On this episode of Thick & Thin, I sit down with writer and editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, Alex Blumberg, to talk about his new book, The Name Dropper, and how he came to write it. We talk about the process of writing the book, how he got the idea for it, and what it's like to be a writer in the public eye when you don't really know what you're writing about. And we talk a lot about drugs, which is a big deal because Alex has a lot of them, and why he writes about them so much. It's a really good episode, and I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much to Alex for being on the show, and thank you for being brave enough to share it with the world. I really appreciate it. And I really hope that you enjoy this episode, because it's a good one, and that you'll find something in it that makes you think about it and reflect on it in a way that you can relate to it. I hope that it makes you reflect on your own life, because that's what we're all here to do, because we're here for you to do the same. And that's why we should all do that, right? We're here to help you do it, right here, right now, right in front of you, in this moment, right across the screen, and in the real world, right next to you. And we'll talk about it, in real life, and we'll all of it, so you can do it right here. . and we can do the next one, too. , right here in the next episode, next week, next Wednesday, next Monday, next Tuesday, next Friday, next Saturday, the next day, the day after next week. Thank you for listening to us, folks. We'll see you next week! xoxo, Alex. -P.S. -Jon Sorrentino -Jon & Alex <3 -Jon Jon - Tom Sarah Tom - Steve Thanks, Jon John Jake Ben Kevin Mike Caitie Joe Michael Matt Evan Matthew Tim Brian David Daniel Sam Julian
00:00:52.000And also for this book, because I work as a journalist, I fact-checked it as best I could.
00:00:57.000And 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.
00:01:18.000I mean, it's really strange when you go back and talk to people that you haven't talked to for a long time, and you're like, okay, what is your...
00:01:26.000And all judgments aside, let's just give me your version of what happened, and I'll tell you what I think happened.
00:01:32.000And you're like, oh my god, I don't know what the fuck the truth is anymore.
00:01:36.000Yeah, I have this one thing where there was this one girl, she recalled something, and she recalled it one way, and then when she realized that it was actually two days later than she thought it was, which made it look like there was an article she had written which had contradicted it, she kept insisting it hadn't happened.
00:01:52.000And 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.
00:02:04.000Yeah, it's very strange when people are confronted by that fact, too.
00:02:10.000I 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.
00:02:20.000I'm trying to beat around the bush like I'm on regular radio or something.
00:02:23.000But he was insisting that he got me on this psychedelic drug the first time, and my other friend was like, um, no.
00:04:51.000This is my favorite part, but that favorite part doesn't necessarily enhance the whole thing, so you have to kind of chip it away, and then the whole thing will be better without it, but it's hard to do, right?
00:05:03.000I 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.
00:05:17.000Well, 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.
00:05:27.000Now, are these illustrations that you added in after the fact, or are they illustrations that you sort of drew while you were experiencing these things?
00:06:14.000First, 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.
00:06:21.000So I didn't bring any of my fun books that I like to read.
00:06:44.000I think towards the end, I... Didn't do anything but work on it.
00:06:51.000I just became this horrible, like, troll beast that didn't wash her hair and would growl at anyone who came near living entirely on coffee and just made it.
00:08:24.000Norwegian adventurer spent six months alone in the Northwest Territory wilderness.
00:08:29.000And 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.
00:08:39.000One of the things that he said that I thought was really interesting, he said, we are not meant to be alone.
00:08:45.000I feel like, you know, people romanticize this idea of being this hermit that's off in the woods, you know, the The the monk that's out meditating in the forest by himself, but that shit is like it's like holding your breath It's kind of cool for a little while, but you don't you don't want to do it very long No,
00:09:02.000man, I think I mean it makes you go crazy like being in solitary things makes you go crazy I Recently did a really big investigative piece on some long-term solitary prisoners and these guys like were really smart guys they were You know,
00:09:31.000He was part of this group of whistleblowers called the Dallas Six that basically they were giving information about guards doing, beating people up and being racist in this prison in PA. And they're all in solitary and the guards retaliated.
00:09:48.000And then when one of the other guys, Carrington, sued the DA for not protecting him from the guards, Yeah, I agree.
00:10:13.000So I did an investigative piece, and eventually I got video and stuff, and it was bullshit, and I really hope their trial goes well in February.
00:10:22.000But as part of it, I spent a lot of time talking to two of the guys, and I mean, you suffer real mental trauma from doing that.
00:10:31.000And no one, even the smartest, toughest, best person who has a really loving mom that is really devoted to giving them all the books and all the support, even that person will suffer real trauma from that.
00:10:44.000Yeah, I've always wondered, like when Bradley Manning was arrested and then later became Chelsea Manning and spent, how many years was she, you know, whenever the transition makes sense, how many years was she in solitary?
00:11:20.000She, like, announced the transition right after her trial.
00:11:24.000But she, I mean, if you look at her chat logs with Adrienne Lamo, she has one line where she says that what she's afraid of is being known to the world as a boy.
00:11:32.000So I think she decided it herself a long time ago.
00:11:52.000But I remember thinking, like, who wouldn't lose their fucking mind being naked in a room by yourself for years?
00:12:00.000Like, what if they thought that she was a hazard to herself or something like that?
00:12:05.000Yeah, 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.
00:12:23.000Is she in regular prison now or still in solitary?
00:12:53.000Someone who is a soldier who transitioned to becoming a woman and then sends letters that all have the animal that's known as the symbol of peace over all the eyes.
00:13:04.000I 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.
00:13:13.000I mean, from what I know kind of about reading her life story, like this was someone who Like her happiest time was like dating a dude who was around sort of like the MIT hacker scene and I think that if she was middle class and not poor she just would have like gone to school and gotten a computer science degree and that would have been the whole thing.
00:13:31.000It'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.
00:13:39.000I mean, you could say that what they did was treasonous.
00:13:42.000Is it really treasonous when you're exposing crime?
00:13:45.000Like, isn't it supposed to be illegal to commit crime?
00:13:47.000And if your government is doing things that are illegal, isn't it your job as a patriot to expose those things?
00:14:00.000If 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.
00:14:13.000And there's no way that you can love your country and not call it on its bullshit at all.
00:14:16.000I think that the opposite thing is treason.
00:14:18.000I think it's treason to say, like, just because it's my country, any crime is justified.
00:14:44.000He 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.
00:14:52.000Snowden is hanging out with Putin in Russia, which is just bizarre to me.
00:15:32.000But what's really bizarre about the video is I didn't know how, like, opulent...
