The Joe Rogan Experience - #453 - Molly Crabapple
Episode Date: February 11, 2014Molly Crabapple is an American artist and journalist, known for her work for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Royal Society of Arts, Red Bull, Marvel Comics, DC Comics and CNN. ...
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The Joe Rogan Experience.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Molly Crabapple.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming.
It's so cool, so cool to make contact with you,
cool to see your stuff on the internet.
I first found out about you because actually a dispute that you had with Amber Lyon,
you guys are buddies now,
everything got worked out.
Everything got worked out, yeah.
But I went to your page
and I was like,
holy shit, what cool art.
Like really interesting stuff.
Like very distinct and fascinating.
And I started reading your tweets
and I was like,
oh, she's really fucking smart.
Oh, cool.
Man, thank you.
So here you are.
Thanks so much.
Oh, you're welcome.
And you were telling us about, what was the thing that you did where you had to paint a mural?
You were talking about it like right before.
It was like how many hours was it?
So I was in London, jet-lagged, off my ass, reeling, and I had to paint a 50-foot mural in three days, like up on a ladder, all intricate Sharpies.
And Modafinil got me through this.
The wonder drug that people don't want to,
that people speak of in hushed tones,
they don't want to admit they take it.
I even had the guy who was one of the directors of maps on the show,
and he was reluctant to talk about taking modafinil before the show
because he was tired.
And I was like, do you know how crazy that is, man're you're part of the multi-disciplinary psychedelic studies group and you're afraid to tell
people that you took some modafinil before a show not afraid but he was a just a touch reluctant
and then he divulged it but i'm like that stuff is great i think he could get very addictive though
i think that's uh not physically addictive as far as what I've experienced,
but the effects are so real and so obvious that I would think that some people would be like,
I want to be on it all the time, man.
Well, it gets rid of all of the weakness of your meat self.
It makes you just not tired.
It makes you focused.
You don't get distracted.
Anyone would want to be on it all the time.
They'd be like, I'm fucking Superman.
Wow, you got a really powerful reaction to it.
I loved it. I didn't have that same reaction.
I didn't feel like...
I just felt sharper. That's it.
I didn't feel like Superman.
I felt like
I have less lag in my
system. That's how I felt.
But it didn't make me feel any stronger or anything like that.
But I do know it's outlawed the Olympics.
It is. Interesting. do know it's outlawed the Olympics. It is.
Interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
It probably has some profound effects on the body as well.
If you think about the effects that it has on the mind, that stuff is amazing.
I found out about it from Dave Asprey was the first person.
But after the fact, like he did the podcast and was like this really sharp, really fucking like smooth talking guy with so much information.
And I was like, God, this guy never runs out of energy.
This is crazy.
And then I watched this special that was a special on ProVigil,
and he was on it and talking about taking this stuff
and this incredible effect that it has
and all these IT people are on it.
And I was like, oh, okay, I got to try this.
So the first time I tried it, I called him up, and I was like oh okay i gotta try this so the first time i tried it i called them up but i was like this is fucking crazy like and i i had the same feeling that like tim ferris
had tim ferris who wrote that four-hour body and four-hour work week he he didn't put it in his
book specifically because he would worry that people would just be eating it like candy oh
that's so interesting i didn't know that yeah yeah yeah he got to that people would just be eating it like candy. Oh, that's so interesting.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He got to that part of the book.
He was like, fuck this, man.
They're going to just start eating it.
People are crazy.
You can't give them this stuff.
I don't think people understand.
I think there's a lot of people out there that don't know about modafinil.
Well, don't get turned on to it.
So there's more for those who need it. I think they'll be fine.
I think the government knows how to make that stuff.
I mean, that's the Uber munch.
It's going to come out of a modafinil bottle.
Yeah, did you just...
I gave one to Brian. He was in here, and
he had a drive to San Diego, and he had
got like two hours sleep, and he was ready to conk out.
And I was like, trust me, just eat this.
Did I even tell you to eat? I thought you'd eat half.
Eat a half of one.
Just eat a half of one. Immediately, I went from just having the worst day of my life to just, everything's fine.
Everything's great.
I need to get more of that.
It's fascinating.
It's fascinating.
I mean, where did that come from?
I didn't even find out about that stuff until a year ago.
What's going to be a year from now?
It doesn't even seem to have any negative side effects. Yeah, is there any? that stuff until a year ago. What's going to be a year from now? What kind of fucking...
It doesn't even seem to have any negative side effects.
Yeah, is there any?
I don't know.
Just like Tim Ferriss, though.
His quote that there's no biological free lunch.
Remember when he was talking about it?
Yeah, it's...
I don't know.
I hope it doesn't do anything to you, because it's pretty awesome.
I guess the only side effect would be if you just used it not to sleep
because you can't not sleep even if you don't feel sleepy.
Allegedly, it allows you to go to sleep.
I've never tried it.
Every time I've tried the stuff, it's because I have a lot of work to do.
But I won't let myself do it more than once every couple of weeks,
like once a month even.
It's just too delicious.
No, same.
It's my special crutch for when I have some giant mural project where I know I'm going to be on a ladder for 14 hours.
Yeah, some people have a different reaction to it, though.
Some people just, you know, to them it's just like coffee.
It's interesting.
I've heard a couple people's different descriptions of what it does for them.
I think there's also a difference between ProVigil and NewVigil.
Have you tried NewVigil?
No, I haven't.
NewVigil is the stuff that I gave you.
Right.
So the ProVigil got you through?
It saved me.
Do you paint any differently when you're on it or off of it?
So drawing at that sort of scale, like when I'm doing those murals, is like the mental equivalent of picking scabs.
It is so boring.
You're just making these tiny repetitive lines over and over.
And it actually makes me paint better because I get this hyper focus and I can deal with the pain and boredom of what I'm doing.
Wow, that's pretty cool.
So when you're designing something like this, like this enormous mural, do you draw it out on a micro scale first?
Like how do you go about making something like that?
When I was doing the London thing, I just riffed.
I had kind of an idea that I was going to do the decline and fall of civilization as told through this nightclub I was working on.
And I just fucking let it pour out of my hands.
Wow. So you just freeballed it.
I freeballed it. Yeah.
Wow. That is so cool. Do you ever freeball something and get halfway into it and be like,
eee, I should have gone a different direction here?
Well, with murals, it's easy not to do that because there's so much space. You could just
kind of work around it. But I've had that all the time when I'm working on a piece.
I'll like draw half of it and I'll be like, oh man, I screwed up the head. The stairs are all crooked. This is failure.
Let me burn this like a child who has failed me. Yeah. I used to draw a lot as a child and I
originally wanted to be a comic book artist. I was really fascinated by comic book art and
that Frank Frazetta type stuff. And when i started to draw a lot like sometimes i would
get on these these periods where i would start something and then halfway in i'd be like i gotta
drop this one and i realized when you start becoming a comedian that it's sort of the same
thing in everything like when you're being creative if you're trying something out you
whether it's writing or whatever you do to truly create, you have to kind of explore like whatever weird whims.
And some of them pan out and some of them don't, right?
It's so true.
And also when you're a creative person, you have to just accept that your first like five years are just going to not be very good.
And the problem is usually you want to be creative because you have kind of, you know, you have good taste, you have a vision.
And you see so clearly the ways you fail your vision and you just have to learn how to stick through your fail period.
Yeah, I think the fail period is huge, though.
It's so important for, I think, every art form.
I think you have to suck at it to really appreciate what's magical about being good at it.
Oh, God, yeah.
And then there's this moment, this one happy day when it feels effortless just for one second and it was all worth it. Oh, God, yeah. And then there's this moment, this one happy day when it feels effortless just for one second, and it was all worth it. And then other people are like, oh, it's easy for you. Get
a real job. Yeah, those people are hilarious. The get a real job. Why would you want to wish that
on anybody? Why would you want to wish a real job? How rude. Get a real job. Stop chasing your dreams.
How did you become a famous artist? What happened?
So I've been drawing since I was four years old. My mom is an amazing illustrator. She like
illustrated like Cabbage Patch Kids or like, you know, stuff for gumball machines. She's super good,
way better than I am. And so I was making all like the little kiddie mistakes that kids do.
And my mom would just be like, no, no daughter of mine is going to draw a nose like an upside
down seven. You're going to do this right.
And then I just got good at it and I got good at hustling money with it.
Like I'd be 17 and I would hang up flyers at Forbidden Planet offering to draw people's D&D characters.
That's hilarious.
That's a slick move.
Thank you.
Or I would like draw people's pets.
I draw their kids. It's just when you're making art,
you're able to take raw materials that cost $2
and turn it into something that costs $500 or $1,000 or $10,000.
Everything is like all the value is in you.
And so I just, I kept doing it.
I was addicted both to drawing and also to the hustle of it.
That's fascinating.
I like that you admit that because a lot of people,
oh, I'm just about the art.
I don't even care about the money.
Oh, fuck those people.
That's a trust fund.
That's their trust fund talking.
I love the idea that you can be creative and pursue money.
No, it's absolutely true.
Why not?
Yeah, the alternative is having some fucking gallery milking you
and taking 50% of what you make.
And you know what they take?
Yeah, they take 50 percent.
Whoa.
That seems like a lot.
I know.
Right.
It's 50.
It's like worse than agents, worse than anything.
Fifty percent.
Wow.
That's crazy.
And then do you have to have like an exclusive deal with them?
Is that like how a lot of them do it?
So like if they take 50 percent, you can't just go to another place and they also sell a different painting and then they take 50% too. Do they have a piece of you forever?
It depends on the deal you have. But if you were working with like some big gallery,
yeah, they would have a piece of you. And also you wouldn't be able to sell your work privately.
Like they would, like if someone came to you and was like, yo, Joe, I want to buy one of your
comics panels, you'd have to go to the gallery and have them negotiate the deal and take their cut.
It really is all dependent upon like what you can get away with you know because if you're like we were talking
the other day about reality shows where the people who go on those shows they have to sign you know
different shows of different contracts obviously but if you're on one of those like what just name
a show hairdresser show you're making you. Those people have to sign these crazy contracts where they can use your likeness for like the rest of your natural life.
They own a piece of like everything you do in show business essentially.
It's this weird thing that they kind of can say like we're making you.
So because we're making you, we own a chunk of you.
say, they kind of can say, like, we're making you. So because we're making you, we own a chunk of you.
And it's so sad now, especially because if you want to be your own entity, if you want to be famous, you don't need those bastards. Like, you can make a niche for yourself. You don't need to
sign away your soul to some, like, vampiric reality corporation that's going to make you
look like a fool. Yeah, the thing is that system is already plugged in, runs smoothly, and extracts money.
That's the television system.
It runs very smoothly.
We all know we can go to A&E and get quality programming.
We all know that we can go to HBO and watch Game of Thrones.
So it's completely plugged in.
We're so completely used to it, especially if you're going to do a reality show, that's like where you would go. If you just like just anything to get famous,
boom, you know, that's where you would go. And you, you sort of have to become a part of that
system. But if you're an artist, do you have to go initially with galleries? Like how do you
break out? Do you break out entirely through social media? Like how do you? I never went through galleries.
I mean, I've been like a few group shows, but galleries never really wanted me.
So I was pretty much entirely through the Internet and also through doing art about stuff that other people cared about.
Like it's one thing if you're just doing abstract pastel canvases.
But like I would go to Guantanamo Bay and draw that.
So people who cared about Guantanamo Bay and draw that. So people who cared about
Guantanamo Bay or civil liberties would also be turned on to my art.
Oh, wow. So now I'm sorry, I connected you with reality shows is not intentional. It was probably
a poor analogy, but my my analogy of the struggling person who gets sucked in. So really what you can
get away with that, you know, a person in a reality show, like, hey, it could be you, it could be anybody
else, buddy.
Sign the dotted line.
Whereas an artist has options.
And when an artist develops like a group of people that appreciate their art and then
it spreads out, then you totally have options.
So then, you know, you're essentially running your own show now, right?
Exactly.
And that's why they propagandize so much the idea that artists can't know anything about money.
The idea that talking about money
makes you corrupt.
Because if you believe that
in your heart of hearts,
you're really vulnerable
to bad shitty deals
that take 50% of what you make.
Yeah, because those people,
they're like,
listen, we're all going to make money.
You need us and we need you.
And that's true,
but like 50%,
it's like,
that seems crazy.
You just have a building, dude.
You got a building?
We put the stuff up.
How did you get 50% for putting a light on it?
I mean, that is one of the weirdest deals ever.
Like one person is actually creating the art,
and the other person has a window and a roof, and they get half.
That seems like a ripoff.
And the whole model is like you spend a year, two years, you know, slaving on your show.
You put all of the money it takes to do it up yourself, like all the money in the canvas, the paints, you know.
Then you hang your show for a month.
What sells, sells.
What doesn't usually can't be re-shown because it's kind of a failure.
And then you get 50 percent when the gallery deigns to pay you.
When and how long is that sometimes?
Like a few months, a year.
A year?
There have been stories.
I've had friends who haven't gotten paid by their galleries like ever.
