The Joe Rogan Experience - #738 - Molly Crabapple

Episode Date: December 16, 2015

Molly Crabapple is an American artist and journalist, known for her work for The New York Times, VICE, the Wall Street Journal, the Royal Society of Arts, Red Bull, Marvel Comics, DC Comics and CNN. Her new book "Drawing Blood" is available now on Amazon -- http://amzn.to/1QqNp5m

Dude, I'm so happy to be here. Dude, I'm so happy you're here. I've been reading your book, and it's fucking excellent. You're a really good writer. Thank you so much. I killed myself doing that book. That is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. How long did it take?

About two years. Wow. And when I got the deal, I had this delusional idea that it would be like writing 25,000 word essays, and this was so wrong. This was so, so, so much harder than anything I'd ever done. Why was it so much harder than writing essays? Well, when you write essays, you are doing like these kind of short things. It's limited. You have a beginning, a middle and an end.

No characters, no dialogue, you know, simple narrative. Whereas this man, like keeping a plot together over 300 pages and then that plot is your life, which by definition has no plot. Right. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Was it hard to recall all the moments in your life and do them justice? So hard. And also for this book, because I work as a journalist, I fact checked it as best I could. And nothing is more personally painful than fact checking the ends of various friendships and relationships and realizing what a jerk you were at the time yeah i can only imagine yeah i don't want to do that like oh man i had a whole victimization narrative and oh that was quite quite wrong i think they probably did too everybody does

you know everybody i mean it's it's it's really strange when you go back and talk to people that you haven't talked to for a long time and And you're like, okay, what is your... And, you know, all judgments aside, let's just give me your version of what happened. And I'll tell you what I think happened. And you're like, oh, my God. I don't know what the fuck the truth is anymore. Yeah, I have this one thing where there is this one girl. She recalled something.

And she recalled it one way. And then when she realized that it was actually two days later than she thought it was which made it look like there was an article she had written which had contradicted it she kept insisting it hadn't happened and i was like man here's your twitter here's my twitter here's the twitter of the two other people who are at brunch here's the email confirming it it happened on this day and finally she was like i just give give up. I give up, but I don't remember it. Yeah, it's very strange when people are confronted by that fact, too. Yeah, I had a friend that I'm no longer friends with that insisted something. And then when my other friend jumped in and said, that's not what happened at all.

It was a psychedelic drug talk. I'm trying to beat around the bush like I'm on regular radio or something. I'm trying to beat around the bush like I'm on regular radio or something. But he was insisting that he got me on this psychedelic drug the first time. And my other friend was like, no, that was mine. It was my drugs. I was there. Like, what are you talking about, man?

And then he just sort of stopped talking to us. Yeah, like kind of sulked off and then comes back later with a new subject. Well, people love to, you know, they love somehow or another to get glory from the past. And like somehow or another, it's one of those things that never works. Sort of like name dropping. Name dropping has never worked ever. No one has ever said, I'm really good friends with Leonardo DiCaprio. And someone's gone, whoa.

Let me give you a movie now. You're fucking amazing. No, immediately people go, oh, this guy's a name dropper. Or he just happens to say it and it happens to be true. There's a fine line, but everybody knows what the difference is. When you're a name dropper, you can smell it in a sentence. It's just like it comes off in the air. So this book is fucking super intimate. You just cut the skin away and open your chest up and just the whole world can see your soul.

You know, you peeled it out. I tried my best. I mean, I just wanted to do something honest, you know? Well, it's definitely that, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I wasn't there, obviously. Two years is a long time to write something. Like, how many times did you have to go back over it?

Oh, God, like seven drafts. And there's 100 pages of cuts from this book, too. That's in another Word file that I might mine someday for other essays. But it was like over and over. And, you know, because I had never written a book before, I didn't realize, you know, how much extra you write. I feel like I was, like, building a block of marble, basically, out of words. And then I had to, like, cut away at the horrible, ugly block of marble I had made. And then finally something cool emerged.

Yeah, they all say that. All the great writers say that. Like, my friend Steve Rinell always uses this quote, you have to kill your babies. Yeah, exactly. That's what they say, right? That's,'s like the common writer's conversation, kill your babies. But then you can keep your babies in another document and you can devote like one essay per baby where they make sense. That's similar to stand up comedy in a lot of ways. Like one of the hardest things about comedy is recognizing like a bit, sometimes it's just too fat, there's too much stuff in it,

and you have to figure out what to chop off. But you have like these emotional connections to these punchlines. Like, but I love this part. I love saying it. This is like my favorite part. But that favorite part doesn't necessarily enhance the whole thing. So you have to kind of chip it away and then the whole thing will be better without it. But it's hard to do, right?

Oh, God. I mean, the best piece of advice I ever got when I started writing was my friend Lori, who's a really cool journalist, said to me, the worst articles I've ever written are the ones where I try to say everything about a subject. That makes sense. Yeah. Well, your style is really interesting, too, because one of the things that's really cool is you've got a lot of illustrations that go along with these stories now are these illustrations that you added in after the fact are they illustrations that you sort of drew while you were experiencing these things a few of them i drew at the time like there are some old illustrations like from turkey or

from paris that i did when i was a teenager some stuff from occupy but But I would say like over 100 of them I did new for the book. Oh, wow. So that's a lot of extra work on top of that as well. Oh, my God. How many days were you doing this every day? Like how will you find the time? Because I know you're so busy doing journalism, you're busy doing art. Like how did you find the time to do this?

I was a really horrible person to be around for quite a few months. I have the coolest boyfriend in the world. Thank you, Fred, for putting up with me during this. Powerful Fred. Fred is awesome. I had a few things. First, I had friends with a house in the country, and they let me stay there for a number of weeks. And they didn't have internet signal in a lot of it.

So I didn't bring any of my fun books that I like to read. So I was just stuck. It was just me and this fucking thing, and we were going to beat each other. I rented a lot of it. So I didn't bring any of my fun books that I like to read. So I was just stuck. It was just me and this fucking thing and we're going to beat each other. I rented a lot of hotel rooms. I had an editor who put a beat down on me and was like, you can't keep going off to other countries.

You actually have to write this book that I contracted you for. At one point he was like, are you fleeing to war zones so you don't have to look at your book contract? Is that how it's going? I just, I think towards the end, I didn't do anything but work on it. I just became this horrible troll beast that didn't wash her hair and would growl at anyone who came near,

living entirely on coffee and just made it. That was how I did it. That is a good way to do it, right? If you can get somewhere without the internet. Yeah. I used to write a lot on airplanes. I used to look forward to airplane flights. I'd be like, okay, I'm stuck in this seat. There's no internet access. And then what the fuck do the airlines do? They put internet on the goddamn planes. I know. And then you're like, oh, I need to see what someone says about me on Twitter. Oh no, someone was wrong on Twitter. I must remedy this. I'm going to go on Amazon and buy a new pair of sneakers.

Exactly. It's so easy to just get distracted nowadays. It's just the world is becoming more and more available. And if you're off in a cabin in the woods with no internet access. Yeah, you're stuck. You're confronted with your own work to do. Yeah, it's so attractive. That's such an attractive idea. be off in a cab it's so romantic right to be off in a cabin in the woods by yourself

working on your your great work except whenever i'm actually there i want to like dig holes in my arms because i'm like where is the wi-fi signal there's a guy that i tweeted about today there's an article that I tweeted where this guy decided he wanted to live by himself in the, I think it was the Northwest Territories. He was going to do it for a solid year, but he made it six months. And then he had a satellite phone. He's like, come get me. I can't fucking do this anymore. But he was just going crazy like by himself for six months. And it's a fascinating story. This is the guy right here. Norwegian adventurer spent six months alone in the Northwest Territory wilderness.

And it's really cool because the guy is very good at describing what he felt and what it was like and what he expected versus what it was really like. One of the things that he said that I thought was really interesting, he said, we are not meant to be alone. And I kind of feel that way too. I feel like I, you know, people romanticize this idea of being this hermit that's off in the woods, you know, the, the, the monk that's out meditating in the forest by himself. But that shit is like, it's like holding your breath. It's kind of cool for a little while, but you don't, you don't want to do it very long. No, man. I think it makes you go crazy.

Being in solitary things makes you go crazy. I recently did a really big investigative piece on some long-term solitary prisoners. And these guys were really smart guys. They were really strong guys, in my opinion. One of them I consider really a genius. But he had been in solitary for 14 years man 14 years and um who is this his name is andre jacobs he was part of this uh group of whistleblowers called the dallas six that um basically they were giving information about

guards doing um beating people up and being racist in this prison in PA. And they're all in solitary, and the guards retaliated. And then when one of the other guys, Carrington, sued the DA for not protecting him from the guards, the DA turned around and charged them all with rioting. And I got really into the case because I was like, this seems semantically interesting. How do you riot if you're in solitary? I consider rioting a group activity. If someone's rioting in solitary, you could just leave them there and they'd get tired eventually. And then the riot would be over.

That's hilarious. They call it rioting. I really hope their trial goes well in February. But as part of it, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to two of the guys. And, I mean, you suffer real mental trauma from doing that. And, like, no one, even, like, the smartest, toughest, best person who has, like, a really loving mom that is really devoted to giving them, you know, all the books and all the support, even that person will suffer, like, real trauma from that. Yeah, I've always wondered like when Bradley Manning was arrested and then later became Chelsea Manning and spent how many years was he, she, you know, whenever the transition makes sense, uh, how many years was she in solitary? Like, like it was quite a long time. Like three years, I think. Like, it was quite a long time.

Like three years, I think, right? And naked. Yeah. Naked and in cold conditions. Like, they literally tortured her. Like, they tortured her. Like, what they decided, when do you say her and when is him? Because when did she decide to transition?

When she was in there, right? She, like, announced the um right after her trial but she um i mean if you look at her chat logs with adrian lammo she has one line where she says that what she's afraid of is being known to the world as a boy so i think i think she decided it herself a long a long time ago but before she was arrested yeah before she was arrested but that uh she just didn't publicly announce it for a long time that is a crazy the worst things to be known as a boy yeah whoa yeah it was a line from the chat log and anyone who's listening to this like please fact check it i don't want to get it wrong but that's what i remember but i remember thinking like who wouldn't lose their fucking mind being naked in a room by yourself for years like what did they thought that

she was a um a hazard to herself or something like that? Yeah, their bullshit excuse is always like, oh, you're a suicide risk, so we have to have you naked with no glasses, nothing to read, a horrible, like, suicide prevention blanket that you can't, like, you know, wrap around you and just, we have to, like, torture you because you might be a suicide risk. Like, is she in, like, regular prison now or still in solitary she's in regular prison right now actually like one of my most cherished possessions in the universe is she wrote me a letter once because i drew a birthday card for her she dots her eyes with little doves it's really cute with doves yeah she draws little doves on them every eye yeah i hope this isn't a long letter no it's a short one it was a it was a gracious one it was it was i think it reminded me of like you know the thank you card that like someone very graciously writes someone who's given them a gift and how but what a bizarre set

of circumstances someone who is a soldier who transitioned to becoming a woman and then sends letters that all have the the animal that's known as the symbol of peace yeah over all the eyes i mean i think from her life you get the sense that part of the reason she wanted to join the army was she's just like so smart and she just wanted to go to college i mean um from what i know kind of about reading her life story like this this was someone who like her happiest time was like dating a dude who was around sort of like the mit hacker scene and i think that if she was middle class and not poor, she just would have like gone to school and gotten a computer science degree. And that would have been the whole thing. It's incredible that someone who exposes crimes and that's the only way you could look at what happened with Edward Snowden and with Bradley Manning.

I mean, you could say that they did what they did was treasonous. You get. Is it really treasonous when you're exposing crime exposing crime like isn't it supposed to be illegal to commit crime and if your government is doing things that are illegal isn't it your job as a patriot to expose those things like when do you when is it not treasonous oh god yeah i mean they're both of them are heroes um if no one is putting their own government in check, then that government will just tend to concentrating more and more power and people in it will concentrate to doing worse and worse things because there's no sort of supervision. And there's no way that you can love your country and not call it on its bullshit at all. I think that the opposite thing is treason. I think it's treason to say, like, just because it's my country, any crime is justified.

But what they're doing, though, is so horrible because they're making it so that no one ever does anything like this again. They make such a giant example. Like Julian Assange is literally, like, going crazy, staying in that one house in London. He can't leave. If he leaves, they'll arrest him the moment he steps foot on the... Like, what a crazy thing. Like, he can get out on the balcony and wave to people and get a slight amount of vitamin D, and then he has to go back inside, and he's fucking trapped. Snowden is hanging out with Putin in Russia, which is just bizarre to me. So strange.

I watched a bizarre Putin video today. Which Putin video did you watch? Putin, they're analyzing his gait. The way he walks. This is so creepy. Why don't they just admit that they have a crush on him and want to have a sleep over? That is so weird. I mean... Well, it's because he has a very specific way

of walking that's indicative of someone who has military training. It's called the gunslinger's gait. Did they make that term up themselves? I guess they probably did. But what he does is he swings his left arm but not his right so he could pull his gun out really quickly. That's the idea.

But what's really bizarre about the video is I didn't know how opulent wherever he is, palace or whatever the fuck it is, they have these fucking enormous, like here it is, look at these enormous gold doors. Like, let's play it.

Let's play it, Jamie, so you can watch this. Like, if you watch as he walks, if you notice, his left arm swings notably while his right arm stays relatively still in comparison. Like, a huge contrast.

