Dec. 16, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:12:13
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Dude, I'm so happy to be here. | ||
| Dude, I'm so happy you're here. | ||
| I've been reading your book, and it's fucking excellent. | ||
| You're a really good writer. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I killed myself doing that book. | ||
| That is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. | ||
| How long did it take? | ||
| About two years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And when I got the deal, I had this delusional idea that it would be like writing 25,000-word essays, and this was so wrong. | ||
| This was so, so, so much harder than anything I'd ever done. | ||
| Why was it so much harder than writing essays? | ||
| Well, when you write essays, you are doing, like, these kind of short things. | ||
| It's limited. | ||
| You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. | ||
| No characters, no dialogue, you know, simple narrative. | ||
| Whereas this man, like, keeping a plot together over 300 pages, and then that plot is your life, which by definition has no plot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it hard to recall all the moments in your life and do them justice? | ||
| So hard. | ||
| And also for this book, because I work as a journalist, I fact-checked it as best I could. | ||
| And nothing is more personally painful than fact-checking the ends of various friendships and relationships and realizing what a jerk you were at the time. | ||
| Yeah, I can only imagine. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to do that. | ||
| Like, oh man, I had a whole victimization narrative, and oh, that was quite wrong. | ||
| I think they probably did too. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| I mean, it's really strange when you go back and talk to people that you haven't talked to for a long time, and you're like, okay, what is your... | ||
| And all judgments aside, let's just give me your version of what happened, and I'll tell you what I think happened. | ||
| And you're like, oh my god, I don't know what the fuck the truth is anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I have this one thing where there was this one girl, she recalled something, and she recalled it one way, and then when she realized that it was actually two days later than she thought it was, which made it look like there was an article she had written which had contradicted it, she kept insisting it hadn't happened. | ||
| And I was like, man, here's your Twitter, here's my Twitter, here's the Twitter of the two other people who are at brunch, here's the email confirming it. | ||
| It happened on this day. | ||
| And finally she was like, I just give up. | ||
| I give up, but I don't remember it. | ||
| Yeah, it's very strange when people are confronted by that fact, too. | ||
| I had a friend that I'm no longer friends with that insisted something, and then when my other friend jumped in and said, that's not what happened at all, it was a psychedelic drug talk. | ||
| I'm trying to beat around the bush like I'm on regular radio or something. | ||
| But he was insisting that he got me on this psychedelic drug the first time, and my other friend was like, um, no. | ||
| That was mine. | ||
| It was my drugs. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about, man? | ||
| And then he just sort of stopped talking to us. | ||
| Yeah, that kind of sulked off and then comes back later with a new subject. | ||
| Well, people love to, you know, they love somehow or another to get glory from the past. | ||
| And like, somehow or another, it's one of those things that never works, sort of like name dropping. | ||
| Like, name dropping has never worked ever. | ||
| No one has ever said, I'm really good friends with Leonardo DiCaprio. | ||
| And someone's gone, Whoa! | ||
| Let me give you a movie now! | ||
| You're fucking amazing! | ||
| No, immediately people go, oh, this guy's a name dropper. | ||
| Or he just happens to say it and it happens to be true. | ||
| There's a fine line, but everybody knows what the difference is. | ||
| When you're a name dropper, you can smell it in a sentence. | ||
| It's just like it comes off in the air. | ||
| So this book, it's fucking super intimate. | ||
| You just cut the skin away and opened your chest up and the whole world could see your soul. | ||
| You know, you peeled it out. | ||
| I tried my best. | ||
| I mean, I just wanted to do something honest, you know? | ||
| Well, it's definitely that, I guess. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I wasn't there, obviously. | ||
| Two years is a long time to write something. | ||
| How many times did you have to go back over it? | ||
| Oh god, like seven drafts? | ||
| And there's a hundred pages of cuts from this book, too, that's in another word file that I might mine someday for other essays. | ||
| But it was like over and over. | ||
| And you know, because I had never written a book before, I didn't, I didn't realize, you know, how much extra you write. | ||
| I feel like I was like building a block of marble basically out of words. | ||
| And then I had to like cut away at the horrible, ugly block of marble I had made and then finally something cool emerged. | ||
| Yeah, they all say that. | ||
| All the great writers say that. | ||
| Like my friend Steve Rinell always uses this quote, you have to kill your babies. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's what they say, right? | ||
| That's like the common writer's conversation, kill your babies. | ||
| But then you can keep your babies in another document and you can devote like one essay per baby where they make sense. | ||
| That's similar to stand-up comedy in a lot of ways. | ||
| One of the hardest things about comedy is recognizing a bit sometimes is just too fat. | ||
| There's too much stuff in it, and you have to figure out what to chop off. | ||
| But you have these emotional connections to these punchlines. | ||
| Like, but I love this part. | ||
| I love saying it. | ||
| This is my favorite part, but that favorite part doesn't necessarily enhance the whole thing, so you have to kind of chip it away, and then the whole thing will be better without it, but it's hard to do, right? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, the best piece of advice I ever got when I started writing was my friend Lori, who's a really cool journalist, said to me, the worst articles I've ever written are the ones where I try to say everything about a subject. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, your style is really interesting, too, because one of the things that's really cool is you've got a lot of illustrations that go along with these stories. | ||
| Now, are these illustrations that you added in after the fact, or are they illustrations that you sort of drew while you were experiencing these things? | ||
| A few of them I drew at the time. | ||
| There are some old illustrations from Turkey or from Paris that I did when I was a teenager. | ||
| Some stuff from Occupy. | ||
| But I would say over a hundred of them I did new for the book. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| So that's a lot of extra work on top of that as well. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| How many days were you doing this every day? | ||
| How were you finding the time? | ||
| Because I know you're so busy doing journalism. | ||
| You're busy doing art. | ||
| How did you find the time to do this? | ||
| I was a really horrible person to be around for quite a few months. | ||
| I have the coolest boyfriend in the world. | ||
| Thank you, Fred, for putting up with me during this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Powerful Fred. | |
| Fred is awesome. | ||
| I had a few things. | ||
| First, I had friends with a house in the country and they let me stay there for a number of weeks and they didn't have internet signal in a lot of it. | ||
| So I didn't bring any of my fun books that I like to read. | ||
| So I was just stuck. | ||
| It was just me and this fucking thing and we're gonna beat each other. | ||
| I rented a lot of hotel rooms. | ||
| I had an editor who put a beatdown on me and was like, you can't keep going off to other countries. | ||
| You actually have to write this book that I contracted you for. | ||
| At one point, he was like, are you fleeing to Warzone so you don't have to look at your book contract? | ||
| Is that how it's going? | ||
| I think towards the end, I... Didn't do anything but work on it. | ||
| I just became this horrible, like, troll beast that didn't wash her hair and would growl at anyone who came near living entirely on coffee and just made it. | ||
| That was how I did it. | ||
| That is a good way to do it, right? | ||
| If you can get somewhere without the internet? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I used to write a lot on airplanes. | ||
| I used to look forward to airplane flights. | ||
| I'd be like, okay, I'm stuck in this seat. | ||
| There's no internet access. | ||
| And then what the fuck do the airlines do? | ||
| They put internet on the goddamn planes! | ||
| I know, and then you're like, oh, I need to see what someone says about me on Twitter. | ||
| Oh, no, someone was wrong on Twitter. | ||
| I must remedy this. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to go on Amazon and buy a new pair of sneakers, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| It's so easy to just get distracted nowadays. | ||
| It's just the world is becoming more and more available, you know? | ||
| And if you're off in a cabin in the woods with no internet access... | ||
| Yeah, you're stuck. | ||
| You're confronted with your own work to do. | ||
| Yeah, it's so attractive. | ||
| That's such an attractive... | ||
| Idea. | ||
| It's so romantic, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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To be off in a cabin in the woods by yourself, working on your great work. | |
| Except whenever I'm actually there, I want to, like, dig holes in my arms because I'm like, where is the Wi-Fi signal? | ||
| There's a guy that I tweeted about today. | ||
| There's an article that I tweeted where this guy decided he wanted to live by himself in the, I think it was in Northwest Territories. | ||
| He was going to do it for a solid year. | ||
| But he made it six months, and then he had a satellite phone. | ||
| He's like, come get me! | ||
| I can't fucking do this anymore! | ||
| But he was just going crazy, like, by himself for six months. | ||
| And it's a fascinating story. | ||
| This is the guy right here. | ||
| Norwegian adventurer spent six months alone in the Northwest Territory wilderness. | ||
| And it's really cool because the guy is very good at describing what he felt and what it was like and what he expected versus what it was really like. | ||
| One of the things that he said that I thought was really interesting, he said, we are not meant to be alone. | ||
| And I kind of feel that way too. | ||
| I feel like, you know, people romanticize this idea of being this hermit that's off in the woods, you know, the The the monk that's out meditating in the forest by himself, but that shit is like it's like holding your breath It's kind of cool for a little while, but you don't you don't want to do it very long No, | ||
| man, I think I mean it makes you go crazy like being in solitary things makes you go crazy I Recently did a really big investigative piece on some long-term solitary prisoners and these guys like were really smart guys they were You know, really strong guys, in my opinion. | ||
| Like, one of them I consider really a genius. | ||
| But he had been in solitary for 14 years, man. | ||
| 14 years. | ||
| Who is this? | ||
| His name is Andre Jacobs. | ||
| He was part of this group of whistleblowers called the Dallas Six that basically they were giving information about guards doing, beating people up and being racist in this prison in PA. And they're all in solitary and the guards retaliated. | ||
| And then when one of the other guys, Carrington, sued the DA for not protecting him from the guards, the DA turned around and charged them all with rioting. | ||
| And I got really into the case because I was like, this seems semantically interesting. | ||
| How do you riot if you're in solitary? | ||
| I consider rioting a group activity. | ||
| Like if someone's rioting in solitary, you could just leave them there and they'd get tired eventually and then the riot would be over. | ||
| You know? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| They called it rioting. | ||
| So I did an investigative piece, and eventually I got video and stuff, and it was bullshit, and I really hope their trial goes well in February. | ||
| But as part of it, I spent a lot of time talking to two of the guys, and I mean, you suffer real mental trauma from doing that. | ||
| And no one, even the smartest, toughest, best person who has a really loving mom that is really devoted to giving them all the books and all the support, even that person will suffer real trauma from that. | ||
| Yeah, I've always wondered, like when Bradley Manning was arrested and then later became Chelsea Manning and spent, how many years was she, you know, whenever the transition makes sense, how many years was she in solitary? | ||
| Like it was quite a long time. | ||
| Like three years, I think, right? | ||
| And naked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Naked and in cold conditions. | ||
| Like they literally tortured her. | ||
| Like they tortured her. | ||
| Like, what they decided, when do you say her and when is him? | ||
| Because when did she decide to transition? | ||
| When she was in there, right? | ||
| She, like, announced the transition right after her trial. | ||
| But she, I mean, if you look at her chat logs with Adrienne Lamo, she has one line where she says that what she's afraid of is being known to the world as a boy. | ||
| So I think she decided it herself a long time ago. | ||
| Before she was arrested? | ||
| Yeah, before she was arrested. | ||
| But she just didn't publicly announce it for a long time. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| The worst thing is to be known as a boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, it was a line from the chat log. | ||
| And anyone who's listening to this, please fact check it. | ||
| I don't want to get it wrong, but that's what I remember. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But I remember thinking, like, who wouldn't lose their fucking mind being naked in a room by yourself for years? | ||
| Like, what if they thought that she was a hazard to herself or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, their bullshit excuse is always like, oh, you're a suicide risk, so we have to have you naked with no glasses, nothing to read, a horrible, like, suicide prevention blanket that you can't, like, you know, wrap around you, and just, we have to, like, torture you because you might be a suicide risk. | ||
| Is she in regular prison now or still in solitary? | ||
| She's in regular prison right now. | ||
| Actually, one of my most cherished possessions in the universe is she wrote me a letter once because I drew a birthday card for her. | ||
| She dots her eyes with little doves. | ||
| It's really cute. | ||
| With doves? | ||
| Yeah, she draws little doves on them. | ||
| Every eye? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope this isn't a long letter. | ||
| No, it was a short one. | ||
| It was a gracious one. | ||
| I think it reminded me of the thank you card that someone very graciously writes, someone who's given them a gift. | ||
| What a bizarre set of circumstances. | ||
| Someone who is a soldier who transitioned to becoming a woman and then sends letters that all have the animal that's known as the symbol of peace over all the eyes. | ||
| I mean, I think from her life you get the sense that part of the reason she wanted to join the army was she's just like so smart and she just wanted to go to college. | ||
| I mean, from what I know kind of about reading her life story, like this was someone who Like her happiest time was like dating a dude who was around sort of like the MIT hacker scene and I think that if she was middle class and not poor she just would have like gone to school and gotten a computer science degree and that would have been the whole thing. | ||
| It's incredible that someone who exposes crimes, and that's the only way you could look at what happened with Edward Snowden and with Bradley Manning. | ||
| I mean, you could say that what they did was treasonous. | ||
| Is it really treasonous when you're exposing crime? | ||
| Like, isn't it supposed to be illegal to commit crime? | ||
| And if your government is doing things that are illegal, isn't it your job as a patriot to expose those things? | ||
| Like, when is it not treasonous? | ||
| Oh, God, yeah. | ||
| I mean, both of them are heroes. | ||
| If no one is putting their own government in check, then that government will just tend to concentrating more and more power and people in it will concentrate to doing worse and worse things because there's no sort of supervision. | ||
| And there's no way that you can love your country and not call it on its bullshit at all. | ||
| I think that the opposite thing is treason. | ||
| I think it's treason to say, like, just because it's my country, any crime is justified. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But what they're doing, though, is so horrible because they're making it so that no one ever does anything like this again. | ||
| They make such a giant example. | ||
| Julian Assange is literally going crazy, staying in that one house in London. | ||
| He can't leave. | ||
| If he leaves, they'll arrest him the moment he steps foot on the... | ||
| What a crazy thing. | ||
| He can get out on the balcony and wave to people and get a slight amount of vitamin D and then he has to go back inside and he's fucking trapped. | ||
| Snowden is hanging out with Putin in Russia, which is just bizarre to me. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| I watched a bizarre Putin video today. | ||
| Which Putin video did you watch? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's Putin. | |
| They're analyzing his gait. | ||
| The way he walks. | ||
| This is so creepy. | ||
| Why don't they just admit that they have a crush on him and want to have a sleepover? | ||
| That is so weird. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, it's because he has a very specific way of walking that's indicative of someone who has military training. | ||
| It's called the Gunslinger's Gate. | ||
| Did they make that term up themselves? | ||
| I guess they probably did. | ||
| But what he does is he swings his left arm, but not his right, so he could pull his gun out really quickly. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| But what's really bizarre about the video is I didn't know how, like, opulent... | ||
| Wherever he is with palace or whatever the fuck it is like they have these fucking enormous like here it is Look at these enormous gold doors Like let's play it. | ||