Like they did a whole show, put up all that money, all that effort, and zero.
And what do they do?
They try to sue.
Oh, God.
do? They try to sue. They, you know. Oh, God. Yeah. There's a weird group of people, no matter what discipline you're involved in, whether it's art, whether it's music, whether it's comedy,
you're going to run into people that are kind of swindlers, right? No, like in New York,
in Times Square, there are always these guys that are like standing out in the snow, giving out
flyers for comedy clubs just in exchange for their chance to perform for a little bit yeah and like sometimes i look at
them and i feel so bad i'm like man this the system is so disrespectful to you like you're
providing the talent and you're also standing out in the freezing cold like handing these things
these flyers out yeah that's not a fun system to be a part of the trying to get on stage system
but for the comics, I always think,
man, if they just do that,
they'll have more funny shit to talk about.
If they just do that and make it through
and then eventually become a professional,
they could actually talk about that.
They could actually sit down on a talk show
and talk about how they used to hand out flyers
in the village for the comedy seller
before they could ever get on stage.
It's almost like a badge of honor that you did something like that.
I could definitely see that.
But only if you're like 21.
Yeah, not if you're 40.
If you're 40 and you're handing out, well, I don't know, fuck it, man.
If you're even more of a hero if you're 40 and you quit your job and you're 40 and you're out there handing out flyers,
that's even more fucking crazy.
Then I got some respect for you.
Still in my heart of hearts, I want there to be a way like for people to make it as comedians or to make it in any creative thing without having to do that sort of like bowing down, handing out flyers in the snow.
Well, I think that the clubs are really vulnerable, unfortunately.
It's not a lot of business in comedy clubs. And I think they probably, I don't know which clubs specifically pay people to hand out flyers or what have you.
But it's hard for clubs to stay open these days.
It's hard for people to get people to come in and sit down and watch comedy shows.
And I think a lot of it is the comedian's fault.
You know, I mean, a lot of it is people that don't stay in touch with their audience enough.
I think there's a lot of bad comedy out there, too, unfortunately.
You can't always find a good show.
It's difficult to find a good show.
L.A. is pretty exceptional.
I mean, L.A. has, there's a hundred great comics that live in and around L.A.
Like, easily, right?
Wouldn't you say? I meet a new one every
day, too. It's just non-stop.
Yeah, so many funny people here.
This is unusual. But it's like
people don't want to take a chance and go to
a comedy club on a Thursday night.
That's a lot of times what
these clubs need. They need
a really big Thursday night, a big
Wednesday night. And when they can
do that, then they can do that
Then they can pay their bills and stay open but for us without them life would suck
Imagine if you didn't have comedy clubs
And you had to like organize like open mic nights to work out new material at the Roxy or some shit
Yeah, next to a pool table
Be terrible without them without the ice house and the Comedy and Magic Club and places like that.
But that's a different relationship than that of a gallery and an artist.
Like, you really don't need them.
We need club owners.
I mean, if I wanted to sell my paintings for a million bucks, which is its own thing, I would need them.
Because Russian oligarchs and hedge fund guys, they work with galleries.
I mean, they don't want to be fucking coming over to my studio and having awkward conversation with me.
They want to go to a sleek white gallery
and have someone who speaks their language
assure them that it's a good investment.
But I don't sell work for a million dollars.
So there is a niche for me just to be on my own.
I think you can sell work for a million dollars.
We just have to make it so that you can sell work for a million dollars.
I mean, I don't mean we,
but I mean anybody who's involved in deciding what things cost.
If they just decided your work cost a million bucks, it's totally rational.
It makes sense.
I mean, there is work out there that costs a million bucks, right?
Why can't yours?
For sure it could.
It's a weird thing.
It's like art, it's like two things at once.
Like on one hand, it's like this object of beauty and pleasure.
But on the other hand, it's also like a stock.
It's an investment.
And stocks, like the prices of them, it's kind of arbitrary.
And it's the same with art.
And it has everything to do with who collects it, what collections you're in, what gallery you're in.
It's almost like the value is determined entirely based on the approval of certain people and has nothing to do with intrinsic qualities at all.
Well, there's also really clever ways of getting people excited about the price of something. And
who was it that was telling us about this? Oh, it was a friend that was talking to Tom Segura and I
when we were in New York. He was talking about how they set up, galleries set up an artist in
one way. They'll gift these pieces. And he was talking about this particular photographer.
And they created this guy's entire career
by gifting these really enormous,
very beautiful pieces to famous collectors
and saying, this is a $50,000 piece.
The gallery would like to gift this to you
just out of, you know, token of our appreciation
of your business, whatever.
So they give him this beautiful picture.
And then he cedes these to a couple other people.
Now, if there's art collectors that are all keeping up with the Joneses type guys,
and if there's some new guy who's giving out $50,000 pieces to that guy,
and then Mike has one and Shelly has one, I need to get one too.
Like, where is this guy? I need to go.
Oh, my God, he's amazing.
And then, boom, next thing you know, they do a gallery showing and they put up this guy's stuff and they've already established the price point.
They told him I'm gifting you a $50,000 piece.
And then boom, it's $50,000 for all these different photographs.
And they're flying off the shelves and they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day.
You know, obviously more than a day to take the pictures and print them and all that.
But it's an incredible windfall of money. And it was created with a sort of artificial demand
based on gifting things. No, it's absolutely ingenious. Also,
Damien Hirst, when he did that skull covered in diamonds, he started kind of...
Can you pull that up? Pull that up, Brian, if you can find it online.
He started kind of a, what do I want to call it, like a fund, a group of people, including himself, to buy the skull at auction so that it could be the highest priced artwork ever done.
So he was spending his own money on his own art just to create this webris of wealth.
Wow, that's hilarious.
That's a smart thing.
This is it right here?
Yeah.
Wow, that's beautiful. God. If you're a rapper. Is that a real skull This is it This is it right here Yeah Wow that's beautiful
God
If you're a rapper
Is that a real skull?
Yeah it is
You can buy real skulls
Isn't that weird?
Remember when I had that piranha tank
I had the real skeleton in it
Bought a skeleton
Bought like a femur
Couple of human heads
You can just buy them
Didn't that creep you out?
Like there was like spirits attached to that I don't buy it Energy I think it's buy them. Didn't that creep you out? There was spirits attached to that.
I don't buy it.
Energy.
I think it's just a bone.
Didn't feel a fucking thing.
It's very weird.
I first used to think.
Well, not only not, but who knows how they died?
Who the fuck knows how they died?
How are you getting a hold of bones?
Don't worry about it.
When you're buying bones from Malaysia,
do you really have a direct line of,
what was the term you would use?
Like a direct line of possession from the body, from the person being alive to them being dead to you having that skull on your desk?
And do you just throw it away?
How do you get rid of it?
I just got rid of it.
Wink, wink.
What the fuck? Wink, wink.
The bones were dissolving in the water.
I found that fascinating.
Like, very quickly.
Like, within a year, the bones were dissolving.
And just regular, that's my, you know, fresh water.
I had a fresh water tank.
So imagine, you know, in the ocean, how quickly your bones dissolve.
Probably even more quickly, right?
Or would it be the opposite because of the salt content?
Would it be the opposite?
I'm just freaked out.
I didn't know that was a real skeleton this whole time.
Yeah, totally.
So was it like a memento mori for you or was it just decoration?
Well, I'm an asshole.
And I thought it would be cool to have piranhas in my house and to feed them things where there were skulls laying around on the bottom of the tank.
That's just the true story.
What do you feed piranhas?
Goldfish.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They fuck up some goldfish.
But, you know, what's way cooler than piranhas, though, is people who have those, if you've
ever been to someone who has, like, a reef, have a coral reef and like all those like little reef dwelling plants and stuff, like really delicate plants.
Very difficult to grow.
So it's hard to do correctly.
We have like one of those really beautiful coral reef looking things.
But when they do have them, they have these incredibly colorful fish.
I mean, it's constant art.
I mean, if you look at a coral reef, like one of those really good tanks that people put together,
they have that one reality show.
Yeah, mine was like a real school.
They have that.
It was a long time ago, ladies and gentlemen.
I've changed.
I wouldn't do that today.
I have kids.
But they can make them so that it's like mesmerizing.
Like you're just looking at all these different colors of plants
and these different colors of these weird little fish.
That's way more beautiful than piranhas.
Piranhas are boring.
They just sit there and wait to kill something.
Then when you throw a goldfish in there,
they fuck the goldfish up and then that's it.
Yeah.
But they're not beautiful.
There's things that are beautiful
and there's things that are not beautiful.
And I don't know, I'm not sure I could define
why something's beautiful, why something's not.
And sometimes what's beautiful changes.
Like there's people that are so tired of traditional beauty
that ugliness becomes beautiful to them.
Scars become beautiful to them.
Character becomes beautiful to them.
You know, people just, they change what they find beautiful in the world
and what they see.
I think that's pretty fascinating, and I don't know why.
No, it's a fascinating thing.
I mean, you take war.
War is one of the ugliest things in the world.
It's the destruction of fucking everything.
But I follow these guys.
They're these Western Muslim fundamentalists who are
going to fight in Syria right now. And they all have Instagram accounts. And their Instagram
accounts are the most fetishist, most like they're fetishizing war. They are like taking
these horrifying scenes from like Aleppo or Raqqa and they're running them through filters and
they're kind of making, they're ripping
them out of context and making them beautiful
and it's this weird thing because it's like you know
that if you were there, this apocalypse
this is death, this is like the end of thinking beings
but over the internet
through all these filters it becomes beautiful
like when you stand far enough away
Wow, that's an interesting
way to think about it
that it really truly is what it is, going through a bunch of filters and that's an interesting way to think about it. That it really truly is what it is, going through a bunch of filters.
And that's the only way you could ever watch, like, Saving Private Ryan.
It has to go through all these filters.
Exactly. They have to, like, take the horror and make it aesthetic.
Yeah, and detach you from it in some way.
You know, put you into it, but still detach you from it.
Yeah, otherwise no one would ever accept it.
I mean, the only reason why people accept war in this day and age
is because it's nowhere near us.
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, why would you accept something that's taking living, thinking,
loving people and turning them into red mash?
Yeah, and all with dubious intent.
I mean, there's reasons to go to war.
There's reasons to defend countries against
invaders. And then there's like weird shit.
We're like, wait a minute. Why are we over there?
What did the Afghans do?
What did they do? What did they do to us?
This seems like a weird adventure.
We're over there for how many years?
What the fuck is going on?
Yeah, and that it's
still going on. 2013.
It's very bizarre.
2014. Still going on. you win. And then we go to war on terror. Terror is a tactic. Terror can't surrender.
You know, and it leads to all these incredibly, incredibly dubious decisions, whether it's like New York, where cops are frisking young guys balls just to look for marijuana,
or whether it's fucking Gitmo, or whether it's this unending war in Afghanistan.
Yeah. There's definitely more information about it today than ever before too you know there's so
many people taking little youtube videos of people doing fucked up things and just there's there's
just more ways for people to sort of spread the truth than kind of ever before it's it's harder
to keep a gitmo open today than it was a long time ago like the more stories that come out of
there and the more you're like jesus what the fuck are they doing? What are they doing? They're playing loud music and keeping them up all night and hog-tying
them and waterboarding them. What are you getting out of that?
You guys are fucking freaks. What are you doing?
What are you doing to people? Does that work?
When I was there, one of the things that I learned that I hadn't realized before was
most of the guys there are people that we bought for bounties in Afghanistan.
We bought them?
Yeah.
So this is what we did.
War in Afghanistan starts.
We're looking for Arab dudes in Afghanistan, you know, like Bin Laden was.
They called them the Afghan Arabs.
They were these, like, guys who had, you know, they had fought the Russians and then stayed on and, you know, were fundies. So we're looking for these guys. So what we do is we drop
fucking flyers on Afghanistan offering 5,000 buck bounties for any Arabs they capture. Now,
$5,000 in Afghanistan is 10 years local salary. So what happens is they just bring in Arabs.
They're not terrorists necessarily. They're not fighters. They're just fucking Arab dudes.
They also bring in a bunch of just fucking Arab dudes. They also bring
in a bunch of like random Afghan dudes who are like mentally ill or owe debts to people or use
drugs or who otherwise have annoyed them. And then these guys, we buy them 5,000 bucks. The locals
are like, yeah, he's a, he's a terrorist. Give me my money. And then they go over to Gitmo and
there's no way for them to prove that they're innocent. What? Wait a minute.
Really?
Really.
I mean, how many of them are like that in there, you think?
Well, how about this?
Okay.
Almost 800 people have gone through Gitmo.
We've had eight convictions for war crimes so far.
Wow.
So, I mean, lots of, I mean, there are definitely scary, evil fucking people in Gitmo, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Nashiri.
And then there are also probably like misguided teenage dudes who shot a rifle once at us who, you know, I mean, they were shooting a rifle, but should they be like tortured for 12 years for it?
No, I don't think.
And then there's just people like this one Al Jazeera cameraman that we held there for a bunch of years.
Just a cameraman?
