In this episode, we're joined by veteran war journalist Ben Shapiro to talk about his time covering the war in Afghanistan. Ben talks about how he survived a nightmarish experience in the middle of a gunfight, and how he was able to survive it. We also talk about what it's like to be a war journalist and how to deal with the odds of survival in the face of near-death experiences, and the lessons he learned along the way. If you haven't heard of Ben Shapiro, you're not going to want to miss this one - he's one of the most respected war journalists in the world, and he's got a hell of a lot of stories to tell. We hope you enjoy this one, and if you do, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you thought of it in the comments section below! We'd love to hear from you! Timestamps: 3:00 - Ben's first day in Afghanistan 9:30 - How did he survive a night in a ditch? 14:15 - What was it like being a war reporter? 17:00 19:30 What was the worst night of your life in Afghanistan? 22:15 27:40 - What did you learn from surviving a night of combat? 29:40 How did you survive? 30 - How do you feel about the odds? 36:00 -- how did you deal with it? 39:30 -- what was your biggest failure? 40:40 -- how do you cope? 45 -- what would you do to survive in the midst of danger? 47:10 -- what do you think you're going to do in the next day? 48:15 -- what are your biggest challenge? 50:00 What are you looking forward to do next? 51:00 Is there anything you're looking for in the future of your career? 52:00 Do you have a better chance of surviving in the war? ? 55:00 Are you willing to take the lesser of better odds than you're willing to do? 56: What do you need to survive this? 57: what are you going to survive again? 58: What would you be willing to sacrifice? 59:00 Can you survive another day of your day of fighting another day in the field? 61:00 Will you ever survive this again?
00:00:15.000Everyone sent me the clip, and I think you said something about taking a knee in the middle of a gunfight, and he said, yeah, that was Ben.
00:00:41.000War journalists are very fascinating people to me because oftentimes you guys move towards the gunfire with the camera to get the shot.
00:00:51.000And, you know, I've talked to folks before who have worked as a war journalist, and they say you almost don't think you're so concentrated on getting the shot, you don't think about the fact that you might get shot.
00:01:20.000I was with the US Marines for Operation Mushtarak, like the biggest operation of the Afghan war.
00:01:26.000And there was a town called Maja that was controlled by the Taliban.
00:01:29.000And I met up with this one group of Marines.
00:01:31.000I used to love going out with the Marines, because if you were willing to run the same risks as them, they'd let you film everything.
00:01:37.000And their mission was to get dropped by helicopter in the middle of this town at 3am on day one, and then just fight their way out from the middle of the town.
00:01:44.000And as soon as the sun came up, all of the speakers on the mosques were saying, the infidels are here, the infidels are here, get your weapons, get your weapons.
00:01:52.000And General McChrystal had introduced this rule of courageous restraint, saying you're not allowed to shoot unless you're shot at, or unless you see someone preparing a hostile act.
00:02:00.000And the Taliban had figured out how to use this, so...
00:02:03.000I'm sitting in this field with about 28 marines, watching the Taliban drop off guys in buildings all around us with their weapons wrapped in blankets, knowing the marines can't shoot them.
00:02:13.000So they're setting up the perfect ambush.
00:02:16.000And as soon as we started walking across the field, it started and it's like nothing I've ever heard or experienced before.
00:02:24.000The guys either side of me got hit, one of them badly.
00:02:28.000A guy was killed on the other side of the field, almost straight away.
00:02:31.000And I was there alone, filming it myself.
00:02:33.000And because I was watching the whole thing through this tiny little screen on my camera, it felt like I wasn't, you know, in as much danger as they were.
00:03:32.000You always just, you know, join up and sign up for these insane trips.
00:03:37.000And if you survive today, and you're probably not going to survive, but if you do survive today, don't ever go out with these idiots ever again.
00:03:44.000And the next day they said, oh, we're going to launch this operation, take this mask.
00:03:47.000And I went out with them all over again.
00:03:50.000It just felt like a good night's sleep.
00:03:52.000Yeah, it wasn't even a good night's sleep, but yeah.
00:03:54.000But yeah, once you survive a few, I mean, I remember when I started doing this, you had an idea of what good odds and bad odds were, and that, you know, you're willing to accept lesser and lesser odds as time goes on because nothing happens, and it's easy to get careless and stupid.
00:04:10.000That's a real thing with violence, right?
00:04:13.000Until you've actually experienced it firsthand personally being enacted on yourself, it almost doesn't seem real.
00:04:20.000Even when bullets are zipping by your head, yeah.
00:04:23.000Is that just a weird compartmentalization thing that people are capable of?
00:04:29.000I mean, I think with me it's slightly different.
00:04:32.000I mean, I took part in this MDMA therapy for PTSD recently, and one of the revelations that came out as a result of that was...
00:04:40.000I got into this 20 years ago, thinking I could help people in Syria, Palestine, Congo, wherever, by raising awareness about what's happening.
00:04:49.000After a while, you lose faith in that idea.
00:04:51.000So then you start feeling a bit guilty and thinking, am I just here for my own benefit?
00:04:56.000Am I just here to profit in some way and not actually helping whatsoever?
00:05:00.000So I think that guilt made me think You're not important enough to have something as dramatic as getting shot or blown up happen to you.
00:05:08.000I know that sounds so stupid and never thought that until, you know, it came out as part of this therapy, but I think I really had started thinking that.
00:05:16.000So the MDMA therapy made you sort of look at your rational perspective, like how are you rationalizing your time in these very, very dangerous places?
00:05:30.000In ways that I hadn't even thought about before.
00:07:11.000I think a lot of people feel that way, and I think that leads some people to think Assad is not a good guy.
00:07:16.000He 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.
00:07:24.000Is it because when we do get rid of a leader like Libya with Gaddafi or Iraq with Hussein, that what happens is you get this power vacuum and then it becomes far worse?
00:08:23.000Well, it's so hard when you look at the rest of the world and you see these horrific conditions and you see warlords in power and you see atrocities being committed and we're sitting over here in the valley watching on internet and drinking Starbucks,
00:08:52.000I mean, because of the Khashoggi murder, maybe something's going to happen with Yemen.
00:08:56.000And there is a lot we can do there because we are directly supporting one side.
00:09:00.000It almost seems like what you were talking about, but in a far lesser extent, the feeling that you get when you're in these war zones that it's almost like it's not real, that you're covering it through this lens so you're immune from it.
00:09:14.000It almost feels like we view the massive conflicts of the world that way.
00:10:08.000Yeah, and the reason I started doing this when I was a kid, as soon as I started reading about these situations, and I remember reading that my government, the British government, was arming You know, often the wrong side in these conflicts.
00:10:20.000I remember thinking, how is this not front page news?
00:10:22.000How is everyone not talking about this every single day?
