| When you see that, because it's brutal. | ||
| It's a brutal fucking business, man. | ||
| It's a brutal business. | ||
| You know, I mean, I don't know if MMA is more brutal. | ||
| I think it probably is. | ||
| There's a lot of pokes to the eye in MMA, a lot. | ||
| And most of them, they're unintentional. | ||
| Most of them. | ||
| But a bunch have to be intentional. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I know sometimes the ref tries to get there. | ||
| That's just a bit too much for me. | ||
| This weekend... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was rough. | ||
| I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like a boxing crowd appreciates a good, skillful, technical match. | ||
| I feel like sometimes a UFC crowd will be cheering at that moment you just described. | ||
| I think humans like brawls. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason why Arturo Gotti and Mickey Ward was such a successful trilogy. | ||
| It's because those guys would just beat the fuck out of each other. | ||
| They were so closely matched, and they were both these blood-and-guts warriors, and they just stood in front of each other. | ||
| And we knew at the time that these guys are not going to beat Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| They're not going to beat the best guys. | ||
| They're good fighters. | ||
| They're world-class fighters, but they're not world champions. | ||
| And there's a thing that we look at when we watch fighters. | ||
| A fighter could be good, but there's fighters that we appreciate, but they'll never fight for the world title. | ||
| If they do, they have no chance. | ||
| And then there's fighters like, this guy might be the best in the world. | ||
| There's a difference. | ||
| And you can admire Floyd for his defensive skills, but he's never going to have that war with Mickey Ward or Arturo Gatti like that. | ||
| Never. | ||
| But he's also going to be fine when he's 55. He'll be able to talk and walk and, you know, nothing happens to him. | ||
| He didn't endure the punishment and the beatings that those guys had. | ||
| That's the saddest of all, is when you see these guys, you see them on television, you see the war, but you don't see the aftermath. | ||
| You don't see the struggles that they have with their memory. | ||
| You don't see the confusion, the anger out of nowhere, the emotional outbursts where they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. | ||
| They don't know why they're saying what they're saying. | ||
| Most of them are broke before they even retire. | ||
| Did you see the film about Michael Bent? | ||
| It just came out on Netflix as part of that Losers series. | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| That's worth watching. | ||
| He never really liked boxing, never really wanted to box, but has got a really successful career in Hollywood producing plays and movies. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a great... | ||
| Michael Bent produces plays and movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| He wrote a play, I think, and he teaches actors how to box as well when they're doing movies. | ||
| It's a great little talk. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| Well, I'm always very happy when someone finds a path. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's crazy when people are just good at things. | ||
| There's a guy in MMA like that, Anthony Rumble Johnson, who's one of the most terrifying fighters in the history of the sport. | ||
| Just a ruthless knockout artist. | ||
| And his last loss, I was talking to him in the Octagon. | ||
| I was interviewing him and he said, I don't like fighting. | ||
| I'm not a fighter. | ||
| He goes, I'm an athlete. | ||
| I'm just good at it. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that is a crazy, honest, like, in such an introspective way. | ||
| Like, he's, like, looking at himself. | ||
| Like, this is not what I – I don't want to do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Since then, he's thought about coming back, but – People say to me all the time, you're adrenaline junkie, you're addicted to the thrill. | ||
| I'm like, there's no fucking thrill doing this. | ||
| You think it's a thrill? | ||
| You're not close enough. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Did you read Tribe, Sebastian Jung's book? | ||
| Yeah, and I met him a few times as well. | ||
| When I was having a few problems, he was very helpful. | ||
| He was a really, really good guy, yeah. | ||
| I really like that guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And before I met him, you know, he's got that picture in Vanity Fair of like posing with the dog tag and it's like a model looking picture. | ||
| And I thought, oh, this guy's ridiculous. | ||
| Tosser. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then I met him and he was the nicest, most humble, considerate guy. | ||
| He's fantastic. | ||
| And I really like that book as well. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't be a bigger fan of his. | ||
| As a human, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You just feel flat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, how did the PTSD treatment get organized? | ||
| Is this through MAPS? Are you part of that study? | ||
| Yeah, we did a short film about Rick Doblin and this effort to get MDMA legal. | ||
| But I'd been in denial for years and years, and a new producer joined Vice, a guy called Stephen Bailey. | ||
| And we had the first meeting where he was pitching some of his ideas. | ||
| And he mentioned, you know, this breakthrough therapy using MDMA for PTSD. And I just involuntarily put my hand up and said, I'll do it. | ||
| Straight away. | ||
| It gave me the excuse to actually, you know, get some help and see if... | ||
| Had you done MDMA recreationally before that? | ||
| I mean, yeah, I came of age in London in the 90s. | ||
| I mean, it was like having a pint of beer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is the difference between doing it in a therapeutic environment? | ||
| It's MDMA-assisted therapy. | ||
| The emphasis is on the therapy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, there were times when I would ask him, why is this happening? | ||
| Why do I think this? | ||
| And he'd put it back on me and make me put two and two together. | ||
| Sometimes you listen to music, sometimes you put an eye mask on and you don't sleep, but you just have a quiet 20-30 minutes. | ||
| But it's a very intense 7-8 hour therapy session and the MDMA just enables you to get the benefits. | ||
| All of the veterans and first responders who took part in the first round of trials had been therapy resistant. | ||
| And I think the first round, I think 72% of them got the benefits and were considered PTSD free after the three month trial. | ||
| So during the three month trial, how many experiences do they have? | ||
| One a month. | ||
| One a month, that's it? | ||
| Three total, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he said that gave him permission. | ||
| And that was what he needed. | ||
| And he didn't even do the second two sessions. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What an interesting way of looking at it, of course. | ||
| And that word permission, because there is so much guilt. | ||
| Just getting permission to just give yourself a bit of a pat on the back. | ||
| Survivor's guilt is real. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Irrational thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or maybe I didn't really experience it because I came out unscathed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, which is one of the reasons why I didn't seek treatment for years and years and years. | ||
| Because I've got friends who lost their legs. | ||
| I've got friends who were kidnapped and killed, you know. | ||
| So maybe I've only just dipped my toes. | ||
| So there's nothing. | ||
| I've got nothing to complain about. | ||
| What was your number one issue? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What did you think your natural reaction should have been? | ||
| I mean, blood rate increasing, heart rate increasing, you know, vigilance. | ||
| And what did you think at the time was the cause of you being numb? | ||
| While it was happening? | ||
| 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. | ||
| To be right next to an IED and not freaking out is pretty crazy. | ||
| Yeah, with a suicide bomber running down the street towards... | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| And also, you know, people... | ||
| One of the reasons you feel guilty is you do get respect for being brave. | ||
| And I would say it wasn't bravery. | ||
| I wasn't scared and then did it anyway. | ||
| I wasn't scared. | ||
| I was just numb and just, you know, kept on. | ||
| You get respect from other journalists, from the soldiers? | ||
| Like, who are you getting respect from? | ||
| Yeah, or people that watch the films. | ||
| And it doesn't feel like bravery. | ||
| It just feels like you've become stupid about the risks you're taking. | ||
| So talk me through this therapy. | ||
