Shane Smith (Part 1)

00:00The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Just doesn't feel like an official show unless you hear that stupid song. Oh, you're getting crafty with that. Left right ear. You're crazy, bro. Shane Smith's in the house, ladies and gentlemen. This guy, this one guy in front of us right now, I have probably enjoyed your online videos more than anything I have ever watched online. And that is the God's honest truth. Amen. I've been turning people on to you for a long time, man. And I don't remember which was the first one that I saw. Somebody sent a link to it on the message board. I don't remember which one it was. It was the advice guide to travel. Might have been Thailand. Mine was. It was you chilling in a bathtub with some ladyboys. And I was like, this dude's a bad motherfucker. He's got a big smile on his face and he's chillin in the bathtub with these lady boys

00:56And then of course I saw the the Liberia one and then I'm like who the fuck are these guys? And then I started going these these guys are fucking nuts man They're just going to the weirdest situations and they're giving you like a real take on it It seems like people you know went to Liberia and saw the situation and and broke it down intelligently But it seems like people you know Whereas like if I watch a 60 minutes piece on Liberia and they send a correspondent that I don't know that dude. I don't know that dude. The difference with what you guys are doing is, whether it's Hamilton Morris doing drugs, or whether it's you going somewhere, or your boy just went to the Congo, I feel like those are regular people. They're not bullshit artists. I'm not getting that. That's a rare thing, man. Well, that's the... I don't know how to close it. That's good right there. We call it immersionism,

01:47where we don't really have a story before we go. Like, for example, Liberia started as an article in the mag, which was general butt naked in the two-pack army because they had stolen a container, like a ship with a container in the container that had two-pack Shakur t-shirts, right? And so it became the uniform of the army. So exactly. So that's right up Bice's alley. We're like, wow, that's freaky. Right. So we didn't really have a story. But when we went there, we just started hanging out with all these warlords. And each one would tell you a story that was worse than the next. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, we all ate flesh. How many people have eaten human flesh in Liberia? Oh, 70%. 85% of the women have been raped. It's such a shocking thing. And you're just talking about cannibalism all the time. It's just a given. Oh, yeah, no problem. They used to eat people in the presidential palace. Fuck.

02:41And you're sitting there going. And not just people, babies, children. They would steal people's babies. Yeah, so the, well, Butt Naked, the guy that we spent a lot of time with, they believe that if they split the back of a living innocent child open and take out the still beating heart and eat it, that they couldn't be hurt in battle. Oh, my God. And they would fight naked. That's why it's called General Blood Naked. So they would eat the heart, drink the blood, and then take off all their clothes and then just run into battle shooting the shit out of the gun. And this guy's still alive. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing that he tells this story. like wouldn't you want to keep that secret well he's a he's now named joshua blahi and he's a he's a preacher and they had a tribunal uh a council to sort of see all the war crimes and

03:30stuff and he admitted to sort of killing you know and eating you know you know 25 000 to 30 000 people oh my god and uh but they they said oh you're a you're a preacher now and he's like yeah And he's like, okay, well, it's okay then. Holy shit. In 2011 in the world, in the earth that we live on, that's actually going down. Someone has killed 25,000 people and eaten babies. But it's okay now because you're in a cult. Yes. That's a great cult to be in, man. I would say that's a good one to join. If you're in a situation where you've eaten about 20,000 people and you're like, fuck, I need a way to not go to jail. How do I explain this? Oh, I'm a preacher now. Yeah, he was a priest in the crown tribe before, which they believed in human sacrifice. And he was fighting on the Liberians of the crown side against the sort of American-sponsored side. And so he had been a ritualistic cannibal before.

04:27And then there was not a lot of food during the Civil War, so people just started eating bodies for food. Jesus Christ. So would they hunt people and eat them? No, there's enough people dying. There's a lot of dead people just lying around. Wow. What a fucking crazy place on earth. You want to talk about Mad Max wasn't that bad. Right? What people are worried about with Mad Max, living in Thunderdome, that's not as bad. I would way rather live in Thunderdome than Liberia. Two men enter, one man leave. It seems pretty straightforward. I would rather live on Brokeback Mountain. Yeah. Dude, that sounds completely insane. And Liberia started out as a U.S. slave colony, right? No, it was actually they took freed slaves. And they brought them back to Africa. They brought them back to Africa. And they called it Liberia for freedom. And Monrovia, the capital, is named after President Monroe.

05:24And they wrote the Constitution in America. And then they brought the freed slaves over. And then the slaves promptly enslaved the native Africans using the plantation method that they had learned in America. Oh, my God. And so for the next sort of 250 years, the American Liberians, so they would have names like Charles Taylor, for example, or very sort of westernized names, had enslaved the sort of locals until a guy named Samuel Doe, who was an African Liberian, overthrew the government. And that started the Civil War. And then Charles Taylor, who was educated here in America, went after him. and that's when all this cannibalism and lunacy started. And Charles Taylor now is on trial or being convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But all the other generals like Butt Naked and Bin Laden and Rambo, they're all still there, just sort of hanging out in Liberia. That is incredible.

06:25When was it established as a country? So it was established in the 1840s. So slavery was made illegal in 1865? Is that what it was? So it was sort of repatriated slaves from the north, and then when they outlawed slavery, they would keep going. So I think it was made in an international state in the 1860s. And then it was sort of American run. It was our sort of quasi-foray into colonialism. In Africa. In Africa, and then it turned into a complete and utter disaster. Holy shit. You want to talk about it. There's no way to make anything worse. Is there a way? Is there a worse spot on Earth? No. That sounds like the worst spot on Earth. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you're in, there's a place called West Point, which is the sort of slum of Monrovia, which, like, it doesn't have an electricity grid. Monrovia, the city, or water or anything. But there's a bad part. Yeah. It's all bad. Imagine that.

07:24It's like a slum in hell. It's all bad. Hell has a slum. But there's this one part called West Point. It's called West Point. And you go there and it's, I mean, it's shocking. It's, you know, eight, nine, ten-year-old kid just smoking heroin, you know, slashes across, milky eyes everywhere, you know, stomps everywhere. All these people have fought in wars. Prostitution is just everywhere. Drugs is everywhere. And there's just shit in the streets. There's no, like, it's just, it's literally chaos. It's worse than chaos. You're like, well, even in Mad Max, there would be some, yeah, there would be some, you know, two men enter women. There'd be some law. There'd be some sort of. Border town. Yeah, something. But there's none. It's just fucking crazy. Like, it's just, it's full on. And you can't fix that because those people are fucked. They're programmed that way. They're like wild dogs that want to eat people.

08:21Well, the thing is, is what I don't understand. You know what I mean? You can't fix a wild dog that wants to eat people. Most of them were child soldiers. So they've grown up just killing the shit out of people their whole lives. And so this is what I understand is, you know, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. Okay, stop. And then they don't give them any money or jobs. Unemployment's at 75%. So there's just these dudes who have one skill, which is to kill people. They don't have any jobs. And they're just sort of sitting around starving. You're like, well, they're just going to start fighting again. And that's why what all the generals said is like one of the guys, Rambo, was like, I am a product of war. I'm a son of war. What do you expect me to do? You know, that's all I know how to do. That has got to be the craziest place on earth. It's amazing just even thinking about it,

09:04thinking that that's possible, that humanity can slip in the same time frame as you and I sitting in this room with air conditioning and this broadcasting, this signal that's going out to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Well, this is the future. There's just like a million minicams. This is like post-Japan. yeah this is like the mad max of podcasting yeah this is like uh the studio where the dude who made those uh replicants in blade runner it's like where he would work yeah last of the v8 interceptors so that's got to be as bad as things can go i mean you can't think of anything worse cannibalism smoking heroin in the street as a baby everyone's missing arms and shit i mean they really it has to be the worst humanity can get and it coexists with this yeah it's amazing the one story you know

09:55we were going to church uh where butt naked was going to preach and the one story that freaked me out the most was we went to the cemetery in the downtown you know of monrovia and um there's all the graves were empty and they had been opened up and what had happened is no one had anywhere to live so they opened up the the graves you know took out the skeletons and just lived in the graves about 4 000 people were living in the graves right but as a thousand people just living in the graves and then so but he's telling me the story and he's saying you know i was taking the bus back from guinea and i was going and you know i got off the bus and they had sort of you know cooked sticks of meat and so he had it and he goes oh this is human flesh and uh because he knows what human flesh tastes like because he ate a lot so he goes to the guy and he says excuse me

10:47you know I'm general butt naked but you know I'm now converted that you're someone selling this meat as you know beef or whatever but it's actually human flesh and they said it's human flesh and he's like well cuz I ate human flesh a lot before and so as he's telling me the story I'm just like all of that is just an aside the the the punchline was when he said oh they were actually stealing cadavers you know from the hospitals and just cutting them up and making you know meat for the for the buses that go through the border but so that's the punchline but meanwhile like i'm sitting in this graveyard which had 4 000 people living in the graves and he's telling me well i knew it was human flesh because you know i ate it a lot and you're sort of sitting there going wait all the givens of telling this joke or this story every given is like okay so we're

11:35living in the cemetery we're eating human flesh and then i found out that they're grave robbing to make you know kebabs in the street and you're sitting there going at that point you're just going okay i mean just any kind of aside any story and you're just sitting you're all you're at the end of humanity like we're all fucking doomed you know that is the low point it's it's got to be it's the lowest point on earth why does it not get more press why is that not like a bigger like i watched your thing on the congo and that really fascinates me because now people are at least sort of forced to be paying attention to that part of africa because it's the source of all the minerals that we need for electronics. And people are starting to realize that. And I didn't realize it until fairly recently. I wrote a message board post asking people, like, is there a way to get a karma-free cell phone?

