Ben Anderson

00:00chain on it's been a while working live we're live do you want to talk about that or no the same thing did you everyone sent me the clip and and I think you said something about taking a knee in the middle of a gunfight and he said yeah that was betting he's a Savage what did you do that what happened refresh my memory we're in Afghanistan right and the guys I'm with the Afghan soldiers them with get ambushed by the Taliban and I just went down on one knee and carried on talking uh war journalists are very fascinating people to me because oftentimes you guys move towards the gunfire with the camera to get the shot and you know I've talked to folks before who have worked as a war journalist and they say you almost don't think you're you you're you you you've so concentrated on getting a shot you don't think about the fact that you might get shot it's a safety mechanism

01:08yeah you think you're protected by looking at it on a screen rather than realizing it's it's actually happening in real life right now that's stupid it's so strange they might try to keep this like go like a fist from your face perfect there we go I was with them the US Marines for operation most Iraq like the biggest operation of the Afghan war and I was a town called Marja that was controlled by the Taliban and I'm at up it's one group of Marines I tasted love got the Marines cuz that if you were willing to run the same risks of then they'd let you film everything and their mission was to get dropped by helicopter in the middle of this town at 3:00 a.m. on day one and then just fight their way out from the middle of the town and as soon as the Sun came up all of the speakers on the mosques were saying the infidels are here the infidels are here get your

01:50weapons get your weapons and general McChrystal had introduced this rule of courageous restraint saying you're not allowed to shoot unless your shutter or unless you see someone preparing a hostile act and the Taliban had figured out how to use this so I'm sitting in this field with about twenty eight Marines watching the Taliban drop off guys in buildings all around us with their weapons wrapped in blankets knowing the Marines can't shoot so they're setting up the perfect ambush and as soon as we started walking across the field it started and it's like nothing I've ever heard or experienced before we ran and dived into a ditch the guys either side of me got got hit one of them badly that guy was killed on the other side of the field almost straightaway I was there alone filming it myself and because I was watching the whole thing through this tiny little

02:36screen on my camera it felt like I wasn't you know in as much danger as as they were and I was so afraid and the adrenalin runs out after a while and you just become numb and you I mean then I'd resign myself I thought we were all going to get killed we were completely surrounded and outnumbered no RPGs and snipers I watched it back and the footage is pretty good you know I'm changing shots and zooming in and focus you know heart I think focusing on that helps me help me you know how did you get out of it I mean to this day I'm not even sure I think the Marines just started identifying Taliban targets and picking them off and then the Taliban ran out of ammunition and the actual ambush lasted like six seven hours of non-stop fighting yeah and then we ran into a an old building which is which became their base for six months just in a you know abandoned building and they

03:24shelled that all night and the fighting carried on the whole next day but but that first day in the ditch I remember saying to myself you're an idiot you never say no to anything you always just you know join up and sign up for these insane trips and if you survive today and you're probably not going to survive if you do survive today don't ever go out with these idiots ever again and the next day they said oh we're going to launch this operation take this mask and I went out was I'm on again it's for a good night's sleep yeah well it was even a good night's sleep but yeah but we survived a few you I mean I remember I started doing this you had an idea of what what good odds and bad what odds were and that you know you're willing to accept lesser and lesser odds as time goes on because nothing happens and it's it's easy to get to get careless and stupid that's a real thing with violence

04:12right until you've actually experienced it firsthand personally being enacted on yourself it almost doesn't seem real even when bullets a sniffing by your head is that a just a weird compartmentalization thing that people are capable of is that what it is I think it is I mean I think with me it's slightly different I mean I took part in this MDMA therapy for PTSD recently and one of the one of the revelations that came out as a result of that was I I got into this 20 years ago thinking I could help people in Syria Palestine Congo wherever by raising awareness about about what's happening after a while you lose faith in the idea so then you start feeling a bit guilty and think am I just here for my own benefit am I just here to profit in some way and not actually helping whatsoever so I think that guilt made me think you're not important enough to have something as dramatic as

05:06getting shot or blown up happen to you I know that sounds so stupid and ever thought that until you know it came out as part of this therapy but I think I really had started thinking that so the the MDMA therapy made you sort of look at your rational perspective like what what how are you rationalizing your your time in these very very dangerous places in in ways that I hadn't even thought about so it was going on your subconscious it was so absolutely yeah you're sort of making these agreements and arrangements in order to be able to still do that yeah and if it continued then it was gonna end badly thank you like you know there was there was only one way it was gonna end and I I hadn't hadn't seen that coming at all I hadn't I hadn't connected the dots like that that's all how did you wind up stopping cheers Cheers I mean this is the big I haven't stopped and I don't I'm gonna

06:00stop I did the MDMA therapy thinking this would give me an excuse to stop right I thought that's what I wanted three quarters of the way through the first session I was planning the next program I mean people say you're an adrenaline junkie that's not true at all it's not a thrill to be there it's horrible to be there as an endurance test every single time but I still think it's it's important do you think it's important because the information that you can get to people there's no other way they can get it yeah I mean I wonder what impact that has these days but you hope that it hasn't impact or everything has an impact I'm sure it has an impact but I mean the example I was using this some of my colleagues have been broken by this is is you know the Syrian war has been very well covered every crime has been very well documented you know often with video footage of exactly the

06:46crime being carried out has it made any difference whatsoever I'm not sure the Syrian one is one where you hear you hear rational people say that like Assad is not our enemy and that well how do you what do you feel about that I mean I think we're dealing with the legacy of the Iraq and the Afghanistan war in that even if you want to help what's the point you can't you're only gonna make it worse I think a lot of people feel that way and I think that leads some people to think Assad is not a good guy he probably does have the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands but we should deal with him anyway because that's better than Iraq or Afghanistan because when we do get rid of a leader like Libya with Gaddafi or Iraq with Hussein that what happens is you get this power vacuum and then it becomes far worse we've tried every model we tried invading Afghanistan taking over

07:40we trying to rebuild the entire culture and Armed Forces and government ourselves that has failed miserably tried Iraq Libya tried leading from the back you know limited intervention hoping that the guys on the ground could do the fighting for us and then Syria we've tried almost no intervention whatsoever and all three have failed so I think now you've got people I mean the thing I always think most people would say we should have intervened in Rwanda I think almost everyone would say I mean Bill Clinton would say that's his biggest regret I think in this presidency most people would say we should have intervened in Rwanda I think if Rwanda happened tomorrow you'd have a lot of people here saying it's not worth it we won't help we can't make the situation better so why even try well it's so hard when you look at the rest of the world and you see these

08:27horrific conditions and you see warlords and power and you see atrocities being committed and or sitting over here and you know in the valley watching on internet and drinking Starbucks you know oh it's just Trump gossip yeah I mean well more so yeah American cut American foreign coverage was never was never great no now it's almost gone I mean Yemen we'll see I mean because of the Khashoggi murder maybe maybe something can happen with Yemen cuz it and there is a lot we can do there cuz we are you know directly supporting one side it almost seems like what you were talking about but you know far lesser extent the the feeling that you get when you're in these war zones it's almost so it's not real that you're you're covering it through this this lens so you're immune from it it almost feels like we view the the massive conflicts of the world that way they're

09:20like we're watching it on television we're seeing it on our phones or our laptops it's not it's real I know it's real it is a it's a real issue it's not real like in terms if it's not knocking on my door ya know it's almost like we feel about it that way yeah and the numbers as well I mean you know in Syria it could be eight hundred thousand dead oh the people really think what that means what does 800,000 that actually mean right do they when I think with certain numbers you you just they just become it just becomes digits and it just doesn't make sense yeah doesn't uh you look if you hear five guys get killed in a shootout you go off five guys are dead yeah you start thinking about it you hear 500,000 people died on the other side of the planet it's almost almost doesn't register yeah but for you it registers yeah yeah and you know I mean the reason I started doing this you

10:10know when I was a kid as soon as I started reading about these situations and and you know when I when I remember reading that in my government the British government was arming you know often the wrong side you know in these conflicts I remember thinking how is it's not front-page news right how is everyone not talking about this every single day and I still feel like that now even though I'm clearly out of step with you know most of the population but well your soul immersed is it hard for you when you come back and you see the Trump gossip and all the nonsense and all the things that we engage in on a daily basis here in America that are really trivial at best I mean you know is it hard for you to mean you you get to see the worst happening in the world all the time is it hard for you to relate yeah I mean you know I mean one of the one of the main symptoms I had of

10:58the PTSD from covering this for so long was was it was numbness to physical danger when I there but it was numbness when I got back home mmm so you'd come back and you know at one point used to think if I come back with with the footage I have of whatever conflict it's gonna have some kind of impact it's gonna create some kind of ripple when you come back and you think it's that's gonna be there's gonna be nothing the film is going to go out as a few people are gonna tweet a few people are gonna you know send me a message that that's it are we in a information overload state I mean you you if you go back to you know the early days of the internet Facebook it was going to be the free flow of information you know no borders it's I mean I don't think we can doubt it it's made us dumber now that the infinite this there's so much it's not just how much there is

11:44it's also how much bad stuff you know gets traction and how much really important stuff doesn't get traction I mean one of the great things about about the Trump ear is some of the best writing you know I think for four years but how many people are reading it yeah I would like to know how many people read man tiny bees or articles yeah from the beginning to the end yeah yeah I really would like to see that when you think about the amount of time that guy puts into an article yes it's such a strange time because it doesn't it doesn't seem like any other time it doesn't seem like any other time in terms of our consumption of information or how much information we consuming and it it's like the the sheer volume of it is it's almost it's almost insurmountable like the sheer volume of data that comes in every day it doesn't go away there's just new data comes in

12:38it just keeps coming in and piling uh yeah you know it's like porn right like you never could watch all the porns yeah this it's not possible like but they keep making them yeah you know what I mean and like uh you open up pornhub and you go warth of how many of them how many of them are there yeah and that's you know that is really data I mean but then all these crazy Internet videos and stories and there's just every day it's something new it's constant but but you'd have thought that would that would have led to a situation where some things are indisputable right because there is video evidence but but it's the opposite of the case thing is verifiable now no matter how much evidence exists my concern is that that's leading into this trend of deep fakes and the this new audio editing ability that they have - they can take your voice and your your mouth and put

13:31some stuff in there that you never said yeah and you know it could be noose I mean you could do that it could be Assad it could be Obama it could be anyone it's so strange and it might get debunked in the New York Times the next day you don't care how many people are reading that very people even aware of it yeah very few yeah yeah everything that's taken out of context no one reads the full context anything that is a small video clip no one's gonna see the fold and I think that's what what Trump is master yes he doesn't care if he gets taken apart the next day in The New Yorker he knows his base aren't reading the New Yorker they don't even aware of that article well it doesn't seem to be bothering him either he's one of the rare guys I've been paying attention to him a lot over the last few months he doesn't seem to be getting older like a lot of them do like it's the concern

14:16that makes them old you know that's the stress of the job that makes him all he seems to be sleeping in late I got traveling and I come back and I read the headline you know Trump's having a meltdown screaming in the White House and I see him on TV he looks as happy as a pig in I don't believe any of that they write I think they write things like that I think yells at people but I think yelled at people when he was a real estate mogul and I think you know he wants to get done he's a billionaire he likes progress he likes to make money he doesn't like incompetence yells at people I don't know it's just it's you I feel like we're at this cusp of something very strange happening like we're in the middle of it right now but we're at the cusp of something very strange we're all it would take is one massive world event one mat2 to completely remap how we we

15:06view each other and how we view things it's very disconcerting to me if this it feels like without that one big world event we're not that far away from that right now right here a parallel universe is right now exists on things that you would have thought everyone can accept as a basic fact like what you know I mean Syria yeah you know the white helmets there there are some fairly serious people saying the white helmets are you know some kind of media front for al-qaeda or others would you explain the white helmets for people so when there's a when there's a bombing and a building collapses they go in and drag people out and get their medical attention as quick as possible and people think that they're somehow or another were involved in it they're a front yeah and that the footage is faked in order to drum up sympathy for the rebel-held areas oh I

15:56mean that's I've heard you know serious people say that serious people yeah not-not-not loons on Facebook I've heard you know I'm sure analyst sir yeah yeah yeah I mean I mean Seymour Hersh I think has walked it back a little bit since but he said that in the early days why do you think he believed it I read really interesting article about him just a few days ago where was it I forget what it was it was you know the not expose but a really good look at look look at him and I think he's just spent his career believing rightly that the government lies about all kinds of things and that's got him into a point where he thinks well they always like no matter what mm-hmm so and it's happened to a lot of journalists Robert Fisk Seymour Hersh Martha Gellhorn when my favorite war correspondents of all time I reread some of her stuff recently and and the first

16:44batch of war reporting she did I think is the best war reporting I've ever read Spanish Civil War Vietnam and then she spent 25 years writing novels and then later on wrote about I believe it as the Yom Kippur War and was denying that massacres have happened and saying you know our Arabs like they always like there was no massacre and we now know there was a massacre well there were massacres in the aftermath of these of these wars so I don't know what happens I mean maybe if you just do this for too long you just become so cynical that you're open to these things but it's yeah I'm amazed that Seymour Hersh is open to that idea so when the the very people that are calling it the very people that have boots on the ground and that are in these war zones are calling these things when they become cynical and they become jaded that's when it gets really really

