Molly Crabapple

00:00dude I'm so happy to be here dude I'm so happy you're here I've been reading your book and it's 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 of short things it's limited you have beginning a middle and an end no characters no dialogue you know simple narrative where is 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

00:50do them justice so hard and also for for this book cuz I work as a journalist I I fact checked it as best I could and nothing is more personally painful than factchecking 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 you're like okay what is your and you know no 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 the truth is anymore yeah I had this one thing where there was this one girl she recalled

01:40something and she recalled it one way and then when she realized that it was actually two days later than she thought it was which made it look like there was an article she had written which had contradicted it she kept insisting it hadn't happened and I was like man here's your Twitter here's my Twitter here's the Twitter of the two other people who are at brunch here's the email confirming it it happened on this day and finally she was like I just give up I give up but I don't remember it yeah it's uh it's very strange when people are confronted by that fact too yeah I I had a 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 that is it was a psychedelic drug talk I'm trying to beat around the bush like I'm on regular radio or something but uh he was insisting that he uh got me on this

02:28psychedelic drug the first time and my my other friend was like um no that was mine it was my drugs I was there like what are you talking about man and then he just sort of stopped talking to us just like end the conversation 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 like somehow or another it it's one of those things that never works sort of like name dropping like name dropping has never worked ever no one has ever said I'm really good friends with leard DiCaprio and someone's gone whoa let me give you a movie now you're amazing no immediately people go oh this guy's a name dropper you know or he just happens to say it didn't happens to be true there's a fine line but everybody knows what the difference is like when you're a name dropper it comes you could

03:16you can smell it in a sentence you know it's just like it comes off in the air so this book is um it's it's super intimate like you you like just just cut the skin away and open your chest up just the whole world could see your soul you know you 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 I guess I mean I don't know I wasn't there obviously um two years is a long time to write something like did you how many times did you have to go back over it and oh God like seven drafts and there's a hundred pages of cuts from this book too that's in another word file that I might mine someday for other essays but it was like over and over and you know because I had never written a book before I didn't I didn't realize you know how much extra you write I feel like I was like building a block of marble basically out

04:10of 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 uh my friend Steve reell always uses this quote you have to kill your babies yeah exactly that's what they say right that's like the common writer conversation kill your babies but then you can keep your babies in another docu and you can devote like one essay per baby where they make sense that's uh similar to standup comedy in a lot of ways like one of the the hardest things about comedy is recognizing like um a bit sometimes is just too fat there's too much stuff in it and you have to figure out what to chop off but you have like these emotional connections to these punch lines like but I love this part I love saying it this is like my favorite part but that favorite part doesn't necessarily

04:55enhance 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 it's hard to do right oh God I mean the best piece I ever of advice I ever got when I started writing was um 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 you your your style is really interesting too because uh one of the things is really cool is like 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 I would say

05:43like over a hundred of them I did new for the book oh wow so that's a lot of extra work on top of that as well oh my God God how many day were you doing this every day or like how are you uh find the time cuz I know you're so busy doing journalism you're busy doing art like how did you find the time to do this um I was a really horrible person to be around for quite a few months uh I have the coolest boyfriend in the world thank you Fred for putting up with me during this Fred Fred Fred is Fred is awesome I I had a few things first I had friends with the 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 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 thing and we were going to beat each other I rented a lot of hotel rooms I had an an editor who put a

06:31beat down on me and was like you can't keep uh going off to other countries you actually have to write this book that I contracted you for I at one point he was like are you fleeing to war zone so you don't have to look at your book contract is that how it's going I I just I think towards the end I didn't do anything but work on it I just became this horrible like troll Beast that didn't wash her hair and would growl at anyone who came near living entirely on coffee and just made it that was how I did it that is a good way to do it right if you can get somewhere without the internet yeah I used to write a lot on airplanes I used to look forward to airplane flights I'd be like okay I'm stuck in the seat there's no internet access and then what the do the airlines do they put internet on the goddamn planes I know and then you're like oh I need to see what