| So you're fasting for 24 hours, you take the MDMA, and then they just start talking to you about the things that are troubling you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course you can have all that. | ||
| And it felt like a revelation. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because I thought that had been closed to me for so long. | ||
| I don't know, seven, eight years, maybe longer. | ||
| I just thought, no, you can't do that. | ||
| That's not for you. | ||
| Or you can't put someone else through that with you. | ||
| What is it particularly about MDMA? I mean, I've done it, but I've only done it once. | ||
| Is it just because of the fact that it just alleviates the insecurity and allows you to look at things in a more natural sense? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And once you've had these experiences, for you it was three experiences, they're profound enough that you retain the benefits? | ||
| Some. | ||
| I mean, it looks like I'm in the 25% that still have PTSD after the three months, but it still helps enormously. | ||
| I mean, the next day they got me to sit down and do a video diary. | ||
| And I was kind of saying, yeah, I thought this was a revelation. | ||
| And I said, you know what? | ||
| I'm just smiling now in a way that I don't feel like I've smiled for years. | ||
| Like it feels like my whole face is smiling. | ||
| And this is the next day, which is usually a little wrecked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's two or three days when you have what we used to call a moody Tuesday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that what it, two or three days? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But with this, there's no come down. | ||
| With this, there's no downside. | ||
| How do they give you no come down? | ||
| Do they give you five HTP or anything while you're... | ||
| Nothing apart from the MDMA. I mean, you have juice, you have water throughout. | ||
| I mean, maybe the comedown is related to, you know, people that used to take it would just dance and sweat all night long. | ||
| Dehydrate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe it's just shitty MDMA. Maybe you get the real shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah, the ecstasy they would have sold in London would have been rat poison and breeze-block dust and all kinds of stuff in there, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I know they're having very positive results with this, and are they planning on implementing this to the public in any short term? | ||
| I mean, is this something that, like, people that are listening to this right now, is this going to be available to them fairly soon? | ||
| It looks like it should be legal by 2021, 2022. The third round of officially FDA-approved trials starts soon. | ||
| That's the first one that involves people other than veterans and first responders. | ||
| If that gets as good a result to the first two trials, which I'm sure it will, then I think it's going to be... | ||
| And because FDA gave it breakthrough drug status, there's nothing that anyone can do to stop it. | ||
| It will be legal by 2021-2022. | ||
| That's very good news for a lot of people that are suffering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's exactly what it did to me. | ||
| I was just in this rut for so long where it was impossible to look at things. | ||
| Did you think about changing your life? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm thinking about it a lot right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, no one knows because you can't check in most of these areas, but it's in the tens of thousands at least. | ||
| And the percentage is also preposterous. | ||
| It's far more than 50%, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's airstrikes. | ||
| So it used to be US drone strikes on al-Qaeda suspects. | ||
| Now it's Saudi-Emirati airstrikes with US assistance. | ||
| I mean, we were, until recently, refueling the planes, supplying the planes, supplying the weapons. | ||
| But yeah, they've hit weddings, funerals, schools, hospitals, and I don't think that's by accident. | ||
| I think they're taking an approach to Yemen that we need to crush the opposition, not take out the military leaders. | ||
| And you can't, there's no movement in history that's been crushed by force. | ||
| That never works. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| When you're over there, what does it feel like in Yemen as opposed to Afghanistan or other places? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You see them everywhere there. | ||
| And that's a real surprise to see that. | ||
| How did Yemen become this area that's so synonymous with drone strikes? | ||
| Why did we approach Yemen differently than any other part of the world in terms of the allocation of drone strikes there? | ||
| In terms of numbers, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think for a while the only thing the U.S. was doing in Yemen was drone strikes against al-Qaeda. | ||
| But I don't know if there have been more drone strikes in Yemen than elsewhere. | ||
| I mean, that's where we killed an American citizen, which got lots of headlines. | ||
| Right, on purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With no trial. | ||
| It was because he had joined ISIS? Is that what it was? | ||
| Al-Qaeda. | ||
| Yeah, it was a very well-known and popular online presence, rallying people to fight. | ||
| But the airstrikes in Yemen and with US weapons, that's what's really killing people. | ||
| And meaning that people can't get food and aid there because you just can't move things around there. | ||
| Whatever came out of that guy getting killed, basically no one was punished for it. | ||
| I mean, he's an American citizen. | ||
| If it was in America... | ||
| Somehow or another, this guy was in the suburbs of Chicago and they launched a drone strike on him. | ||
| It would be front page news and it would be a real issue, but the fact that it was in Yemen... | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I think you're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's some stories that, for whatever reason, like Jamal Khashoggi did not go away. | ||
| And it's still out there. | ||
| Like, it was so egregious and so crazy that this guy walks into the embassy and just never comes out. | ||
| And they're like, I don't know what happened. | ||
| And then slowly you start getting a different story and then apparently there's leaked, there's audio and perhaps even video of his murder. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And ordered, by the way, by someone who was hanging out with Jared Kushner afterwards with apparently no mention of what happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, as a journalist, when you see shit like that, that has got to hit home. | ||
| Yeah, the last few years for journalists, especially, you know, if you're, I mean, he wasn't an American citizen. | ||
| But he did write for the Washington Post, right? | ||
| Yeah, and was a resident. | ||
| But, I mean, I was arrested in Iran for a week, a long, long time ago, and roughly the same time, an Iranian-Canadian photographer was arrested. | ||
| And she was raped and beaten to death. | ||
| So the people that are citizens of these countries, they're really, really bearing the brunt. | ||
| And again, that's why I'm uncomfortable if people call me brave, because I get to come home. | ||
| With these guys, you know, they can get to them and they can get to their families very easily. | ||
| And that takes a whole other level of bravery. | ||
| The woman who was raped and beaten to death, what was she involved with? | ||
| She was a photographer. | ||
| She was just taking pictures? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was accused of being a spy. | ||
| They tried to get me to confess to being a spy. | ||
| That's a very normal assumption out there. | ||
| And how long were you in jail for? | ||
| Just seven or eight days. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Actually, not too bad. | ||
| Psychologically, it was bad because they were threatening torture and execution. | ||
| Physically, it wasn't too bad. | ||
| I was fed. | ||
| I had a bad bed. | ||
| I was roughed up a bit. | ||
| I wasn't beaten. | ||
| But I did think it could last months and months and months. | ||
| And I did think I could go to Evan Prison. | ||
| They actually put me in a car and drove me to what they said was Evan Prison once and then just took me somewhere else. | ||
| Evan Prison? | ||
| Evan Prison is where people have been tortured and executed. | ||
| So they just drove you there to scare you? | ||
| Drove me around for a few hours to scare me and then took me to another place, yeah. | ||
| What were they trying to get you to confess to? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What were you over there covering? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how did you get it free? | ||
| How did I get it? | ||
| How did you get it free? | ||
| I didn't know at the time, but if two countries have diplomatic relations, it's only a big deal after a week. | ||