17:32sketchy and and we rely so heavily on people like you like there's I'm not going over there you know Jamie's not going over there look at them you know I'm saying I mean in oh and you wouldn't be able to really get like I know people that have gone to Venezuela and they come back and they go I don't know what the is going on over there I don't know who to believe I don't understand it Venezuela is a very strange one and I get messages all the time and you know I've had a be Martin who goes over there and she has one take on it and I have other people that I talked to that have a different take on it and I do not know I don't know who to believe and I think you'd have to go over there and do you see diff to spend a lot of time to try to figure this out and it would have to be the entire focus of your life to really try to parse it out I think that's true of a lot of conflicts I mean

18:18one of the one of the one of the drawbacks of doing what I do is I'm covering seven or eight things at once so yeah I feel like I'm not expert enough in even Afghanistan where I've covered I've covered that more than any other and but but if anybody's an interesting one because it's there's there's such a left-right divide on that and if you support the opposition then you find yourself alongside John Bolton and Donald Trump yeah which means that a lot of people are gonna automatically attack you right right automatically yeah even if it's correct and and I think it's you know you we can say without a doubt that Maduro has destroyed the economy there Maduro has imprisoned beaten killed journalists there is a movement there that do want genuine elections but some people will say well just because George Bush in another area or John Bolton and nasarah support the opposition therefore the

19:04opposition must be illegitimate and the information coming out must be must be false and I wish people did rely on on people who actually went there but yes I feel that I feel that they rely on the you know the guy behind the glass desk on the on the news when they were allowed opinion we're all where people are actually there well we still have this idea in our head that the the person who's reading the news is the authority you know that Don Lemon has the inside scoop or whoever it is you know and I think it used to be that those guys would spend 20 or 30 years traveling and then that get the cushy job behind the class desk in this union now it seems like you can go straight to the cushy job behind the glass desk well we just need someone who's relatable who can read a teleprompter you know who fits the profile they're looking for whether it's Fox News or CNN you know

19:53and also the information is there you know there are fantastic documentaries articles being written about all of these conflicts right people aren't reading them well with something like Venezuela that the real problem is you have two sides you have two different versions of what's happening and it's if you're if you're not educated in that country and you don't understand their politics it's very difficult to figure out who's telling the truth yeah same with Syria yeah yeah and you know I I agree with you that I don't I don't necessarily think we're getting stupider or Dumber in this country or in the world in general because the Internet but we're definitely getting weirder in our perceptions of actual world events and I think every time something had like mass shootings for instance like New Zealand every time one of these horrific tragedies takes place you see

20:49more and more division i watch people fight over it on twitter people blaming left-wing people people blaming right-wing people people trying to find some reason and this one is particularly disturbing because it appears that at least one of the guys I don't know their names I don't know if they even release if they withheld the names of these guys who have done this I haven't seen the names I thought in there one of them seems like he's trolling like he he Thank You T PI and and said that Candice Owens was his biggest inspiration and he's doing that I guess we could agree some people are saying that that okay sign is a white power sign I know we had this dispute with Tim pool where he was saying I guess it is a game that some people do play what does it call the game the look I don't know there's a name there's some game where if you look under the table you see someone doing

21:44that there a lot of punch you or something something stupid like that I saw this Stephen Miller photo where he's doing up his blazer and supposedly doing the white know there was a woman in court - that was doing that where she had her hand like this and people were saying that but that's what people are talking about rather than right which is ridiculous like AHA evidence evidence but this guy in custody is clearly making that symbol clearly so like what is he you know he's like some troll murderer some troll mass murderer he's both he's both with everybody and a cold-blooded ruthless killer of people that were praying yeah I mean I think let's not lose sight of that you have to have some serious hatred to walk into a mosque and gun down yeah he's 32 people in seven people the other way you know that's yeah it's horrific across the board top to bottom it's it's horrific but

22:36it's also one of those things where like we we see so many of these now that we're starting to get numb whether it's a Jewish synagogue whether it's a you know a Muslim temple whether it's a gay club or whether whatever it is it's like you see so many of these mass murders now that's just whether it's a school or a movie theater it's like man it's just it all like you were talking about when you're filming the news you know you're there you're watching the bullets fly by you hear them fly by your head and you are just watching it through the lens we're many many many many levels removed from that and we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do and we're not there we're not we're the both and the people that are there where the bullets take place they try to give you a description of it and even they barely can comprehend what happened but also as

23:34you said we're going straight to the argument about who to blame right you follow and you know rather than yes I mean people spent as much time as they spend arguing on Twitter reading yes you know I know people say fake news you know that there are people who you can trust if they write a ten thousand white piece on Syria for The New Yorker for example like you know that they're they're being fact-check and maybe it would be better if there was a website where you we curated all of like the bulletproof that's a terrible way to describe it but you know the locks rock-solid investigative journalism that are a hundred percent ethical that you could completely rely on for an accurate assessment of what's happening because it is difficult for people and when people they rely on biased websites which many of them do whether it's bias to the left or bias to the right things

24:26get even more money and there's so many of them it's so easy to get so easy to reinforce your confirmation bias with whatever you know whether it's left-wing or right-wing just find that website read the comments these are my people they think like me and especially now it used to be a few conservative leaning you'd read to Wall Street you're a liberal leading New York Times now no matter how far off the scale you are you can find a pretty professional-looking website yeah so we'll write a story backing up yeah you're prejudiced and people aren't looking at a story thinking okay I want to find out what happened here yeah they're thinking I know what my gut feeling tells me I need to find a hat not even a story a headline yeah that justify is my gut feeling about this and that's as far as it seems to go now you as a journalist as a person who risks their life to

25:12bring this information to people how does this make you feel I mean there's this part of the reason why you needed to do that MDMA therapy not just the fact that you were you know you're you really are without better useful without a better term shell-shocked right I mean you're you're they're thought that you're there yeah there's something that comes out of that that's got to be very very difficult to recover from and overcome yeah but there's also the fact that you're going over there and bringing this back and it doesn't seem to people don't seem to give a and that used to be what kept you going is is you thought like some of my work is gonna make some kind of difference and when that starts to fade and you start to think that's not gonna happen that's I'm sure your work makes a lot of difference to the people that pay attention to it that I think we're we're overwhelmed by I

26:00think it's everywhere there's and what I mean I mean like nonsense yeah you know Kim Kardashian's psoriasis is in the front page of the CNN or something like that you know it's not nonsense to her but you know what I mean like there's there's stuff that people are concentrating on it's like Jesus Christ it's I thought one of our one of our Doc's on HBO if it got 4 million views I think that would be considered very good viewing figures yeah in the country of 360 million people yeah well it's very difficult to get people to watch documentaries on real-world events you get them to watch documentaries on like a sex call from Oregon or someone yeah like wild wild country that probably got 10 million yeah yeah no it's just I don't know man you know this New Zealand thing really had me rattled I and you know was also strange people like seemed to demand a response they demand people in the

26:58public eye to talk about it and you know say thoughts and prayers or something like that but as soon as you say thoughts and prayers they'll say impress here we've had that for years and rows actually happen it's yeah yeah it's um it's very stripped but like the I don't know if they their concern that you're not horrified they want to make sure you are like who the isn't like how could you not be I don't understand this or is it just they're just frustrated confuse themselves or just lashing out at any target they can find or anyone they can find and also you know I mean I know the footage is available of you know this guy's the head cam as he's he shot everybody but but footage like that has been widely available for a long time now no and I think that's that's had a massive knowing effect I mean you know the picture of the Syrian refugee washing up on the beach you know it felt

27:50like that was gonna have an effect it felt like that was the picture that was really gonna gonna change things no I'm not sure it did it might not for a couple days yeah and then more news yeah I mean not you know just to be not completely pessimistic that when you're doing stuff with Vice and HBO you do get young people reaching out to you and saying I had no idea yeah I want to be a photographer or a doctor or maybe that's an effect that's gonna be felt down the room I don't know it feels like there are there is a generation of people growing up thinking I'm not gonna play by the normal set of rules like I am gonna actually try and do something about this I think I really do believe you do have an effect I think vice certainly has an effect I think a lot of this has an effect I think it's very difficult to feel that effect if you're not experiencing it personally I

28:36mean to just look out onto the landscape and say how much of an effect is this having on people it's hard like where are you getting the feedback from how are you how are you gauging whether or not this is changing people's perceptions well sometimes the feedback you do get is is on Twitter well get a few lunatics will say oh you fainted so then you think wow really having no impact but I think that's an argument for just not reading the comment well there's a little bit of that and then you know I had Rene to rest on recently and she's done a lot of work covering all these various Russian troll farms and how they so how they essentially organize conflict online and you know they set up these things where you have like a pro Texas movement and they set them up across the street from a probe Muslim movement and they do it on purpose and then they have these pro-lgbt

29:32movement things online that they organized to attack certain people in certain groups to diminish certain aspects and divide parts of the Democratic Party it's crazy yeah when you hear about like that on top of all this you're like well just the the actual news itself is so difficult to disseminate it's so difficult to figure out what should I pay attention to what's real and then you have this kind of happening on top of that you're like well you know I know you know there's a piece came out in the New York card I don't mean just you keep on going on about the New York about a piece came how about the New Yorker today by Edie Ceaser the friend of mine about brexit and about Aaron banks and and and I have read the piece yet but I know and I always been working on and you know there may be evidence that the Russians directly influenced that the brexit vote

30:16are the brexit voters really gonna look at that article and think oh maybe I was misled maybe I maybe I read 10 articles on Facebook that that made me vote wrongly you know how many people actually have their minds open enough to write consider that I mean it especially with American politics it feels like football yes if your player foul someone of course it's not foul if your player gets fouled as a play and foul he should get sent off it's 100 percent blatant tribalism yeah yeah very few objective people very few legitimate centrists everyone seems to be digging their heels in on one side or the other and it seems that a lot of them have just picked team yeah I don't I don't necessarily think they've curated these opinions and cultivated these ideas over many years of soul-searching and reading and trying to understand who they are and how they interface with the world I don't think

31:12that's happening all your family yes team exactly has always been Republican then suddenly saying maybe I'm gonna vote fish instead of Trump it was like coming out with something like it's that big a deal your occupation you know depending upon your occupation I mean good luck finding a job intact if your right wing you know good good luck working in the arms industry if your left one yeah yeah it's like there's a weird weird time ban yeah you know and I used I always used to read about the Nixon era thinking that must've been a fascinating time to be alive yeah but then to actually live through a similar period now you're thinking it's not it's not fascinating it's just it's just depressing every single the Nixon thing it must have been insanely difficult to get information right you relied on Rolling Stone New York Times whatever Washington Post whatever newspaper was covering whatever

32:03story you relied on all those but you you couldn't get it any other way now you can get it from everything I mean there's people on the ground that are tweeting about things and then they become local celebrities so they become sort of like temporary Internet journalists slash celebrities yeah weird wait when you you your perspective and your your life experience is so much richer and deeper in this than anybody else's do you think there's a way to turn this around does this going to eventually even out I hope so um right now I don't see what that what that looks like what that looks like is the best way yeah to describe it what does that look like I mean yeah my attention span I think has been shortened yeah I'll sit down to watch a movie at home I'm within ten minutes I'm reaching for my phone yes I'm not a heart surgeon there's no emergency that need you know right right

33:02I might be checking Twitter again again yeah it's a perfect storm yeah distractions and we now know it is addictive so yeah how you turn that around though I mean it feels like there's a little bit of a movement of people to you know switch that stuff off and just read a book or go for a walk off but yeah you gotta have real discipline though I mean you're fighting against a heroin addiction yeah yeah it's crazy and everyone else is addicted to oh yeah so you're not part of the conversation if you don't know man oh I walked into a restaurant the other night and everyone was looking at their phone no one was looking at each other I'm like I'm in a movie yeah this is a movie some poster public yeah yeah I mean if if instead of looking at their phones if everyone was just looking at the sky you'd be like oh my god there's a real problem these people are sick

33:49yeah it's something wrong yeah you know if everybody's just sitting there with their hands open like staring up at this guy and sitting next to each other you're like these people are sick there's something wrong they need help instead they're they're looking at nothing yeah they're checking their feed over and over again someone's complaining about Captain Marvel being a woman yeah yeah yeah and all the experts are they the ones getting followed on there they're not who in our experts I mean the experts in whatever you know the ones really are we looking at them you know it should be this this free flow of information where you can find out anything in your hand well what an incredible thing yeah but it's it's not that it's definitely not that well I think there's two things I think one we didn't earn it is just given to us right it's not like we did all the work to

34:36curate all this technology and put it together and figure out how to implement it and our deal no we just went to the Verizon store and picked up a new phone I mean that's that's what most people are doing yeah and because of that it's almost like being like a trust fund kid or something like that it's just all given to you it's all handed to you all this you know I felt I feel the same way sometimes about weapons I feel like the discipline required to learn how to use one and create it and build it and then understand the responsibility of actually using it on a human being oh that's just out the window you just go to the store and buy it you know there's no requirements of you other than you never killed anybody yet have you ridden driven over anybody in your car no if you robbed a bank no okay yeah yeah you beating your wife no okay yeah there's a guy yeah it's strange