| Let's play it Jamie so you can watch this like if you watch as he walks if you notice his left arm swings notably while his right arm stays Relatively still in comparison like a huge contrast and he always does this and that's so that he could shoot you in the fucking head quicker Or else someone finds out there's an untreated rotator cuff injury, one or the other. | ||
| That's true, right? | ||
| We're just like looking way too into it. | ||
| But apparently it's really common amongst these guys in the Russian military that move into some form of political power. | ||
| But what's kind of creepiest about it, back it up to the beginning again, Jamie, please? | ||
| What's creepiest about it is look at those fucking doors! | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| Like, what are those goddamn doors? | ||
| Look at all that gold! | ||
| Everything's gold! | ||
| I mean, I guess that's the vestiges of being an imperial power where people used to collect Fabergé eggs. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| I mean, he is one of the most open dictators that you can see in modern society, which is supposed to be some sort of a democracy. | ||
| Entirely familiar with how the Russians run their political system But I know that he was out and then he was you know He put some other guy in some sort of a puppet position and now he's back running the whole show But it's it's he's a weird case man. | ||
| I don't know how he manages it It seems like guys like that someone always wants to kill them and just it always falls apart But he's managed to keep it together for a long long long time No, he is. | ||
| I mean, I can't say I'm like super familiar with Russian politics. | ||
| So I could, I might be talking bullshit. | ||
| But I mean, he, you know, he was the ex head of the KGB, like he seems incredibly versed in spying on people and killing people who are threats and maintaining his position at all costs. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't just kill him. | ||
| He kills him, like, openly. | ||
| Yeah, he has him gunned down. | ||
| In front of their girlfriend and stuff like that. | ||
| Like, he's just, it's just a massive terror tactic. | ||
| There was that one guy that was, yeah, he was walking with his girlfriend and his thought was that he had become so famous from criticizing him that Putin couldn't kill him because if he did, it would be so obvious. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| No, he doesn't care. | ||
| I mean, I always think about there is a very respected journalist whose last name I won't pronounce because I'll butcher it. | ||
| But yeah, she was also just like gunned down for criticizing him. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's kind of happened, theoretically at least, in other places. | ||
| But one of the weird ones in America was that Michael Hastings guy. | ||
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unidentified
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That guy. | |
| That's still, that one really freaks me out to this day. | ||
| Because if you don't know the story, Michael Hastings was, there's actually a TED Talk That's available right now. | ||
| It's a podcast called the TED Radio Hour, which I listen to all the time, that had one episode called Disruptive Leadership and actually focused on this general, General McAllister. | ||
| And they were kind of sympathetic to him in this TED Talk because the idea was that he did a real leadership thing by stepping down. | ||
| And what it was was Michael Hastings had gotten embedded in this military organization where they were overseas. | ||
| And when the volcano erupted, remember that volcano in Iceland? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It erupted and it fucked up all the flights out of Europe. | ||
| And you couldn't fly from that part of the world to this part of the world. | ||
| So he got stuck. | ||
| It was supposed to be a short trip and he got stuck over there for a month. | ||
| And as he got closer and closer to these people, they got more and more relaxed and they started telling jokes that were inappropriate about like Al Gore or Joseph Biden. | ||
| And along the lines, this guy, Michael Hastings, formulated this article, published it in Rolling Stone, and it became this sort of a national scandal. | ||
| I believe his name is McAllister, right? | ||
| Is that his name? | ||
| He was forced to step down. | ||
| And that's what the whole focus of this TED Radio Hour was about, was this guy taking a leadership position, a leadership point of view by deciding that his position was not as important as the cause itself, and he was just going to step down because he had created... | ||
| This environment where it was too much controversy. | ||
| And he was upset that President Obama didn't ask him to stay, but it is what it is, and that's it. | ||
| But what they don't say in this thing was this Michael Hastings guy who was in this recording, who was talking about what it was like when he was there, and he committed suicide in one of the strangest, most controversial ways ever. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it was a suicide. | ||
| I think it was an accident. | ||
| Well, some people think it was a suicide, some people think it was an accident, and the black helicopter crew thinks that he was murdered, and that what they did is they took over the electronics in his Mercedes, and they forced his car to drive right into a tree at 120 miles an hour with no brakes. | ||
| Explode and Let me there's all this crazy all these crazy conspiracy theories that are attached to it that say that engines don't go flying from a car like that unless there's a bomb Involved and you know like why would this guy do this and it is pretty pretty trippy stuff and then there was claims that there was crystal meth in his system and then he was you know high on drugs and he had A problem with drugs in the past, | ||
| but then the counter to that was people were like, well, no, he's probably doing Adderall, which a lot of writers do, because it helps him write. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the New York drug. | ||
| Everyone's on Adderall in New York. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I know a lot of people who are very close to Michael Hastings, and I will say the people that I know that are very close to him think it was a tragic accident. | ||
| He just happened to be going 120 miles an hour on Sunset Boulevard? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's for the people I know that, you know... | ||
| They never hit his brakes? | ||
| I can't debate it, but that's just what I've heard from people who I'm very close to, who are close to him. | ||
| Yeah, I would say that, too. | ||
| If I was close to that dude, I knew I was on some sort of a list. | ||
| If you're close to that guy, you know, you've got to be on a list, right? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Well, I mean, probably, like, if you're an investigative journalist doing a lot of stuff in Iraq and Somalia, you're probably on a list. | ||
| You talking about yourself? | ||
| I haven't done Somalia stuff. | ||
| No, I mean, but, like, a lot of his friends were investigative journalists. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure everybody's... | ||
| I'm probably on a list. | ||
| Probably on a list for having you right here. | ||
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unidentified
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Dude! | |
| I'm in California. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm adopting the native dialect. | ||
| I'm sure we're all on lists, because how could you be interesting if you're not on a list? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's sort of like a badge of courage to be on some sort of a list. | ||
| Depends on what list, though. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird world we live in right now. | ||
| I think there's a temporary bridge right now that's going on where, whether it's the NSA, fill in the blank with whatever name of whatever organization that's supposedly watching over us, but they have a certain amount of power to look into people that we don't have yet. | ||
| That's temporary. | ||
| There's going to come a time where this electronic barrier that we have in between each other, it's all going to dissolve. | ||
| And everyone's going to have the same sort of power to spy on everybody that the NSA has. | ||
| We're just going to have to accept it. | ||
| It's going to be very strict. | ||
| It's going to be like we're all camping. | ||
| Oh God, it's going to be a horrifying world. | ||
| We already know too much about each other. | ||
| We do, right? | ||
| Was that a concern when you were writing this book? | ||
| Because you empty yourself out in this book. | ||
| I mean, you talk about sexual liaisons and relationships and friendships and things gone wrong. | ||
| When you were writing this, did you ever say, man, maybe I don't want everybody to know these things? | ||
| I had a few things that were like that, usually actually with friendships, but ultimately I thought that it was more important to be honest. | ||
| Though the one thing that I did do was I felt like it would have been really unfair if I had taken kind of personal moments I had with someone like 15 years ago. | ||
| And just like put them in a book and thus on that person's Google results without asking them. | ||
| So while I tried to be pretty merciless with myself, with people who I'm still friends with, I got their approval on what I wrote about them. | ||
| Oh, that's really cool. | ||
| That's really important. | ||
| That would be a real good way to destroy a friendship. | ||
| You started telling crazy, intimate stories about someone. | ||
| Yeah, just not cool. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| And I know that a lot of people disagree with that and they're like, they're my memories. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it's right, especially if you're kind of the more famous one. | ||
| Not cool. | ||
| Yeah, well, saying they're my memories. | ||
| But if you share a moment with someone, I think it's kind of a group memory, or at least a group moment. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of collectively owned. | ||
| And I ran them by my parents also. | ||
| That's got to be weird. | ||
| That was the most terrifying thing. | ||
| Because I ran the parts about my parents by them, but then they hadn't read the whole book. | ||
| And I had this really terrifying thing when the book came out where I was like... | ||
| Oh my god, what are they gonna think? | ||
| I mean, I love my parents. | ||
| I have a really supportive relationship. | ||
| I couldn't ask for like You know, two cooler people on earth, you know, my parents. | ||
| But still, you're always scared, right? | ||
| It's scary to show yourself like that. | ||
| But they liked it. | ||
| They liked it mostly. | ||
| So I'm very happy about that. | ||
| Well, you must have really open-minded parents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| What do your parents do? | ||
| My mom, she used to be an illustrator. | ||
| Now she's mostly retired. | ||
| She works kind of as a babysitter slash cat sitter now. | ||
| And my dad's an academic. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Well, so yeah, you obviously have some intelligent, open-minded parents. | ||
| So they've got to be really proud of you because this is excellent stuff. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, they really are. | ||
| And it was cool because I got to talk about how both of them influenced me so much in their totally, totally different ways. | ||
| Like my mom is an amazing artist. | ||
| She draws so beautifully and she draws kind of like me if I was a less bitter and jagged person. | ||
| Like she draws like the sweet me. | ||
| And I was able to say like, this is how my mom taught me how to draw. | ||
| You know, this is how she inspired me. | ||
| You got some great people that reviewed this too, man. | ||
| You got Matt Taibbi to review this, Patton Oswalt reviewed this. | ||
| I mean, this is really fucking impressive stuff. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Matt's awesome. | ||
| He actually interviewed me for my book launch in New York and I grew up reading that. | ||
| You know, I was reading like The Exile when I was 18 and I love his stuff in New York Press. | ||
| What I love about Matt's work is that A lot of journalists like they're like these really like narrow professional people that are very, very serious. | ||
| And Matt was like this total wild man when he was young. | ||
| And now he does this incredible investigative journalism on finance and politics, but he still writes like a real person. | ||
| He still writes in that kind of Hunter S. Thompson tone. | ||
| That's exactly how I was going to describe it. | ||
| Like a lucid Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Less drug-addled. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Best of Hunter S. Thompson and less narcissistic a bit. | ||
| No, much less narcissistic now. | ||
| But it was so influential to me because I was like, wow, you can totally be this badass investigative journalist and you could also be this guy who, when he was young, was having these crazy, often criminal adventures in the Aftermath of the Soviet Union falling, those two things were not incompatible at all. | ||
| I always like people like that who have lives that are really, really diverse. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really good way of describing him, too, because we do have this idea that if you're going to be an investigative journalist, that your piece has to be sort of homogenized and that the facts take precedent over the flavor of the prose. | ||
| And his has a lot of flavor. | ||
| There's a lot of personality in distributing those facts, but it doesn't get in the way of the facts. | ||
| Oh, God, no, no. | ||
| It's such like a master class on how to do it. | ||
| And in fact, it really serves the facts, because especially when he's writing about financial journalism, I mean, finance can be so boring and so complicated that it can really be over most people's heads. | ||
| And if you write it completely without flavor, most people will never even be able to sink into it at all. | ||
| Yeah, he's the guy that I got most of my information about the financial collapse about, and one of the things that disturbed me the most was how little reaction, like, publicly, his articles caused. | ||
| Like, I thought, like, it would be one of those things where everyone would be sharing it, it would go, it would be on the front page of the New York Times, today on CNN, Matt Taibbi, uncover, and everybody would be like, look at the facts, this is crazy! | ||
| But meanwhile, it was like this... | ||
| Terrible, terrible scenario where the whole system was hijacked by these fucking criminals and no one seemed to care. | ||
| I have bills to pay. | ||
| I have to keep going. | ||
| I have a spin class at 9 o'clock. | ||
| I can't be paying. | ||
| And no one really gave it the attention, or I shouldn't say no one, but not publicly, nationally. | ||
| It didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved. | ||
| And he wrote a series of them. | ||
| And, you know, some of them, I was like, this guy's gonna get fucking killed. | ||
| Like, these were intense allegations, and backed up, all of it backed up by facts and really well written, and it's just like, almost like it's too much for people. | ||
| They're just like, ugh. | ||
| It's like complicated. | ||
| It deals with a lot of things that are kind of boring, very intellectually demanding, not necessarily partisan. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people, they're like, what are you going to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It bothers me that he's not more famous. | ||
| It bothers me. | ||
| I think, I hope with the next book he will be because I think he's like one of the best journalists working in America. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Now, how much time do you spend doing all this? | ||
| You do a lot of journalism and you do a lot of crazy shit. | ||
| You go to a lot of really nutty sort of dangerous places. | ||
| I've been to a few, yeah. | ||
| What is like the most disturbing place that you've been to? | ||
| So the most dangerous place I went to was last summer when I went into Syria for a day. | ||
| And that was basically... | ||
| When I talk about how dangerous it was, the fact that I wouldn't even spend the night there shows probably something about my tolerance levels. | ||
| At that time, this coalition of Islamist groups had just kicked ISIS out of this border town called Azaz. | ||
| And you could take a bus over to the Turkish border, and then you could cross. | ||
| And I did that with a war journalist friend of mine, and I spent a day with the Islamic Front driving around Azaz. | ||
| And one of the things that was happening then was it was before James Foley was murdered, but We all knew that there were lots and lots of kidnappings there, and at that point we thought it was just for ransom and stuff, but still, you know, kidnapping is a terrible, terrible thing. | ||
| The scariest thing that ever happened to me as a journalist was we're with these three young media activists slash fighter guys, really cool dudes. | ||
| I mean, I liked them. | ||
| And we're in this car, we're driving around Azaz, and the car slows to a halt. | ||
| It just breaks down. | ||
| And Patrick, the guy I'm with, immediately thinks it's set up for kidnapping to get us out of the car. | ||
| Because that's one way that you can set things up for kidnappings. | ||
| And the guys didn't have their guns. | ||
| And so we had to walk to the media office through Azaz. | ||
| And Azaz at that point looked like something out of Mad Max. | ||
| Like it was just no women on the street, just men. | ||
| A lot of AKs. | ||
| Even if a guy didn't have an AK, like they'd be holding like sticks and stuff. | ||
| There were Well, there was a, like, what I can only describe as, like, a gun bodega, which was fascinating because it sold all these different guns. | ||
| Like, it might sell, like, a beautiful antique, you know, pearl inlaid revolver that, like, someone's dad had, but then also grenades and stuff. | ||
| Grenades? | ||
| Grenades, yeah, because, you know, in case someone tried to kidnap you, you'd have a grenade. | ||
| Have a fucking... | ||
| You're coming with me, bitch. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| Basically, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, we're walking through this town, and... | ||
| That was, I think, the scariest thing that I ever did in my life. | ||
| But it all turned out fine. | ||
| And we got to the media office, which it was a government building that that these young men had taken over when they kicked out the central government. | ||
| And the director of it had been kidnapped by ISIS. And the young guys are there like watching watching soccer, because everyone everyone loves soccer there. | ||
| And it was just, I don't know, it's like, This feeling of being in this place where the whole world is both fucking with it and abandoned it both at once, you know? | ||