And he always does this. And that's so that he can shoot you in the fucking head quicker. Or else someone finds out there's an untreated rotator cuff injury, one or the other. That's true, right? We're just like looking way too into it. But apparently it's really common amongst these guys in the Russian military that move into some form of political power.

But what's kind of creepy is about it. Back it up to the beginning again jamie please um what's creepiest about is look at those fucking doors like what is that like what are those goddamn doors look at all that gold everything's gold i mean i guess that's the vestiges of being an imperial power where people used to collect Fabergé eggs. Yeah, he is. I mean, he is one of the most open dictators that you can see in modern society, which is supposed to be some sort of a democracy. I'm not entirely familiar with how the Russians run their political system, but I know that he was out and then he was, you know, he put some other guy in some sort of a puppet position and now he's back running the whole show. But it's, it's, he's a weird case, man. I don't know how he manages it. It seems like guys like that, someone always wants to kill them and just, it always falls apart, but

he's managed to keep it together for a long, long, long time. No, he is. I mean, I can't say I'm, like, super familiar with Russian politics, so I might be talking bullshit, but, I mean, he was the ex-head of the KGB. Like, he seems incredibly versed in spying on people and killing people who are threats and maintaining his position at all costs. Yeah, he doesn't just kill them. He kills them, like, openly. Yeah, he doesn't just kill him. He kills him like openly.

Yeah, he has them gunned down. In front of their girlfriend and stuff like that. Like he's just, it's just a massive terror tactic. There was that one guy that was, yeah, he was walking with his girlfriend and his thought was that he had become so famous from criticizing him that Putin couldn't kill him because if he did, it would be so obvious. Nope. No, he doesn't care.

I mean, I always think about there is a very respected journalist whose last name I won't pronounce because I'll butcher it. But, yeah, she was also just like gunned down for criticizing him. Yeah, well, that's kind of happened sort of theoretically, at least, in other places. But one of the weird ones in America was that Michael Hastings guy. Yeah. That's still, that one really freaks me out to this day. Because if you don't know the story, Michael Hastings was, there's actually a TED Talk that's available right now.

It's a podcast called the TED Radio Hour, which I listen to all the time, that had one episode called Disruptive Leadership, and it actually focused on this general, General McAllister. And they were kind of sympathetic to him in this Ted talk because the idea was that he did a real leadership thing by stepping down. And what it was was Michael Hastings had gotten embedded in this military organization where they were overseas. And when the volcano erupted, remember that volcano in Iceland? Yeah.

It erupted and it fucked up all the flights out of Europe. And you couldn't fly from that part of the world to this part of the world. So he got stuck. It was supposed to be a short trip and he got stuck over there for a month. And as he got closer and closer to these people, they got more and more relaxed and they started telling jokes that were inappropriate about like Al Gore or Joseph Biden. And along the lines, this guy, Michael Hastings, formulated this article, published it in Rolling Stone, and it became this sort of a national scandal. And I believe his name is McAllister, right?

Is that his name? He was forced to step down. the whole focus of this TED Radio Hour was about, was this guy taking a leadership position, a leadership point of view by deciding that his position was not as important as the cause itself, and he was just going to step down because he had created this environment where it was too much controversy. And he was upset that President Obama didn't ask him to stay, but it is what it is, and that's it. But what they don't say in this thing was this Michael Hastings guy who was in this recording

who was talking about what it was like when he was there, and he committed suicide in one of the strangest, most controversial ways ever. I mean, I don't think it was a suicide. I think it was an accident. Well, some people think it was a suicide. Some people think it was an accident. And the black helicopter crew thinks that he was murdered and that what they did is they took over the electronics in his Mercedes and they forced his car to drive right into a tree at 120 miles an hour with no brakes and explode. I mean, there's all this crazy, all these crazy conspiracy theories that are attached to it that say that engines don't go flying from a car like that unless there's a bomb involved. And, you know, like, why would this guy do this?

And it is pretty, pretty trippy stuff. And then there was claims that there was crystal meth in his system and that he was high on drugs and he had a problem with drugs in the past. But then the counter to that was people were like, well, no, he's probably doing Adderall, which a lot of writers do because it helps him write. Yeah. It's like the New York drug. Everyone's on Adderall in New York. Is it? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of people who are very close to Michael Hastings and I will say the people that I know that are very close to him think it was a tragic accident. He just happened to be going 120 miles an hour on Sunset Boulevard. Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's for the people I know that, you know, they never hit his brakes. I can't I can't debate it. But that's that's just what I've heard from people from people who I am very close to

who are close to him. I would say that, too, if I was close to that dude. I knew I was on some sort of a list. If you're close to that guy, you know, you on some sort of a list. If you're close to that guy, you know, you got to be on a list, right? Oh my God. Well, I mean, probably like if you're an investigative journalist doing a lot of stuff in Iraq and Somalia,

you're probably on a list. You talking about yourself? I haven't done Somalia stuff. No, I mean, but like a lot of his friends were investigative journalists. Oh, yeah. I'm sure everybody's. I'm probably on a list.

Probably on a list for having you right here. Dude. No, you take it. Dude. I'm in California., I'm probably on the list. Probably on the list for having you right here. Dude. No, you take it. Dude. I'm in California. I don't know. I'm adopting the native dialect. I'm sure we're all on lists, because how could you be interesting if you're not on a list? That's true.

It's sort of like a badge of courage to be on some sort of a list. Depends on what list, though, you know? But, yeah, it's a weird world we live in right now. I think there's a temporary bridge right now that's going on where whether it's the NSA, you know, fill in the blank with whatever name of whatever organization that's supposedly watching over us. But they have a certain amount of power to look into people that we don't have yet. That's temporary. a certain amount of power to look into people that we don't have yet. That's temporary.

There's going to come a time where this electronic barrier that we have in between each other, it's all going to dissolve. And everyone's going to have the same sort of power to spy on everybody that the NSA has. And we're just going to have to accept it. It's going to be very, it's going to be like we're all camping. Oh, God, it's going to be a horrifying world. We already know too much about each other. We do, right?

Was that a concern when you were writing this book? Because you empty yourself out in this book. I mean, you talk about sexual liaisons and, you know, relationships and friendships and things gone wrong. And when you were writing this, did you ever say, man, maybe I don't want everybody to know these things? I had a few things that were like that, usually actually with friendships. But ultimately, I thought that it was more important to be honest. Though the one thing that I did do was I felt like it would have been really unfair if I had taken kind of personal moments I had with someone like 15 years ago and just like put them in a book and thus on that person's Google results without asking them. So while I tried to be pretty merciless with myself, with people who I'm still friends with, I got their approval on what I wrote about them.

Oh, that's really cool. That's really important. That would be a real good way to destroy a friendship. You started telling crazy intimate stories about someone. Yeah, just not cool. It's not fair. And I know that a lot of people disagree with that and they're like, they're my memories. But I don't know. I don't think it's

right, especially if you're kind of the more famous one. Not cool. Yeah, well, saying they're my memories. But if you share a moment with someone, I think it's kind of a group memory or at least a group moment. Yeah, it's kind of kind of collectively owned. And I ran them by my parents also.

That's got to be weird. That was the most terrifying thing. And there is that because I ran the parts about my parents by them. But then they hadn't read the whole book. And I had this really terrifying thing when the book came out where I was like, oh god what are they going to think and I mean I love my parents I have a really supportive relationship I couldn't ask for like you know two cooler people on earth you know my parents but still you're always scared right it's scary to show yourself like that but but they liked it they liked it mostly so I'm very happy about that well you must have really open-minded parents

what do your parents do? My mom, she used to be an illustrator. Now she's mostly retired. She works kind of as a babysitter slash cat sitter now. And my dad's an academic. Oh, that's cool. Well, so yeah, you obviously have some intelligent, open-minded parents. They've got to be really proud of you because this is excellent stuff.

Thank you so much. Yeah, they really are and um it was cool because i got to talk about how both of them influenced me so much in their totally totally different ways like my mom is an amazing artist she she draws so beautifully and she draws kind of like me if i was a less bitter and jagged person like like she draws like the sweet me and i was able to say like this is how my mom taught me how to draw. You know, this is how she inspired me. You got some great people that reviewed this too, man.

You got Matt Taibbi to review this. Patton Oswald reviewed this. I mean, this is really fucking impressive stuff. Thank you. Yeah, Matt's awesome. He actually interviewed me for my book launch in New York. And I grew up reading Matt, you know, I was reading like The Exile when I was 18. And I love his stuff in New York Press. And what I love about

Matt's work is that a lot of journalists like they're like these really like narrow professional people that are very, very serious. And Matt was like this total wild man when he was young. And now he does this incredible investigative journalism on finance and politics but he still writes like a real person he still writes in that kind of hunter s thompson tone that's exactly how i was going to describe it like a lucid hunter s thompson exactly like less drug addled yeah yeah best of hunter s thompson and less narcissistic a bit i would know much less narcissistic now but it was so influential to me because I was like, wow, you can totally be this badass investigative journalist. And you could also be this guy who, when he was young, was having these crazy, often criminal adventures in the aftermath of the

Soviet Union falling. Those two things were not incompatible at all. I always like people like that who have lives that are really, really diverse. Yeah, that's a really good way of describing him too, because we do have this idea that if you're going to be an investigative journalist, that your piece has to be sort of homogenized and that it's going to, the facts take precedent over the flavor of the prose. And his has a lot of flavor. There's a lot of, there's a lot of personality in distributing those facts, but it doesn't get in the way of the facts. Oh, God, no, no. It's such like a master class on how to do it. And in fact, it really serves the facts because especially when he's writing about financial journalism, I mean, finance can be so boring and so complicated that it can really be over most people's heads. And if you write it

completely without flavor, most people will never even be able to sink into it at all. Yeah, he's the guy that I got most of my information about the financial collapse about. And one of the things that disturbed me the most was how little reaction, like publicly, his articles caused. Like, I thought it would be one of those things where everyone would be sharing it. It would be on the front page of the New York Times.

Today on CNN, Matt Taibbi, uncover. And everybody would be like, look at the facts. This is crazy. But meanwhile, it was like this terrible, terrible scenario where the whole system was hijacked by these fucking criminals, and no one seemed to care. It just, I have bills to pay. I have to keep going.

I have a spin class at 9 o'clock. I can't be paying. And no one really gave it the attention, or I shouldn't say no one, but not publicly, nationally. It didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved. And he wrote a series of them. And, you know, some of them I was like, this guy's going to get fucking killed. Like these were intense allegations and backed up, all of it backed up by facts and really well written.

And it's just like, almost like it's too much for people. It's like complicated. It deals with a lot of things that are kind of boring, very intellectually demanding, not necessarily partisan. And I think for a lot of people, they're like, what are you going to do? Yeah. It bothers me that he's not more famous. It bothers me. I think I hope with the next book he will be because I think he's like one of the best journalists working in America.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. He's amazing. He's amazing. Now, how much time do you spend doing's, he's amazing. He's amazing. Now you, how much time do you spend doing all this? You do a lot of journalism and you do a lot of crazy shit. You go to like really nutty sort of dangerous places. I've been to a few. Yeah. What is like the most disturbing place that you've been to? So the most dangerous place I went to was last summer when I went into Syria for a day.

And that was basically, and the reason when I talk about how dangerous it was, the fact that I wouldn't even spend the night there shows probably something about my tolerance levels. But at that time, this coalition of Islamist groups had just kicked ISIS out of this border town called Azaz. And you could take a bus over to the Turkish border, and then you could cross. And I did that with a war journalist friend of mine, and I spent a day with the Islamic Front driving around Azaz. And one of the things that was happening then was it was before James Foley was murdered, but we all knew that there were lots and lots of kidnappings there. And at that point, we thought it was just for ransom and

stuff. But still, you know, kidnapping is a terrible, terrible thing. And when the scariest thing that ever happened to me as a journalist was we're with these three young media activists slash fighter guys, really cool dudes. I mean, I liked them. And we're in this car, we're driving around as us, and the car slows to a halt, just breaks down. And Patrick, the guy I'm with, immediately thinks it's set up for kidnapping to, you know, get us out of the car. Because that's one way that you can set things up for kidnappings. And the guys didn't have their guns and so we had to walk to the media office um through azaz and azaz at that point looked like something out of mad max like it was just no women on the street just men a lot of ak's uh even if a guy didn't

have an ak like they'd be holding like sticks and stuff um there were well there was a like what i can only describe as like a gun bodega which was fascinating because it sold all these different guns. Like, it might sell, like, a beautiful antique, you know, pearl inlaid revolver that, like, someone's dad had, but then also grenades and stuff. Grenades? Grenades, yeah, because, you know, in case someone tried to kidnap you, you'd have a grenade. Have a fucking, you're coming with me, bitch. Yeah, basically. Basically, yeah. kidnap you you'd have a great have a fucking you're coming with me bitch yeah basically basically yeah so you know we're walking through this town and um that was i think the scariest

thing that i i ever did in my life but it all turned out fine and we got to the media office which it was a government building that that these young men had taken over when they kicked out the central government and um the director of it had been kidnapped by isis and the young guys are there like watching watching soccer because everyone everyone loves soccer there and it was just i don't know it's like this feeling of being in this place where um the whole world is both fucking with it and abandoned it both at once, you know. And anything could happen. So that was the most dangerous thing I've ever done. Like nothing I've ever done was as dangerous as going to Syria.