12:25That was the question. Like, is there a cell phone where you go, I don't feel bad about buying this. No one had to work slave labor. There was no child labor involved. But there's not. There's not. Coltan is only, it's like Tanzanite. You know, it comes from, you know, one or two places in the world. and the biggest, I think 85% or 90% of it, comes from Congo, which is the most fucked up country in Liberia or maybe even more. And they've been having just a raging civil war where, you know, they take, again, they kidnap people and turn them into child soldiers and stuff. And all of that is just to get Coltan, which is what they need to make tablets or cell phones or what have you. So if you have an iPad or a BlackBerry, then guess what? You know, you're helping sponsor. you know with the longest running civil war and I think it's now I think it's

13:12the seventh bloodiest war in history yeah but what my thought was like if this was happening in France yeah this would be goddamn front page news every day of the week it's it's racist it's weird it's you know it really is like really out front I mean that's like that's out front and racist as you can get I think it's definitely there's there's there's you know a race issue there it's also I think that there's a bit of Africa fatigue because you know it's always interesting way to put it it's always heavy it's always you know and I've been going to Africa for a long time we do stuff for one and you know what they're doing there is really positive and really good there's lots of good stuff going on but there's also I mean you know there's really bad stuff going on and and and I guess people like after a while it's the same thing too people are

13:59like listening to Iraq and listening to Iraq and then all of a sudden someone says well 50 people died in a you know traffic bomb today and people go oh well because they've heard it so many times before yeah and so i remember the first time i went to sudan um you know we got quite a big scoop when we went there because everyone was saying it was racial you know it's arab on black arab on black and when we went there they're like we're all black i mean it's they just want the oil they did this exact same thing in the south they killed two million people displaced five million all for the oil and now they found oil in Darfur and they want to kick everybody out it's very simple and no one had reported on that it was about oil no one not anyone in the western press Al Jazeer had done one story on it and it was all race race race race race

14:44and you're like it's about oil like you know they that the whole Darfur conflict about all so anyway um it's it's weird what happens in Africa and the press uh and how it doesn't really cover it It's insane. It's insane watching your Congo documentary made me think you know what? This is the only documentary I've ever watched in the Congo outside of ones that go deep into the wildlife Sure, you know what a lot of people don't know about the Congo is it was Grasslands doing for fairly recently and then it filled in with jungle and it's like one of the strangest ecosystems in the world Yeah, it's the place where they have that why that one gigantic chimpanzee. You know about that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Have you ever been? Have you gone to the Congo? I've been to the Congo, yeah. But did you actually go in? You actually went into the jungle? Yeah, yeah. Whoa. The fuck is that like?

15:34The first time we went, do you know David Cho? Do you know that guy? David Cho. He's an artist. He's like a famous graffiti artist, and then he became a sort of fine artist or whatever. Okay. He's a really good artist, a cool guy. He does a series for us called Thumbs Up, and he hitchhiked across America. Jesus Christ. And then he hitchhiked across China. And I think he's hitchhiking across North Africa next. But anyway, he went because there's the German Zoological Society, the National Geographic Society, and all these people are looking for this dinosaur deep in the middle of the conglomerate. Oh, I've heard of that. There's this part that nobody's ever really gotten into and only the pygmies can go through and they all speak to each other in song and all can understand them. And he was trying to get to the pygmies. He was trying to get to see the dinosaur because he believes the dinosaur exists.

16:18And so when he went in there, it just sort of gets harder and harder and weirder and weirder and weirder. And then people are making, oh, you want to see the dinosaur? You want to see the dinosaur? They make him drink this fucking potion and then they come out all dressed as dinosaurs but like in palm prawns and shit. And he's like hallucinating going, well, what the fuck is going on? So he didn't get in to see the dinosaur because he went crazy before that. But that's sort of like the Congo. It is the heart of darkness. The deeper you get into it, it just gets freakier and freakier and weirder and just, you know, you can't even, like, for example, you know, again, to go back to your Mad Max thing, you think that there's going to be some sort of rule, some sort of warlords will come up with some sort of law or something. You know, Barter Town has to have a fucking law. There's no law. Like, it's chaos.

17:10It's just, it's like, ah, there's a thing, I'll eat it. You know, there's something, kill it. You know, like, and, you know, it's just, it's staggering. Like, it's literally chaos. Is that what happens to people when you leave them alone? This is it. If you scratch, this is why religion, I was driving here and there's all these churches and I was thinking about it. I was like, they have these churches and religion and society and laws and all this stuff because left to our own devices, man, we are bad. We're just like chimps. We're bad. Kill it, fuck it, and eat it. We're just like chimps. I mean, that's really what the problem is. We're like 96-whatever percent chimps. This chimp in the Congo has been fascinating to me because it's a giant chimp. It's like six feet tall. They have pictures of it walking upright. And they kill leopards. They have a video of one eating a fucking leopard.

17:56And the locals call them lion killers. They have two words for chimps, tree beaters and lion killers. And they get gray hair and their backs stick up like a dog when they get excited. Like, what a wild fucking animal, man. That's a real animal. They know it exists. They have fecal matter samples. They have DNA, tissue, hair, video, pictures. They know, like, this is a real, legit chimp. And they can't get to it. It's just too fucking far into crazy town. You'd have to hike a month into the jungle to get to this one fucking pack of who knows how many of these things are left. And who knows how many of those in the conflict. Who knows how many of those have been killed. Because there's a big picture of one of them that you can see if you look up Bondo ape online. And look in the photo section of Google. There's one where there's two dudes that look like regular sized guys. 150, 160 pounds.

18:44And they got this giant dead chimp. And they killed it in the Congo. They shot it. Yeah, and they're like one arm around one of them. I mean, the thing looks fucking huge. It looks like it's 300, 400 pounds. And these guys are sitting there posing with it with a big bullet hole on its chest. I think there's another sponsor of the show. It's like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It's coming. All blue. It's coming, man. July 15th. 3D. Well, it's just fascinating to me that this can exist. This, you know, Pasadena can exist at the same time as the Congo. And it's all on the same timeline. I mean, if you look at historical timelines, how many times has this existed before when Atlantis was around? What the fuck was the rest of the world like? Is that humanity? Are we just shining spots and then just everything else, just a full spectrum all the way down to Congo?

19:31When you take away any sort of rules, when you take away shit, we are bad, bad people. That's why people, as they get older, become Republicans. That's what it is. They start understanding human nature. Don't let the children come knife me. You fucking people need discipline. Don't let them put a knitting needle in my liver. Yeah, show me a man who's a young man who's not a liberal, and I'll show you a man with no heart. Show me an old man who is not a conservative, and I'll show you a man with no brain. Right, right, there you go. There's a certain element of human nature. I don't know who said that, but there's a certain element of human nature. It's good that you remember the quote, yeah. Yeah, I don't remember who wrote it, though. You're supposed to remember it. It's much more authentic. Just say, you know. Some smart dude. I don't know who actually said this one. And then you actually sound...

20:15Left to our own devices. But I wonder if that's going to change now because of the internet. I wonder if, you know, we think about what a short period of time it's been around since, you know, the mid-90s to now. You know, it's a blip in human history. The dissemination of information is so much easier now. I wonder if that's going to change things. I wonder if that's going to, you know, spread the better life or spread the idea of the better life across the world. Because, like, do they have the internet in the Congo? No. Nothing. No. Shit. I don't know. Cell phones? Not really. No? No. Wow. No. Holy shit. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's weird because, you know, I was in Libya during the revolution, and they all had cell phones, and that's how they were communicating, and that's how they did it. Actually, they did a lot of their organization through Twitter and stuff. But they were still pretty hardcore.

21:10Like, it was just a tool. It wasn't changing anything for the better. It was just making them more efficient. Well, I guess not for the better, because I think that it was essential in sort of Arab Spring to have ways of communication that the government couldn't shut down. Didn't they eventually wind up killing the whole Internet? They did, yeah. They did, but they opened sites that you could get through dumb phones even. And then the rebels freed up the cell phone tower so that people could communicate. Yeah, but they did they Egypt shut down the whole internet when you see that and then you come back to America and you see Occupy Wall Street Do what do you what do you think do you like? Oh shit? Do you guys know what the rest of the world is like what are you gonna do you gonna shut this thing down? I think Occupy Wall Street is funny. We did a lot of stories on it

22:01You know just because you know I always say Europe gets up my nose because their politics is kind of like first-year university. It's it's like they read a book you know and so therefore i know politics but american politics is like high school you know and so there's they're like well we just want to you know the rich people should give more to the to the poor people and everyone should just share it more and you're like well that's redistribution of well that's communism that's each according to his own according to the need and you sit there and say well if you're taking money if the state gets to take money from everyone and decide who gets it. Well, you can just look at the Soviet Union or China before they became the most capitalist country on earth. So is that what you're saying? You want communism? No, we don't want that. We just want it to be nicer. We want it to be fair. And so...

22:51Yeah, you hear the, why do you need all that money? When I'm just looking for a job, why do you need 100 million? I would be more into it for sure because I like chaos and I like riots and stuff. I like, no, but during a de-stratification, like we're a young, new media company, So during destratification of power, you get in, you know, so you like chaos. Chaos is what we feed on, what makes us. Do you worry about your safety when you go into these situations? Not really. Really? Do you just get hammered and fucking plow through? Like, how do you deal with being in Libya in the moment of... It's not really scary until you see it in the edit room, you know. Like, it's just you're there. You know how it is. You fly in somewhere, and you're kind of amped, and then shit happens, and people start shooting and you're talking to dudes and they're going, and we're going to fucking kill those guys.