| And anything could happen. | ||
| So that was the most dangerous thing I've ever done. | ||
| Like nothing I've ever done was as dangerous as going to Syria. | ||
| But I think the most personally disturbing thing was, I was in Gaza, six months ago, I guess. | ||
| And I went to Shujaia, which is this neighborhood that was completely destroyed by Israel during Protective Edge, like they bombed it, and then they went in with tanks, and then they went in with bulldozers, like, so it's like, flattened. | ||
| And it's just, like, gone. | ||
| Like, you know, you go there and you're like, this is a neighborhood that has been wrecked. | ||
| And a lot of times when you see houses that have collapsed, you can see all of the stuff of people's lives in it. | ||
| Like, you're like, oh, there's the cooking pots and there's the bed and there's all the stuff that's just trapped in. | ||
| And then people, because there's a big housing shortage, obviously, in Gaza, were living in these bombed out buildings, you know, where their home was. | ||
| And, you know, with, like, no real, like, services or anything, like, I saw this, I was walking, I was kind of scrambling through this, like, building to take pictures, and then I just randomly walked into what I thought was an abandoned room, and there's, like, an old guy there, you know, hanging out, and, you know, I was like, I'm really sorry to, you know, invade your home, and... | ||
| I was just talking to him, but yeah, he had had a baller, gorgeous home before this, and now he was just living in the wreck of one of the rooms. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Mad Max is the way you describe that city, and that sort of apocalyptic scenario is something that we all worry could happen to us, to anything. | ||
| But one of the things that I always try to remember is that the apocalypse is already here. | ||
| It's just not here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you go there, it's here. | ||
| Like, in Gaza, it's there. | ||
| That's the apocalypse. | ||
| I mean, it's there. | ||
| I mean, it might as well be in that guy's house. | ||
| I mean, you are living like Mad Max. | ||
| Those people in that, what's the name of the city again? | ||
| Azaz. | ||
| Azaz. | ||
| And Azaz, I mean, that is what everyone's terrified of. | ||
| What everyone's terrified of is a reality where you walk down the street and everyone's carrying military weapons and you're just, it's chaos. | ||
| And it's fairly lawless. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a lot of the refugee camps that I saw, it's not that they were lawless. | ||
| I would never describe them as that. | ||
| But just in the sense of the extreme falling in your life situation, there was a guy I met when I was in Iraqi Kurdistan. | ||
| Last time I was with Dr. Thot Borders there, and he was this super smart dude. | ||
| He was Kurdish, which meant that he was really discriminated against, but he scored so high in his math exams, he was able to go to an elite engineering school and get an aeronautics degree. | ||
| He's an aeronautics engineer. | ||
| This is a dude that would be on the path to having an awesome job, and now he's living in a tent with his whole family and his mom and everything. | ||
| You know, you never expect that when you're living in like an awesome city like Aleppo that he was living in. | ||
| And then the war comes and there's bombings and you're driven out of your home and you're so displaced that eventually you're forced to be living in this tent with no end in sight and you're not allowed to like ever improve your circumstances because you have the wrong passport. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's hard for anybody living in America to wrap their head around what it would be like to be there and be stuck in that position. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, so the Syrian refugee thing, one thing that I... I think perhaps isn't in the media enough is that the people who are coming to Europe right now are the middle class of the country because it costs over a thousand dollars to pay a smuggler to take you over. | ||
| And every single one of those people could Buy a plane ticket and travel like a normal person and not have their kids risk drowning and all of that. | ||
| But they're banned from it because they're Syrians. | ||
| And the whole like taking the boat and walking from Greece to Germany and having volunteers give out water and sleeping on the streets and like the whole humanitarian disaster is just a function of not letting them buy plane tickets. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Well, there's this big push in America now, especially among the Republicans, to not allow anyone from Syria to come into the United States. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Like, not a single person with the Syrian refugee program has ever been arrested for a terrorism offense. | ||
| It's like, it's nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| it's so... | ||
| But they're bound! | ||
| They're so scary! | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're terrorists! | |
| Oh my god, it's... | ||
| I swear. | ||
| There's gotta be, like, one of them that's an asshole. | ||
| I'm sure there's assholes, but not one of them was arrested for a terrorism offense, ever. | ||
| But I guarantee if you let, like, a million Canadians in, you're gonna... | ||
| and they're the nicest people ever. | ||
| There'd be some of those guys that are in that big riot, what was it, in Toronto? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, one of them. | |
| Yeah, one of them would get through. | ||
| One of them would get through. | ||
| Or one of them from the Vancouver hockey riot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of those assholes would make it through. | ||
| No, it's crazy and it's really personally upsetting to me because I've done so much work with Syrians over the last few years and to see these amazing people that I know who are so tough and so smart And have endured so much, like being defamed like this, I feel almost like someone's shit-talking, like my... | ||
| Well, someone is shit-talking, my friends. | ||
| You know, it makes me angry on a personal level, like not just a theoretical one. | ||
| Well, it's not just... | ||
| It's so short-sighted because if you consider the fact that... | ||
| You're talking about an entire group of people that's fleeing a terrible area. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you're saying, well, they've all got to be bad. | ||
| That's one of the most racist things that you could ever say publicly in 2015. Like, it's sort of this weird accepted racism. | ||
| And because of the fact that terrorism, like, when you're dealing with Muslims, right, you're dealing with 1.6, is that what it is? | ||
| Billion people? | ||
| It's like a fifth of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so the idea is saying, well, these terrorist activities, they've been done by Muslims. | ||
| Why don't we kick all the white people out of America because white people have been responsible for all the mass shootings? | ||
| I mean, that's more logical than this. | ||
| It's so awful. | ||
| And the other thing that's, to me, particularly moronic is I see sometimes in the media, like, why aren't the Muslims condemning the terrorists? | ||
| Every single group that is actually on the ground fighting ISIS with guns, you know... | ||
| They're Muslims. | ||
| Yeah, they're like 90% Muslim, or 95% Muslim. | ||
| I mean, a lot of them are war criminals, too. | ||
| I'm not saying they're good groups, necessarily, but they're Muslim. | ||
| Every single major Muslim religious leader in the world has condemned ISIS in terms that... | ||
| They wouldn't even use in America. | ||
| I mean, it's astounding to me. | ||
| I think that the only reason anyone would think that Muslims aren't condemning ISIS is because they can't use Google, don't read the news, and have never spoken to a Muslim. | ||
| Or for the same reason why Matt Taibbi's articles never really got as popular as I thought they should. | ||
| People just don't have the time or the need. | ||
| Everything is wonderful. | ||
| You go to the supermarket. | ||
| You buy food. | ||
| It's really easy. | ||
| You know, you go through the McDonald's drive-through. | ||
| Your stomach's full. | ||
| You sit home. | ||
| You watch Netflix. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| Like, you don't need to pay attention to Syria. | ||
| Fuck those people. | ||
| Keep them out! | ||
| Donald Trump's gonna keep us safe! | ||
| And you just drink yourself into a coma, wake up in the morning, do it all over again. | ||
| Drink some coffee, get out the door, get in your fucking car, do the same shit. | ||
| As long as you can get to work. | ||
| I got bills. | ||
| As long as you can get to work, you're fine. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| The idea of America in the first place was supposed to be a place where people could go, where they didn't like where they were, and they wanted to found... | ||
| They wanted to establish a new life. | ||
| They wanted to... | ||
| We're going to take a giant chance. | ||
| We're going to get in a fucking stupid boat and make it across this giant body of water. | ||
| We don't even know what it looks like. | ||
| They didn't even have photos back then. | ||
| That's one of the weirdest things about traveling to America, if you really stop and think about it. | ||
| It was done when people didn't even have photographs. | ||
| The first people that came over, if you wanted to picture something, you had to fucking draw it. | ||
| And that's how crazy these people were. | ||
| They're like, I don't care. | ||
| I saw a drawing and some pretty trees. | ||
| We're fucking getting in the boat. | ||
| But they brought their babies and their grandma and shit and they got in a boat and they came to America because they had an idea. | ||
| And that idea was there is a better life here. | ||
| We can make it. | ||
| And the two deny that to these people because they were born on the wrong patch of dirt. | ||
| And I'm not saying they shouldn't be checked. | ||
| You shouldn't go through a criminal background check and make sure you're not letting in some mass murderer or not letting in some rapist or some thieves or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if there's a way to do that, that should be done. | ||
| But the idea that you should never let anybody in that's from Syria, it's like, God, man, imagine you're cursed just because you were born on the shitty patch of dirt. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what the thinking is. | ||
| It's like, because you were born here, you carry some virus and you have to be quarantined. | ||
| And man, I'm so fucking grateful that you're saying this to your audience on the massive platform you have. | ||
| I know I sound sappy and shit, but thank you, really. | ||
| Well, listen, thank you for going over there. | ||
| If it wasn't for people like you and the vice people and all these journalists and all these people that go over there and show us in video form exactly what's happening and get to watch it and see what it's like, they go, oh, this is fucking chaos. | ||
| This is in the world right now. | ||
| 2015, while people are watching the Emmys and everybody's on the red carpet smiling, there's parts of the world that are like a Mad Max movie. | ||
| Right now. | ||
| Or like, this refugee camp I went to, or it was a bunch of refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. | ||
| Like, people don't know. | ||
| It gets cold there. | ||
| Like, kids freeze to death, you know, every winter in those camps, because it's like you're Living under vinyl tarp in the mountains. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's very strange that the world is so uneven. | ||
| That there are places like the Congo that exist on the same timeline as Park Avenue. | ||
| There's people that have doormen that dress up like the guys that were holding open the door for Putin. | ||
| You hop into Uber limousines and you travel around the city with the right fragrances in the car. | ||
| We live in really strange times. | ||
| The disparity that existed, that's kind of always existed. | ||
| There's always been disparity. | ||
| There's always been, you know, the haves and the have-nots, and in some places it's on a much more grand scale. | ||
| But it's never been so obvious. | ||
| Especially because so many people are online now. | ||
| I think a lot of people maybe don't realize... | ||
| Especially in the Middle East, how internet-connected people are. | ||
| When I was in Domiz, which is the refugee camp in Iraq that I was at, one of the most popular stores was the store that was selling personal Wi-Fi hotspots. | ||
| And you'd have people that were living in a tent with tarp and nothing, but they'd have a Wi-Fi hotspot. | ||
| And that's because they had a family that was scattered all around the world, and the only way to communicate with them was with WhatsApp. | ||
| With texting services like this or with Skype, and so the most important thing you were going to get was internet access so that you could talk to your brother that was in one country and your daughter that was in another. | ||
| That was more important than anything. | ||
| You said daughter. | ||
| I heard your New York came out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, fuck. | |
| It's coming out, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I tried so hard. | |
| You get excited it came out. | ||
| You sound like my uncle. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I'm from Queens originally. | ||
| Well, you know what's kind of crazy is, I guarantee you, there's a high possibility that someone in one of those camps is listening to you right now. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| On this podcast that have downloaded it from the internet. | ||
| No, it's absolutely true. | ||
| I wonder, I feel like if you're, like if someone who's listening, is listening, you know, from a camp or is listening, you know, in a refugee situation, like I, man, how cool would it be to get someone like that on your show as a guest if there is like a way with Skype or something? | ||
| That'd be amazing. | ||
| I have to clear it with Donald Trump, make sure he thinks it's okay. | ||
| Are Syrian voices allowed into the country or would that cause ISIS? Does ISIS come from Syrian voices? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Most likely it's a disease of the mind. | |
| He wants to stop the internet to the Middle East. | ||
| Have you heard this? | ||
| This is the latest Donald Trump thing? | ||
| I had a signing last night, so I unfortunately missed the intellectual glory that was the Republican debate, so fill me in on this. | ||
| I didn't see it, but he was talking about this, that one of the things that they would do, or he would do, is knock off the internet to certain parts of the Middle East. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because that's how they're plotting against us, Molly Crabapple, while you sit in your wonderful New York apartment writing books about sex. | ||
| The terrorists. | ||
| The terrorists are winning. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, so... | ||
| In ISIS territories that those fuckers are occupying, they got rid of private internet access in people's homes because they're really scared of the internet, too. | ||
| They are super scared because there are all these citizen activists and journalists that are revealing shit about them on the internet. | ||
| Right now, like if you're in Raqqa, the only way to even get online is to be on these internet cafes that are kind of run by dudes with ISIS connections. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| That's because ISIS is also really fucking scared of the internet. | ||
| They really don't like it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, because a lot of Syrians living and Iraqis living in their territories fucking hate them, and they give intel on them to foreign journalists. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So the internet acts as a way that they communicate and establish plans, but it also acts as something that's plotting against them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Same as the internet does it everywhere else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just communication. | ||
| It's just people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you're a group of cunts that the whole world hates and you're online, I guarantee you're going to get some haters. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's a there's one group of journalists there that's became very famous that's called BRCA is being silently slaughtered that I mean, they did tons of work documenting ISIS shit and ISIS, I mean, beheaded two of their members that were in Turkey. | ||
| And there are plenty of other citizen journalists there. | ||
| And yeah, ISIS is dead scared of normal of normal people who are living under their fucking occupation using the internet. | ||
| They hate it. | ||
| You know, another thing they're scared of, they're scared of being killed by women. | ||
| So that's kind of, I think, this is my theory, that the Kurdish, they won't go to heaven if a Kurdish girl kills them thing. | ||
| I think like one person said that and then they saw how much play it got in the media and they were like, oh man, this is good PR. Let's keep, let's keep milking this one. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| Does it make sense ideologically, like within their religion? | ||
| Is that something that they believe in? | ||
| If you get killed by a woman, you don't get all the virgins? | ||
| No, I think that's bullshit. | ||
| I think maybe there's like a macho thing, you know, where they're like, oh, fuck, a girl shot my leg, but it's not a theological thing. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| It seems so good, though. | ||
| I know, really. | ||
| It seems sweet. | ||
| I was just thinking of like some crazy Amazon scenario. | ||
| Just like armies of chicks with guns chasing ISIS and they just run away because they're scared of being killed by chicks. | ||
| I mean, the women who are fighting ISIS in the YPJ are ferocious soldiers, but ISIS is scared of getting killed by soldiers. | ||
| If that was true, though, and we really allocated our resources correctly, I think there's probably enough really mean bitches in the world we could put together a hell of a fucking army. | ||
| I think so, too, with tons of motivation. | ||
| Could you imagine just jets and bombers and missiles all being piloted by women? | ||
| Like, that's it. | ||
| Only women. | ||
| Only women going after ISIS because if they get killed by these women, they're fucked and they don't get to go to heaven. | ||
| I think you'd have to do like a more... | ||
| I think that the bombings aren't doing shit against ISIS. I think what YPG is doing is, you know, I think it'd have to be more on the ground. | ||
| On the ground, yeah. | ||
| Well, especially in Afghanistan, right? | ||
| That's one of the things that people have always had a problem with invading Afghanistan. | ||