00:10:25.000And I still feel like that now, even though I'm clearly out of step with, you know, most of the population.
00:10:32.000Is 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?
00:10:41.000I mean, you know, is it hard for you to...
00:10:45.000I mean, you get to see the worst shit happening in the world all the time.
00:10:53.000Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, one of the main symptoms I had of the PTSD from covering this for so long was it was numbness to physical danger when I was there, but it was numbness when I got back home.
00:11:05.000So you'd come back and, you know, at one point you used to think, if I come back with the footage I have of whatever conflict, it's going to have some kind of impact.
00:11:24.000Are we in an information overload state?
00:11:28.000I mean, if you go back to, you know, the early days of the internet, Facebook, it was going to be the free flow of information, you know, no borders.
00:11:37.000I mean, I don't think you can doubt it.
00:16:51.000And then she spent 25 years writing novels and then later on wrote about, I believe it was the Yom Kippur War and was denying that massacres had happened and saying, you know, Arabs lie, they always lie, there was no massacre.
00:17:09.000I mean, maybe if you just do this for too long, you just become so cynical that you're open to these things.
00:17:15.000But it's, yeah, I'm amazed that Seymour Hersh is open to that idea.
00:17:20.000When the very people that are calling it, the very people that have boots on the ground and that are in these war zones and calling these things, when they become cynical and they become jaded, that's when it gets really, really sketchy.
00:17:33.000And we rely so heavily on people like you.
00:18:06.000And I think you'd have to go over there and do...
00:18:09.000You'd have to spend a lot of time to try to figure this out and it would have to be the entire focus of your life to really try to parse it out.
00:18:16.000I think that's true of a lot of conflicts.
00:18:18.000I mean, one of the drawbacks of doing what I do is I'm covering seven or eight things at once.
00:18:23.000So I feel like I'm not expert enough in even Afghanistan where I've covered that more than any other.
00:18:28.000But Venezuela is an interesting one because there's such a left-right divide on that.
00:18:32.000And if you support the opposition, then you find yourself alongside John Bolton and Donald Trump, which means that a lot of people are going to automatically attack you.
00:18:44.000And I think it's, you know, we can say without a doubt that Maduro has destroyed the economy there.
00:18:49.000Maduro has imprisoned, beaten, killed journalists.
00:18:52.000There is a movement there that do want genuine elections.
00:18:56.000But some people will say, well, just because George Bush in another area or John Bolton in this era support the opposition, therefore the opposition must be illegitimate and the information coming out must be false.
00:19:12.000And I wish people did rely on people who actually went there, but it doesn't feel like that.
00:19:15.000It feels like they rely on the guy behind the glass desk on the news with a loud opinion rather than the people who are actually there.
00:19:22.000Well, we still have this idea in our head that the person who's reading the news is the authority, that Don Lemon has the inside scoop or whoever it is, you know?
00:19:32.000And I think it used to be that those guys would spend 20 or 30 years traveling, and then they'd get the cushy job behind the glass desk in the studio.
00:19:39.000Now it seems like you can go straight to the cushy job behind the glass desk.
00:19:43.000Well, we just need someone who's relatable, who can read a teleprompter, who fits the profile that they're looking for, whether it's Fox News or CNN. And also, the information is there.
00:19:55.000There are fantastic documentaries, articles being written about all of these conflicts.
00:20:02.000Well, with something like Venezuela, the real problem is you have two sides.
00:20:07.000You have two different versions of what's happening.
00:20:10.000And 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.
00:20:23.000And, you know, I agree with you that I don't necessarily think we're getting stupider or dumber in this country or in the world in general because of the internet, but we're definitely getting weirder in our perceptions of actual world events.
00:21:40.000I don't know if there's an official name of it.
00:21:41.000There's some game where if you look under the table, you see someone doing that, they're allowed to punch you or something, something stupid like that.
00:21:46.000I saw the Stephen Miller photo where he's doing up his blazer and supposedly doing the white power sign.
00:22:32.000Across the board, top to bottom, it's horrific.
00:22:36.000But it's also one of those things where we see so many of these now that we're starting to get numb.
00:22:42.000Whether it's a Jewish synagogue, whether it's a Muslim temple, whether it's a gay club, whatever it is.
00:22:52.000It's like you see so many of these mass murders now.
00:22:55.000Whether it's a school or a movie theater, it's like, fuck, man.
00:23:00.000It's just, it all, like you were talking about, When you're filming the news, you're there, you're watching the bullets fly by, you hear them fly by your head, and you are just watching it through the lens.
00:23:15.000We're many, many, many, many levels removed from that.
00:23:19.000And we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do.
00:23:56.000Maybe it would be better if there was a website where we curated all of the bulletproof, that's a terrible way to describe it, but rock-solid investigative journalisms that are 100% ethical,
00:24:12.000that you could completely rely on for an accurate assessment of what's happening.
00:24:41.000And especially now, it used to be if you were conservatively and you'd read the Wall Street Journal, if you were liberal leading New York Times, now, no matter how far off the scale you are, you can find a pretty professional looking website that will write a story backing up your prejudice.
00:24:54.000And people aren't looking at a story thinking, okay, I want to find out what happened here.
00:24:58.000They're thinking, I know what my gut feeling tells me.
00:25:00.000I need to find, not even a story, a headline that justifies my gut feeling about this.
00:26:20.000One of our docs on HBO, if it got 4 million views, I think that would be considered very good viewing figures.
00:26:27.0004 million in a country of 360 million people.
00:26:31.000Well, it's very difficult to get people to watch documentaries on real-world events.
00:26:36.000You get them to watch documentaries on a sex cult from Oregon or something like that, like Wild Wild Country, that probably got 10 million.
00:27:25.000Or is it just they're frustrated and confused themselves or just lashing out at any target they can find or anyone they can find?
00:27:33.000And also, you know, I mean, I know the footage is available of, you know, this guy's head cam as he shot everybody, but footage like that has been widely available for a long time now.
00:27:43.000And I think that's had a massive numbing effect.
00:27:46.000I mean, you know, the picture of the Syrian refugee washing up on the beach.
00:27:50.000You know, it felt like that was going to have an effect.
00:27:52.000It felt like that was the picture that was really going to change things.
00:28:02.000I mean, just to be not completely pessimistic, when you're doing stuff for Vice and HBO, you do get young people reaching out to you and saying, I had no idea.
00:28:12.000I want to be a photographer or a doctor or...
00:28:15.000Maybe that's an effect that's going to be felt down the road.
00:29:02.000And then, you know, I had Renee DiResta on recently, and she's done a lot of work covering all these various Russian troll farms and how they essentially organize conflict online.
00:29:19.000And, you know, they set up these things where you have like a pro-Texas movement, and they set them up across the street from a pro-Muslim movement, and they do it on purpose.