07:18someone says about me on Twitter oh no someone was wrong on Twitter I must remedy this yeah I'm going to go on Amazon buy a new pair of sneakers you know it's like exactly it's so easy to just get distracted nowadays it's it's just the world is becoming more and more available you know and if you're off in a cabin in the woods with no internet access yeah you're you're stuck you're you're confronted with your own work to do yeah it's so attractive that's such an attractive idea to be off in a cab it's so romantic right to be off at 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 cuz I'm like where is the Wi-Fi signal there's a guy that I tweeted about today uh there's an article that I tweeted where this guy decided he wanted to live by himself in the uh I think it was the Northwest

08:10Territories he was going to do it for a solid year and but he made it six months and then he had a satellite phone he's like come get me I can't do this anymore but he was just going crazy like by himself for six months and it's a it's a fascinating story this is the guy right here Norwegian Adventurer spent six months alone in the northworth territory Wilderness and and uh it's really cool because the guy is he's very good at describing like 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 is like it's like holding your

08:57breath it's kind of cool for a little while but you don't you don't want to do it very long no man I think I mean it makes you go crazy like being in solitary things makes you go crazy I recently did a really big investigative piece on some long-term solitary prisoners and these guys like were really smart guys they were you know really um strong guys in my opinion like one of them I 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 these uh group of whistleblowers called the Dallas 6 that um basically they were giving information about guards doing um beating people up and being racist in this prison in PA and they were all in solitary and the guards retaliated and then when one of the other guys Carrington sued the DA for um not protecting him from the guards the da

09:55turned around and charged them all with rioting and I got really into the case cuz I was like this seems semantically interesting how do you Riot if you're in solitary I I consider rioting a group activity like if someone's rioting in solitary you could just leave them there and they'd get tired eventually and then the riot would be over you know yeah like that's hilarious they called it rioting so there so I uh I did an investigative piece and eventually I got like video and stuff but and it was and I really hope their trial goes well in February but as part of it I you know I spent a lot of time talking to um 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

10:42person will suffer like real 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 three years I think and naked yeah naked and in cold conditions like they literally tortured her like they tortured her like they what they decided wend doy when do you say her and when is him cuz when did she decide to transition when she was in there right she like announced the transition um right after her trial but she um I mean if you look at her chat Logs with Adrien LMO 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

11:36arrested yeah before she was arrested but that uh she just didn't publicly announce it for a long time that is a crazy the the worst thing to be known as a boy yeah whoa yeah it was 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 mind being naked in a room by yourself for years like what did they they thought that she was a um a hazard to herself or something like that yeah they their their excuses always like oh you're a suicide risk so we have to have you naked with no glasses nothing to read uh a horrible like suicide prevention blanket that you can't like you know wrap around you and just we have to like torture you cuz you might be a suicide risk for like is she in like regular prison now or still in solitary she's in

12:27regular prison right now actually like one of my most cherished possessions in the universe is she wrote me a letter once cuz I 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 it reminded me of like you know the thank you card that like someone very graciously writes someone who's given them a gift how what 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

13:12college 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 Mi 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 computer science degree and that would have been the whole thing it's incredible that someone who exposes crimes and that's uh 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 could but is it really treasonous when you're exposing crime like isn't it's 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

13:57both 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 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 so they make such a giant example like Julian Assange is literally like going crazy staying in that one house in 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

14:47vitamin D and then he has to go back inside and he's 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 gate the way he walks this is so creepy like they why don't they just admit that they like have a crush on him and want to have a sleepover that is so weird I mean well it's because um he has a very specific way of walking that's indicative of someone who has military training it's called the Gunslinger gate is that did did they make that term up themselves I guess they probably did but um what he does is he swings his left arm but not his right so he could pull his gun out really quickly that's the idea but what's really bizarre about the video is I didn't know how like opulent wherever he is with Palace or whatever the it is like they have these

15:42enor 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 noticeably 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 head quicker that's it or else 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 uh get that move into uh some form of political power but what's what's kind of creepiest about it back it up to the beginning again Jamie please um what's creepiest about is look at those doors like what is that like what are those goddamn doors look at all that gold everything's gold I mean I guess

16:40that's the vestages of being an imperial power where people used to collect Fab eggs yeah he is I mean he is one of the most open dictators that that you can see in modern society which is supposed to be some sort of a democracy 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 could I might be talking but I mean he you know he was the ex- head of the KGB like he seems incredibly Versed and spying on people