| So on the night of the seventh day or the eighth day, they let me go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But I had no idea at the time. | ||
| I thought this could go on months and months and months. | ||
| Now, when you're over there in Iran, what is their perception of the United States when you talk to the young people over there? | ||
| Oh, love the United States. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Music, culture, sports, everything. | ||
| And extremely well-educated about the United States. | ||
| American foreign policy is a completely different discussion. | ||
| But, I mean, one of the things we tried to cover was the Friday... | ||
| Rally at Tehran University, where you see everyone chanting, death to America, death to Israel. | ||
| And we wanted to cover it because they bus in old men from the countryside who sit there going, oh, yeah, death to America, death to Israel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, it's not something to be taken seriously. | ||
| So it's just some propaganda-staged event? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 this is what happened. | ||
| So, it's over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| So you think that with, wow, with one speech, the whole thing shifted? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they would have been willing to somehow or another negotiate or cooperate or work alongside? | ||
| Getting rid of Saddam was obviously in their interest. | ||
| They fought a brutal eight-year war with him. | ||
| We have a very strange relationship with Iran. | ||
| I mean, going back to the hostages from the Jimmy Carter era, Yeah. | ||
| But I do think it's one of the most misunderstood countries in the region. | ||
| I mean, when you actually go there, you know, the people are so smart and so educated and potentially such, such good allies. | ||
| So what is the key issue? | ||
| It's the government. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, what I just explained. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think they're capable of being far more rational than the speeches by the crazy old Mullers would suggest. | ||
| I mean, they've proved it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Every time I meet people from these countries, I feel like a fraud because there's so much that they know that I don't know and that I shouldn't know. | ||
| And, you know, I get paid to do this. | ||
| I get paid to pay attention to this for a living and I feel out of my depth regularly. | ||
| And that's focusing on the five or six countries that I focus on, let alone everything else. | ||
| What other countries do you focus on? | ||
| I mean, the last few years it's been Congo quite a bit, Afghanistan mostly, Iraq, Yemen. | ||
| I've focused on a lot over the last three, four years. | ||
| They're the main ones. | ||
| Been to Brazil recently, been to Central African Republic recently. | ||
| Now, I've talked to a friend of mine who's from Brazil who has a completely different take on the new leader of Brazil. | ||
| Like, he's more positive about it. | ||
| And then I've talked to other people that say he's a monster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he certainly seems like a monster. | ||
| Yeah, and they're experiencing some crazy economic crisis as well, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it was the fastest growing economy in Latin America. | ||
| It was booming. | ||
| Yeah, it was booming just a few years ago. | ||
| So it's like this rollercoaster ride. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I think it was 72,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See, again, there's just so much shit to pay attention to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Rio, the image of Rio is still, you know, Samba on the beach. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been a few times. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I've been for UFC events. | ||
| It's beautiful people, very nice, very friendly. | ||
| But then you go two or three miles up into the hills. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's another world. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And during the World Cup and Olympics, they put billboards next to that road to block the view of the favelas. | ||
| Did they really? | ||
| And those billboards are now starting to fall apart and you can now see it again. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you can hear it. | ||
| If you stay close to there, you'll hear it. | ||
| I mean, we went into the favelas many times. | ||
| We saw one guy who was suspected of being a police informer. | ||
| So the trafficking gangs had captured him, slashed at his leg so he was lying on the ground, put four rifles to his head and just unloaded. | ||
| And his chin was still kind of where it should be, but everything else was... | ||
| This is when you got there while... | ||
| We got there right afterwards, sorry. | ||
| No, we didn't witness it happening. | ||
| We got there right afterwards, but yeah, it's... | ||
| I mean, hideous violence there on a massive scale. | ||
| And also, I got into an argument with someone the other day about this. | ||
| Deeply racist. | ||
| You know, the rich people in Ipanema tend to be white European descendants. | ||
| The poor kids getting shot in the favelas, almost all... | ||
| Black. | ||
| And if you walk into a bar in Ipanema with a black girl, everyone will assume she's a prostitute. | ||
| If you walk into a bar in Ipanema with a black guy, everyone will assume he's a drug dealer. | ||
| And again, the exact opposite of the public image of Brazil. | ||
| Ipanema is the more wealthy area? | ||
| Yeah, that's the very wealthy, nice beach area with all the nice hotels and apartment blocks. | ||
| But they still must get robbed all the time down there, right? | ||
| 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 might be wrong on that. | ||
| I believe it was one in three. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Over the course of a year? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it was a massive, massive number. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you're anywhere near a favela, you'll hear it most nights. | ||
| You'll hear shots being fired most nights. | ||
| And not like, boom, boom, boom, you know, you'll hear a fight going on. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| How much time do you spend over there? | ||
| Three weeks, I believe it was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And what are you covering? | ||
| We did a film about the pacification campaign, the police and army clearing the favelas before the World Cup and Olympics. | ||
| So we went back just to see... | ||
| Just to sort of illuminate it for people to think that this is what Brazil is actually like. | ||
| And see what happened afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And those areas were abandoned as soon as the World Cup and Olympics were over. | ||
| Dude, I don't know how you do this. | ||
| You're so friendly, too. | ||
| You're so easygoing. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| You seem so peaceful. | ||
| You don't seem like a shell-shocked guy. | ||
| You know, you really don't. | ||
| You seem very, very even. | ||
| Oh, that's good to hear. | ||
| Six months ago, a few friends said, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think I still have PTSD, but it definitely helped. | ||
| And I bumped into a friend of mine, Dan Reed, who made the Michael Jackson documentary. | ||
| I saw him in New York a few weeks ago. | ||
| The Neverland documentary? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he said, Ben, you just seem a bit calmer. | ||
| What is your take on that documentary? | ||
| 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... | ||
| They go into that in detail in the doc, and basically they'd been replaced by the new young boy, and had been kind of kicked to the side. | ||
| And then Michael reached out and said, I need you to help me. | ||
| And they say it was exciting, the idea to be... | ||
| To be back in Michael's good books and be wanted by Michael again. | ||
| So they talk about that very openly. | ||
| I had dinner with them a week before the film came out and I believed them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What did you think about the doctor, Michael Jackson's doctor, saying that he was chemically castrated? | ||
| Oh, I didn't hear that. | ||
| This is something that we've talked about before, because his voice was so different. | ||
| And to me, I said a long time ago, before his doctor came out and said he was chemically castrated, I said he sounds like a castrato. | ||
| He sounds like one of those men who were taken as boys in the 1800s and the 1700s. | ||
| So he chose to do it, the doctor's saying. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think the doctor is saying that his father did it to him. | ||
| This is the doctor that killed him, by the way, so take that with a grain of salt, right? | ||
| But he was saying that he chemically castrated him to preserve his voice. | ||
| Which, you know, it sounds preposterous until you look at his frame. | ||