00:29:29.000And then they have these pro-LGBT movement things online that they organize to attack certain people in certain groups, diminish certain aspects, and defy parts of the Democratic Party.
00:29:59.000You know, there's a piece came out in The New Yorker.
00:30:01.000I don't mean to keep on going on about The New Yorker, but a piece came out about The New Yorker today by Ed Caesar, a friend of mine, about Brexit and about Aaron Banks.
00:30:09.000And I haven't read the piece yet, but I know what he's been working on.
00:30:12.000And, you know, there may be evidence that the Russians directly influenced the Brexit vote.
00:30:17.000Are the Brexit voters really going to look at that article and think, oh, maybe I was misled.
00:30:22.000Maybe I read 10 articles on Facebook that made me vote wrongly.
00:30:28.000How many people actually have their minds open enough to consider that?
00:30:32.000I mean, especially with American politics, it feels like football.
00:30:36.000If your player fouls someone, of course it's not a foul.
00:30:39.000If your player gets fouled, it's a blatant foul.
00:30:50.000Everyone seems to be digging their heels in on one side or the other.
00:30:53.000And it seems that a lot of them have just picked a team.
00:30:58.000I 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.
00:31:15.000So if your family has always been Republican, then suddenly saying, maybe I'm going to vote for Hillary instead of Trump feels like coming out or something.
00:32:06.000But you couldn't get it any other way.
00:32:09.000Now you can get it from everything, right?
00:32:11.000I mean, there's people on the ground that are tweeting about things, and then they become local celebrities, or they become sort of like temporary internet journalists slash celebrities.
00:33:09.000And we now know it is addictive, so how you turn that around, I mean, it feels like there's a little bit of a movement of people to switch that stuff off and just read a book or go for a walk.
00:34:57.000I feel the same way sometimes about weapons.
00:35:01.000I feel like the discipline required to learn how to use one and create it and build it and then understand the responsibility of actually using it on a human being, all that shit's out the window.
00:35:31.000And this, as a human being, the lack of discipline and accountability that we have in this ultimate access to all these things constantly, and many of them become just massive distractions.
00:35:47.000And, you know, this in some ways is the utopia that people have dreamed of for generations.
00:35:57.000You have everything you could possibly need.
00:35:58.000So 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.
00:36:06.000And again, that's not what we're doing.
00:36:08.000Well, I don't think we operate very well without legitimate conflict.
00:36:13.000Without legitimate conflict in terms of actual things you need to worry about.
00:36:18.000When I used to live in the East Coast, one of the things that was really noticeable was that when it snowed out, people were nicer.
00:36:25.000They helped people when they were broken down the side of the road.
00:36:29.000There was a sense of vulnerability that we were all deeply entrenched in this winter nature thing, and we've got to work together, otherwise we can't survive.
00:38:02.000And I realized, like, you can't really appreciate this until it's taken away from you.
00:38:07.000When it's taken away from you, then you understand what it is.
00:38:10.000So then you wonder, when the kids of today grow up, what are they going to be like when everything has just been at their fingertips from day one forever?
00:38:55.000But to your point, if there was a way to actually filter and say, this is verifiable, this contains seven things which are absolutely bullshit.
00:39:04.000We have no doubt about that whatsoever.
00:39:32.000I don't want people to have to do that.
00:39:35.000There's countries that have mandatory military service.
00:39:37.000They seem to have an amazing feeling of...
00:39:40.000of patriotism in those countries and appreciation in those countries because they actually do have to join the military for two years or whatever it is.
00:39:57.000People outside of your circle and your bubble.
00:39:59.000I mean, the amount of times here when you talk to people about Muslims, LGBT, whatever it is, and you think, oh, it's because you've never met anyone.
00:40:06.000You've actually never met anyone that is X, Y, or Z, which is...
00:40:11.000I moved to Brooklyn five years, six years ago, and I moved to Clinton Hill, Fort Greene.
00:40:15.000And I got a few friends that have been there forever, and I said, look, this probably sounds like a really stupid thing to say, but it feels kind of segregated here.
00:40:22.000And they were like, duh, of course it does.
00:40:26.000You know, I'd grown up on the Spike Lee movies.
00:40:28.000I mean, I guess they do show a kind of segregation.
00:40:31.000But I thought, you know, this was the place where everyone lived together on the same block and went to each other's bodegas and restaurants.
00:40:37.000I lived on the dividing line between the bit that was getting gentrified and the projects.
00:40:42.000You go two blocks that way, pretty much all black.
00:40:44.000You go three blocks that way, pretty much all white, with yoga studios and bougie coffee shops and pet spas.
00:40:50.000And the two communities just did not mix.
00:40:53.000It wasn't necessarily that they hated each other, or they just did not mix.
00:40:57.000Different language, different everything.
00:40:59.000Right, there's this utopian perception that there is a place where everybody's cool.
00:41:16.000But 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.
00:41:29.000And she had to get her daughter into a public school.
00:41:31.000And the choice was the very good, well-supported school in the gentrifying, mostly white area, Or the bad, failing public school in the non-gentrified, mostly black area, where her kid's education might suffer.
00:41:44.000And I think I'm remembering it correctly, but her and her husband had a real fight about it because she said, no, we've got to put our kid in the bad, failing school and help it get better.
00:41:52.000And it's going to take years, and our daughter may suffer in the short term, but that's what we have to do if we're living in this neighbourhood.
00:42:09.000When you're thinking of your children, you're always thinking of their safety.
00:42:13.000You're always worried about them and you want to protect them.
00:42:15.000So putting them in a situation where they wouldn't be as protected is never your first instinct.
00:42:19.000Oh, she was in town hall meetings where, you know, progressive white liberal parents, who would be very left-wing on every other issue, were really fighting to make sure their kid went to the good majority white school.
00:42:31.000And, you know, they want a bit of diversity, but not too much diversity.
00:42:51.000Atlanta's interesting, you know, because Atlanta has a lot of, there's a lot of...
00:42:59.000Well, there's a lot of everything in Atlanta, but it's a very black city in a lot of ways, but it's also a very white city.
00:43:05.000You see a lot of black and white people hanging out together in clubs and bars and restaurants and stuff, and it's really much closer to a 50-50 split than a lot of places, at least in some of the neighborhoods that I've been to.
00:43:18.000When I go back to London, that's one of the few things I'm proud of about London versus certainly New York.
00:43:23.000It's not a big deal for a group of friends, a family, a couple to be genuinely mixed.
00:43:31.000You would know, I'd ask you, is that because London didn't experience slavery the way the United States did?
00:43:40.000Yeah, I mean, obviously we have a, you know, colonial history.
00:43:46.000And for a very long time, we've had a huge Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Jamaican community.