00:15:37.000Wherever he is with palace or whatever the fuck it is like they have these fucking enormous like here it is Look at these enormous gold doors Like let's play it.
00:15:47.000Let's play it Jamie so you can watch this like if you watch as he walks if you notice his left arm swings notably while his right arm stays Relatively still in comparison like a huge contrast and he always does this and that's so that he could shoot you in the fucking head quicker Or else someone finds out there's an untreated rotator cuff injury,
00:16:47.000I 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.
00:16:59.000Entirely 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.
00:17:13.000I 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.
00:17:25.000I mean, I can't say I'm like super familiar with Russian politics.
00:17:28.000So I could, I might be talking bullshit.
00:17:31.000But I mean, he, you know, he was the ex head of the KGB, like he seems incredibly versed in spying on people and killing people who are threats and maintaining his position at all costs.
00:17:47.000In front of their girlfriend and stuff like that.
00:17:49.000Like, he's just, it's just a massive terror tactic.
00:17:52.000There 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.
00:18:28.000That's still, that one really freaks me out to this day.
00:18:31.000Because if you don't know the story, Michael Hastings was, there's actually a TED Talk That's available right now.
00:18:38.000It's a podcast called the TED Radio Hour, which I listen to all the time, that had one episode called Disruptive Leadership and actually focused on this general, General McAllister.
00:18:51.000And 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.
00:19:01.000And what it was was Michael Hastings had gotten embedded in this military Yeah.
00:19:29.000And 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.
00:19:39.000And along the lines, this guy, Michael Hastings, formulated this article, published it in Rolling Stone, and it became this sort of a national scandal.
00:19:53.000I believe his name is McAllister, right?
00:19:59.000And that's what the whole focus of this TED Radio Hour was about, was this guy taking a leadership position, a leadership point of view by deciding that his position was not as important as the cause itself, and he was just going to step down because he had created...
00:20:15.000This environment where it was too much controversy.
00:20:18.000And he was upset that President Obama didn't ask him to stay, but it is what it is, and that's it.
00:20:23.000But 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.
00:20:37.000I mean, I don't think it was a suicide.
00:20:40.000Well, 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.
00:20:58.000Explode and Let me there's all this crazy all these crazy conspiracy theories that are attached to it that say that engines don't go flying from a car like that unless there's a bomb Involved and you know like why would this guy do this and it is pretty pretty trippy stuff and then there was claims that there was crystal meth in his system and then he was you know high on drugs and he had A problem with drugs in the past,
00:21:24.000but 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.
00:21:35.000I 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.
00:21:44.000He just happened to be going 120 miles an hour on Sunset Boulevard?
00:21:48.000Yeah, I mean, that's for the people I know that, you know...
00:22:43.000Yeah, it's a weird world we live in right now.
00:22:45.000I think there's a temporary bridge right now that's going on where, whether it's the NSA, fill in the blank with whatever name of whatever organization that's supposedly watching over us, but they have a certain amount of power to look into people that we don't have yet.
00:23:25.000Was that a concern when you were writing this book?
00:23:28.000Because you empty yourself out in this book.
00:23:31.000I mean, you talk about sexual liaisons and relationships and friendships and things gone wrong.
00:23:38.000When you were writing this, did you ever say, man, maybe I don't want everybody to know these things?
00:23:46.000I had a few things that were like that, usually actually with friendships, but ultimately I thought that it was more important to be honest.
00:23:54.000Though 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.
00:24:04.000And just like put them in a book and thus on that person's Google results without asking them.
00:24:09.000So 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.
00:26:19.000He actually interviewed me for my book launch in New York and I grew up reading that.
00:26:25.000You know, I was reading like The Exile when I was 18 and I love his stuff in New York Press.
00:26:30.000What 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.
00:26:38.000And Matt was like this total wild man when he was young.
00:26:41.000And now he does this incredible investigative journalism on finance and politics, but he still writes like a real person.
00:26:48.000He still writes in that kind of Hunter S. Thompson tone.
00:26:50.000That's exactly how I was going to describe it.
00:27:02.000But 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,
00:27:17.000those two things were not incompatible at all.
00:27:20.000I always like people like that who have lives that are really, really diverse.
00:27:23.000Yeah, that's a really good way of describing him, too, because we do have this idea that if you're going to be an investigative journalist, that your piece has to be sort of homogenized and that the facts take precedent over the flavor of the prose.
00:27:48.000It's such like a master class on how to do it.
00:27:51.000And 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.
00:28:02.000And if you write it completely without flavor, most people will never even be able to sink into it at all.
00:28:06.000Yeah, 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.
00:28:19.000Like, I thought, like, it would be one of those things where everyone would be sharing it, it would go, it would be on the front page of the New York Times, today on CNN, Matt Taibbi, uncover, and everybody would be like, look at the facts, this is crazy!
00:29:03.000And, you know, some of them, I was like, this guy's gonna get fucking killed.
00:29:06.000Like, 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.
00:30:07.000When 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.
00:30:16.000At that time, this coalition of Islamist groups had just kicked ISIS out of this border town called Azaz.
00:30:24.000And you could take a bus over to the Turkish border, and then you could cross.
00:30:29.000And I did that with a war journalist friend of mine, and I spent a day with the Islamic Front driving around Azaz.
00:30:36.000And 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.
00:30:54.000The 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.
00:31:37.000Even if a guy didn't have an AK, like they'd be holding like sticks and stuff.
00:31:40.000There 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.
00:31:49.000Like, it might sell, like, a beautiful antique, you know, pearl inlaid revolver that, like, someone's dad had, but then also grenades and stuff.
00:32:13.000And 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.
00:32:22.000And 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.
00:32:31.000And it was just, I don't know, it's like, This feeling of being in this place where the whole world is both fucking with it and abandoned it both at once,
00:32:50.000So that was the most dangerous thing I've ever done.
00:32:52.000Like nothing I've ever done was as dangerous as going to Syria.
00:32:54.000But I think the most personally disturbing thing was, I was in Gaza, six months ago, I guess.
00:33:02.000And I went to Shujaia, which is this neighborhood that was completely destroyed by Israel during Protective Edge, like they bombed it, and then they went in with tanks, and then they went in with bulldozers, like, so it's like, flattened.
00:33:16.000Like, you know, you go there and you're like, this is a neighborhood that has been wrecked.
00:33:21.000And a lot of times when you see houses that have collapsed, you can see all of the stuff of people's lives in it.