35:30and this is a human being the the lack of discipline and accountability that that we have in this ultimate access to all these things constantly and many of them become just massive distractions and yeah this in some ways is is the Utopia that people have dreamed from yeah things up for generations sure we're free of war you're not going to get attacked in your house tonight you're not going to starve you have everything you could possibly need so you'd think we would become the perfect human beings in the absence of all those things that would have killed us in the past or would have made life hard in the past yeah and again that's that's what we're doing well I don't think we operate very well without legitimate conflict without legitimate conflict in terms of like actual things you need to worry about like I when I used to live in the East Coast one of the things I

36:20was really noticeable was that when it snowed out people were nicer they help people when they're broken down the side of the road they were nicer to each other there was a sense of vulnerability that we were all deeply entrenched in this winter nature thing and we got to work together otherwise we can't survive yeah yeah you know and I think that applies to all aspects of life that when there's no real danger people become extremely frivolous yeah yeah it's amazing how quickly we become lazy and complacent yeah and actually the flipside of the negative stuff I was saying earlier some good days I'll come back from Yemen Syria wherever I'll go out and get a cup of coffee coffee you know I'll read the newspaper I'll get a doughnut and I think man I'm the luckiest man alive yeah right because you do experience these horrific environments you can appreciate it yeah

37:11and the famine we can you know I mean within you know a few hours here we could have one of the best meals yeah possible in the world you know it's you know it's that's very incredible so one good day that you couldn't you can you can appreciate but again this is you coming from these bad things so it puts an imp sorry yes trying to try to back you up and say yeah if you're not if you're not protected from all that stuff then you can get to appreciate the basics again I was on this trip and Prince of Wales we camped out on this island it rained every day for six days seven days I mean we're soaked you're soaked everything soaked your sleeping bag so cue tent soaked everything came back home and it felt so good like I never felt the Sun like that before like the Sun was just this like this magic love glow that the sky was pouring down on the city everything felt so happy and I

38:03realized like you can't really appreciate this until it's taken away from you yeah it's taken away from you then you understand what it is so then you wonder when the kids of today grow up right what are they gonna be like when everything has just been at their fingertips from day one forever forever no mystery they don't understand bullshitters either because like like when I was a kid people used to lie about shed and you really didn't know you like no no he seems like he's full of you couldn't just yet have to go to an encyclopedia and you know and actually read the information now you can go okay what year did this happen and you pull up your phone get the out yeah yeah yeah you know yeah people lie about being in the Olympics they lied about this they lied about that yeah it's it's good in that we have ultimate access to information for people that use it and understand what

38:53it is and appreciate it it is good but to your point if there was a way to actually filter yeah and say this is verifiable this yeah this contains seven things which are absolutely we have no doubt about that whatsoever if that could exist wonderful but I mean folks have tried a few people have tried it used to it still feels like you end up being described to see you know being on one side of the fight yeah I almost feel like we need some sort of organized discipline like maybe like mandatory volunteer work cleaning up impoverished communities or mandatory volunteer work doing thing like it and but I don't want people to have to do things like I'm conflicted on that too I don't want people to have to do that you know like when there's countries that have mandatory military service they seem to have an amazing feeling of of patriotism in those countries and

39:42appreciation in those countries because they actually do have to join the military for two years or whatever it is we don't have that over here yeah weird and to a point about going up and cleaning out clean out you know an impoverished area at least then you get to me yeah other people yeah people outside of you you're circling your bubble I mean yeah the amount of times here when you talk to people about Muslims whatever it is and you think ours cuz you've never met anyone right you've actually never met anyone that is X Y or Z which is I moved to Brooklyn in five years or six years ago and I moved to Clinton Hill Fort Greene and I got a few friends there have been there forever and I said let this probably sounds like a really stupid thing to say but it feels kind of segregated here and they were like duh of course it does and I couldn't believe it you know I I'd

40:27grown up on the Spike Lee movies and I mean I guess they do show what kind of segregation but I thought you know this was the place where everyone lived together on the scene to each other's bodegas and restaurants and right I lived on the dividing line between the bit that was gang gentrified and the projects you go two blocks that way pretty much wore black you go three blocks that way pretty much all white with yoga studios and bougie coffee shops and pets bars and and the two communities just did not mix it wasn't necessarily they hated each other all right they just did not make different language different everything right this is seater peon perception that there is a place where everybody's cool yeah yeah and I thought it might be New York it might be Brooklyn yeah oh it's probably the only place that's closed right least it has the reputation for it yeah

41:13because at least in Brooklyn people walk around I mean yeah but but talking about amazing pieces of journalism over the last few years there's Nicole Hannah Jones wrote a piece about New York school system public school system the most segregated school system in America we in New York really and she had to get her daughter into a public school and the choice was the very good well supported school in the gentrifying mostly white area or the bad failing public school in the non gentrified mostly black area where her kids education might suffer and I think I'm remembering it correctly but her husband had a real fight about it because she said no we got to put our kid in the in the bad failing school and help it get better and it's going to take years and our daughter may suffer in the short-term but that's what we have to do if we're living in this neighborhood

41:58it's an incredible piece Wow yeah that's a the real conflict as a parent you have children know when you're oh yeah I'm sure right you're when you're thinking of your children you're always thinking of their safety you always worried about them you want to protect them so putting them in a situation where they wouldn't be as protected his never your first instinct oh she was in in town hall meetings where you know progressive white liberal parents who would be very left-wing on every other issue hmm we're really fighting to make sure their kid went to the good majority white schools yeah they want a bit of diversity but not not too much diversity right they want a black friend yeah yeah yeah that's when people think of Brooklyn they do think of it as being like the most diverse place yeah and it's yeah street-by-street segregated it land is pretty diverse and land is interesting

42:51you know because Atlanta has a lot of there so there's a lot of well there's a lot of everything in Atlanta but it's it's a very black city in a lot of ways but it's also a very white city you see a lot of black and white people hanging out together in clubs and bars and restaurants and stuff and it's really like much closer to like a 50/50 split in a lot of places at least in some of the neighborhoods that I've been to when I got back to London this was one of the few things I'm proud of about about London yeah it's certainly New York it's it's not a big deal for a group of friends a family around to be to be genuinely mixed hits that you would know I'd ask you is that because London didn't experience slavery the way the United States did yeah I mean obviously we have a you know colonial history right of course but that wasn't in the country itself right for a very long

43:47time we've had a huge Pakistani Bangladeshi Jamaican community and it's it's you know I mean here if you have black friends or you date a black girl or you know it's it's people think you're trying to prove your work ruddiness there it was just normal normal yes a London I'm not saying England's perfect London I I experienced that when I was in London as well it seemed like way more integrated yeah yeah and that's I mean still five six years after I moved to New York that's it's this still a surprise well New York is a different animal now New York is so expensive it's so strange and my friend Judah who Judah Freelander who lives there said he's he's lived there for a long time he's like it's so changed it used to be like a lot of artists and a lot of creative people and he goes it's now it's all financed people like every go to finance everybody just wants the

44:38most expensive suit and the most expensive watch and they live in this ridiculously expensive apartment and I thought that went out in the 80s I thought that was like Wall Street America still very much exists that's still prevalent well I was talking to this guy yesterday who's a 26 year old who's graduating with a degree in finance and trying to figure out what he wants to do and he's thinking about moving New York and getting a job in Wall Street but he's hesitant because he's a nice guy he doesn't want to go dark you know and I'm like you could you could go to the dark side like these people or look not all of them but a lot of them are just straight-up materialists they're just chasing money when you're in the money business and you're just chasing money like there's your reward is things your reward is objects and status and clothes and houses and yeah and sometimes

45:35you talk to those guys and you say so what do you do I work in finance yeah yeah but what do you actually do I work in finance I'm very well rewarded as you can see yeah but what do you actually do oh I look for fluctuations in international grain markets congratulations what an amazing thing to dedicate your life to you know and if you just said what they do rather than what the reward was right I think this is ridiculous what a waste of your time it is but the the status of being super wealthy for a lot of them is worth it because they don't have a passion right they don't have a thing their dinner trying to write a book they're not trying to make a painting or whatever the it is yeah you know they're just trying to make the money and they're making the money so everything is great yeah coke and I mean if I rots if I pulled up here in a you know a purple

46:23Lamborghini with a diamond studded watch I'd be like look at this he must be wrong people yeah yeah but not that many people would be would be that impressed I think most people would think what a what a duel yeah yes sir it's certain circles right it's whatever circle that you're in yeah certain circles I can finance circles it is about those things more than it's not because those things represent success in your industry your friend should read a piece of him even in a book by Michael Lewis and he talks to a bunch of graduates who you know are about to get approached by the big banks and financial institutions he says listen you think you're going to do this for two or three years yeah a few million dollars and then do something worthwhile with your life but what's gonna happen is you're gonna get seduced and you're gonna get the mortgage you're gonna and

47:08you're suddenly twenty years of your life will have gone by and you'll think what the am I just done with this is the exact advice I gave him yesterday the exact advice I was like man you got to do something that actually makes you happy don't get sucked into that and he was saying I was thinking of trying it for a few years that's what they say yeah man once you once you get a mortgage once you get a car yeah nice BMW yeah how much that run you a month yeah yeah man yeah it's some it's a strange thing to the stock market the moving around of numbers and looking for fluctuations in the market and the fact that what drives me crazy is when you hear that people have gotten servers that are the closest as possible to the market because that the ping because they're using algorithms so that everything is done off of a computer program and the closer they are the quicker the transaction

48:07takes place and it actually can be to the tune of millions of dollars that's another Michael Lewis book yeah oh is it flash boys yeah okay yeah these guys figured out what was going on and then they started a trading floor where there was so much cable that no one could benefit from those you know those nanoseconds of yardage yeah the other banks tried to close it down and it wasn't that popular Jamie was telling me that there's a game called fortnight and all the kids play and there moving to Columbus Ohio so they could be closer to there but that's one of the places right access also so another place where they move to same deal yeah to be closer to the server so that they could ping lower cuz it's like a real business yeah but at least these guys are playing a game it's a skill I mean there I made $100,000 yesterday play yeah yeah so I turned on ESPN last

48:57night trying to watch the boxing and I was boxing at my garden last night an ESPN the main channel had gamers in a stadium playing playing football on the computer they have an eSports arena in Vegas right at the Luxor it's like an eSports arena the franchise fees for the next season a Call of Duty or twenty five million dollars of team which is like four four guys on a team genes playing the game and someone's gotta pay for that Jesus Christ you were in Dallas for the Earl Spence Mikey Garcia fight yeah yeah Earl Spence is the real deal I mean I felt Mikey Garcia without books him for a few rounds at least early on and then maybe you know Spence his size and power to make a difference but yeah I boxed in front but I looked at them in the weigh-ins I was likes yeah he's a lot bigger yeah to weight divisions yeah yeah well Mikey start his career at one

49:46was at 135 he was featherweight champ I think was his first bozos lighted them yeah so was that 126 see pull pull that up Mike Garcia see they fought at 47 and Earl Spence looks every bit of 147 I mean he's a big fella he looks like he could fight 154 easy you know Mike Garcia just looks so much smaller than him at the win but it wasn't just his size it's like yeah Errol's Prince jr. is just the real deal with the surprise for me he was incredible he's good he's so smart to like when you hear him talk he's so smooth him do you remember the smiley Winky Felix Trinidad yes I do it reminded me that yeah look at the size difference and he would have put on a load of weight yeah well yeah I mean he's he's taller he's wider he's more muscular and he's probably pretty dehydrated making that way a little Roberto Duran have his time his life yeah yeah yeah he was dancing at the weigh-ins and

50:45share certain fighters were dancing and he was dancing too it's pretty funny what is he doing now is he like working as he's helping them promote these things is that what's going on he was on this one yeah he was there we saw a ringside he's so beloved he's what a crazy story that guy had right like to go for that No Mas fight he was he was shunned I mean hated yeah mass shame across the whole world for years yeah until he beat Davey more that's one of my favorite flights of all ha brutal brutal just to see that tenacity just slowly yeah and I read a story that Tyson was at that fight with all of his friends from Brooklyn and they couldn't afford ticket so they just rushed the security game knowing that three or four of them would get caught him and the others would get in and that's how he got in yeah Wow yeah I remember watching that fight thinking that he was gonna lose and I

51:34was a big Roberto Duran fan no thank god man he's probably gonna lose he was supposed to lose right as he bunted L sure then he Davey more up Davey more wound up dying a crazy accident where he was working on his car his driveway and it fell on him yeah he fell on him or I ran him over like one of those things who's trying to fix his car something up like that and Duran laced him at one point when he started the leather laces yeah he thumbed him to they think that's what you remember his I swallow pretty bad that's one of the fights that makes me feel a bit guilty about loving boxing you see that cuz it's through the business man it's a little business you know I mean I don't know if MMA is more brutal I think it probably is there's a lot of folks that I in MMA a lot and most of them are they're unintentional most of them but a bunch have to be intention to thing that