| It's essentially a series of mountain ranges occupied by warlords. | ||
| There's not a lot of access. | ||
| It's not so easy to get to. | ||
| Well, the thing with ISIS is what they do is they, I mean, they move in, you know, they occupy cities, like a military occupation. | ||
| They try to, you know, marry people and build families. | ||
| And they try to insert themselves as much as possible into the fabric of a city. | ||
| And that's in part, it's them making it so that if you, you know, bombed Raqqa, you would be murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were just too poor to get out. | ||
| So they do it strategically? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sort of embed themselves as a human shield? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The majority of Raqqa, they're like farmers who couldn't afford to get out because it's expensive to even get out of Syria. | ||
| What a mess. | ||
| What a crazy, chaotic, psychotic mess. | ||
| It's really bizarre that, remember that Obama speech that he had on television, was it a year or so ago, where he was talking about eminent military action against Syria and the whole country went, what? | ||
| Are you fucking crazy? | ||
| And then it just stopped. | ||
| Literally, like, silence. | ||
| Like, you didn't hear anything more about it. | ||
| They just completely backed off just because Republicans and Democrats, everyone was like, are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| Like, look what happened in Iraq. | ||
| Look what happened in Afghanistan. | ||
| Look at the massive negative reaction the American public has had to all these military actions. | ||
| You're gonna start up a new one in Syria? | ||
| For what reason? | ||
| Because somebody got gassed? | ||
| Because they gassed people? | ||
| Like, what's going on that we need to sacrifice American lives over there exactly? | ||
| Like, what's the cause of all this? | ||
| I mean, what's really sort of so tragic about Syria is that Obama, this is me saying an opinion that's not necessarily mine, but it's opinion that I've gotten from speaking to refugees. | ||
| A lot of people, I think, felt very led on by what Obama said, and they felt like, Oh, there's going to be, you know, some support or, I don't know, some action against Assad. | ||
| Because, I mean, what everyone thinks about American intervention or non-intervention, what Assad did is a crime against humanity on a massive scale. | ||
| Whatever you think we should have done, what he did was fucking horrific. | ||
| And anyone who is in Syria and, you know, who was at the receiving end of that would very often want someone else to intervene. | ||
| Why don't you explain to people what he did do? | ||
| He ran, like, an industrial-scale arrest-torture-killing program. | ||
| He does something called barrel bombings, which are taking, like, basically, like, dumpsters full of TNT and shrapnel and dropping them on populated areas. | ||
| He targets schools, targets hospitals, destroyed large swaths of Aleppo. | ||
| And this isn't me saying... | ||
| This isn't me saying that I think the U.S. should have intervened, because I... I still don't know, but I'm very against the U.S. intervening in general and anything, because I think we always fuck it up. | ||
| But he also factually did do those things. | ||
| It's just hard to imagine that someone's capable of doing shit like that. | ||
| It's just where people can get to, where people can get to in their minds that allows them to do shit like that. | ||
| I think what it was was his one of the things that was quite influential was his father put down a sort of incipient insurgency opposition thing in a city called Hama by killing 20,000 people and like bombing the fuck out of the city and it put put it down and I think that perhaps in his mind he thought that he could do the same when there was no uprising against him but obviously that you know wasn't what happened. | ||
| Well, that's the story of Saddam Hussein and his sons as well. | ||
| Imagine being the son of an evil, brutal dictator. | ||
| Yeah, and you're just like, well, those sons always end up like these fucking Nero figures, don't they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I mean, it's like the father is very often like a thuggish military guy. | ||
| And then the son is this princeling who always got whatever he wanted in his life. | ||
| And that's when it gets so, so weird. | ||
| You see it with like Kim Jong-il also. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Uday and Kuse, is that what his name is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those motherfuckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| God, I read some horrible stories about what they would do. | ||
| They would find women that were getting married and they would take them from their husband, rape them, and then feed them to dogs. | ||
| They had dogs that they had in their basement that they just didn't feed and they would throw people that they didn't like to their dogs and the dogs would tear them apart. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| And they would watch, of course. | ||
| But the fact that a person can get to that place, that a person can get to that place where they... | ||
| In the weirdest way, we're flexible in a beautiful way. | ||
| You know, you can see someone who can create beautiful songs and... | ||
| Art and they can touch people with their words and their thoughts and their deeds and you know they can they can be something inspirational and amazing but we're also flexible in this horrific way where they could play upon the worst fears and the worst the worst emotions that people are capable of Of manifesting and they could just attack and torture and maim and brutalize and murder and they could do it wantonly and do it for no real | ||
| reason. | ||
| They could do it sadistically for fun, for recreation. | ||
| The fact that that's the same beast. | ||
| It's just they're human beings and it's like... | ||
| I mean there could obviously be some anomalies in the brain itself but essentially a good portion of what makes a person who they are is Their environment and their life experiences and the nurturing and like how they're raised and what they're exposed to and we get we're so flexible and pliable because we want to survive that We're capable, | ||
| the same species during the same time period, we're not talking about like cave people that cannibalized because they didn't have books, they didn't understand it was bad, and they hadn't invented language yet. | ||
| No, we're talking about people with the internet. | ||
| They're capable of doing these horrific things, but at the same time, there's someone like, you know, I mean, you fill in the blank, there's a lot of beautiful people out there that do things, but my friend Justin Wren, who's from these photos over here, who goes to the Congo, and he lives with the pygmies for six months a year, and he He builds wells for them and he gets malaria and almost dies. | ||
| He's an American from Texas. | ||
| He just went over there and saw how incredible these people were and he dedicates his life to it. | ||
| To me, he's one of my favorite people because he's this beautiful manifestation of experiencing friendship and love from these people and just becoming incredibly dedicated to try to take care of them. | ||
| But these people exist at the same time. | ||
| It's so hard to understand. | ||
| Like a parrot is a fucking parrot. | ||
| You know, some parrots you can tame and they'll eat peanuts out of your hand. | ||
| And other ones, they live in the trees. | ||
| But they're fucking parrots. | ||
| And we're like everything all at once. | ||
| We're so weird. | ||
| We're so weird. | ||
| I mean, I'm a fan of people. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| You're pro people? | ||
| I'm a huge fan of people. | ||
| I love people. | ||
| I think we're amazing. | ||
| But we're also horrible. | ||
| What we're capable of is so strange. | ||
| You know, like, you or I are not capable of those things. | ||
| So for us to see that, like, what we consider a horrible person in America is like someone who says something horrible on, you know, on Twitter about race or something like that. | ||
| Or someone who's, you know, disparaging about President Obama or, you know, it's like so minor in a lot of ways. | ||
| What we shame people for here, you know? | ||
| You didn't use the correct gender pronoun, you piece of shit. | ||
| Terrible, terrible things that are going on at the same time in other parts of the world. | ||
| I mean, I don't believe in a race to the bottom. | ||
| It shouldn't be like, well, you haven't thrown someone to the dog, so you're cool. | ||
| No, it's definitely not that. | ||
| No, but I definitely hear where you're coming from. | ||
| That is funny, right? | ||
| You can always look at Saddam Hussein's kids and be like, I'm fine. | ||
| Be like, all I did was punch a baby. | ||
| I didn't have dogs eat it. | ||
| Why do you gotta shame me for my baby punching? | ||
| Shaming. | ||
| Shaming is a new thing, right? | ||
| When did shaming come around? | ||
| I mean, I feel like- Public shaming is sort of an old American tradition. | ||
| We have a book called The Scarlet Letter about public shaming. | ||
| Yeah, but not as a phrase, you know? | ||
| Like fat shaming, you know? | ||
| You mean when it became... | ||
| Yeah, slut shaming. | ||
| Like, these terms are very new. | ||
| These are, like, these new concepts. | ||
| I mean, I think that they're new coinages to describe, you know, old behavior. | ||
| And the truth is, I do think people should be criticized for, like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel like if you're going on Twitter and you're writing, you're a dumb whore, to random women, that is jerk-ass behavior. | ||
| And people should tell you that you're being a fucking jerk for it. | ||
| Unless she's really into it. | ||
| That's her thing. | ||
| If she's previously expressed a desire for that. | ||
| Yeah, they have an established relationship. | ||
| You're a dumb whore. | ||
| Oh, you fucker. | ||
| Get over here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Previous consent. | ||
| But to random women who don't have that in their Twitter bio, that that's what they're into... | ||
| I think like you were being a jerkass and if someone is like fuck you stop calling random women whores on Twitter Oh, yeah, you know, I think that I think that's fine I think that what we're talking about before about having no That one day we're gonna come a time where there's no boundaries between people. | ||
| I'm really absolutely convinced this like I've I've had these weird Trips in the sensory deprivation tank where I've sort of seen this take place the slow acceptance of what is the ultimate inevitable reality and And it kind of freaks me out sometimes I have to get out of the tank because I just can't handle it because I really think I think like life as a person We have this idea that we're gonna put our shell on and we're good. | ||
| I got my shell on. | ||
| Yeah, this is gonna be no shells It's we're gonna just have to somehow or another like you know how you have friends like I have friends that I'm almost too close to them I know everything they do, you know, like what'd you do? | ||
| Ah, you fucker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| How'd you do that? | ||
| Oh my god, what are you doing? | ||
| I just fucking lost my mind. | ||
| But you know everything. | ||
| We're gonna know that about everybody. | ||
| It's just a matter of time. | ||
| But the thing is, I don't think it's going to make us nicer to each other or make us like each other better. | ||
| I think that one of the things that Twitter has done – I love Twitter. | ||
| I'm addicted to Twitter. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I think it's really cool. | ||
| But in addition to having us speak to all sorts of amazing people that we never would have spoken to before, it also really revealed what other people were thinking and made us really dislike them for it. | ||
| In a lot of ways, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's also the anonymity, the ability to reach out to Molly and just say some mean shit anonymously. | ||
| You know, you're just this little egg. | ||
| I'm a little egg. | ||
| You know, that's all your icon is. | ||
| And, you know, you have a series of letters that represent your egg. | ||
| And then you're like, fuck you, Molly Crabapple. | ||
| You fucking bitch. | ||
| I read your bullshit. | ||
| I don't even believe that's how it went down. | ||
| I think you're a fucking attention whore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then you read that, you're like, ow! | ||
| You know, you fucking anonymous person searing my soul with your hate. | ||
| I mean, I don't, like, I get a lot of, like, as I'm sure you do. | ||
| I think, okay, so this is the thing. | ||
| Sometimes the thing that helps me put it in perspective is I got 70,000 Twitter followers. | ||
| And I think if I ever had any other grouping, like any real-life grouping of 70,000 people, like, what would be the jackass ratio that I would expect in that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's always 1 in 100. That's my thought. | ||
| My thought is it's the real 1% that we should be concerned with. | ||
| The jackass 1%? | ||
| Yeah, the mean people. | ||
| Because I think they're so common. | ||
| The idea of the 1% being the real problem in America, being successful people. | ||
| I think if you got the 1% of all the successful people together, only 1% of them would be evil cunts. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| I think you keep going with the 1%. | ||
| Out of those people that are evil, how many of them are true sociopaths? | ||
| Probably 1% of them, too. | ||
| It keeps going. | ||
| But if you have 300 million people, you're dealing with 3 million assholes. | ||
| Like if there's a hundred people, one of them is going to suck. | ||
| And if you have 300 million, you have 3 million people that suck. | ||
| And if they all get a hold of your Twitter account, you're going to think the world has ended. | ||
| You're going to think, my God, and you won't see the other 99. You won't see them because the hateful words of the one will just be overwhelming. | ||
| And every now and then, Molly, your book's amazing. | ||
| You're like, retweet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a lie. | |
| It's a lie. | ||
| Oh, I just cling to this! | ||
| Yeah, you'll try to find it. | ||
| I mean, I've watched people in scans. | ||
| Like, we were talking about Lance Armstrong. | ||
| And I looked at the mentions that Lance Armstrong gets on Twitter. | ||
| Like, anything he writes. | ||
| Like, anything he writes. | ||
| Like, had a great time, you know, doing this race. | ||
| Was it as good a times when you're running away from drug tests? | ||
| Oh, for fuck's sake. | ||
| Like, they can't help it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, people just love to dig. | |
| They just love to fucking reach out of that ribcage and pull out your heart. | ||
| They can't help it. | ||
| They know they can. | ||
| And it's also a new ability that human beings have sort of cultivated over the last couple decades. | ||
| It really didn't exist before. | ||
| Well, before, you would have had to have written a letter, left your mom's basement, walked all the way down to the block with all these other humans. | ||
| It's always your mom's basement. | ||
| Why don't I say your dad's basement, your girlfriend's basement? | ||
| There's so many other basements these people could be in. | ||
| Why do I have to put them all in their mom's basement? | ||
| Because it's somehow or another for a man the most pathetic thing. | ||
| Like, Mom! | ||
| I'm down here, Mom! | ||
| Stop yelling! | ||
| I'm down here telling people they're wrong on the internet! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're typing up a fucking storm and trying to hurt Lance Armstrong's feelings. | |
| You're cycling and fucking lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a good personification of that. | |
| It's like this feeling of just wanting to just somehow or another get a reaction. | ||
| And it's all losers. | ||
| That's unfortunate. | ||
| I mean, I hate to say that to those people right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're like, no, no, I'm a winner and I think what he did was dishonorable. | |
| Okay, well then you might think it, but if you actually are sitting around trying to attack him, I guarantee you that is energy and focus that you could have best spent on your own life. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Or like maybe if you're just like a mean critical person who is a winner, you could have written a really great essay about like juicing in the sport that like really took him down. | ||
| And then you could have challenged your like meanness in a positive and winning direction. | ||
| But if you really looked at the essay, honestly, you'd have to take down the whole sport itself. | ||
| I mean, you really wouldn't. | ||
| If you want to take down Lance Armstrong, you'd have to take him down by his individual actions in defending his actions in the sport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He admits that. | ||
| He's pretty open about the fact that he fucked up and that he made some pretty horrible choices. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| The sport itself, like if you really wanted to write an essay, you'd write, what the fuck, a bunch of steroid using bike riders. | ||
| That's what you got. | ||
| Yeah, and you'd write, like, probably about the economic impetus and all the ways that, like, top people were able to kind of condone it, but then get out with their hands clean. | ||
| And you'd write something, like, that really channeled your meanness into a positive direction that really tore shit down. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird thing about blogs, too, though. | ||
| I've read some really mean blogs that people write about folks, and I'm like, what's interesting about this is, like, Blogs are not a conversation. | ||
| It's like you're you have this attack this focused attack of of an individual But if that individual was there and they could respond to this and you could have a communicate It would be a different thing like what it is is like It's like a message tied to the claw of a raven that you're sending out like it's so it's such a one-way thing and It's not really an effective way to communicate because you're not really trying to communicate. | ||
| What you're trying to do is hurt somebody. | ||
| Like when you see attack blogs... | ||
| Oh, they're the worst, yeah. | ||
| There's some that deserve it. | ||
| Like if you could write an expose on someone who runs some horrible business that is using slave labor or fill in the blank on some terrible scenario that you could expose... | ||
| I mean, the world should see it. | ||
| Like, okay, here, Matt Taivi's expose on the financial collapse. | ||
| Brilliant, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brilliant. | |
| Perfect. | ||
| And, you know, those are real legitimate and important. | ||