17:39and killing people who are threats and maintaining his position at all costs yeah he doesn't just kill him he kills him like openly yeah he hasn't gten 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 um there is a very respected uh journalist whose name last name I won't pronounce because I'll I'll butcher it but um yeah she was also just like Gunn down for criticizing him yeah well that's kind of happened sort or it's bit theor theoretically at least in other places but one one of the weird ones in America was that Michael Hastings guy

18:27that guy that's a that's still that one really freaks me out to this day cuz if you don't know the story Michael Hastings was there's actually a TED Talk um that's available right now it's um um a podcast called the TED Radio Hour which I listen to all the time that had um one episode called disruptive leadership but it actually focused on this General General McAllister and they were kind of sympathetic to him in this in this Ted talk because uh the idea was that he did a real leadership Thing by stepping down and what 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 up all the flights out of Europe and uh you couldn't fly from that part of the world to this part of the world so uh he got stuck it was supposed to be a short trip and he got

19:27stuck 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 and or Joseph Biden and um along the lines uh this this guy Michael Hastings formulated this article published it in Rolling Stone and um it became this sort of a national Scandal and I believe his name is McAllister right is that his name he um he was forced to step down and that's what the whole focus of this TED Radio Hour was about was this guy um 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 um 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

20:25this thing was this Michael Hastings guy who's in this recording who's 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 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 mph with no brakes and explode and I mean there 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 is pretty pretty trippy stuff and then there was claims that there was crystal

21:19meth in his system and then he was you know high on drugs and he had a problem with drugs in the past but then the counter to that was people were like well no he's probably doing Aderall which aot writers do because it helps write yeah it's like the New York drug everyone's on Aderall in New York is it yeah yeah I mean I I know a lot of people who are very close to to Michael Hastings and um I will say the people that I know that are very close to him think it was a tragic accident um they just happened to be going 120 mes 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 I can't I can't debate it but that's that's just what I've heard from PE from people who I am very close to who are 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

22:05know 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 uh I haven't done Somalia stuff um no I mean but like a lot of his friends were investigative journalists I mean oh yeah I'm sure everybody's I'm I'm probably on a list probably on a list for having you right here dude no you dude I'm in California I don't know I'm I'm adopting adopting the uh the native dialect I 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 uh yeah it's a weird world we live in right now I think it's a it's there's a a temporary bridge right now that's going on where whether

22:53it'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 there's going to come a time where this electronic barrier that we have in between each other it's all going to dissolve and everyone's going to have the same sort of power to spy on everybody that the NSA has we're just going to have to accept it it's going to be very 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 cuz you 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 was did you when you were writing this did you ever say man Me

23:42Maybe I don't want everybody to know these things I had a few things that were like that usually with actually with friendships But ultimately I 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 really unfair if I had taken kind of you know 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 that's really important that's that would be a real good way to destroy a friendship you started telling crazy intimate stories about someone just not cool like it's not it's not fair you know so and I know that like a lot of people disagree with

24:30that 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 it it not cool yeah well saying they're my memories like 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 I I ran them by my parents also that's got to be weird that was the most terrifying thing and there is the cuz I ran the parts about my parents by them but then they hadn't read the whole book and I had this really terrifying thing when the book came out where I was like oh my God what are they going to think and I mean I love my parents I have a really supportive relationship I couldn't ask for like you two cooler people on Earth you be my parents but still you're always scared right it's scary to show yourself like that but but they liked it

25:19they liked it mostly so I'm very happy about that well you must have really open-minded parents what your parents do my mom she used to be an illustrator now she's mostly retired she works kind of as a babysitter SL cats sitter now and my dad uh dad's an academic oh that's cool well so yeah you see obviously have some intelligent open-minded parents but they've got to be really proud of you because this is excellent stuff thank you so much yeah they they really are and um it was cool cuz 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

26:08got some great people that uh reviewed this too man you got Matt taibe to review this Pat and Oswald reviewed this I mean this is really impressive stuff thank you yeah Matt Matt's awesome he actually uh interviewed me for um 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 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 they're 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 and he still writes in that kind of hunteress Thompson tone that's exactly how I was going to describe it like a lucid hunteress Thompson exactly less drug addled yeah yeah best of