00:33:27.000Like, 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.
00:33:34.000And 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.
00:33:45.000And, 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,
00:34:04.000I was just talking to him, but yeah, he had had a baller, gorgeous home before this, and now he was just living in the wreck of one of the rooms.
00:34:18.000Mad 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.
00:34:30.000But one of the things that I always try to remember is that the apocalypse is already here.
00:34:52.000And Azaz, I mean, that is what everyone's terrified of.
00:34:55.000What everyone's terrified of is a reality where you walk down the street and everyone's carrying military weapons and you're just, it's chaos.
00:35:13.000But just in the sense of the extreme falling in your life situation, there was a guy I met when I was in Iraqi Kurdistan.
00:35:22.000Last time I was with Dr. Thot Borders there, and he was this super smart dude.
00:35:28.000He was Kurdish, which meant that he was really discriminated against, but he scored so high in his math exams, he was able to go to an elite engineering school and get an aeronautics degree.
00:35:39.000This is a dude that would be on the path to having an awesome job, and now he's living in a tent with his whole family and his mom and everything.
00:35:49.000You know, you never expect that when you're living in like an awesome city like Aleppo that he was living in.
00:35:55.000And then the war comes and there's bombings and you're driven out of your home and you're so displaced that eventually you're forced to be living in this tent with no end in sight and you're not allowed to like ever improve your circumstances because you have the wrong passport.
00:36:20.000I mean, so the Syrian refugee thing, one thing that I... I think perhaps isn't in the media enough is that the people who are coming to Europe right now are the middle class of the country because it costs over a thousand dollars to pay a smuggler to take you over.
00:36:41.000And 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.
00:36:50.000But they're banned from it because they're Syrians.
00:36:53.000And 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.
00:37:05.000Well, there's this big push in America now, especially among the Republicans, to not allow anyone from Syria to come into the United States.
00:37:44.000One of those assholes would make it through.
00:37:46.000No, it's crazy and it's really personally upsetting to me because I've done so much work with Syrians over the last few years and to see these amazing people that I know who are so tough and so smart And have endured so much,
00:38:03.000like being defamed like this, I feel almost like someone's shit-talking, like my...
00:38:07.000Well, someone is shit-talking, my friends.
00:38:09.000You know, it makes me angry on a personal level, like not just a theoretical one.
00:39:02.000And the other thing that's, to me, particularly moronic is I see sometimes in the media, like, why aren't the Muslims condemning the terrorists?
00:39:11.000Every single group that is actually on the ground fighting ISIS with guns, you know...
00:39:34.000I 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.
00:39:42.000Or for the same reason why Matt Taibbi's articles never really got as popular as I thought they should.
00:39:47.000People just don't have the time or the need.
00:40:21.000The 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...
00:41:12.000And the two deny that to these people because they were born on the wrong patch of dirt.
00:41:18.000And I'm not saying they shouldn't be checked.
00:41:21.000You 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.
00:41:29.000Yeah, I mean, if there's a way to do that, that should be done.
00:41:32.000But the idea that you should never let anybody in that's from Syria, it's like, God, man, imagine you're cursed just because you were born on the shitty patch of dirt.
00:41:42.000Yeah, that's exactly what the thinking is.
00:41:44.000It's like, because you were born here, you carry some virus and you have to be quarantined.
00:41:48.000And man, I'm so fucking grateful that you're saying this to your audience on the massive platform you have.
00:41:54.000I know I sound sappy and shit, but thank you, really.
00:41:57.000Well, listen, thank you for going over there.
00:41:59.000If it wasn't for people like you and the vice people and all these journalists and all these people that go over there and show us in video form exactly what's happening and get to watch it and see what it's like, they go, oh, this is fucking chaos.
00:42:16.0002015, while people are watching the Emmys and everybody's on the red carpet smiling, there's parts of the world that are like a Mad Max movie.
00:43:33.000Especially because so many people are online now.
00:43:37.000I think a lot of people maybe don't realize...
00:43:43.000Especially in the Middle East, how internet-connected people are.
00:43:46.000When I was in Domiz, which is the refugee camp in Iraq that I was at, one of the most popular stores was the store that was selling personal Wi-Fi hotspots.
00:43:56.000And you'd have people that were living in a tent with tarp and nothing, but they'd have a Wi-Fi hotspot.
00:44:03.000And 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.
00:44:09.000With texting services like this or with Skype, and so the most important thing you were going to get was internet access so that you could talk to your brother that was in one country and your daughter that was in another.
00:44:18.000That was more important than anything.
00:44:33.000Well, 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.
00:44:48.000I 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?
00:45:16.000This is the latest Donald Trump thing?
00:45:17.000I had a signing last night, so I unfortunately missed the intellectual glory that was the Republican debate, so fill me in on this.
00:45:24.000I 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.
00:45:36.000Well, because that's how they're plotting against us, Molly Crabapple, while you sit in your wonderful New York apartment writing books about sex.
00:45:51.000In 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.
00:46:00.000They are super scared because there are all these citizen activists and journalists that are revealing shit about them on the internet.
00:46:06.000Right 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.
00:46:25.000Well, because a lot of Syrians living and Iraqis living in their territories fucking hate them, and they give intel on them to foreign journalists.
00:46:51.000When you're a group of cunts that the whole world hates and you're online, I guarantee you're going to get some haters.
00:46:57.000Yeah, I mean, there's a there's one group of journalists there that's became very famous that's called BRCA is being silently slaughtered that I mean, they did tons of work documenting ISIS shit and ISIS, I mean, beheaded two of their members that were in Turkey.
00:47:13.000And there are plenty of other citizen journalists there.
00:47:16.000And yeah, ISIS is dead scared of normal of normal people who are living under their fucking occupation using the internet.
00:47:24.000You know, another thing they're scared of, they're scared of being killed by women.
00:47:27.000So that's kind of, I think, this is my theory, that the Kurdish, they won't go to heaven if a Kurdish girl kills them thing.
00:47:35.000I 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.
00:48:04.000I was just thinking of like some crazy Amazon scenario.
00:48:06.000Just like armies of chicks with guns chasing ISIS and they just run away because they're scared of being killed by chicks.
00:48:12.000I mean, the women who are fighting ISIS in the YPJ are ferocious soldiers, but ISIS is scared of getting killed by soldiers.
00:48:22.000If that was true, though, and we really allocated our resources correctly, I think there's probably enough really mean bitches in the world we could put together a hell of a fucking army.