He was an Al Jazeera cameraman, yeah. there for a bunch of years. Just a cameraman? He was an Al Jazeera cameraman, yeah.
They held him there for years?
They did.
And so Chelsea Manning, when she leaked the Gitmo files that show kind of our evidence against people and what we hope to get out of them, what we hope to get out of this guy was information on Al Jazeera.
Wow.
That's crazy. So how many people are in Gitmo currently? 155. There's 155 guys in there. And out of those 155 guys,
how many of them are like really scary people? And how many of them are these people that were, in your opinion, sold?
So when I spoke to the chief prosecutor of Gitmo, General Mark Martins, he told me that 20 people are prosecutable there.
20?
20.
So the rest of them, it's just like they have them, they just have to keep them now?
Yeah, they're not prosecutable.
Because the thing is, just because someone shot a rifle at American forces in Afghanistan doesn't mean they did a war crime.
Like, that's not a war crime.
That's just, you know, that's just being like a Taliban soldier or whatever.
And so you can't you can't try them for shooting a rifle at you 12 years ago.
So their logic is that they're holding these guys until the end of the war.
But the war isn't against Afghanistan that they're holding them against until the end of.
The war is against terror.
So they are holding these guys until the end of the war on terror.
Whoa.
Wow.
That's like the war of – that is such an insane statement.
That war has been going on forever.
And it can end. I mean terror is a tactic. Right. That war has been going on forever. And it can end.
I mean, terror is a tactic.
Right.
And when did it start?
I mean, is there a defined begin point to the war on terror?
I mean, didn't it?
When?
When did it start?
I think 9-11 is when they started the war on terror.
But couldn't they backdate it to other terrorist activities?
Like, couldn't they backdate it to the Iranian hostages from the Carter administration if they really wanted to get crazy?
I mean, couldn't they backdate it to, you know, the attack on Israeli athletes back in the Olympics?
They could backdate it all the way if they wanted to.
I mean, the war on terror has been on from the beginning of time.
It will never end.
Meaning, like, this is not a war that is going to be over anytime soon.
No, it can't.
So they're just locked up.
Yeah, they're just locked up.
And it's this weird bureaucratic thing.
And part of the problem is, like, okay, let's say you have a dude, right,
who either is innocent or he's, like, some low-level grunt.
And he's been to Gitmo, and he can't go back to his home country for whatever reason.
And no other countries want to
take him because we've made a big deal about how these guys are the worst and the worst in the
world and we can't resettle them to america because americans are fucking cowards who are so
terrified that like a 50 year old man might i don't know blow something up so they're just stuck
there by the way people like right-wing people are going crazy right now.
America's a bunch of, you think we're cowards?
Because we don't want a man who's in Guantanamo Bay walking amongst my children.
Okay, so here's an example of what I'm talking about.
There are these dudes, and they finally let them out after 12 years.
But they're Uyghurs.
So they are Chinese guys fighting.
They're a Chinese ethnic minority. They were fighting against China. They had no problem
with us. They were swept up in the war on terror. And they were put in Guantanamo.
Immediately, we realized that these guys weren't fighting us. They were fighting China.
Multiple tribunals decided this. The Bush administration said these guys, you know,
not fighting us. There were church groups that wanted to take them in America and resettle them here. China wanted them back because China wanted to torture them
to death. But we were so fucking scared as a country that we would not allow the resettlement
of anti-Chinese people in America. So what did we...
We kept them in Gitmo.
We slowly got rid of them one by one.
I put them in like Albania.
We put some of them in like a fucking...
Where was it?
It was like some Polynesian island took some of them.
We put the last of them in Slovakia very recently.
It sounds like if somebody one day writes a book on Guantanamo Bay, it's going to be a doozy.
Yeah.
Right?
That book's going to be a doozy.
That sounds nuts.
That's a terrifying thing that humans can do.
We touched upon it a bit yesterday with the immortal technique that the way that people can dehumanize the other, you know, whether it's another gender, whether it's another race, whether it's another nationality, whether it's another sexual orientation, whatever the other that we can justify like dehumanizing, people are capable of incredible ugliness. It's so strange, the broad range of what we're capable of. Like,
amazing, loving things and the worst. Like, I have a friend, and he has these neighbors,
and they're an old couple. And they come over, and they're like his kids' long-lost grandparents.
They're so nice. It's like they've always been a part of the family.
They're just really sweet people who live next door.
And they buy the kids, like, presents for Christmas,
and they do little cute things with them,
and they'll, like, babysit them.
And they love these kids like family.
They just got lucky.
Just got lucky and moved next to some beautiful people
who are super cool and friendly.
But you could also move next to someone who wants to eat your kids you know i mean we're capable of so much of a range it's it's it's hard to wrap your head around sometimes it really is no it's
the most fascinating thing like we have you know this little bit of light between these two voids
and we can do anything with it we can you know we can make the most amazing art we can like fucking
save kids and we can love each other and. We can, you know, we can make the most amazing art. We can like fucking save kids and we can love each other. And then we can also turn each other into red
mash. I wonder if, if it's important to have both wonder if it sounds like a weird thing to say,
but if everything is natural, I mean, if the, the, the way giraffes form herds, the way birds
fly together in the sky and what something looks like it's orchestrated.
If all that stuff is natural, why would we assume that human behavior isn't natural too?
And although it's like super complex and way more complicated than what we see in the animal world,
all these like pushes and pulls and struggles and accomplishments, all that stuff together, the evil and the good,
it's almost like you can't appreciate one without the other.
Without the evil, it almost seems like the actual good just wouldn't have the same feeling that it has.
It has this amazing feeling because we understand loss, because we understand evil,
we understand aggression, we understand all these really uncomfortable, unfortunate aspects of humanity.
So when we find someone who's awesome,
you know, it's just, that's why it feels so good.
If everybody was awesome,
we'd be like a bunch of fucking,
like a nation of spoiled lottery winners.
You know, like where we have just no idea
how lucky we are.
Just stumbling through the whole thing.
But it's almost like to see the evil
and to hear about things like Guantanamo Bay.
It's horrific, of course,
but it almost like it gives the loving part of humanity more energy.
It's almost like inspired to perform stronger acts of love
in the face of the most fucked up shit available in 2014.
It's real weird because I think there's a relationship there that's unavoidable. And I don't like that feeling. I don't like the
idea that we're never going to get our shit together. I'd like to think that people will
get their shit together. I'd like to think that within my lifetime, I would see a massive change
in the way people interact with each other. Because I think it's possible with individuals. If it's possible with individuals, it should be
possible with all of us. But then the other part of me, the more rational part that's not going on
emotions and hope says, I think that this is always how it's going to be. This is how shit
keeps moving. If you don't have this, you don't keep moving. If you don't have murder, if you
don't have rape, if you don't have horror, you don't have people assaulting people, if you don't have this, you don't keep moving. If you don't have murder, if you don't have rape, if you don't have horror, you don't have people assaulting people, if
you don't have drug overdoses and car accidents, then you don't appreciate peace. Then the
lake doesn't look so beautiful. Then the birds chirping don't mean as much. The whole thing
is reliant upon each other. And the love that you get, the strength of it, is almost dependent
upon your understanding of evil in the world, dependent upon your understanding of death, dependent upon your understanding of misfortune.
Well, just by being human, you're kind of born into that tragedy.
We're the only animal that understands that we're going to die.
We think, right?
We don't know about dolphins.
That's true.
They might know us up.
So like my cat, who I had since I was 11, I love this little beast so much.
And we just had to put her to sleep finally.
She's like 20 years old.
And I don't think she knew.
Like one day she's just like sproing around, being bad, stealing shit.
And then the next day her like back legs stop working.
And yeah, poor little beast.
I was so sad. But I think it was like kind of merciful like she she didn't she didn't know
like we we had to know and kind of decide for her you know yeah well it would have just been
really slow especially if she's in a protected environment where she has good food and a warm
place to sleep and it takes a long time for their little bodies to quit.
But we were both talking about how I have a cat who's 17 now.
I've had her since she was a little tiny baby.
My sister gave her to me.
And she was like a little fluff ball.
And she does this howl thing at night.
We were talking about it's like, you know,
they say that it's like cats don't know what they're doing.
It's like a form of cat dementia.
Like they might even have have cat Alzheimer's.
She's old as fuck.
17 is really old.
What was the phrase that you used?
That it was like the opera song of death.
Oh, yeah.
Mine does that.
How old is yours?
About 15, 16.
Those old cats, man.
That's a weird thing they do.
She never did that when she was younger.
I think it's also, like, you know how when people start to lose their hearing
and then they start talking louder and louder to compensate?
I think this might be the cat thing.
She's like, human, get me food, but she doesn't hear herself,
so she has to just scream at the top of her lungs.
Maybe.
Maybe they just, maybe even darker.
Here's where it gets really dark.
Maybe that is like nature trying to set them up to get killed.
Because it's a nighttime thing.
They're out there moaning and howling.
I mean, maybe unbeknownst to them that that's sort of like a calling card for predators.
To let them know that there's some sort of suffering animal.
Meow, meow. And, you know, some coyote hears that and's some sort of suffering animal. Meow, meow.
And, you know, some coyote hears that and is like, oh, shit, it's the dinner bell.
You know?
Maybe they just get hornier the older they get.
Yeah, like they're all cougars?
Yeah.
Like, come on, I haven't had sex ever.
I'm about to die.
I want it now.
Yeah, right?
A lot of them have never had sex ever.
That's a good point.
My cats never had sex except for my dog. Yeah, right? A lot of them have never had sex ever. That's a good point. My cat's never had sex except for my dog.
Yeah.
But they don't do that when they go outside
so my theory sucks. Because if they're in
danger and fear outside, like
when my cat goes outside, she doesn't make any noise.
It's only when she's inside, in the comforts
of the house, and she lets out that wail.
But it might be just to
attract predators to figure out a way in through the
doggy door. Right.
You know?
Can you imagine?
You woke up and you saw a coyote eating a cat in your house.
Ugh.
That's happened before.
You hear about that lady in Chile recently?
She came home, fucking, there was a cougar in her house.
Like, she took all these photos of it.
It was like wrestling with the lampshades
or the shades to the window.
It's just a regular cougar, like an older lady just fucking around on a lamp.
Drunk, one shoe on, lipsticks all fucked up.
Fucking with lampshades.
Get out of here, lady.
What are you doing in my house, you crazy bitch?
No.
No.
I don't know how we got on that subject.
Cats. Old cats dying.
Yeah, imagine having Bruce Jenner in your house.
Look at this guy.
Something's going on.
This is TMZ's alleged discovery
that Bruce Jenner is becoming a woman.
Well, he supposedly got his larynx scraped off.
He got his Adam's apple shaved down, allegedly.
That's why he's got a Band-Aid on it.
But who knows?
That shit could be Photoshopped.
Wow, this is TMZ.
I mean, it looks like he's getting boobs lately.
Or did he always have that?
He's an old guy.
Old guys like that, their gravity starts hitting them.
Look, I mean, Sylvester Stallone was one of the few guys that's, like, deep into his 60s
that still works out on a regular basis.
Most people quit.
And Bruce Jenner was this amazing athlete.
He was an Olympian.
He was an Olympic gold medalist.
He was on the cover of fucking Wheaties.
And now he's been...
It's one of the biggest blows to masculinity in our time
is the fall of Bruce Jenner.
It's like, what's happened to that guy?
Just the way he gets yelled at on that show.
The way he gets demoralized.
He's a fucking Olympian!
You crazy freaks
are just detention whores.
This guy is a goddamn Olympian.
You treat him like shit.
And he wants to be a woman now.
You broke Bruce Jenner.
What if this is all
just a joke though?
Like a part of a troll
that the Kardashians wrote?
That would be hilarious.
It could be.
I mean, who knows? I mean mean we're playing right into it the
whole reality thing the whole reality show thing is a fascinating aspect of
our culture it's absolutely fascinating I know a lot of people think that it's
base and stupid and idiotic and most certainly it is it's also quite
fascinating that that's become something that people are really attracted to,
is watching the lives of people who have nothing going on that's exceptional.
There's no singing.
There's no dancing.
There's no entertainment.
They're just like you and I, allegedly, and that that's become something that people are into.
That's really weird.
Well, don't you think it's also because reality shows are so cheap to make?
Because you don't have to hire writers.
You don't have to hire talent.
You just have to take, you know, people who you don't really have to pay a lot of money, put them in really stressful situations, get ununionized producers who you don't acknowledge are scripting the entire thing, and put it together.
It's just so much cheaper to do.
There's such an economic impetus behind it.
I think it's also just that it's really effective, too. They're really high rated. Like,
the Duck Dynasty show got like 16 million people to watch it. I mean, that's a lot of goddamn
people. It's economically effective because it works. People like watching stupid shit,
you know? That's a fact. People are tired of thinking when they get home from a job that
drains them of any creative juices that they might still have left from their childhood.