52:29gets me the MMA is cuz I come from you know books is my sport when you see a guy go down and he's clearly out and the guy jumps women and pounds him I know sometimes the ref tries to you know that's that's just a bit too much for me this weekend Jorge Masvidal he knocked out Darren till and he kayoed him he clipped him on the left hand on the way down he hit him with another left hand and then Darren till is flatlined completely out in Moscow down uncorks a bomb right on face while he's out cold was right I mean correct me if I'm wrong but I feel like a boxing crowd appreciates a good skillful technical match I feel like sometimes a UFC crowd will be cheering at that moment you just described I think humans like brawls I mean there's a reason why our oh god he and Micky Ward was such a successful trilogy it's because those guys would just beat the out of me they were so closely

53:18matched and they were both these blood and guts warriors and they just stood in front of each other and they were and we knew at the time that these guys are not gonna beat Floyd Mayweather they're not gonna beat the best guys they're you know they're good fighters they're world-class fighters but they're not world champions and there's a thing that we look at when we watch fighters like fighter could be good but there's a there's a fighters that we appreciate but they'll never fight for the world title if they do they have no chance and then there's fighters like this guy might be the best in the world you know there's a difference you know and you can admire Floyd offensive skills but he's never gonna have that war with Micky Ward or Archer again ever but he's also gonna be fine when he's 55 he'll be able to talk and walk and you know nothing happens to them to him his

54:07he's not he didn't endure the punishment the beatings that those guys had that's the saddest of all is when you see these guys you see them on television you see the war you see the foot but you don't see the aftermath you don't see the struggles that they have with their memory you don't see the the confusion the the anger out of nowhere the emotional outbursts where they don't they don't know why they're doing what they're doing they don't know why they're saying what they're saying most in the broke before they even retire yep yeah yeah did you see the the film about Michael Benton I just came out on Netflix it's part that loser series no I did not that's worth watching he he never he likes boxing never he wore into box but it's got a really successful career in Hollywood producing plays and movies really yeah yeah yeah it took it's a great Michael bent loses plays and

54:51movies yeah what a play I think Andy T teaches actors how to how to box as well I don't know when they're doing movies it's a great little good for him well I'm always very happy when someone finds a path you know you just get the sense that boxing was never him and he found a way at the end to be him and do something loved and he's thriving at it which which is a rare thing for Xboxes it's crazy when people are just good at think there's a guy in MMA like that Anthony Rumble Johnson who's one of the most terrifying fighters in the history of the sport just a ruthless knockout artist and last his last loss he I was talking to him in the Octagon I was interviewing him and he said I know I don't like fighting I'm not a fighter because I'm an athlete I'm just good at it and I was like wow that is a crazy honest like in such a introspective way of like he's like looking at him selves

55:40like this is not what I don't want to do this yeah but since then he's thought about coming back but people say to me all the time your adrenaline junkie you're addicted to the thrill and there's no thrill doing this work you think it's it's real you know you know question enough I'm sure there's no thrill for you but do you think that being in these incredibly tense environments ramps life up in a way that you don't get outside of it like did Yuri tribe Sebastian oh yeah yeah and I met him a few times but he was he was when I was having a few problems he was he was very helpful he was a really really good guy yeah I really liked that guy yeah yeah before I met him you know he's got that picture in Vanity Fair like posing with the dog tag and it's like a model looking picture I thought ah sir yeah yeah yeah and I met him he was the nicest most humble considerate guy he

56:30sees when testing over he liked that book as well yeah I couldn't could be a bigger fan of his he's a human too just yeah just very genuine really there when you're talking to him yeah but that's sort of his take on it is that and if you're listening I know I talk about that book too much I just love it but his take on it was that these people experiencing life in this incredibly extreme environment and then they come back to the rest of the world that just doesn't feel real anymore so it's not it's not thrilling when you're there but it is real drama you're seeing life and death drama right in front of your face so when you come back you think you really want to see this person see this film try out this new restaurant and then you get back and you just each of them care it just feels flat yeah yeah I mean the you know when we're not getting the PTSD treatment

57:14numbness was the word that came out more numbness to everything like numbness to the danger there but numbness back here for the things that should be pleasurable and should be providing some kind of relief as well now how did the PTSD PTSD treatment get organizes through maps are you part of that study yeah we did a short film about about rick doblin and this this you know there's this effort to get MDMA legal but i'd been in denial for years and year than a new producer joined Visegrad called Steve and Bailey and we had the first idea where he was pitching some some first meeting when he was pitching some of his ideas and he mentioned you know this breakthrough therapy using MDMA for PTSD and I just involuntarily put my hand up and said I'll do it straightaway that gave me the excuse to actually you know get some help and see if how I'm done MDMA recreationally

58:00before that I mean yeah I came of age in London in the nineties like it was like having a pint of beer then what is the difference between doing it in a therapeutic environment I mean it's it's it's mdma-assisted therapy right the emphasis is on the therapy so you're lying in a bed if you've fasted for 24 hours before the therapist knows you and knows your issues so knows how to like politely you know gently nudge you towards the right topic of conversation but always makes it makes you actually gets the conclusions right you know there were times when I would ask him why is this happening why do I think this and he'd put it back on me and make me put two and two together mmm sometimes you listen to music sometimes you put an eye mask on and you don't sleep but you just you know have a quiet 20-30 minutes but it's a it's a very intense seven to eight hour therapy

58:48session and the MDMA just enables you to get the benefits and all of the veterans and first responders who took part in the first round of trials had been therapy resistant and I think the first round I think 72% of them got the benefits and were considered PTSD free after after the three-month trial so during the three-month trial how many experiences do they have one a month one a mother's three total yeah yeah and that I mean the best the best example I can give of how this works at the first veteran I met had been through it he had one session and he'd lost some friends in Iraq and it felt guilty about it and always thought maybe if I had done something different I could have saved them and he imagined being them in in the first MDMA session and they were saying to him why are you ruining your life you're alive you're healthy we want you to have a fun

59:34productive full life and enjoy your friends and enjoy your family and he said that gave him permission and that was what he needed he didn't even do the second two sessions Wow that's a what an interesting way of looking at of course and that word permission because there is so much guilt yeah I'm just getting permission to just give yourself a bit of a pattern survivors awaken is real oh yeah yeah a lot of people that come back from the war that lost friends have that horrible feeling that it should have been them that they're not as good as the person who died or that somehow or another them being alive is the reason why their friend was dead irrational thoughts well maybe I didn't really experience it because I came out unscathed right um yeah which is one of the reasons why I didn't seek treatment for years and years and years because I got friends who lost their legs I've got

60:22friends who were kidnapped and killed you know so maybe I've only just dipped my toes so there's nothing nothing I've got nothing to complain about what was your number one issue I think the numbness to danger and to pleasurable things back here I mean I cameraman in Mosul we were there when the Iraqi army beat Isis and it was I mean it was house-to-house fighting we were stepping on bodies to get through rooms and at one point I was with we were with three or four Iraqi soldiers trying to get to the river to cut off these two Isis positions and they got a radio message saying there's a suicide bomber and a gunman running down the street towards you know so we stepped into this what used to be a shop that's all blown up and smashed a bit and I sat down as the two soldiers tried to shoot this suicide bomber as he was running towards us and someone said I edid and right next to me

61:10under the rubble was an ie D the day before I think or two days before two French journalists and Kurdish Germans had been killed when they stepped on ie trying to get out and Xavier Manzano my cameraman just said he looked bored and he filmed it like we got that moment on camera and I remember just looking so bought and I couldn't give a about the suicide bomber the AED I was just bored out of my brains and that's when I thought this is this is not a natural reaction to what's going on around you right now what did you think your natural reaction should have been I mean blood rate increasing heart rate are we seeing you know vigilance and you know and what did you think at the time was the cause of you being numb like while it was happening I hadn't really thought that much about PTSD I just thought I'd become so used to this and one of the things that came up in the in one of the

62:01last sessions I did was I didn't think I was important enough to get to get shot on her and have medics rushed over to help me and maybe a helicopter take me out and you know um and I know that sounds ridiculous now but I thought I think part of me thought yeah you're not important enough to have something so dramatic happened to you you're just you're just witnessing other people in these dramas Wow it's be right next to an AED and not freaking out it's pretty crazy yeah with a suicide bomber riding down the street towards you I mean that's and also you know people people one of the reasons you feel guilty is you do get respect for being brave and I would say it wasn't bravery I wasn't scared and then did it anyway I wasn't scared I was just numb and just you know can't get respect from other journalists from the soldiers like who are you getting respect from yeah or people that were

62:52films yeah and it doesn't it doesn't feel like braver it just feels like you're you know you've you've become stupid about the risks you're taking so talk me through this therapy so you fasted for 24 hours you take the MDMA and then they just start talking to you about the things that are troubling you yeah so you take 125 milligrams and then when that hits a lot I think it's a good dose but then when it hits you take another 75 well so overall that that's a good dose and that keeps you up for you know six seven eight hours and then you know the therapist would ask very brief questions just just knowing what what direction to push me and I remember the first session I mean I'd fought because of what I now know was PTSD I thought because of the job I do and because there was this kind of darkness in there I didn't get involved with anyone seriously for a very long time and even

63:46thought I'm not going to have a family and kids and house and dog and you know I just just hadn't even thought about it just assumed that's not for me because of the job I do right and very early on in that first session after I resisted it for about an hour and a half that was really resisting it for a long time and thinking it was even a personal placebo but but there was this wave of relief of just of course you can of course you can have all that and it it felt like a revelation because I thought that had been close to me for so long for tonight I know seven eight years maybe longer I just thought Hurst you can't do that that's not for you or you can't put someone else through that with you what is it particularly about MDMA what is it about I mean I've done it but I've only done it once the is it just because of the fact that it just alleviates the

64:32insecurities and allows you to look at things in a more natural sense you look at everything as if we're just talking about having coffee or water everything is just easy to think about on a dress and talked about and I think I'll probably explain it badly but I think the science of it is you have five networks in your brain and and I was basically in fight-or-flight mode so much that that was the only mode I knew so even when I'm back in New York if someone walks up to close behind me I'm expecting in confrontation I mean fight-or-flight mode all the time so your brain is ignoring the other parts of your brain that provide context and they say that bang outside is just a car backfiring it's not an ID or someone shooting so the MDMA just allows your brain to you know all the parts of your brain to communicate again you're not just in that fight-or-flight mode so

65:16once you get out of that fight-or-flight mode you can then address things that you couldn't even begin to address before and once you've had these experiences in for you as three experiences they're profound enough that you retain the benefits some I mean it looks like I'm in the 25% that still have PTSD after the three months but it still helps enormously I mean the next day they got me to sit down and do a video diary and I was kind of saying yeah I thought this knew this was a revelation and I said you know what I'm just I'm just smiling now in a way that I don't feel like I've smiled for years like it feels like my whole face is smiling and this is the next day which is usually a little wrecked yeah I think it's two or three days when you have the what we used to call a moody Tuesday yeah two or three days yeah but there there's no there's no come down with

66:03this it's it's you know there's no downside how they give you know come is they give you five HTTP or anything while you're nothing apart from the MDMA I mean I well you have you have juice you have water throughout I mean maybe they come down is related to you know people that used to take it would just dance and sweat right all nightly hydrate yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe it's a shitty MDMA maybe girl yeah I mean the yeah the ecstasy they would have sold in London would have been rat poison and breeze popped out and all kinds of yeah so I know they're having very positive results with this and are they planning on implementing this to the public in any time short term I mean is this something that like people that are listening this right now is this going to be available to them fairly soon it looks like it should be legal by 2021 2020 to the third round of

66:51officially fda-approved trials starts soon and that's the first one that involves people other than veterans and first responders if that gets as good results or the first two trials which I'm sure it will then then I think it's going to be and because FDA gave it breakthrough drug status there's nothing that you know anyone can do to stop it it will be legal by 2021 2022 that's very good news for a lot of people that are suffering yeah it's so difficult for people to change perspective just to have a break from the the normal sort of momentum of your life and to be able to stop and analyze yeah and that's exactly what it did to me I was just in this rut for so long where there was it was impossible to look at things did you think about changing your life yeah and I'm thinking about a lot right now I mean I you know III thought I would retire after this this therapy but I

67:44think I said it before that you know in the first session I was planning the next film next series like this is still what I want to do I'm just going to do it smarter I've got to take breaks I've got to you know recover in between trips and there isn't this pressure to be where people are getting their heads blown off every single time and then the last one I did was about Yemen and we spent a week on the frontlines with the various fighting groups and got the usual crazy fighting footage but the powerful stuff was a woman who had her leg blown off by an airstrike in an IDP camp in a miserable IDP camp where the Saudis Emiratis acclaiming they're providing people with everything they need and then at the end a child malnutrition clinic right on the front line where a nurse just just begged all parties to end this war and she was she was literally on the front line

68:26surrounded by a minefield couldn't get doctors couldn't get supplies had a few dozen kids in this clinic that she was just managing to keep alive you know these wailing emaciated babies with their rib cages caged it caved in and you know the reason you do this is to cover the effects of war it's not to get crazy footage of explosions and shootouts it's the effect of war on civilians you know so maybe the answer is to do that and and you know not feel this pressure to just get the crazy fighting footage all the time in our country Yemen is in many ways mostly synonymous for drone attacks drone strikes is when we think about Yemen we think about the drone strikes that we hear about on wedding parties the accident the number of people that are accidentally killed the civilian casualty rate is some preposterous number yeah I mean no one knows cuz you can't check these areas but it's in the