But I think the most personally disturbing thing was I was in Gaza six months ago, I guess. And I went to Shijya, which is this neighborhood that was completely destroyed by Israel during protective edge, like they bombed it. And then they went in with tanks, and then they went in with bulldozers, like, so it's like flattened. And it's just like, gone, like, you know, you go there, and you're like, this is, this is a neighborhood that has been wrecked. And a lot of times when you see houses that have collapsed, you can see all of the stuff of people's lives in it. Like you're like, oh, there's the cooking pots

and there's the bed and there's all the stuff that's just trapped in. And then people, because there's a big housing shortage, obviously in Gaza, were living in these bombed out buildings, you know, where their home was. And, you know, with like, no real like services or anything, like I saw this, I was walking, I was kind of scrambling through this, like building to take pictures. And then I just randomly walked into what I thought was an

abandoned room. And there's like an old guy there, you know, hanging out. And, you know, I was like, I'm really sorry to, you know, invade your home. And I was just just talking to him. But, yeah, he had had like a baller, gorgeous home, you know, before this. And now he was just living in a little like the wreck of one of the rooms. Whoa. Wow. It's, you know, Mad Max is the way you describe that city. And that sort of apocalyptic scenario is something that we all worry could happen to us, to anything.

But one of the things that I always try to remember is that the apocalypse is already here. It's just not here. Yeah. If you go there, it's here. Like, in Gaza, it's there. That's the apocalypse. I mean, it's there. I mean, it might as well be in that guy's house. I mean, you are living like Mad Max. Those people in that. What's the name of the city? Azaz?

Azaz. Azaz. And Azaz. I mean, that is what everyone's terrified of. What everyone's terrified of is a reality where you walked on the street and everyone's carrying military weapons and you're just it's chaos. And it's fairly lawless. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the refugee camps that I saw, it's not that they were lawless. I would never describe them as that. But just in the sense of the extreme falling in your life situation, there was a guy I met when I was in Iraqi Kurdistan last time. I was with Dr. Thot Borders there.

And he was this Iraqi Kurdistan. Last time I was with Dr. Scott Borders there. And he, you know, he was this like, super smart dude, like, he was Kurdish, which meant that he was really discriminated against. But he scored so high in his math exams, he was able to go to like an elite engineering school and get an aeronautics degree. And you know, he's an aeronautics engineer. And like, this is a dude that would, you know, be be on the path to like having an awesome job. And now like he's living in a tent with his like whole family and his mom and everything. And, you know, you never expect that when you're living in like an awesome city like Aleppo that he was living in. And then the war comes and there's bombings and you're driven out of your home and you're so displaced that eventually you're forced to be living in this tent with no end in sight.

And you're not allowed to ever improve your circumstances because you have the wrong passport. Jesus Christ. It's hard for anybody living in America to wrap their head around what it would be like to be there and be stuck in that position. It really is. I mean, so the Syrian refugee, the Syrian refugee thing, one thing that I think perhaps isn't in the media enough is that the people who are coming to Europe right now are the middle class of the country because it's cost over $1,000 to pay that, pay a smuggler to take you over. pay a smuggler to take you over. And every single one of those people could buy a plane ticket and travel like a normal person and not have their kids risk drowning and all of that. But they're banned from it because they're Syrians. And the whole like taking the boat and walking from Greece to Germany and having volunteers give out water and sleeping on the streets and like the whole humanitarian disaster is just a function of not letting them buy plane tickets at all. That's all it is

Well, there's this big push in America now Especially among the Republicans to not allow anyone from Syria to come into the United States It's crazy like not a single person with the Syrian refugee program has ever been arrested for a terrorism offense It's it's like it's nuts. It's it's so they're brown. They're so scary. They're terrorists. Oh my god It's I gotta be like one one of them that's an asshole. I'm sure there's assholes, but not one of them was arrested for a terrorism offense ever. I guarantee if you let, like, a million Canadians in, and they're the nicest people ever. There'd be, like, some of those guys that are in that big, like, riot, what was it, in Toronto? Yeah.

Smashing cars. Yeah, one of them would get through. Or one of them from the Vancouver hockey riot. Yeah. One of those assholes would make it through. No, it's crazy. And it's really, like, personally upsetting to me because I've done so much, you know, work with Syrians over the last few years. And, like, to see these, like, amazing people that I know who are so tough and so smart and have endured so much, like, being defamed like this.

I feel almost like someone's shit talking like my like my well someone is shit talking my friends you know it it makes me angry on a personal level like not just a theoretical one well it's not just it's it's so short-sighted because if you consider the fact that you're you're talking about an entire group of people that's fleeing a terrible area exactly you're And you're saying, well, they've all got to be bad. That's one of the most racist things that you could ever say publicly in 2015. Like, it's sort of this weird accepted racism. And because of the fact that terrorism, like, when you're dealing with Muslims, right, you're dealing with 1.6, is that what it is?

Billion people? It's like a fifth of the world. Yeah. And so the idea is saying, well, these terrorist activities, they've been done by Muslims. Why don't we kick all the white people out of America because white people have been responsible for all the mass shootings? I mean, that's more logical than this. this. It's so awful. And like the other thing that's to me, like particularly like moronic is I see sometimes in the media, like why aren't the Muslims condemning the terrorists? Every single group that is actually on the ground, like fighting ISIS with guns, you know, they're Muslims. Yeah. Yeah. They're like 90% Muslim or 95% Muslim. I mean, a lot of them are war criminals too. I'm not saying they're good groups necessarily, but they're Muslim. Every single major Muslim religious leader in the world has condemned ISIS in terms that they wouldn't even use in America. I mean, it's astounding to me. I think that the only reason anyone would think that Muslims aren't condemning ISIS is because they can't use Google, don't read the news, and have never spoken to a Muslim.

Or for the same reason why Matt Taibbi's articles never really got as popular as I thought they should. People just don't have the time or the need. Everything is wonderful. You go to the supermarket. You buy food. It's really easy. You know, you go through the McDonald's drive-thru. Your stomach's full.

You sit home. You watch Netflix. You're good. Like, you don't need to pay attention to Syria. Fuck those people. Keep them out. Donald Trump's going to keep us safe. Oh, God.

And you just drink yourself into a coma, wake up in the morning, do it all over again. Drink some coffee, get out the door, get in your fucking car, do the same shit. As long as you can get to work. I got bills. As long as you can get to work, you're fine. It's just, the idea of America in the first place was supposed to be a place where people could go Where they didn't like where they were and they wanted to found they wanted to establish a new life They wanted to look we're gonna take a giant chance

We're gonna get in a fucking stupid boat and make it across this giant body of water We don't even know what it looks like they didn't have photos back then That's one of the weirdest things about traveling to america if you really stop and think about it it was done when people didn't even have photographs the first people that came over if you wanted a picture something you had to fucking draw it right and that's how crazy these people were they're like we would i don't care i saw drawing some pretty trees we're fucking getting in the boat but they brought their babies and their grandma and shit they got in a boat and they came to America because they had an idea. And that idea was there is a better life here. We can make it. And to deny that to these people because they

were born on the wrong patch of dirt. And I'm not saying they shouldn't be checked. You shouldn't go through a criminal background check and make sure you're not letting in some mass murderer or not letting in some rapist or some thieves or whatever yeah i mean if there's a way to do that that should be done but the idea that you should never let anybody in that's from syria it's like god man imagine you're cursed just because you were born in the shitty patch of dirt that's yeah that's exactly what the thinking is it's like because you were born here like oh you carry some virus you have to be quarantined and man i'm like i'm so i'm so fucking grateful that you're saying this like to your audience and with like on the massive platform you have like i i know i sound sappy and shit but like thank you

really well listen thank you for going over there if it wasn't for people like you and and you know the vice people and all these journalists and all these people that go over there and show us in in video form like exactly what's happening and get to watch it and see what it's like you go oh this is fucking chaos like this is in the world right now 2015 while people are watching the emmys and everybody's on the red carpet smiling the there's parts of the world that are like a Mad Max movie right now. Or like this refugee camp I went to. It was a bunch of refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Like people don't know.

It gets cold there. Like kids freeze to death, you know, every winter in those camps. Because it's like you're living under vinyl tarp in the mountains. Jesus Christ. It's very strange that the world is so uneven, that there are places like the Congo that exist on the same timeline as Park Avenue, that there's people that have doormen

that dress up like the guys that were holding open the door for putin you know and you hop into uber limousines and you travel around the city you know with the the right fragrances in the in the car and it's it's a we live in really strange times because i think the disparity that existed that it's kind of always existed there's always been disparity there's always been disparity. There's always been, you know, the haves and the have-nots. And in some places, it's on a much more grand scale. But it's never been so obvious. Especially because so many people are online now.

I think a lot of people maybe don't realize, especially in the Middle East, like how internet connected people are. When I was in Domiz, which is this refugee, it was the refugee camp in Iraq that I was at. One of the most popular stores was the store that was selling personal Wi-Fi hotspots. And you'd have people that were living in like a tent, you know, with tarp and like nothing, but they'd have like a Wi-Fi hotspot. And that's because they had a family that was scattered all around the world. And the only way to communicate with them was with WhatsApp or with texting services like this or with Skype. And so like the most important thing you were going to get was internet access so that you

could like talk to your brother that was in one country and your daughter that was in another. Like that was more important than anything. You said daughter. I heard your New York came out. Oh, fuck. It's coming out, man. I tried so hard.

I got excited it came out. You sound like my uncle. York came out. Oh, fuck. It's coming out, man. I tried so hard. I got excited it came out. You sound like my uncle. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I'm from Queens originally. Well, you know what's kind of crazy is I guarantee you there's a high possibility that someone in one of those camps is listening to you right now. Oh, absolutely.

On this podcast that have downloaded it from the internet. No, it's absolutely true. I wonder, I feel like if you're, like if someone who's listening is listening, you know, from a camp or is listening, you know, in a refugee situation, like I, man, how cool would it be to get someone like that on your show as a guest if there is like a way with Skype or something? That'd be amazing. I have to clear it with Donald Trump. Make sure he thinks it's okay. Are Syrian voices allowed into the country or would that cause ISIS? Does ISIS come from Syrian voices? Most likely it's a disease of the mind. He wants to stop the Internet to the Middle East. Have you heard this? This is the latest

Donald Trump thing. I had a signing last night, so I unfortunately I missed the intellectual glory that was the Republican debate. So fill me in on this. I didn't see it, but he was talking about this, that one of the things that they would do or he would do is knock off the Internet to certain parts of the Middle East. Why? Well, because that's how they're plotting against us, Molly Crabapple, while you sit in your wonderful New york apartment writing books about sex the terrorists the terrorists are winning oh god i mean so in isis territories that those

fuckers are occupying they got rid of private internet access in people's homes because they're really scared of the internet too they are super scared because they're all these citizen activists and journalists that are revealing shit about them on the internet. Right now, like if you're in Raqqa, the only way to even get online is to be on these internet cafes that are kind of run by dudes with ISIS connections. Whoa. And that's because ISIS is also really fucking scared of the internet. They really don't like it. Really?

Yeah. Why is that? ISIS is also really fucking scared of the Internet. They really don't like it. Really? Yeah. Why is that? Well, because a lot of Syrians living and Iraqis living in their territories fucking hate them. And they give intel on them to foreign journalists.

That's fascinating. So the Internet acts as a way that they communicate and establish plans, but it also acts as something that's plotting against them. Exactly. Same as the internet does it everywhere else. Yeah. I mean, it's just communication. It's just people. Yeah. When you're a group of cunts that the whole world hates and you're online, I guarantee you're going to get some haters. Yeah. I mean, there's one group of journalists there that's became very famous that's called Bracca is being silently slaughtered that I mean they did tons of work documenting ISIS shit and ISIS I mean beheaded two of their

members that were in Turkey and there are plenty of other citizen journalists there and yeah ISIS is dead scared of normal people who are living under their fucking occupation using the internet they hate it you know another thing they're scared of they're scared of being killed by women so that's kind of i i think i think this is my theory that um the kurdish they won't go to heaven if a kurdish girl kills them thing i think like one person said that and then they saw how much play it got in the media and they were like oh man this is good pr let's keep let's keep milking this one you think so i think so yeah

does it make sense ideologically like within their religion is that something that they believe in if they were like, oh man, this is good PR. Let's keep milking this one. You think so? I think so, yeah. Does it make sense ideologically, like within their religion? Is that something that they believe in? If you get killed by a woman, you don't get all the virgins? No, I think that's bullshit. I think maybe there's like a macho thing, you know, where they're like, oh fuck, a girl shot my leg, but it's not a theological thing. Damn it. It seems so good though. I know, really. It seems sweet. I was just thinking of like some crazy amazon scenario just like armies of chicks with guns chasing isis and they just run away

because they're scared of being killed by chicks i mean like the the women who are fighting isis like in the ypj are you know ferocious soldiers but either their isis is scared of getting they're scared of getting killed by soldiers if we really was true, though, and we really allocated our resources correctly, I think there's probably enough really mean bitches in the world we could put together a hell of a fucking army. I think so, too, with tons of motivation. Could you imagine just jets and bombers and missiles all being piloted by women? That's it. Only women.

Only women going after ISIS because if they get killed by these women, they're fucked and they don't get to go to heaven. I think you'd have to do, like, a more... I think that the bombings aren't doing shit against ISIS. I think what YPG is doing is, you know, I think it would have to be more on the ground. On the ground, yeah.

Well, especially in Afghanistan, right? That's one of the things that people have always had a problem with invading Afghanistan. It's essentially a series of mountain ranges occupied by warlords. There's not a lot of access. It's not so easy to get to. Well, the thing with ISIS is what they do is they occupy cities. Like a military occupation, they try to marry people and build families. And they try to insert themselves as much as possible into the fabric of a city. And that's in part it's them making it so that if you, you know, bombed Raqqa, you would be murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were just too poor to get out.

