Name: Joe Rogan Experience #599 - Shane Smith
Uploaded: 2015-01-14T08:50:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #599 - Shane Smith' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-01-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #599 - Shane Smith' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-01-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #599 - Shane Smith

This is our whole new setup. We're in HD now. You're going to look beautiful.
I don't need... I need not HD. I need, like, cheesecloth. I need Vaseline.
Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.
No, we're all in HD. We got multicolored. Look at the colors.
Different colors for the buttons now. That's huge.
When you get lit up colors, that's what I thought the future was going to look
like
when there was computers in, like, 2015.
I thought it would be, like, the inside of, like, a spaceship.
Because that was Star Trek, then.
Yeah, like, multicolored.
That's how.
Like, all of our buttons are the same color.
That is how, right?
That's the TriCaster. So we're in HD now. You're beautiful, baby.
You're beautiful. Look at you. You're beautiful.
Oh, fuck. I need hair. Where's my hair and makeup?
What's going on, man? You fucking savage world traveler.
You're the most savage world traveler I know.
You're the dude. I'll get a text message from you when you're in fucking
Bulgaria.
or some shit.
You're in North Korea on some wacky cell system that the communists use.
You're all over the world.
Well, I didn't text you from North Korea because they won't let me.
But, yeah, I was just in Antarctica in the South Pole.
That's hard to get to. Very hard to get to.
You were one of the, your special was one of the first things that I ever saw
on North Korea that made me, like, really start to investigate it.
Like, I knew that they had, there was a lot of human rights violations and this
horrible things that they're doing to people in prisons.
Like, when you going to those fake restaurants and having these people take you
around and trying to present you with this image of what North Korea is like.
Like, oh, it's just like everywhere else. Come here.
And you were, like, really, you know, talking about it pretty openly on camera
while you were there.
And that made me really, like, start to look into it.
And this is before all this shit has gone down with the interview, of course,
and before, before people really, I think, like, after his dad died.
That's when people really got a sense of, like, well, this is not going to end
here.
Yeah.
Like, this crazy communist, this is, like, the last real crazy communist
dictator.
Yeah.
Like, the old school sort of utopian communist, you know, cult of personality.
They're God.
They're, you know, the president.
They're the, you know, George Washington.
They're everything.
Yeah.
And, yeah, it's still going on, which is crazy.
In fact, they picked Kim Jong-un because he looked like his grandfather, Kim Il-sung.
And so the people were like, oh, you know, they're the same guy kind of thing.
God.
It's so weird.
I mean, I was always, I'm one of those people that I'll get something in my
head and then that will be stuck in my head for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Yeah.
Like, for a long time was the Mongols and people were like, dude, will you just
shut the fuck up about the Mongols?
Did you see that movie Mongol?
Yeah, I did.
So good.
Pretty good.
You know what's really good, man?
Marco Polo on Netflix.
Really?
I'm going to check it out.
Yeah, it deals with Kublai Khan, who's like the descendant, the grandson of Genghis
Khan.
Genghis.
Yeah, you're supposed to, I always said Genghis, but you should always say Genghis.
Yeah.
But then I got into North Korea after your show.
Right.
After watching you in that restaurant going like, what a weird charade this is.
Yeah.
The government's putting on a charade for journalists.
Yeah.
And also I was thinking, like, they fucking, they kidnapped people.
Sure.
Like, you going there and doing that was pretty dangerous.
Yeah.
There's another film.
We interviewed the woman, actually.
I think they just sold the rights where they're making the film.
It's a crazy story of, there was like, basically the Orson Welles of South
Korea.
So after the war, they had this crazy film scene going on in South Korea.
And there was like the Orson Welles and like the hottest starlet, the Marilyn
Monroe, basically.
Right.
And their husband and wife.
And they end up getting into a fight.
And the wife goes to Japan.
She's crying.
She's pissed off.
She goes to Tokyo.
Boom.
Disappears.
Right.
And no one can find her.
What the fuck's going on?
So he goes to Tokyo.
Boom.
He disappears.
Now, it turns out they were kidnapped by the North Koreans.
Right.
By Kim Il-sung.
Yeah.
And so they had made this film studio, which I actually went to.
It's a complete replica of 20th Century Fox back in the 50s.
And they make all these anti-American films.
Anyway, it turned out that the woman who he kidnapped, he turned into sort of a
sex slave.
And the star of all these North Korean propaganda movies, because he used to
make a ton of movies.
They get the husband and say, now you're going to direct her in these movies.
Right.
They kidnapped him in Tokyo.
And he said, fuck you.
I'm not going to do that.
So they had put him in a concentration camp, which a Korean concentration camp
may be the worst place in the world.
So he's eating grass and he's being tortured.
Five years.
Right.
Five fucking years he's in this concentration camp.
Finally, he says, OK, I'll do it.
I'll direct the films.
So they let him out.
And he goes to Kim Jong-il's palace.
And then all of a sudden, there's his wife.
And his wife all of a sudden realizes, holy shit, he's A, alive.
B, he came to get me.
C, he's been in the concentration camp.
And he realizes, oh, she's been eating shrimp pate all day.
Fucking Kim Jong-il while I'm in the concentration camp.
In any case, they get together and make like seven movies, big movies for North
Korea.
And in fact, one of them called Escape, no joke, called Escape, wins a Moscow
like Oscar, like a Soviet Oscar at the time.