26:57hunteress Thompson and less narcissistic a bit no much less narcissistic now but it was so influential to me cuz 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 like 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 he that's a a really good way of describing him too because we 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 the facts take precedent over the flavor of the pros 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

27:47he's it's it's such like a master class on how to do it and in fact it's 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 is the guy that I got most of my information about the financial collapse about and one of the things that Disturbed me the most was how little reaction like publicly his articles caused like I thought like it would be one of those things where everyone would be sharing it it would go it would be on the front page of the New York Times uh on today on CNN Matt taiii uncover and everybody be like look at the facts this is crazy but meanwhile it was like this terrible terrible scenario where the

28:40whole system was hijacked by these 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 9:00 I can't be pay and no one no one really gave it the attention or I shouldn't say no one but not public 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 killed like these were these were intense allegations and it's 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 like they just like 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 F more famous it bothers me I think I I hope

29:36with the next book he he will be because I I think he's like one of the best journalists working in America now he yeah I agree I agree he's he's amazing he's amazing now you how much time do you spend doing all this you do a lot of Journalism I mean you you do a lot of crazy 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 You' been to so the most dangerous place I went to was uh last summer when I went into Syria for a day and that was um basically and the reason when I talk about how dangerous it was the fact that I 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 aaz and you could take a bus over to the Turkish border and then you could cross

30:30and I did that with a war journalist friend of mine and I spent a day with the Islamic front driving around aaz and one of the things um 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 terrible terrible thing and when um the scariest thing that ever happened to me as a journalist was we're with these three uh young media activist SL fighter guys really cool dudes I mean I liked them and we're in this car we're driving around aazz and the car slows to a halt just breaks down and Patrick the guy I'm with immediately thinks it's a set up for kidnapping to you know get PE get us out of the car because that's one way that you can set things up for kidnappings and um the guys didn't have their guns and so we

31:28had to walk to the media office um through aaz and aaz at that point looked like something out of Mad Max like it was just no women on the street just men a lot of AKs 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 is 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 and grenades grenades yeah because you know in case someone tried to kidnap you you could have a great I have a you're coming with me 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

32:17building that they 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 socer cuz 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 with it and abandoned it both at once you know and um and Anything could happen so that 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 um I was in Gaza 6 months ago I guess and I went to shua 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

33:16gone like you know you 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 um 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 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 inv invade your home and I was just just talking to

34:05him but yeah this 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 described that 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 me 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 aah aaz aaz and aaz I mean that is what everyone's terrified of what everyone's terrified of is a real where you walk down the street and everyone's carrying military weapons and you're just it's chaos and there's it's fairly

35:05Lawless yeah I mean a lot of the refugee camps that I saw it's not that they were Lawless I I would never describe them as that but just in the sense of the extreme uh falling in your life situation there is a guy I met when I was in Iraqi Kurdistan uh last time I was with Dr St 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 be 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

35:55you're and then the war comes and there's bombings and you're you're driven out of your home and you're so displaced that eventually you're forced to you know be living in this tent with no end in sight and you're not allowed to like ever improve your circumstances because you have the wrong passport Jesus Christ it's hard for anybody living in America to wrap their head around what it would be like to be there and be stuck in that position it really is I mean so the Syrian um Refugee um 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's cost over $1 thousand dollars to pay to pay that um 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

36:49risk drowning and all of that but they're banned from it cuz they're syrians and the whole like taking the boat and walking from Greece to Germany and having volunteers give out water and sleeping on the streets and like the whole humanitarian disaster is just a function of not letting them buy plane tickets that 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 but they're brown they're so scary they're terrorists oh my God it's there's got to be like one of them that's an I am I'm sure I'm sure there's but not one of them was arrested for a terrorism offense ever guarantee if you let like a

37:31million Canadians in you're going to and they're the nicest people ever there'd be like some of those guys that are in that that big like Riot was in Toronto smashing cars yeah one of them smashing a car or one of them from the Vancouver uh hockey Riot one those make it through no it's it's crazy and it's um it's really like personally upsetting to me because I've done so much you know work with 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 shitalking like my like my well someone is shitalking my friends you know it it makes me angry on um a personal level like not just a theoretical one well it's not just it's it's so shortsighted because if you consider the fact that you're you're talking about an entire group of people