69:17tens of thousands at least and it's the percentage is also preposterous it's far more than 50 percent right yeah I mean it's it's airstrikes yeah so it used to be us drone strikes on on al Qaeda's awesome things now it's Saudi Emirati airstrikes and with with US assistance I mean we were until recently refueling the plane supplying the plane supplying the weapons but yeah they've hit weddings funerals schools hospitals I don't think that's that's by accident I think they're taking an approach to Yemen that the way to crush the opposition not take out the military leaders and you can't there's no movement in history that's been crushed by force that never works Jesus Christ when you're over there what does it feel like in Yemen as opposed to Afghanistan or other places Yemen the actual fighting is is much more low intensity it's fairly small groups of guys at some

70:14distance just lobbing shells eat each other and there's you know there's snipers and there are gunfights but it's not as big scale as or Afghanistan but there are regular airstrikes that are killing civilians and while the two sides are fighting this this slow and bloody war the infrastructure is being destroyed and the civilians are unable to get basic food and medicine that that's the really shocking thing there and also the I mean I knew that the coalition as it's called you know that the fighting groups backed by Saudi Arabian UAE were American backed but you see American stuff everywhere I mean em ramps you know these million dollar bomb-proof trucks I've only ever seen American soldiers and Marines driving in Iraq and Afghanistan you see them everywhere there and that's a real surprise to see that well how did Yemen become this area that's so synonymous with drone strikes

71:06like why did we approach Yemen differently than any other part of the world in terms of the allocation of drone strikes there in terms of numbers I don't know I mean I think for a while the only thing the US was doing in Yemen was drone strikes against al-qaeda but I don't know if there have been more drone strikes in Yemen than then elsewhere I mean that's where we killed an American citizen right that which got lots of headlines right on purpose yes yeah with no trial they just it was because he had joined Isis is that what it was yeah it was it was a very well known and popular you know online presence rallying people to fight but the airstrikes in in in Yemen are you know and and you know with with us weapons are that's that's that's what's really killing people and and meaning that people can't get get food and aid there because you just can't move things around there whatever came

72:01out of that guy getting killed they they basically no one was punished for it I mean he's an American citizen he was I mean if it was in America if somehow now this guy was in the suburbs of Chicago and they launched a drone strike on him it would be front-page news it would be a real issue but the fact that was in Yemen I mean and again the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan is that now we're killing guys like him with drone strikes or Special Forces raids here and there and it's it's happening almost in secret and no one this appears to be illegal I mean some people are yeah you know you can you know which media outlets you can go to to read about this but I think most people are thinking if that's if that's the alternative to invasion yeah and trillions of dollars and American soldiers coming back with no legs for a war we don't understand Brian I think a

72:53lot of people are willing to accept it I don't agree with it but that seems to be what's happening now no I think you're right the the other thing about that is with a lot of these even though it does seem to be illegal people sort of shrugged their shoulders and then no one pursues it and then it just kind of goes away yeah but there's some stories that for whatever reason like Jamal shogi did not go away and it's still still out there like it was so egregious so crazy that this guy walks into the embassy yeah and just never comes out and they're like I don't know what happened and then slowly you start getting a different story and then apparently there's leaked there's audio and perhaps even video of his murder yeah that ordered by the way by someone who was hanging out with Jared Krishna afterwards with apparently no mention of what happened yeah now as a

73:44journalist when you see like that that has got a hit home oh yeah the last few years but for journalists especially you know if you're I mean he wasn't an American citizen Ram but he did write for The Washington Post yeah and was a resident but but I mean I was I was I was arrested in Iran for a week a long long time ago and roughly the same time an Iranian Canadian photographer was arrested and she was raped and beaten to death so the people that are citizens of these countries they're they're really really bearing the brunt and again that's why I'm uncomfortable if people call me brave because I get to come home right and with these guys you know they can get to them and they can get to their families very easily and that that takes a whole other level of bravery and a woman who's raped and beaten to death would was she involved with photographer she's taking

74:32pictures yeah yeah and the usual thing with I mean certainly in Iran but this is common all over the place if you're a dual citizen working as a journalist in for example Iran they'll accuse you of being a spy I was a human being a spy they tried to get me to confess to being a spy that's a very normal assumption out there and how long were you in jail for just seven or eight days I was out like actually not too bad me psychologically it was bad because they were threatening torture and execution physically it wasn't it wasn't too bad I was fed I had a bad bed I was roughed up a bit I wasn't I wasn't beaten but I did think it could last months and months and months and I did think I could go to Evin prison there she put me in a car and drove me to what they said was ever in prison once and then just took me somewhere else evin prison Haven prison is where people have been tortured and

75:16executed so they just drove a little scarier drove me around for a few hours to scare me and then took me to another place here what were they trying to get you to confess to to being a spy and they said at one point they said do you honestly expect us to believe you travel the world collecting all this information and you don't share it with your government I said yeah that's exactly how it works and they thought I was insulting their intelligence by by saying that well you are they're covering we were I did a series one of the first series I did was called holidays in the axis of evil so I spent my first four years as a journalist undercover wearing a secret camera and luckily I appeared on a couple of docks with a guy who was not very good and so I looked genuine next to him so the controlled BBC two said give this guy a series I was racking my brains trying to

76:04think wanted to be a foreign correspondent and wanted to cover up conflict then George Bush made the axis of evil speech and john bolton added three countries to the list so it was Iraq Syria Cuba North Korea Libya Cuba with a six evil countries so we went to all six countries me and one camera man held handheld camera Shane actually saw it and that's when he first reached out and I started talking to Vice about eventually joining them but kind of documentaries from the streets up so we were just trying to say you know despite all the rhetoric about Iran this is what the people are actually like and it was it was kind of you slurred we we interviewed a bunch of students who were involved in some famous protest in 1999 where the police came in and smashed the dormitory and burned them down and beat them I think because we interviewed them we were then tracked and

76:51Wow so how'd you get it free how did I get how did you get free its I didn't know at the time if to come ten countries have diplomatic relations it's only a big deal after a week so on the night of the seventh day all that or the eighth day they they let me go oh yeah but I had no idea at the time I thought this could go on months and months and months now when you were over there in around what is their perception of the United States when you talk to the young people over there oh love the United States real music Culture Sports everything I never the extremely well educated about the United States American foreign policy is a completely different discussion but I mean one of the things we tried to cover was the Friday rally at Tehran University where you see everyone chanting death to America death to Israel mm-hmm and we wanted to cover it because they bus in

77:43old men from the countryside you sit there gonna yeah death to America death to Israel yet it's not something to be so just some propaganda staged event yeah I mean you know if there was a turning point in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and with Iran Ryan Crocker who was you know former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Israel Iraq Afghanistan a straight after 9/11 he was sent to Geneva where a number of countries affected by the refugee crisis were meeting to discuss how to deal with it one of the countries are on so they have this meeting and then he and his Iranian counterpart would disappear for he says seven or eight hours over tea to discuss the future of American Iran relations they knew that they were going to get rid of the Taliban so the Iranians said okay here's a map of the Taliban leaders homes if you take out those homes on day one Taliban have finished and Ryan

78:35Crocker said oh thank you can I can I take notes from this map they said the map is yours we made it for you gave him the map let the Americans use Iranian airspace and handed over some prisoners they were absolutely key in us overthrowing the Taliban so quickly and Ryan Crocker was making good progress and then talking about the future of Iraq post-saddam one night he gets a knock on his door hmm and two of his staffers come in and say boss you're you're really not gonna like what's just happened nice what just happened and it was the axis of evil speech so the moderates so-called in Iran who had fought hard to get permission to negotiate with the Great Satan the US said you've made us look stupid you know it was hard for us to get this chance we helped you in Afghanistan we were willing to discuss future relations between our two countries and and this is this is what

79:25happens so it's over Wow and then fairly soon after that obviously there's the invasion of Iraq and Iran is sponsoring the insurgency and giving them sophisticated IEDs and all that rather than you know potentially helping so you think that with Wow with one speech yeah the whole thing shifted yeah so they would they would have been willing to somehow or another negotiate or cooperate or I mean it working alongside getting rid of Saddam was obviously in their interest yeah brutal eight yeah yeah with it we have a very strange relationship with Iran I mean going back to the hostages from you know the Jimmy Carter era yeah I do think it's one of the most misunderstood countries in the region I mean when you actually go there you know the people are so smart and so educated and and and potentially such such good allies so what is the the key issue it's the government yeah yeah yeah

80:22and you know what I just explained right I think they're capable of thing being far more rational than the speeches by the crazy old mullahs would would suggest oh I mean if they proved him yeah and the idea that the Saudis Emiratis can somehow bomb the Houthis in Yemen into submission and push back Iranian influence on their southern border is ridiculous that's just never going to happen and and I think even if you ignore the obvious moral argument just from a pragmatic point of view the idea that we should back this unconditionally is is ridiculous see this is just part of the real problem when you're dealing with world advanced is trying to parse all this stuff out and look at so many different stories from so many different parts of the world in so many different areas of conflict and it's almost impossible to pay attention to it all every time I meet people from these countries I'm

81:15I feel like a fraud because there's so much that they know that I don't know and that I should write and you know I get paid to do this I get paid to pay attention to this for a living and I feel out of my depth regularly and that's focusing on the five or six countries that I focus on let alone everything else what other countries do you focus on I mean the last few years has been Congo quite a bit Afghanistan mostly Iraq Yemen I've focused on a lot of the last three four years they're the main ones been to Brazil recently been to Central African Republic recently but now I've talked to a friend of mine who's from Brazil who has a completely different take on the new leader of Brazil like he's more positive about it and then I've talked to other people that say he's a monster yeah I mean if people in Brazil are living through the current chaos I can understand why they

82:06might go to a DJ type figure to say it's gonna be messy but he's gonna clean out right but he certainly seems like a monster yeah and they they're experiencing some crazy economic crisis as well yeah and it was the fastest growing in Latin America was booming yeah I was abused just a few years yeah so it's like this roller coaster ride we did a film there recently and I might might get the numbers slightly wrong but the amount of people that were murdered in Brazil in 2017 I believe it was was double more than double the amount that were murdered in Syria Jesus yeah I got a 70 mm yeah and after the World Cup and Olympics the the trafficking gangs and the the police militias just retook all of those areas that were pacified to you know protect the tourists during the the World Cup the Olympics so that violence has just come right back to the favelas so again there's just so much to

83:01pay attention to yeah and Rio the image of Rio is still you know sambar on the beach yeah nice I've been a few times right yeah I've been hurt UFC events beautiful people very nice very friendly but then you go two or three miles up into the hills yeah it's another world well we drove when you land at the airport you drive through the favelas on the way to Rio and you're like whoa this is this is a different kind of power and during the World Cup and Olympics they put billboards next to that road to block the view of the favelas did their and those billboards are now starting to fall apart and you can now say Oh seeing again yeah Wow and you can hear it if you if you stay close to there you'll hear I mean we went into the favelas many times we saw one guy who was suspected of being a police informer so the the trafficking gangs had captured him slashed at his leg so he was lying

83:49on the ground put four rifles to his head and just unloaded and his chin was still kind of where it should be but everything else was this is when you you got there one we got there right afterwards sorry now we didn't witness it happening and we got there right afterwards but yeah it's it's I mean hideous violence there on a massive scale yeah and also I got into an argument on the other day about this um deeply racist you know the rich people in Ipanema tend to be white European descendants the poor kids getting shot in the favelas almost all black and if you walk into a bar in Ipanema with a black girl everyone will assume she's a prostitute if you walk into a bar and if an Emer with a black guy everyone will assume he's a drug dealer and again the exact opposite of the public image of Brazil it Benina is the more wealthy area because there is yeah

84:39that's the very best the very wealthy nice beach area nice hotels and apartment blocks but they still must get robbed all the time down there right it used to be that the violence was separated from the really rich areas but there are now a lot of wealthy Brazilians leaving because it's it's it's affecting everywhere now I mean that the one of the experts we interviewed in in the last film said I believe it was one in three Rio residents will get caught in crossfire at some point over the course of a year I might be wrong in that believe it was one really year yeah yeah but it was a massive massive number yeah yeah I mean if you're anywhere near a favela you'll hear it most nights you'll hear shots being fired most nights and not like boom boom boom you know you'll hear a fight going on Jesus Christ how much time do you spend over there three weeks I believe it was Wow and what are you

85:34covering we did a film about the pacification campaign the police and army clearing the favelas before the World Cup and Olympics so we went back just to see just to sort of illuminate it for people that think that this is what Brazil's actually like and see what yeah what happened afterwards right and those areas were abandoned as soon as the World Cup and Olympics were over dude I don't know how you do this you're so friendly to it's so easygoing Olivia you seem so peaceful like you don't seem like a shocked guy you know you really don't you seem very very even oh that's good to hear yeah I mean I think I still have PTSD but it definitely helped and I bumped into a friend of mine the diet Dan Reid who made the Michael Jackson documentary I saw him in New York a few leagues Neverland yeah yeah why I said Ben you just seem you just seem a bit a bit calmer well what is your take on