Every day, it's like a fucking bad battery slowly getting drained down to zero. And they don't have
the energy, a lot of them, to watch anything challenging or fascinating or read a book or you know
partake in a hobby no they want to drink a beer and they want to watch really
stupid shit whether it's the Real Housewives or any of that stuff it's
it's really fascinating though this attraction that we have to it it's a
weird it's a weird symptom of where our culture is that there's only so many
hours of programming on every network in a day. So many hours, you know,
you only get like, you know,
12 hours that people are really actually paying attention. Right.
And what are you putting on during that time? What are you putting on?
You're putting on shit. Everybody's putting on shit.
Like there's gotta be a better way to do this.
Like the, the, the way you guys are doing it,
like, it's almost like
you're creating stuff that only idiots would like.
And it's a strange thing,
because it's the same time as the most beautiful
and amazing things are happening on TV also.
It's at the same time as, like, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Yes.
So there's the most high fucking beautiful art
and madness on one hand,
and then there's just stupid swill
where vain people are being humiliated on the other.
But the people who are making those shows,
I met them.
They're really nice folks.
It's just they just have a job.
Their job is to make reality TV.
I mean, that's where it becomes a catch-22.
I know a lot of them.
One of my neighbors is a producer, makes reality shows. Nice guy. I think, that's where it becomes a catch-22. I know a lot of them. One of my neighbors is a
producer, makes reality shows. Nice guy. I think most people are nice. I mean,
so I was in Lebanon recently doing this piece for the New York Times about sectarian militias in
Tripoli. And so I interviewed these sniper dudes. And these guys are like the sharks and the jets,
but with rocket launchers and with grenades and stuff. They're two neighborhoods.
They shoot at each other.
They kill each other.
They train, like, nine-year-old boys to shoot RPG launchers.
Like, it's fucked up.
And I interviewed these guys, and they're really cool.
Like, they're just, like, nice, chill dudes, like, joking around with you,
like, sharing cigarettes, showing off their, you know, weapons stash.
They're nice.
Everyone is nice.
Wow.
That's bizarre. Except when they're not nice, you know, weapons stash. They're nice. Everyone is nice. Wow. That's bizarre.
Except when they're not nice, you know?
What a great statement.
Everyone is nice except when they're not nice.
That's like Roadhouse reversed.
Remember Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse?
Be nice till it's time to not be nice.
Oh, God.
You remember?
That was the big fucking tough guy statement in Roadhouse.
One of the great pieces of American cinema.
Man, I'm so culturally illiterate.
But I just think that most people are pretty cool
until they're in a context where it's not to their benefit to be cool
or where the rest of the group is doing something horrible,
and then they go along with that.
But just like an average everyday life, most people are great.
They're real fun.
They'll joke around with you and have coffee and are cool.
Yeah, that gives me hope.
It gives me hope when I look at how many humans there are.
There's 300 million of us in this country,
and how little violent crime there actually is.
Because we know that people just working beside each other
on a daily basis in offices and wherever you work,
there's going to develop interpersonal conflicts.
There's inter-office dating,
and then there's drama that comes from that.
There's inter-office friendships that go sour.
People loan people money.
There's potential for violence, like literally in every office in America all day, every day.
There's always someone who doesn't like someone.
If you have an office of 200 people, for sure there's, like, a few disputes.
For sure there's a guy who's fucking always parking in my fucking parking spot.
There's a this, a that.
He always handles my paperwork different.
Fuck him.
People are—it's amazing how little we kill each other.
I mean, it really is quite incredible, the sheer numbers.
The problem is we get hit with the news of the entire country and the world, in fact.
Anything extraordinary that happens in other parts of the world, especially especially nasty or evil we hear about that
too we want to know all the most fucked up shit so we're dealing with this impossible to understand
number of essentially seven billion human beings and then we're hearing a surprisingly low number
of horrific things for seven billion fucking people but our brains are still these caveman brains that are
designed for uses of tribes of 150 people so when we keep hearing about all this bad shit we're like
imminent danger dangers around the corner we're gonna fix which is the reason the reason why the
government can still pull off something like the NSA and say, we need to protect you from terrorism, so we're going to look at all your girly pictures and all your emails
and we're going to listen to all your phone calls because we need to protect from terrorism.
What terrorism? What terrorism? What are you talking about, man? There's 300 million of us.
More people are dying every day from aspirin than are dying from fucking terrorism.
What are you doing? What's really going on?
Because if you were really trying to protect people, this is not a good good way to do it it's not a good way to listen to everybody's
fucking emails you guys can't figure out who the bad guys are didn't they do bad shit already
does people just wait their whole life and they're super goody two-shoes and then one day do something
really bad no not usually right so follow the fucking bad people find them from the jump
and you know you're gonna miss a few the cracks. But don't take away our rights.
That's ridiculous.
That's some terrorism shit right there.
Because you're making people aware that you're listening to everything they do.
You're watching over them.
You're looking through their fucking laptop webcam.
And you're justifying it how?
Get the fuck out of here.
That's some creepy, weird, stalker shit that you're allowed to get away with because you're the government.
I say no.
The government is just people.
And we vote them in and allow them to have power.
We don't allow them to do all this stuff.
This is crazy.
You can't just look through people's email.
That's ridiculous. That's not effective. This is crazy. You can't just look through people's email. That's ridiculous.
That's not effective. It's ridiculous. It's insanely rude. There's so many things about
it that are wrong when you're dealing with people who've committed no crimes and in fact pay taxes,
follow rules, contribute to society, and you're looking through their stuff too.
You look through everybody's stuff. You hold all their phone calls? Who are you? You're just a
person. Like you're a person in an organization. No one granted that organization that kind of
power. You guys are criminals. This is criminal activity. You can't just do that.
And then they always justify it by kind of pointing to a scary other, like making a bogeyman.
Maybe the bogeyman is like scary Arab terrorist.
Maybe it's scary inner city black guy with guns.
Like they always paint this picture of someone else and be like, oh, look over there.
We're only looking at him.
We're protecting you.
You're the good people.
But in reality, I mean, we're all we're all the fucking we're all the fucking same people.
And well, there are for sure some horrible people out there in the world.
Absolutely. And we have, you know, we have a real issue as a society in in in recognizing how much of it is caused by the resentment of the United States occupation of these countries.
How many of these evil people have been motivated
by things that our own people have done? Like we need, you know, we really need to look at it
in an honest way before we decide like what's good and what's bad and what we're going to
tolerate and what people are going to go after. Like who started all this? Like why is this going
on? No, unsurprisinglyprisingly when you drone a wedding party
and burn some burn people alive they don't like you just shockingly isn't that crazy that you're
telling me that okay but there's a lot of people who would hear that statement and go oh my god
she's exaggerating no they're not no there's no exaggeration you're telling actual yeah you're
telling just one of many stories where innocent people were murdered in this incredibly ineffective way of doing war.
And they had the balls to call any of that stuff surgical.
There's no surgery in war.
Bombs are not surgical.
These are things that destroy buildings.
They burn people alive.
You can't pinpoint things like that.
My boyfriend went on a program where he got to do
illustrations at a drone base. And he actually got to like look through, you know, to hang out
in the cockpit where they have the drones and to see what you see on the camera. It's not surgical.
It's like a blurry, blurry video image. And that's what you're putting decisions of life and death on?
Well, did you see the recent thing where the NSA was using metadata?
I did, yeah.
They were using metadata to locate cell phones
that they believed were in the possession of people that they wanted.
So they would shoot a missile towards that cell phone.
And then they do crazy things like they redefine what winning means.
Like they'll be like, oh, such and such number of militants were killed.
But the only way they know they're militants is because they're men between like the ages of 16 and 60.
That's like that's the that's the only definition of militant, that you're a man and you're standing on the spot of land.
Is it the issue that almost all the people that are of that age in that area are resentful of the American troops and they all become militants?
I mean, you can't burn people alive just because of what's in their head.
Yeah.
But no, but I mean, what I'm saying is like, let's imagine it the other way.
Yeah.
Let's imagine if we were being occupied, if there was Afghanistan, sent troops, and they were in Kansas.
You don't think those Kansas farmer dudes would get fucking fired up
and every one of them would want to kill the Afghanistan invading army?
Of course they would.
So they all would become militants.
Well, that's how they define it.
I mean, I'm sure that some of them would just be like,
I'm up in my hills, I just want to mind my own business and have my family and don't want to risk my life. And I'm sure some of them would be like like, I'm up in my hills. I, you know, just want to like mind my own business and have my family and, you know, don't want to risk my life. And I'm sure some of
them would be like, fuck you occupying army. But yeah, if you occupy a country, they're going to
be resentful of you. Everything about an occupation is awful from like making people go through
checkpoints to searching them to raiding people's houses and breaking their shit to hauling people
off to jail. Like that shit makes people not like you, unsurprisingly.
Yes, unsurprisingly.
But it seems like, I mean, it doesn't even talking about that.
You can hear the wheels spinning on the other side.
You can hear people say, oh, listen, you're exaggerating.
We're making, there's a few unfortunate casualties, but hey, that's the price of war.
And if it wasn't for that, the war wouldn't be going on over there.
It would be going on over here.
Molly Crabapple, whatever your real name is.
Well, it's interesting the metaphor of a few bad apples, right?
In real life, if you have a few bad apples, they don't just like stay isolated.
They poison the whole barrel.
That's true.
Don't just like stay isolated. They poison the whole barrel.
That's true.
It's actually a really apt and interesting metaphor for problems during an occupation or problems on a police force.
We just don't view it the right way.
But I mean, everything I'm talking about is factual, documented.
They're, you know, acknowledged by our government. I mean.
Except the fact that you said that we're such cowards because I don't think you understand your history.
Young lady, if you went back and looked over the accomplishments of this great nation, people get very upset of you.
If you try to like lump Americans, America, we're cowards.
I fucking love America. I fucking love New York. I was born in New York.
Like when I was in the courtroom drawing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, all I could think was like, you're the man who murdered 2000 of my fucking neighbors and you blew up my city. Fuck you. But how
very girl of you that was like, that was like such a, a chick statement. Fuck you. You know,
I guess dudes would do it too, but it would be a little, you'd have, you'd have deeper
dude voices. My vocal range is somewhat
higher than yours. But you know what I'm saying about... No, but it's... I don't think Americans
are... How about this? I don't think it's the American way to be cowards, but I think that
cowardice has been foisted upon us to excuse horrific shit by our government.
I think there's some of that, for sure. And there's also people that feel incredibly disenfranchised and don't know what to do. There's also people that realize that voting itself seems to be wholly ineffective. And then people get into office that you thought were going to make great changes and turn out to be an extension of the past administration in many ways. Oh, God, I agree with you. Like, I was hoping so hard when Obama was elected. Like, I, you know, I worked for his campaign the first time I like, gave way too much money for him.
And I remember that night when he was elected, everyone's dancing on the streets. And the next
morning, like the sky was bluer. And then slowly, but surely, you realize that the same old shit
was happening or even being intensified. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what the story is. I wonder if he tricked us
or I wonder if that is just the job. Like you get in there and it's a machine that you, you,
you, you have a little influence. You can move things a little bit, but look, things are in
place and they've been in place for a long time. And you start talking to international bankers
and you start realizing the profit motive
behind this decision or that decision
and how it could be justified
and rationalize that
and spit it out in a speech
and then that's your day-to-day
and then you're on that fucking path.
You're on that path of justifying and rationalizing shit
and then one day you find yourself talking about Syria
and you find yourself on TV talking about Syria and you find yourself
on TV talking about Syria and the entire country goes no fuck this there's no support for it zero
and everybody's like okay okay I guess uh guess we won't go to Syria and then it just stops I mean
that there's never been a better indicator that this whole thing is a charade than Syria.
The fact that it was of utmost importance to the fact that the president had to make a big press conference and stand in front of everybody and talk about the imminent military invasion of this horrible nation that's killed people.
And just that's it.
They just killed people.
So they did.
They did essentially what a lot of people do. But we got to get over there. And the entire country went, no, you didn't hear even in the like the conservative pundits. No one was for that.
A quarter of the population of Lebanon now are Syrian refugees.
Like they're just fucking blanketing the mountains there.
Like you go to the Bekaa Mountains and like there's literally like a fucking tent with a family in it every few feet.
And I talked to these people and they'd be like, well, that was stupid that he said chemical weapons are a red line.
Like why is it any better to be killed with shrapnel than it is chemical weapons? And and they'd be like why did he say he was going to he was going to help us and then he didn't
and i would say well because no one in america wanted him to because we shot the bed so much
with iraq i think uh there's a lot of people that we could go i mean if we really wanted to do good
in the world and save some people,
wouldn't we invade North Korea?
Wouldn't that be, like, number one?
Man.
Doesn't that seem like that's the bad one?
That's so many people, though, that you would have to do something with.
You know, they're broken people.
Are they, though?
They're just trapped.
They're trapped in a horrible, sick environment where they have a real dictator who is a murderer
who just kills his own family members because he thinks they're plotting against him.
He didn't just kill his uncle.
He killed his uncle's family.
That guy's alive today in 2014.
He's not like Alexander the Great.
He's not like some Hitler character that we talk about in history books.
He's around right now.
And he kills his family.
Yeah.
Like, he's suspecting they were trying to have a coup against him.
So he murders them all.
He's our fucking Caligula.