23:38And you're like, oh, just thinking like, what am I going to ask this dude next, you know? Right. And then like, get the shot of the shooting or whatever the fuck it is. Jesus Christ. And then you're just there and like, fuck it, we need to eat something. What are we going to eat? I've got the shits and I got to go, you know, and you're just, and then get the fuck out, go, go, go. And then you're just on a plane and then you just collapse because you're tired. And then when you actually watch it in the edit suite, you're like, oh, fuck. That was a bit hairy. Yeah, I was hanging out with a cannibal. Yeah. Well, actually, I was just in Siberia, and that was actually, it was really, we got really fucked up. And it's a long story, but I realized then, that was one, because Siberia is so big, it takes like two days to get anywhere.

24:21So when you're running, you have time to reflect on everything and why you're there and all this stuff. And we were running across Siberia in this sort of smuggler's route. And then I was a bit scared because I'm like, like the FSB were after us, who's now the KGB. The militia were after us. Like the local police were after us. And the North Korean sort of thugs were after us. Jesus Christ. Why were they all after you? So we broke this story. We're going to put it on my new HBO show. But so I went to North Korea twice. And then I did two documentaries in North Korea. And I had like 250 million video views or something. It was like a big internet thing, and we won a bunch of Webbys. So that was one of my big documentaries. So I've been fascinated with North Korea ever since. I watched the thing on North Korea. It was amazing. Thanks. But you never really get to talk to North Koreans, right?

25:12And so I'm like, I'd like to just fucking talk to these guys and see what the real deal is. Because everyone you talk to there is just like, Kim Jong-il is God, and Kim Il-sung is God, and everything's great, and we love it here. So we heard about these slave labor camps where Kim Jong-il is exporting his people to become slaves or he'll arrest them or taking concentration camps within North Korea. And he sends them to Siberia out in the middle of fucking nowhere. And they do like logging and mining and shit for 10 years for no pay. And then they pay Kim Jong-il and then Kim Jong-il, you know, supports his regime with that money. So he's selling slaves. Holy shit. Yeah, big story. Right. And so we went to Siberia and it's really hard to get there. I came in through China and then into Khabarovsk.

26:02And then I was just taking like train after train after train after train, like two day train after two day train after two day train. And then you finally get out in the middle of nowhere and it's all North Korea. Like they built it to look like North Korea. Siberia? In Siberia. Yeah. And so it's Russia. And so they but they have these like little North Korean towns with just North Korean writing. And some of the people, the North Koreans, they don't actually know that they're not in North Korea. What? They think they're in North Korea, but they're in Siberia. What? Yeah. So anyway. Holy shit. So we broke this story. No one else has done it yet, except for the guy who was with us, Simon Atrovsky, who did it in Russia. And he's freaking out because they're making – they're making so they do larch which goes to make like basically every desk or computer table in the world so everybody has this furniture

26:53Ikea or everywhere and it's all done by slaves oh my god North Korean slaves but you know we heard you could actually go talk to them you know because it's not in North Korea and they can't do anything to you know so if you can talk so they're just trapped by location there's no way to get out of there because there's no way to get out There's no way to get out, but they're trapped. Well, they have their own security and police. So you're not allowed to leave? No, no, you're not. You are an actual slave? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Holy shit. So we went there. What percentage do you think believe it's North Korea? You know, we talked to a bunch of people there when we finally talked to the North Koreans. and it was pretty interesting because you don't get to talk to them in North Korea. And there they were saying, we're here to work for the motherland and we're trying to increase our standard of living

27:51and we're trying to make things better in the country. We're trying to help the hunger, which is really interesting because they'll never say that in North Korea. Everything's perfect in North Korea. The rest of the world is fucked. And so they're actually saying North Korea is fucked. We're here to try to alleviate the suffering of our people. So now you've already got insight into the real people know that it's fucked. The real people know that, you know, there's no food. The real people. Whereas they don't say that. You never hear that anywhere else in North Korea. But anyways, I don't know the percentage. I mean, we talked to a few people who were like, you know, why are there sort of American imperialists here in our country? We're like, well, we're in Russia. You know, like, so. Wow. It was fucked up. Wow. But anyways, the Russians. So they were after you for one reason. Well, the Russians didn't.

28:35So we went to this place. We weren't supposed to go there. There's no cops up there. It's so far away. But there's some mob dudes. And so we met the mob dudes. And the mob dudes were taking us around. They were super nice. And they took us around so the North Koreans couldn't fuck with us too much because we were with the mob. And then so we get on the train to go back to sort of civilization. And all the North Koreans got on. And then when we got to the next sort of town, there was FSB, the XKGB, the militia, the local police, and then these thugs that the North Koreans worked with, and they all came after us. And, like, Simon Atrosky, I've got to say, that's a real hero because the FSB was like, you're coming with us. And Simon was like, no, I'm not. I'm not going anywhere. And he had these sort of Russian Federation sort of press credentials that he had made up for us.

29:21And he's going, the Ministry of Propaganda knows that we're here. We're totally allowed to be here. You're not allowed to do anything. You have to call the ministry in Moscow. And he was, like, really, you know, being tough with these guys. These guys are, like, bad boys. you know KGB types and so he wouldn't go anywhere with them so while they went to call and the FSB guys we said well we're going to go check into our hotel we went to go check into our hotel and then did a like we went behind the thing and jumped into another car that we had called so we jumped like did a running jump where we just chucked our shit into another car then the other car went out and then we met another car at the edge of town and went out but there's no real roads in Siberia it's only the the um the railway the trans-Siberian so we're like if we get on if we jump the train

30:01they're gonna know we're just gonna get us at the next stop so we had to drive in this jeep like across siberia with no roads like in through ruts and hunting tracks and shit holy shit to the chinese border how long did it take two days and we got to the chinese border there's this little known place called a cabros but i'll remember later but there's it's sort of half in russia half in china and in between there's an island and it's like a mega sort of trading sort of shitty mall thing where you can just buy like Chinese products and people go and trade and there's no real border. So we knew about that because we'd hang out with the mob and the mob told us that's how they smuggle shit. So we went to this little mall thing and you just walk in on one side, you're in Russia and walk out the other side and you're in China. And that's how we got

30:46out. Otherwise we would have been fucked. Did they talk about the machine when you were there? The mob? No. Inside joke. So yeah, we hung out with the mafia dudes and the mafia dudes were They're the guys who told us about the smugglers road to get out They're the guys who told us how to get across the border the guys who saved us from the North Koreans and from the FSB What is this smugglers route like is it like all just like yeah? Yeah, you know in 20 miles an hour the whole way. Yeah, yeah Like hunting tracks, and what about gas? They they carry it brought it all with yeah, that it's like Mad Max. They have a big fuel tanks in the back Yeah, it's fucking hardcore. It was wow. That's as hardcore journalism as journalism with cats yeah we and actually the piece it's funny because it took so long to get there that

31:34we're just on the train forever so we're just getting wasted on the train and it starts off really sort of stupid like i was saying heart of darkness it was like you know when you go into the congo as you go into siberia it just gets weirder and weirder and drunker and drunker and so dudes are just like literally blind drunk and like there's people doing murders on the train they have cops jesus christ no it's crazy like it's so and you can see it like you see it on the on the footage. I don't know where we have any. Did we bring that footage? Yeah, I got the footage right here. Oh, fuck. Yeah, pull some of that shit up. I got to see this. And is this the stuff that's going to be in the HBO show? Yeah. Which one should I play first, you know, or just... I don't know. I don't know anything. Play Siberia, if they have it. Oh, wow. You guys are like super tech. It's him, not me. Wow.

32:24This is like the road warrior of love. Which one was it? I love it here. I'm not I don't want to do we can't read that see are they labeled yeah it says this is North Korea well that's North Korea well we can show North Korea North Korea's fuck well let's see the Siberian one because that's what we were just talking about right now labor games Korea doesn't say Siberia. It says port bombing, rebels. What would it be labeled as? Nokia. No-co. No-co? No-co. No-co slave camps? Yeah. Bombing, Liberia. There's Billy the Fish. We finally found our North Koreans deep in the bush and were busy talking to them when things started to get a bit hairy. These guys are coming back here. The dude with the crowbar is coming back. He says, what is that, your off switch? He says, I use it for fixing tractors. I like the fish more and more. He took the crowbar from him and said, what is that, your off switch?

33:47that dude was a bomb came back now they're giving mr kim shit and they're quite angry so that's just when we had first met the north koreans and they end up surrounding us there and we can't leave and then the fish takes out his shotgun the fish was the most awesome dude ever he's he's like the local mafia dude just with all gold teeth and like a adidas track suit and he's just like this is russia you can't fuck with me oh there's another one I don't know what that one is. Japan. Dipkun. Russia. This is, yeah, China. Going into the middle of the forest, this is a logging camp run by North Koreans. You can see there's a North Korean flag and North Korean propaganda in here. There's some North Koreans waving at us over there. All this wood is going to England. When we get off this train, we're going to go out into the camps where they actually log out in the middle of Siberia.