| I mean, he did not have the frame of a person who had testosterone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But then he had kids. | |
| He didn't have kids. | ||
| He's saying those kids are not his kids. | ||
| They're not his kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| They're definitely not his kids. | ||
| I mean, this is what we were talking about earlier, about how it's easy to get the facts to fit a theory, you know. | ||
| Right, but those kids are not his kids. | ||
| Those are the whitest kids you're ever going to look at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're really white. | ||
| I mean, they're not part African-American. | ||
| I mean, we've got to remember before his vitiligo kicked in, he was very dark. | ||
| You know, he looked like his brothers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He looked like his father. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's, I don't know. | ||
| I hadn't heard that theory before that his kids weren't his kids. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I haven't heard many theories. | ||
| I don't think that much about Michael Jackson. | ||
| I mean, I think that's just been pretty much established. | ||
| Yeah, that his kids weren't really his kids. | ||
| And I think the woman that he had children with, I think, was on the record saying they never had sex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think. | ||
| Yeah, I think they talk about that as well, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| But we had a similar case in the UK with Jimmy Savile, the most popular. | ||
| That seems even worse. | ||
| And the documentary is great because it's a portrait of how you groom not just a kid, but the family as well. | ||
| And in some ways, you groom the entire country to the point where if accusations come out, everyone says, no, not him, no way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| Well, he looked like a monster. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But Jimmy Savile looks like a monster in retrospect. | ||
| I wrote to him as a kid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you really? | |
| Because he had this show called Jim Will Fix It. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Where he'd grant you your wish and then you'd sit on his lap and he'd give you a medal. | ||
| Oh, you got off light, buddy. | ||
| No one thought he was a monster back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| No one. | ||
| But he was so hideous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Louis Theroux did a great documentary with him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He keeps his mother's bedroom exactly what it was and all the clothes hanging in the closet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But honestly, in his lifetime, this was not discussed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Not even questioned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And like I say, I think he groomed the entire country. | ||
| Well, there's so many cases like that where you have this systemic pedophile situation that doesn't make sense. | ||
| Like, how did this last? | ||
| Like, Penn State, like the Sandusky case. | ||
| Like, how did this last? | ||
| Everyone seems to have known about it. | ||
| How did it last? | ||
| And people had seen a kid in the shower. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And hadn't, I mean, you think now, you'd kill yourself if you didn't intervene in some way. | ||
| I think it's also easy to forget how much that wasn't part of the conversation back then, though. | ||
| You know, the idea that there are pedophiles out there, and it's actually incredibly widespread. | ||
| That just wasn't... | ||
| Right. | ||
| That wasn't something people were worried about back then, from my memory, at least, anyway. | ||
| No. | ||
| It was church. | ||
| It was Catholic church, priests. | ||
| We knew about that. | ||
| Other than that, there was no discussion of, like, some world-famous football coach who was secretly fucking kids. | ||
| Like, you never heard that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| And Paterno, they think, had to have known. | ||
| There's no way he couldn't have known, or at least been exposed to some of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's also Penn State football. | ||
| It's a religion. | ||
| It's so important to them to see that these people that were in charge of it were so fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Jesus, man. | ||
| This show's a bummer. | ||
| Ha! | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm probably going to do a fourth session. | ||
| The therapist recommended a fourth session, which isn't what they normally do, but said... | ||
| I mean, I thought being able to cry would be a major breakthrough as part of this therapy. | ||
| Because you normally can't cry at all? | ||
| I haven't cried since I was 13 years old or something, 14 years old. | ||
| Oh, well that's different because that predates your war correspondence. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, English culture, it's, you know, my grandparents fought in the war, were tough as nails. | ||
| It's, you know, there is this pressure to be tough. | ||
| In the first normal therapy session, I told her what I thought was quite an everyday story about an experience in war to the therapist, and he cried. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ! | ||
| And then the first MDMA session, the therapist cried, I don't know, two or three times, and the cameraman cried. | ||
| And I still couldn't get there. | ||
| And then the third session, I nearly did, and my jaw was trembling, and I kind of thought, oh, there's going to be this... | ||
| What would have felt like a breakthrough and still hasn't come. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never happened. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What were they crying about? | ||
| I can't even remember what stories. | ||
| You just said this show has been a bummer, like the stories I just tell them, you know. | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm joking, kind of joking. | ||
| I'm very happy you're talking about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| People say, oh, this is Ben. | ||
| Ben's just come back from Yemen. | ||
| Oh, what's it like in Yemen, Ben? | ||
| Do you really want to know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, tell us. | ||
| And then 10 minutes later, there's this dark cloud over the evening, and everyone's just like, oh, Jesus. | ||
| So you just feel like you're just killing them. | ||
| They're cutting into their steak, and you're talking about someone getting their leg amputated. | ||
| I've got a bad habit of doing that. | ||
| But I can't even remember what the stories were that had that effect. | ||
| What is it like when you go to dinner with fellow war journalists? | ||
| What do you guys talk about? | ||
| There's a few that are really good friends and we can talk about all this stuff. | ||
| There's a lot that I'm not that close to. | ||
| And I don't like the mutual back patting that goes on with it. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I think that defeats the point of foreign reporting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So consciously or unconsciously, I don't spend a lot of time with other war journalists. | ||
| There are those who I deeply admire, who I see every now and again, like Sebastian Junger. | ||
| But I don't hang out with them day in, day out. | ||
| So there's levels to the involvement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To how deeply you're immersed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Closest to the front line with the flak jacket on and the perfectly ironed shirt and they're not sweating. | ||
| Or even worse, the Brian Williams type situation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or on the roof of the Five Star Hotel. | ||
| You might see people report about what's happening with ISIS, and they're in Beirut. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think they're relying on the fact that a lot of people don't understand that's a different country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, some of those guys are paid millions and treated very, very well. | ||
| The photographers and print journalists who are immersed and are spending weeks there... | ||
| Are sometimes struggling to make a living and aren't well-known and aren't well-supported. | ||
| What is it about the talking head in front of the camera that we want so badly? | ||
| I mean, I think it's a way for the news networks to claim credibility. | ||
| And when you see them get deployed, they're not focused on getting material from the war in these countries. | ||
| They're focused on the two-way. | ||
| We're now talking to our guy live from wherever. | ||
| That's more important than actually spending days collecting footage of what's actually going on. | ||
| 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 mean, am I right about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think in Mosul, a lot of the major news networks said to their crews, you're not allowed to spend the night in Mosul. | ||