He's dark.
And no one talks about going over there.
Don't talk about it.
Well, I mean, South Korea wouldn't want it.
Could you imagine having to, like, try to deal with that many starving, deeply brainwashed people?
Well, it would definitely suck, but I think that it's better than the alternative.
The alternative is these people stay imprisoned.
You have a million plus people.
I mean, how many people live in North Korea?
How many millions?
These poor people are fucked. I mean, they're in one of the Korea? How many millions? These poor people are fucked.
I mean, they're in one of the most evil dictatorships that we know of.
They're in a dictatorship where if you didn't cry loud enough or convincingly enough when his dad died, you'd go to jail for six months.
So I got to give a shout out to one of my best friends here, Michael Malice.
He just did a book on North Korea.
And he's a celebrity ghostwriter.
And so he— You don't mean he writes about ghosts.
I don't mean he writes about ghosts, except in this instance.
He ghost wrote the autobiography of Kim Jong-il. He called it Dear Reader.
Whoa. I like it. Dear Reader. That's rude. That's almost racist.
I am the reader of this country.
Right?
It's almost.
If you found someone super duper sensitive, they could say that that would be, are you trying to be racist?
No, he's just talking to the reader.
I understand.
But it's like a double entendre.
Yes.
There's a double entendre to it.
You know?
If someone super sensitive would really like use that as an excuse to blow up at you right now.
Not you.
I mean, if you were him, if you wrote that story.
But his book, one of the things it raises money for is there are actually organizations that encourage North Koreans to defect and give them resources when they do.
How do they get out of there?
It's really hard to escape. But there actually are North Korean defectors
living in South Korea right now.
They must feel so lucky.
I watched the whole piece.
It was horrific about this guy who left
and left his family behind.
They tortured his family and hid the knowledge
that he had of what happened to his family
because he got away.
It was horrible.
It was so hard to watch.
He was weeping and weeping and thinking about his children.
And I can't imagine that that's going on today, you know?
And I know that there's horrible atrocities that are committed in Afghanistan.
It's not simply a cut-and-dry thing that, you know, the United States wants the resources
that country has.
There's also some horrible human
rights violations going on there, the oppressive regimes, the fundamentalist religious groups that
run various sects of whatever parts of that world that you're talking about, whether it's
Afghanistan, whether it's Iraq. There's a lot of bad people over there that it would do the people
that are around them much good if they remove those bad people but those north koreans they got it extra bad because there's no plans
there's nothing over there that we can take if we found like a billion dollars in diamonds under
north korea if we found you know some sort of natural gas pipeline that was like the greatest
supply ever pure energy we'd figure out a way to work with that little fuck.
We'd figure out a way to get in there.
He doesn't have anything.
If they had something, we'd already be there.
If they had something, we would slowly weasel our way in there.
We would give them some nice things and take care of them
and send over some teachers and give them some food
and slowly weasel our way in and then we would
eventually be like allies with north korea we'd we'd chop it up we can we get to figure it out
but he doesn't have shit so we get to see what happens when a country has no natural resources
there's no reason why anybody wants to invade you and you're being run by evil like the worst the worst possible progression of what a human
can become an evil dictator controlling a nation with fear the amount of pain and suffering that
comes directly from that fat little head is insane i mean it's insane the amount of power that a guy
has if he's a dictator and that's all going on right now. It's weird. And Dennis Robbins
over there playing basketball.
That's the weirdest thing. It's like how they worship the bulls.
Guy's a basketball fan.
Hey, maybe his uncle's a douchebag.
Maybe we're out of line. Maybe he killed that guy
because he was an asshole.
Kim Jong-il was a super movie buff, and he
actually kidnapped a South Korean director
and his wife to try to bring him over there
to start North Korea's film industry.
Oh, my God.
Did they get him back?
I think he eventually escaped, yeah.
Oh, my God.
He had to escape?
He had to escape.
Oh, what a crazy fuck.
So, yeah, the dictator's there.
They have their hobbies.
They're really passionate about them.
We have no reason to go over there.
That's a fascinating thing.
When you deal with someone who has, in one hand, passionate about them. We have no reason to go over there. That's a fascinating thing when you
deal with someone who has, in one hand, extreme power because they have this really disciplined
army. And then they also have nuclear power. They have nuclear weapons. And really bizarre that
that's also going on in something that's a total, complete dictatorship. It's a rare thing to get to see a nation with that kind of power
that also has this really unbelievably brutal dictatorship, but it has it today in this time,
you know, where, you know, we look back at Nazi Germany or we look back at, you know,
any of the evil empires of the past, it's all sort of blurry.
It's all sort of, well, you know, back then things were different.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, it's right now.
It's right now with the civil rights movement of the United States happening decades ago.
It's right here in this day and age.
It's right here after the space shuttle was retired.
I mean, it's going on right now. And that guy's just running shit over there. And we don't ever talk about that
place. Nobody talks about going over there and fixing that. We only go somewhere if you
got some good shit. Like, what do you got? You got some oil? Okay, we'll bring democracy.
We got democracy. You got oil. Let's work it out.
So much fucking democracy we brought to Iraq.
So much democracy.
Hey, listen, Miss Pessimistic.
It takes a little time for our work to plant seeds and take root.
Al-Qaeda just took over Fallujah in Iraq.
Did they really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's not good.
Well, yeah.
What happens now?
I don't know. We're out of there. Maybe we go back in because Al-Qaeda's in Fallujah. That'll be the next. Well, yeah. What happens now?
I don't know. We're out of there.
Maybe we go back in because Al-Qaeda's in Fallujah.
That'll be the next. Play ping pong in the Middle East.
Pull out of Afghanistan, back in Iraq.
Maybe that's the move.
Do you think that that actually goes on?
Like, that's the grand conspiracy theory is always connected to the idea that there's governments that will create conflict
in order to finance a war to go after that conflict and to make sure that people unite
against some greater evil. And that in the face of peace, like people become unruly and they want
to take over government and they want to like make too much reform. And that the way to keep people
in line and in check is to
constantly keep them in conflict. That's what I've always thought about the war on drugs because
drugs aren't a military problem. They're either people putting something in their body recreationally
or they're addicts, you know, struggling with a disease. They're not something that you deal with
with the metaphors of war. And yet we use that so that we can justify civil
liberties violations. Not only that, it doesn't necessarily ring true with everyone because we
know that there's good drugs too. I don't like the idea of you saying the war on drugs because
I think it's stupid. Because what about, are you going to take away my coffee? Guess what? I can
handle coffee, dude. And I like it. I like it and I can handle it. You don't have a war on coffee, okay?
Oh, no, but we don't count caffeine.
Oh, okay.
Well, what drugs do you have a war with?
Let's sort it all out logically.
Let's find out which ones you have a beef against that makes sense and which ones you don't.
But how about a war on assholes?
Everybody hates assholes.
When's that coming?
You have a war on these ambiguous things.
You have a war on these open-ended things like drugs.
There's a lot of good ones.
You can't have a war on drugs.
You don't even say a war on bad drugs.
You don't even say, let's have a war on addictive drugs.
No, it's the war on all drugs.
Fuck you.
I'm on drug side.
I like drugs more than I like assholes that want to universally go after all drugs.
Because I think that's stupid. Because drugs represent human ingenuity. It represents intelligence. It
represents the ability to extract chemicals and form things that may very well be beneficial,
may extend the lives of people you love and care about, may reduce suffering in people,
may cure people of certain illnesses. Drugs are not bad.
The problem is there are bad drugs.
So I think the war on drugs is just a stupid idea.
No, it's so foolish and misguided and justifies so many evil things.
So I look at Stop and Frisk in New York,
which is this program where cops hassle black and Latino guys and grope their balls, usually under the pretext of trying to find guns.
Where do I sign up?
Woo!
Groper? Gropey.
Gropey, just for the experience.
Just for the experience.
But it's all about finding drugs.
Right.
And it's like, we have a program where we're having cops feel up teenage guys to find drugs.
Is that what it started out as?
Do you think that there was any motivation to just try to reduce the amount of thuggish people that were harassing folks?
I mean, was there like a motivation behind it?
Because it's always nice to say that it's always the cops that did something terrible and they're going after these young Latino kids.
But was there a rash of crimes or people feeling intimidated?
I mean, sometimes it's a gray area.
Sometimes there's both.
Sometimes there's a lot of cops that they use it as a green light to go after kids and they're just racist.
And then sometimes there's stop.
I mean, the idea of stop and frisk might have been like
initially because they had people that had found people with weapons. It might've been that they
were worried that people would bring weapons to certain areas. So they say it's for weapons,
but it's guns are kind of big. You know what I mean? Like you don't need to do the super
invasive searches like they're doing to look for guns. They're big pieces of metal. Some dudes are
really good at hiding stuff. Gotta be got to be really careful about that.
You've got to check their balls.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think whenever you have a position of power,
like the cops, which is a pretty ultimate position of power,
and then you have people that are already feeling disenfranchised
because they're minorities, and then you put those together,
you're going to have this instant resentment anyway,
especially if the young kids know someone who's in jail or they've been to jail themselves
or they've known someone who's been abused by cops.
And for the cop and for the guy, it might be totally a different circumstance.
The cop might not be a racist at all.
I mean, I don't think that it's about like the individual cop's feelings.
Like a lot of cops are black
and Latino themselves
in New York.
I think it's that
systematically
it's a racist thing.
Right.
White guys who are
stopped and frisked
are about 10 times
more likely to actually
have something on them
than black and Latino guys.
White guys are stupider.
Or maybe you have to be
like really fucking
sketchy looking
to be stopped and frisked if you're a white guy whereas just being black or Latino gets you stopped and frisked. Or maybe you have to be like really fucking sketchy looking to be stopped and frisked
if you're a white guy, whereas just being black or Latino gets you stopped and frisked. Or maybe
the stop and frisk has made black and Latino guys stop carrying drugs. They just like leave it
places. That's possible. If I was a black or Latino guy and I was like really into weed, I'd probably
stash my weed all over town. I'd probably tuck it under garbage cans and shit somewhere. I wouldn't want to have it on me. If somebody takes it and they find it,
fuck it. At least I don't go to jail. You know, it's not that hard to get weed. But if you were
constantly getting bugged by cops. No, it's fucked up. I mean, I don't think the TSA should be
fucking groping people either. And stop and frisk is basically the TSA. But every single day,
every time you leave the house. Yeah, believe me, I'm in no way trying to justify stop and frisk.
But I think that it's first of all, it's not the cops' ideas.
The cops get their ideas from whoever decides and dictates policy.
And it's not the police officers themselves.
It's whoever's in charge.
Whatever reason they have, I would like to hear it.
I would like to know why they would think that it'd be okay to just stop and frisk people.
Maybe they've got a legitimate argument.
Fascinating it would be to hear.
But it's already hard as shit to be a minority
and to grow up in this haves and haves not world
that we're living in now.
It's already hard as fuck.
And if you think that the cops are constantly looking
to go after you,
if you're stopping and frisking someone
who's not doing anything, you're going after someone who's absolutely not committing a crime. Like you're
just finding a person walking and you're going right to them and just choosing them as someone
that you're going to harass. That's crazy. Like you're telling me you're that bad at finding crime
that you got to look for it in places where it's absolutely not happening right now. Are you an
investigator? What are you doing?
You're gonna deep go dig deep into this guy's life and pull up hard drives and find out what he's done
But you just find someone and search and search and search until you find a crime
No, you don't dude you catch people that either did crimes or in the middle of crimes, you know future crime
You're not preventing crime. You just decided he might have weed on him. It's you can't do that
That's just creepy.
You just can't walk up to people and like take their shit. But for the cops, I feel bad for them.
I really do. It's a shit position to be in where you're, you're being told that you have to do
that. And who knows if they have quotas. I mean, I don't know. I don't know, but we know that they
have definitely had quotas in the past when it comes to arrests, when it comes to speeding
tickets, things along those lines.
It's abusive.
It's abusive to those officers because they're going to be the ones that are the face of this shit policy.
They're going to be the ones that have to go out there and enforce these stupid rules.
If we had a better group of people that were in charge of dictating policy, I think we'd probably have a better relationship altogether between people and police.
No, I agree with you. And yeah, I just think that things like banning drugs by their nature lead to those sort of police abuses.
Oh yeah, for sure. Well, especially when you're looking for pot.
Come on, every cop knows, every cop. If a cop's in his 30s, he smoked pot. He just has. He's tried it once. The odds of him not are like 1 out of 1,000. So maybe 1 out of 1,000 really hasn't smoked pot. Maybe it's 1 out of 100. Let's go crazy. Let's give him as much room as possible.
all know that it's not killing anybody. You know it's not a real issue. So what are you doing?
Like, why would you have to arrest somebody for that? It's crazy. It's nonsense. That's the number one nonsense contributing factor for why people don't take other drug policy seriously or warnings
about other drugs seriously. It's the outrage that we have about being told lies about marijuana.
And the fact that you're arrested.
A cop can just pull your pockets up and find this.
Ah, look what I found.
And then you're locked in a fucking cage.
And that he thinks he's doing the right thing.