00:43:51.000And it's, you know, I mean, here, if you have black friends or you date a black girl, you know, people think you're trying to prove you're woke.
00:44:51.000Well, I was talking to this guy yesterday who is a 26-year-old who's graduating with a degree in finance and trying to figure out what he wants to do.
00:45:01.000And he's thinking about moving to New York and getting a job in Wall Street.
00:45:04.000But he's hesitant because he's a nice guy.
00:46:39.000Certain circles, like in finance circles, it is about those things more than it's not, because those things represent success in your industry.
00:46:49.000It may have even been a book by Michael Lewis.
00:46:52.000And he talks to a bunch of graduates who, you know, are about to get approached by the big banks and financial institutions.
00:46:58.000And he says, listen, you think you're going to do this for two or three years and a few million dollars and then do something worthwhile with your life.
00:47:04.000But what's going to happen is you're going to get seduced, and you're going to get the mortgage, and suddenly 20 years of your life will have gone by, and you'll think, what the fuck have I just done with life?
00:47:12.000This is the exact advice I gave him yesterday.
00:48:14.000Yeah, these guys figured out what was going on, and then they started a trading floor where there was so much cable that no one could benefit from those, you know, those nanoseconds of advantage.
00:48:23.000And, of course, the other banks tried to close it down, and it wasn't that popular.
00:48:27.000Jamie was telling me that there's a game called Fortnite that all the kids play, and they're moving to Columbus, Ohio, so they could be closer to the server.
00:48:34.000Not just there, but that's one of the places.
00:49:13.000I think the franchise fees for the next season of Call of Duty are $25 million of a team, which is like four guys on a team playing the game, and someone's got to pay for that.
00:49:31.000I mean, I thought Mikey Garcia would outbox him for a few rounds at least, early on, and then maybe, you know, Spence's size and power would make a difference, but he outboxed him from...
00:49:38.000When I looked at them in the weigh-ins, I was like, yikes.
00:52:29.000The thing that gets me with MMA is, because I come from, you know, boxing is my sport, when you see a guy go down, and he's clearly out, and the guy jumps on him and pounds him.
00:52:37.000I know sometimes the ref tries to get there.
00:52:41.000Jorge Masvidal, he knocked out Darren Till, and he KO'd him.
00:52:45.000He clipped him with the left hand on the way down, he hit him with another left hand, and then Darren Till is flat-lined, completely out, and Masvidal uncorks a bomb right on his face while he's out cold.
00:54:58.000Well, I'm always very happy when someone finds a path.
00:55:02.000You just get the sense that boxing was never him, and he found a way at the end to be him and do something he loved, and he's thriving at it, which is a rare thing for Xboxes.
00:55:11.000It's crazy when people are just good at things.
00:55:13.000There's a guy in MMA like that, Anthony Rumble Johnson, who's one of the most terrifying fighters in the history of the sport.
00:55:43.000Since then, he's thought about coming back, but – People say to me all the time, you're adrenaline junkie, you're addicted to the thrill.
00:55:48.000I'm like, there's no fucking thrill doing this.
00:55:53.000I'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?
00:56:06.000Did you read Tribe, Sebastian Jung's book?
00:56:09.000Yeah, and I met him a few times as well.
00:56:11.000When I was having a few problems, he was very helpful.
00:56:14.000He was a really, really good guy, yeah.
00:56:17.000And before I met him, you know, he's got that picture in Vanity Fair of like posing with the dog tag and it's like a model looking picture.
00:56:23.000And I thought, oh, this guy's ridiculous.
00:56:46.000But his take on it was that these people are experiencing life in this incredibly extreme environment, and then they come back to the rest of the world, and it just doesn't feel real anymore.
00:56:57.000So it's not thrilling when you're there, but it is real drama.
00:57:00.000You're seeing life and death drama right in front of your face.
00:57:02.000So when you come back, you think you really want to see this person, see this film, try out this new restaurant, and then you get back and you just don't care.
00:57:17.000Numbness to the danger when you're there, but numbness back here for the things that should be pleasurable and should be providing some kind of relief as well.
00:57:24.000Now, how did the PTSD treatment get organized?
00:57:27.000Is this through MAPS? Are you part of that study?
00:57:29.000Yeah, we did a short film about Rick Doblin and this effort to get MDMA legal.
00:57:35.000But I'd been in denial for years and years, and a new producer joined Vice, a guy called Stephen Bailey.
00:57:41.000And we had the first meeting where he was pitching some of his ideas.
00:57:46.000And 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.
00:58:15.000So you're lying in a bed, you've fasted for 24 hours before, the therapist knows you and knows your issues, so knows how to politely, gently nudge you towards the right topic of conversation, but always makes you actually get to the conclusions.
00:59:11.000I mean, the best example I can give of how this works, the first veteran I met had been through it.
00:59:17.000He had one session, and he'd lost some friends in Iraq, and he'd felt guilty about it, and always thought, maybe if I'd done something different, I could have saved them.
00:59:24.000And he imagined being them in the first MDMA session.
00:59:28.000And they were saying to him, why are you ruining your life?
00:59:58.000A 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.
01:00:32.000I think the numbness to danger and to pleasurable things back here.
01:00:37.000I mean, my cameraman in Mosul, we were there when the Iraqi army beat ISIS, and it was house-to-house fighting.
01:00:43.000We were stepping on bodies to get through rooms.
01:00:46.000And at one point, we were with three or four Iraqi soldiers trying to get to the river to cut off these two ISIS positions, and they got a radio message saying, there's a suicide bomber and a gunman running down the street towards you now.
01:00:58.000So we stepped into this We're good to go.
01:01:25.000We got that moment on camera and I remember just looking so bored and I couldn't give a shit about the suicide bomber, the IED. I was just bored out of my brain.
01:01:35.000And that's when I thought this is not a natural reaction to what's going on around you right now.
01:01:40.000What did you think your natural reaction should have been?
01:01:55.000I hadn't really thought that much about PTSD. I just thought I'd become so used to this.
01:01:58.000And one of the things that came up in one of the last sessions I did was I didn't think I was important enough to get shot and hurt and have medics rush over to help me and maybe a helicopter take me out.
01:02:12.000I know that sounds ridiculous now, but I think part of me thought, yeah, you're not important enough to have something so dramatic happen to you.
01:02:18.000You're just witnessing other people in these dramas.
01:02:26.000To be right next to an IED and not freaking out is pretty crazy.
01:02:30.000Yeah, with a suicide bomber running down the street towards...
01:03:12.000So you take 125 milligrams, and then when that hits about an hour, I think it's a good dose.
01:03:17.000But then when it hits you, you take another 75. So overall, that's a good dose.
01:03:22.000And that keeps you up for, you know, six, seven, eight hours.