| But I've read some things that people have written that are just about, like, random celebrities or, you know, like... | ||
| You're just like, why are you that invested in Tyler Swift? | ||
| Like, how do you have so much opinion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's Taylor. | |
| I'm a fucking dork. | ||
| I don't know anything. | ||
| Well, I'm a fucking dork, too. | ||
| Haters gonna hate, hate, hate. | ||
| That fucking song, I like that song, goddamn, because I have daughters and I have a wife. | ||
| That goddamn song is playing all the time. | ||
| They play it in the car when I'm with them. | ||
| I'm like, okay, you can play that one. | ||
| I like that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| That's awesome. | ||
| I'm embarrassed that I like it. | ||
| No, no, it just it shows like diverse musical tastes. | ||
| That's all I definitely have that sometimes too diverse, you know, but I don't know how we got into that But it's like yeah, like mean takedowns of like some singer like come on really this terrible person really affecting your life in some strange way but like The comments that people will make to people, | ||
| I believe, on Twitter and Facebook, well, Facebook is slightly less anonymous, but all these anonymous methods of communicating, they're going to dissolve slowly but surely the boundaries between people. | ||
| It's not just going to be the NSA that can find out exactly what you're doing and who's saying what to who. | ||
| It's going to be the whole fucking world. | ||
| Everyone's going to be able to do that. | ||
| It's going to be very, very weird. | ||
| Very weird. | ||
| The other thing is people will find out the people who are doing that. | ||
| I remember there was this asshole who made a bunch of Twitter accounts to write that women who worked in tech, but then just random women he didn't like were cunts. | ||
| And he really fixated on this one woman who is a programmer at Tor, which is an anonymous web browser. | ||
| And he made seven Twitter accounts at one point to tell her she was a cunt. | ||
| And so, finally, she was like, this has gone on long enough. | ||
| And when he was visiting her website, presumably to find more proof that she was a cunt, she got his IP address, tracked down where he worked, and posted his name in his workplace. | ||
| And with the line that was like, it's classic, she wrote, should have used tour, fucko. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, you know... | |
| If you went up to a bunch of women or if you went up to a bunch of women at bars and just screamed like cunt in their face, like eventually either them or their boyfriend or someone around was going to hit you. | ||
| But because you were doing this online, you thought like, wow, I can just go up to people and scream cunt and nothing's ever going to happen. | ||
| And, you know, it did. | ||
| And there's no one who's going to be sympathetic to anyone who's going to get seven Twitter accounts just to call some woman a cunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no one feels bad that he got doxed. | ||
| Well, the poor guy got doxed. | ||
| Well, he was just expressing himself and exercising his First Amendment rights. | ||
| No, I really think we're maybe a few years away from that just not being around anymore, from it being some strange new world where we're all going to know exactly... | ||
| I really believe that we're maybe 10 years away from being able to read each other's thoughts. | ||
| Oh God, can you imagine? | ||
| Yeah, it's going to be very strange. | ||
| But all the romance and things is going to be gone. | ||
| Because so much of really exciting things in life is anticipating and not knowing. | ||
| And then, you know, it's almost like the unwrapping of Christmas presents. | ||
| Like when someone texts you, hey, what are you doing? | ||
| And you're like, Yes, it's her! | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| There's that moment where you didn't know if someone likes you or not, what's going on, and then you're going back and forth with each other, sending each other emails, or you get that phone call out of the blue from someone you didn't know they really were into you, and you're like, yeah! | ||
| But when you know everyone's thoughts, it's going to be like, oh, you're into me, you fucker. | ||
| Why are you playing? | ||
| There's going to be no playing cool. | ||
| There's going to be no... | ||
| When you go to apply for a job, you're like, well, you fucking don't like me, so I'll just get out of here. | ||
| You think I'm a loser, so you're not going to hire me. | ||
| There's not going to be any illusions. | ||
| So a lot of romance is going to be gone. | ||
| A lot of the fun of things is not knowing. | ||
| We don't like that, though. | ||
| No, I'm an artist. | ||
| I like the not knowing. | ||
| I like the mystery sometimes. | ||
| It's fun as long as it works out. | ||
| Obviously, it's worked out for you. | ||
| You're a young woman. | ||
| You already have a book published. | ||
| You have many, many, many, many art pieces published. | ||
| You have journalism things that you've done. | ||
| It's worked out for you, all this romance. | ||
| But for some people, this is not happening for them. | ||
| And they're like, God damn it. | ||
| I just think it would be better if there was no secrets. | ||
| If you're that person and it wasn't working out for you, probably if there were no secrets you would just have the crushing disappointment of realizing either no one was thinking of you or they were thinking bad things about you and it would just make you more unhappy. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But... | ||
| Is what we are as human beings currently, is that a static state? | ||
| And is this a state that we can expect to exist in sort of this form, speaking with our mouths, making noises with our faces, interpreting it in our own minds and listening to other people say things and sort of establishing what they're meaning? interpreting it in our own minds and listening to other Is that it? | ||
| Is this going to be forever? | ||
| Is this going to be how human? | ||
| No, no fucking way. | ||
| Just like a monkey climbed off of a tree and, you know, and eventually became a person, 200 people. | ||
| Plus thousand years later or whatever the fuck it was, whatever has led us to improve to become what we are today is a continuous cycle. | ||
| It's not going to stop. | ||
| I think that this idea that what we've got right now, like, oh, the romance of not knowing and, you know, it's amazing and it all works out. | ||
| Well, it's fucking temporary. | ||
| This is a little... | ||
| When we look back in time, too, the amount of time that we've spent in this state currently, the internet state, has been so brief but so transcendent Absolutely. | ||
| The most transcendent thing, I mean, I think as much or more than the printing press. | ||
| Probably more, my god. | ||
| One of the really good articles I was reading about the refugee stuff is by this Iraqi journalist that I always plug because he's so brilliant, Raith Abdul Ahad. | ||
| And he did this piece about people making the trip. | ||
| And one of the things he talked about is that this was a trip that when he was a young man in Iraq, he had tried to pay a smuggler to do and the smuggler defrauded him and he didn't get to do it. | ||
| But it was all under the control of smugglers. | ||
| Whereas now, if you have a cell phone, once you get from Turkey to Greece, once you do that little four-hour boat ride, you just put on the GPS maps on your cell phone and you walk. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You don't need smugglers after that. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It completely upended this entire really disgusting, nasty business. | ||
| Well, similar in a lot of ways to the business of sneaking people over from Mexico. | ||
| You know, I have a friend who he's been living in America for more than 20 years because I've known him for I've known him for 18 years. | ||
| So he's I think he's been living in America for like 27, 28 years. | ||
| And that's how he came over. | ||
| He came over in a fucking van in the middle of the night and they got out and there was a guy behind them that had a stick like they would take like a giant like branch from a tree with all the leaves. | ||
| And as they walked, one guy behind them would wave the branch back and forth to cover up their footsteps. | ||
| Yeah, and they did it through the middle of the night, and they eventually got to some sort of border town, whether it was in Arizona or whatever, and they made their way and infiltrated into cities and eventually found jobs and barely survived, barely fed themselves. | ||
| And fuck, man, you just imagine that life. | ||
| And then there's all these people, we've got to tighten up our borders! | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| Like, tighten up the border shit. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Trump's, like, idiot idea of that wall that's not even, like, physically possible to build because he would have to go through all these, like, rivers and take over people's land. | ||
| How do we get presidential candidates who, not that they're stupid, not that they're crazy, but who, like, fundamentally deny physical reality? | ||
| Like, this is where we are right now. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he necessarily is a presidential candidate. | ||
| I don't buy it. | ||
| You think it's to make the other ones look moderate and reasonable? | ||
| No, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy. | ||
| I think it's him riding this crazy wave of attention and trying to think in his own mind that it's justified because he's shining light on these important issues in a way that only he can because he's independently wealthy and he's not bound to You know, the wishes of his constituents. | ||
| He can just kind of go out there and say, I want to put a giant wall up and call it the Trump wall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we're going to keep out the Mexicans! | |
| Yeah! | ||
| And meanwhile, everybody wants to fucking kill him and his face is falling off his bones. | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| It's so Coen Brothers-esque that he really does seem like satire. | ||
| I mean, he's like the ultimate American satire president candidate. | ||
| Did you ever interview him like back before this? | ||
| No, I've never met him. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I once confronted him at a press conference in Dubai. | ||
| It's like one of my finest moments. | ||
| No, I was really scared because Dubai is a police state. | ||
| There's no free speech there. | ||
| They'll lock you up. | ||
| They're rich enough. | ||
| They don't really care about your American passport that much. | ||
| And so I was at this press conference where he had these golf courses that he was licensing his name to. | ||
| And I had some intel that the guys that were building the golf courses were getting 200 bucks a month to do construction work. | ||
| And like the Emirates, the average salary of an Emirati is, I think it's like 60,000 a year, I think. | ||
| And so he gets 200 a month, you know, to do like hard ass construction work. | ||
| And so I get up during the press conference where he's getting his ass kissed and I wave my hand around and I say, Mr. Trump, you've been saying how You know, this all stands for luxury and your construction guys are getting $200 a month. | ||
| Are you satisfied with that? | ||
| And his mouth fucking shriveled. | ||
| I've never seen it shriveled with this little tiny rosebud of hate. | ||
| And I got so yelled at. | ||
| He yelled at you? | ||
| He didn't yell at me. | ||
| The underling yelled at me. | ||
| Who's the underling? | ||
| From the Emirati PR firm that was there. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| That's not an appropriate question! | ||
| How is that not appropriate? | ||
| I know. | ||
| And then the next question was, Mr. Trump, you stand for luxury and Dubai stands for luxury. | ||
| Is that why you and Dubai like each other? | ||
| Tough, tough stuff. | ||
| So did he answer you? | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| He didn't answer me. | ||
| He just, like, mouth shriveled. | ||
| And, like, Ivanka's mouth went all small. | ||
| Like, everyone's mouth went really small with anger. | ||
| Ooh, Ivanka, so this is a long time ago, right? | ||
| Ooh, is that the drawing you made? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that's the drawing I made. | ||
| He was so angry at me, because I took, like, a little start-up to just picture of him. | ||
| But, yeah, he was, like, there talking about how New York should be more like Dubai, because in Dubai everything was perfect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, yeah, he, like, the ass-kissing. | ||
| He said that he built the greatest architectural buildings in New York. | ||
| I beg to differ. | ||
| Wow, he really said that? | ||
| You know, my friend Joey Diaz grew up in New York and he said one of the things that people forget about Donald Trump is all the disputes that he had with small local construction companies that they used for projects. | ||
| And now these people wound up going out of business and they couldn't battle him financially. | ||
| There's like this wave of people that hate him in that whole construction business. | ||
| I don't know who's right and who's wrong about those disputes, but The idea that you could take that model, which is already problematic in America, and then take it and wrap it up in a giant way in Dubai. | ||
| That fucking piece that Vice did on those people that are in Dubai that are trapped, where they take their passports. | ||
| I think I did a big piece on that. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there was a... | ||
| How long ago was... | ||
| Last summer? | ||
| No, this was a few years ago, like maybe six or seven years ago. | ||
| Oh man, nice. | ||
| There was a camp that they went to and these men were just openly weeping. | ||
| They were showing this like hole in the ground where they have to shit. | ||
| And they were showing how poor the water is. | ||
| And they had promised them a substantial amount of money per month. | ||
| And they were coming over from India and the Philippines, a lot of third world countries. | ||
| And once they got there, they would take their passports away and then reduce their salary dramatically, you know, and they couldn't leave and they were forcing them to build these structures. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's totally like that. | ||
| And then the other really fucked up thing is that these guys, they're not passive. | ||
| They try to strike and stuff, especially very often, not only do they reduce their salaries, they just don't pay them. | ||
| And can you imagine you have a wife and kids at home who are depending on you to go to another country and make money for the family, and then you just don't get paid for three months? | ||
| It's like breaking a whole family. | ||
| And so these guys will do strikes, they'll do sit-downs in front of the buses, and then they haul them off to jail and deport them when they do that. | ||
| It's so scary. | ||
| It's, again, what we're talking about, the spectrum of human behavior. | ||
| I mean, it's like a few steps away from being a serial killer, but it's just this sort of pathological detachment from compassion, you know, that you don't care about these people that are... | ||
| Risking their lives to make these giant buildings that these royal people are going to walk on roses that they throw at their feet and step into these things and go skiing in the middle of summer in these gigantic buildings they make. | ||
| They make these crazy fucking structures over there because they almost have an unlimited budget. | ||
| It's almost like they have an idea in their head. | ||
| You know, I would like to fly indoors. | ||
| And they're like, okay, we're going to build you a mile-high fucking gigantic building where you could fly inside. | ||
| And then you have planes that you could fly indoors. | ||
| I shouldn't even have said that because someone in Dubai is probably listening and ding! | ||
| A light bulb went off in their head. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| An indoor flight course! | ||
| And what's so strange is I was prepared to hate how Dubai looked. | ||
| I hate how Dubai is. | ||
| But I was prepared to aesthetically hate it as well as ethically hate it. | ||
| But what's weird is when you go there, it's beautiful. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like, I remember, I was looking at that building, like the Shard, you know, the world's tallest building, Alberge. | ||
| Did you go in it? | ||
| I went onto the ground floor and I bought a $20 cup of coffee. | ||
| $20? | ||
| Yeah, it was $20. | ||
| Oh my god, how does it taste? | ||
| Like a fucking cup of iced coffee. | ||
| That was just sort of a Veblen object. | ||
| But so I was like going into... | ||
| I was going into it prepared to really aesthetically judge it too. | ||
| And the thing is, it's so beautiful. | ||
| And then I was remembering, I was like, Versailles is also beautiful. | ||
| And look at how that was made. | ||
| And it was this weird thing, because you think about how splendor is always made and how the most beautiful things in the world always are constructed. | ||
| And you definitely go there and you're like, this is the city of the future. | ||
| And this is the new aristocrats. | ||
| And this is beautiful. | ||
| And it's all being built by slaves who are dying to build it. | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's the future, but it's definitely the future of that area. | ||
| But they just have this strange world where it was incredibly poor up until just a few decades ago. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, they start pumping oil out of that place, and the money is astronomical. | ||
| And the change in the amount of money that area has, and the few that have it, the disparity of wealth is just unimaginable. | ||
| One of the kind of interesting things that they did in Abu Dhabi, which actually I kind of admire it, is that in a lot of countries when they get oil money, like someone steals it, you know, up top. | ||
| But in Abu Dhabi, what they did was they gave citizens a lot of entitlements to stuff like you get free education if you're an Emirati, you get free health care. | ||
| Housing, get a stipend. | ||
| Emirati women are like super, super educated. | ||
| Most of the PhDs are Emirati women. | ||
| So like, that's awesome. | ||
| But the thing is, the flip side of that is like, citizens are only 10% of the population. | ||
| And it's like 90% of the people, the people who do everything, like the engineers, the shop workers, the maids, the, you know, construction dudes, like the people who do every manner of work are not citizens and have no rights to anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's a trip. | ||
| We're, you know, we're looking on the outside at that place. | ||
| I mean, I've talked to people that I've been to Dubai and I've been to Abu Dhabi. | ||