34:45holy this is like four hour four hours four days from anything and all of a sudden you just got trees trees trees trees trees trees trees north korea north korea camp north korea camp north korea camp and then when we got off they were really not happy to see us they were how did you find out about all this this dude simon is you know he's a russian journalist and he had heard that russians couldn't get jobs in in the far east because of slaves and where he's like what so he went out and checked it out but no one had really ever done the story except for him and he just did it on a um on a on a on a small program there and then he he didn't go as deep as we went he didn't so he wanted to go back and and of course he didn't go as deep as you went who the would yeah and so and so we went and and uh it was fucked up like north korean slaves in siberia

35:33it was it was a messed up messed up uh trip why isn't heraldo rivera covered this where are you Geraldo I don't think anyone cares they're like okay but they should care just because it's so crazy I mean it's just pretty crazy oh so the reason why so we get to the Chinese border and we're like finally we got out and we and and right when we were there so we were in the Amur region the far eastern Amur region and Kim Jong-il who hasn't left North Korea in like seven years met Medvedev in in the Amur region so right when we were there Kim Jong-il was in the same region to talk about new labor and trade agreements, which means more fucking slaves. So that's why they were so freaked out is because obviously Russia doesn't, they think, oh, we're Europe, we're smart, we're like everybody else. They don't want people to know that they have North Korean slaves. So they were trying to shut it down.

36:26And meanwhile, we were there right when Kim Jong-un was there. We didn't know it until we got into China. It was crazy. Wow, imagine if they had caught you there. It would have been bad. Fuck. Do you worry about that when you're doing these sort of stories? I mean, is that in the back of your head or you just go, go, go? I think that, you know, people always say, like, what's the scariest place you've ever been to? And it's funny because I think that in places like Russia or Iran or even Afghanistan, places like that, if you're going to get caught, they're going to, you're going to go to, like, jail and it'll be unpleasant. But somebody's going to make some deal to get you out. Somebody's going to sort of, you know, do a trade or put pressure on or do whatever to get you out. whereas if you go to like Mexico, you know, and you're doing some narco shit, they'll just kill you like, fuck it.

37:12If there's any question mark at all, just kill them, you know. Like, you know, when I did narco cinema and I just come out of Iraq, you know, there's 50,000 narco-related killings a year in Mexico and you're just like, that's way more than Iraq. Yeah. Like, so when you start to do, one of the stories we want to do now is fundamentalist Mormons from America went down there when they were sort of forced to give up polygamy. And so they... They went down to Mexico? Mexico, yeah. Well, Mitt Romney's grandfather was one of them. Oh, my God. Somebody get that to someone in a debate. Yeah, exactly. So he went down there. So they have these militias and shit, right? And now what's happened, because they're fairly wealthy, the cartels have started kidnapping them right so there's a war going on between the cartels and the mormon polygamist extremist militias right the americans holy shit so they have like american

38:13colonies of mormons down there correct how many how many people well that's so that's the thing there's like there's a few of them they're quite big colonies but you know that's you know we don't know exact numbers but somewhere around 20,000 30,000 can I grab one of those 20 or 30,000 I shouldn't I don't know the exact numbers of where we're supposed to go down and wow talk but so anyways so they've like basically started their own little mini civilization yeah exactly so when but when you're when you're when you're in Mexico like two two stories like you know everyone's like oh you know Iraq is scary and you're like actually Jamaica was scary because when I went down to Jamaica, I went down and I met Dudas, who ran the shower posse. He was one of the biggest drug dealers in America. In fact, America was going to call out all Jamaica's loans and bankrupt the country unless they gave them Dudas.

39:07But Dudas was like the most powerful man in the country, so they didn't want to give him up. So it was like raging gun battles in Kingston and shit. So I interviewed him, but then there was this war between Movado, is a dance hall guy in Vibes Cartel and Gullah and Gaza crew. And they were fighting each other and Dudas had this like peace concert and shit. But anyways, they used to have this party called Pasa Pasa in Kingston. And it's in Tivoli. And it was run by Dudas, this Coke, the biggest Coke dealer. And when you go down there, on every street corner, there's dudes with AK-47s. And you're like a pork ball. You're like, what the fuck are you doing here? This isn't for you to be here. and meanwhile like America's trying to extradite their god Dudas and so I was down there and and and I was with some dance hall guys and they were like

39:53speeding through and they wouldn't stop at red lights I'm like what are you doing like damn a lot of gunshot down here you know like like people were just getting shot and like like super violent and by the way if they killed you it wouldn't be a bad thing they'd be like good fucking you know you killed the guy he shouldn't be here so you know Jamaica Mexico for sure when you're doing anything with narco because they'll just kill you just for being there why the fuck are you here and then the favelas in brazil because the same thing they're just like why the fuck are you here there's no reason for you to be here you know yeah that's amazing man now when you go and you do these uh these mexico trips do you do you have like someone who guides you and keeps you safe like how do you uh because i told we had anthony bourdain on he said one of the things you got to

40:37get a local guy when you go to these crazy spots you get a local guy who's like you know a handler and that guy takes care of everything you tell and you pay him. Do you guys do that? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, you definitely have to have local guys. I don't believe in security or definitely not like, you know, for sure not like Western bodyguards or like pilgrims or any of those. Big, obvious, visible, big guys. Talking into their wrists and shit. That's just stupid because they're just going to. Attract attention. What the fuck is going on here? Let's get them, you know. But definitely you need local fixers. In Mexico, we have 34 offices around the world. So we have our own guys, local guys, pretty much everywhere. And then you have local fixers who know the terrain, know the language, know what's going on and how to get you out of shit. And you guys started this, you were doing a magazine called Voice? Yeah.

41:27And then you took it over and took the O out and just called it Vice? Yeah, it was called Voice of Montreal. all and it was a it was sort of a welfare project in Canada run by Haitians and they were doing a Black History Month thing and they figured they could get more money out of the government by doing an English language cultural publication and so we were all working there I wanted to be a writer so I was like I finally got a job and meanwhile Quebec was trying to separate from the rest of Canada so like English language publications became illegal so like you know no audience and uh so anyway eventually they couldn't pay us our wages and stuff so we said okay well we own it now so we dropped the o and just called advice and like everyone's like what a great name how'd you think it up how'd you think it up we're like we just dropped the o you know and it's a perfect

42:21story yeah and then we we moved to the states and then we then we started expanding now we're in 34 four countries. And where are you guys based out of? You're based out of New York? New York and London are two hubs. Our biggest office next year is going to be in China. And how long have you been doing this? 16 years. Holy shit. Yeah, I'm old, man. Goddamn. And now it's music. You even have a clothing line and everything now. It's like a huge... Yeah, we have a record label and films and TV and mag and online and all our different verticals and events. That's awesome. And was this a plan from the very beginning to branch off in all these different directions or it just sort of naturally happened? Yeah, no, we never had a business plan. We never knew anything. We never thought about it really. What happened was we wanted the outlawed English basically in Quebec, so we went national in Canada.

43:11We're the biggest magazine in Canada, but that was like being the biggest magazine in Reykjavik or something. We're the number one podcast in Canada. Really? Hey, Canada. All right. Love Canada. Canada's good. I love Canada. I'm going to swear I'm going to move if shit gets bad. Yeah, Vancouver. I came real close in 2004. I was looking at space in Vancouver. Really? Yeah. I was thinking about it. I wouldn't go to, you got to go to the, because it's going to get real bad. You got to get to like one, north of where I grew up in Ottawa, there's like a million lakes. You can just buy a lake for like a hundred bucks. You got to buy a lake and, you know, build a cabin on the lake because when shit gets bad, you got to get far away from the cities. When shit gets that bad though, you might want to just die. Yeah. You want to live like in Liberia, you know? I don't want to. I don't want to live like that.

43:56I'd rather take a bullet. I'd rather take a bullet than live like that. A stump. OD on Flintstone. Yeah. I don't think you can, Brian. Yeah, you can. I think that's a rumor. So you guys started now. How did you get started from going from a magazine to these incredible, in-depth, on-scene investigative pieces that you're doing? What was the first one? Heavy Metal in Baghdad. So, for about a decade, we were kind of a style mag, so we were really just interested in cocaine and supermodels and denim. Denim. But why? These jeans are weird. And it was because it was fun. It was a lot of fun, and we were kids. And then when we started expanding around the world, we're like, oh, this shit is fucked up. Like, holy fuck, have you seen this? And we'd write about it and people were like, I've never heard about that. What the fuck's going on? We're like, yeah, it's crazy.

44:58So that happened as well as the sort of failure of mainstream media during the Iraq war with everyone saying like weapons of mass destruction, just lying, and they knew that there was no weapons of mass destruction and all this shit. and so we did a thing where we went to we snuck into Iraq and we went to hang out with the only heavy metal band in Baghdad across the Cauda and it was supposed to be like a seven minute piece it was the first piece we launched VBS with and you know eventually we shot them over three years and we turned into a feature film that won Critics Joyce in Toronto it won best documentary in Berlin film festival like it got picked up by the bbc by ken al plus well you know friend eddie raves about it eddie bravo raves about that movie and so everyone's like you know oh that's like news

45:51you know we're like we're following a band but you saw the whole thing unfold like how everything was up and people could relate to it because like oh i'm in a band and then their band gets their uh practice space gets bombed by a scud missile and you know they they're gonna be killed because they wear like iron maiden t-shirts or like they head bang which is seen as jewish so they're or they'll cut your head off and shit. And so that was the first thing, and it was so successful, and we loved doing it, that we started saying, well, why don't we, the whole, everyone's like, what's been your demo and what's your business plan and all this shit? We're just like, we have none. All we do is stories that we like. So if there's a story like General Butt Naked and the Tupac Army, that's a fucking jaw dropper. We're going to go shoot that, you know? And so we started shooting it, and people were like,

46:35I've never heard anything like this. What the fuck? And so more and more and more people started watching and we started doing it more and more. If I have any criticism, it's that sometimes it's hard to find shit. Like you have a bunch of different shows on Vice.com. There's so many different ones. Like I was trying to find Hindmo's Adventure, the dude who lives up in the Arctic, who lives in like East Alaska, and I couldn't find it. I had to Google it and then find it through Google. Yeah, we suck. We're only good at... I couldn't find it on your website. It's not on Netflix anymore either. We're only good at one thing. We're good at making content. We're not good at anything else. Yeah, but someone should be good at doing that for you. Well, this dude here, look at this fucking thing. Yeah, this is the master. We need to steal him and have him come over. He's not going to the Congo, bro. Trust me.