86:29that documentary I have not watched it but I've heard that those two guys had testified saying that nothing had ever happened to them before this and then then now they're down on their luck and now they've changed their tune and saying that it was they go into that in detail in the doc and basically they had been replaced by the new young boy on the side and then Michael reached out and said I need you to help me and and they say it was exciting the idea to be to be back in Michael's good books and be wanted by Michael again so they did they talked about that very openly I had dinner with him a week before the film came out and I believed them really yeah yeah and and one of them certainly I think has has what looks like the symptoms of PTSD and the other one I think went through therapy before he was able to talk about this stuff so I don't think they're doing here for for

87:17financial gain what did you think about the doctor Michael Jackson's doctors saying that he was chemically castrated oh I didn't I didn't hear that this is something that we've talked about before because his voice was so different and to me I said a long time ago before his doctor came out and said he was chemically castrate I said he sounds like a castrato he sounds like one of those men who were taking his boys in you know the 1800s and 70 chose to do it the doctor saying I don't know that I think the doctors saying that his father did it to him I think that was with this is the doctor that killed him otherwise so take that with a grain side right but they were saying that he chemically castrated him to preserve his voice which you know it sounds preposterous until you look at his frame I mean it did not have the frame of a person who kissed her own

88:04kids he did saw those kids Ananda's kids they're definitely not his kids I mean so it's easy to get the facts to fit a theory you know couple those kids are not his kids those are the whitest kids you're ever gonna look at yeah they're really white I mean they're not part african-american I mean he we got to remember before his vitiligo kicked in he was very dark you know he looked like his brothers yeah yeah looked like his father yeah I mean it's um I don't know I hadn't heard that theory before his kids his kids when these kids really haven't had many theories I'm not I don't think that much about Michael Jackson so I mean I think that's just been pretty much established yeah that his kids weren't really as kids and I think his there's the woman that he had children with I think I saw on the record saying they never had sex all right I think yeah I think they I think

88:51they talked about that as well yeah yeah I don't know but it's it when we had a similar case in the UK with Jimmy Savile that's the most popular that's that's that seems even worse and the documentaries great is a portrait of how you grew him not just a kid but the family as well and in some ways you groom the entire country to the point where if accusations come out everyone says no not him no way Brian that's that's how it works well he looked like a monster yeah and Michael Jackson looked like a monster eventually but when we always go back to him as a boy when he was singing ABC I mean he was just adorable little kid incredibly talented and so dynamic and exciting to watch like God he's so talented look at him and then in thriller I mean everybody loved him but Jimmy Savile looks like a monster in retrospect I wrote to him as a kid he had a show called Jim will fix it right

89:39when he'd grant you your wish and then you'd sit on his lap and give you a little he got off flight no no one thought he was a monster back then no one but he was so hideous yeah and and Louis Theroux did a great documentary with him yes he keeps his mother's bedroom exactly was it was all the clothes hanging yeah but I mean obviously in his lifetime this was not discussed questioned yeah like I say I think he groomed the entire country well there's so many cases like that where you have this systemic pedophile situation that doesn't make sense like how did this how did this last like Penn State like the Sandusky case like how did this law how did everyone seems to have known about it how did it last and people had seen a kid in the shower yes and hadn't I mean yeah you think now you'd right you'd kill yourself if you didn't you know grant evene in some way I think

90:29it's also easy to forget how much that wasn't part of the conversation back then though you know the idea that there are pedophiles out there and it's it's actually incredibly widespread that just wasn't right that wasn't something people were worried about back then from my memory at least anyway no it was church it was Catholic Church priests we knew about that ever other than that there was no discussion of like some world famous football coach who was secretly kids like that you never heard that I mean and Paterno they thinks had to have known there's no way he couldn't have known or at least been exposed to some of it and to the conversation we had earlier I remember that that great documentary where a guy protests in front of the statue another guy comes up and tries to beat him up just for daring to suggest yeah you know this this hero of his would be capable

91:17of that yeah people just you know they just can't fathom it because they've been so well groomed myself Penn State football is just sucks it's a religion it's so important to them it's into to see that these people that were in charge of it we're so up yeah Jesus man shows a bummer sorry but you know do you plan on doing this MDMA therapy on a regular basis and what what sort of an impact do you think I mean when when you go over the results of the first therapy where you are it almost immediately alleviates you of a lot of your feelings but you still are thinking about planning your next adventure and your next project I'm probably gonna do a full session like the therapist recommended a full session which isn't well that normally do but but said I mean I thought I thought being able to cry would be a major breakthrough let's part of this therapy um and

92:14actually you normally can't cry at all I'm cried since I was 13 years old or something 14 oh well that's different because that predates your war correspondence yeah yeah I mean English culture it's you know my grandparents fought in the war with tough-as-nails it's you know there is this pressure to be to be tough Oh in the first normal therapy session I told her what I thought was quite an everyday story about an experience in war to the therapist and he cried oh and then the first MDMA session the therapist cried I don't know two or three times and the cameraman cried and I still still couldn't get there and then the third session I nearly did and I my jaw was trembling and I kind of thought all this there's going to be this what would have felt like a breakthrough and still happen yeah what were they crying about I can't even remember what stories you just said the

93:06show's been a bummer like the stories I just tell them that you know well I mean I'm joking kind of joke but this is very happy you're talking this is one of the you know the the lesser symptoms of doing this is you you turn up to a party or a dinner or something you know with people they're enjoying the South ourselves of smiling mm-hmm oh this is Ben Ben's just come back from from Yemen oh what's it like in Yemen Ben you really really want to know yeah tell us and then ten minutes later there's this dark cloud of the evening oh Jesus you just feel like you're you know you're just killing killing the there cutting any mistake in your talk yeah yeah doing that but I can t remember what the stories were had that effect what is it like when you go to dinner with fellow war journalists what do you guys talk about I'm not there's a few that are really good friends and we can talk

93:56about all this stuff there's a lot I'm not I'm not that close to and I don't like the you know the the mutual you know and backpacking that goes on with it and was that what it is I kind of think you know if you're doing this for a living like you you you shouldn't be sharing stories with other people who cover that country other other people from you know from your background or your country you should be talking to the people from that country and a lot of journalists I mean it's possible in Afghanistan and Syria in Iraq to have a pretty good life you stay in the 5-star Hotel you eat well drink wine every night and you you know you you get information from each other right and I think that defeats the point of foreign reporting oh I see so consciously or unconsciously I I'm not I'm not you know I don't spend a lot of time with with other war journalists

94:42there there were those who were deeply admire who I see every now and again like Sebastian Junger but I'm not I don't I don't hang out with him day in day out mmm so there's levels to the involvement yeah to whether how deeply you're immersed and it's it's it's completely upside-down in the state because the TV new gen TV news journalists aren't deeply involved and just want to get that quick shot of them looking like they're somewhere middle east Annie right closest to the front line with the flak jacket on their perfectly ironed shirt and they're not they're not sweating or even worse the Brian Williams type situation yeah yeah or on the roof of the 5-star hotel sometimes you might see people report about what's happening with Isis and they're in Beirut right and I think they're relying on the fact that a lot of people don't understand that's a different country right but you know

95:26those guys some of those guys are paid millions and treated very very well the photographers and print journalists who are immersed and are spending weeks there are sometimes struggling to make a living and aren't well-known and aren't well supported what is it about the talking head in front of the camera that we want so badly I mean I think it's it's it's a way for the news networks to you know claim credibility and then when you see them get deployed they're not focused on getting material from the war in these countries they're focused on that on the two-way right I mean our guy live from wherever right that's more important than actually spending days collecting footage of what's actually going on it seems like you see that rarely if ever these days it's more and more rare it seemed to me that during like Desert Storm in the 90s there was always someone that was over there and

96:18it seemed like there was real threat and it was really going on but now everything seems to be done from the desk and you don't really see a lot of I mean am i right about that yeah I mean I think it mostly a lot of the major news network said to their crews you're not allowed to spend the night in Mosul you know you can go there and fill a street interview some refugees who just escaped Isis charity but you can't spend days on end there whereas the freelance photographers and some of the writers they were spending days on in there and getting getting the real stuff is it because the on-camera people will be targeted I just think the risk is too high full-stop for the entire crew and certainly if you know when the story is really big can you send one of the very well-known correspondents there then yeah they can't be running around you know filming house-to-house fighting so

97:03when you're over there and you see these guys show up and you know that they're just gonna be hanging out at the hotel and what does that feelin like yeah I mean I'm pretty disdainful of those yeah ask you have to be yeah yeah well you see these films like whiskey-tango-foxtrot about Afghanistan I dunno I just don't recognize that that world you know partying every night at whatever bar a restaurant you think if you're there and you're obviously in the wrong place right right and it's not it's not an adventure you know it's not a fun trip for you of wild times and you know it's it shouldn't be there should be I mean for me it feels like an endurance test every time you go it should be hard and you should be spending time with the people you're covering and you know sometimes you can you can think you've finished with someone and just go for dinner or tea and just by having normal human

97:52conversations you find out so much other stuff that you didn't go there to report on yeah that's that's what you have to be doing and then that takes a weeks weeks of getting closer to them and gain their trust yeah yeah yeah and just just just you know spending enough time there where you you then end up being in the right place at the right time to show something really happening I mean most of all we filmed the Iraqi army attacking a house where Isis was shooting from the house and there were three or four families in the house so the Iraqi army shot at Isis or the ISIS guys went down and encouraged the families to run towards us and just seeing that moment of civilians fleeing an escaping Isis for the first time after three years and when they turned the corner and saw us they knew they'd made it and they just collapsed at the ground they were kissing the ground they

98:35were hugging each other now those are the moments you you you're trying to capture just I mean I've never seen relief like it Jesus Christ and how they get them out of there what do they do from that stage I mean they'll eventually walk out of Mosul itself and then there are people that can take them to the the IDP camps around there and we'll get them you know the basic services they need and medical services but there's not there's not much of that there and that that was the shock in in Yemen was the places that Saudis knew Moratti said were being so well supplied with food and water and tents and medical facilities just just weren't at all we took no position we talked about Syria early you know we're after the population for as displaced yes you know you're talking about you know twelve thirteen million people here internally displaced or over a fled

99:21you know just unimaginable unimaginable and it's one of the biggest controversies in this country in terms of what to do when the refugees come what what what do you do some countries are taking them in with open arms some countries are not and there's a lot of people that are concentrating on the negative aspects of taking these people into your community community um what what is your what did you take I'm watching all this thing happen why watching all this I spent a Friday and Saturday in in Houston with a group of Afghan interpreters who had been with in Afghanistan who got these special immigrant visas and came to America with their with their families I cannot think of a better group of people who are contributing to life here I mean on the Saturday morning they were they were running a food bank they've got jobs they're paying taxes yeah I mean I think

100:11we should welcome them with open arms and I think you know despite our moral obligation to do that I think we would benefit yeah from from doing it and you know it we turned away Jewish refugees during World War two you'd think we'd learn from that and say never again you know you know I mean if you're if you're an American Christian I think Christianity is fairly clear and what into it with refugees yes you know so so the vision to not only say no to refugees but also to vilify them and say oh look a lot of them are fighting age male yeah clearly Isis sneaking in I mean that's a level of viciousness and ignorance that I just I just can't fathom the ignorance is it's it's very pervasive right it's like it's one of these things where we don't you don't know you're you're reading these stories and there as people are telling you these are fighting age males and that we could

101:08very well be letting Isis in to our country we very well could be letting in these terrorist cells and allowing them to come in but we also could be letting families and that this is a country that's made of immigrants I mean it's one of the weirdest things in this country that this is a country so so obsessed with borders and immigration but yet it's comprised entirely of immigrants yeah there's a great do you know Gary Young the British journalist no he interviews Richard Spencer and Richard spent Gary Young I think makes a very similar point and Richard Spencer says yeah but this country was built by white people you know we came up with the patient no no it was it was literally built by black people Gary Young says he says yeah but only because we told him how to do it and it's on camera Gary Young says you know what I came to see you because I thought

102:01you were the intellectual argument for supporting Trump so I thought I'd mention it Spencer was the he did why do you think that I don't know but he says you're not this is just ridiculous and he just shuts down the interview turns around and walks off good for him I don't know anything about Richard Spencer other than he always gets mentioned as a white supremacist I literally don't know what he stands for what he does or what he says I think I would say he's well dressed and with a nice hat this is a yeah it's such a crazy subject the idea of I mean it would be nice if the whole world was up to the same standards of health and and prosperity and he didn't have to worry about where you could go if the whole world was essentially like the United States where you could go to where the good parts were you know if you live in Detroit and you save up your money you

102:54can move to Florida or wherever you want to go I mean you can do that this is the beautiful thing about living inside of a country be fantastic if the whole world was like that you could just kind of go wherever you would prosper and wherever things would be well but this the thing about refugees and other countries where we don't understand their language or their culture and then you get scared because you hear the were worried about Muslim terrorists and it's again it's one more piece of information that just it just overwhelms you one more one more thing to concentrate on there is a difference with Muslims in the Catholic Church and child abuse scandal yes did a lot of people say are there for all Christians are suspicious and all Christians are secretly pedophiles right they're just not telling us no they didn't they didn't but they deal with what's fear of