| I was there for a UFC event and, you know, without getting into anything political, it's beautiful. | ||
| You know, you're like, wow, these people have done a great job in constructing these things. | ||
| But the guy... | ||
| The guys that I was with, some of them went to Dubai because we had the night off and I was tired. | ||
| I decided to stay home. | ||
| They went to Dubai. | ||
| They were like, ah, we're going to go to a bar and have just some places you can go to drink. | ||
| You have to drink in certain places because it's illegal to have alcohol, but there's some sort of weird loophole. | ||
| And they said it was all Russian prostitutes. | ||
| They said it's just like these predatory coyote women that had like crossed over and just like looking to just pocket cash from banging all these rich dudes. | ||
| I was like, whoa. | ||
| My friend went to a bar and he said, I'm not bullshitting. | ||
| This bar might have been 80% hookers. | ||
| And I go, that might, he goes, I've never seen anything like it in my life. | ||
| Yeah, women go over there to make some serious money. | ||
| I bet you can. | ||
| I bet you can fucking clean it up. | ||
| But it's probably really dangerous too, right? | ||
| You know, I never really did research on sex work in Dubai or in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| I know mostly about construction work and something about the maids and not so much. | ||
| But I think for anyone who's not a citizen, it's dangerous because you don't have any real rights if you're not a citizen. | ||
| Yeah, I remember. | ||
| I think it was a British couple that were making out on the beach and they were arrested. | ||
| They were just kissing. | ||
| But they were openly showing affection on the beach and they were thrown in jail. | ||
| I'm like, well, how about this? | ||
| This is another one. | ||
| This is the craziest one. | ||
| There was a British man who he had... | ||
| Eating a poppy seed bagel and poppy seeds will you will test positive for heroin if you eat like it's trace amounts but obviously it's not enough to be psychoactive but it's enough to show up in a really comprehensive blood examination so they tested this guy and He tested positive for heroin and they put him in a fucking cell He had a poppy seed bagel at Heathrow Airport, and that bagel got him locked up in a jail cell. | ||
| Like, whoa! | ||
| There's another woman who is an executive at Brillstein Gray, which is a very prominent Los Angeles entertainment group. | ||
| And she had... | ||
| What is that shit that people take? | ||
| It's a natural thing. | ||
| Oh, you take it when you want to go to bed. | ||
| Valerian? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It wasn't that. | ||
| It was melatonin. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| She had melatonin. | ||
| Fucking melatonin? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| You can't have melatonin. | ||
| They arrested her, locked her up, took her passport, put her in a jail cell for fucking melatonin. | ||
| And then, you know, somehow or another, somehow got word of it and they got her out eventually. | ||
| But what a terrifying moment it must have been for her. | ||
| There was another guy who had a marijuana seed... | ||
| Or a stem or a piece of marijuana that was wedged in between the tread of his shoes. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| And that was enough to put him in jail. | ||
| And he was gonna be sentenced for some fucking astronomical amount of time. | ||
| And I don't know what happened to that poor guy, but unfortunately for him, he was a black guy with dreadlocks from England. | ||
| And they were like, uh-uh, dude. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Cage. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Yeah, it's a really, really, really racist country there. | ||
| Here we go right here. | ||
| Some of the horror stories have been reported by the BBC. Four-year jail term for possession of 0.003 grams of cannabis stuck to the bottom of his shoe. | ||
| That's the guy. | ||
| That's Keith Brown. | ||
| Robert Dalton on trial for alleged possession of 0.3 grams of cannabis. | ||
| 0.03. | ||
| Unnamed 20-year-old on trial for alleged... | ||
| This is all cannabis, mostly. | ||
| I had this one dude I met there. | ||
| He's Emirati. | ||
| And he was really interesting. | ||
| His name is Ahmed Mansour. | ||
| And he... | ||
| I mean, like, he's so brave, right? | ||
| Because you have so many privileges. | ||
| Like, as an Emirati, especially he came from, like, a good family and everything. | ||
| You know, you can really just coast if you're Emirati and you're, you know, from a well-off family. | ||
| And he made a web forum that let people discuss, basically discuss the royal family, frankly. | ||
| And it also, it let people discuss religion, kind of frankly. | ||
| And if you were an atheist, you could talk about it on the web forum. | ||
| And they fucking, they locked him up for, was he in jail for... | ||
| I have to check this, but I want to say it was around nine months, and they infected him with scabies when he was in jail. | ||
| And then when they let him out- They infected him purposely? | ||
| Yeah, that's what he said. | ||
| He said that they gave him a blanket that had scabies on it. | ||
| And then when he was out, he had this series of unfortunate events that happened. | ||
| Over $100,000 accidentally disappeared from his bank account, and no one knows how it got missing. | ||
| And then, like, on two occasions, guys just sort of jumped out and beat the shit out of him, and no one knows who they were, you know? | ||
| It's a mystery. | ||
| And his car just gets stolen all the time, and the tires keep getting air taken out of it, and, you know, magical mystery. | ||
| No one knows who's behind that. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah, could you imagine if you, like, pissed off some royal family and they just hired some dude and they pay him and your job is to fuck with this guy forever. | ||
| Like, that's it. | ||
| That's your job. | ||
| Or, you know, if you're, like, some sort of a rich billionaire character, you could hire a bunch of people. | ||
| You can have a whole team, you know, and their job is just to fuck with people. | ||
| There's this one guy, I don't like him, let's go get him. | ||
| That wouldn't be hard. | ||
| Like, if you're like some Trump guy, and you've got billions of dollars, and someone like Molly Crabapple makes you feel like shit at some Dubai press event, and you're like, fuck this bitch, this is what we're gonna do, I'm gonna hire a team, and I'm gonna fuck with Molly Crabapple's life. | ||
| I mean, that's a reality. | ||
| Like, someone who's that wealthy, they could do something like that. | ||
| That's scary shit. | ||
| Yeah, they definitely, definitely, definitely could. | ||
| Yeah, they could hire somebody just every time you go out to your car, your tires are flat. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Fuckers! | ||
| At a certain point, though, you'd probably put up, like, a little cam on your car, and, you know... | ||
| Yeah, or you'd hire some people, too. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, and it'd be like, war of the proxies. | ||
| War of the proxies, that's it, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Have you gone to any places that were positive in your journalism escapades? | ||
| I love Istanbul. | ||
| Istanbul is one of my favorite cities ever. | ||
| It's just so gorgeous and it's so exciting. | ||
| You walk down Istiklal Jadasi, which is Sort of the main street in a neighborhood called Bayolu. | ||
| And it's like there's like lights and all these couples hand in hand. | ||
| Everyone's playing music. | ||
| There's like kids selling flower crowns. | ||
| It's just like it feels like the sort of boulevard that every other boulevard in the world was trying to be. | ||
| It's so magic. | ||
| And I mean, I could I could just walk around Istanbul like any time of day or night and I would never not like have my heart beat fast for that city. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that's your favorite spot? | ||
| That's my favorite spot. | ||
| Do you think you could ever be an expat? | ||
| Move to Istanbul and... | ||
| They're arresting a lot. | ||
| They have a bad record, unfortunately, for arresting journalists there. | ||
| One of my colleagues at Vice, this brilliant Kurdish dude, Mohamed Rasul, he is currently in jail right now for doing journalism in Turkey. | ||
| And Vice is trying really hard to get him out, but he is rotting in a jail cell. | ||
| And they claim that he is ISIS because he used encryption. | ||
| He's a Kurdish dude. | ||
| He's a Kurdish dude that covers all of the anti-ISIS stuff. | ||
| He's not ISIS. This is so embarrassing and inane. | ||
| And yeah, he's rotting in a jail cell there. | ||
| How long has he been there? | ||
| Oh God, it's over... | ||
| I think it's going to be going on three months now. | ||
| And I don't think they've even really charged him yet. | ||
| They've just leaked statements to the press. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| But that aside, I, you know, the political repression aside, I really do find Istanbul to be a marvelous city. | ||
| No place is perfect. | ||
| They charge it. | ||
| So what is his actual, what is their grievance with him? | ||
| What is the actual issue? | ||
| He was going with these two British vice journalists and they were covering clashes between the Turkish government and Kurds in the south and they picked them up doing that. | ||
| So they just decided they didn't like him, like what he's doing, causing trouble? | ||
| Well, they've been actually like deporting and fucking with a lot of journalists who have been doing this. | ||
| But I think it's like the two British guys got out because, you know, they're British. | ||
| Whereas if you're an Iraqi Kurd, like, who's going to be the person putting pressure on Turkey for you? | ||
| Well, I'm sure you're aware of that Saudi Arabian blogger that's been beaten repeatedly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a fucking horrible story, too. | ||
| That's one of the weirdest aspects of the United States relationship with Saudi Arabia. | ||
| It's like, we'll talk about all the atrocities that are committed by all these different countries, but Saudi Arabia's like... | ||
| Yeah, they're moderate. | ||
| And meanwhile, they sentenced a poet to death for poetry in Saudi recently. | ||
| How bad was the poetry, though? | ||
| Was it like, jam, slam, comedy, you know those things? | ||
| Why are you poetry shaming? | ||
| Why do you have to free verse shame right now? | ||
| Free verse? | ||
| Yeah, free verse. | ||
| Is that what they call it? | ||
| No, isn't free verse when you make poetry that doesn't rhyme or have any meter or anything? | ||
| I thought that's a haiku. | ||
| No, haiku is a short one, right? | ||
| I'm not much into poetry, but I remember I went to a poetry slam in Venice once, which is the perfect place to go because people take themselves so fucking seriously. | ||
| And I was with a buddy of mine and we were high as you should ever be while you're in public walking around talking to people, like barely aware of reality. | ||
| And we walked by this place and it was a poetry slam and I'm like, we have to go inside, we have to go inside. | ||
| And we went inside and we were both like biting our hands trying not to laugh because it was just so preposterous. | ||
| You know, that really just pretentious, save the world type poetry. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. | ||
| Done by 20 year old white guys with dreadlocks. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| I mean, I think as a visual artist, I have a similar thing when I see really, really bad artwork and I'm just like, not only are you shaming yourself, you're shaming my whole profession here. | ||
| Yeah, but you know what? | ||
| I also, as I've gotten older and I've sort of... | ||
| Understand the nuance of life like what this guy's doing his stupid shame sham slam whatever poetry What he really is doing is just trying to express himself and he's developing as a person and right now It's kind of ridiculous to other people that are maybe a little bit more Well-versed in the ways of the world and with a more social experience But what he's trying to do is like he sees the world is wrong and he wants to get social brownie points by pointing it out and you know and people clap and cheer and he's so he sat down on this loose Leave Binder and wrote | ||
| all this stuff out and he just feels like he's really good. | ||
| And one day he'll look back at that and go, what a fucking moron I was. | ||
| Just like I'll look back at, I have a comedy notebook from 1990 and I should probably burn it in case someone breaks in my house and finds it. | ||
| Dude, if you die, then someone will publish the collected papers of Joe Rogan and this will be your most famous thing. | ||
| It's like a A bit in there about Wonder Woman, like trying to explain Wonder Woman. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| But I was, you know, 21 years old or whatever the fuck I was at the time. | ||
| It's like, it's just, that's what you, when you suck and when you're young, I mean, it takes a while to get good at anything. | ||
| I sucked for so many years. | ||
| Sometimes I look back at my old drawings and I'm like, how did I ever get hired as an artist? | ||
| What delusional process did I ever think that I would be an artist? | ||
| Putting these things out there and again and again and again in the face of very deserved rejection for many years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| It worked out, right? | ||
| Because if you just keep chipping away at it... | ||
| Eventually, eventually get through. | ||
| And I tried to actually really write about that in my book because I feel like sometimes a lot of artists, they front and they act like, oh, I was just really good from the start and then it was really easy. | ||
| And I was like, no, I sucked from the start and it was really hard. | ||
| Yeah, most comedians will tell you that they suck from the start, except the ones that aren't that good, which will claim that they were always awesome. | ||
| I think all my friends that are really good, they'll tell you they're fucking, they were terrible. | ||
| I have two young daughters, and one of the cool things is watching their art, like they're really into art, especially my seven-year-old is really into it. | ||
| She draws every day. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| And I watch her early stuff, like I save all her stuff, or at least representations, like some of it. | ||
| and Watching like their early like control of her motor skills in her hands from the time she was like three to four years later This just dramatic difference in what she's ability, you know her ability to draw things and draw representations and figure out like perspective and sizes and We were going through this book yesterday. | ||
| She has this How to draw figures book. | ||
| And it was the weirdest fucking thing. | ||
| Because it was these princesses. | ||
| And she's trying to draw princesses. | ||
| And I'm looking at the book. | ||
| And we're going through it together. | ||
| And it's like one of those books where you have a framework. | ||
| There's balls and sticks. | ||
| And you try to make the framework. | ||
| And then you add the clothes to the framework. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But the women's legs were like... | ||
| more than twice as long as they should have been. | ||
| Oh, when you're trying to do those like fashion-y cartoon drawings, everyone is like so stretched out. | ||
| And what's weird is that you get so used to seeing that, that when you see like cartoon people done at their real proportions, they all look like weird and stubby. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's got to be weird for, because it doesn't seem that way for men. | ||
| Like, I was looking at the representations of men. | ||
| They're fairly proportionate. | ||
| But with women, it was all these insanely long legs and insanely skinny bodies. | ||
| And I was like, this is fucking strange. | ||
| So much so that I had to point it out to her. | ||
| You know, she's like, you know, she's drawing it. | ||
| I go... | ||
| Well, here's the deal. | ||
| You can draw it like this. | ||
| One of the beautiful things about art is you can do whatever you want. | ||
| If you want to make people that have giant hands that are the size of those foam number ones that people wear at a football game, you could totally do that. | ||
| No one can stop you. | ||
| Drawing is your expression, whatever you want to do. | ||
| But if you want to draw like a real person, And so then I started showing her a real human body. | ||
| I'm like, okay, I'm going to stand up, and I'll stand up next to the wall. | ||
| And what we're going to do is we're going to mark on the wall where the top of my head is and where my waist is. | ||
| Oh, that's so cool that you did that with her. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| And so we went from the top of my head to the waist, and then we went from the waist down to the feet. | ||
| And I said, and you notice that they're pretty much the same, or at least close. | ||
| But the women in these cartoon things you're supposed to draw were no bullshit. | ||
| There was twice as much length in their legs as there was from their waist up to their head. | ||
| And she was like, well, why do they do that? | ||
| And I go, well, some people think that it looks better to make people that aren't real, that are longer than reality. | ||
| But why do we accept that? | ||
| Because if there was a woman and she had a normal proportion body but enormous tits, Just freakish tits. | ||
| Like, everybody would look at that and go, what the fuck are you making these kids draw? | ||
| You know? | ||
| But for whatever reason, like having the... | ||
| And by the way, some people have freakish tits. | ||
| Like, there's people that for whatever reason... | ||
| Like, there's that poor dude who can't go to the airport without getting frisked because he has this giant hog. | ||
| He has, like, some 20-inch dick. | ||
| He's got the world's largest dick. | ||
| And, like, they always check his pants because they think he's carrying drugs or something. | ||
| Well, there's women out there that are just naturally born with enormous breasts, and there's nothing they can do about it. | ||
| There's no one born with... | ||
| There's no one six feet tall, and only two feet of them are upper body, and the rest of it is legs. | ||
| That just doesn't exist. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's crazy. | ||
| And even when I was at art school, we would have a different formula for drawing figures, and there was like... | ||
| They would measure it in heads. | ||
| So it's like this figure is nine heads. | ||
| And a fashion figure, which what they called it, which is, you know, the figure for a fashion illustration, was like so many more heads than like any other figure. | ||
| And so it was like that crazy elongated thing and exactly what you're saying with like the crazy daddy long legs legs. | ||