00:48:33.000I think so, too, with tons of motivation.
00:48:36.000Could you imagine just jets and bombers and missiles all being piloted by women?
00:48:44.000Only women going after ISIS because if they get killed by these women, they're fucked and they don't get to go to heaven.
00:48:50.000I think you'd have to do like a more...
00:48:54.000I think that the bombings aren't doing shit against ISIS. I think what YPG is doing is, you know, I think it'd have to be more on the ground.
00:49:17.000Well, the thing with ISIS is what they do is they, I mean, they move in, you know, they occupy cities, like a military occupation.
00:49:22.000They try to, you know, marry people and build families.
00:49:24.000And they try to insert themselves as much as possible into the fabric of a city.
00:49:28.000And 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.
00:49:56.000What a crazy, chaotic, psychotic mess.
00:49:59.000It'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?
00:50:46.000I mean, what's really sort of so tragic about Syria is that Obama, this is me saying an opinion that's not necessarily mine, but it's opinion that I've gotten from speaking to refugees.
00:50:59.000A lot of people, I think, felt very led on by what Obama said, and they felt like, Oh, there's going to be, you know, some support or, I don't know, some action against Assad.
00:51:12.000Because, I mean, what everyone thinks about American intervention or non-intervention, what Assad did is a crime against humanity on a massive scale.
00:51:21.000Whatever you think we should have done, what he did was fucking horrific.
00:51:24.000And anyone who is in Syria and, you know, who was at the receiving end of that would very often want someone else to intervene.
00:51:32.000Why don't you explain to people what he did do?
00:51:34.000He ran, like, an industrial-scale arrest-torture-killing program.
00:51:44.000He does something called barrel bombings, which are taking, like, basically, like, dumpsters full of TNT and shrapnel and dropping them on populated areas.
00:51:53.000He targets schools, targets hospitals, destroyed large swaths of Aleppo.
00:52:03.000This isn't me saying that I think the U.S. should have intervened, because I... I still don't know, but I'm very against the U.S. intervening in general and anything, because I think we always fuck it up.
00:52:14.000But he also factually did do those things.
00:52:20.000It's just hard to imagine that someone's capable of doing shit like that.
00:52:25.000It's just where people can get to, where people can get to in their minds that allows them to do shit like that.
00:52:33.000I think what it was was his one of the things that was quite influential was his father put down a sort of incipient insurgency opposition thing in a city called Hama by killing 20,000 people and like bombing the fuck out of the city and it put put it down and I think that perhaps in his mind he thought that he could do the same when there was no uprising against him but obviously that you know wasn't what happened.
00:53:00.000Well, that's the story of Saddam Hussein and his sons as well.
00:53:04.000Imagine being the son of an evil, brutal dictator.
00:53:08.000Yeah, and you're just like, well, those sons always end up like these fucking Nero figures, don't they?
00:53:34.000God, I read some horrible stories about what they would do.
00:53:36.000They would find women that were getting married and they would take them from their husband, rape them, and then feed them to dogs.
00:53:43.000They 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.
00:53:55.000But the fact that a person can get to that place, that a person can get to that place where they...
00:54:01.000In the weirdest way, we're flexible in a beautiful way.
00:54:06.000You know, you can see someone who can create beautiful songs and...
00:54:10.000Art and they can touch people with their words and their thoughts and their deeds and you know they can they can be something inspirational and amazing but we're also flexible in this horrific way where they could play upon the worst fears and the worst the worst emotions that people are capable of Of manifesting and they could just attack and torture and maim and brutalize and murder and they could do it wantonly and do it for no real
00:54:48.000It's just they're human beings and it's like...
00:54:51.000I mean there could obviously be some anomalies in the brain itself but essentially a good portion of what makes a person who they are is Their environment and their life experiences and the nurturing and like how they're raised and what they're exposed to and we get we're so flexible and pliable because we want to survive that We're capable,
00:55:13.000the same species during the same time period, we're not talking about like cave people that cannibalized because they didn't have books, they didn't understand it was bad, and they hadn't invented language yet.
00:55:23.000No, we're talking about people with the internet.
00:55:26.000They're capable of doing these horrific things, but at the same time, there's someone like, you know, I mean, you fill in the blank, there's a lot of beautiful people out there that do things, but my friend Justin Wren, who's from these photos over here, who goes to the Congo, and he lives with the pygmies for six months a year,
00:55:42.000and he He builds wells for them and he gets malaria and almost dies.
00:55:49.000He just went over there and saw how incredible these people were and he dedicates his life to it.
00:55:54.000To me, he's one of my favorite people because he's this beautiful manifestation of experiencing friendship and love from these people and just becoming incredibly dedicated to try to take care of them.
00:56:05.000But these people exist at the same time.
00:56:38.000You know, like, you or I are not capable of those things.
00:56:42.000So for us to see that, like, what we consider a horrible person in America is like someone who says something horrible on, you know, on Twitter about race or something like that.
00:56:54.000Or someone who's, you know, disparaging about President Obama or, you know, it's like so minor in a lot of ways.
00:57:01.000What we shame people for here, you know?
00:57:04.000You didn't use the correct gender pronoun, you piece of shit.
00:57:09.000Terrible, terrible things that are going on at the same time in other parts of the world.
00:57:15.000I mean, I don't believe in a race to the bottom.
00:57:17.000It shouldn't be like, well, you haven't thrown someone to the dog, so you're cool.
00:58:38.000But to random women who don't have that in their Twitter bio, that that's what they're into...
00:58:43.000I think like you were being a jerkass and if someone is like fuck you stop calling random women whores on Twitter Oh, yeah, you know, I think that I think that's fine I think that what we're talking about before about having no That one day we're gonna come a time where there's no boundaries between people.
00:58:57.000I'm really absolutely convinced this like I've I've had these weird Trips in the sensory deprivation tank where I've sort of seen this take place the slow acceptance of what is the ultimate inevitable reality and And it kind of freaks me out sometimes I have to get out of the tank because I just can't handle it because I really think I think like life as a person We have this idea that we're gonna put our shell on and we're good.
00:59:24.000Yeah, this is gonna be no shells It's we're gonna just have to somehow or another like you know how you have friends like I have friends that I'm almost too close to them I know everything they do, you know, like what'd you do?
00:59:55.000But in addition to having us speak to all sorts of amazing people that we never would have spoken to before, it also really revealed what other people were thinking and made us really dislike them for it.