| You know, you can go there and film a street and interview some refugees who just escaped ISIS territory, but you can't spend days on end there. | ||
| Whereas the freelance photographers and some of the writers, they were spending days on end there and getting the real stuff. | ||
| Is it because the on-camera people would be targeted? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So when you're over there and you see these guys show up and you know that they're just going to be hanging out at the hotel and... | ||
| What is that feeling like? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty disdainful of those guys. | ||
| You have to be. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And it's not an adventure. | ||
| It's not a fun trip for you of wild times. | ||
| It shouldn't be that. | ||
| It should be. | ||
| I mean, for me, it feels like an endurance test every time you go. | ||
| It should be hard and you should be spending time with the people you're covering. | ||
| And sometimes you can think you've finished with someone and just go for dinner or tea. | ||
| And just by having normal human conversations, you find out so much other stuff that you didn't go there to report on. | ||
| That's what you have to be doing. | ||
| And that takes weeks. | ||
| Weeks of getting closer to them and gaining their trust. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, I've never seen relief like it. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And how do they get them out of there? | ||
| What do they do from that stage? | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, please go. | ||
| We talked about Syria earlier. | ||
| Half the population is displaced. | ||
| You're talking about 12, 13 million people, either internally displaced or fled. | ||
| Just unimaginable. | ||
| Unimaginable. | ||
| And it's one of the biggest controversies in this country in terms of what to do when the refugees come. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Some countries are taking them in with open arms. | ||
| Some countries are not. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that are concentrating on the negative aspects of taking these people into your community. | ||
| What is your take on watching all this thing happen? | ||
| Watching all this take place? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The ignorance is... | ||
| It's very pervasive, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you know Gary Young, the British journalist? | ||
| No. | ||
| He interviews Richard Spencer. | ||
| Gary Young, I think, makes a very similar point. | ||
| And Richard Spencer says, yeah, but this country was built by white people. | ||
| You know, we came up with... | ||
| He said, no, no, it was literally built by black people, Gary Young says. | ||
| He says, yeah, yeah, but only because we told them how to do it. | ||
| And it's on camera. | ||
| Gary Young says, you know what? | ||
| I came to see you because I thought you were the intellectual argument for supporting Trump. | ||
| So I thought I might learn something. | ||
| You thought Richard Spencer was the intellectual argument? | ||
| Why did he think that? | ||
| He did, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But he says, you're not. | ||
| This is just ridiculous. | ||
| And he just shuts down the interview, turns around and walks off. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| I don't know anything about Richard Spencer other than he always gets mentioned as a white supremacist. | ||
| I literally don't know what he stands for, what he does, or what he says. | ||
| And they always say he's well-dressed and with a nice haircut. | ||
| This is such a crazy subject. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One more. | ||
| One more thing to concentrate on. | ||
| There is a difference with Muslims. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're just not telling us. | ||
| No. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| But they do with Muslims. | ||
| Well, it's fear of the unknown. | ||
| You know, it's a lot of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You'd think that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He had so much faith. | ||
| I mean, far more than me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that's what I hear far more often than the opposite. | ||
| Does that really depend on where you go? | ||
| I mean, because if you go certain places, people have a lot of faith in Trump. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, Donald Trump's going to protect us from evil. | ||
| There's places where you go that... | ||
| I mean, it's become a cliche, but I do think you'll find a lot of places critical of American foreign policy. | ||
| That doesn't mean they're critical of America. | ||
| How do they parse that out? | ||
| I think... | ||
| I mean, Vietnam, I think, is a good example. | ||
| We have defeated communism, or communism has been defeated in Vietnam, just because the new generation grow up and think Western culture, communism. | ||
| I know which one I want. | ||
| It's a simple choice. | ||
| And I think that young generation is making that very simple choice. | ||
| And it could just mean democracy. | ||
| And you think that is in Afghanistan as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That they're recognizing that Western culture provides more freedom and more economic opportunity, more prosperity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I haven't heard, apart from the Taliban, I haven't heard much anti-American feeling in Afghanistan at all. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| This cannot be a mistake. | ||
| A lot of people believe that. | ||
| A lot of people believe that over here as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But that still doesn't mean they'll hate all Americans in America. | ||
| And it means a lot of them would love to visit and maybe even come and live here. | ||
| Is that anything that you take seriously? | ||
| Those conspiracy theories? | ||
| Is there any validity to any of that stuff? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oil, obviously, in Iraq. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's the creepiest thought whatsoever, is that the government wants these perpetual wars. | ||
| I mean, that is the scariest conspiracy theory. | ||
| I'm not saying I support it, but if you... | ||
| Wanted to consider a conspiracy theory that's truly terrifying. | ||
| It's that they keep perpetual wars going on so that they can profit. | ||
| And, you know, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton benefited from airstrikes. | ||
| You know, there's a quick possible bump in terms of your approval ratings. | ||
| That's been proven many times. | ||
| But these wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, having gone so long and resulted in, I think, a humiliating defeat in both countries. | ||
| No one's been anything from that. | ||
| Well, there's a numbness that this country has towards them now. | ||
| It's been so many generations. | ||
| It's been so many years. | ||
| There's so many. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| What are the numbers of troops that have gone over to Afghanistan and Iraq and come back and not come back too? | ||
| It's just staggering. | ||
| And those towns they fought for, Fallujah in Iraq, Helmand province in Afghanistan, are now back in the hands of the Taliban in Helmand province. | ||
| That's not even news here. | ||
| Marja, the place I described earlier, is now back in the hands of the Taliban. | ||
| I've been since I went there with the U.S. Marines. | ||
| I don't remember seeing a headline about that. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it's conveniently ignored. | ||
| 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, what are we, 16 years in? | ||
| Is that what it is now? | ||
| Afghanistan is 18. 18? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they say the longest war in American history. | ||
| The first four or five years, we went to Iraq very quickly and weren't doing very much in Afghanistan. | ||
| So, you know, I'd argue it's not an 18-19 year war, but it's a very long and very costly war. | ||
| Does this ever give you this feeling of hopelessness? | ||
| Do you look at yourself 40 years down the line still doing this? | ||
| How do you approach this? | ||
| I think about that, and I also think about just selling everything I have and getting a little house in Jamaica and just retreating from the world. | ||
| Just drinking beer and relaxing? | ||
| I think I tried to do my bit. | ||
| I'm not sure how much of a bit I did, but you can get that feeling very easily. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you said it earlier, you know, when you read the numbers, hear the stories, I just, I can't even take it seriously anymore. | ||
| I mean, I can take it seriously, but I can't fathom it. | ||
| I can't really take it on board and really imagine what that's like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've seen it with my own eyes, and even then it's so hard to process. | ||