| It's very strange because for men, I've never talked to a man who understands that look because men are not attracted. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure everybody varies, right? | ||
| But most men are not attractive to these stick figure people. | ||
| But women are expected to be stick figure people to be models. | ||
| It's one of the weirdest things. | ||
| And then women think that in order to be attractive, they have to be like these media representations of women, so they have to starve themselves. | ||
| And then men are like, no, don't do that. | ||
| No one likes that. | ||
| But it's like there's this weird disconnect between what the opposite sex or, I mean, I don't know, I can't speak for lesbians, obviously, but what the opposite sex finds attractive and the representations of attractive women. | ||
| Sucked in cheeks, basically like on death's door. | ||
| Like, yeah, she's hot. | ||
| Like, no, that's weird. | ||
| It's weird to see someone all cracked out and skinny like that being the most obvious representation of a beautiful person in nice clothes. | ||
| I mean, I think it's, you know, fashion models aren't for men, you know, or they're not for straight men. | ||
| They're supposed to appeal to women who are buying the clothing. | ||
| But do they even... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, fashion... | ||
| I think, you know, women of all sizes, skinny, skinny, whatever, I think, you know, I'll be super beautiful. | ||
| As long as that's really you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| As long as you're not, like, harming yourself to do it. | ||
| But I think that... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think the idea is that you can just hang any clothing on them and it doesn't affect the hang of the clothing. | ||
| So it's almost like they're as close to it being... | ||
| Like a coat hanger is possible. | ||
| I think that's the theoretical underpinnings of it. | ||
| But yeah, it's true. | ||
| Like if you look at like a Playboy model or like a model for like, you know, like Black Men's Magazine or, you know, like a model for Maxim, like they're like these super fit young women, you know, who like have like really good like muscles and are really curvy. | ||
| Yeah, well, people, like, men are naturally attracted to women with a certain amount of body fat. | ||
| It's a natural thing, because to be healthy, like, the whole idea of breasts and butts and hips being attractive is because, genetically, women who have those things will carry children better and will be more likely to be able to nourish those children because they're healthy. | ||
| It's a total genetic thing. | ||
| So much so, this is the weirdest aspect of it, so much so that if a woman has Fake boobs. | ||
| Like, you know they're fake. | ||
| You know. | ||
| There's no disconnect at all. | ||
| You're absolutely aware that she has gone through surgery to cut her skin, stuff bags of water in there that make them stick out. | ||
| You're like, oh, but they stick out more. | ||
| Like, men will be more attracted sexually. | ||
| And the sexual attraction is supposed to, at least, represent wanting to breed with that person. | ||
| Like, you are not just tricked. | ||
| You're tricking yourself. | ||
| Fake boobs are one of the weirdest things of all time, if you really stop and look at it. | ||
| If aliens came down from another planet, or even historians, because I guarantee you, we were talking about Bradley Manning and Chelsea Manning. | ||
| There's going to come a time in whatever not-so-distant future, the next hundred years, where they're just going to be able to turn you into a woman. | ||
| You're going to say, like, I don't want to be a woman anymore. | ||
| I'd like to be a man. | ||
| They'll make you a man for a year. | ||
| And you're like, eh, I like being Molly better. | ||
| You go back to being Molly instead of Mike. | ||
| Molly and Mike, the show, right? | ||
| I think they're going to be able to do that with breasts. | ||
| They're going to be able to do that with everything. | ||
| They're going to be able to manipulate genetics to the point where... | ||
| Have you ever seen or listened to this Radiolab episode on CRISPR? I haven't. | ||
| No, what's that? | ||
| CRISPR is a new method of manipulating genetics that they have invented. | ||
| It's a really super complicated thing that I'm going to butcher. | ||
| But they've invented it by studying the DNA of viruses and they figured out how to utilize that sort of method to manipulate eventually, at least, human DNA. To the point where they're going to be able to change your traits. | ||
| They're going to be able to change so many different things. | ||
| Introduce genes into specific areas of your body and fix problems or change things that you don't like. | ||
| They're going to be able to do some fucking freaky shit. | ||
| And this is just one invention. | ||
| I think 2012 it was invented, and by the time 2032 rolls around, who the fuck knows what they're gonna have? | ||
| I think we're really close to be able to just completely manipulate human bodies. | ||
| But the point being, when historians go back and they look, At fake boobs, they're going to be like, what the fuck were these people doing? | ||
| Like, how weird is this? | ||
| There's going to be a Smithsonian that has like boxes of like silicone, and this is the early days, and this is when they went to saline, and you know, we're going to look at that stuff going, what a strange time to be alive. | ||
| The thing is, though, with trickery and matters of aesthetics, I don't even want to call it trickery. | ||
| I mean, there's all sorts of things. | ||
| You can totally admire, think a guy looks really hot in a sharp suit, even though you know it's not really his skin, you know what I mean? | ||
| There's a whole visual appreciation of other people that doesn't necessarily just have to do with what's quote-unquote real or what's your genetic heritage. | ||
| That's really true. | ||
| Like, clothes are a great example. | ||
| That's a really good example. | ||
| Because that is weird. | ||
| Like, you see someone who's dressed sharp, and you go, ooh, man, he looks great in that suit. | ||
| Like, that's a beautiful vest. | ||
| Like, wow, that looks awesome on him. | ||
| That's a strange thing. | ||
| Like, you look good with stuff on you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You could hang stuff on you that makes you look good or professional or authoritative or all of these other things, even though, like, they're just, like, stuff that you're wearing. | ||
| I wonder if that's the same with hermit crabs. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| If they pick out a good shell. | ||
| Could you imagine someone's like, I'm wearing the really slick, cool shell. | ||
| I'm going to get all the girl hermit crabs right now. | ||
| Yeah, probably, right? | ||
| There's some weird things in nature with animals doing things like that. | ||
| How about animals that can actually... | ||
| Have you ever paid attention to octopus at all? | ||
| Octopi? | ||
| You know, I'm like, I'm pretty shamefully ignorant. | ||
| You might have to educate me here. | ||
| I had, well, apparently cuttlefish are just as bizarre, if not more. | ||
| But my friend Remy Warren is a, um, he's a host of a show called Apex Predator, where they, um, they monitor, they sort of, um, Try to emulate the different attributes that certain predators have and how how they survive and see like if there's like some human version of that and and they like Check out like how it's called heron that those tall birds her | ||
| herons herons. | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
| Heron? | ||
| Herons? | ||
| Like how they walk with their crazy long legs and then stab at the water looking for like frogs and shit and he did one on octopuses and out of all the different animals we were talking about he was like you know there's all these cool animals they were talking about like how wolves will chase down packs of elk and how they corner them and And these canyons and draws and how they figure out how to trap them. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| But when he started talking about octopus, he's like, dude, you have never... | ||
| They are fucking aliens. | ||
| Look at these things. | ||
| Look how they can change their colors. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| They can change their colors and immediately adapt to their environment to the point where they're indistinguishable from the background. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Oh, they're insane. | ||
| They're insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| They can instantaneously, like within fractions of a second, change the outside of their body to look exactly like a coral reef, not just in the image, but in the texture. | ||
| They can change themselves to look more like predators or like dangerous things. | ||
| It's incredible what they can do. | ||
| We live in the coolest world. | ||
| My God. | ||
| Oh, the world's amazing. | ||
| The world of the ocean still... | ||
| There's some new project that they're doing right now where they're trying to map the ocean floor. | ||
| And without a doubt, they're going to discover some freaky fucking fish life, marine life down there that we've never... | ||
| I've encountered before, but just these creatures, we're just starting to learn what these things are doing. | ||
| Like, look at that! | ||
| It's like a flower or something blossoming on fast motion. | ||
| That's an octopus. | ||
| But it looks like a tiny... | ||
| A Wookiee or something. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like a video game character running. | ||
| But watch this. | ||
| It can merge with these coral reefs and it looks like a coral reef. | ||
| So it's literally developed this ability to turn its body into the shape of a reef and then its little tiny, I mean, it curls its tentacles up into little tiny legs and runs on two legs. | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| Wow, and look, it's like a teardrop shape. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| I would always draw octopuses just because they're fun to draw with all the tentacles and stuff, but my god. | ||
| Yeah, I had no idea. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| And the fact that they can do it like that, they just change. | ||
| You're like, fucking, what a weird world. | ||
| And they communicate with each other somehow through that, and we don't know how. | ||
| We know they're really fucking smart, though. | ||
| Are they going to take it all over after we destroy everything? | ||
| The octopi are going to rule the earth? | ||
| Well, that's something I've been really dwelling on lately when it comes to marine life and dolphins and orcas, and I'm a huge believer that they are just as intelligent as us, if not more, and that what we're doing with SeaWorld and all these wild dolphin shows is nothing less than slavery. | ||
| It's slavery of some alien intelligence that we can't communicate with. | ||
| We don't understand what they're saying. | ||
| So we're like, um, can't hear you. | ||
| I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| So fucking jump for fish or starve. | ||
| It's your choice. | ||
| And I've thought about it, like our ideas about what is intelligent. | ||
| Like we don't think that something's intelligent unless it does exactly what we do. | ||
| When we think of intelligence, we say, okay, well, Molly sent me an email. | ||
| I sent her an email back. | ||
| I know she's intelligent. | ||
| She's communicating through an email. | ||
| The dolphin doesn't know how to fucking make an email. | ||
| He's an idiot. | ||
| But they don't need email. | ||
| Why do we need email? | ||
| We need email because we need to communicate. | ||
| Well, they can communicate for miles through the water with their chirps and their noises. | ||
| They recognize each other from years and years being apart from each other, even though to us they all look the fucking same. | ||
| They can move and manipulate through 3D space in the water. | ||
| They don't need a house because they're smart enough to go where the water's warm. | ||
| Fish is everywhere and it's free, so they don't need jobs. | ||
| So all these ideas that we have, like what represents intelligence, all that stuff's stupid. | ||
| Because to them, if you're like, well, I'm going to build a house and drive my car to work, they're like, what are you talking about, bitch? | ||
| You're under the water. | ||
| They'd be like, I'm going to hoard all the fish in my thing and kill them and then I'll sell you the fucking fish for kelp. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Yeah, they'd be like, what? | ||
| Like, you're a high dolphin. | ||
| I'm going to write you a letter from my laptop. | ||
| There's no internet down here, stupid. | ||
| There's no, like, you're a crap dolphin. | ||
| Yeah, your fucking laptop's not going to work underwater, asshole. | ||
| So all of our ideas about what's intelligent is only based on our ability to manipulate our environment or create things. | ||
| That didn't exist. | ||
| So our intelligence is a very bizarre intelligence because we're the only intelligence that can not just manipulate our environment that's local, but our environment globally. | ||
| We can essentially change the weather. | ||
| We can cloud seed and make it rain. | ||
| That's one of the weird things they do in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| They make it rain every week. | ||
| They do it on purpose. | ||
| They spray the sky with some sort of silver or something or another that makes it, I forget what the exact compound is, but it actually causes it to rain. | ||
| And they've been doing it like once a week for years. | ||
| They have rainstorms that they manufacture. | ||
| We're freaks. | ||
| We're freaks and our intelligence is fundamentally built on dissatisfaction, which, I mean, we have to have because we're also like weak and not apex predators necessarily. | ||
| And we're getting weaker, I think, too. | ||
| I think that's part of it. | ||
| You know, if you went back to the early humans and you compared like our tendons and bone structure and Are they really humans? | ||
| Are they stronger than us? | ||
| I always thought they were, like, shorter and stuff. | ||
| Neanderthals were. | ||
| But they're not really humans, right? | ||
| They're, like, a type of human in how they categorize them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They were way stronger than us, though. | ||
| They weren't just stronger than us. | ||
| They were, like, really short. | ||
| They were, like, five foot, five foot two, but, like, 220 pounds, just fucking gorilla-like. | ||
|
unidentified
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Damn. | |
| With super thick bones and thick heads and... | ||
| And they don't really know exactly how intelligent they were either. | ||
| There's all this speculation as to whether or not they figured out tools on their own or whether they copied them from Homo sapiens and where Homo sapiens came from and did they interbreed and there's debate on that as well. | ||
| And then they're always finding these fucking new, they found another one like within the last couple of weeks, they found another new species of human that they didn't know existed. | ||
| They found some large tooth that turned out to be not categorized. | ||
| It was a human tooth but not categorized in any previous version of human beings that they were aware of before. | ||
| They found quite a few of them now, including, I'm sure you've heard of like the Hobbit people they found on the island of Flores. | ||
| That was 14,000 years ago. | ||
| That's not that long ago. | ||
| I mean, that's not before the beginning of recorded history, is it? | ||
| Or is it a little bit before? | ||
| It depends on whose version of the beginning of recorded history is. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that believe... | ||
| There's this guy that I've had on my podcast a few times now. | ||
| His name is Randall Carlson, and he's an expert in cataclysmic events. | ||
| And especially astroial impacts. | ||
| And him and this guy Graham Hancock have worked together. | ||
| And Graham Hancock wrote this book called Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| It was a really controversial book in the 90s. | ||
| And then now he has a new one called Magicians of the Gods, which sort of shows how much of his early work that was widely criticized was actually substantiated now by science. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Where these ancient structures that didn't make any sense that they were trying to figure out, like, who fucking built these? | ||
| Like, how are they here? | ||
| And archaeologists sort of tried to put, like, vague dates on them. | ||
| And the idea behind it was that civilization has not evolved and has not progressed on a... | ||
| Straight plane, but rather there's been these peaks and valleys and that what has happened is people have gotten this very high level of sophistication and culture and then Massive cataclysmic disasters have white people out almost to the brink of extinct extinction and then they've risen back up again So like science is like found quite a few of them, but one of the big ones they keep pointing out is Is that there's somewhere around 12,000 years ago, there was a series of impacts on the Earth. | ||
| And this has been proven by science now because over the last few years they've discovered this stuff called, I think it's called tritonite, but it's essentially called nuclear glass. | ||
| And it exists around where they do nuclear tests and it also exists at meteor impact sites. | ||
| And the impact creates heat that's so intense, it turns sand and rock to glass. | ||
| And they find this stuff all throughout Europe and it's all around the same time period, which also coincides with the end of the Ice Age. | ||
| And it also coincides with a thousand plus years later, the beginning of modern civilization, agriculture, mathematics. | ||
| And so their theory is that that wasn't exactly the beginning, but that was a rebirth. | ||
| And there was most likely thousands of years of civilization that existed before that, but it was almost entirely wiped out when people were just bombarded with rocks from the sky. | ||
| I mean, it makes a lot of sense, especially when societies were less interconnected, like the whole reason, you know, stuff, various like, you know, math or astrology survived the Dark Ages in Europe was because in the Middle East, people were able to keep it alive. | ||
| We live in a time now where unless they literally wiped out everyone, it'd be very hard to do that. | ||
| But in a world where people don't have that level of communication, where they don't have that level of connection, where they Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it would be pretty easy, especially today in our culture, because everything has become digital. | ||
| It's one of the weirdest things about us Advancing and evolving is that as things move to the cloud and as things become much less physical books like your book here, but much more like laptops and Kindle. | ||