01:00:49.000Sometimes the thing that helps me put it in perspective is I got 70,000 Twitter followers.
01:00:53.000And 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?
01:01:33.000But if you have 300 million people, you're dealing with 3 million assholes.
01:01:39.000Like if there's a hundred people, one of them is going to suck.
01:01:42.000And if you have 300 million, you have 3 million people that suck.
01:01:46.000And if they all get a hold of your Twitter account, you're going to think the world has ended.
01:01:50.000You'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.
01:01:58.000And every now and then, Molly, your book's amazing.
01:02:44.000Well, before, you would have had to have written a letter, left your mom's basement, walked all the way down to the block with all these other humans.
01:03:32.000I mean, I hate to say that to those people right now.
01:03:34.000They're like, no, no, I'm a winner and I think what he did was dishonorable.
01:03:38.000Okay, 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.
01:03:49.000Or 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.
01:03:58.000And then you could have challenged your like meanness in a positive and winning direction.
01:04:01.000But if you really looked at the essay, honestly, you'd have to take down the whole sport itself.
01:04:33.000Yeah, and you'd write, like, probably about the economic impetus and all the ways that, like, top people were able to kind of condone it, but then get out with their hands clean.
01:04:42.000And you'd write something, like, that really channeled your meanness into a positive direction that really tore shit down.
01:04:47.000Yeah, that's a weird thing about blogs, too, though.
01:04:50.000I've read some really mean blogs that people write about folks, and I'm like, what's interesting about this is, like, Blogs are not a conversation.
01:04:58.000It's like you're you have this attack this focused attack of of an individual But if that individual was there and they could respond to this and you could have a communicate It would be a different thing like what it is is like It's like a message tied to the claw of a raven that you're sending out like it's so it's such a one-way thing and It's not really an effective way to communicate because you're not really trying to communicate.
01:05:26.000What you're trying to do is hurt somebody.
01:05:33.000Like if you could write an expose on someone who runs some horrible business that is using slave labor or fill in the blank on some terrible scenario that you could expose...
01:06:27.000No, no, it just it shows like diverse musical tastes.
01:06:30.000That's all I definitely have that sometimes too diverse, you know, but I don't know how we got into that But it's like yeah, like mean takedowns of like some singer like come on really this terrible person really affecting your life in some strange way but like The comments that people will make to people,
01:06:50.000I believe, on Twitter and Facebook, well, Facebook is slightly less anonymous, but all these anonymous methods of communicating, they're going to dissolve slowly but surely the boundaries between people.
01:07:03.000It's not just going to be the NSA that can find out exactly what you're doing and who's saying what to who.
01:07:08.000It's going to be the whole fucking world.
01:07:10.000Everyone's going to be able to do that.
01:07:15.000The other thing is people will find out the people who are doing that.
01:07:19.000I remember there was this asshole who made a bunch of Twitter accounts to write that women who worked in tech, but then just random women he didn't like were cunts.
01:07:31.000And he really fixated on this one woman who is a programmer at Tor, which is an anonymous web browser.
01:07:36.000And he made seven Twitter accounts at one point to tell her she was a cunt.
01:07:40.000And so, finally, she was like, this has gone on long enough.
01:07:46.000And when he was visiting her website, presumably to find more proof that she was a cunt, she got his IP address, tracked down where he worked, and posted his name in his workplace.
01:07:57.000And with the line that was like, it's classic, she wrote, should have used tour, fucko.
01:08:05.000If you went up to a bunch of women or if you went up to a bunch of women at bars and just screamed like cunt in their face, like eventually either them or their boyfriend or someone around was going to hit you.
01:08:14.000But 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.
01:08:31.000Well, he was just expressing himself and exercising his First Amendment rights.
01:08:36.000No, I really think we're maybe a few years away from that just not being around anymore, from it being some strange new world where we're all going to know exactly...
01:08:48.000I really believe that we're maybe 10 years away from being able to read each other's thoughts.
01:09:17.000There's that moment where you didn't know if someone likes you or not, what's going on, and then you're going back and forth with each other, sending each other emails, or you get that phone call out of the blue from someone you didn't know they really were into you, and you're like, yeah!
01:09:31.000But when you know everyone's thoughts, it's going to be like, oh, you're into me, you fucker.
01:10:26.000I just think it would be better if there was no secrets.
01:10:30.000If 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.
01:10:44.000Is what we are as human beings currently, is that a static state?
01:10:48.000And 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?
01:11:29.000I think that this idea that what we've got right now, like, oh, the romance of not knowing and, you know, it's amazing and it all works out.
01:11:40.000When we look back in time, too, the amount of time that we've spent in this state currently, the internet state, has been so brief but so transcendent Absolutely.
01:11:51.000The most transcendent thing, I mean, I think as much or more than the printing press.
01:11:59.000One 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.
01:12:08.000And he did this piece about people making the trip.
01:12:12.000And one of the things he talked about is that this was a trip that when he was a young man in Iraq, he had tried to pay a smuggler to do and the smuggler defrauded him and he didn't get to do it.
01:12:20.000But it was all under the control of smugglers.
01:12:23.000Whereas now, if you have a cell phone, once you get from Turkey to Greece, once you do that little four-hour boat ride, you just put on the GPS maps on your cell phone and you walk.
01:13:21.000Yeah, and they did it through the middle of the night, and they eventually got to some sort of border town, whether it was in Arizona or whatever, and they made their way and infiltrated into cities and eventually found jobs and barely survived, barely fed themselves.
01:13:37.000And fuck, man, you just imagine that life.
01:13:41.000And then there's all these people, we've got to tighten up our borders!
01:13:48.000Trump's, like, idiot idea of that wall that's not even, like, physically possible to build because he would have to go through all these, like, rivers and take over people's land.
01:13:57.000How do we get presidential candidates who, not that they're stupid, not that they're crazy, but who, like, fundamentally deny physical reality?
01:14:10.000You think it's to make the other ones look moderate and reasonable?
01:14:13.000No, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy.
01:14:15.000I think it's him riding this crazy wave of attention and trying to think in his own mind that it's justified because he's shining light on these important issues in a way that only he can because he's independently wealthy and he's not bound to You know,
01:15:17.000They don't really care about your American passport that much.
01:15:19.000And so I was at this press conference where he had these golf courses that he was licensing his name to.
01:15:27.000And I had some intel that the guys that were building the golf courses were getting 200 bucks a month to do construction work.
01:15:33.000And like the Emirates, the average salary of an Emirati is, I think it's like 60,000 a year, I think.