So they do it strategically. Yeah. Sort of embed themselves as a human shield. Yeah, exactly. They do it strategically. Yeah. Sort of embed themselves as a human shield. Yeah, exactly.

And like there are, I mean, the majority of Raqqa is, they're like farmers who couldn't afford to get out because it's expensive to even get out of Syria. What a mess. What a crazy, chaotic, psychotic mess. It's really bizarre that, remember that Obama speech that he had on television, was it a year or so ago, where he was talking about eminent military action against Syria and the whole country went, what? I mean, fucking crazy. And then it just stopped. Literally, like silence, like you didn't hear anything more about it. They just completely backed off just because Republicans and Democrats, everyone was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like, look what happened in Iraq.

Look what happened in Afghanistan. Look at the massive negative reaction the American public has had to all these military actions. You're going to start up a new one in Syria? For what reason? Because somebody got gassed? Because they gassed people? Like, what's going on that we need to sacrifice American lives over there? Exactly.

Like, what's the on that we need to sacrifice American lives over there? Exactly. Like, what's the cause of all this? I mean, what's really sort of so tragic about Syria is that Obama, this is me saying an opinion that's not necessarily mine, but it's an opinion that I've gotten from speaking to refugees. And a lot of people, I think, felt very led on by what Obama said. And they felt like, oh, there's going to be some support or, I don't know, some action against Assad. Because, I mean, whatever one thinks about American intervention or non-intervention, what Assad did is a crime against humanity on a massive scale what whatever we think you think we should have done what he did was fucking horrific and anyone who is in syria and you know who was at the receiving end of that would very often want someone else to intervene explain to people what he did do he uh ran like an industrial scale um arrest uh torture, killing program. He does something called barrel bombings, which are taking like, basically like dumpsters full of TNT and shrapnel and dropping them on populated areas, target schools, targets hospitals, destroyed large swathes of Aleppo. And this isn't, this isn't me saying, this isn't me saying that I think the U.S. should have intervened because I still don't know, but I'm very against the U.S. intervening in general in anything because I think we always fuck it up. But he also factually did do those things.

It's just hard to imagine that someone's capable of doing shit like that. It's just hard to imagine that someone's capable of doing shit like that. It's just where people can killing 20,000 people and like bombing the fuck out of the city and it put it down. And I think that perhaps in his mind, he thought that he could do the same when there was no uprising against him. But obviously, that wasn't what happened. Well, that's, I mean, that's the story of Saddam Hussein and his sons as well. Imagine being the son of an evil, brutal dictator. Yeah. And you're just like, well, those sons always end up like these fucking Nero figures, don't they?

I mean, it's like the father is very often like a thuggish military guy. And then the son is this princeling who always got whatever he wanted in his life. And that's when it gets so, so weird. You see it with like Kim Jong-il also. Exactly. Yeah. And Uday. Kuse, is that what his name?

Yeah. Those motherfuckers. God, I read some horrible stories about what they would do. They would find women that were getting married and they would take them from their husband, rape them, and then feed them to dogs. They had dogs that they had in their basement that they just didn't feed and they would throw people that they didn't like to their dogs and the dogs would tear them apart whoa and then they would watch of course but the the fact that a person

can get to that place that a person can get to that place where they it, in the weirdest way, we're flexible in a beautiful way. You can see someone who can create beautiful songs and art and they can touch people with their words and their thoughts and their deeds and they can be something inspirational and amazing. But we're also flexible in this horrific way where they could play upon the worst fears and the worst the worst emotions that people are capable of manifesting and they could just just attack and torture and

maim and brutalize and murder and and they could do it wantonly and do it with no for no real reason they could do it sadistically for fun, for recreation. The fact that that's the same beast, that it's just they're human beings, and it's like, I mean, there could obviously be some anomalies in the brain itself, but essentially a good portion of what makes a person who they are is their environment and their life experiences and the nurturing and how they're raised and what they're exposed to and we get we're so flexible and pliable because we want to survive that we're capable the same species during the same time period we're not talking about like

cave people that cannibalize because they didn't have books they didn't understand it was bad and they hadn't invented language yet no we're talking about people with the Internet that are capable of doing these horrific things. At the same time, there's someone like, you know, I mean, you fill in the blank. There's a lot of beautiful people out there that do things. But my friend Justin Wren, who's from these photos over here, who goes to the Congo. He lives with the pygmies for six months a year, and he builds wells for them, and he gets malaria and almost dies. And, you know, he's an American from Texas. He just went over there and saw how incredible these people were, and he dedicates his life to it.

He's like, to me, he's like one of my favorite people because he's like this beautiful manifestation of, like, experiencing, like, friendship and love from these people and then just becoming incredibly dedicated to try to take care of them. But these people exist at the same time. It's just, it's so hard to understand. Like a parrot is a fucking parrot. You know, some parrots you can tame and they'll eat peanuts out of your hand and other ones they live in the trees, but they're fucking parrots. And we're like everything all at once. We're so, we're so weird.

We're so weird. You know, I mean, I'm a fan of people. Don't get me wrong. You're pro people? or I are not capable of those things. So for us to see that, like what we consider a horrible person in America, it's like someone who's says something horrible on, you know, on Twitter about race or something like that, or someone who's, you know, disparaging about President Obama or, you know, there's like so minor in a lot of ways, what we shame people for here. You know, you didn't use the correct gender pronoun, you piece of shit.

You know, meanwhile, there's terrible, terrible things that are going on at the same part of the world, in the same time, in other parts of the world. I mean, I don't believe in a race to the bottom. It shouldn't be like, well, you haven't, like, thrown someone to the dog, so you're cool. No, no, it's definitely not that. No, but I definitely hear where you're

coming from that is funny right you can always look at like saddam hussein's kids and like i'm fine be like all i did was punch a baby i didn't have dogs eat it why do you gotta shame me for my baby punching shaming shaming is a new thing right when did shaming come around i mean public shaming like the term don't you feel like public shaming is sort of an old american tradition we have a book called the scarlet letter about public shaming yeah but not as a phrase you know like fat shaming you know you mean when it when it became um yeah slut shaming like these terms are very new these like these are like these new concepts i mean mean, I think that they're they're

new coinages to describe to describe, you know, old behavior. And the truth is, I do think people should be criticized for like, I don't know, I feel like if you're going on Twitter and you're writing you're a dumb whore to random women like that is jerk ass behavior and people should tell you that you're being a fucking jerk for it. She's really into it that's her thing if she's she's previously expressed she's previously expressed a desire for that yeah they have like an established relationship you're a dumb whore oh you fucker get over here like yeah yeah no previous consent but you know to random random women who don't have that in their twitter bio that that's what they're into i think like you were being a jerk ass and someone is like fuck you stop calling random women who don't have that in their Twitter bio that that's what they're into. I think like you were being a jerk ass and if someone is like, fuck you, stop calling

random women whores on Twitter. Oh yeah. You know, I think that, I think that's fine. I think that what we were talking about before about having no, um, that one day we're going to come a time where there's no boundaries between people. I'm, I'm really absolutely convinced of this. Like I've, I've, uh, I've had these weird, um, trips in the sensory deprivation tank where I've sort of seen this take place. The slow acceptance of what is the ultimate inevitable reality.

And it kind of freaks me out sometimes. I have to get out of the tank because I just can't handle it. Because I really think, I think like life as a person, we have this idea that we're going to put our shell on and we're good. I got my shell on. Yeah. There's going to be no shells. We're going to just have to somehow or another... Like, you know how you have friends?

Like, I have friends that I'm almost too close to them. I know everything they do. You know, like, what'd you do? Ah, you fucker, why'd you do that? Oh, my God, what are you doing? Ah, I just fucking lost my mind. But you know everything. Like, we're going to know that about everybody.

It's just a matter of time. But the thing is, I don't think it's going to make us nicer to each other or make us like each other better. I think that one of the things that Twitter has done, I mean, I love Twitter. Like I'm addicted to Twitter. I love it. I think it's really cool. But in addition to having us speak to all sorts of amazing people that we never would have spoken to before, it also like really revealed what other people were thinking and made us like really dislike them for it. In a lot of ways, right? Yeah.

Yeah. What's also the anonymity, the ability to reach out to Molly and just say some mean shit anonymously. You know, you're just this little egg. I'm a little egg. You know, that's all your icon is. And, you know, you have a series of letters that represent your egg. And then you're like, fuck you, Molly Crabapple.

You fucking bitch. I read your bullshit. I didn't even believe that's how it went down. I think you're a fucking attention whore. And then you read that, you're like, ow! You know, you fucking anonymous person is searing my soul with your hate. I haven't, I mean,

I don't, like, I get a lot of, like, as I'm sure you do. I think, okay, so this is the thing. Sometimes the thing that helps me put it in perspective is I got 70,000 Twitter followers. And I think if I ever had any other grouping, like any real life grouping of 70,000 people, like, what would be the jackass ratio that I would expect in that? It's always one in a hundred. That's my thought. My thought is it's one,

it's the real 1% that we should be concerned with. The jackass 1%? Yeah, the mean people. Because I think they're so, they're so calm. Like the idea of the 1% being like the real problem in America, being successful people. I think if you got the 1% of all the successful people together,

only 1% of them would be evil cunts. I really believe that. I think 1% across, I think you keep going with the 1%. Like how many of those, well, out of those people that are evil, how many of them are true sociopaths? Probably 1% of them too.

Like it keeps going. But if you have 300 million people, you're dealing with 3 million assholes. Like if there's 100 people, one of them's going to suck. And if you have 300 million, you have 3 million people that suck. And if they all get a hold of your Twitter account, you're going to think the world has

ended. You're going to think, my God, and you won't see the other 99. You won't see them because the hateful words of the one will just be overwhelming. And every now and then, Molly, your book's amazing. You're like, retweet. It's all a lie. It's all a lie. Let's cling to this. Yeah. You'll try to retweet. It's all a lie. It's all a lie. It's clinging to this.

Yeah, you'll try to find it. I mean, I've watched people in... Like, we were talking about Lance Armstrong. And I looked at the mentions that Lance Armstrong gets on Twitter. Like, anything he writes. Like, had a great time, you know, doing this race. Was it as good a time as when you're running away from drug tests? Oh, fuck's sake.

They can't help it. It's like they people just love to dig they just love to fucking reach out of that rib cage pull out your heart they can't help it they know they can and it's also a new ability that human beings have sort of cultivated over the last couple decades really didn't exist before well before like you would have had to have, like, written a letter, left your mom's basement, walked all the way down to the block with all these other humans. It's always your mom's basement. So, yeah, I mean, why don't I say, like, your dad's basement, your girlfriend's basement? There's so many other basements these people could be in.

Like, why do I have to put them all in their mom's basement? Because it's somehow or another for a man the most pathetic thing. Like, Mom, I'm down here, Mom. Stop yelling. I'm down here, Mom. Stop yelling. I'm down here telling people they're wrong on the internet. You're typing up a fucking storm. I'm trying to hurt Landshark's feelings. You're cycling and fucking lying.

Yeah. I like that. That was a good personification of that. It's like this feeling of just wanting to just somehow or another get a reaction. And it's all losers. That's unfortunate. I mean, I hate to say that to those people right now. No, no, I'm a winner.

And I think what he did was dishonorable. Okay, well, then you might think it. But if you actually are sitting around trying to attack him, I guarantee you that is energy and focus that you could have best spent on your own life 100 or like maybe if you're just like a mean critical person who is a winner you could have written a really great essay about like juicing in the sport that like really took him down and then you could have challenged your like meanness in a positive and winning direction but if you really looked at the essay honestly you'd have to take down the whole sport itself i mean mean, you really wouldn't. If you want to take down Lance Armstrong, you'd have to take him down by his individual actions in defending his actions in the sport.

Yeah. He admits that. He's pretty open about the fact that he fucked up and that he made some pretty horrible choices. That's it, though. The sport itself, like if you really wanted to write an essay, you'd write, what the fuck, a bunch of steroid using bike riders. That's what you got. Yeah, and you'd write like probably about the economic impetus and how all the ways that like top people were able to kind of condone it, but then get out with their hands clean and you write something like that really channeled your meanness into a positive direction

that really tore shit down. Yeah. That's a weird thing about blogs too, though. There's a lot of people, I've read some really mean blogs. People write about folks and I'm like, what's interesting about this is like blogs are not a conversation. It's like you're, you have this attack, this focused attack of, of an individual. But if that individual was there and they could

respond to this and you could have a communication, it would be a different thing. Like what it is, it's like a message tied to the claw of a raven that you're sending out. Like it's such a one-way thing. It's not really an effective way to communicate because you're not really trying to communicate. What you're trying to do is hurt somebody. Like when you see attack blogs. They're the worst, yeah. There's some that deserve it. Like if you could write an expose on someone who runs some horrible business that is using slave labor, fill in the blank on some terrible scenario that you could expose.

I mean, the world should see it. Like, matt taivi's exposes on the financial collapse brilliant brilliant perfect and you know that those are real legitimate and important but i've read some things that people have written they're just about like random celebrities or you know like you're just like why why are you that invested in tyler Like, how do you have so much opinion? I think it's Taylor. Fuck. I'm a fucking dork. I don't know anything. Well, I'm a fucking dork, too.

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate. That fucking song, I like that song, goddamn it, because I have daughters and I have a wife. That goddamn song is playing all the time. They play it in the car when I'm with them. I'm like, okay, you can play that one. I like that one. Cool. That's awesome.