01:03:26.000And then, you know, the therapist would ask very brief questions, just knowing what direction to push me.
01:03:33.000And I remember the first session, I mean, I thought because of what I now know was PTSD, I thought because of the job I do and because there is this kind of darkness in there, I didn't get involved with anyone seriously for a very long time and even thought, I'm not going to have a family and kids and house and dog.
01:03:50.000I hadn't even thought about it, just assumed that's not for me because of the job I do.
01:03:56.000And very early on in that first session, after I resisted it for about an hour and a half, I was really resisting it for a long time and thinking it was even a placebo, But there was this wave of relief of just, of course you can.
01:04:20.000Or you can't put someone else through that with you.
01:04:23.000What is it particularly about MDMA? I mean, I've done it, but I've only done it once.
01:04:28.000Is it just because of the fact that it just alleviates the insecurity and allows you to look at things in a more natural sense?
01:04:35.000You look at everything as if we're just talking about having coffee or water.
01:04:39.000Everything is just easy to think about and address and talk about.
01:04:42.000And 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.
01:04:52.000So even when I'm back in New York, if someone walks up too close behind me, I'm expecting a confrontation.
01:04:57.000I'm in fight or flight mode all the time.
01:04:59.000So your brain is ignoring the other parts of your brain that provide context.
01:05:04.000And that say, that bang outside is just a car backfiring.
01:06:25.000I mean, yeah, the ecstasy they would have sold in London would have been rat poison and breeze-block dust and all kinds of stuff in there, you know.
01:07:14.000It's so difficult for people to change perspective, just to have a break from the normal sort of momentum of your life and to be able to stop and analyze.
01:07:28.000I was just in this rut for so long where it was impossible to look at things.
01:07:33.000Did you think about changing your life?
01:07:36.000Yeah, and I'm thinking about it a lot right now.
01:07:39.000I thought I would retire after this therapy, but I think I said it before, in the first session I was planning the next film, the next series.
01:07:54.000There isn't this pressure to be where people are getting their heads blown off every single time.
01:07:59.000The last film I did was about Yemen, and we spent a week on the front lines with the various fighting groups and got the usual crazy fighting footage.
01:08:06.000But the powerful stuff was a woman who had her leg blown off by an airstrike in an IDP camp, in a miserable IDP camp where the Saudis and Emiratis are claiming they're providing people with everything they need.
01:08:16.000And then at the end, a child malnutrition clinic right on the front line where a nurse just...
01:08:47.000So maybe the answer is to do that and, you know, not feel this pressure to just get the crazy fighting footage all the time.
01:08:54.000In our country, Yemen is in many ways mostly synonymous for drone attacks.
01:09:01.000Drone strikes is, when we think about Yemen, we think about the drone strikes that we hear about on wedding parties, the number of people that are accidentally killed.
01:09:11.000The civilian casualty rate is some preposterous number.
01:09:14.000I mean, no one knows because you can't check in most of these areas, but it's in the tens of thousands at least.
01:09:18.000And the percentage is also preposterous.
01:10:01.000When you're over there, what does it feel like in Yemen as opposed to Afghanistan or other places?
01:10:08.000Yemen, the actual fighting is much more low intensity.
01:10:12.000It's fairly small groups of guys at some distance just lobbing shells at each other and there's snipers and there are gunfights but it's not as big scale as Iraq or Afghanistan.
01:10:22.000But there are regular airstrikes that are killing civilians and while the two sides are fighting this slow and bloody war, the infrastructure is being destroyed and the civilians are Unable to get basic food and medicine.
01:10:38.000That's the really shocking thing there.
01:10:40.000And also, I mean, I knew that the coalition, as it's called, the fighting groups backed by Saudi Arabia and UAE were American-backed.
01:10:47.000But you see American stuff everywhere.
01:10:50.000I mean, MRAPs, you know, these million-dollar bomb-proof trucks.
01:10:52.000I've only ever seen American soldiers and Marines driving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
01:12:12.000Somehow or another, this guy was in the suburbs of Chicago and they launched a drone strike on him.
01:12:17.000It would be front page news and it would be a real issue, but the fact that it was in Yemen...
01:12:21.000I mean, again, the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan is that now we're killing guys like him with drone strikes or special forces, raids here and there, and it's happening almost in secret and no one's saying, this appears to be illegal.
01:12:37.000You know which media outlets you can go to to read about this, but...
01:12:41.000I think most people are thinking if that's the alternative to invasion and trillions of dollars and American soldiers coming back with no legs for a war we don't understand, I think a lot of people are willing to accept it.
01:12:54.000I don't agree with it, but that seems to be what's happening now.
01:12:58.000The other thing about that is with a lot of these, even though it does seem to be illegal, people sort of shrug their shoulders and then no one pursues it and then it just kind of goes away.
01:13:17.000Like, it was so egregious and so crazy that this guy walks into the embassy and just never comes out.
01:13:23.000And they're like, I don't know what happened.
01:13:25.000And then slowly you start getting a different story and then apparently there's leaked, there's audio and perhaps even video of his murder.
01:13:58.000But, I mean, I was arrested in Iran for a week, a long, long time ago, and roughly the same time, an Iranian-Canadian photographer was arrested.
01:14:06.000And she was raped and beaten to death.
01:14:08.000So the people that are citizens of these countries, they're really, really bearing the brunt.
01:14:14.000And again, that's why I'm uncomfortable if people call me brave, because I get to come home.
01:14:19.000With these guys, you know, they can get to them and they can get to their families very easily.
01:14:23.000And that takes a whole other level of bravery.
01:14:27.000The woman who was raped and beaten to death, what was she involved with?
01:14:33.000And 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.
01:15:25.000And 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?
01:15:33.000I said, yeah, that's exactly how it works.
01:15:36.000And they thought I was insulting their intelligence by saying that.
01:16:40.000We interviewed a bunch of students who were involved in some famous protests in 1999 where the police came in and smashed the dormitories and burnt them down and beat them.
01:16:48.000And I think because we interviewed them, we were then tracked and arrested.
01:17:26.000And extremely well-educated about the United States.
01:17:30.000American foreign policy is a completely different discussion.
01:17:33.000But, I mean, one of the things we tried to cover was the Friday...
01:17:36.000Rally at Tehran University, where you see everyone chanting, death to America, death to Israel.
01:17:41.000And we wanted to cover it because they bus in old men from the countryside who sit there going, oh, yeah, death to America, death to Israel.
01:17:52.000I mean, if there was a turning point in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Iran...
01:17:58.000Ryan Crocker, who was the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan.
01:18:04.000Straight 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.
01:18:13.000So they'd have this meeting, and then he and his Iranian counterpart would disappear for, he says, seven or eight hours over tea to discuss the future of American-Iran relations.