| I have a Kindle and it has 150 books on it or something like that. | ||
| It's that thin. | ||
| It sits right in my backpack. | ||
| I mean, what? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's like this magician's thing, but also you could... | ||
| Potentially drop a server that had the only copy of something and have that only copy... | ||
| Disappear. | ||
| Yeah, be gone. | ||
|
unidentified
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Vanish. | |
| And if the power goes out, you're not getting any of this stuff. | ||
| I had a friend who was going back into an area where he couldn't bring books because there were checkpoints. | ||
| And he had his iTunes account was something that the country that it was tied to you couldn't buy good e-books on. | ||
| So I remember I got him all these pirated copies of 1984 and James Baldwin and Catch-22 and stuff to read. | ||
| And he only has a few hours of power a day and he's reading 1984 on his phone. | ||
| Craziest illustration of both the ubiquity of a book and also the limits of it in the cloud age? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of limits of it. | ||
| Our entire society is dependent upon the grid. | ||
| If the grid goes down, almost none of this stuff is effective. | ||
| But by the same token, he could smuggle all these books past checkpoints, and no one knew he had them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, there's definitely, if you're in a war-torn area like that, it's great. | ||
| It's just, to me, it freaks me out when I think of if something like that happened. | ||
| Like, there was a big event, I think it was in Indonesia, like 70,000 years ago. | ||
| They think that civilization was wiped out to the point of there being only a couple thousand people left on the planet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A supervolcano erupted. | ||
| If anything remotely like that happened, we would instantaneously be brought right back to where people were 50,000 years ago. | ||
| Well, most of us don't have any sort of skills to maintain or rebuild anything. | ||
| I mean, I don't. | ||
| I know if there's like the zombie apocalypse, I'd be like, fucking food or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And if we broke into Home Depot, like there's a Home Depot that's like a few miles from here, how many fucking people could get a hammer from there? | ||
| There's a lot of people out here. | ||
| There's not enough hammers. | ||
| We'd hope the shelters that we have hold up, but then where are we going to get food? | ||
| Unless we get into the ocean and go fishing, are you going to shoot deer? | ||
| How many deer are there? | ||
| Like five in this whole neighborhood? | ||
| Well, the level of population density we have could never be supported by traditional agriculture, ever. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| You know what else is weird? | ||
| A friend of mine pointed this out. | ||
| He goes, why is it that when you walk down the street, you see all these plants, but none of them grow food? | ||
| Like, everyone grows plants everywhere, but there are all these fucking useless plants. | ||
| Like, wouldn't it be amazing if, like, cities were filled with plants that grow fruit and all the grasses and stuff you saw were edible and there was lettuce everywhere. | ||
| Like, literally everything had food on it. | ||
| Like, it would be just the same amount of water used... | ||
| But you would actually get something out of it. | ||
| But we're so rich that we're like, nope, pine trees. | ||
| No, I want an oak. | ||
| I want a beautiful oak here. | ||
| We don't support the trees and the plants around us that we can actually eat. | ||
| I remember one time I was in Spain and I was like 17 and I was broke. | ||
| And I was with my friend and we saw like, wow, these orange trees, steal a lot of oranges. | ||
| And we like climb up the tree and we like steal all the oranges. | ||
| And then we like peel them and then they're like bitter and dry. | ||
| And we're like, these are fucking decorative oranges. | ||
| They tricked us. | ||
| They tricked us. | ||
| These oranges are lies. | ||
| I think that they specifically probably planted those type of oranges to avoid bad people like us climbing their trees and stealing all of them. | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| You're a bad person because you're doing what people have done for the last 100,000 plus years. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Bad person for picking fruit from a tree. | ||
| How strange. | ||
| And it's also probably those were what oranges really tasted like before we started fucking with them. | ||
| I refuse to believe that. | ||
| That's a cruel world. | ||
| Well, they know that the fact for like corn and a lot of other food was like really gross before people started manipulating it. | ||
| Truth, truth. | ||
| But oranges, I want to believe that like prehistoric oranges were a tasty treat and these were not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I ate an apple the other day, and me and my friends were laughing while we were eating these apples. | ||
| We're like, these fucking things have definitely been fucked with. | ||
| They were big, big giant, and they were so juicy. | ||
| We're like, what kind of genetically modified shit are we eating right now? | ||
| Because these are just not normal apples. | ||
| Giant, juicy, delicious apples. | ||
| Probably in the middle of apple off-season, too. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| You ever had a crab apple? | ||
| Molly crab apple? | ||
| I have a photo of me under a crab apple tree, but I don't know if I've ever eaten a crab apple. | ||
| Man, I'm sure this will get remedied someday, but not yet, I don't think. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, I... Oh no, oh my god, you're right. | |
| God, I'm getting deep into the memory bank. | ||
| When I was seven and I lived in Far Rockaway, I think one of the neighbors had a crab apple tree. | ||
| Or it had the tree with the little apples. | ||
| Those are the crab apples. | ||
| Yeah, those are the crab apples. | ||
| And I believe I stole some of them and I believe they're very sour, as I remember them. | ||
| Yeah, they're very sour. | ||
| I ate one of those when I was a little kid. | ||
| Well, more than once, I'm sure. | ||
| When I was a little kid growing up in Massachusetts, I remember biting into those things. | ||
| Yeah, it's so much hope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're good for throwing at people, though. | ||
| That's what we used them for when we were kids. | ||
| Nice, nice. | ||
| Chuck them at each other. | ||
| Small and hard. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, your little tiny hands, you get a good grip on a crab apple and really whip it. | ||
| Nice, nice. | ||
| What else you got going on these days besides, I know you're promoting this book, and... | ||
| Besides that, I'm really excited about this. | ||
| I'm going to India for a month because there's all these literary festivals in India. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I'm getting to go to Jaipur and Mumbai. | ||
| Have you been before? | ||
| No, it's my first time in my life, so I'm really excited about that. | ||
| And then besides that, you know, I think I'm reaching that point of burnout where I'm just, I'm like actually planning to take a month off. | ||
| I know it sounds like fucking blasphemy, but I think I'm going to like lie on a beach in Goa or something and read a lot of books. | ||
| And other than that, the only thing I really have to talk about is my super dork hobby, which is I've been studying literary Arabic for the last year and I got pretty good at translating stuff, written stuff. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm really... | ||
| I'm pretty proud of it. | ||
| I do this every morning. | ||
| So I'm translating a long dialogue by the Syrian poet that's called Sex, Poetry and the Revolution. | ||
| And it is badass. | ||
| But other than that, I think I'm actually going into that time where I'm just making a little blank space. | ||
| And then at the end of that, I'll probably be back doing a bunch of journalism for Vice, doing stuff on prisons in the Middle East, working on my next book project. | ||
| I don't know, seeing where life goes. | ||
| Because the thing that's so strange about doing a memoir is it really is like sectioning off a chapter, you know, like sectioning off, you know, 15 years of your life. | ||
| And then you've taken all of that and you've put it into this book form. | ||
| You've made it into an object and then you go on to what's next. | ||
| And I guess while I have the vague contours of that in my head, part of me just wants to do nothing for a while and then the plan will come to me. | ||
| I think that's a great idea. | ||
| I'm thinking the same thing about my own life right now. | ||
| I think I'm too involved in too many different things, and I could use a reset, like a calming. | ||
| I think it's all good stuff, and that's the problem. | ||
| And I think that's what you're experiencing as well. | ||
| You have so many cool things you have going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're so awesome. | |
| I feel so lucky. | ||
| But if there's no space, I mean... | ||
| Can't absorb them. | ||
| Yeah, it's like that Louis C.K. thing about never being bored. | ||
| I mean, I have that in the best of all possible ways. | ||
| I have so many cool opportunities. | ||
| But if you never have any time to be bored or be down, you're just bouncing from thing to thing. | ||
| What is the Louis C.K. thing about never being bored? | ||
| I'm not aware of it. | ||
| It was like a monologue that he had about where he was saying that since we have smartphones, basically... | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Now I remember it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So you never have any space to feel anything or to be bored. | ||
| And so you're just always in the state of distraction. | ||
| And I think it can be like that with work stuff, too. | ||
| After that, probably just doing a bunch of journalism stuff. | ||
| I work a lot with a really cool Syrian-American nonprofit that I'm going to plug here. | ||
| They're called Karam Foundation. | ||
| How do you spell that? | ||
| K-A-R-A-M. And they do something really cool because a lot of attention right now, it's on the Syrian refugees that make it to Europe, but They actually work with people who are displaced inside Syria and then also people like on the border. | ||
| And for the last two years, I've taken part in a program with them where we go down to these schools that are on the border and they bring like, they bring dentists that fix all the kids' teeth. | ||
| They bring eye doctors to get all the kids' glasses that need it. | ||
| But then they also bring like writers and philosophers and architects and like You know, people who teach classes with the kids. | ||
| And I always do murals there. | ||
| I've done murals in two schools now. | ||
| So next spring, I'll probably be back with them painting lots of rebellious cats all over a school in Southeast Turkey. | ||
| Wow, you live such a broad and fascinating life. | ||
| I mean, you've had so many really intense experiences. | ||
| All over the place. | ||
| Both all over the place professionally and creatively and then geographically. | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| You're not living a boring life. | ||
| No, I feel so lucky. | ||
| I mean, that's why it's so hard for me to be... | ||
| I need to take a reset because it's like the whole world is so big and cool and I love so many things and it's... | ||
| Yeah, but I think your instincts are correct though. | ||
| It seems to me like you've got so much going on all the time, constantly, in so many different arenas. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot, but I don't know. | ||
| It must be the same with you, too. | ||
| I mean, you do comedy, you do this super thoughtful talk thing, you host MMA stuff. | ||
| I mean, you've done so many fucking things. | ||
| I mean, it's just because I feel, and perhaps you feel this way, the world is just so big and weird and interesting, and I just want to learn stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I wish I could live 10 different lives simultaneously. | ||
| I'd have a bunch of different careers that I'd be interested in. | ||
| Same, same, exactly. | ||
| But to do any of those things correctly requires so much attention and focus. | ||
| It's almost like you can't enjoy too many things because then the one thing that you enjoy the most or that you choose to enjoy the most, you really can't focus on it correctly. | ||
| Or else you just never, ever, ever have downtime, ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm close to that. | ||
| I get close to that sometimes. | ||
| But it's not good. | ||
| But it's weird because, like, my non-downtime seems very recreational. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, it's super fun. | ||
| Like, I don't want to, like, complain, like, wow, I get to travel all over the world and meet fascinating people and confront bastards. | ||
| Boo-hoo for me. | ||
| And yet, you know, at a certain point, You know, this is a big compliment, and I don't mean this in terms of imitation, but your drawing of Trump and Ivanka was very Ralph Steadman-esque. | ||
| Oh, I idolize that guy. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| That's a massive compliment. | ||
| I think that man is like a god amongst men. | ||
| He's a bad motherfucker, for sure. | ||
| But that image is just so much like, I think of it as like the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, with all the horror. | |
| Horrible, like, the monster, like, toad people. | ||
| Oh, it's so good. | ||
| Yeah, I've got that framed on my wall in my office, a print from Stedman's illustration of the Kentucky Derby. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's so cool. | |
| Have you ever, like, had him on the show, or do you want to go to Kent? | ||
| No, I would love to. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if he's ever in Los Angeles, but I prefer to do these things in person. | ||
| But if he's ever here, I would love to have him on, just to talk to him about Hunter, and what it was like, and what it was like for a time Hunter dosed him with acid. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Or when they went to Rumble in the Jungle and Hunter sold their tickets and he was drawing it off the TV screen. | ||
| Yeah, and he was swimming in the pool and he totally fucked the whole story up. | ||
| Because he thought that Foreman was going to kill Muhammad Ali and he didn't want to see it. | ||
| So he put a Richard Nixon mask on and swam around the pool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he, to this day, or, well, not to this day, obviously he's dead, but considered that one of his biggest journalistic failures. | ||
| And he went into a giant slump after he did that because, like, he realized that his decadence and his indulgence had actually gotten in the way of an amazing moment in history. | ||
| God. | ||
| Just to realize the fucking beautiful beast that you rode to being who you were was turning around and becoming a sort of cliche that was fucking up everything you liked. | ||
| Did you ever see the Alex Gibney movie, Gonzo, The Life and Times of Dr. Hunter? | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's such a good documentary. | ||
| But that was almost like initially, that's how they started the movie off. | ||
| He started the movie off explaining that at the end of his life, Hunter had really stopped being creative. | ||
| The writing wasn't there anymore. | ||
| The things that he wrote were really middling. | ||
| They weren't that good. | ||
| And it was because his indulgences and his excesses had really cooked his brain. | ||
| And he had become almost a caricature of himself. | ||
| Along the line some of the interviews They had found him when he was a younger man and when he had started to become famous and he was actually worried about that very thing He was saying like I can't even get out of my own way anymore And they don't even necessarily when I'm when I'm doing these things I can't tell whether or not they want me and they want my take on things or whether they want reality itself like and I'm Because it's almost it would almost be better if I died Like for my own | ||
| work. | ||
| And that was like, wow, like this guy is experiencing like a really early version of, well, it's also very rare that a journalist becomes that famous. | ||
| So, so rare, so rare. | ||
| But I mean, I think the problem was that he, at a certain point, he stopped growing and changing and pushing himself and it was just more comfortable to like stay in the mask. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, and also, the indulgences and the substances became not just a habit, but probably a physical addiction. | ||
| And at that point in time, he's more of a slave to that than he is even the work itself. | ||
| And the work itself is almost like something that he's eventually going to get to. | ||
| I'll get to that eventually. | ||
| I'll get to that. | ||
| But it's just cocaine. | ||
| We read off a list when Lance Armstrong was here yesterday of a typical day in the life of Hunter S. Thompson as far as... | ||
| Oh God, yeah, it just starts with like massive... | ||
| Does it start with like ether or coke? | ||
| What does it start with? | ||
| It starts with... | ||
| It's like Chivas Regal, cocaine, Dunhill cigarettes, cocaine, Chivas Regal... | ||
| We read it all off. | ||
| It's fucking preposterous. | ||
| Like you should be fucking dead. | ||
| And then it says at midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write. | ||
| And this is like after getting up at three... | ||
| Oh God, you spend your entire time like pouring like liquids into your head and then smoking things. | ||
| But for a while it worked. | ||
| He wrote some insane shit during that time. | ||
| He wrote some amazing stuff. | ||
| It's almost like he just redlined his brain, never changed the oil, and kept the metal pinned. | ||
| And then this magnificent thing happened until it horrifically ground down. | ||
| I gotta be boring and I gotta go. | ||
| I'm really sorry. | ||
| Get out of here! | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm lame, I'm lame. | |
| No, please, no worries. | ||
| Thank you so much for coming on. | ||
| And everybody, Drawing Blood is the book. | ||
| I'm in the middle of it right now and it is excellent. | ||
| And your writing is really fantastic and honest and just really, really good stuff. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And you can follow Molly on Twitter, Molly Crabapple on Twitter. | ||
| Same thing on Instagram, website. | ||
| MollyCrabapple.com Go buy the book, fuckers. | ||
| Thank you so much, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is awesome. | |
| Thank you, Molly. | ||
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| That was so cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
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