Joe Rogan & Sebastian Junger on the Syrian Civil War, ISIS

Hello freak bitches. Now you've got a documentary out that you're working on as well? Yeah, well it's out. No, it's airing on Sunday. It's um It's called Hell on Earth. It's about the Syrian Civil War and the rise of Isis and it's out on National Geographic Channel 9 Eastern 8 Central this Sunday. This Sunday? Yeah. Is it going to be available? I mean you can obviously watch it at the time But it's going to be available on Netflix or Apple TV or something like that. I think it's yeah Yeah, it's um. I haven't even thought that far ahead I mean it's owned by National Geographic, so I don't know quite now there I'm sure you'll be able to get it on their website at some point, but it's airing on Sunday And what was your experience doing that? Well, I you know I was home writing tribe actually and so I wasn't overseas you couldn't really get into Syria anyway I mean it was a suicidal thing to do And so what we did my colleague Nick that guy who was here earlier We basically sort of worked the border border areas around Syria Looking for people who were living in Syria who knew people in Syria who could shoot for us And we found some very very brave people who documented their lives under Isis their lives with the Free Syrian Army There was a lot of combat And we accumulated about an hour a thousand hours of footage and interviews we did with experts and we put together Hell on Earth trying to explain How really quite peaceful democratic protests Turned into violent demonstrations and finally into a civil war and of course It's the it was the repressive government I mean people protests in the street And they're met with machine gun fire and eventually Civilians are gonna get some machine guns themselves and fight back, and that's how you get a civil war How do you take thousands of hours like that and boil it down to one show? Well that's it's very very hard I mean that's what filmmaking is and it's figuring out What's the 1% that goes into the film and how do I structure it? How much time does it take to do something we got a really good? I mean this is the first I've made this is my fifth film most of the films I've made it was me and an editor and so another person in the room or whatever This we had a big team And so we had some very very smart young people who are going through all this footage and categorizing it like here This is a section about you know this material is about Whatever escaping Isis and this is about trying to find food You know whatever they would they would sort of put it into categories And then I would start to look through some of that material and we could gradually sort of build a build a structure The the situation in Syria seems to be from someone who just hasn't studied it that much But just looks at it from the outside one of the bleaker darker Situations that we have here in the world. I mean it's the tragic tragedy of this generation. I think Over 400,000 Syrians mostly civilians have died the equivalent death toll in this country would be I think seven or eight million Americans the equivalent amount of people And and half the country half the Syrian population has been displaced from their homes and millions Millions are you know outside the country's borders in Europe and and and even in this country What did you take out of the documentary? I mean it seems like no one has a solution for Syria No, I mean civil wars are tough that way I think Isis Isis eventually is going to be defeated on the battlefield They're gonna be eradicated, and I hope they are because they're a ghastly brutal group and Assad who is who's killed way more people than Isis he just didn't do it publicly like they did He's the leader of Syria president of Syria He's propped up by Iran and by Russia, and so he's not going anywhere I mean if you have those two countries as your allies like you're not going anywhere So I think what's gonna happen ultimately is that Isis will be defeated and the country will be partitioned along sectarian lines And there eventually there may be a kind of Delicate peace It seems like with all those Middle Eastern countries home But any country that's run by a brutal dictator as soon as that dictator is removed or as soon as somebody Dies, there's this massive power vacuum. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that would be the argument for not trying to remove him I mean he's a complete criminal and sadist and He's horrible, but what was the argument for keeping Saddam Hussein in power was the argument for keeping Gaddafi in power Yeah, I mean basically it's sort of utilitarian argument It's from John Stuart Mill like what's gonna What's gonna cause the least human suffering or promote the most human happiness and and you know I sometimes? I can understand the reasoning behind look the guy's a dictator But we should leave him in place because the alternative is a lot of other innocent people suffering When we remove him and the country collapses this country has already collapsed so the problem is the question is okay We make a tentative peace deal with him. We'll leave you in power. We won't try to topple you But let's stop fighting. I mean I can I could support that yeah personally Wow, isn't that crazy the idea of keeping that guy in power just so less people suffer You keep a brutal murderous dictator in power. Yeah, I know we're better off that way Yeah, well, I mean you know the war killed almost half a million people Yeah, if you want anything if you want that to continue like right now. Yeah, that's I mean those are the awful moral choices It's very frustrating for people though because they would like to see like the we'd like to see some solution like on the table Well, it's a solution to the violence right I mean any any peace deal is a solution to the violence so And the first thing that has to happen. I think is that the violence stops that people stop dying The pursuit of justice is a secondary is important, but it's a secondary matter after that