01:18:24.000They knew that they were going to get rid of the Taliban.
01:18:27.000So the Iranians said, okay, here's a map of the Taliban leaders' homes.
01:18:31.000If you take out those homes on day one, Taliban are finished.
01:19:06.000So 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.
01:19:16.000You know, it was hard for us to get this chance.
01:19:28.000And 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.
01:19:39.000So you think that with, wow, with one speech, the whole thing shifted?
01:20:34.000And the idea that the Saudis and Emiratis can somehow bomb the Houthis in Yemen into submission and push back Iranian influence on their southern border is ridiculous.
01:20:45.000And I think even if you ignore the obvious moral argument, just from a pragmatic point of view, the idea that we should back this unconditionally is ridiculous.
01:20:57.000See, this is just part of the real problem when you're dealing with world events, is trying to parse all this stuff out and look at so many different stories from so many different parts of the world and so many different areas of conflict, and it's almost impossible to pay attention to it all.
01:21:13.000Every time I meet people from these countries, I feel like a fraud because there's so much that they know that I don't know and that I shouldn't know.
01:22:01.000I mean, if people in Brazil are living through the current chaos, I can understand why they might go to a Duterte-type figure to say it's going to be messy, but he's going to clean it up.
01:22:27.000We did a film there recently, and I might get the numbers slightly wrong, but the amount of people that were murdered in Brazil in 2017, I believe it was, was more than double the amount that were murdered in Syria.
01:22:44.000And after the World Cup and Olympics, the trafficking gangs and the police militias just retook all of those areas that were pacified to protect the tourists during the World Cup and Olympics.
01:22:54.000So that violence has just come right back to the forefellers.
01:22:59.000See, again, there's just so much shit to pay attention to.
01:23:16.000Well, we drove, when you land at the airport, you drive through the favelas on the way to Rio, and you're like, whoa, this is a different kind of poverty.
01:23:37.000If you stay close to there, you'll hear it.
01:23:38.000I mean, we went into the favelas many times.
01:23:41.000We saw one guy who was suspected of being a police informer.
01:23:45.000So the trafficking gangs had captured him, slashed at his leg so he was lying on the ground, put four rifles to his head and just unloaded.
01:23:54.000And his chin was still kind of where it should be, but everything else was...
01:24:38.000Yeah, that's the very wealthy, nice beach area with all the nice hotels and apartment blocks.
01:24:45.000But they still must get robbed all the time down there, right?
01:24:49.000It used to be that the violence was separated from the really rich areas, but there are now a lot of wealthy Brazilians leaving because it's affecting everywhere now.
01:24:57.000I mean, one of the experts we interviewed in the last film said, I believe it was one in three Rio residents will get caught in crossfire at some point over the course of a year.
01:26:25.000And he said, Ben, you just seem a bit calmer.
01:26:28.000What is your take on that documentary?
01:26:30.000I have not watched it, but I've heard that those two guys had testified saying that nothing had ever happened to them before this, and then now they're down on their luck, and now they've changed their tune in saying that it was...
01:26:42.000They go into that in detail in the doc, and basically they'd been replaced by the new young boy, and had been kind of kicked to the side.
01:26:50.000And then Michael reached out and said, I need you to help me.
01:26:53.000And they say it was exciting, the idea to be...
01:26:56.000To be back in Michael's good books and be wanted by Michael again.
01:27:06.000And one of them certainly I think has what looks like the symptoms of PTSD and the other one I think went through therapy before he was able to talk about this stuff.
01:27:15.000So I don't think they're doing it for financial gain.
01:27:18.000What did you think about the doctor, Michael Jackson's doctor, saying that he was chemically castrated?
01:29:16.000Michael Jackson looked like a monster eventually, but we always go back to him as a boy when he was singing ABC. I mean, he was this adorable little kid, incredibly talented and so dynamic and exciting to watch.
01:30:58.000And Paterno, they think, had to have known.
01:31:01.000There's no way he couldn't have known, or at least been exposed to some of it.
01:31:05.000And to the conversation we had earlier, I remember that great documentary where a guy protests in front of the statue, and another guy comes up and tries to beat him up, just for daring to suggest that this hero of his would be capable of that.
01:31:18.000People just can't fathom it because they've been so well-groomed.
01:31:39.000But, you know, do you plan on doing this MDMA therapy on a regular basis?
01:31:45.000And what sort of an impact do you think?
01:31:48.000I mean, when you go over the results of the first therapy, where it almost immediately alleviates you of a lot of your feelings, but you still are thinking about planning your next adventure and your next project...
01:32:02.000I'm probably going to do a fourth session.
01:32:04.000The therapist recommended a fourth session, which isn't what they normally do, but said...
01:32:07.000I mean, I thought being able to cry would be a major breakthrough as part of this therapy.
01:32:14.000Because you normally can't cry at all?
01:32:15.000I haven't cried since I was 13 years old or something, 14 years old.
01:32:19.000Oh, well that's different because that predates your war correspondence.
01:32:24.000I mean, English culture, it's, you know, my grandparents fought in the war, were tough as nails.
01:32:28.000It's, you know, there is this pressure to be tough.
01:32:32.000In 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.
01:33:05.000You just said this show has been a bummer, like the stories I just tell them, you know.
01:33:08.000Well, I mean, I'm joking, kind of joking.
01:33:11.000I'm very happy you're talking about it.
01:33:13.000This is one of the, you know, one of the lesser symptoms of doing this is you turn up to a party or a dinner or something, you know, with people that are enjoying themselves, they're smiling.
01:34:09.000I kind of think, you know, if you're doing this for a living, like, you shouldn't be sharing stories with other people who cover that country, other people from, you know, from your background, from your country.
01:34:17.000You should be talking to the people from that country.
01:34:20.000And a lot of journalists, I mean, it's possible in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq, to have a pretty good life.
01:34:25.000You stay in the five-star hotel, you eat well, drink wine every night, and you, you know, you get information from each other.
01:34:55.000And it's completely upside down in the States because the TV news journalists aren't deeply involved and just want to get that quick shot of them looking like they're somewhere Middle Eastern-y.
01:36:10.000It seemed to me that during Desert Storm in the 90s, there was always someone that was over there, and it seemed like there was real threat, and it was really going on.
01:36:22.000But now, everything seems to be done from the desk, and you don't really see a lot of...
01:36:29.000I mean, I think in Mosul, a lot of the major news networks said to their crews, you're not allowed to spend the night in Mosul.
01:36:34.000You know, you can go there and film a street and interview some refugees who just escaped ISIS territory, but you can't spend days on end there.
01:36:41.000Whereas the freelance photographers and some of the writers, they were spending days on end there and getting the real stuff.
01:36:47.000Is it because the on-camera people would be targeted?