01:15:40.000And so he gets 200 a month, you know, to do like hard ass construction work.
01:15:44.000And so I get up during the press conference where he's getting his ass kissed and I wave my hand around and I say, Mr. Trump, you've been saying how You know, this all stands for luxury and your construction guys are getting $200 a month.
01:17:00.000You 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.
01:17:11.000And now these people wound up going out of business and they couldn't battle him financially.
01:17:18.000There's like this wave of people that hate him in that whole construction business.
01:17:22.000I 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.
01:17:36.000That fucking piece that Vice did on those people that are in Dubai that are trapped, where they take their passports.
01:17:55.000There was a camp that they went to and these men were just openly weeping.
01:18:00.000They were showing this like hole in the ground where they have to shit.
01:18:03.000And they were showing how poor the water is.
01:18:05.000And they had promised them a substantial amount of money per month.
01:18:09.000And they were coming over from India and the Philippines, a lot of third world countries.
01:18:14.000And 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.
01:18:27.000And then the other really fucked up thing is that these guys, they're not passive.
01:18:32.000They try to strike and stuff, especially very often, not only do they reduce their salaries, they just don't pay them.
01:18:37.000And can you imagine you have a wife and kids at home who are depending on you to go to another country and make money for the family, and then you just don't get paid for three months?
01:18:48.000And 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.
01:18:56.000It's, again, what we're talking about, the spectrum of human behavior.
01:18:59.000I 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...
01:19:13.000Risking their lives to make these giant buildings that these royal people are going to walk on roses that they throw at their feet and step into these things and go skiing in the middle of summer in these gigantic buildings they make.
01:19:25.000They make these crazy fucking structures over there because they almost have an unlimited budget.
01:19:30.000It's almost like they have an idea in their head.
01:19:33.000You know, I would like to fly indoors.
01:19:36.000And they're like, okay, we're going to build you a mile-high fucking gigantic building where you could fly inside.
01:19:43.000And then you have planes that you could fly indoors.
01:19:47.000I shouldn't even have said that because someone in Dubai is probably listening and ding!
01:20:45.000And 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.
01:20:52.000And you definitely go there and you're like, this is the city of the future.
01:20:59.000And it's all being built by slaves who are dying to build it.
01:21:03.000Well, I don't know if it's the future, but it's definitely the future of that area.
01:21:06.000But they just have this strange world where it was incredibly poor up until just a few decades ago.
01:21:13.000And then all of a sudden, they start pumping oil out of that place, and the money is astronomical.
01:21:22.000And the change in the amount of money that area has, and the few that have it, the disparity of wealth is just unimaginable.
01:21:32.000One 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.
01:21:43.000But 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.
01:22:00.000But the thing is, the flip side of that is like, citizens are only 10% of the population.
01:22:04.000And it's like 90% of the people, the people who do everything, like the engineers, the shop workers, the maids, the, you know, construction dudes, like the people who do every manner of work are not citizens and have no rights to anything.
01:22:52.000They were like, ah, we're going to go to a bar and have just some places you can go to drink.
01:22:55.000You have to drink in certain places because it's illegal to have alcohol, but there's some sort of weird loophole.
01:23:01.000And they said it was all Russian prostitutes.
01:23:04.000They 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.
01:24:11.000Eating a poppy seed bagel and poppy seeds will you will test positive for heroin if you eat like it's trace amounts but obviously it's not enough to be psychoactive but it's enough to show up in a really comprehensive blood examination so they tested this guy and He tested positive for heroin and they put him in a fucking cell He had a poppy seed bagel at Heathrow Airport,
01:24:38.000and that bagel got him locked up in a jail cell.
01:25:56.000Some 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.
01:27:36.000Yeah, 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.
01:28:01.000Like, if you're like some Trump guy, and you've got billions of dollars, and someone like Molly Crabapple makes you feel like shit at some Dubai press event, and you're like, fuck this bitch, this is what we're gonna do, I'm gonna hire a team, and I'm gonna fuck with Molly Crabapple's life.
01:29:15.000And I mean, I could I could just walk around Istanbul like any time of day or night and I would never not like have my heart beat fast for that city.
01:29:31.000They have a bad record, unfortunately, for arresting journalists there.
01:29:34.000One of my colleagues at Vice, this brilliant Kurdish dude, Mohamed Rasul, he is currently in jail right now for doing journalism in Turkey.
01:29:48.000And Vice is trying really hard to get him out, but he is rotting in a jail cell.
01:29:53.000And they claim that he is ISIS because he used encryption.
01:30:34.000He 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.
01:30:44.000So they just decided they didn't like him, like what he's doing, causing trouble?
01:30:48.000Well, they've been actually like deporting and fucking with a lot of journalists who have been doing this.
01:30:53.000But I think it's like the two British guys got out because, you know, they're British.
01:30:58.000Whereas if you're an Iraqi Kurd, like, who's going to be the person putting pressure on Turkey for you?
01:31:03.000Well, I'm sure you're aware of that Saudi Arabian blogger that's been beaten repeatedly.
01:31:47.000I'm not much into poetry, but I remember I went to a poetry slam in Venice once, which is the perfect place to go because people take themselves so fucking seriously.
01:31:57.000And 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.
01:32:06.000And we walked by this place and it was a poetry slam and I'm like, we have to go inside, we have to go inside.
01:32:13.000And we went inside and we were both like biting our hands trying not to laugh because it was just so preposterous.
01:32:19.000You know, that really just pretentious, save the world type poetry.
01:32:33.000I mean, I think as a visual artist, I have a similar thing when I see really, really bad artwork and I'm just like, not only are you shaming yourself, you're shaming my whole profession here.
01:32:45.000I also, as I've gotten older and I've sort of...
01:32:50.000Understand the nuance of life like what this guy's doing his stupid shame sham slam whatever poetry What he really is doing is just trying to express himself and he's developing as a person and right now It's kind of ridiculous to other people that are maybe a little bit more Well-versed in the ways of the world and with a more social experience But what he's trying to do is like he sees the world is wrong and he wants to get social brownie points by pointing it out and you know and people clap and cheer and he's so he sat down on this loose Leave Binder and wrote
01:33:21.000all this stuff out and he just feels like he's really good.
01:33:24.000And one day he'll look back at that and go, what a fucking moron I was.
01:33:27.000Just 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.
01:33:35.000Dude, if you die, then someone will publish the collected papers of Joe Rogan and this will be your most famous thing.