47:20You don't want anybody crying in your lap. No, I would be the crier. You could throw me out, though, first, so I'd be eating first, I guess. He would definitely be eating first. He's fleshy, and he won't even run. No, I'll cry. He's like a rabbit with epilepsy. He'll just fall and start shaking in a little soft, fluffy bundle. I'd probably survive, though. They were like, oh, I'm not going to eat that. You'd come back with abs, hardened, doing chin-ups in the jungle. It would totally change your life. Well, the most hugely strong dudes I've ever seen in my life, actually, were in Liberia because they don't have water. So they do this thing where they go way out into the outskirts in the jungle, and they fill up these two-ton wooden carts with water. And one guy pushes, and one guy pulls two or three. And they just up and down these hills all day long. They don't eat anything.

48:05And they just push, like, two tons up a hill, two tons down a hill. Oh, my God. And they're just fucking massive. It's like Conan. He pushed the wheel for 10 years. Well, that's what he's going to do. It's just fucking massive, dude. Wow. Anyway. What a fucking insane place on earth that is. Yeah. I just can't. I'll never be able to get over the fact that that exists right while this exists. And we could be. No one wants to put their head there, but you could have been born there, man. That could have been your shitty roll of the dice. You could have been shit out in the bottom of a hut in the middle of Liberia. just as easily as you could have in Montreal fuck so you start out you do this Baghdad thing and then how does it branch out into what you have now because now you guys have you know I mean Thailand and Liberia and I saw the Chernobyl thing that was fucking nuts man did you worry about that I mean you're

48:56you're there in some serious fucking radiation yeah I was drunk that whole trip because does the drug does the alcohol supposedly protect you from radiation Two things I heard. God knows if they're true, but I heard them, so I believe them as fact. One, that the doctors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived because they got so bummed out by skin falling off and shit that they would get wasted, and alcohol is a diuretic, so it forces you to piss. It flushes out the radiation in your system, right? And also the firemen in Chernobyl lived because they would get drunk every night. and so when we were there they actually said take your medicine and it was like brandy you know so we were just drinking this like homemade brandy the whole time we were there and i was loaded uh and we were like laughing you know with the geiger counter as it goes up like 1500 you know

49:52and you're just like oh my god you know and you're just like you know 1500 1500 1600 you know and meanwhile just because you're drunk and then when you go back they have like a geiger counter to test your shoes and they're just like you know straight to red so i just sort of threw everything out you know bought like a silver silver ukrainian suit and you know what's a normal level what's like a healthy level i think it's like 0.25 millirengans is is is hot and and we were at like 1500 oh my god have you had any side effects you've been going to the doctor like like regularly like Are you freaking out about it at all? I do not go to the doctor. Pour some wine on your feet. I'm Irish, so I'm just like, have a whiskey and you'll be fine. But I was just in Japan, actually. And what's going down there, you want to talk about Mad Max, that's fucking crazy shit. And we're actually going to go back and shit.

50:49We were doing the preliminary thing there. And the actual reactors, the steel, the containment of the reactors is now melting into the sort of groundwater and melting into the soil. And there's like major cities there of like 500,000 people that are completely fucking irradiated. And they're not telling people the truth and the kids know that it's wrong. They're really frustrated and they're really angry. And the government's just like denying shit. And both Chernobyl and in Japan, I was shocked because everyone, because, you know, energy, people are going, oh, nuclear power, nuclear power, you know, it's the future, it's great and whatever. You just go there and you go, if it fucks up even this much, if it fucks up just a tiny bit, like, you know, in the Ukraine, an area the size of France is still completely irradiated, you know, and you're just like, well, I mean, what the, like, how is this even a fucking option?

51:43Yeah. How is it a possibility that you could have one mistake or a natural disaster like a tsunami? You know, the fact that they only, they only planned for what was an 8.2 or something like that. That's as bad as it could get and they got a nine. They just wrecked everything. And then the power goes out and they can't cool everything off. And then they're pouring ocean water on it. And that water is now back in the ocean. There's an online presentation that shows the irradiated water and how it's moving through the Pacific Ocean. It's fucking terrifying. Yeah. It's beyond terrifying. And what's happening in Japan now is, I mean, it just shows you, like, well, what can they do? How are they going to evacuate a million people? Where the fuck are they going to evacuate them to? And how big is Japan? Like, what is the total size of it? Is it possible that the entire Japanese island will get irradiated?

52:33Well, no, because it's, now I'm going to show myself up here for being a bad boy, but I think it's like seven major islands. So, you know, there's, you know, Sapporo's on the north one, and so they have different islands, but it is definitely, it's sort of this area that's about an hour and a half, two hours north of Tokyo, but it's actually sort of heavily populated around there. Two hours drive? Yeah. So, and that's, you could be that close to a horrible nuclear disaster like that? Two hours drive? Yeah. That doesn't seem safe. Well, there's, like, you know, Japan, when we first started having our office there, it was like, you know, the future. It was like, you know, wow, they're way ahead of us and technology and, you know, everything else. and now when you go there you know there's no air conditioning so it's everybody's really hot and

53:24the the lights are at like half light and you know even stupid shit like we were at karaoke and like the it'll just go and slow down because the the power's all fucked up and it's it feels kind of like a ghost town lots of people have left creepy and it yeah it's like oh it's gone beyond future it's gone to like it was the future and now it's like post future and if If that's the post-future, then we should drink a lot today because it's going to not be pleasant. It's going to be Akira. I'm going there for the first time in February for the UFC. Are you really? Yeah. I flew over with a bunch of wrestlers. I was just there two days ago or three days ago. And there was just a bunch of huge, huge fucking wrestlers. Those boys are big. The wrestling dudes. Not the UFC dudes. I'm just drawing in a picture. Japanese wrestlers? No, they were like WWE dudes. Oh, yeah, yeah.

54:15Well, most of those guys were real wrestlers originally. Really? A lot of them were, at least. You know, but there's no real outlet for amateur wrestlers if they want to go into professional sports except for MMA. Well, not MMA. But MMA to me seems like, you know, real fighting, the ultimate fighting. It's a big difference. Wrestling, it doesn't seem to me to be real. Well, the real amateur wrestling is a great sport, but unfortunately it never got popular enough to be a professional sport. They've tried it a bunch of times. There's a lot of wrestlers in MMA. But the actual sport of real, yeah. Because you can learn striking, but it's hard to learn the wrestling part. Well, it's a great base. And it's also, those guys are tough as shit. If you go through wrestling practice, wrestling practice, I only wrestled one year in high school, and it was one of the toughest things athletically I ever did.

54:56The practices are absolutely brutal. Yeah. You know, especially if you have. You're a very strong guy. It's just a grueling kind of a workout, and they're mentally tough because of it. I went and hung out with a bunch of jujitsu guys with Daniel Gracie. Oh, yeah? In Brazil. In Rio? Well, Rio, and yes, Rio. And we went to the favelas to where they train by running barefoot up mountains and beating the shit out of tractor tires. And they have full contact training where they knock each other out in practice and shit. He took me all around, and those dudes are tough. I don't know how anyone can beat a Brazilian because they're a fucking tough motherfucker. Well, there's a lot of Brazilian champions now. One of the ultimate fighters this last season that happened last weekend, this past weekend. One of them was a Brazilian kid. We've got three Brazilian champions now, and who knows how many more.

55:48Yeah, we were doing the Vale Tudo stuff, which is anything goes. No weight class, no age, no gender. So you guys covered that stuff? Yeah. They usually have weight classes in Vale Tudo fights, but you guys will fight bigger guys. Well, we were going to the Vale Tudo, like the full-on anything goes Vale Tudo stuff. what's interesting is that's how the Gracie started is they would fight anybody from any style, any weight class, anything and they would have a $100,000 prize if you could beat a Gracie and that's how the whole sort of Valle Tudor thing started in that MMA. Yeah, it's really fascinating when you find out that Jiu Jitsu really was started by two guys. I mean, it wasn't started by two guys. It was judo in Japan and Japanese jiu-jitsu. And submission wrestling has been existing in many forms for a long time. But Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the really technical version of Brazilian jiu-jitsu,

56:47was really started by Elio Gracie and Carlos Gracie, two bad motherfuckers from this one family in Brazil that created an army of super killers. Yeah, Daniel Gracie was three-time world jiu-jitsu champion. And so he's more of a jiu-jitsu guy. Yeah. He's a big, big motherfucker. Jiu-jitsu is a much safer way to compete. You know, when you start getting involved with head trauma, that's when things get sketchy. Yeah. You know, the returns aren't the same, you know. Yeah. And you're going to lose. Everyone's going to lose. But if you lose in a jiu-jitsu tournament, you know, occasionally your arm popped. You could even, you know, have to have a surgery on a knee or something like that. But if you lose in an MMA fight, that's a completely different animal. Yeah, yeah. It's a hard world. It is. So Mayhem lost that last fight? Yep. Yeah, he got beat up. He gassed. I don't know what happened.