103:46the unknown you know it's a lot of it the languages and the the fact that we're you know there's also this there has to be this feeling that we've invaded their country several countries and been there for a long time and there's a deep-seated resentment that you know there's the thought of every time you accidentally blow up a wedding party with a drone every time you kill civilians every times in collateral damage you're creating untold numbers of people that hate the United States you'd think that I'd you know having traveled too much of those countries I don't see don't see that and yesterday I was interviewing the Afghan interpreters and I said what do you think about negotiating with the Taliban I mean in one case a good friend of mine called Soroush who's now living in in Houston I said you know these guys killed your brother because you were working for the

104:36Americans as an interpreter so how do you feel about the Americans now doing a deal with the Taliban and what about if the u.s. leaves and the Taliban finishes off the government and then comes after your family he said you know what America is not gonna let that happen America has so much power and knows what to do that they will make sure that any agreement they reach with the Taliban will be enforceable and it will be safe he had so much faith in me far more than me Wow and that's that's what I hear far more often than the opposite is it does that really depend on where you go I mean cause if you go certain places people have a lot of faith in Trump you know like Donald Trump's gonna protect us from evil there's play places where you go that I mean it's become a cliche but but I do think you'll you'll find a lot of places critical of American foreign policy mm-hmm that doesn't mean

105:21they're critical of America I know Halladay parse that out I think I mean Vietnam I think is a good example we have defeated communism or communism has been defeated in Vietnam just because the new generation grow up and think Western culture communism I know which one I want is a simple choice yeah and I think that young generation is is making that very simple choice and it could just mean democracy and you think that is in Afghanistan as well yeah that they're recognizing that Western culture provides more freedom and more Economic Opportunity more prosperity yeah and I haven't heard apart from from the Taliban I haven't heard much anti-american feeling in Afghanistan at all really I'm also a lot of that I mean maybe I'm biased because a lot of the people I'm talking to had interactions with with Americans mmm but they would even say as many mistakes

106:14as were made in the Prosecuting of the war with airstrikes and nitrates and all that the American soldiers and Marines we met we knew were good people and and like I said with Roach my interpreter it's it's incredible how many people still believe that to this day there are conspiracy theories so for example in Iraq you'll hear a lot of people say well Isis must have been part of America's plan incompetence cannot explain what happened in Iraq this cannot be a mistake yeah a lot of people believe that a lot of people believe that over here as well right yeah but that still doesn't mean they'll hate all Americans in America and it means a lot them would love to visit and maybe even come and live here is that anything that you take seriously though those conspiracy theories is there any validity to any lifestyle the massive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have

107:02done massive damage to the US on the world stage there's no way the u.s. benefits from from what's what's happened I mean you know the Taliban would have done a deal in 2002 where they got almost nothing 18 years later a trillion dollars later tens of thousands of lives later we're now in negotiating with the Taliban where they might get a very good deal that's a massive humiliation for the US and also Iran Russia is below others know that the u.s. is not going to intervene in lots of countries so they're doing whatever they want and almost gloating about it knowing full well that America just doesn't have this have the public support to intervene anywhere else for a very long time what's the predominant conspiracy that they want to prolong this war because of the military-industrial complex because they're they're spending tons of money and yeah gaining contracts

107:53and oil obviously in a row how many Karzai as I said to me do you think America failed in Afghanistan I said of course I do like every film have maids like young explains exactly how and he says now I think I think this is exactly what they want they want this being attacked on all sides by extremists so we will bow to their to their every wish and what do you say to that I mean you know he's he's met far more senior people than me so it's hard to argue with him but yeah I don't give that theory any any thought well that's the creepiest thought whatsoever is that the government wants his perpetual Wars I mean that is the scariest conspiracy theory I'm not saying I support it but if you wanted to consider a conspiracy theory that's truly terrifying it's that they keep perpetual Wars going on so that they can profit and you know George HW Bush Bill Clinton benefited from

108:45airstrikes you know there's a quick possible bump in terms of your approval ratings now that's that's improving many times but these wars Iraq and Afghanistan you know having gone so long yeah and resulted in and I think a humiliating defeat in both countries no one's were anything from them well there's a numbness that this country has towards them now it's been so many generations it's been so many years there's so many I mean what what order the numbers of troops that have gone over to Afghanistan and Iraq and come back just and not come back to this isn't staggering and those towns they fought for Fallujah in Iraq Helmand province in Afghanistan are now back in the hands of the Taliban in that's not even news here no all those places Marja that the place I described earlier is now back in the hands of the Taliban I've been you know since I went there with the US Marines I

109:38I don't remember seeing a headline about them no no it's conveniently ignored because the public I just you know you know I've had so long I've seen people come back in body bags or without legs and thinking I don't even know what victory looks like now I don't even know what the point of this is is anymore yeah where are we 16 years in is that what it is no Afghanistan is 18 18 yeah I mean they say the longest war in American history the first four or five years we went to Iraq very quickly and weren't doing very much in Afghanistan so you know I'd argue it's not an 1819 year war but it's it's a very long and very costly war does this ever give you this feeling of hopelessness like do you look at yourself forty years down the line still doing this like how do you how do you how do you approach this I think about that and I also think about just selling

110:25everything I have and getting a little house in Jamaica and just drinking beer and relaxing yeah I think I tried to do my bit I'm not sure how much of a bit I did but but yeah like it's it's it's it you can get that feeling very easily yeah I would imagine that you you see so much and you see so much anguish and so much pain and suffering and death and war and so much of it seems pointless that after a while you might want to just detach disconnect and you said it earlier you know when you read the numbers hear the stories yeah I just I can't even take it serious anymore I mean I can take it seriously but I can't fathom it I can't really really imagine what that's like yeah and I've seen it with my own eyes and even then it's it's it's so hard to process do you have an exit strategy no I mean I could make documentaries about other things but I just don't think it

111:19would be this this feels urgent to me yeah you know and I question how useful this work is but it feels somewhat useful it certainly feels like the most useful thing I can do for now I'm not a doctor I'm not you know I'm not a politician so even if it's not that much use it's somewhat useful well there's also the problem that you've you've dedicated so much of your time to I do think it's very useful you've dedicated so much time doing this that if you were to make you know documentary on something frivolous oh this guy's a cabinetmaker how do you do it Bob yeah yeah yeah you might lose your mind I mean I don't think you'd once you've experienced what you've experienced it's probably very very difficult to look at the the world through a normal lens and be satisfied with normal results and it would be easy to dismiss anything else you did as being frivolous you know

112:15comparison to covering Yemen or Afghanistan or Congo or wherever so do you essentially just take it project by project and just keep going yeah I mean I'm I'm thinking about this everyday right now because like I said in the in that first MDMA so yeah I thought this is what you want to do this is this is what you care about this is where your art is so I'm pretty sure I'm gonna keep on doing it just maybe doing it in a different way I'm also really tempted just to try and take you know three months off I go to Costa Rica and surf and do yoga and read nice books and just just just then see how I feel one of my favorite quotes is um is Nietzsche he says credit no thought not had in the open air while walking in in beautiful landscapes wow what a great only when you're in that state of mind can you make the right decision so it'd be nice to make the decision in the place like

113:02that sure especially you caught up in the momentum of these chaotic events and everything he was happening that you want to be I mean Isis are about to get defeated in Syria I want to be there to see it yeah cover it do you think you really could take three months and go to Costa Rica have you done that before I did nine days in Jamaica recently nine whole days yeah what was it like on day two I I loved every minute of did you really and I actually felt like my brain kind of woke up yeah I just felt you know that the numbness I talked about earlier the worst thing is it just kills your curiosity yeah and that's that's horrible and it just I just felt you know curious again I felt like my mind and I read a couple of books that weren't all related and I I focused on them I took it in I you know I was I was in it for the experience and I loved it why don't you just do that then take

113:54those three months maybe in every different view yeah I feel guilty you ever think do you feel guilty yeah yeah that's what I was gonna ask you like do I wanted to know if you felt guilty around day two idea I didn't feel guilty on this one because it was it was quick I mean in the past you know you can you can go to a big fight and enjoy it in London you can go for a big dinner and enjoy it and love it but that's about it you know a month of luxury somewhere I think I would I would you're not covering this fight when you went to there Spence Mike you know just I've made a custom box in Docs I made a documentary about Danny Jacobs did you really when he survived cancer in the night he became a world champion oh why we were there and it was actually it was great to be able to say to people here's my latest film it'll make you feel really good it'll inspire you that

114:40so to contradict what I said earlier that felt really good to be able to do that maybe there's more of those in your future yeah yeah I was talking something out the other day about maybe a documentary about the gym that Danny comes from which is a door that leads to the basement of a bodega in bed-stuy and they don't have three world champions Wow it's highly it's it's not a lot bigger than this room really with a lower ceiling yeah yeah real yeah yeah and it's underneath the bodega yeah it's a Saddam Ali you think is the first Arab or Yemeni world champion he beat Miguel cata Wow he got into boxing was a kid so his dad who owns a bodega built this gym in the basement and that's where he and Danny came up that's incredible and people walk past it and it's just this door there's no sign and people don't even know have you been to the Cronk gym in Detroit no I have it it doesn't exist

115:27anymore dozen oh but you turn up to the building you think this can't be the right place it's looks like a derelict building I go down this basement you know two staircase into the basement and there's this crappy gym with one ring and a few bag and that's it and then Tommy Hearns walks in and Henry I can one day walks in and you know over car walks in it's similar to that I heard Lennox Lewis on the podcast week it was amazed he sounded great it's amazing right good yeah it seemed like there's anything wrong with him at all I was wondering if chess is what's helping him you know because he doesn't seem to be sustaining any of the long term and if he got knocked out a couple yeah yeah yeah yeah he really did you know I mean it's it's amazing well I really do wonder because chess is so it's so difficult and your mind is constantly firing and it and the brain

116:18in some ways does atrophy without use I mean whether it's not physical attribute in terms of the size of it but in terms of its abilities the more active you are solving polish Foreman used to do a lot of crossword puzzles and things along those lines and he actively sought diffic difficult little quizzes and puzzles and to keep his mind sharp I met Quincy Jones a couple of months ago oh yeah he's learning Mandarin I think how old is he I don't know he's in his 80s I think 26 oh wow and by the way we had we had a group of us had dinner and he was the last man to leave he closed the restaurant down Wow he's incredible and I got into an argument about reo and racism in Brazil in front of him really and he said wait a minute I've been going to the favelas in Rio since the 60s I thought here we go and he said and Ben's right Brasilia is deeply racist I

117:12just got backed up by quincy jones in an argument it was it was great but he's he says exactly the same thing yeah so he does these things specifically to try to stay sharp yeah yeah yeah treat the brain like a muscle yeah I think there's something to that I mean the lawn I mean Lennox Lewis is obviously one anecdotal case but man he's so sharp but that's what's so frightening about the numbness that comes from the PTSD is if it takes away that curiosity it takes you've got a day off and you think I'm gonna do a crossword I'm gonna language it takes away that that energy that's that's terrifying right the numbness yeah the the numbness of people well people in extreme poverty and extreme stress they do experience that sort of yeah numbness especially if you're in a dangerous neighborhood and just you're overwhelmed like you were saying about how the adrenaline

118:00eventually wears off and then you know just kind of you're in this weird grey state yeah and imagine someone someone in prison if you can awaken that you know who knows what's possible but it seems like there's almost no effort rehabilitation no wakening that is is I don't think that difficult it just means the right book or the right person the right film well there's a place where I believe MDMA therapy could really have some amazing results yeah we've talked about it with with the therapists who are leading this I think that's their dream is to get in and do this in a prison because I guarantee the majority of those guys in there are suffering from PTSD reaction are reacting to it well and the majority of them have probably been abused and come from abusive environments and horrible situations and the the idea that we just take people and lock them in cages and say well

118:51you've done your time now get get out and now you're gonna be even more up and now you're you know you're habituated yeah you're used to being surrounded by violent criminals good luck in the world and we're gonna make it even harder for you than anybody else to get a job or an apartment yeah yeah I mean it was just a story about Kim Kardashian trying to pay this guy's rent because he got out of jail and she's gonna pay his rent for five years to sort of get him on his feet he still can't get a apartment oh it had the first bad yeah nobody wants them no one wants to take him in yeah yeah it's and we don't ever want to give anybody a road to redemption you up once you do something wrong one robbery you get accused of yes oh yeah and you're off to Rikers for three years before we even stand trial sure I read a stat the other day I think it's 94% of trials in the

119:40u.s. settled on a on a plea bargain don't even go to trial and I thought that was wrong I thought that can't be accurate and while they scare people yeah yeah you can plead guilty and get five years yeah or you can go to trial and you'll probably get 30 yeah we're just insane yeah like what why would you give me five years if a judge would give me 30 like what is that yeah what does happen if I am guilty yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I know it's insane it's just like that it's the money saving sort of mechanism and and in ensuring that they don't lose you know and just they scare you yeah you want to risk it all you want to 30 years you won't have a life but five years you will yeah you might get out and - yeah be a good fella don't stab anybody in jail yeah yeah what we do with people in this country when someone commits a crime is it's pretty stunning and then