01:33:42.000It's like a A bit in there about Wonder Woman, like trying to explain Wonder Woman.
01:34:19.000And 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.
01:34:27.000And I was like, no, I sucked from the start and it was really hard.
01:34:31.000Yeah, 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.
01:34:39.000I think all my friends that are really good, they'll tell you they're fucking, they were terrible.
01:34:44.000I have two young daughters, and one of the cool things is watching their art, like they're really into art, especially my seven-year-old is really into it.
01:34:52.000And I watch her early stuff, like I save all her stuff, or at least representations, like some of it.
01:35:01.000and Watching like their early like control of her motor skills in her hands from the time she was like three to four years later This just dramatic difference in what she's ability, you know her ability to draw things and draw representations and figure out like perspective and sizes and We were going through this book yesterday.
01:35:23.000She has this How to draw figures book.
01:35:26.000And it was the weirdest fucking thing.
01:36:35.000One of the beautiful things about art is you can do whatever you want.
01:36:37.000If you want to make people that have giant hands that are the size of those foam number ones that people wear at a football game, you could totally do that.
01:38:31.000So it's like this figure is nine heads.
01:38:33.000And a fashion figure, which what they called it, which is, you know, the figure for a fashion illustration, was like so many more heads than like any other figure.
01:38:41.000And so it was like that crazy elongated thing and exactly what you're saying with like the crazy daddy long legs legs.
01:38:47.000It's very strange because for men, I've never talked to a man who understands that look because men are not attracted.
01:39:07.000And 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.
01:39:14.000And then men are like, no, don't do that.
01:39:17.000But it's like there's this weird disconnect between what the opposite sex or, I mean, I don't know, I can't speak for lesbians, obviously, but what the opposite sex finds attractive and the representations of attractive women.
01:39:31.000Sucked in cheeks, basically like on death's door.
01:39:38.000It's weird to see someone all cracked out and skinny like that being the most obvious representation of a beautiful person in nice clothes.
01:39:49.000I mean, I think it's, you know, fashion models aren't for men, you know, or they're not for straight men.
01:39:55.000They're supposed to appeal to women who are buying the clothing.
01:40:31.000Like if you look at like a Playboy model or like a model for like, you know, like Black Men's Magazine or, you know, like a model for Maxim, like they're like these super fit young women, you know, who like have like really good like muscles and are really curvy.
01:40:46.000Yeah, well, people, like, men are naturally attracted to women with a certain amount of body fat.
01:40:50.000It's a natural thing, because to be healthy, like, the whole idea of breasts and butts and hips being attractive is because, genetically, women who have those things will carry children better and will be more likely to be able to nourish those children because they're healthy.
01:41:47.000Fake boobs are one of the weirdest things of all time, if you really stop and look at it.
01:41:51.000If aliens came down from another planet, or even historians, because I guarantee you, we were talking about Bradley Manning and Chelsea Manning.
01:42:00.000There's going to come a time in whatever not-so-distant future, the next hundred years, where they're just going to be able to turn you into a woman.
01:42:07.000You're going to say, like, I don't want to be a woman anymore.
01:42:30.000CRISPR is a new method of manipulating genetics that they have invented.
01:42:38.000It's a really super complicated thing that I'm going to butcher.
01:42:41.000But they've invented it by studying the DNA of viruses and they figured out how to utilize that sort of method to manipulate eventually, at least, human DNA. To the point where they're going to be able to change your traits.
01:42:57.000They're going to be able to change so many different things.
01:42:59.000Introduce genes into specific areas of your body and fix problems or change things that you don't like.
01:43:06.000They're going to be able to do some fucking freaky shit.
01:43:10.000I think 2012 it was invented, and by the time 2032 rolls around, who the fuck knows what they're gonna have?
01:43:19.000I think we're really close to be able to just completely manipulate human bodies.
01:43:24.000But 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?
01:43:32.000There'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.
01:43:45.000The thing is, though, with trickery and matters of aesthetics, I don't even want to call it trickery.
01:43:51.000You can totally admire, think a guy looks really hot in a sharp suit, even though you know it's not really his skin, you know what I mean?
01:43:59.000There's a whole visual appreciation of other people that doesn't necessarily just have to do with what's quote-unquote real or what's your genetic heritage.
01:44:26.000You 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.
01:44:34.000I wonder if that's the same with hermit crabs.
01:45:00.000I had, well, apparently cuttlefish are just as bizarre, if not more.
01:45:04.000But my friend Remy Warren is a, um, he's a host of a show called Apex Predator, where they, um, they monitor, they sort of, um, Try to emulate the different attributes that certain predators have and how how they survive and see like if there's like some human version of that and and they like Check out like how it's called heron that those tall birds her
01:45:38.000Like how they walk with their crazy long legs and then stab at the water looking for like frogs and shit and he did one on octopuses and out of all the different animals we were talking about he was like you know there's all these cool animals they were talking about like how wolves will chase down packs of elk and how they corner them and And these canyons and draws and how they figure out how to trap them.
01:46:22.000They 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.
01:46:35.000They can change themselves to look more like predators or like dangerous things.
01:47:24.000It can merge with these coral reefs and it looks like a coral reef.
01:47:30.000So it's literally developed this ability to turn its body into the shape of a reef and then its little tiny, I mean, it curls its tentacles up into little tiny legs and runs on two legs.
01:48:10.000Are they going to take it all over after we destroy everything?
01:48:12.000The octopi are going to rule the earth?
01:48:14.000Well, 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.
01:48:33.000It's slavery of some alien intelligence that we can't communicate with.
01:48:37.000We don't understand what they're saying.
01:49:09.000We need email because we need to communicate.
01:49:10.000Well, they can communicate for miles through the water with their chirps and their noises.
01:49:14.000They recognize each other from years and years being apart from each other, even though to us they all look the fucking same.
01:49:22.000They can move and manipulate through 3D space in the water.
01:49:26.000They don't need a house because they're smart enough to go where the water's warm.
01:49:30.000Fish is everywhere and it's free, so they don't need jobs.
01:49:32.000So all these ideas that we have, like what represents intelligence, all that stuff's stupid.
01:49:38.000Because 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?
01:50:14.000So 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.
01:50:25.000We can essentially change the weather.
01:50:38.000They spray the sky with some sort of silver or something or another that makes it, I forget what the exact compound is, but it actually causes it to rain.
01:50:48.000And they've been doing it like once a week for years.