But I'm embarrassed that I'm like that's okay you can play that one I like that one cool that's awesome but I'm embarrassed that I like it no no it just it shows like diverse musical tastes that's all I definitely have that sometimes too diverse you know but um I don't know how we got into that but it's like yeah like mean takedowns of like some singer like come on really this terrible person really affecting your life in some strange way. But like the comments that people will make to people, I believe on Twitter and Facebook, all these are not more Facebook. It's like slightly less anonymous, but all these anonymous methods of communicating,

they're going to dissolve slowly, but surely the boundaries between people. It's not just going to be the NSA that can find out exactly what you're doing and who's saying what to who it's going to be the whole fucking world everyone's going to be able to do that and it's going to be very very weird very weird the other thing is like people will find out the people who are doing that I remember there was this like asshole who made a bunch of twitter accounts to write that women who worked in tech, but then just random women he didn't like were cunts. And he really fixated on this one woman who is a programmer at Tor, which is an anonymous web browser.

And he, like, made seven Twitter accounts at one point to, like, tell her she was a cunt. And so, finally, she was like this this has gone on long enough and um when he was visiting her website uh presumably to find more proof that she was a cunt she got his ip address tracked down where he worked and posted his name in his workplace and with the line that was like it's classic she wrote should have used tour fucko and and i was like you know if you went up to a bunch of women or if you went to a bunch of women at bars and just screamed like cunt in their face like eventually either them or their boyfriend or someone around was going to hit you but because you were doing this online you thought like wow i can just go up to people and scream cunt and nothing's ever

going to happen and some you know it did and there's no one's going to be sympathetic to anyone's going to get seven twitter accounts just to call some woman a cunt. Yeah. No, no one feels bad that he got doxxed. Oh, the poor guy got doxxed. Well, he was just expressing himself and exercising his First Amendment rights. No, I think I really think we're we're maybe a few years away from that just not being around anymore from it being some strange new world where we're all going to know exactly what i think i really believe that it's we're maybe 10 years away

from being able to read each other's thoughts oh god can you imagine yeah it's going to be very strange but all the romance and things going to be gone because so much of like so much of like really exciting things in life is like anticipating and not knowing. And then, you know, it's almost like the unwrapping of Christmas presents. Like, like when someone texts you, Hey, what are you doing? And you're like, yes, it's her. Fuck you. You know, like there's that, that moment where you didn't know if someone likes you or not, like what's going on. And then you're going back and forth with each other, sending each other emails,

or you get that phone call out of the blue from someone you didn't know they really were into you, and you're like, yeah. But when you know everyone's thoughts, it's going to be like all the romance. Oh, you're into me, you fucker. Why are you playing? There's going to be no playing cool.

There's going to be no, you know, when you go to apply for a job, you're like, well, you fucking don't like me, so I'll just get out of here like you think I'm a loser So you're not gonna hire me. There's not gonna be any illusions So a lot of romance is gonna be gone a lot of a lot of the fun of things is not knowing you know We don't like that though No, I'm an I'm an artist. I I Like I like the not. I like the not knowing. I like the mystery sometimes.

It's fun as long as it works out. Obviously, it's worked out for you. You're a young woman. You already have a book published. You have many, many, many, many art pieces published. You have journalism things that you've done. It's worked out for you, all this romance. But for some people, this is not happening for them. And they're like, God damn it. I just think it would be better if there was no secrets. But if you're that person and it wasn't working out for you, probably if there were no secrets, you would just have the crushing disappointment of realizing either no one was thinking of you or they were thinking bad things about you and it would just make you more unhappy. Maybe.

But is what we are as human beings currently, is that a static state? And is this a state that we can expect to exist in sort of this form, speaking with our mouths, making noises with our faces, interpreting it in our own minds and listening to other people say things and sort of establishing what they're meaning. Is that it? Is this going to be forever? Is this going to be how human? No, no fucking way. Just like a monkey climbed off of a tree and eventually became a person 200 plus thousand years later, whatever the fuck it was, whatever has led us to improve to become what we are today is a continuous cycle. It's not going to stop. I think that this idea that what we've

got right now, like, oh, this, the romance of not knowing and you know, it's amazing and it all works out. Well, it's fucking, it's temporary. This is a little, when we look back in time to the amount of time that we've spent in this state currently, the Internet state has been so brief, but so transcendent. Absolutely. Like the most transcendent thing. I mean, I think as much or more than like the printing press, probably more. My God. One of the really good articles I was reading about the refugee stuff is by this Iraqi journalist that I always plug because he's so brilliant Raith Abdul Ahad and he did this uh piece about you know people making the trip and one of the things he talked about is that this was a trip that when he was a young man in Iraq he had tried to pay a smuggler to do and smuggler like defrauded him and he didn't get to do it but it was all under the control of smugglers whereas

now if you have a cell phone like once you get from Turkey to Greece, once you do that little four-hour boat ride, you just put on the GPS maps on your cell phone and you walk. Wow. You don't need smugglers after that. Isn't that crazy? It completely upended this entire,

like, really, like, disgusting, nasty business. Well, similar in a lot of ways to the business of sneaking people over from mexico you know i have a friend who he's been living in america for more than 20 years because i've known him for i've known him for 18 years so he's i think he's been living in america for like 27 28 years and that's how he came over he came over in a fucking van in the middle of the night and they got out and there was a guy behind them that had a stick, like a, they would take like a giant, uh, like branch from a tree with all the leaves. And as they walked, one guy behind them would wave the branch back and forth to cover up their footsteps.

Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. And they, they did it through the middle of the night. And they eventually got to some sort of border town where there's an Arizona or whatever. And they made their way and infiltrated into cities and eventually found jobs and barely survived, barely fed themselves. And fuck, man, you just imagine that life. And then there's all these people people we've got to tighten up our borders fuck man like that tighten up that the border should i mean trump's like idiot idea of that wall that's not even like physically possible to build because i would have to go through all these like rivers and take over people's land and his like how do we get presidential candidates who not that they're stupid not they're crazy but who like fundamentally deny physical reality like this

is what this is where we are right now. Yeah, I don't think he necessarily is a presidential candidate. I don't buy it. You think it's to make the other ones look moderate and reasonable? No, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy. I think it's him riding this crazy wave of attention and trying to think in his own mind that it's justified because he's shining light on these important issues

in a way that only he can because he's independently wealthy and he's not bound to the wishes of his constituents. He can just kind of go out there and say, I want to put a giant wall up and call it the Trump wall. And we're going to keep out the Mexicans. Yeah. And meanwhile, everybody wants to fucking kill him, and his face is falling off his bones. It's so bizarre. It's so Coen Brothers-esque that he really does seem like satire. I mean, he's like the ultimate American satire president candidate.

Did you ever interview him back before this? No, no, I've never met him, nothing. I once confronted him at a press conference in dubai it's like one of my my finest moments i i know i was really scared because dubai is uh it's a police state you know there's no free speech there it's real real you know they'll lock you up and they're rich enough they don't really care about your american passport that much and so i was at this press conference where he had these golf courses that he was licensing his name to. And I had some intel that the guys that were building the golf courses were getting 200 bucks a month to do construction work.

And like the Emirates, the average salary of an Emirati is I think it's like 60,000 a year, I think. And so he gets 200 a month, you know, to do like hard ass construction work. And so I get up during the press conference where he's getting his ass kissed, and I wave my hand around, and I say, Mr. Trump, you've been saying how this all stands for luxury, and your construction guys are getting $200 a month. Are you satisfied with that? And his mouth fucking shriveled. I've never seen it shriveled with this little tiny rosebud of hate. And I got so yelled at. He yelled at you? He didn't yell at me. The underling yelled at me. Who's the underling?

From the Emirati PR firm that was there. What did they say? That's not an appropriate question. How is that not appropriate? I know. And then the next question was, Mr. Trump, you stand for luxury and Dubai stands for luxury. Is that why you and Dubai like each other? It's a tough, tough stuff. So did he answer you? No, he didn't. He didn't answer me. He just like mouth shrivel.

And like Ivanka's mouth went all small. Like everyone's mouth went really small with anger. Ivanka, this is a long time ago, right? Is that the drawing you made? Yeah, that's the drawing I made. He was so angry at me because I took like a little start up to just picture of him. But yeah, he was like there talking about how New York should be more like Dubai because in Dubai everything was perfect. Yeah.

Yeah. He like the ass kissing. He said that he built the greatest architectural buildings in New York. I beg to differ. Wow. He really said that. You know, my friend Joey Diaz grew up in New York and he said one of the things that people forget about Donald Trump is all the disputes that he had with small local construction companies that they used for projects. And now these people wound up going out of business and they couldn't battle him financially.

And it's like this wave of people that hate him in that whole construction business. I don't know who's right and who's wrong about those disputes, but the idea that you could take that model, which is already problematic in America, and then take it and wrap it up in a giant way in Dubai. That fucking piece that Vice did on those people that are in Dubai that are trapped where they take their passports. I think i did a big piece on that did you yeah yeah there was a um um how long ago was last summer no this was a

few years ago like maybe six or seven years ago nice there was a um a camp that they went to and these men were just openly weeping they were showing this like hole in the ground where they have to shit and they were showing how poor the water is. And they had promised them a substantial amount of money per month. And they were coming over from India and the Philippines, a lot of third world countries. And once they got there, they would take their passports away and then reduce their salary dramatically, you know, and they couldn't leave. And they were forcing them to build these structures. Exactly. It's totally like that. And then the other really fucked up thing is that like these guys, they're not passive. Like they try to strike and stuff, especially very often,

not only do they reduce their salaries, they just don't pay them. Like, and can you imagine like you have like a wife and kids at home, you know, who are like depending on you to like go to another country and, you know, make, make money for the family. And then you just don't get paid for three months. Like it's like, you know, breaking a whole family. And so these guys will do strikes. They'll do sit downs in front of the buses. And then they haul them off to jail and deport them when they do that. It's it's scary. It's so scary that it's again what we're talking about, the spectrum of human behavior that I mean, it's like a few steps away from being a serial killer, but it's just this sort of pathological detachment from compassion. You know, that you don't care about these people that are risking their lives to make these giant buildings. These royal people are going to walk on roses that they throw at their feet and step into these things and go skiing in the middle of summer in these gigantic buildings they make.

and step into these things and go skiing in the middle of summer in these gigantic buildings they make. They make these crazy fucking structures over there because they almost have an unlimited budget. It's almost like they have an idea in their head, you know, I would like to fly indoors. And they're like, okay, we're going to build you a mile-high fucking gigantic building where you could fly inside. And then you have planes that

you could fly indoors like i shouldn't even have said that because someone in dubai is probably listening and ding a light bulb went off in their head yes an indoor flight course and it's what's so strange is like i was prepared to like hate dubai how dubai looked like i hate how dubai is but i mean i was prepared to like aesthetically hate it as like I hate how Dubai is but I mean I was prepared to like aesthetically hate it as well as ethically hate it but what's weird is when you go there it's beautiful that's the thing it's like I remember I was looking at that building like the shard you know the world's the world's tallest I'm building I'll Burge did you go in it I went onto the ground

floor and I bought a $20 cup of coffee $2020? Yes, $20. Oh my God. How does it taste? Like a fucking cup of iced coffee. That was just sort of a Veblen object. But so I was like going into, I was going into it, like prepared to like really like aesthetically judge it too. And like, the thing is, it's like so beautiful. And then I was remembering, I was like, Versailles is also beautiful. And look at how that was made. And it was this weird thing because you think about how splendor is always made and how the most beautiful things in the world always are constructed. And you definitely go there and you're like, this is the city of the future. And this is the new aristocrats.

And this is beautiful. And it's all being built by slaves who are dying to build it. Well, I don't know if it's the future, but it's definitely the future of that area. But they just have this strange world where it was incredibly poor up until just a few decades ago. And then all of a sudden, they start pumping oil out of that place,

and the money is astronomical. And the change in the amount of money that area has, and the few that have it, the disparity of wealth is just unimaginable. One of the kind of interesting things that they did in Abu Dhabi, which actually I kind of admire it,

is that in a lot of countries when they get oil money, like someone steals it, you know, up top. But in Abu Dhabi, what they did was they gave citizens a lot of entitlements to stuff. Like you get free education if you're an Emirati. You get free health care, housing, get a stipend. Emirati women are like super, super educated.

Most of the PhDs are Emirati women. So like that's awesome. But the thing is, the flip side of that is like citizens are only 10 percent of the population. And it's like 90 percent of the people, the people who do everything like the engineers, the shop, the shop workers, the maids, the, you know, construction dudes, like the people who do every manner of work are not citizens and have no rights to anything. trip we're you know we're looking on the outside at that place i mean i i've talked to people that i've been i've been to dubai and i've been to abu dhabi i was there for a ufc event and uh you know without getting into anything political it's beautiful you know you're like wow these people have done a great job in constructing these things but the guy the guys that I was with, some of them went to Dubai because we had the night off and I was tired. I decided to stay home. They went to Dubai.