120:35when you factor in the fact that there is actual businesses that evolve or revolve rather around profiting off people being incarcerated is even crazier yep and no one investigates that either yeah I'm again there are some great investigations ProPublica people like that sure how many people are eating them reading them that's a better way to say yeah yeah something no what emotion is there yeah and to your point about you know overflow of information it's it's all there it's just yeah let's not at the top of the pile and we're near the top of the pile that's probably the last thing that people concentrating on because you're assuming these people are bad criminals and you don't want them on the street what do you wanna do you want to think about all the good people out there that are struggling concentrate of them first yeah then what but this is part of what's wrong part of what's

121:16wrong as these people are in these terrible situations terrible communities nowhere out nothing no positive image to model everyone is a drug dealer or criminal it's crime around you all the time you wind up in the system you become incarcerated and then that's your life now yeah and you're stuck in this thing and yeah there's more of them in American prison than anywhere else on the planet Earth yeah and there's a foreigner here that's one of the things that just never fails to shock me well anyone's got its own concerns too right I mean there's so many stabbings in London now it's really crazy yeah yeah I mean but compared to shootings here it's it's nothing you know it's yeah but yeah it's it's definitely a problem and then you know that you just don't see police on the streets like you used to in London yeah and you don't see police my dad was a

122:01policeman before I was born but you you just don't see you know like streetwise policemen who are part of the local community getting intelligence knowing when you're and often you'll see I mean I remember the riots in Brixton which were right near where I lived and the police would stand back let the riot unfold and then just study video afterwards recognize that guy will arrest him three days later I didn't think that's what Elise was supposed to do well they want to protect their own house yeah yeah yeah then how do we fix the world I have no idea that you might be MDMA that's yeah I know some people that would would say that and make a good argument for it and really believe it it's a really good argument for psychedelics remapping the world there really is there's a frivilous yeah there's a moment in the MDMA documentary did we interview Rick Doblin you know

122:47the mastermind of this come on oh wait yeah it's been on at the end I say what's the potential this if you get it legalized and he basically says spiritualize the world world peace and I look at him like he's serious and he laughs and says I know it sounds crazy but I really believe this is possible it is past yeah yeah well not just MDMA MDMA is a great doorway because of its work with people with trauma but psilocybin is as well and you know psilocybin obviously comes with these profound breakthrough psychedelic experiences that completely not just completely remap your perceptions of life but show you a whole world that you didn't think could possibly exist and then all the other ones you know ibogaine for all these people that are hooked on pills it was one of the most effective drugs or known molecules on earth for alleviating people of opiates I'm trying to get to me I've tried a

123:40couple of times if that's what they want to try with me next yeah I mean anything that makes people compassionate and kind to themselves as well as others yes yeah I don't seem like that much of a jump I think most people have it in them yeah you know not that far under the surface people are scared you know they're scared they're tense and you know people are just in constant states of conflict I mean that's a big thing that's going on in this world and one of the things that psychedelics do is they give you a brief break from that conflict you know and then give you these thoughts that you probably would have never achieved without these drugs and that's exactly what MDMA did with me it just removed all of those all those fears yeah yeah I think it's entirely possible I really do I think it's a real there's a there's a real case for us being able to set up

124:34some sort of clinics some sort of supervised psychedelic experiences where one after another people start changing and they that trickles down they start changing the people around them people say well what happened to Mike like Oh Mike did mushrooms at this new clinic that they're opening up and they're changing a new guy he's a different person he's so nice and then they joined too and I mean I just think there's so much room for that in this world it's so difficult to change who you are people rarely change they become a slightly different version of who they were 5 10 15 years ago they rarely actually change and then even to people who are completely skeptical about this the fact this is helping veterans yeah it means that everyone is behind it well it's a great way to get in yeah yeah I mean they're very wise Maps is in approach to this one particular modality

125:25because if they can actually achieve this you're gonna also achieve it and help people that are in the they're in the community that's least likely to accept psychedelics right-wing pro-war you know Magga people like those those people I mean those are probably the least likely if you wanted to generalize yeah to accept psychedelics we watched the fox news segment with Rick his house in Boston a Fox News talking about MDMA for veterans how did they approach it well they looked at each other at the end and said do you ever think you'd do a pro ecstasy piece and they said no but if it helps the veterans I guess we're for it too right yes exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah and if it can lower crime rates to get people on mushrooms I mean if dimethyltryptamine can change people's perceptions there's so many of these different drugs to that you could introduce people to under a clinical

126:21supervision setting where you could change though I mean how many people are involved in psychotherapy and it doesn't do a goddamn thing to them they just keep going back and forth or they numb them up with pills Oh with me it was sold off straight away you know it works they doubled the dose didn't work double the dose again I was just a zombie yeah and that I don't have any experience with it but I know people that have had very negative experiences yeah with just the world becomes all the bright colors are gone and the world just becomes weird that's exactly a delta everything yeah and the great thing about MDMA is it's not a potential opioid crisis because it's a therapist sitting down giving you the pill right I don't give you 50 pills and you can abused it whatever you want yes done I mean logistically doing what you say is gonna be hard to set up we need a lot of

127:07therapists a lot of facilities but it's it's it's it's possible well once their success it and then it becomes a business then it can happen I mean once insurance starts covering it once people start experiencing positive benefits you can get it from both sides right you get it from the commerce aspect you get money starts coming in people start paying for it and it becomes a business that's successful it actually has good results people start talking well about it other people start opening up these these centers yeah there's so much potential to this those people at maps and Rick Doblin and all of his crew they're really they have the real potential to change the world yeah and actually went the first session when I was really resisting it in fighting it I just imagined Rick's face and the Met Office faces in in South Carolina and just the kindness and

127:58benevolence yeah and I just I just thought of those faces and that's what allowed me to just let it wash over and Wow and hit me but Johnson and Johnson just got permission to use to market their version of ketamine and right now the dose of ketamine I had was is about $90 they're gonna sell it for $15,000 that's that's the danger of it getting properly legalized and as you said turned into a successful business oh that's terrible yeah now why is it so expected just so they can make money off of it now this is the therapeutic dose of ketamine in some sort of psychiatric sort of sort what's the environment they're going to do it and so they want to have it very much controlled but it looks like they want to stop the the you know therapists giving it in the study in their own office I mean which is which is what's going on now have it controlled and under you know in a

128:55hospital sort of situation and then there is a very good and it's not even underground cuz I'm not sure it even sure it's it's not legal here right ketamine yeah I think it is illegal um but there are therapists giving it out now and I bought legally you know I think you can oh you bought it with a restriction real yeah yeah with the prescription in New York oh maybe I'm wrong his ketamine legal legal under prescription maybe it's a schedule 2 drug or something along those lines I was gonna get that someone sent me the message about the $15,000 I'm what it that's crazy yeah ninety-two 15,000 yeah which is far worse far more than you know the amount that Martin shkreli put up the price right and went to jail for yeah but yeah he's a douchebag though it's easy to point at him yeah you know he owns the wu-tang clan album yeah I don't know someone got it man easy Joe I studied I saw he's

129:54still running his business from like a burner cell phone in jail oh that's hilarious well what he's saying is though what happened the wu-tang clan album I thought it was in possession of the FBI that's in there that offer something come on son that is hilarious that might be one of the most hilarious parts of that story the FBI owns the wu-tang clan forbidden album how much did he pay like a million dollars for it paid a lot because it was up for auction heap I think this says he paid two million Wow you could never get that money back especially if the tracks got released but what a great marketing tool it's worth more than two million dollars in marketing therefore it's not released confirmed he paid two million for yeah but he's full of yes I bet he did though I mean if I had to guess you know I mean how many wealthy people out there what ankled fans a lot yeah probably

130:54probably a healthy bid healthy bidding war as of uh this is as of like a year ago the feds have it so I don't know if there's an update on that there's always I mean when it's an individual that's like him that's easy to it's easy to look at him disparagingly like look at this guy he's a dick you know oh he wants to raise the money I raise the price of these drugs that can help people him let's go get them but if it's Johnson and Johnson it's like yeah first they make baby powder yeah you know they're so respected it's such a common household name and then I'm calling it ketamine they're calling it s ketamine s slightly different that sounds like a snail right sounds like escargot and it's a nasal spray oh Jesus I know how different that makes it but uh-huh well it's better than shooting it up because I know that a lot of people take it intramuscularly

131:51where you just jab it into your thigh I believe yeah this is the drug will only be given by accredited specialists who must monitor patients for two hours after administration I don't think you just get it and go home and oh that makes sense because I know Neal Brennan did it and he had some very good results from it I took I've spoke to him a few times he's tried everything he's a he's trying he's great he's had he's hilarious guy he's had some real depression problems though he has some very good relief from magnetic therapy yeah and have you seen the involuntary trembling thing he did as well no what's the idea of that what is that I have no idea involuntary tremble are you sitting there and shoulders just going they just said it was great choose him up with something nothing job just talking oh so he just does it on press yeah no this therapist in LA he gets him to do it

132:40somehow and that helped him yeah I have to watch game I don't know I watched the three Mike special thinking it was just another comedy stand-up right I had no idea about that that third Mike being the serious stuff yeah I thought was incredible he's a brilliant guy he's very smart guy and his stand-up is outstanding and he just keeps getting better but you know he's a guy fighting demons yeah he's the classic case of the comedian that can never be helped happy unless he's on stage killing you know and then you know even then that's brief like he's just never this jovial funny guy but he's a brilliant comedian yeah but as long as I've known him for many years he struggled and it sounds like he's kind of an unofficial executive producer for a bunch of other comedians as well how so like advising them and giving them notes and it seems like a whole bunch of

133:28people I'm sure you didn't get his input people definitely respect him but yeah I'm sure he gives people taglines and gives him advice and stuff like that very smart guy but to be as honest as he was and not even end it with the joke right you know just to tell the serious story and then yeah that blew me away yeah I met him on the Friday night and watched it on the Saturday morning and had no idea and it was it was one of the best things I've seen for a long time Wow yeah now he's a special guy it's uh it's hard when you know I've had a few friends take their life 3 in the last year um and you know yeah you see a guy like Neil and you know he's constantly pursuing all these different therapies and constantly trying to find some thing that alleviates this depression and you just keep hoping you keep hoping you keep searching keep hoping that one of these things sticks well these things

134:23really see I mean he's very very proactive he's always searching for new things he's very open about it and talking about it but the ketamine does seem to have helped him quite a bit and he was telling me like man he's like this is so crazy I'm going to this doctor's office and having these full-blown psychedelic experiences at the doctor's office yeah and then two hours later you're out on the street feeling completely normal what was your ketamine experience like I took a tablet you put it under your tongue and let it dissolve for ten minutes and then I laid on a sofa in a therapists office for two hours and I was out on the street again two hours later so how long did it take before kicked in I don't really know cuz and I never thought it was kicking in um but then I just found myself saying things and concluding things that I wouldn't normally say and for the next week and a

135:08half I just felt like that's just a weight off did you have any sort of hallucinogenic experience no nothing no hallucinate no listen to listen to music quite quietly but but and I you know I mask on for a few minutes here and there sometimes didn't talk at all but yeah just there was just this relief especially afterwards like in the in the week and a half or so much much just felt this just this lightness mmm and you know to your point about Neil being so open to trying everything even that even taking that step is hard you know sometimes even getting out the door sure was hard let alone researching this stuff and trying everything I mean when I first moved to America I said okay y'all not gonna do yoga you're not gonna do therapy you're not gonna be prescription drugs that's in New York I have to drop that skeptical skepticism and to try everything yeah

135:54genuinely open to everything that's that's that's a lot in itself well it's hard for people to try anything new I mean you have to respect any time anyone does anything new the first time a person straps on a pair of running shoes and goes for a jog it's hard yeah it's hard to just do something it's hard to change gears yeah what will be curious enough to try it in the first place you have to be open to the idea not just be cured I mean in the case of taking something like ketamine brave you have to be brave I mean you're once you take you can't untape they're on a ride yeah they take the first MDMA session was as frightened more frightening to me than going to Syria or Yemen or how so um I guess the vulnerability I just thought I'd say things and accept things that the you know I put up a front against for so long mmm and it's a British thing I think it's

136:44very much a British thing but it's also you know my identity has been a tough brave war correspondent right and you can you can like that yeah Holmes respected yeah yeah yeah and yeah you know that I don't know I don't know what when I had that you know feeling of relief in the last I think is the last no the first session sorry about well you could have a family and the dog and kids and enjoy it and be happy there's also a part of me that resisted that and thought no that's somehow taking your foot off the gas and somehow losing sight of what's important and what your role is and what you can do to actually help things you know yeah and just you know doing whatever is good for you well it seems so conflicted because you obviously great get a great benefit out of this this ability to help you and you really do help and you really do put yourself in these incredibly difficult

137:33situations so there's there's something there's there's a positive aspect of it but for sure there's a price that you're paying that's pretty substantial yeah and I before the MDMA therapy I thought if the price is you're on your own and you're not enjoying the things that most people enjoy then that's the price you pay you know that's that's that's you know what you want to do and you'll do it whatever the price is and so I'm open to the idea of that that not being the case I hope that's the case I hope it not being the case is actually the case yeah Wilson Ben thank you man thanks for coming in here thanks for everything you do I really appreciate it it was great talking to you and I wish you well man if is ever anything we could do please let me know thank you thank you brother frame thank you thank you