Yeah, busting perps.
I hate potheads.
I put them in jail as much as I can.
I had a friend who was a cop.
And he was telling me how he loves to arrest people for pot, even if they have a medical marijuana license.
Why?
And I was like, why would you do that?
I go, why would you do that?
I go, do you really think that guy's doing something horrible, or are you just taking advantage of the fact that you can lock him up?
And he's like, you know, when you're on the job, you know, I just run into so many of these fucking annoying people.
I go, they're so annoying, you should lock them up.
They have medical marijuana licenses. It's like, come on,, you should lock them up. They have medical marijuana license.
It's like, come on, man, don't do that.
Like, that's fucked.
And it's like one of the fucked up things about America
is that we take locking people up so lightly.
Yeah.
Taking away people's freedom,
locking them in a fucking cage
where they might be subjected to violence.
Like, we're just cool with that.
We imprison the highest percentage
of our population of anyone.
And this is a grave thing to lock someone in a cage.
Like, I don't think it should be done unless someone's fucking violent or a thief or someone who's actually done something bad.
It's not for people who do drugs or hookers or stuff like that.
I agree.
Both of those things are awesome.
There's no reason.
Hookers should be awesome.
It should be just like massages.
It should be something that people can choose to do for a living
it shouldn't be so stigmatized
the problem is it's so stigmatized
that the whole situation
is just sketchy and icky
for everybody
no it should be decriminalized
it is so fucked up that we are
locking women up because of what they do with their bodies
yeah it's fucked up that
you could do it for free,
but you can't.
I mean, it's a zero victim
because not only can you do it for free,
it's one of the most desirable things you could do to a person.
Like, people love it.
Like, they sell cars because of it.
I mean, how many movies are sold
with a woman's legs, long legs, stepping out of a car?
A man takes his shirt off and shows his rippling six-packs.
It's all sex. But if you pay for it stepping out of a car. A man takes his shirt off and shows his rippling six-packs. It's all sex.
But if you pay for it, it's a crime.
Can we
barter? You know, are you allowed to
barter? Can we use a barter system?
I wonder if Bitcoin works with prostitution.
I wonder if they could prosecute you for using
Bitcoin. If they don't even believe in Bitcoin's
money, if it's not real money,
if it's not real money, maybe that's the argument.
Like, man, I don't even believe in Bitcoin. We just play. We have sex together. But we pretend like we're giving each other money. If it's not real money, if it's not real money, maybe that's the argument. Like, man, I don't even believe in Bitcoin. We just play. We have sex together, but we pretend like
we're giving each other money. Well, I mean, sex work is another example of how making victimless
crimes leads to police abusing people. I did a piece on the fact that in New York, if you carry
multiple condoms, police can arrest you for loitering with the intent to be a prostitute.
Well, you're either that or you're a woman of loose morals.
And we would like to lock you up, keep you off the street because you might be out there
dishing out pleasure everywhere you go and do it in a safe manner.
Oh, God, no.
I've got time for you, you floozy.
Yeah, God, no.
God forbid people have joy in a safe way.
That would be terrible.
It's a weird thing.
It's a weird irony that we all enjoy sex.
Like almost everyone.
Doug Stanhope doesn't have sex anymore.
He's the only person I know.
Doug's probably not the healthiest guy in the world.
Except mentally.
He's very mentally healthy.
But he treats his body like a can.
Just throws things in there.
He's a maniac.
But he doesn't need sex apparently but most people
like it you know i think most people look forward to it most people enjoy intimacy and the idea that
that somehow or another could be a crime just because money's exchanged it's very strange
couldn't there be like a really good working relationship that a man and a woman could have where like it was like, yes, the guy paid the woman money, but they actually enjoyed each other's company and they were really good friends.
And they just had sex like every couple of weeks or so.
And the guy gave her money and then everybody's cool with it.
And the girl just has a few relationships like that.
So she's sort of a professional prostitute.
But really what she is is just a girl who has sex with a bunch of guys that she actually likes.
And that's her job. You know what I mean? And people would say, no,
that's awful. But why is it awful? Everyone's just having sex. Like, why is that awful?
That was the old school model of courtesans. You know, they would have... What is that?
Courtesans were, they were sex workers, but they also were kind of like very beautiful,
like fancy, like escorts.
And they were almost like living luxury objects would be the best way to describe them.
What year was this?
When this was going on?
It lasted for a long time.
I'm going to talk about the 1890s in Paris.
So you would like, let's say you were a rich dude.
You would hire a courtesan to sleep with her, of course, but also to have this like gorgeous
woman on your arm at the opera and also to like cover her in diamonds so you could show
how much of your own money you could waste on her and she would just be like this cool smart woman
who is also fucking gorgeous who was also a great lay and these women would maybe have like three
two or three like you know super rich protectors they were business women they would um you know
like they'd begin and end relationships of their own accord they'd maintain awesome households
and these women were some of the richest and most liberated women of their time.
Powerful rich hookers.
Why not?
Why not?
Why wouldn't it be?
Cortisol?
Cortisans.
Cortisans.
Cortisans.
Cortisol is the shit that you get nervous.
Stress.
Right?
Yep.
Cortisans.
That's interesting.
I never heard that before.
stress right yep courtesans that's interesting i never heard that before so it's like just a really intelligent version of prostitution and really effective yeah like a mixture of
a prostitute and someone who's an escort you know in the original sense of like escorting you places
yeah yeah professional escorts that's such a weird thing because until everyone sort of figured out
that it means prostitution a lot a lot of thought, okay, so people just hire people for dates.
That makes sense.
Like you say, if you have to go somewhere and you're supposed to bring a date,
just hire this person to be your date.
I guess that's effective.
I guess people need that.
And then I realized, oh, no, it's just people.
Some people still do it, though.
Some people still use them as a date where they, like,
are in town for a business meeting
and then they take them out to dinner and then they nail them and then wash them off.
That's sex though.
That's sex.
Yeah, but it's like a whole like six hour, eight hour night.
Oh, so they take them like a girlfriend.
It's not just like straight to the room and it's like, oh, how many flowers?
You know, it's not like that.
That's weird.
Yeah, it's weird that we have this giant stigma about sex,
so much so that it's illegal to sell.
And it's completely culturally, like, how we accept it,
how our culture accepts it.
That's all it is.
I mean, it's not, it doesn't make any sense logically.
It's just something that we've sort of, like, chosen.
But then again, if any one of my
friends turned into a prostitute, I'd be really
sad. Really? Yeah. Why? I wouldn't want
them. I think
I'm just being a hypocrite. I'm telling you.
I'd be really sad. I'd be like,
just can't believe someone
you know is forced to sell their body
for sex. But they're not being forced.
Like, you know, except in the way that
all of us are forced to work
for a living.
No, you're right.
I'm just being honest.
I really wouldn't be happy
if someone I used
to work with,
someone on the set
of a show
that I worked on,
all of a sudden
she became a prostitute.
And everybody was like,
remember Wendy?
Yeah, she's a prostitute.
You'd be like, what?
Remember Esther?
I mean, some of my friends
are sex workers
and they're like fucking...
Some of your friends
are sex workers?
Party at Molly Crabb.
No.
But they're—
They're okay with it?
They're fucking amazing, badass women.
Some of them like their jobs.
Some of them are just doing the jobs, you know, to make money the same way anyone does a job to make money.
Right.
But they're not forced.
They're amazing, badass women with agency.
Well, look, that's logical.
Your way of describing it is powerful and empowering and logical.
Me, I'm going with emotion, and I'm saying I'd be sad.
If I ran into someone, they found out they were a hooker now.
I think you'd meet some people who are sex workers, and you'd be like, oh, you're really cool, and then you'd get over it.
I'm sure.
I definitely would.
I know I would.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I really don't.
But I'm just, I think that a lot of people who are
doing it don't want to do it.
And I think, whenever I see someone
that doesn't, look, if I ran into someone that I
really knew and they were working at Wendy's
behind the counter, I'd probably be bummed out at them too.
You know? That's not what you want
to do. What's worse? Being a hooker
or working at Wendy's? I don't know.
There's different levels. They both suck. If you're a massage parlor hooker, then to work at wendy's i don't know there's different levels
if you're a massage parlor hooker then yeah that's horrible because you're probably just
every 30 minutes having a new stranger but if you're like one of the high-end
i squirt call girls you know that's probably pretty nice you know you're making three thousand
dollars four thousand dollars up you know some nights yeah logically i mean it's really all
about perception
the perception part is where it becomes a big issue because i've said this many times why is it
totally acceptable to be a massage therapist but if someone says what do you do i jerk off guys
you know like that's terrible yeah like but if you're like a massage therapist like oh okay you
give pleasure with your hands you jerk off guys oh you give pleasure with your hands i mean it's
the same thing.
Very little is different about it.
You're paying someone to do something to you
that they probably wouldn't do for free.
They want that money, so they give you a rub down.
They work their elbow on your back.
It feels great.
I mean, that's the whole idea is pleasure.
But we're okay with that unless it's,
oh, not this area.
This is a bad, bad, naughty area.
Don't you touch that for money.
We have to be in love for you to touch that.
Fascinating.
40 bucks.
That's all?
Yeah.
Will you guys talk so I can pee?
Sure.
I'm sorry.
I drank too much coffee.
Give me five minutes.
Not even.
Your artwork, you also had a, you worked with DC online, didn't you, at one point?
Yeah, I did.
Unfortunately, the imprint got canceled.
But yeah, I did.
Me and my best friend, John Levitt, we did a story with DC online.
And you also have worked with Patton Oswalt.
I saw you did like a poster of his.
Yeah, I did the key art for his new show, Tragedy Plus Comedy is Time.
That's great.
He's so fucking cool.
When he asked me to do that, I like squealed.
I was so excited.
Yeah, here's the,
if you look right on the screen,
the poster right there.
It's awesome.
How long are you in town for
here in Los Angeles?
Are you here for any work?
I'm just doing meetings,
like meetings with my agent,
meetings with some producers
and production companies
and just bullshitting with my friends. But I'm just
here till tomorrow night,
unfortunately.
You should just move out here. I should move out here.
It's fucking warm here, unlike New York, which is
this hell of sleet. I couldn't deal with that
at all. That's too much. I don't know how
anyone lives in that, especially
when you could just live here and have this every single day,
the same weather. I don't get why you would
do that. Is there a reason that keeps you in New York?
Do you just like the scene?
Have you always lived in New York?
I'm from there.
I'm like a fish that's used to, like, deep-sea pressurized environments, and I'll explode if I'm somewhere else.
Really?
Yeah.
So you have to have the constant energy of the city.
I have to.
Stuff like that.
Yeah, I mean, it just, like, makes you jagged and sharp, and it's really hard to live there.
Like, it's the only city where if you move into an apartment with a washer dryer, you have
made it.
You are the elite with your washer dryer there.
New York, you mean?
Yeah.
It's a crazy place to live, but that's what you get if you want that big hive thing.
You want that being a part of it all.
Did you do Pat Nusswald's?
Yeah, I did.
I did that for his last thing.
Wow, that's beautiful.
He's so awesome.
I was so honored that I got to do that.
He's a very cool guy. I love that you have such a distinctive style. Like I can see your stuff
online now after finding out about your work and I immediately recognize it as yours. It's like,
there's only a few people that that works with. Like Alex Gray is a big one, obviously,
you know, you're familiar with Alex Gray.
I fucking love him. I saw his work the first time I was 18.
It was at Tibet House.
You should meet him.
I want to meet him.
You got to meet him.
You got to go to that place.
No, the way that he like takes these people and he makes them into like these hyper colored veins and tendons.
And he kind of shows like what everyone is under the skin.
He's amazing.
Yeah.
What were you saying before I interrupted you?
The first time you were introduced to him, what you found out about?
Yeah, I was at this place called Tibet House that had exhibits of Tibetan art,
and they had a whole show of his because he had something that was kind of influenced,
I think, by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Yeah.
And I was like 18, and I saw that, and I was like, oh, my God, this man is a master.
Yeah, he's a really nice guy, too.
I don't want to make this week an Alex Gray love fest because we were talking about him yesterday,
but he's just such a real sweet, gentle guy, like a real loving guy.
And he's also the only person that I've ever met that created his own religion.
Like he has a religion that's tax-free status.
He is exempt.
Like the federal government gave him tax-free religious status.
And he's serious about it.
He's building this intense temple.
And it's essentially all based on visionary psychedelic experiences.
And this really pure, like, love that he has for people and for the world and for just the way he interacts with people.
He's a, like, real legit guy.
I mean, he really is a guy who's been over to the other side
on numerous occasions and brought back an incredible amount. To me, I don't think anybody's
ever captured psychedelics in visual form like he has. He's captured them in this most amazing
and representative way. It's so representative of the actual real psychedelic experience itself
that it'd be impossible for someone to create
if they hadn't had those experiences.
No, it's absolutely true.
I mean, I am like such a neophyte to psychedelics.
I've done mushrooms once in my life.
That's my entire experience.
And even that...
This all...
What is this?
It's Alex Grace.
Oh, is it really?
Yeah.