| Do you have an exit strategy? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I could make documentaries about other things, but I just don't think it would be... | ||
| This feels urgent to me. | ||
| And I question how useful this work is, but it feels somewhat useful. | ||
| It certainly feels like the most useful thing I can do for now. | ||
| I'm not a doctor. | ||
| I'm not a politician. | ||
| So even if it's not that much use, it's somewhat useful. | ||
| Well, there's also the problem that... | ||
| You've dedicated so much of your time to it. | ||
| I do think it's very useful. | ||
| You've dedicated so much time doing this that if you were to make a documentary on something frivolous, oh, this guy's a cabinetmaker. | ||
| How do you do it, Bob? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You might lose your fucking mind. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it would be easy to dismiss anything else you did as being frivolous in comparison to covering Yemen or Afghanistan or Congo or wherever. | ||
| So do you essentially just take it project by project and just keep going? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Ah, what a great quote. | ||
| Only when you're in that state of mind can you make the right decision. | ||
| So it'd be nice to make the decision in a place like that. | ||
| Sure, especially you. | ||
| I mean, you caught up in the momentum of these chaotic events. | ||
| And every day something new is happening. | ||
| I mean, ISIS are about to get defeated in Syria. | ||
| I want to be there to see it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, cover it. | ||
| Do you think you really could take three months and go to Costa Rica? | ||
| Have you done that before? | ||
| I did nine days in Jamaica recently. | ||
| Nine whole days? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it like on day two? | ||
| I loved every minute of it. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| And I actually felt like my brain kind of woke up. | ||
| I just felt, you know, the numbness I talked about earlier, the worst thing is it just kills your curiosity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's horrible. | ||
| And I just felt, you know, curious again. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why don't you just do that then? | ||
| Take those three months. | ||
| Maybe you have a different view. | ||
| Yeah, I feel guilty. | ||
| You do feel guilty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. | ||
| I wanted to know if you felt guilty around day two. | ||
| Yeah, I did feel guilty on this one because it was quick. | ||
| I mean, in the past, you know, you can go to a big fight and enjoy it and love it. | ||
| You can go for a big dinner and enjoy it and love it. | ||
| But that's about it. | ||
| You know, a month of luxury somewhere, I think I would get uncomfortable. | ||
| You're not covering this fight when you went to the Errol Spence? | ||
| No. | ||
| I've made a couple of boxing docs. | ||
| I made a documentary about Danny Jacobs. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| When he survived cancer and the night he became a world champion. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| We were there. | ||
| And it was actually, it was great to be able to say to people, here's my latest film. | ||
| It'll make you feel really good. | ||
| It'll inspire you. | ||
| So to contradict what I said earlier, that felt really good to be able to do that. | ||
| Maybe there's more of those in your future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they now have three world champions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| It's tiny. | ||
| It's not a lot bigger than this room. | ||
| Really? | ||
| With a lower ceiling. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's underneath a bodega? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's Saddam Ali, who I think is the first Arab or Yemeni world champion. | ||
| He beat Miguel Cotto. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He got into boxing when he was a kid, so his dad, who owns the bodega, built this gym in the basement, and that's where he and Danny came up. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And people walk past it, and it's just this door. | ||
| There's no sign. | ||
| People wouldn't even know. | ||
| Have you ever been to the Kronk Gym in Detroit? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| It doesn't exist anymore, does it? | ||
| No, no, but you turn up to the building and you think this can't be the right place. | ||
| It looks like a derelict building. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you go down this basement, you know, staircase into the basement and there's this crappy gym with one ring and a few bags and that's it. | ||
| And then Tommy Hearns walks in and Henry Akin one day walks in and, you know, Oba Carr walks in. | ||
| It's similar to that. | ||
| I had Lennox Lewis on the podcast last week. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| He sounded great. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| He sounded really good, yeah. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with him at all. | ||
| I was wondering if chess is what's helping him. | ||
| Because he doesn't seem to be sustaining any of the long-term... | ||
| He got knocked out a couple of times like that. | ||
| Yeah, he really did. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| I really do wonder. | ||
| Because chess is so... | ||
| It's so difficult, and your mind is constantly firing. | ||
| And the brain, in some ways, does atrophy without use. | ||
| I mean, whether it's not physical atrophy in terms of the size of it, but in terms of its abilities. | ||
| The more active you are solving puzzles. | ||
| George Foreman used to do a lot of crossword puzzles and things along those lines. | ||
| And he actively sought difficult little quizzes and puzzles and things to keep his mind sharp. | ||
| I met Quincy Jones a couple of months ago. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| He's learning Mandarin, I think, and doing well at it. | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's in his 80s, I think. | ||
| He just turned 86. Wow. | ||
| And by the way, a whole group of us had dinner, and he was the last man to leave. | ||
| He closed the restaurant down. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He's incredible. | ||
| And I got into an argument about Rio and racism in Brazil in front of him. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And he said, wait a minute. | ||
| I've been going to the favelas in Rio since the 60s. | ||
| And I thought, oh, shit, here we go. | ||
| And he said, and Ben's right, Brazil is deeply racist. | ||
| I just got backed up by Quincy Jones in an argument. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| But he says exactly the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, so he does these things specifically to try to stay sharp. | ||
| Yeah, treat the brain like a muscle. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's something to that. | ||
| I mean, Lennox Lewis is obviously one anecdotal case, but man, he's so fucking sharp. | ||
| But that's what's so frightening about the numbness that comes from the PTSD is if it takes away that curiosity. | ||
| You've got a day off and you think, I'm going to do a crossword. | ||
| I'm going to learn a language. | ||
| If it takes away that energy, that's terrifying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The numbness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And imagine someone in prison. | ||
| If you can awaken that. | ||
| Who knows what's possible? | ||
| But it seems like there's almost no effort at rehabilitation. | ||
| But awakening that is, I don't think, that difficult. | ||
| It just needs the right book or the right person, the right film. | ||
| Well, there's a place where I believe MDMA therapy could really have some amazing results. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, and the majority of them have probably been abused and come from abusive environments and horrible situations. | ||
| The idea that we just take people and lock them in cages and say, well, you've done your time. | ||
| Now get out. | ||
| Now you're going to be even more fucked up. | ||
| Now you're habituated. | ||
| You're used to being surrounded by violent criminals. | ||
| Good luck in the world. | ||
| And we're going to make it even harder for you than anybody else to get a job. | ||
| Or an apartment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He still can't get a fucking apartment. | ||
| Oh, I'd heard the first bit. | ||
| I hadn't heard the second bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody wants to take him in. | ||
| We don't ever want to give anybody a road to redemption. | ||
| You fuck up once. | ||
| You do something wrong. | ||
| One robbery. | ||
| You get accused of fucking up. | ||
| And you're off to Rikers for three years before you even stand trial. | ||
| I read a stat the other day. | ||
| I think it's 94% of trials in the US are settled on a plea bargain. | ||
| Don't even go to trial. | ||