01:36:51.000I just think the risk is too high, full stop, for the entire crew.
01:36:55.000And certainly when the story's really big and you send one of the very well-known correspondents there, then yeah, they can't be running around filming house-to-house fighting.
01:37:03.000So when you're over there and you see these guys show up and you know that they're just going to be hanging out at the hotel and...
01:37:17.000And you see these films like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot about Afghanistan, and I just don't recognize that world, you know, partying every night at whatever bar or restaurant.
01:37:27.000I just think if you're there, you're obviously in the wrong place.
01:38:02.000And just spending enough time there where you then end up being in the right place at the right time to show something really happening.
01:38:10.000I mean, in Mosul, we filmed the Iraqi army attacking a house where ISIS was shooting from the house and there were three or four families in the house.
01:38:18.000So the Iraqi army shot at ISIS, so the ISIS guys went down and encouraged the families to run towards us.
01:38:24.000And just seeing that moment of civilians fleeing and escaping ISIS for the first time after three years.
01:38:30.000And when they turned the corner and saw us, they knew they'd made it.
01:38:33.000And they just collapsed to the ground.
01:38:48.000I mean, they'll eventually walk out of Mosul itself, and then there are people that can take them to the IDP camps around there and we'll get them the basic services they need and medical services, but there's not much of that there.
01:38:59.000And that was the shock in Yemen, was the places that the Saudis and Emiratis said were being so well supplied with food and water and tents and medical facilities just weren't at all.
01:39:47.000I spent Friday and Saturday in Houston with a group of Afghan interpreters who I'd been with in Afghanistan who got these special immigrant visas and came to America with their families.
01:39:58.000I cannot think of a better group of people who are contributing to life here.
01:40:03.000I mean, on the Saturday morning they were running a food bank.
01:40:57.000It's like, it's one of these things where we don't, you don't know, you're reading these stories, and there's people who are telling you that these are fighting age males, and that we could very well be letting ISIS into our country, we very well could be letting in these terrorist cells and allowing them to come in,
01:41:16.000but we also could be letting families in that This is a country that's made of immigrants.
01:41:22.000It's one of the weirdest things in this country that this is a country so obsessed with borders and immigration, but yet it's comprised entirely of immigrants.
01:41:33.000Do you know Gary Young, the British journalist?
01:42:32.000The idea of, I mean, it would be nice if the whole world was up to the same standards of health and And prosperity and you didn't have to worry about where you could go.
01:42:45.000If the whole world was essentially like the United States, where you could go to where the good parts were.
01:42:52.000You know, if you live in Detroit and you save up your money, you can move to Florida or wherever you want to go.
01:42:58.000This is the beautiful thing about living inside of a country.
01:43:02.000It would be fantastic if the whole world was like that.
01:43:05.000You could just kind of go wherever you would prosper and wherever things would be well.
01:43:10.000The thing about refugees in other countries where we don't understand their language or their culture and then you get scared because you hear that they're Muslims and we're worried about Muslim terrorists and Again, it's one more piece of information that just overwhelms you.
01:43:30.000In the Catholic Church and child abuse scandal, did a lot of people say, therefore all Christians are suspicious and all Christians are secretly pedophiles?
01:43:48.000The languages and the fact that we're, you know, there's also this, there has to be this feeling that we've invaded their country, several countries, and been there for a long time.
01:44:00.000And 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...
01:44:47.000America's not going to let that happen.
01:44:49.000America 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.
01:45:27.000I mean, Vietnam, I think, is a good example.
01:45:30.000We have defeated communism, or communism has been defeated in Vietnam, just because the new generation grow up and think Western culture, communism.
01:46:05.000Maybe I'm biased because a lot of the people I'm talking to had interactions with Americans, but they would even say as many mistakes as were made in the prosecuting of the war, with airstrikes and night raids and all that, the American soldiers and marines we met,
01:46:58.000Is there any validity to any of that stuff?
01:47:00.000The massive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have done massive damage to the US on the world stage.
01:47:05.000There's no way the US benefits from what's happened.
01:47:08.000I mean, you know, the Taliban would have done a deal in 2002 where they got almost nothing.
01:47:14.000Eighteen years later, a trillion dollars later, tens of thousands of lives later, we're now negotiating with the Taliban where they might get a very good deal.
01:47:24.000That's a massive humiliation for the US. And also Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, others know that the US is not going to intervene in lots of countries.
01:47:33.000So they're doing whatever they want and almost gloating about it, knowing full well that America just doesn't have the public support to intervene anywhere else for a very long time.
01:47:42.000What's the predominant conspiracy theory that they want to prolong this war because of the military-industrial complex because they're spending tons of money and gaining contracts?
01:48:13.000I mean, you know, he's met far more senior people than me, so it's hard for me to argue with him, but yeah, I don't give that theory any thought whatsoever.
01:48:22.000That's the creepiest thought whatsoever, is that the government wants these perpetual wars.
01:48:26.000I mean, that is the scariest conspiracy theory.
01:48:29.000I'm not saying I support it, but if you...
01:48:32.000Wanted to consider a conspiracy theory that's truly terrifying.
01:48:36.000It's that they keep perpetual wars going on so that they can profit.
01:48:41.000And, you know, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton benefited from airstrikes.
01:48:46.000You know, there's a quick possible bump in terms of your approval ratings.
01:49:21.000And those towns they fought for, Fallujah in Iraq, Helmand province in Afghanistan, are now back in the hands of the Taliban in Helmand province.
01:49:44.000Because the public are just, you know, you know, I've had so long of seeing people come back in body bags or without legs and thinking, I don't even know what victory looks like now.
01:49:52.000I don't even know what the point of this is anymore.
01:50:21.000I think about that, and I also think about just selling everything I have and getting a little house in Jamaica and just retreating from the world.
01:50:32.000I'm not sure how much of a bit I did, but you can get that feeling very easily.
01:50:39.000Yeah, I would imagine that you see so much and you see so much anguish and so much pain and suffering and death and war and so much of it seems pointless that after a while you might want to just detach, disconnect.
01:50:53.000And you said it earlier, you know, when you read the numbers, hear the stories, I just, I can't even take it seriously anymore.
01:51:00.000I mean, I can take it seriously, but I can't fathom it.
01:51:02.000I can't really take it on board and really imagine what that's like.
01:52:00.000Once you've experienced what you've experienced, it's probably very, very difficult to look at the world through a normal lens and be satisfied with normal results.
01:52:11.000And it would be easy to dismiss anything else you did as being frivolous in comparison to covering Yemen or Afghanistan or Congo or wherever.
01:52:19.000So do you essentially just take it project by project and just keep going?
01:52:24.000Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about this every day right now because, like I said, in that first MDMA session, I thought, this is what you want to do.