57:43It could have been that he hadn't fought in a long time. It could have been that it was a giant adrenaline dump. But he got tired really quickly. And Michael Bisping fought a real good fight. And Michael Bisping looked better than he's ever looked before. And he beat the shit out of Jason, especially standing up. Wow. Standing up, he really just boxed his face in. Have you talked to him since then? No, I'm going to let him chill out. I know Jason is a big, disappointing loss for a guy like him, so I'm just going to let him just relax. Maybe he'll come back on the podcast once he's going to be bummed out for a while, but he'll be back. The thing about fighting is a lot of it is psychological. A lot of it is just being able to perform in the moment, and a lot of people are dwarfed by that moment. They just tense up, and their adrenaline gets to them, and they get nervous, and they just can't do it.

58:34Well, it's also like fighting when you're used to winning. You're just like, I'm always going to win. Yeah. And then when someone beats you down, you're like, what? Like, look at George Foreman. Like, he was the baddest man on the planet. And then after he got beat, he's just like, okay, I'm done. That's it. Like, forget it. Yeah, Ali beat him, and then he came back, and he fought someone else. He fought one other guy and had like this crazy rock-up-sock-up robots fight. And then he took, yeah, well, they both got knocked down like three times each. And then he's like, fuck this. And then he became a preacher. And then big and fat at 36 years. And then came back. Decides to make a comeback. Really fat, too. Everybody thought it was a joke. I like that style of boxing, too. He looked like a weeble, you know, where he had his left right out. And he'd just sort of rock back and forth.

59:23And he was just waiting for that right hand to come out. The thing is, when it came, it was like you were hit by a telephone pole. It was like somebody thrusted a telephone pole on you. Donk. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So when you were in Thailand, did you get to go and check out any of the Muay Thai fights? I did, actually. I interviewed the beautiful boxer. Do you know about her? Is that the she-male? Yeah. She used to be a guy? Used to be a guy, became a she-male, and then became the champion Muay Thai boxer for her weight class. and she used to do this. Her signature move was she'd run up your legs, the knee in the face. So, you know, in the classic Muay Thai, they sort of plant, and she would do this thing where she'd run up your legs and kick you in the face. Was she fighting men? Men, men, only men, yeah. And then when the men would go down, she'd kiss them on the lips as a fuck you

60:16because they didn't want her to fight and stuff. She had a big target on her back. And was she post-op? Oh, I don't fucking know. What did it feel like? I think the story is, see, the story is there was one of these women that was a fucking killer until she got the surgery. And then essentially they take your balls away. And when they take your balls away, you no longer have testosterone. She lost her muscle tone. And, you know, she essentially became a real girl. And she was fighting guys. And they were kicking her in the fucking head all of a sudden. Yeah. She became champion. I don't think she was a celebrity. I don't think she was really fighting that much anymore. She might have had the operation. Isn't it funny? They have to call her she I get them all confused because there was a lot of them I was in a minute I Was I was surrounded by females for a time of my life in Thailand Wow

61:10So when when she originally started fighting she was fighting men But then after she got the operation even though she's you're calling her a she she's still fighting men Yeah, what the fuck is that what I mean? we think that that's like the whole point of getting the operation you're a woman she you know she she started getting into muay thai because she was uh getting picked on for being you know uh a female and then uh so she you know she she wanted to beat the shit out of everybody and she did and but i think by the time by the time i met her i think she was probably maybe i i i asked the question so I but I don't remember the answer but I think she was she was post op but she had just had the operation but she wasn't fighting anymore she got the money she got the money to do it through fighting Wow so she financed her surgery her transgender surgery sexual reassignment surgery yeah through

62:04kicking people kicking people's asses and tough those guys are tough as fucking hell fuck yeah that's one of the most brutal martial arts in the world and and they start really, really young. That's a strange thing to cover just in and of itself. I have a friend who went over there, and he was over there for a long time, like several, several months just training in Muay Thai. Sam Shepard, he wrote a book about it. Not the Sam Shepard. No, no, a different one. Different guy. An MMA author. All right, right. Who's the Sam Shepard? He's like a famous writer, playwright, you know. No, I better not be saying this guy's wrong last name because I'm drunk. I'm going to get another drink. It's right there, buddy. So when you were in Thailand, tell me, is there a reason? Do they have some sort of a rationalization for why there are so many ladyboys there?

63:00What causes one place to have such an exorbitant amount of men that dress like women? Sam Sheridan. Sam Sheridan. You dumb motherfucker. You dumb as fuck, dude. I asked that a lot why there's so many ladyboys there and they were like well you know we're very feminine and it's Buddhist so it's not frowned upon and I'm like yeah but even if it wasn't frowned upon in other places they have like 100% more ladyboys than anywhere yeah what is that I don't know there's no no one has a reason I don't know it's weird and they look the best looking ladyboys the most authentic there's this one town the most authentic well German look ladyboys are just so sad If you want an authentic ladyboy, go to Thailand. Yeah, I mean, if you see like a German, you know, a fucking Austrian ladyboy. Or American. Yeah. American are the worst. Big, huge fucking football players. Yeah, they want to suck a cock. You're like. Wish they were a girl.

63:53That's a strange thing, man, because it's not gay and it's not straight. It's like you're doing. There are women in men's bodies. What the fuck is going on? They want to be free. Some of them don't even. They just get off on dressing like women. Sure. You know, Oscar de la Hoya, that's his king. Likes to dress like a woman. Really? Yeah, Jimmy Hoffa. He actually admitted to it. Hoffa. No. Who's the guy? Sam Shepard. J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover. That was De La Hoya, like, kept it a secret forever and paid the girl off and sued everybody who tried to say anything differently. Well, that's probably why he's such a good boxer. He knows how to avoid duck haymakers. That ain't me in the girl's underwear. Apparently, he's just got a kink. He just likes dressing up like a girl, but he fucks these girls. So it's like, hmm. Okay. I don't know what that's all about. I mean, you're entitled to it. I don't even know.

64:45Everyone is always like, didn't you fuck them? Did you fuck them? And I'm like, you understand that there's like two good dudes with cameras and lighting rigs and shit. Yeah. It's like we're there to shoot something. I don't even know why we were there. We were shooting. Shemales are always a good story, A. But B, I think we were shooting Beautiful Boxer. and we're like, oh, you know, an hour and a half south of Bangkok, there's Pattaya, which is the shemale capital of the world. It's like, and it became big because all the dudes from Vietnam would go there on R&R, and so they would all fuck shemales. And now. Jesus Christ. Well, now, like, whatever, the Seventh Fleet or whatever the fuck it is, comes in there, and they all have their R&R, and it's all shemales. So we heard that there was this place where there's, like, this shemale beauty pageant, and then they have, like,

65:31a shooting range downstairs where you can shoot machine guns and shit so we're like okay we can go get like 10 you know she-males dressed up like marilyn monroe and shoot machine guns with them we have to do that so we did that and then and then and then we decided to interview them and by then i had a few ales so they're like get in a hot tub and i'm like okay yeah well that's what was the craziest shit when you were that's one of the first things i ever saw you do you're in this hot tub with these lady boys i'm like who is this wild motherfucker he doesn't that's not so wild that's pretty wild dude i like i'd like to have a bath yeah you were smiling with them and laughing and having a good time and yeah i wonder why people asked you if you fucked them because it seemed like you fucked them so if i had to guess he'd be like yeah man i i have a friend who's a

66:17comic and he uh was uh doing this show with a a lady boy and she was really hot she offered to blow him he's like all right and i'm like dude you got blown by a guy he goes maybe yeah but i never i never saw a dick i'm not really sure to me a hot chick blew me and it was awesome yeah well there was a while there that i was interested i was interested in in weird shit and there was a i did a piece on uh the in japan they they grow up masturbating to cartoons you You know, like the porn is cartoon. Yeah, tentacle, baby. What is that about? I don't know. It's hot. Have you seen their – they have really good artists there. It's pretty good. But they grow up like – cartoons are like porn, right? So now they have these brothels, like whorehouses, right? But they're dolls, real dolls, so like 20 grand, 30 grand. But they're like cartoon characters, so you can fuck a cartoon, right?