| And I thought that was wrong. | ||
| I thought that can't be accurate. | ||
| Well, they scare people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can plead guilty and get five years. | ||
| Or you can go to trial and you'll probably get 30. Yeah. | ||
| Which is insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, why would you give me five years if a judge would give me 30? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is happening there? | ||
| Yeah, if I am guilty. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's insane. | ||
| It's just like a money-saving sort of mechanism and ensuring that they don't lose. | ||
| You know, and just, they scare you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You want to risk it all? | ||
| You want to, 30 years, you won't have a life. | ||
| But five years, you will. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You might get out in two. | ||
| Be a good fella. | ||
| Don't stab anybody in jail. | ||
| What we do with people in this country when someone commits a crime is pretty stunning. | ||
| And then when you factor in the fact that there's actual businesses that revolve around profiting off of people being incarcerated is even crazier. | ||
| And no one investigates that either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, there are some great investigations. | ||
| ProPublica, people like that. | ||
| How many people are reading them? | ||
| Reading them. | ||
| That's a better way to say it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The information is there. | ||
| And to your point about the overflow of information, it's all there. | ||
| It's just that's not the stuff at the top of the pile. | ||
| It's nowhere near the top of the pile. | ||
| That's probably the last thing that people are concentrating on because you're assuming these people are bad criminals. | ||
| And you don't want them on the street. | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| Think about all the good people out there that are struggling. | ||
| Concentrate on them first. | ||
| But this is part of what's wrong. | ||
| Part of what's wrong is these people are in these terrible situations, terrible communities, no way out, no positive image to model. | ||
| Everyone is a drug dealer or a criminal. | ||
| It's crime around you all the time. | ||
| You wind up in the system. | ||
| You become incarcerated, and then that's your life now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're stuck in this thing. | ||
| And there's more of them in American prison than anywhere else on the planet Earth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And as a foreigner here, that's one of the things that just never fails to shock me. | ||
| Well, England's got its own concerns too, right? | ||
| I mean, there's so many fucking stabbings in London now. | ||
| It's really crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, but compared to shootings here, it's nothing. | ||
| But yeah, it's definitely a problem. | ||
| And you just don't see police on the streets like you used to. | ||
| In London? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you don't see police. | ||
| My dad was a policeman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| I didn't think that's what police were supposed to do. | ||
| Well, they want to protect their own ass. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Ben, how do we fix the world? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I think it might be MDMA. Actually, I know some people that would say that and make a good argument for it and really believe it as well. | ||
| Just a really good argument for psychedelics remapping the world. | ||
| There really is. | ||
| Sounds frivolous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a moment in the MDMA documentary you did where I interview Rick Doblin, the mastermind of this. | ||
| I've had him on. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Yeah, he's been on. | ||
| And at the end, I say, what's the potential for this if you get it legalized? | ||
| And he basically says, spiritualize the world, world peace. | ||
| And I look at him like, are you serious? | ||
| And he laughed and says, I know it sounds crazy, but I really believe this is possible. | ||
| It is possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| I'm trying ketamine. | ||
| I've tried it a couple of times, but that's what they want to try with me next. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, anything that makes people compassionate and kind to themselves as well as to others. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like that much of a jump. | ||
| I think most people have it in them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, not that far under the surface. | ||
| Well, people are scared. | ||
| You know, they're scared and they're tense and... | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's exactly what MDMA did with me. | ||
| It just removed all of those fears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's entirely possible. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They rarely actually change. | ||
| And even to people who are completely skeptical about this, the fact this is helping veterans means that everyone is behind it. | ||
| Well, it's a great way to get in. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We watched the Fox News segment with Rick at his house in Boston of Fox News talking about MDMA for veterans. | ||
| How did they approach it? | ||
| Well, they looked at each other at the end and said, do you ever think you'd do a pro ecstasy piece? | ||
| And they said, no, but if it helps the veterans, I guess we're for it too, right? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And if it can lower crime rates to get people on mushrooms... | ||
| I mean, if dimethyltryptamine can change people's perceptions. | ||
| There's so many of these different drugs, too, that you could introduce people to under a clinical supervision setting where you could change that. | ||
| I mean, how many people are involved in psychotherapy and it doesn't do a goddamn thing to them? | ||
| They just keep going back and forth. | ||
| Or they numb them up with pills. | ||
| Oh, with me, it was Zoloft straight away. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| They doubled the dose. | ||
| Didn't work. | ||
| Doubled the dose again. | ||
| I was just a zombie. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's exactly what it was. | ||
| Dulled. | ||
| Dulled everything. | ||
| And the great thing about MDMA is it's not a potential opioid crisis because it's a therapist sitting down giving you the pill. | ||
| I don't give you 50 pills and you can abuse it wherever you want. | ||
| Logistically, doing what you say is going to be hard to set up. | ||
| We need a lot of therapists, a lot of facilities, but It's possible. | ||
| Well, once there's success, and then it becomes a business, then it can happen. | ||
| I mean, once insurance starts covering it, once people start experiencing positive benefits, you can get it from both sides, right? | ||
| You get it from the commerce aspect. | ||
| Money starts coming in. | ||
| People start paying for it, and it becomes a business that's successful. | ||
| It actually has good results. | ||
| People start talking well about it. | ||
| Other people start opening up these centers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's so much potential to this. | ||
| Those people at MAPS and Rick Doblin and all of his crew, they have the real potential to change the world. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, that's terrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, why is it so expensive? | ||
| Just so they can make money off of it. | ||
| Now, this is the therapeutic dose of ketamine in some sort of psychiatric sort of... | ||
| What's the environment they're going to do it in? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Ketamine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think it is illegal. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But there are therapists giving it out now. | ||
| I mean, I bought mine legally. | ||
| You know, I think you can... | ||
| Oh, you bought it personally? | ||
| With a prescription. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, with a prescription in New York. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Is ketamine legal? | ||
| Legal under prescription? | ||
| Maybe it's a Schedule 2 drug or something along those lines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Someone sent me the message about the $15,000 and how much it was. | ||
| That's fucking crazy. | ||
| $90,000 to $15,000. | ||
| Which is far more than the amount that Martin Shkreli put up the price. | ||
| Right, and went to jail for. | ||
| But yeah, he's a douchebag though. | ||
| It's easy to point at him. | ||
| He owns the Wu-Tang Clan album. | ||
| What happened with that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Someone's got it, man. | ||
| He's in jail. | ||
| I saw he's still running his business from a burner cell phone in jail. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Well, what he's saying is, though, what happened to the Wu-Tang Clan album? | ||