They're like, ah, we're going to go to a bar and have just some places you can go to drink. You have to drink in certain places because it's illegal to have alcohol, but there's some sort of weird loophole. And they said it was all Russian prostitutes. some sort of weird loophole and they said it was all Russian prostitutes. They said it's just like these predatory coyote women that had like crossed over and just like looking to just pocket cash from banging all these rich dudes. I was like, whoa, like my friend went to a bar and he said, I'm not bullshit. This bar might've been 80% hookers. And I go that much. He goes, I've never seen anything like it in my life. And I go that much. He goes, I never seen anything like it in my life. Yeah. Women go over there to like, to make, to make some

serious money. Um, but you can, I bet you can fucking clean it up, but it's probably really dangerous too. Right. You know, I never did. I never really did research on like sex work in Dubai, like my, or in Abu Dhabi. Like I know mostly about construction work and something about the maids and not so much. But I think for anyone who's not a citizen, it's dangerous because you, like, don't have any real rights if you're not a citizen. Yeah, I remember. I think it was a British couple that were making out on the beach and they were arrested. They were just kissing.

But they were openly showing affection on the beach and they were thrown in jail. I'm like, well, how about this? This is another one. This is the craziest one. There was a British man who, um, he had eaten a poppy seed bagel and poppy seeds. Well,

you will test positive for heroin if you eat like it's trace amounts, but obviously it's not enough to be psychoactive, but it's enough to show up in a really comprehensive blood examination. So they tested this guy and, uh, he tested positive for heroin and they put him in a fucking cell. They're like, he had a poppy seed bagel at Heathrow airport and that bagel got him locked up in a jail cell. Like, whoa. There's another woman who was an executive at Brillstein Gray, which is a very prominent Los Angeles entertainment group. And she had, what is that shit that people take?

It's a natural thing. Oh, you take it when you want to go to bed. The Valerian? No, no, no, no, no. It wasn't that. It was melatonin. Yeah, yeah. She had melatonin. Fucking melatonin. Yeah, yeah. She had melatonin.

Fucking melatonin? Yes. You can't have melatonin. They arrested her, locked her up, took her passport, put her in a jail cell for fucking melatonin. And then, you know, somehow or another, somehow got word of it and they got her out eventually. But what a terrifying moment it must have been for her. There was another guy who had a marijuana seed or a stem or a piece of marijuana that was wedged in between the tread of his shoes.

That was it. And that was enough to put him in jail. And he was going to be sentenced for some fucking astronomical amount of time. And I don't know what happened to that poor guy. But unfortunately for him, he was a black guy with dreadlocks from england and they were like uh-uh dude forever cage forever yeah it's a really really really racist some of the here we go right here some of the horror stories have been reported by the bbc four-year jail term for possession of 0.003 grams of cannabis stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

That's the guy. That's Keith Brown. Robert Dalton on trial for alleged possession of 0.3 grams of cannabis. 0.03. Unnamed 20-year-old on trial for alleged... This is all cannabis, mostly. I had this one dude I met there. He's Emirati.

And he was really interesting. His name is Ahmed Mansour. And he, I mean, like, he's so brave, right? Because you have so many privileges, like as an Emirati, especially he came from like a good family and everything, you know, you can really just coast if you're Emirati and you're, you know, from a well off family. And he made a web forum that let people discuss, basically discuss the royal family, frankly. And it also, it let people discuss religion kind of frankly. And if you were an atheist, you could talk about it on the web forum. And they fucking, they locked him up for, was he in jail for, I have to, I have to check this, but I want to say it was around nine months and they infected him with scabies when he was in jail. And then when they let him out. They infected him purposely? Yeah. That's what he said. He said that they gave him a blanket

that had scabies on it. And then when he was out, he had this series of unfortunate events that happened. Over $100,000 accidentally disappeared from his bank account and no one knows how it got missing. And then on two occasions,

guys just sort of jumped out and beat the shit out of him and no one knows who they were You know, it's a mystery and his car just gets stolen all the time and the tires keep getting air taken out of it And you know magical mystery. No one knows who's behind that, huh? Fuck yeah Could you imagine if you like pissed off some royal family and they just hired some dude and they pay him and your job is to Fuck with this guy forever like that's it that's your job or you know if you're like some sort of a rich billionaire character you could

hire a bunch of people you'd have a whole team you know and their job is just to fuck with people there's this one guy i don't like him let's go get him i mean that wouldn't be hard like if you're like some trump guy and you've got billions of dollars and someone like Molly Crabapple makes you feel like shit at some Dubai press event, you're like, fuck this bitch. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to hire a team and I'm going to fuck with Molly Crabapple's life. I mean, that's a reality. Like, someone who's that wealthy, they could do something like that. That's scary shit.

Yeah, they definitely, definitely, definitely could. Yeah, they could hire somebody just every time you go out to car your tires are flat like what the fuck fuckers at a certain point though you'd probably put up like a little cam on your car and you know or you'd hire some people too yeah exactly it'd be like war of the proxies war of the proxies that's it right yeah i don't know what are have you gone to any places that were positive in your journalism escapades? I love Istanbul. Istanbul is like one of my favorite cities ever. It's just so gorgeous and it's so exciting. And you walk down like Istiklal Jadesi, which is sort of the main street in a neighborhood called Beolu. And it's like, there's like lights and all these couples hand in hand.

Everyone's playing music. There's like kids selling flower crowns. It's just like it feels like the sort of boulevard that every other boulevard in the world was trying to be. It's so magic. And I mean, I could just walk around Istanbul like any time of day or night. And I would never not like have my heart beat fast for that city. Wow. So that's your favorite spot?

That's my favorite spot. Do you think you could ever be an expat, move to Istanbul? They're arresting a lot. They have a bad record, unfortunately, for arresting journalists there. One of my colleagues at Vice, this brilliant Kurdish dude, Mohamed Rasul, he is like currently in jail right now for doing journalism in Turkey. And Vice is like, you know,

trying really hard to get him out. But he's like rotting in a jail cell. And they claim that he is ISIS because he used encryption. He is a Kurdish dude. He's a Kurdish dude that like covers all of the anti-ISIS stuff. He's not ISIS.

This is so embarrassing and inane. And yeah, he's rotting in a jail cell there. How long has he been there? Oh God, it's over, I think it's going to be going on three months now. And I don't think they've even really charged him yet. They've just leaked statements to the press. Whoa.

But that aside, I, you know, the political repression aside, I really do find Istanbul to be a marvelous city. No place is perfect. They charge him. So what is his actual, what is their grievance with him? What is the actual issue? He was going with these two British vice journalists and they were covering clashes between the Turkish government and Kurds in the south.

And they picked them up doing that. So they just decided they didn't like him, like what he's doing, causing trouble. Well, they've been actually like deporting and fucking with a lot of journalists who have been doing this. But I think it's like the two British guys got out because, you know, they're British. Whereas if you're an Iraqi Kurd, like who's going to be the person putting pressure on Turkey for you? Well, I'm sure you're aware of that Saudi Arabian blogger that's been beaten repeatedly.

Right. Yeah. That's a fucking horrible story, too. That's one of the weirdest aspects of the United States' relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's like, we'll talk about all the atrocities that are committed by all these different countries, but Saudi Arabia is like, Yeah, they're moderate. And, like, meanwhile, they sentenced a poet to death for poetry in Saudi recently.

How bad was the poetry, though? Was it like Def Jam, Slam, comedy, you know those things? Why are you poetry shaming? Why do you have to free verse shame right now? Free verse? Yeah, free verse. Is that what they call it? No, isn't free verse when you make poetry

that doesn't rhyme or have any meter or anything? I thought that's a haiku. No, a haiku is a short one, right? I'm not much into poetry. But I remember I've gone to, I went to a poetry slam in Venice once, which is the perfect place to go because people take themselves so fucking seriously. And I was with a buddy of mine and we were high as you should ever be while you're in public walking around talking to people like barely aware of reality and we uh walked by this place and it was a poetry slam and we had i'm like we have to go inside we have to go inside and we went inside and we were both like biting our hands trying not

to laugh because it was just so preposterous just like you know that really just pretentious save the world type poetry. Yeah, yeah, I do. Done by 20-year-old white guys with dreadlocks. Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, I think as a visual artist, I have a similar thing when I see like really, really bad artwork. And I'm just like, not only are you shaming yourself, you're shaming my whole profession here. Like, not only are you shaming yourself, you're shaming my whole profession here.

Yeah. But you know what? I also, like, as I've gotten older and I've sort of understand the nuance of life, like what this guy's doing, his stupid shame, sham, slam, whatever poetry, what he really is doing is he's trying to express himself and he's developing as a person. And right now it's kind of ridiculous to other people that are maybe a little bit more well-versed in the ways of the world and with a more social experience. But what he's trying to do is he sees the world is wrong, and he wants to get social brownie points by pointing it out,

and people clap and cheer. So he sat down on this loose-leaf binder and wrote all this stuff out, and he just feels like he's really got it. And one day he'll look back at that and go, what a fucking moron I was. Just like I'll look back at... I have a comedy notebook from 1990 and I should probably burn it

in case someone breaks in my house and finds it. Dude, or when... And fucking publishes it. If you die, then someone will publish the collected papers of Joe Rogan and this will be your most famous thing? A bit in there about Wonder Woman, like trying to explain Wonder Woman. It's so but I was you know 21 years old or whatever the

fuck I was at the time it's like it's just that's what you're you're when you suck and when you're young I mean it takes a while I sucked for so many years I sometimes I look back at my old drawings and I'm like how did I ever get hired as an artist? What delusional process did I ever think that I would be an artist putting these things out there and again and again and again in the face of very deserved rejection for many years. But it worked out, right? Because like if you just keep chipping away at it, eventually, eventually get through. And I really I tried to actually really write about that in my book because I feel like sometimes a lot of artists, they front and they act like, oh, I was just really good from the start and then it was really easy

and I was like no I sucked from the start and it was really hard yeah most comedians will tell you that they suck from the start except the ones that aren't that good which will claim that they were always awesome but the ones I think all my friends that are that are really good they'll tell you they're fucking they were terrible I have um young daughters, and one of the cool things is watching their art. Like, they're really into art, especially my seven-year-old is really into it. She draws every day. That's so cool. And I watch her early stuff.

Like, I save all her stuff, or at least representations, like, you know, like some of it. like you know like some of it and watching like their early like control of her motor skills in her hands from the time she was like three to four years later there's just dramatic difference in what she's ability you know her ability to draw things and draw representations and and figure out like perspective and sizes and we were going through this book yesterday. She has this how to draw figures book. And it was the weirdest fucking thing because it was these princesses. She's trying to draw princesses. And I'm looking at the book and we're going through it together. And, you know, it's like one of those books where you have a framework, you know, like you like balls and sticks and you try to like make the framework and then you add the clothes to the framework. Yeah, totally. But the women's legs were like more than twice as long as they should have been. Oh, when you're trying to do those like fashion-y cartoon drawings, everyone is like so stretched

out. And what's weird is that you get so used to seeing that, that when you see like cartoon people done at their real proportions, they all look like weird and stubby. Yeah. out and what's weird is that you get so used to seeing that that when you see like cartoon people done at their real proportions they all look like weird and stubby yeah well that's got to be weird for because it doesn't seem that way for men like i was looking at the the representations of men they're fairly proportionate but with with women it was all these insanely long legs and insanely skinny bodies and i was like this is fucking strange so much so that i had to point it out to her you know she's like uh you know she's drawing it i go well here's the

deal you know i'm like this is you can draw it like this one of the beautiful things about art is you can do whatever you want if you want to make people that have giant hands that are size of those foam number ones that people wear at a football game you could totally do that no one can stop you because it's just drawing is your expression whatever you want to do but if you want to draw like a real person and so then we started I started showing her like a real human body I'm like okay I'm gonna stand up and I'll stand up next to the wall and what we're gonna do is we're gonna mark on the wall where the top of my head is and where my waist is oh that's so cool that you did that with me that's awesome and so we went from the top of my head to the waist, and then we went from the waist

down to the feet. And I said, and you notice that they're pretty much the same, or at least close. But the women in these cartoon things you're supposed to draw were no bullshit. There was twice as much length in their legs as there was from their waist up to their head. And she was like, well, why do they do that? And I go, well, some people think that it looks better to make people that aren't real,

that are, like, longer than reality. But, like, why do we accept that? Because, like, if there was a woman and she had, like, a normal proportion body but enormous tits, just freakish tits, like, everybody would look at that and go, what the fuck are you making these kids draw? You know? But for whatever reason like having me and when and by the way

Some people have freakish tits like there's there's people that for whatever really there's that that poor dude Who can't go to the airport without getting frisked because he has this giant hog has like some 20-inch dick I was like they got the world's largest dick and like always check his pants. They think he's carrying drugs or something. Well, there's women out there that are just naturally born with enormous breasts and there's nothing they could do about it. There's no one born with no one. There's no one six feet tall and only two feet of them are upper body and the rest of it is legs. That just doesn't exist. You know, it's it's crazy. And they even when I was at art school, we would have a different formula for drawing figures and there was like, they would measure it in heads. So it was like,

this figure is nine heads. And a fashion figure, which is what they called it, which is the figure for a fashion illustration, was like so many more heads than like any other figure. And so it was like that crazy elongated thing and exactly what you're saying with like the crazy daddy long legs legs it's very strange because for men we I've never talked to a man who understands that look because men are not attracted I mean I'm sure everybody varies right but most men are not attractive to these stick figure people but women are expected to be stick figure people to be models it's one of the weirdest things and then women think that in order to be attractive they have to be like these media

representations of women so they have to starve themselves and then men are like no don't do that no one likes that but it's like there's this weird disconnect between what the opposite sex or i mean i don't know i can't speak for lesbians obviously but what the opposite sex, or I mean, I don't know, I can't speak for lesbians, obviously, but what the opposite sex finds attractive and the representations of attractive women. Like, sucked in cheeks, basically like on death's door. Like, yeah, she's hot. Like, no, that's weird. It's weird to see someone all cracked out and skinny like that being the most obvious representation know, the most obvious

representation of like a beautiful person in nice clothes. I mean, I think it's, you know, fashion models aren't for men, you know, or they're not for they're not for straight men. They're supposed to appeal to women who are buying the clothing. But do they even? I don't. I mean, I think, you know, fashion, I think, you know, women of all sizes, skinny, skinny, whatever, I think I'll be super beautiful. As long as that's really you.