Oh, damn.
Hall of Sacred Mirrors or something like that.
Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
You should do mushrooms with Alex Gray.
Fingers crossed.
Listen, we can introduce you for sure.
He's got a place in upstate New York that he's building this, what does he call it?
I think that's what this is, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors or the Colossal Org.
No, that's the place that he had in New York.
He's got the place that he's building.
He's building this temple, but the outside of it is his art,
like three-dimensional images, like these fractal faces.
Entheon?
Yeah, Entheon.
Pull the image of what Entheon looks like.
That's it right there.
That's the actual building itself.
And he did a Kickstarter and funded the construction of this thing.
And it's going to be insane.
I mean, he's going to build this gigantic three-dimensional piece of art.
And if you scroll back up where you just were,
there was something with him standing with a guy.
See, he's doing stuff like that.
I think that's three-dimensional as well because it is, right?
That's like a sculpture, right?
And so he's going to use the kind of technology that you use
to create these gigantic sculptures,
and they're going to do the entire building in it.
Like that's what the actual building.
Scroll back up.
That's what the actual building is going to look like.
That's going to be insanely beautiful.
To me, this is what art is.
I hate the idea that art is just this thing that you pin to a gallery wall like a dead butterfly.
To me, art is something that you have to live with and you have to interact with.
And what he's doing is fucking art.
Well, he's definitely doing art, but he's definitely doing his own thing.
I mean, i've never
seen anybody's work that looks quite like that and but that's what i was saying about your stuff
too you have a very distinctive style and it's hard to describe a distinctive style when you
like sit like if you see like alex gray and like how do you know it's alex gray oh dude you just
recognize it right away but your stuff is kind of like that too. Like, I don't know why I know that it's your stuff,
but when I see it, I can pretty, pretty, pretty accurately tell.
Man, thank you so much.
What is that? You're welcome. But it's awesome stuff, obviously. It's beautiful artwork,
but it's also so distinctive and I'll never really truly understand what it is that I,
that you pick up on.
So Picasso has this line that style is the residue of trying to get it right.
I think with a lot of artists, well, we're trying to get reality,
but then who we are filters that.
It's like our handwriting, you know?
Right. Yeah.
And my eyes, they see things curvy.
They see things hyper-detailed.
They see things kind of subversive and perverted.
They see things kind of whimsical and mean. That's just like how my brain works.
And has your style changed in any way as you've grown older?
When you've been drawing for so long, when did you start developing this sort of subversive style?
Well, kind of one of my big formative moments as an artist was there was this club in New York, or there is this club called The Box, that was the sexiest, most depraved, most perverted, most waste of money, most gorgeous club in New York.
Like it was a place where people would blow through like 10K on bottle service.
And there were like porn stars hanging from hoops over the bar and world-class circus performers.
And when I was 24, I got the job as the house artist there.
I got to sit down next to the stage and I got to just sketch people.
And this, like this kind of, this is how I came of age, you know, sitting on that nightclub
stage, drunk out of my fucking mind, drawing beautiful girls and fire eaters and, you know,
like fucking crazy depraved Weimar Berlin style
performances like that. That's what made me. Wow. And so when you look back, which I've always
found really fascinating about artists that they go through periods like this is like, you know,
Picasso obviously went through very many classic periods. Do you have like different periods of your art where
you recognize like, this is when I was young and I, you know, this is how I saw the world. And
does it represent that to you? Oh God, so much. Yes, you fucking nailed it. I mean,
a few years ago I started doing more journalistic stuff where I would go to a place like Gitmo or
Lebanon and I would draw it. And I mean, it's still the same because I'm making it, you know,
the style is still very similar, but it's different because it's not just this crazy
surrealist, you know, blah out of my head thing. It's trying to capture reality. It's trying to
capture what that kid looked like with the rocket launcher over his shoulder.
Wow. And so what led you to this like socially conscious work that you're doing now? Like what
led you to try to expose all this stuff that's driving you crazy about the world?
So I was always pretty political,
but I didn't want to do political art
because I felt like it would just be this preachy lie
because a lot of it's really bad.
A lot of it is preachy and bad,
and it's like a certain demographic.
Or even it's good, but it's just for a certain demographic.
What demographic gets the preachy art?
Well, like...
White people, right? For sure.
Yeah, something like that.
White people want to show you how awesome they are.
But I mean, even like,
Shepard Faire is a really cool graphic designer and everything.
Like his stuff, you know, this isn't a diss to his stuff,
but if you look at a Shepard Faire thing, you know,
like either I'm of the demographic this is for or I'm not.
You know, it looks like how we expect activist art to look like.
And I just didn't want to look like. And I am.
I just I just didn't want to do that. Like my work was always more girly, more whimsical,
more fucked up. And then when Occupy Wall Street happened and when WikiLeaks happened and when a lot of sort of the shit that went down in 2011 happened, I felt like it was this
real moment where I had to take sides. I felt like I was being a fucking coward, not taking sides.
And so the first thing I did was I started drawing people down at Occupy because there is this media image
that everyone down there was, you know, white guy with dreadlocks hitting a bongo. But when I went
down there, there were fucking construction guys, there were teamsters, there were nurses,
there were teachers. There are all sorts of people down there. And I wanted to
show people what that looked like. Wow. that's interesting. Yeah, everybody always has that immediate image.
You know what I have the image of?
Did you ever see the video where Peter Schiff goes down to Occupy and he's representing the 1%?
And he has like he debates all these different people.
You know, I might have.
I'm not sure, though.
It's a brilliant video because Peter Schiff is a financial genius, you know, and he makes all these people look really stupid because a lot of them really don't know exactly why they're there.
I mean, they do.
They think that the world is ugly and that greed is terrible.
But when they start defining capitalism to him and he starts explaining to them what's actually wrong with the system and what they think is wrong with the system and why they're incorrect, they get tongue-tied and they start talking
in cliches and there's no real clarity to what they're trying to say.
So we always assume that it's like those highlight people.
The way I've always described Wall Street and Occupy, especially Occupy Wall Street,
is that it's like white blood cells moving to a sick area.
Like they know there's something wrong there and they're piling up all around it.
Like that's, there's never been more clear.
Like it's hard to get people to stay somewhere.
Yeah.
It's hard to get people to group up and like camp out and stay in one and all agree to
keep meeting back at this one area.
You got to have a really fucked up spot to get people to do that.
Because that's just not normal human behavior.
People have lives.
They've got shit to do.
They've got friends.
They've got family.
You can't get them to hang out in a park.
In winter?
No.
In fucking New York winter?
Yeah, you have to have some serious devotion for that.
Yeah.
You have to have a real issue.
There's got to be a real issue.
There's got to be something up.
And I think what that guy did, it was a little unfair because- Of course was unfair that's what peter schiff does and also it's like looking slick mass movements
you can't have a mass movement where every single member of that mass movement is an articulate
genius who can spell out the theoretical basis for it of course and look peter schiff is a um
a fantastic speaker it's a total mismatch yeah it's horrible i mean i had a hard time when he
was on the podcast like he doesn't he he's first of all he's very well read very smart and very
opinionated and he's used to these shows where you do these like seven minute bursts so you have to
like just just go go go go go go go with points. And he has the ability to spit out information and, you know,
and relevant information like incredibly quickly and very strong cadence.
And a regular person who's like, can't believe they're even on camera.
And then there's a microphone in front of their face and they know that the
cameras, they hope they don't want to look stupid,
but they're not accustomed to this feeling. So they're,
they're very out of place. They feel very weird.
They feel nervous and insecure.
That's not an accurate representative of a real debate or a real conversation between those two. You're dealing
with, you're like catching them in a really like weak and vulnerable place. You're flustering them.
Yeah. And how you look good in the media, it's such a skill, you know, it's such a performative
thing, like being able to do that. Like most people don't do that. They are not trained in that.
Yeah. That's something that people don't recognize because it looks easy. You look at someone like Ryan Seacrest,
okay. Ryan Seacrest, when he's on television, does that guy ever flub his words? You know,
Ryan Seacrest, what he does looks incredibly easy. But if a regular person had to go and do
Ryan Seacrest job, you would do it so badly. It would come off so awkward. It would be so strange. You'd be
reading cue cards and you'd fuck up. You would say someone's name wrong. There'd be a lot of
things you would get wrong. It just looks smooth. So you assume it's easy because it looks like
it's fairly easy for him to pull off right now. This doesn't look like coal mining, but it's still
quite difficult to do. So if you take a guy like Peter Schiff who's a black belt in talking and you just feed him to these poor people who have no idea they're going to be in a debate when they woke up that morning, you put a camera on him, he's going to feast on them.
He's just – and he's also super successful so he can kind of back up what he said with proof, talk about how many people he employs.
And he's like, how many people do you employ?
I employ 150 people.
Do you not think that I'm contributing?
I have 150 people that work directly.
And then what does someone say to that?
And they're like, you greedy man.
They need to have time to research this debate.
Yeah, it's just not a fair thing.
No, it's not fair.
But it's funny, though.
It's funny.
But that's what most people think of when they think of Occupy.
They think of those guys.
You greedy man!
They don't think of the people that are just circling this disease and looking at this and going,
Okay, you know, I can't stand anymore and stand by and pretend that this isn't an unfixable system that is so easily manipulated and so
obviously corrupt. And this is what runs the country. This is what runs our financial system.
This system of politics, the system of special interest groups influencing politics, corporations
spending money on things, people altering the regulations and the rules in order to profit more and make more money and the ability to set up fake things that affect the price of stocks and derivatives, things where you're betting on things to fail.
And there's a whole economy based on betting on things to fail that's even bigger than the real economy.
Stop.
Yeah, it's just bullshit built on air.
I have a company.
I have employees.
You have a company. i have employees you have a
company you have employees we do not fucking get bailouts from the government if we fail at our
company yeah that like pay back not only you know what we lost but all the profits we would have
made what is going on in wall street has nothing to do with the way that businesses were supposed
to run it's just a giant las Las Vegas casino of madness and shit built
on air where no one can possibly lose because the government will step in and pay things back.
It's just weird that there's one business that's too big to fail and it's the business of controlling
the money. That's the only one. Because there's other businesses that took gigantic hits during
the economy, during the economic collapse. One of them that you're never going to hear about any bit of bail on now is the porn business.
Porn business disappeared.
I mean, not totally disappeared.
Obviously, they still make porn.
But when the internet came along and all their content started being uploaded on BitTorrent
and uploaded on all these free sites, these guys lost some untold millions of dollars
because the industry itself shrunk down
this totally different kind of thing.
They were making money hand over fist
selling DVDs before the internet came along.
It's totally true.
And girls and guys who a generation ago would have been making fucking bank are making so little per scene.
Also now, um, this one company, ManWin controls so much of the market and they control the cam
sites in addition to... Wait a minute, ManWin? ManWin. Google this shit. But what a name. I know,
But what a name.
I know, right?
Man win.
And, you know, people are just having to work harder, do, you know, tougher things for less and less money.
Tougher things.
I love when you say that.
Tougher things when it comes to porn.
That's dark.
Well, I mean.
Dark images.
It is like being a fucking athlete, being a porn star.
Like you're, you know.
Much like an Olympian.
I think so. Well, I guess so. I mean you mean you have to perform you're physically doing things you're using
your body in a really demanding way that can potentially like be injurious that's for the
enjoyment of other people i mean it's not that different from you know playing football and you
know fucking bashing your head against someone else and maybe getting a concussion for you know
the joy of other people well it's probably safer probably safer. I would say it's safer.
Yeah.
It's harder to get into that football thing that is the porn thing probably.
True.
Fair dues.
You don't get drafted to be in porn.
If we had drafts for porn, boy, that would really step up the quality of the porn.
Could you imagine if there was a draft?
If we were so open as a society that like the NFL draft,
we had a porn draft?
I'd do it. What would you do?
What would you do? You'd be like one of the actors?
Just solo masturbation. Are you that good?
Are you that good that you're that confident?
Do you have a style or a flair to the way you do it?
I do like one this way and then
one like on the tip. So it's like Dragonball.
Hmm. So you're performing
magic. Yeah. yeah um i don't
want to pay to see that so i don't think you have a business proposal i don't think you for free you
don't have to pay anything you're my buddy oh that's so sweet so i get a password yeah yeah
who knows how much money the porn business lost they vanished but you're not allowed to say that
man i know girls that are making shit loads of money on cam right now.
Oh, that's the new thing, right? Yeah, all cams.
Yeah, the cam stuff.
Yeah, the new thing is, what do you think is going to happen
with this virtual stuff? Because I'm
really fascinated by Oculus Rift.
Ever since
Duncan Trussell let me try his on, he has
an older model, apparently, which is
a lower pixel,
lower resolution. Yeah, it's still lower pixel, lower resolution. That's the one I have.
Yeah.
It's still incredibly impressive.
I think that's the future of pornography for sure, is those things.
Completely interactive pornography.
I can see that, where you actually were looking through a POV thing.
Yeah.
You could be the woman or you could be the man.
You would see this person
having sex with you. You'd put on this thing where the camera was probably in glasses that you were
wearing or something and watch someone have sex with you and watch you having sex with them.