| I thought it was in possession of the FBI. That's hilarious. | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| That shit is hilarious. | ||
| That might be one of the most hilarious parts of that story. | ||
| The FBI owns the Wu-Tang Clan forbidden album. | ||
| How much did he pay? | ||
| Didn't he pay like a million dollars for it? | ||
| He paid a lot because it was up for auction. | ||
| I think this says he paid two million. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You can never get that money back. | ||
| Especially if the tracks got released. | ||
| But what a great marketing tool. | ||
| It's worth more than $2 million in marketing. | ||
| The actual sale price is not released. | ||
| He confirmed he paid $2 million for it. | ||
| Yeah, but he's full of shit. | ||
| I bet he did, though. | ||
| I mean, if I had to guess. | ||
| I mean, how many wealthy people out there are Wu-Tang fans? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Probably a healthy bid. | ||
| Healthy bidding war. | ||
| Yeah, this is as of like a year ago, the feds have it. | ||
| So I don't know if there's an update on that. | ||
| There's always, I mean, when it's an individual that's like him, it's easy to look at him disparagingly. | ||
| Like, look at this guy. | ||
| He's a dick. | ||
| Oh, he wants to raise the money or raise the price of these drugs that can help people? | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| Let's go get him. | ||
| But if it's Johnson& Johnson, it's like, first of all, they make baby powder. | ||
| You know, they're so respected. | ||
| It's such a common household name. | ||
| And they're not calling it ketamine, they're calling it esketamine. | ||
| Esketamine? | ||
| Slightly different. | ||
| That sounds like a snail, right? | ||
| Sounds like escargot. | ||
| And it's a nasal spray. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| I don't know how different that makes it, but... | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Well, it's better than shooting it up, because I know that a lot of people take it intramuscularly, where you just jab it into your thigh. | ||
| I believe, yeah, this says the drug will only be given by accredited specialists who must monitor patients for two hours after administration. | ||
| I don't think you can just get it and go home and... | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| Because I know Neil Brennan did it, and he had some very good results from it. | ||
| I've spoken to him a few times. | ||
| He's tried everything. | ||
| He's a fucking hilarious guy. | ||
| He's had some real depression problems though. | ||
| He has some very good relief from magnetic therapy. | ||
| And have you seen the involuntary trembling thing he did as well? | ||
| No, what's that? | ||
| He's got a video of that. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Involuntary trembling? | ||
| Yeah, he's just sitting there and his arm and shoulder is just going. | ||
| They just juice him up with something? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nothing? | |
| Just talking. | ||
| Oh, so he just does it on purpose? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or this therapist in LA gets him to do it somehow. | ||
| And that helps him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'd have to ask him. | ||
| I don't know the ins and outs. | ||
| I watched the Three Mike special thinking it was just another comedy stand-up. | ||
| I had no idea about that. | ||
| That third Mike being the serious stuff. | ||
| I thought it was incredible. | ||
| He's a brilliant guy. | ||
| He's a very smart guy and his stand-up is outstanding. | ||
| And it just keeps getting better. | ||
| But, you know, he's a guy fighting demons. | ||
| He's the classic case of the comedian that can never be happy unless he's on stage killing. | ||
| You know, and then, you know, even then, that's brief. | ||
| Like, he's just never this jovial, funny guy, but he's a brilliant comedian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But as long as I've known him for many years, he's struggled. | ||
| And it sounds like he's kind of an unofficial executive producer for a bunch of other comedians as well. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Like, advising them and giving them notes, and it seems like a whole bunch of people respect him and get his input. | ||
| Well, people definitely respect him, but, yeah, I'm sure he gives people taglines and gives them advice and stuff like that. | ||
| He's a very smart guy. | ||
| But to be as honest as he was, and not even end it with a joke, you know, just to tell the serious story and then end, you know, that blew me away. | ||
| I met him on a Friday night and watched it on a Saturday morning and had no idea. | ||
| And it was one of the best things I've seen for a long time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's a special guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah And then two hours later you're out on the street feeling completely normal. | ||
| What was your ketamine experience like? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how long did it take before it kicked in? | ||
| I don't really know because I never thought it was kicking in. | ||
| But then I just found myself saying things and concluding things that I wouldn't normally say. | ||
| And for the next week and a half, I just felt like there was just a weight off. | ||
| Did you have any sort of hallucinogenic experience? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| None whatsoever. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| No hallucinating at all? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Listened to music quite quietly. | ||
| Put an eye mask on for a few minutes here and there. | ||
| Sometimes didn't talk at all. | ||
| But, yeah, there was just this relief. | ||
| Especially afterwards, like in the week and a half or so afterwards, just felt this lightness. | ||
| And, you know, to your point about Neil being so open to trying everything, even that, even taking that step is hard. | ||
| Sometimes even getting out the door. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's hard, let alone researching this stuff and trying everything. | ||
| When I first moved to America, I said, okay, you're not going to do yoga. | ||
| You're not going to do therapy. | ||
| You're not going to do prescription drugs. | ||
| That's New York bullshit. | ||
| To drop that skepticism and to try everything and be genuinely open to everything, that's a lot in itself. | ||
| Well, it's hard for people to try anything new. | ||
| I mean, you have to respect anytime anyone does anything new. | ||
| The first time a person straps on a pair of running shoes and goes for a jog, it's fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard to just do something. | ||
| It's hard to change gears. | ||
| Or be curious enough to try it in the first place, to be open to the idea. | ||
| Not just be curious. | ||
| I mean, in the case of taking something like ketamine, brave. | ||
| You have to be brave. | ||
| I mean, once you take it, you can't untake it. | ||
| You're on a ride. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The first MDMA session was more frightening to me than going to Syria or Yemen. | ||
| How so? | ||
| I guess the vulnerability. | ||
| I just thought I'd say things and accept things that, you know, I'd put up a front against for so long. | ||
| Is it a British thing? | ||
| I think it's very much a British thing. | ||
| But it's also, you know, my identity has been a tough, brave war correspondent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you can like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's respected. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, I don't know. | ||
| When I had that feeling of relief in the first session about, oh, you could have a family and a dog and kids and enjoy it and be happy. | ||
| There's also a part of me that resisted that and thought, no, that's somehow taking your foot off the gas. | ||
| That's somehow losing sight of what's important and what your role is and what you can do to actually help things. | ||
| And just doing whatever is good for you. | ||
| Well, it seems so conflicted because you obviously get a great benefit out of this... | ||
| This ability to help. | ||
| And you really do help. | ||
| And you really do put yourself in these incredibly difficult situations. | ||
| So there's something, there's a positive aspect of it, but for sure there's a price that you're paying that's pretty substantial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I hope that's the case. | ||
| I hope it not being the case is actually the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen, Ben, thank you, man. | ||
| Thanks for coming in here. | ||
| Thanks for everything you do. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| It was great talking to you. | ||
| And I wish you well, man. | ||
| If there's anything we could do, please let me know. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. |
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