Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1266 - Ben Anderson
Uploaded: 2019-03-19T02:45:44.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1266 - Ben Anderson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1266 - Ben Anderson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1266 - Ben Anderson

chain on it's been a while
working live we're live do you want to talk about that or no the chain thing
did you have something
everyone sent me the clip and uh and i think you said something about taking a
knee in the middle
of a gunfight and he said yeah that was ben he's a fucking savage what did you
do what happened
refresh my memory we're in afghanistan right and the guys i'm with the afghan
soldiers i'm with get
ambushed by the taliban and i just went down on one knee and carried on talking
uh um and shane said
yeah he's fucking savage apparently that's a compliment i wasn't sure war
journalists are
very fascinating people to me because uh 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're you're you're so
concentrated on getting the
shot you don't think about the fact that you might get shot it's a safety
mechanism yeah you think
you're protected by looking at it on a screen rather than realizing it's it's
actually happening
in real life right now that is stupid it's it's so strange try to keep this uh
like a like a fist
from your face perfect there we go i was with um the u.s marines for operation
mushtarak like the
biggest operation of the afghan war um and there was a town called marja that
was controlled by the
taliban and i met up with this one group of marines i used to love going out
the marines because
if you were willing to run the same risks as them they'd let you film
everything um and their mission
was to get dropped by helicopter in the middle of this town at 3 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
weapons get your weapons
and general crystal had introduced this rule of courageous restraint saying you're
not allowed to
shoot unless you're shot at or unless you see someone preparing a hostile act
and the taliban had
figured out how to use this so i'm sitting in this field with about 28 marines
watching the
taliban drop off guys in buildings all around us with their weapons wrapped in
blankets knowing the
marines can't shoot them so they're setting up the perfect ambush um and as
soon as we started walking
across the field it started and it's like nothing i've ever heard or
experienced before and 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 straight away um i was there alone filming it
myself and because i was
watching the whole thing through this tiny little screen on my camera it felt
like i wasn't you know
in as much danger as as they were and i i was so afraid and the adrenaline 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 and there were rpgs and snipers um
and i watched it back and
the footage is pretty good you know i'm changing shots i'm zooming in and
focusing and 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 an
you know abandoned building and they shelled 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 um and the next day they said oh we're going to launch this
operation take this mask and
and i you know went out with them all over again this felt like a good night's
sleep yeah well it wasn't
even a good night's sleep but yeah but yeah once you survive a few you i mean i
remember when i started
doing this you had an idea of what 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
it's easy
to get to get careless and stupid that's a real thing with violence right until
you've actually
experienced it firsthand personally being enacted on yourself it almost doesn't
seem real even when
bullets are sipping by your head yeah is that just a weird compartmentalization
thing that people are
capable of is that what it is i think it is i mean i think with me it's
slightly different um 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 that
idea so then you start feeling a bit guilty and thinking am i just here for my
own benefit am i just
here to profit in some way and not actually helping whatsoever um so i think
that guilt made me think
you're not important enough to have something as dramatic as getting shot or
blown up happen to you
i know that sounds so stupid and never thought that until you know it came out
as part of this therapy
but i think i really had started thinking that so the the mdma therapy made you
sort of look at your rational perspective like 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 absolutely yeah you're sort of making these agreements and
arrangements in order
to be able to still do that yeah and if if it continued then it was going to
end badly thank you
like you know there was there was only one way it was going to end and i and i
hadn't i hadn't seen
that coming at all i hadn't i hadn't connected the dots like that at all how
did you uh wind up
stopping cheers cheers i mean this is the big thing i haven't stopped and i don't
think i'm going to
stop i i did the mdma therapy thinking this would give me an excuse to stop
right and i thought that's
what i wanted three quarters of the way through the first session i was
planning the next program and
i mean people say you're an adrenaline junkie that's not true at all it's not a
thrill to be
there it's horrible to be there it's an endurance test every single time but i
still think it's 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
um but you hope that
it has an impact everything has an impact i'm sure it has an impact but i mean
the example i always
use in this you know 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 crime 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 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 wars in that even if you want to help what's the point
you can't you're only
going to make it worse i think a lot of people feel that way and i think that
leads some people to think
assad is not a good guy he probably does have the blood of hundreds of
thousands on his hands
but we should deal with him anyway because that's better than iraq or afghanistan
is it because when
we do get rid of a leader like libya with qaddafi or iraq with hussein that
what happens is you get
this power vacuum and then it becomes far worse we've tried every model we've
tried invading afghanistan
taking over trying to rebuild the entire culture and armed forces and
government ourselves that has
failed miserably tried iraq libya tried leading from the back um 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 um and all three have failed so i think now you've
got people i mean
the thing i always think most people would say we should have intervened in rwanda
i think almost
everyone would say i mean bill clinton would say that's his biggest regret i
think in this presidency
most people would say we should have intervened in rwanda i think if rwanda
happened tomorrow you'd
have a lot of people here saying it's not worth it we won't help we can't make
the situation better
so why even try well it's so hard when you look at the rest of the world and
you see these horrific
conditions and you see warlords in power and you see atrocities being committed
and
we're sitting over here and you know in the valley watching on internet and
drinking starbucks you know
or it's just trump gossip yeah i mean well more so yeah american american
foreign coverage was never
was never great no now it's it's almost gone i mean yemen we'll see i mean
because of the khashoggi
murder maybe maybe something's going to happen with yemen because and there is
a lot we can do there
because we are you know directly supporting one side it almost seems like what
you were talking
about but in a far lesser extent the the feeling that you get when you're in
these war zones that
it's almost like 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 like 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 but it's not real like in terms of it's not
knocking on my door yeah
no 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 800 000 dead um do people really think what what that means what
does 800 000 dead actually
mean right do they when i think with certain numbers you you just they just
become uh it just becomes
digits and it just doesn't make sense yeah it doesn't uh you like if you hear
five guys get killed
in a shootout you go wow those 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 it almost doesn't
register yeah but for you
it registers yeah yeah and you know i mean the reason i started doing this you
know when i was a
kid as soon as i started reading about these situations and you know when i
when i i remember
reading that my government the british government was arming you know often the
wrong side yeah in
these conflicts i remember thinking how is this 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 you're so immersed is it hard for you
when you come back and
you see the trump gossip and all the nonsense and all the things that we engage
in on a daily basis here
in america that are really trivial at best i mean you know is it hard for you
to i mean you you get to
see the worst happening in the world all the time is it hard for you to relate
yeah i mean you you know i
mean one of the one of the main symptoms i had of the ptsd from covering this
for so long was was it
was numbness to physical danger when i was there but it was numbness when i got
back home so you'd
come back and you know at one point you used to think if i come back with with
the footage i have
of wha