And then, I mean, that would be like the ultimate POV for someone. And I would think that that would
be the way your brain would get the most turned on because that would be the way that you can most relate to.
It just seems like that's just what's going to happen because the Oculus Rift is so bizarre.
When you're looking up and looking around, you realize this is a true three-dimensional environment they've created.
I haven't tried it yet.
I tried Google Glass, which was oddly disappointing.
Do you know what's hilarious?
They don't have voice recognition on it.
So you can go up to someone else who has Google Glass and be like, image search, Goatsey.
And it will totally fucking pop up.
You can direct other people's Google Glass by talking close to them.
Oh, no.
I did not even think about that.
I used it.
I have a friend who works for Google, and I used it. I didn't think I would ever use it in real life, though. I like a phone. I used it. I have a friend who works for Google and I used it.
I didn't think I would ever use it
in real life though.
I like a phone.
I like being able
to like text someone.
I like being able
to pull up an image
and I see it
on this big phone.
I don't want to see it
in this weird thing
that it's here
and I see it big
in front of me
and it's just goofy.
I mean I'm sure
like in five years
there are going to be
fucking contact lenses
that like make you
suction you into the network at all time.
But as, like, a first-generation device, it's just, I didn't even have any preconceptions.
But, man, it is fucking, it is doofy.
It is a doofy fucking device.
Totally, perfectly doofy.
It is a doofy device.
But I think it's the predecessor to the finished product, like you said.
It's like, okay, like, if I had to tell you that, you know, your trip back home to new york is going to be a by horse and buggy you'd be like what the fuck
are you talking about that shit's gonna take months yeah that's how you do it that's how you
get to new york like no no you get on a plane stupid like what are you talking about like
someone had to do a horse and buggy for someone to invent a plane they didn't just invent a plane
right off the jump and figure out there's got to be a place called cal California. Let's hope that when we fly over there, there's runways.
No, they had to build runways.
They had to set up the fucking gas stations
for the airplanes over there
before they can talk somebody into flying.
So there had to be steps.
This Google Glass is the wagon train.
This is a covered wagon.
And then one day, there's going to be a Ferrari.
And that fucking thing is going to be
somewhere inside your head.
They'll just probably insert it behind the back of your neck, right into your skull.
It'll integrate your fibers, your tissue, your neural fibers will grow over it or something.
It'll become a part of your brain.
You'll be able to access the internet 24-7.
It'll work on the electricity of your own body.
There'll be no need for a power source.
Occasionally, people will have a bad be like it'd be funny if those were
cigarette smokers only cigarette smokers everybody had to quit smoking cigarettes or you couldn't use
a neural implant that killed the tobacco industry a win-win a win-win for everybody you see this
this is uh seeing the world through your partner's eyes so what you do is you get your girlfriend
and you're both sitting there with the oculus r. So that's all you can see is each other's bodies, though.
So it's like, all right, now move your hand down your chest.
So you're looking down in the Oculus Rift and it looks like you have boobs, but you don't.
Whoa.
Yeah.
I did a project in December where I was wearing glass and I had my friend Tim Pool hack them so they could live stream.
And I was drawing this porn star, Stoya.
And the idea was I wanted people to see what it was like for me to draw through my eyes.
And I was thinking about it.
Like they did.
I mean, they literally were looking through my eyes.
But it almost felt more like they were staring over my shoulder instead.
You know, like it was almost the experience, but not quite.
And I feel like the Oculus Rift, it must be kind of the same,
like just this uncanny valley realm of almostness.
That's a great phrase, uncanny valley.
They use that in the video game industry.
Because like NVIDIA, they allowed me,
when I was doing that sci-fi show,
to come to their studios in Northern California.
And they showed me this new technology that they have that's based entirely on a real person's face.
And it's so insanely, insanely realistic.
Incredibly, incredibly realistic.
And it's just about bridging that uncanny valley.
That's how they kept talking about it.
But I think that once this Oculus Rift gets to that point, things are going to be very, very, very strange.
Because they're going to be able to recreate worlds in there.
I don't think we understand or we can even grasp the kind of impact it's going to have when you have an indistinguishable world that you can enter into
with putting on these oculus riffs and you all of a sudden are on oz and you're going down the path
and you talk to dorothy and you might even be wearing a suit that covers you with sensors that
allow it to replicate physical touch so dorothy might grab your hand and you might be on a this
treadmill that can move in any direction and you're moving
forward. Like they have these things where the only thing that's going to freak you out is the
fact that you know you're kind of moving on a treadmill. Once you get that becomes normal,
like the normal way you walk, you're going to accept the fact that you're in this fucking weird
mystery fantasy world and no one's going to want to live in real world anymore.
Real world's going to get very strange. So like when I was 17, I read, I was reading Plato and you know, he has the cave metaphor,
right? Where the people are watching the shadows on the wall and they're getting into fights with
the shadows on the wall. And they think that those shadows on the wall are all there is to life. And
if you would try to get them out of the cave, they even like fight you because they want those
fucking shadows on the wall. And at 17, it was before the internet was quite so immersive. And
I was like trying to make the cognitive leap and imagine what that would be like.
And now, here I am, 13 years later, getting into earnest fights on Twitter
with shadows on a glowing screen as if that's real life.
Well, Twitter is somewhere on the other end, though.
That is sort of real life.
It is, but we're still...
It's absolutely real life, but it's also still flickering lights at the same time.
It is definitely that.
Well, it's also the disconnect that's not present in nature.
When human beings are interacting with each other, we're supposed to be able to see each other.
Yeah.
We're supposed to feel each other.
When you say something, it can be very subtle and you see someone like maybe take it the wrong way and you're like, oh, no, no, no, no, I don't mean that.
it can be very subtle and you see someone like maybe take it the wrong way and you're like oh no no i don't mean that i mean and they go like oh like all that's missing when there's a video or
text especially text like have you ever sent someone a text and you were totally joking
yeah and they're like what the fuck asshole and and like you you being serious like no i'm not
being serious like come on you don't know that i'm joking you're like but if someone just reads
your words with a they put a different intent in it they can decide you're like the worst piece of
shit ever they can just decide and with the same words can decide you're completely different can
say oh that's just tom he's fucking silly he sends me these silly things like me and my friends like
ari shafir will send me something he'll it's like the other day he day, I sent him a tweet.
He says, thanks, brother.
I'm going to let you eat the heart of my next abortion.
Okay?
I don't think he's serious, all right?
He's actually serious.
He's not. He's not serious.
But you know what I mean?
It's like, I don't even know what I mean at this point.
I do, but it's kind of pointless.
People look to be upset. That's my point, I guess.'s wrecking too much of that I definitely want to see that it's great
he actually sings his own
I put you high up in the sky and now you're not coming down. It slowly turned.
You let me burn.
And now we're ashes on the ground.
Don't you ever say I just walked away.
I will always want you.
It's shot by shot.
I can't live a lie.
Running for my life. I will always want you.
I came in like a wrecking ball.
I never hit so hard in love.
Is this a real Miley Cyrus song?
Is that what this is?
Yeah, he did it shot by shot,
so it's exactly like the original video.
I wonder whose idea that was.
It's a great idea for him.
There's also a really good Robocop remake
that Channel 101 has done.
I don't know if you've seen yet.
Yeah, everybody keeps telling me about that, but I haven't watched it.
There's a good scene where it's just a bunch of dicks getting shot.
Hey, I think you're supposed to say spoiler alert before you say something like that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, Ron Jeremy's a nice guy.
There's a guy who's been around.
It's also, this will sound kind of strange but like I find his version
kind of touching
because like
no like Milly Sears
I mean she's like
this polished
product of
you know like
perfect you know
it's a perfect fucking thing
you know she's like
this auto-tuned voice
you know
gym-toned body
she's perfect
and like he's this
kind of like
this like flawed
you know
old out-of-shape dude
and he's like
you know with not a great voice.
And he's like singing these like canned market tested lyrics.
And there's like something almost like,
like it actually seems like maybe Ron Jeremy actually was in love with someone once.
I don't know.
There's something touching about it.
I'm sure he was.
I feel that too.
I feel real love in his words.
Yeah.
He's not that polished thing.
That is Miley Cyrus.
Have you ever heard Miley Cyrus sing a Dolly Part Parton Jolene? Yeah, I actually really liked it
Yeah, I thought it was fucking lovely. I love that song
She's got a great voice like someone should write shit like that for her, you know
I mean, she's got a great voice like who knows who orchestrates all this stuff. She's a young kid, you know
I mean who the who the fuck at 18 can you know tell record companies?
What kind of music you want to make and what producers you want to work with?
Who knows?
Maybe she'll turn out to be a great singer.
She's got an unbelievable voice, though.
Yeah, the Jolene thing was fucking extraordinary.
Yeah, really incredible.
Like, real soulful.
There's songs where people sing and you know that they, a good quality voice, but it just feels manufactured.
Yeah.
It just feels fake.
And then there's Janis Joplin.
Yeah.
Where it's just so authentic.
Like, to this day, if I'm in my car and I'm listening to, like, XM or something like that and Janis Joplin comes on,
take another little piece of my heart, that come on, that you think about her just singing that, take it. Take another little piece of my heart that come on cut that you think about her just singing that
take it take another little piece of my heart now ugly fucking weird hippie bitch who just can sing
like an angel just this weird lived voice she had this quality of her voice that you just never heard before just so authentic just undeniable
like you couldn't there's no way that janice joplin couldn't have been a star you you could
have heard her at a coffee shop and just dropped everything you're doing call everybody you got to
get a record guy over here you got to record this like this is this is some unusual shit and there's
some other people that they do that oh they, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
They have this beautiful voice, and they do the little fluctuations, but you don't care.
You don't feel anything.
When you see those fucking people, like those Janis Joplin types, that can just, they can make you feel things.
I mean, making people feel things in an authentic way, not in, like, the bullshit, mechanical, you know, tearjerker way,
but in an authentic way is such a rare fucking bullshit mechanical, you know, tearjerker way, but an authentic way is
such a rare fucking gift being able to do that. And you need to like fucking grab those people
and elevate them because my God, they can take you out of yourself. No doubt. And the music,
especially to me, there's something about really good music that completely changes my state of
just my state of body, my state of feeling. It can give me goosebumps. A really good song
can give me goosebumps. The other day I was driving home and Radar Love came on. You know
that song? You ever heard that song? No. Oh, God. It's like a one-hit wonder band from the 60s or
70s. Pull that up, Brian. It's the greatest driving music of all time and when I was uh 18 years old I had
this girlfriend that moved to western Massachusetts I was living in Boston I was living in Newton and
she moved like an hour and a half away and I used to have to drive to go visit her and my cars were
always pieces of shit so it was always a death drive then one time I broke down in a snowstorm
halfway to visit her it's was a fucking huge disaster.
But I had a cassette, and I would play this song, Radar Love,
because it's all about driving.
It's all about driving when you're exhausted
and just keeping your foot on the gas.
This song came on the other day, and my whole body tingled.
Like, I'm driving, and I heard it come on. Like, I'm driving and I heard it come on.
Like, as I changed the channel,
it was right where the drum starts beating right here.
Right here.
And that's right when I hit the channel.
And I was in the car and I was driving
and it was late at night.
And first of all, my whole body started tingling
and it brought me immediately back
to being some half-retarded 18-year-old
driving my piece of shit Audi Fox that could fall apart at any minute.
Wheels could fly off, and I'd go in the fucking oncoming lanes.
Listen to this shit, though, dude.
Some dude did this decades ago.
It's fucking perfect.
And it's half past four and I'm shifting gear. There's a cable coming in from above. Don't need to fuck it up.
We've got a thing.
Let's go.
Radar love.
We've got a wave in the air.
Radar love.
That's a powerful fucking song.
I fucking love that.
They have radar love.
She sends it out and he gets in the car and fucking guns it over there.
That is fucking beautiful.
Thank you for introducing that to me.
It's tingly.
It gives me tingles.
Fucking perfect.
I got to get going.
I have another fucking appointment.
I'm sorry.
Get the fuck out of here, Molly.
Is there anything we can do to promote?
Is there anything we can say?
Is there anything people should visit?
Is there anything people should buy?
Okay, you could.
My website is mollycrabapple.com. I have some prints
on there if you'd like to get them.
I'm working on my memoir for HarperCollins,
Drawing Blood. It'll be out in
2015, so that's a while.
And you can follow me on Twitter
at mollycrabapple. Molly, thank you very much.
This is a lot of fun. We've got to do this again.
I would love that. This was amazing.
She has a lot of collection art books also on Amazon.
Oh, okay. Well, tell us what are the names
so people should go out and get those. I've got two
art books out. Devil in the Details
and Weak in Hell. Beautiful.
I will be buying those as soon as
this podcast is over, ladies and gentlemen.
Amazon OneClick. Make it happen.
Molly Crabapple, you are the shit. That was a lot of fun.
You were the coolest. Thank you for having me. No, you're the coolest.
I can't be the coolest when you're alive.
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Thank you very much.
And be good to each other.
Mwah!