01:52:33.000So I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep on doing it, just maybe do it in a different way.
01:52:38.000I'm also really tempted just to try and take, you know, three months off and go to Costa Rica and surf and do yoga and read nice books and just then see how I feel.
01:53:39.000And I just felt, you know, curious again.
01:53:42.000I felt like my mind, and I read a couple of books that weren't war-related, and I focused on them, I took it in, you know, I was in it for the experience, and I loved it.
01:54:48.000I was talking to someone the other day about maybe a documentary about the gym that Danny comes from, which is a door that leads to the basement of a bodega in Bed-Stuy.
01:54:57.000And they now have three world champions.
01:55:13.000He got into boxing when he was a kid, so his dad, who owns the bodega, built this gym in the basement, and that's where he and Danny came up.
01:55:32.000And you go down this basement, you know, staircase into the basement and there's this crappy gym with one ring and a few bags and that's it.
01:55:38.000And then Tommy Hearns walks in and Henry Akin one day walks in and, you know, Oba Carr walks in.
01:57:47.000The numbness that people – well, people in extreme poverty and extreme stress, they do experience that sort of numbness, especially if you're in a dangerous neighborhood and just – you're overwhelmed.
01:57:58.000Like you were saying about how the adrenaline eventually wears off and then you're just kind of – you're in this weird gray state.
01:58:27.000We've talked about it with the therapists who are leading this.
01:58:30.000I think that's their dream, is to get in and do this in a prison, because I guarantee the majority of those guys in there are suffering from PTSD and reacting to it.
01:58:39.000Well, and the majority of them have probably been abused and come from abusive environments and horrible situations.
01:58:48.000The idea that we just take people and lock them in cages and say, well, you've done your time.
01:59:07.000I mean, there was this story about Kim Kardashian trying to pay this guy's rent because he got out of jail and she's going to pay his rent for five years to sort of get him on his feet.
01:59:17.000He still can't get a fucking apartment.
02:00:28.000What we do with people in this country when someone commits a crime is pretty stunning.
02:00:35.000And then when you factor in the fact that there's actual businesses that revolve around profiting off of people being incarcerated is even crazier.
02:02:02.000Before I was born, but you just don't see, you know, like streetwise policemen who are part of the local community getting intelligence, knowing what's going on.
02:02:10.000And 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.
02:02:18.000We recognize that guy, we'll arrest him three days later.
02:03:14.000And, you know, psilocybin obviously comes with these profound breakthrough psychedelic experiences that not just completely remap your perceptions of life, but show you a whole world that you didn't think could possibly exist.
02:03:27.000And 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.
02:03:55.000You know, they're scared and they're tense and...
02:03:57.000You know, people are just in constant states of conflict.
02:04:00.000I mean, that's a big thing that's going on in this world.
02:04:02.000And one of the things that psychedelics do is they give you a brief break from that conflict and then give you these thoughts that you probably would have never achieved without these drugs.
02:04:26.000I think there's a real case for us being able to set up some sort of clinics, some sort of supervised psychedelic experiences where one after another people start changing.
02:05:19.000Yeah, I mean, they're very wise, MAPS is, in their approach to this one particular modality, because if they can actually achieve this, you're going to also achieve it and help people that are in the community that's least likely to accept psychedelics,
02:05:37.000right-wing, pro-war, you know, MAGA people.
02:05:42.000Those people, I mean, those are probably the least likely, if you wanted to generalize, to accept psychedelics.
02:05:49.000We watched the Fox News segment with Rick at his house in Boston of Fox News talking about MDMA for veterans.
02:06:06.000And if it can lower crime rates to get people on mushrooms...
02:06:11.000I mean, if dimethyltryptamine can change people's perceptions.
02:06:16.000There's so many of these different drugs, too, that you could introduce people to under a clinical supervision setting where you could change that.
02:06:25.000I mean, how many people are involved in psychotherapy and it doesn't do a goddamn thing to them?
02:06:39.000Yeah, and that, I don't have any experience with it, but I know people that have had very negative experiences where just the world becomes, all the bright colors are gone, and the world just becomes weird.
02:07:40.000Those people at MAPS and Rick Doblin and all of his crew, they have the real potential to change the world.
02:07:48.000And actually, the first session when I was really resisting it and fighting it, I just imagined Rick's face and the Mithoffer's faces in South Carolina and just the kindness and benevolence.
02:07:59.000I just thought of those faces and that's what allowed me to just let it wash over and hit me.
02:08:06.000But Johnson& Johnson just got permission to use, to market their version of ketamine.
02:08:12.000And right now, the dose of ketamine I had is like $90.
02:08:29.000Just so they can make money off of it.
02:08:31.000Now, this is the therapeutic dose of ketamine in some sort of psychiatric sort of...
02:08:37.000What's the environment they're going to do it in?
02:08:40.000So they want to have it very much controlled, but it looks like they want to stop the therapist giving it in the study, in their own office, I mean, which is what's going on now, and have it controlled under, you know, A hospital sort of situation?
02:11:46.000Well, it's better than shooting it up, because I know that a lot of people take it intramuscularly, where you just jab it into your thigh.
02:11:54.000I believe, yeah, this says the drug will only be given by accredited specialists who must monitor patients for two hours after administration.
02:12:00.000I don't think you can just get it and go home and...
02:13:37.000But to be as honest as he was, and not even end it with a joke, you know, just to tell the serious story and then end, you know, that blew me away.
02:13:44.000I met him on a Friday night and watched it on a Saturday morning and had no idea.
02:13:49.000And it was one of the best things I've seen for a long time.
02:14:03.000And, you know, you see a guy like Neil and, you know, he's constantly pursuing all these different therapies and constantly trying to find something that alleviates this depression.
02:14:27.000He's very open about it and talking about it.
02:14:29.000But the ketamine does seem to have helped him quite a bit and he was telling me like man He's like this is so fucking crazy I'm going to this doctor's office and having these full-blown Psychedelic experiences at the doctor's office.
02:14:40.000Yeah And then two hours later you're out on the street feeling completely normal.
02:14:43.000What was your ketamine experience like?
02:14:45.000I took a tablet you put it under your tongue and let it dissolve for for ten minutes And then I laid on a sofa in a therapist office for two hours And I was out on the street again two hours later.
02:14:55.000So how long did it take before it kicked in?
02:14:58.000I don't really know because I never thought it was kicking in.
02:15:02.000But then I just found myself saying things and concluding things that I wouldn't normally say.
02:15:06.000And for the next week and a half, I just felt like there was just a weight off.
02:15:11.000Did you have any sort of hallucinogenic experience?
02:17:43.000And 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.
02:17:54.000You know what you want to do and you'll do it whatever the price is.
02:17:59.000And so I'm open to the idea of that not being the case.