67:12and so I did this thing where I went and I'm like oh that's crazy Japanese people are crazy so I went to these ghetto doll brothels I went to these these brothels where you dress them you dress them up and then you and then you fuck them and so I shot the whole thing and it was just a stupid little funny piece like oh Japanese people are crazy and it was so it got picked up so much like it was like huge and so I did a follow-up where they actually will deliver dolls to your house so you you you you go online and you you say i want them to look like this cartoon character i want them to look like a school girl i want them to look whatever you want to look like and then they they bring the dolls to your house and then you spend like a weekend with them like having a party you know sounds amazing drinking doing whatever i would do that in a

68:00second and so i so i did it so i filmed it you know and um and uh again like it was just hugely popular and then I met this dude so I was you know the guy Gaspar Noe you know that director no he did a film called irreversible you know that film yeah yeah it's got like the most you know anyway it's a he's a shocking director like I saw that film and I was like that's the most fucked up thing I've ever seen in my life like really fucking heavy heaviest for you to say that you got to watch it it's insane irreversible irreversible so he was shooting his his next film called enter the void in a place called uh kabuki cho which is run by the mafia and kabuki like you know the japanese opera shit well kabuki cho now is just like orgy houses sex houses s&m houses what is enter the void is that the voice when i talked about the dmt and then irreversible

68:53was his first one which was i think better than enter the void irreversible is like so like it's amazing the most creative thing about enter the void was the way it was shot yeah you know when So he actually had cameras in Kabukicho just like hanging from light, and they would spin, and he would just let them run, and he wouldn't even be on the set. He'd be like in a bar like four blocks away, and he had to pay off the yakas and stuff. So I ended up doing sort of the making of it. I followed him for a while because it was like my friend Harmony Corrine, who does, you know, he's a filmmaker. He did like Gomo, and he wrote Kids. He's like, you want to talk about, because I was doing a film show at the time for FC, and he was like, you want to talk about the craziest film shit ever? You got to go to Tokyo and see Gaspar Noé because he's paid off the mafia

69:37and he's just got these fucking cameras swirling on bungee cords and shit and everyone's fucking everybody else. So I went there and I met these directors through him that do this thing called Genki, which means good or clean. And it's a porn, it's kind of porn where they fuck food. so for example they'll get a fish to felch like milk out of a girl's ass and then they eat the fish or they'll fuck eels or like they'll fuck like that's like when you see the videos of girls with eels up their asses and there was one where like a mud skipper came out have you ever seen a mud skipper mud skipper is like this it looks like an alien it's kind of like this translucent thing with big black eyes that sort of see through with red veins and you're just like that No way is anyone putting that up my ass. That's like an alien motherfucker. And so they're doing all this crazy eel porn and octopus porn and fish felching.

70:39And you're just like, this is the most fucked up shit I've ever seen in my life. And they're like, I know it's called ginky. You're just like, Jesus. I thought the fucking cartoon dolls were bad, but shoving mud skippers up. Has all this traveling and all this crazy shit that you've seen, has this given you any unusual insight to human nature? Because I've got to think, you've seen some shit. You have a much different perspective on the human race. If you were a scientist and you were an objective scientist, you were studying Earth, you would have a much different view of human beings than the average person. well you know i think that uh you know this is i wish i could have a better analogy to make myself look better but there is this there is definitely a sort of good and evil there is a sort of yin and yang that's what i was embarrassed of saying but really like in liberia for example

71:39you have these guys who grow up like killing and eating people on the other side of it there's just churches everywhere like churches and fucking every car has got a you know believe in christ you know bumper sticker or whatever and so there's like these people just super good and like trying to be good and you know and then other people are just like the worst like the worst people on earth and so there's there's definitely a good and evil vibe and we have tremendous capacity for good but we also have tremendous capacity for evil like people do some fucked up shit like bad stuff like eating a baby's heart it doesn't get worse than that but you know people do really bad stuff and and you know you know when they want to send a message or just cut his arm off or you know there were aids brigades in africa where they you know they would have whole brigades

72:26of people with aids and then they would go and then intentionally infect other people because they wanted to effectively have uh genocide and you're sitting there going this is what human beings are capable of we are we are really bad like we're the worst also i think when you go to a lot of places you're like we're just destroying like we're literally the stupidest race or not race a species because we're destroying what we live in you know don't shit where you eat well we're we're like having projectile fucking diarrhea where we everywhere the ocean yeah rainforests just killing everything everything we kind of have the midas touch we kill it and we make money at the same time and then it's dead and so you know every time we go anywhere now it It gets, everyone asks us our politics. And I say, look, it's just the absurdity of the modern condition. It's just fucking insane. Like I was in China.

73:20They had a two and a half week traffic jam, right? And every year they have to sell 3% more cars just to break even. And you're in a two and a half week traffic jam. Two and a half weeks. Yeah, it went from Mongolia to Beijing. It was a famous thing. It created a whole micro economy. And there were people going out there selling food and clothes and shit to people. How fast are you going on this road? Well, you're not. At all? Yeah. You're not moving at all? It was literally a two-and-a-half-week traffic jam. Stop dead? Stop dead. Wow. What the fuck? And so you're like, well, how many fucking cars do we need? And, you know, you've been around. You go to Brazil. You can't go. I was in Tehran, which I don't know why. I didn't think it was a real car place. But, you know, you'd go out. You'd sit in traffic for three hours. And you'd just go home because you couldn't get there.

74:07so you're like well it's ceased to work yet we're still fucking making more and more and more and more and so I think you know when you go to Japan and everyone you know is getting cooked on the inside and no one's admitting it when you go to you know Russia where the mob is running everything and there's North Korean slaves and you go to you know Africa which you know they're having war over every single mineral or anything that they can find they're going to kill somebody else about and it you just start to say okay i mean we're we're literally hovering on this sort of edge of of it's funny because i'm a real sort of optimistic guy and lately i've been sort of saying to people we should get a bolt hole so i was talking to you before we was like we should get a bolt hole we should you know get that lake in canada and get up there where there's fresh water

74:58because sometimes i was in south africa and i was flying back uh in the plane and i watched Collapse. Did you ever see that movie? Yeah. I watched Collapse and, okay, the guy's a bit of a fruitcake or whatever, but I was watching and I was going, shit. You know, because what I just saw in South Africa, too, had freaked me out so much. South Africa's a fucked up place. What's fucked up about South Africa? You know, it's the most... When you say South Africa is a fucked up place, after you just got done talking about Liberia. Well, South Africa because it's the richest country in Africa and it's always heralded as sort of, you know, the Look at what's happening. It's so good and so great whatever and we actually went down to shoot there and You know, it's Incredibly corrupt you know the police Captains are always being arrested, but basically it's completely

75:54Incredibly racist incredibly segregated people living behind barbed wire and electric fences you know there's a famous book called Disgrace which won I don't know the Nobel Prize or the Booker Prize about a guy from Cape Town a professor who gets who gets disgraced by fucking one of his students and goes out into the townships and they end up getting their farm taken over and his daughter gets raped and he gets set on fire and all this shit and you know I was reading that before going there and I was like well that's just crazy shit doesn't happen and when you're there you're like oh that happens every fucking day like it's full fucking on and so as we were shooting we were shooting the africans neighborhoods and the africans are fighting you know the colors who are the mixed races who are fighting the blacks who are fighting the whites and then the whites are just sort of in their compounds

76:50electric wire and security and machine guns and you're just like holy fuck dude i'm like Why don't you go to Australia? Why wouldn't you just get the fuck out? So they choose to stay for what reason? Well, they're African. They're like, we're African. We've been here, you know. Since the Dutch settled. Exactly. When was that? What year was that? In the 1600s. And, you know, the Bantu, there was the Bantu migration and the Zulu migration. And they both sort of happened relatively late because South Africa is sort of hard to get to from the rest of the continent. And then so the Dutch got there, you know, a bit after, like 400 years or something. now don't everyone say that i'm not i don't know the actual exact times but it was but so they've been there a long time and and uh but there's definitely a strategy of sort of you know and

77:36intimidation and there's a lot of there's a lot of institutionalized rape like there and and whenever you see that like when you're like rapes when rape is part of the equation and home takeovers and all this shit i'm out like you know that's that's it's just like not on so um this the the crime rate in south africa is just ridiculous compared to the rest of the world well it's just another example of africa africa just as a whole is pretty crazy yeah i mean it's crazy but it's the craziest spot on earth right south africa you're sort of like well south africa is like i always thought of it as sort of you know canada right in africa you know because it's just sort of you know it's rich or richer and you know it has these sort of you modern cities and you know you know just sort of you know and i grew up in the area of i'm not

78:25going to play sun city and you know right right right apartheid and all that shit which i agree uh with uh fuck apartheid and all that stuff it just now when you go there it's so segregated and so there's so much hatred and so much fucking violence and crazy shit going on every day and people driving in mad max electrified cars with machine guns and living behind electric fences and shit. And you're like, fuck, is this where it's headed? Because this is the whole thing about Occupy Wall Street. If you get to have too much discrepancy with money, so these people have tons of money, and they're living behind barbed wire, electric wire compounds with security guards and machine guns, and the other dudes are out fucking eating rats and smileys and whatever, then you're like, okay, well, there's going to be a fight. there's going to be continual, you know, I'm going to take what you have, you know.