01:50:51.000They have rainstorms that they manufacture.
01:50:56.000We'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.
01:51:04.000And we're getting weaker, I think, too.
01:51:36.000With super thick bones and thick heads and...
01:51:41.000And they don't really know exactly how intelligent they were either.
01:51:44.000There'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.
01:51:57.000And then they're always finding these fucking new, they found another one like within the last couple of weeks, they found another new species of human that they didn't know existed.
01:52:06.000They found some large tooth that turned out to be not categorized.
01:52:12.000It was a human tooth but not categorized in any previous version of human beings that they were aware of before.
01:52:19.000They found quite a few of them now, including, I'm sure you've heard of like the Hobbit people they found on the island of Flores.
01:52:52.000And him and this guy Graham Hancock have worked together.
01:52:57.000And Graham Hancock wrote this book called Fingerprints of the Gods.
01:52:59.000It was a really controversial book in the 90s.
01:53:01.000And 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.
01:53:19.000And archaeologists sort of tried to put, like, vague dates on them.
01:53:22.000And the idea behind it was that civilization has not evolved and has not progressed on a...
01:53:29.000Straight plane, but rather there's been these peaks and valleys and that what has happened is people have gotten this very high level of sophistication and culture and then Massive cataclysmic disasters have white people out almost to the brink of extinct extinction and then they've risen back up again So like science is like found quite a few of them,
01:53:48.000but one of the big ones they keep pointing out is Is that there's somewhere around 12,000 years ago, there was a series of impacts on the Earth.
01:53:59.000And this has been proven by science now because over the last few years they've discovered this stuff called, I think it's called tritonite, but it's essentially called nuclear glass.
01:54:07.000And it exists around where they do nuclear tests and it also exists at meteor impact sites.
01:54:14.000And the impact creates heat that's so intense, it turns sand and rock to glass.
01:54:20.000And they find this stuff all throughout Europe and it's all around the same time period, which also coincides with the end of the Ice Age.
01:54:28.000And it also coincides with a thousand plus years later, the beginning of modern civilization, agriculture, mathematics.
01:54:37.000And so their theory is that that wasn't exactly the beginning, but that was a rebirth.
01:54:43.000And 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.
01:54:53.000I 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.
01:55:07.000We live in a time now where unless they literally wiped out everyone, it'd be very hard to do that.
01:55:12.000But in a world where people don't have that level of communication, where they don't have that level of connection, where they Yeah.
01:55:30.000I mean, it would be pretty easy, especially today in our culture, because everything has become digital.
01:55:35.000It's one of the weirdest things about us Advancing and evolving is that as things move to the cloud and as things become much less physical books like your book here, but much more like laptops and Kindle.
01:55:49.000I have a Kindle and it has 150 books on it or something like that.
01:57:48.000And 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?
01:58:23.000He goes, why is it that when you walk down the street, you see all these plants, but none of them grow food?
01:58:29.000Like, everyone grows plants everywhere, but there are all these fucking useless plants.
01:58:34.000Like, 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.
01:58:44.000Like, literally everything had food on it.
01:58:46.000Like, it would be just the same amount of water used...
01:58:48.000But you would actually get something out of it.
01:58:50.000But we're so rich that we're like, nope, pine trees.
01:59:28.000I think that they specifically probably planted those type of oranges to avoid bad people like us climbing their trees and stealing all of them.
02:01:48.000No, it's my first time in my life, so I'm really excited about that.
02:01:52.000And 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.
02:01:59.000I know it sounds like fucking blasphemy, but I think I'm going to like lie on a beach in Goa or something and read a lot of books.
02:02:08.000And 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.
02:02:33.000But other than that, I think I'm actually going into that time where I'm just making a little blank space.
02:02:40.000And 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.
02:02:51.000Because 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.
02:03:01.000And then you've taken all of that and you've put it into this book form.
02:03:05.000You've made it into an object and then you go on to what's next.
02:03:08.000And 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.
02:04:32.000K-A-R-A-M. And they do something really cool because a lot of attention right now, it's on the Syrian refugees that make it to Europe, but They actually work with people who are displaced inside Syria and then also people like on the border.
02:04:46.000And 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.
02:04:57.000They bring eye doctors to get all the kids' glasses that need it.
02:05:00.000But then they also bring like writers and philosophers and architects and like You know, people who teach classes with the kids.
02:06:05.000I mean, you do comedy, you do this super thoughtful talk thing, you host MMA stuff.
02:06:11.000I mean, you've done so many fucking things.
02:06:13.000I mean, it's just because I feel, and perhaps you feel this way, the world is just so big and weird and interesting, and I just want to learn stuff.
02:06:20.000Yeah, I wish I could live 10 different lives simultaneously.
02:06:23.000I'd have a bunch of different careers that I'd be interested in.
02:06:28.000But to do any of those things correctly requires so much attention and focus.
02:06:33.000It's almost like you can't enjoy too many things because then the one thing that you enjoy the most or that you choose to enjoy the most, you really can't focus on it correctly.
02:06:44.000Or else you just never, ever, ever have downtime, ever.
02:07:06.000And yet, you know, at a certain point, You know, this is a big compliment, and I don't mean this in terms of imitation, but your drawing of Trump and Ivanka was very Ralph Steadman-esque.
02:07:52.000I mean, I don't know if he's ever in Los Angeles, but I prefer to do these things in person.
02:07:56.000But if he's ever here, I would love to have him on, just to talk to him about Hunter, and what it was like, and what it was like for a time Hunter dosed him with acid.
02:08:25.000Well, he, to this day, or, well, not to this day, obviously he's dead, but considered that one of his biggest journalistic failures.
02:08:31.000And 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.
02:08:43.000Just to realize the fucking beautiful beast that you rode to being who you were was turning around and becoming a sort of cliche that was fucking up everything you liked.
02:08:53.000Did you ever see the Alex Gibney movie, Gonzo, The Life and Times of Dr. Hunter?
02:09:21.000And it was because his indulgences and his excesses had really cooked his brain.
02:09:26.000And he had become almost a caricature of himself.
02:09:32.000Along the line some of the interviews They had found him when he was a younger man and when he had started to become famous and he was actually worried about that very thing He was saying like I can't even get out of my own way anymore And they don't even necessarily when I'm when I'm doing these things I can't tell whether or not they want me and they want my take on things or whether they want reality itself like and I'm Because it's almost it would almost be better if I died Like for my own
02:10:03.000And 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.
02:10:15.000But 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.