As a reward, they get to go to Vienna, which was their dream because it's where
the third man was filmed.
He then, and she, and their tour of Vienna, they're allowed to tour Vienna,
they defect.
And they get out.
And finally, they escape.
And then they told the story, and now they're making a movie about it.
So they're probably going to shut that.
Whoever puts that out is going to get shut down, too.
What the fuck?
That is the craziest story ever.
Yeah, true story, yeah.
That a guy can still live like that.
I mean, that's basically the same as people lived 5,000 years ago.
I mean, that kind of shit.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Kidnapping people, forcing the wife to be a sex slave, forcing the husband into
a concentration camp, torturing him.
Yeah, crazy.
Starving him.
Yeah.
It's completely insane.
Whenever you start dealing with North Korea at any level about anything, it's
crazy as fuck.
It's just amazing that it's still around like that.
Yeah, it is.
It's just such an archaic idea.
Yeah.
I mean, it really doesn't fit in what we think of as 2015, the modern world.
Although it wasn't that long ago, you know, that you had Stalinist Russia, you
had Maoist China, you had Hitler's Germany, where people just went, yep, that's
the dude.
He's the one who tells us how to do everything, you know.
I think it's really disturbing because it's happening now.
And even though like 40 years ago or 50 years ago isn't really that long ago,
now feels like that could be us.
But I think if you look at what's happening in Russia, it's not so far away
because obviously the thing about North Korea, which is weird, is it's like
going back to 1938.
You know, it's like going back in time.
But the thing about Russia, if you go to Russia now, they're like, there is no
economic crisis.
America did this to us.
The oil is falling because America did this to us.
It's total Cold War rhetoric.
And Putin is, you know, the new czar.
He's taken over all power and, you know, he runs the press and, you know, he
runs everything.
And it's definitely not going forward in Russia.
It's going backwards.
Yeah, he's a weird case, isn't he?
I mean, it's just so blatant that this guy is a dictator.
When you see what happens when there's any sort of dispute over there and even
with these oligarchs, they take them, they put them in jail and they take their
businesses.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
And he's done this more than once, right?
He did it to a guy recently and he only wound up taking one of his oil
businesses.
Yeah, and, you know, he's done it famously with Gazprom and Rosneft where, you
know, one guy became the richest dude in the world and three other guys got
either assassinated or went to jail.
So, I think that when you look at it, you know, it's a tough place to do
business, Russia, unless you got a key card to the Kremlin, you're not going to
get anything done.
I mean, it's so blatant.
Yeah.
It's so blatant.
It's so strange that that can happen.
They just reactivated 28 Cold War bases this year.
So, they were done.
Okay, Cold War is over.
Yeah, fuck, we're done.
Boom, 28 bases reactivated, like, uh, what?
Do you think that they feel like the only way to recharge the economy is being
a full-blown conflict with the United States?
Yeah, I think that it was a humiliation in Russia.
You know, we look at sort of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and go, oh, you know, they
finally came to their senses and joined the world and whatever.
You know, Yeltsin drank a bit too much or whatever.
But, uh, there, that's seen as a huge humiliation.
As, you know, we were, if not number one, we were number two for a long time.
And then we went to be in and also ran.
And that was, there was a lot of resentment there.
A, B, then, as oil came on the ascendancy, they're like, okay, we're going to
throw our weight around.
So, they were, you know, subsidizing oil.
For example, Cuba was subsidized oil.
You know, one of the reasons why they're like, oh, let's be friends again is
there's no more oil subsidies.
And it's the same thing in the region.
And then I think what happened is Putin came along and said, Russia's the best
again and we're going to fuck with people.
We're going to take back our land that they took from us and we're going to
take back this and our military is the best.
And we're going to put more money in the military and we're going to reactivate
these bases.
And people went, yeah, good, why not?
By the way, you've got to remember, you've got to remember, too, that they grew
up where we were the boogeyman.
Right.
So, it's not to, like, you know, all the old people, like, if you look at the
Fox News people, they're like, yeah, fucking Russia, they're all communes.
Well, all the people in Russia are going, I know the Americans eat the babies,
you know, and so it's not that much of a stretch.
Well, and if you look at, like, the way we behave abroad, I mean, the fact that
we have multiple wars going on, that we have drone attacks.
On their border.
We look scary as fuck to someone outside of us.
Remember that Sting song, The Russians Love Their Children Too?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was a great song.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I remember listening to that song and thinking, was it Sting or the police?
Might have been, I think it was Sting.
I think it was when the police.
It sounds like Sting, but it was the era of the police.
Yeah, and he was, you know, I mean, we thought of them, like, as that was going
to kill everybody.
It was going to be a nuclear war, the Russians were going to kill everybody.
It hovered over our head all the time.
Well, you and I grew up at the end of the Cold War when it was still full on.
Yeah, it's terrifying.
Propaganda and shit.
You ever watch, like, war games?
Yeah.
And, like, that was just a given.
Yeah, of course we're going to destroy each other.
It's just a matter of time.
And then when you get to school and you find out about the Cuban Missile Crisis,
you go, wait, how close was that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, fuck, man.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
Yeah.
Like, they were going to, what?
Yeah.
We were going to go to a nuclear war with fucking Cuba?
Yeah, yeah.
Holy shit.
The idea that that almost happened or could have happened.
Or you got even, like, step one in a three-step process of ha