Yeah, yeah. As long as you're not like harming yourself to do it. But I think that, I don't know, I think the idea is that you can just hang any clothing on them and it doesn't affect the hang of the clothing. So it's almost like they're as close to it being like a coat hanger as possible i think that's the theoretical underpinnings of it um but yeah it's true like if you look at like a like a playboy model or like a model for like you know like black men's magazine or you know like a model for maxim like they're like these super fit young women you know who like have like really good like muscles and are really curvy yeah well people like men are naturally attracted to women with a certain

amount of body fat it's it's it's a natural thing because to be healthy the whole idea of breasts and and butts and hips being attractive is because genetically women who have those things will carry children better and will be more likely to be able to nourish those children because they're healthy. It's the total genetic thing. So much so, this is the weirdest aspect of it. So much so that if a woman has fake boobs, like you know they're fake. You know. There's no disconnect at all.

You're absolutely aware that she has gone through surgery to cut her skin, stuff bags of water in there that make them stick out. You're like, oh, but they stick out more. Like, men will be more attracted sexually. And the sexual attraction is supposed to, at least, represent wanting to breed with that person. Like, you are not just tricked. You're tricking yourself. breed with that person like you you are not just tricked you're tricking yourself like it's the what like fake boobs are one of the weirdest things of all time if you really stop and look

at if we're if aliens came down from another planet or even historians because i guarantee you like we were talking about like bradley manning and chelsea manning there's going to come a time in whatever not so distant future the next hundred years They're just gonna be able to turn you into a woman You know you're gonna say like I don't want to be a woman anymore I'd like to be a man. They'll make you a man for a year I mean like yeah I like being Molly better you go back to be in Molly instead of Mike Molly Mike the show right and

I think they're gonna be able to do that with breasts They're gonna be able to do that with everything they're gonna be able to manipulate genetics to the point where If you're seeing or listen to this a radio lab episode on CRISPR going to be able to do that with breasts. They're going to be able to do that with everything. They're going to be able to manipulate genetics to the point where, um, if you've ever seen, um, or listened to this, a radio lab, uh, episode on CRISPR. I haven't, no, what's that? CRISPR is an, a new method of manipulating genetics that they, that they, um, have invented. It's a really super complicated thing that I'm going to butcher, but they've invented it by studying the DNA of viruses and they figured out how to utilize that, that sort of method to manipulate eventually at least human DNA and the point where they're going to be able to change your traits. They're going to be able to change so many different things, introduce genes into specific areas of your body and fix problems or change things that you don't like,

or they're going to do some fucking freaky shit. And this is just one invention that is, I think, 2012 it was invented. And by the time 2032 rolls around, who the fuck knows what they're going to have? I think we're really close to be able to just completely manipulate human bodies. But the point being, when historians go back and they look at fake boobs, they're going to be like, what the fuck were these people doing? Like, how weird is this? There's going to be a Smithsonian that has, like, boxes of, like, silicone. And this is the early days. And this is when they went to saline. And, you know, we're going to look at that stuff going, what a strange time to be alive.

But the thing is, though, like, with trickery and, like trickery and like matters of aesthetics i don't even like want to call it trickery i mean there's all sorts of things like you can like totally like admire like think a guy like looks really hot in a sharp suit even though you know it's not really his skin you know what i mean right it's it's not there's there's a whole like sort of visual appreciation of other people that doesn't necessarily just have to do with like what's, you know, quote unquote real or like what's your genetic heritage. That's really true. Like clothes are a great example. That's a really good example because that is weird.

Like you see someone who's dressed sharp and you go, oh, man, he looks great in that suit. Like that's a beautiful vest. Like, wow, that looks awesome on him. That's a strange thing. Like you look good with stuff on you. Yeah, exactly. You could hang stuff on you that makes you look good or professional or authoritative or all of these other things. Even though, like, they're just, like, stuff that you're wearing.

I wonder if that's the same with hermit crabs. Oh, my God. If they pick out a good shell. Could you imagine, like, someone's like, I'm wearing, like, the really slick, cool shell. Like, I'm going to get all the girl hermit crabs right now. Yeah, probably, right? There's some weird things in nature with animals doing things like that. How about animals that can actually manipulate?

Have you ever paid attention to octopus at all? Octupi? You know, I'm pretty shamefully ignorant. You might have to educate me here. I had, well, apparently cuttlefish are just as bizarre, if not more. educate me here i had well apparently cuttlefish are just as bizarre if not more but my friend remy warren is a um he's a host of a show called apex predator where they um they monitor they sort of um try to emulate the different uh attributes that certain predators have and how how they survive and see like if there's like some human version of that and and how they survive and see if there's some human version of that.

And they check out how... It's called heron. Are those tall birds? Herons? Herons? How do you say that? Heron? Herons?

Like how they walk with their crazy long legs and then stab at the water looking for like frogs and shit and he did one on octopuses and out of all the different animals we were talking about he was like you know there's all these cool animals they were talking about like how wolves will chase down packs of elk and how they corner them and in these canyons and draws and how they figure out how to trap them it's really fascinating but when he started talking about octopuses like dude you have never they our fucking aliens Like look at these things like look how they can change their colors like this is real

They can change their colors and immediately adapt to their environment to the point where they're indistinguishable from the background This is amazing. Oh, oh, they're insane. They're insane They can instantaneously, like within fractions of a second, change the outside of their body to look exactly like a coral reef, not just in the image, but in the texture. They can change themselves to look more like predators or like dangerous things. It's incredible what they can do. We live in the coolest world, my God.

Oh, the world's amazing. The world of the ocean still. Like there's some new project that they're doing right now where they're trying to map the ocean floor. And without a doubt, they're going to discover some freaky fucking fish life, marine life down there that we've never encountered before. But just these creatures, we're just starting to learn what these things are doing.

Like, look at that. It's like a flower or something blossoming like on fast motion. Oh my God, what is that? That's an octopus. But it looks like a tiny like... A Wookiee or something. Yeah, it looks like a video game character running. But watch this. It can merge with these coral reefs, and it looks like a coral reef.

So it's literally developed this ability to turn its body into the shape of a reef, and then it curls its tentacles up into little tiny legs and runs on two legs. It's fucking incredible. They're amazing. Wow, and look, it's like a teardrop legs. It's fucking incredible. They're amazing. Wow. And look, it's like a teardrop shape. That's so cool. Yeah.

It's amazing. I would always draw octopuses just because they're fun to draw with all the tentacles and stuff, but my God. Yeah, I had no idea. I had no idea. And the fact that they can do it like that, they just change. You're like, fucking, what a weird world. And they communicate with each other somehow through that, and just change. You're like, fucking, what a weird world. And they communicate with each other

somehow through that, and we don't know how. We know they're really fucking smart, though. Are they going to take it all over after we destroy everything? The octopi are going to rule the Earth? Well, that's something I've been really dwelling on lately when it comes to marine life and dolphins and orcas, and I'm a huge believer that

they are just as intelligent as us, if not more. And that what we're doing with SeaWorld and all these wild dolphin shows is nothing less than slavery. It's slavery of some alien intelligence that we can't communicate with. We don't understand what they're saying. So we're like, um, can't hear you. I don't know what you're saying. So fucking jump for fish or starve.

It's your choice. And I've thought about it, like our ideas about what is intelligent. Like we don't think that something's intelligent unless it does exactly what we do. When we, when we think of intelligence, we say, okay, well, Molly sent me an email. I sent her an email back. I know she's intelligent. She's communicating through an email. The dolphin doesn't know how to fucking make an email. He's an idiot. But they don't need email. Why do we need email?

We need email because we need to communicate. Well, they can communicate for miles through the water with their chirps and their noises. They recognize each other from years and years being apart from each other, even though to us they all look the fucking same. They can move and manipulate through 3D space in the water. They don't need a house because they're smart enough to go where the water's warm. Fish is everywhere and it's free, so they don't need jobs. So all these ideas that we have, like what represents intelligence, all that stuff's stupid.

Because to them, if you're like, well, I'm going to build a house and drive my car to work, they're like, what are you talking about, bitch? You're under the water. Like if you did a- They'd be like, I'm going to hoard all the fish in my thing and kill them. And then I'll sell you the fucking fish for kelp. That's a great idea. Yeah, they'd be like, what? Like your high dolphin.

I'm going to write you a letter from my laptop. There's no internet down here, stupid. There's no like, you're a crap dolphin. Yeah, your fucking laptop's not going to work under water, asshole. in. Yeah, your fucking laptop's not going to work underwater, asshole. So all of our ideas about what's intelligent is only based on our ability to manipulate our environment or create things that didn't exist. So our intelligence is a very bizarre intelligence because we're the only intelligence that can not just manipulate our environment that's local, but our environment globally. Like we can essentially change the weather.

We can spray, we can cloud seed and make it rain. Like that's one of the weird things they do in Abu Dhabi. They make it rain every week. They do it on purpose. They spray the sky with some sort of silver something or another that makes it, I don't forget what the exact compound is, but it actually causes it to rain. And they've been doing it like once a week for years.

They have rainstorms that they manufacture. We're freaks. We're freaks. And our intelligence is fundamentally built on dissatisfaction, which, I mean, we have to have because we're also like weak and not apex predators necessarily. And we're getting weaker, I think, too. I think that's part of it.

You know, if you went back to the early humans and you compared like our tens and bone structure and. Are they are they really humans? Are they are they stronger than us? It was that they were like shorter and stuff. Neanderthals were said, but they're not really humans. Right. They're like a type of human. And how they categorize them.

Yeah. They were way stronger than us, though. They weren't just stronger than us. They were like really humans, right? They're like a type of human in how they categorize them. Yeah. They were way stronger than us, though. They weren't just stronger than us. They were like really short. They were like five foot, five foot two, but like 220 pounds, just fucking gorilla-like with super thick bones and thick heads. And they don't really know exactly how intelligent they were either. and they don't really know exactly how intelligent they were either. There's all this speculation as to whether or not they figured out tools on their own or whether they copied them from Homo sapiens and where Homo sapiens came from

and did they interbreed and there's debate on that as well. And then they're always finding these fucking new, they found another one like within the last couple of weeks. They found another new species of human Well, it didn't know existed. They found some large tooth that Turned out to be not category It was a human tooth but not categorized in any previous Version of human beings that they were aware of before if they found quite a few of them now

Including the I'm sure you've heard of like that Hobbit people they found the island of Flores. That was 14,000 years ago. That's not that long ago. Fuck. I mean, that's not before the beginning of recorded history, is it? Well. Or is it a little bit before? A little, but it depends on whose version of the beginning of recorded history is.

There's a bunch of people that believe, there's this guy that I've had on my podcast a few times now. His name is Randall Carlson and he's an expert in cataclysmic events, and especially astroil impacts. And him and this guy, Graham Hancock, have worked together. And Graham Hancock wrote this book called Fingerprints of the Gods. It was a really controversial book in the 90s. And then now he has a new one called Magicians of the Gods, which sort of shows how much of his early work that was widely criticized was actually substantiated now by science, where these ancient structures that didn't make any sense, that they were trying to figure out, like, who fucking built these?

How are they here? And archaeologists sort of tried to put vague dates on them. And the idea behind it was that civilization has not evolved and it's not progressed on a straight plane. But rather there's been these peaks and valleys. And that what has happened is people have gotten this very high level of sophistication and culture. And then massive cataclysmic disasters have wiped people out almost to the brink of extinction. And then they've risen back up again. So science has found quite a few of them, but one of the big ones they keep pointing out is that somewhere around 12,000 years ago, there was a series of impacts on the Earth.

And this has been proven by science now because over the last few years, they've discovered this called I think it's called trite night but it's essentially called nuclear glass and it exists around where they do nuclear tests and it also exists at meteor impact sites and it's the impact creates heat that's so intense it turns sand and rock to glass my god and they find this stuff all throughout Europe and all through and it's all around the same time period, which also coincides with the end of the Ice Age. And it also coincides with a thousand plus years later, the beginning of modern civilization, agriculture, mathematics. And so their theory is that that wasn't exactly the beginning, but that was a rebirth. exactly the beginning, but that was a rebirth. And there was most likely thousands of years of civilization that existed before that, but it was almost entirely wiped out when people were just

bombarded with rocks from the sky. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, especially when societies were less interconnected. Like the whole reason, you know, stuff, various like, you know, math or astrology survived the dark ages in Europe was because in the Middle East, people were able to keep it alive. We live in a time now where unless they literally wiped out everyone, it'd be very hard to do that. But in a world where people don't have that level of communication, where they don't have that level of connection, where they don't have that level of knowledge sharing, it would be very easy for one society to kind of, you know, get to that peak, and then something horrifying happening to it.

And no other societies could carry on that legacy. Yeah. I mean, it would be pretty easy, especially today in our culture, because everything has become digital. It's one of the weirdest things about us advancing and evolving is that as things move to the cloud and as things become much, I mean, much less physical books like your book here, but much more like laptops and Kindle. I have a Kindle and it has 150 books on or something like that. It's that thin. Sits right in my backpack. I mean, what?