79:22When we were in Somalia, it's interesting because we went there with this story that was the pirate stock exchange, right, which we thought was a funny idea because what it is is poor people pay for shares, right, in an RPG or a machine gun, and if it's part of a successful hijacking, they get their dividends back. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. so so it's the pirate uh stock exchange right holy shit however when we went there so that's the story but when we went there we found out we're like you know the pirates are like well the portuguese and japanese and spanish illegally overfished the area took all the fish killed all the fish and so they have no fucking fish and then an italian um waste management company dumped radioactive waste all up and down the coast illegally so they irradiated the beaches killed all the fish and they're like what else the fuck we're gonna do right so they became

80:21pirates and uh so that's the story and this is what we always like about going to story because you go to to do a story like the pirate stock exchange which is just kind of like wild and weird and then it turns out like we're not so far removed from this shit because you know we're part of the problem we caused the problems that led to the piracy because people aren't actually going to go out and be pirates if you give them any other opportunity but if you their up and there's no food and there's no money and there's no beaches there's no water there's no nothing what the hell else are they going to do didn't they call themselves the voluntary coast guard of somalia yeah there's a bunch of them there's all different pirate groups you know when you see this and you see these parts of the world that you can get to in an airplane in a day and you see how

81:02fuck they are yeah and then you see shit like occupy wall street you realize like what a thin veneer of civilization we have over you know just a boiling kettle of chaos that is most of the world well when i was in uh libya recently during the revolution they were like we just want freedom there's actually one kid uh in the thing who's just like my dream is to play for the dallas Mavericks whoa and yeah it was a it was like 17 year old kid who was operating a grad missile launcher it was like a truck with a you know calliope on the back of the yeah so he was just in this truck with like 50 missiles he's like I want to play for the Dallas Mavericks oh my god and so uh somebody call Mark Cuban there you go that was his dream and I asked all these dudes that are all kids and I was like why are you fighting and they're like I want to fight for

81:53freedom I'm just fighting for freedom we want to be like everybody else and it was it was pretty inspiring because these guys have never known freedom. Gaddafi has been in there since 1969 or was in there. So they were just always under him. He's the worst dude ever. Like he's the worst motherfucker. He actually put me in jail. So I hate him. He put you in jail. Yeah. The first time I went, I got arrested. I went for a youth conference, which is the only way to get into Libya. And then I went to shoot the party for the Lockerbie bomber guy. And I got put in jail. So you got put in jail in Libya. Yeah. Fuck. What is that like? Well, to be brutally honest, it was really nice because they actually jailed me in their sort of only place that foreigners were really allowed to go, which was this really nice hotel. Oh, really? Yeah.

82:40But it was scary because they're just like, we're going to fuck you up and you can't say anything. What the fuck are you doing? And there's a lot of yelling and slapping and swearing and shit. But it was just a bummer. Slapping? They slap you around a little? They like to slap your face. Really? as if that's gonna make you like i'm i'm waiting for them to sort of put like electrodes on my genitals or like shove a glass rod up my ass or slapping me i'm like okay good fine if that's all i get i'll be fine so anyways they arrested me i got out i filmed part of it and i put it in the show and then a lot of libyans had seen that and i met a lot of libyans when i was there so when the revolution happened they invited me to come over so i went to benghazi and i went to miserado where the fighting was we were completely surrounded and we were fighting pushing to tripoli

83:22and you know i was everyone was just like we're fighting for freedom we're fighting for freedom and it was like they were so positive and they were like risking everything and like there was one kid who had his leg blown off and he snuck out of the hospital they were going to send him to germany and get him a new leg and and he wouldn't do it he snuck out so he could get back and fight with his brothers and like you know he he was fighting with a fucking spear gun and shit you know against tanks and and you know they were doing it for freedom and i when i came back i i flew through some hub, might have been Chicago, might have been St. Louis, and just everyone was just fat, like eating cheese dogs and just sort of like, you know, I was like, would these dudes fight for freedom? Like would these dudes really sort of get up and give out anything and fight with a spear gun against a tank to fucking?

84:06Well, we've been complacent for so long. We think that we have freedom already and we think that everything's fine and this is America. I think there, at least they understood that they were being repressed by a dictator. I think over there they at least I just wonder how bad it would have to get for people to sort of you know say fuck it I'm going to get off my couch and do something which actually says something about America like I'm Canadian I came down here because it's still I'm the perfect example of the American dream you can come here you can do well it is the best country in the world you know it's the freest you know media country in the world you can do whatever the fuck you want and I love it but at the same time you know we're not necessarily the most adept at fixing problems. No, we just rape. We just take their shit. We take other people's. We go over there and we put them in hock

84:56and then we take their resources. Where's this going, man? You're scaring the shit out of me. The whole... The news scares the shit out of me. The internet scares the shit out of me. You're scaring the shit out of me. Let's talk about She-Mails again. We'll lighten it up. I fucked a cartoon. There's no way it ends well, though. It just seems like unless the aliens land or we invent something crazy every time everyone asks me they're like you know you've seen some bad shit uh you know what what what what do you think uh you know and you're like your question and i just have this flash i don't know why it's subconscious flash of there's a movie called angel heart you remember that yeah sure yeah and there was an old blues singer and he was trying to he was trying to get information from the blues singer and the blues singer like i don't know i

85:41I just drink the two boots cocktails and whatever they put in, that's all I need. And so whenever I feel really bad, I'm just going to have some of this whiskey that you have here. And you have one of these and you go, actually, it's not so bad. You know, it's a lot better than people. It is a nice place. You can have a hamburger on a Sunday. The thing is, it's the best that people have ever lived, supposedly. I don't know about overall, but at least America. This is the best humans have ever lived ever. Yes. But it seems like it's not going to last. Well, you know. It seems like it can't. Yeah. I don't know if it's by sort of fact of getting older, and you're like, well, it can't last. It's just not like it used to be. But my problem is when I come back from India or Africa or Siberia or wherever, and you go to New York, and you're like, what the fuck do you want to eat?

86:27You can eat the best, whatever it is. By the way, I was just in India. The best Indian food I've ever had is in New York, the best French food, the best time. And you're in New York. You can eat this. You can do this. You can go party all night long. you want you do whatever you want and you sit there and go this can't go on it's too good new york is too fucking good you know we shouldn't be allowed to have this much fucking so i do i do i do have a bit of eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die i definitely have a bit of that because when you see the alternative like when it's going to be the road you're probably right you're probably just going to go well i had a good time i'm going to leave you with this because i know you got to get out of here but do you feel like a certain amount of responsibility for illuminating people and all these different things that you find because you

87:09guys are covering shit that not too many people are covering you know you you know you joke around that you're not a real journalist but i didn't know about liberia the way i know about it because of your you know i didn't know about coltan right you know i didn't you guys are letting people know a lot of shit do you feel responsibility well i i think so i think you know there was a time when we realized you know there was about 15 million people watching us every month and you know we distributed about 2 million magazines and we realized that we had a a big platform and that all we were talking about was like nike you know limited edition tokyo fucking come to garcon trainers and so at some point you're like look you know there's a lot of shit going on when we did garbage island that was a big thing for us because we went out into the pacific and there's an island

87:59Were you guys the first to cover that? We were one of the first. I mean, we went out with the scientists that found it. It hadn't really been done by a major media outlet by the time. We've talked about it several times on this podcast. It's fucking insane. Yeah. And bigger now, right? Yeah. Well, it's just growing. And so when we went out there, you realize, holy fuck, there's an island the size of Texas made out of plastic. Jesus Christ. Like, it's just the worst. Yeah. Think about Texas. Going 70 miles an hour takes you a day to drive through it. Yeah. And that's all plastic. Plastic. And so, well, now it's even worse because it's actually dissolving into sort of those little beads that they make all plastics from. And the krill and the shrimps and everything are eating that plastic, so it's entering into the food chain, which is corrupting the whole food chain.

88:43But at that point, you're like, well, what am I going to do? Talk about fucking shoes? I mean, the whole food chain is getting fucked here. And by the way, I always say if the world was going along tickety-boo, people wouldn't be looking to me for news. I mean, like, you know, it's so fucked that people had to go to Vice, which was again about cocaine and supermodels and denim to go, oh, fuck, that's where I get my news. Then the world's really fucked. You know, so. Do they have any ideas of how to clean that up? Is there any. Well, no. I mean, it's just you have to stop making plastic and chuck it in the ocean. You know, like, yeah, how are you going to do that? We're so disgusting. We eat all the fish. We poison it. We throw our fucking nuclear waste in it. We shit all over it. We send some shit into space. If we could pollute space, the sky would be littered. The sky would look like... It is littered.

89:32But really, it would look like stars at night, just things floating above us, slamming into each other. But listen, thank you very much for coming down here. This has been fucking awesome, man. You've got to do this again next time you're in L.A. Anytime, man. I need to hear more shit. When is your show debut on HBO? So we're just shooting it now. We're actually having a party tomorrow night to celebrate. We've got some pretty great segments. I can't believe I'm going to miss it to go to the fucking Today Show. Today Show is very big, though. You're going to be a very popular young man. I don't want to be any more popular. I'm good. You're very popular. This whole thing has been like the most insane thing on Twitter. You're like the god of Twitter. Oh, hardly. You're the sort of sexy, beefier version of Ashton Kuchner. Nice. I'll take that as a compliment, but I don't want to. He's a nut bar. You think? Yeah.

90:23He's a young, handsome man that married a famous old lady. You think he's nuts? And he was getting some crazy pussy in a hotel room where he'd make them give up their phones and give me your cell phones and hand them all to my bodyguard. You're all down with the Hollywood gossip. I just meant he was the first guy to get to the million Twitter followers. Oh. That's all I know about. Oh, you don't know about all the... You're getting up there fast. You're like the fucking man. Well, you know, Twitter's an interesting little resource. The ability to communicate with all these interesting people. and people connected me to you on Twitter. And, you know, they've connected me to Hamilton Morris on Twitter, a lot of different people on Twitter. He's awesome. Yeah. It's Dennis McKenna. I got connected to him on Twitter. It's an amazing thing. The resource of the internet is just fucking fantastic.

91:08And you guys are a part of that, a big part of that. Well, thanks for having me. It was great. Please. This is one of my favorite podcasts of all time. This is fucking awesome. And please keep me in touch with anything you do. We'll promote the shit out of it. Oh, for sure. And let us know when your HBO thing is ready to launch. All right. So let's pause for a minute. We'll let these guys go, and then Brian, you and I will wrap this up. So everybody at home watching online, just go take a leak. We'll be right back.