That's crazy. It's crazy. It's like this magician's thing, but also you could potentially like drop a server that had the only copy of something and have that only copy disappear yeah be gone yeah and if the power goes out you're not getting any of this stuff i had a friend who was um he was going back into an area where he couldn't bring books because there were checkpoints and um i had a lot of and he um had a his itunes account was something that like it just you the country that was tied to, you couldn't buy good e-books on. So I remember I was getting him. I got him all these pirated copies of like 1984 and like James Baldwin and Catch-22 and stuff to read. And, you know, he only has like a few hours of power a day and he's like reading like 1984 on his phone and it was like the craziest illustration of both the like ubiquity of

you know a book and also the limits of it in the sort of cloud age yeah there's a lot of limits of it our entire society is dependent upon the grid if the grid goes down almost none of this stuff is effective but by the same token he could smuggle all his books past checkpoints and no one knew he had them. Right. Yeah. No. I mean, there's definitely, if you're in a war-torn area like that, it's great. It's just, to me, it freaks me out when I think of if something like that happened. Like there was a big event, I think it was in Indonesia, and like 70,000 years ago, they think that civilization was wiped out to the point of there being only a couple thousand people left on the planet. Yeah.

A super volcano erupted. If anything remotely like that happened, we would instantaneously be brought right back to where people were 50,000 years ago. Well, most of us don't have any sort of skills to maintain or rebuild anything. I mean, I don't. I know if there was like the zombie apocalypse, I'd be like fucking food or something. Yeah. And if we broke into Home Depot, like there's a Home Depot that's like a few miles from here. How many fucking people could get a hammer from there? There's a lot of people out here. There's not enough hammers. I mean, we wouldn't even, I mean, we'd hope the shelters

that we have hold up, but then where are we going to get food? Like, unless we get into the ocean and go fishing, like, what are you going to shoot deer? How many deer are there? Like five in this whole neighborhood, you know? Well, like the level of population density we have could never be supported by like traditional agriculture ever. Not anymore. No. It's weird.

You know what else is weird? A friend of mine pointed this out. He goes, why is it that when you walk down the street, you see all these plants, but none of them grow food? Like, everyone grows plants everywhere, but there are all these fucking useless plants. Like, wouldn't it be amazing if, like, cities were filled with plants that grow fruit and all the grasses and stuff you saw were edible and there was lettuce everywhere? Like, literally everything had food on it. Like it would be just the same amount of water used. But you would actually get something out of it. But we're so rich that we're like, no, pine trees.

No, I want oak. I want a beautiful oak here. We don't support the trees and the plants around us that we can actually eat. I remember one time I was in Spain. and I was like 17 and I was broke. I was with my friend and we saw like, wow, these orange trees steal a lot of oranges. And we like climb up the tree and we like steal the oranges. And then we like peel them and then they're like bitter and dry. And we're like, these are fucking decorative oranges.

They tricked us. They tricked us. But these oranges are lies and i i think that they specifically probably planted those type of oranges to avoid bad people like us climbing their trees and stealing all of them isn't that funny you're a bad person because you're doing what people have done for the last exactly yeah we're bad person for picking fruit from a tree. How strange. And it's also probably those were what oranges really tasted like before we started fucking with them. I refuse to believe that.

That's a cruel world. Well, they know that the fact for like corn and a lot of other food was like really gross before people started manipulating it. Truth, truth. But oranges, I want to believe that like prehistorichistoric oranges were a tasty treat, and these were not. I don't know. I ate an apple the other day, and me and my friends were laughing while we were eating these apples. We're like, these fucking things have definitely been fucked with. Like, they were big. Yeah.

Big, giant. And they were so juicy. We're like, what kind of genetically modified shit are we eating right now? Because these are just not normal apples. Giant, juicy, delicious apples. Probably in probably in like the middle of apple off season too yeah probably you ever had a crab apple molly crab apple i have a photo of me under a crab apple tree but i don't i don't know if i've ever fred took that one i don't know if i've ever eaten a crab apple man i i i'm sure this will get remedied someday but uh not not yet i don't know if I've ever eaten a crab apple. Man, I'm sure this will get remedied someday, but not yet, I don't think.

Really? Yeah, I mean, I... Oh, no, you're... Oh, my God, you're right. God, I'm getting, like, deep into the memory bank. When I was seven and I lived in Far Rockaway, I think one of the neighbors had a crab apple tree. Or it had the tree with the little apples. Those are the crab apples.

Yeah, those are the crab apples. And I believe that... I believe I stole some of them, and I believe they're very sour is that i remember them yeah they're very sour i ate one of those when i was a little kid well more than once i'm sure when i was a little kid growing up in massachusetts i remember biting into those things yeah it's so much hope yeah they're good for throwing at people though that's what we used them for chuck them at each other. Small and hard.

Yeah, well, you know, your little tiny hands get a good grip on a crab apple and really whip it. Nice, nice. What else you got going on these days besides, I know you're promoting this book. Besides that, so I'm going to, really excited about this, I'm going to India for a month because there's all these literary festivals in India. So I'm getting to go to Jaipur and Mumbai. Have you been before? No, it's my first time in my life. So I'm really excited about that. And then besides that, you know, I think I'm reaching that point of burnout where I'm just I'm like actually planning to take a month off. I know it sounds like it sounds like fucking blasphemy, but I think I'm going to like lie on a beach in Goa or something and read a lot of books.

And other than that, the only thing I really have to talk about is my super dork hobby, which is I've been studying literary Arabic for the last year and I got pretty good at translating stuff, written stuff. Really? Yeah, yeah. I'm really pretty proud of it. I do this every morning. Yeah, yeah, I'm really pretty proud of it. I do this every morning. So I'm translating a like long dialogue by the Syrian poet that's called Sex Poetry and the Revolution. And it is badass. But other than that, I, I think I'm actually going into that like time where I'm just making like a little blank space. And then at the end of that, I'll probably be back doing a bunch of journalism for vice doing stuff on prisons in the middle east working on my next book project and I don't know seeing seeing where life goes because the thing that's so strange about doing a memoir is it really is like sectioning off a chapter you know like sectioning off you know 15 years of your life and then you've taken all of that and you've put it into this book form

you've made it into an object and then you go on to what's next and i i guess while i have the vague contours of that in my head part of me just wants to do nothing for a while and then the plan will come to me i think that's a great idea i'm i'm thinking the same thing about my own life right now i think i'm too involved in too many different things and I could use like a reset, like a calming. Just to, I think you get, it's all good stuff and that's the problem. And I think that's what you're experiencing as well. Like you have so many cool things you have going on.

They're so awesome. I feel so lucky. Yeah, yeah. But it's, if there's no space, I mean. Can't absorb them. Yeah, it's like that Louis C.K. thing about never being bored. I mean, I have that in the best of all possible ways. I have so many cool opportunities.

But if you never have any time to be bored or be down, you're just bouncing from thing to thing. What is the Louis C.K. thing about never being bored? I'm not aware of it. It was like a monologue that he had about where he was saying that since we have smartphones, basically. Oh, that's right. Now I remember it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you never have like any space to feel anything or to be bored. And so you're just always in the state of distraction.

And I think it can be like that with work stuff, too. So after that, probably just doing a bunch of journalism stuff. I work a lot with a really cool Syrian-American nonprofit that I'm going to plug here. They're called Karam Foundation. And they do something really cool because a lot of attention right now, it's on the Syrian refugees that make it to Europe. But they actually work with people who are displaced inside Syria and then also people like on the border. And for the last two years, I've taken part in a program with them where we go down to these schools that are on the border and they bring like, they bring dentists that fix

all the kids teeth. They bring eye doctors to get all the kids glasses that need it. But then they also bring like writers and philosophers and architects and like, you know, people who teach classes with the kids. And I always do murals there. I've done murals in two schools now. And so next spring, I'll probably be back with them painting lots of rebellious cats all over a school in southeast Turkey. Wow. You live such a broad and fascinating life. I mean, you've had so many really intense experiences.

And all over the place. Like both all over the place professionally and creatively. And then geographically. There's so much going on. Like you're not living a boring life. No, I feel so lucky. I mean, that's why it's so hard for me to be, I need to take a reset. Because it's like the whole world is so big and cool and I love so many things in it.

Yeah, but I think your instincts are correct, though. It seems to me like you've got so much going on all the time, constantly in so many different arenas. Yeah, it's a lot, but I don't know. It must be the same with you too i mean like you do you know you do comedy you do this like super like thoughtful talk thing you like host mma stuff you mean you've done like so many fucking things and i mean it's just because like i feel and perhaps you feel this way like the world is just so big and weird and interesting and like i just want to like learn stuff yeah i wish i could live 10 different lives simultaneously. I'd have a bunch of different careers that I'd be interested in. Same, same, exactly. But it's like to do any

of those things correctly requires so much attention and focus. It's almost like you can't can't enjoy too many things because then the one thing that you enjoy the most or that you choose to enjoy the most, you really can't focus on it correctly. Or else you just never, ever, ever have downtime, ever. Yeah, I'm close to that. I get close to that sometimes, but it's not good. But it's weird because my non-downtime seems very recreational. Yeah, yeah, it's super fun. I don't want to complain like, wow, I get to travel all over the world

and meet fascinating people and confront bastards. Boo hoo for me. And yet, you know, it at a certain at a certain point. You know, this is a big compliment. But and I don't mean this in terms of imitation, but your your drawing of Trump and Ivanka was very Ralph Steadman-esque. Oh, I idolize that guy. I love him. That's a massive compliment. Like, I idolize that guy. I love him. No, that's a massive compliment.

Like, I think that man is like a god amongst men. He's a bad motherfucker, for sure. But that image is just so much like, I think of it as like the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With like all the horrible, like, monster, like, toad people. Oh, it's so good. I've got that framed on my wall in my office, a print from Stedman's illustration of the Kentucky Derby. Oh, that's so cool.

Have you ever had him on the show or do you want to go to Kent? No, I would love to. I mean, I don't know if he's ever in Los Angeles, but I prefer to do these things in person. But if he's ever here, I would love to have him on just to talk to him about Hunter and what it was like. What it was like for a time Hunter dosed him with acid. hunter and what it was like and what his life's the first time hunter dosed him with acid or when they when they went to when they went to like rumble in the jungle and hunter like sold their tickets and and he was like drawing it off the tv screen yeah he was swimming in the pool and he totally fucked the whole story up because he thought that foreman was going to kill muhammad

ali and he didn't want to see it so he put a richard nixon mask on and swam around the pool yeah the well he to this day or well not to this day obviously he's dead but considered that one And he didn't want to see it. So he put a Richard Nixon mask on and swam around the pool. Yeah. Well, he to this day or not to this day, obviously, he's dead, but considered that one of his biggest journalistic failures. And he went into a giant slump after he did that because, like, he realized that his decadence and his indulgence had actually gotten in the way of an amazing moment in history. God. amazing moment in history god just to realize like the fucking like beautiful beast that like you rode to being who you were like was turning around and like becoming like sort of cliche that was fucking up everything you liked well that's what that did you ever see the uh alex gibney movie uh gonzo the life and times of dr hunters it's fucking incredible it's so good. It's such a good documentary. But that was almost like initially, that's how they started the movie off. He started the movie off explaining that at the end of his life, Hunter had really stopped being creative. The writing wasn't there anymore. The things that he wrote were like really middling. They weren't that good. And it was because his indulgences and his excesses had really cooked

his brain. And he just had, he had become almost a caricature of himself. And along the lines, some of the interviews, they had found him when he was a younger man, and when he had started to become famous, and he was actually worried about that very thing. He was saying, like, I can't even get out of my own way anymore. And they don't even necessarily when I'm, when I'm doing these things, I can't tell whether or not they want me and they want my take on things or whether they want reality itself. Like, and I, I'm, um, he goes, it's almost, it would almost be better if I died like for my own work and that was like wow like this guy is experiencing like a really early version of well it's also very rare that a journalist becomes that famous so so rare so rare but I mean I think the problem was that he at a certain point he stopped growing and

changing and pushing himself and it was just more comfortable to like stay in the mask yeah no doubt yeah i think um and also the the indulgences and the substances became not just a habit but probably a physical addiction and at that point in time he's more of a slave to that than he is even the the work itself and the work itself is almost like something that he's eventually going to get to i I'll get to that eventually. I'll get to that. But it's just coke. And we read off a list when Lance Armstrong was here yesterday

of a typical day in the life of Hunter S. Thompson. Oh, God, yeah. And it just starts with like massive... Does it start with like ether or coke? What does it start with? It starts with... It's like Chivas Regal, cocaine, Dunhill cigarettes, cocaine,

Chivas Regal, coke. We read cigarettes, cocaine, Chivas Regal, we read it all off. It's fucking preposterous. Like, you should be fucking dead. And then it says at midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write. And this is like after getting up at three. Oh, God. You spend your entire time, like, pouring, like, liquids into your head and then smoking things.

But for a while it worked. Man, he wrote some insane shit during that time he wrote some amazing stuff for it's almost like he just redlined his brain never changed the oil and kept the metal and then this magnificent thing like happened until it like horrifically ground down i gotta be boring and i gotta go i'm really sorry get out of here all right well thank you no please no worries Thank you so much for coming on and everybody, Drawing Blood is the book. I'm in the middle of it right now

and it is excellent and your writing is really fantastic and honest and just really really good stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you and you can follow Molly on Twitter, Molly Crabapple on Twitter. Same thing on Instagram website. MollyCrabapple on Twitter, same thing on Instagram website

MollyCrabapple.com go buy the book fuckers thank you so much Joe, this was awesome bye everybody that was so cool, thank you