38:20that's fleeing a terrible area and you're saying well they've all got to be bad that 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 of saying well these terrorist activities been they've been done by Muslims why don't we kick all the white people out of America because white people have been responsible for all the mass shootings I mean that's more logical than this it it's so awful and like the other thing that's to me like particularly like moronic is I 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

39:14Isis 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 um every single like 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 I think that the only reason anyone would think that Muslims are in 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 Tai's articles never really got as popular as I thought they should people just don't have the time or the need everything is wonderful you go to the supermarket you buy food it's really easy you know you go through the McDonald's drive through your stomach's full you sit home you watch Netflix you're good like you don't need

40:02to pay attention to Syria those people keep them out Donald Trump's going to keep us safe and you just drink yourself into a coma wake up in the morning Do It All Over Again drink some coffee get out the door get in your car do the same as long as you can get to 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 like where they were and they wanted to found they wanted to establish a new life they wanted to look we're going to take a giant chance we're going to get in a 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

40:49even have photographs the first people that came over if you wanted to picture something you had to draw it right and that's how crazy these people where they're like we I don't care I saw a drawing some pretty trees we're getting in the boat but they brought their babies and their grandma and they got in a boat and they came to America because they they had an idea and that idea was there is a better life here we can we can make it and the 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

41:37like God man imagine you're you're cursed just cuz you were born in the the shitty patch of dirt that's yeah that's exactly what the thinking is it's like because you were born here like you carry some virus you have to be quarantined and man I'm like I'm so I'm so grateful that you're saying this like to your audience with like on the massive platform you have like I I know I sound sappy and but like thank you really yeah 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 get to watch it and see what it's like you go oh this is chaos like this is in the world right now 2015 while people are watching the emys and everybody's on the red carpet smiling the there's parts

42:22of the world that are like a Mad Max movie right now or like this refugee camp um I went to or it was a a bunch of refugee camps in the Bea Valley in Lebanon like people don't know it gets cold there like kids freeze to death you know every winter um in those camps cuz it's like you're living under vinyl tarp in the mountains Jesus Christ it's it's very strange that the world is so uneven that there are places like the Congo that are like exist on the same timeline as Park Avenue that there's 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

43:24disparity there's always been you know the halves and the half not and in some places it's on a much more Grand scale but it's never been so obvious especially cuz so many people are online now like 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 does which is this uh refu it was the refugee camp in Iraq that I 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 cuz they had a family that was scattered all around the world and the only way to communicate them 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

44:14you 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're you said daughter I heard your New York came out oh it's coming out man I tried so hard got excited it came out sound like my uncle yeah man no 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 Absol on this podcast that have downloaded it from the internet no it's Absolut it's absolutely true um 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 and like I man how cool would it be to get someone like that on your show as a guest if there was like a way with Skype or

45:01something that' be amazing I have to clear it with Donald Trump make sure he thinks okay is are are Syrian voices allowed into the country or would that cause Isis does ISIS come from Syrian voices likely it's a disease of the mind uh 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 um 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 like how's that well because that's how they're plotting against us Molly crab apple while you sit in your wonderful New York apartment writing books about sex the ter the terrorists the terrorists are winning oh God I mean

45:50so in Isis territories that those are occupying they got rid of private internet access in people's homes cuz they're really scared of the internet too they are super scared because they're all these citizen activists and journalists that are revealing about them on the internet right now like if you're in rqa 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 and um that's cuz Isis is also really 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 hate them and they give Intel on them to um 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

46:48mean it's just communication it's just people yeah when you're a group of that the whole world hates and you're online guarantee you're going to get some yeah I mean there's a there's one group of um journalists uh there that's became very famous that's called braka as being silently slaughtered that I mean they did tons of work documenting Isis and Isis I mean beheaded two of their members that that were in turkey and there are plenty of other citizen journalists there and yeah Isis is dead scared of normal of normal people who are living under their 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 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

47:38much play got in the media and they were like oh man this is good PR let's keep let's keep milking this one you think so I think so yeah does it make sense ideologically like within their religion is that something that they believe in if you get killed by a woman you don't get all the virgins no I think that's I think that maybe I think maybe there's like a macho thing you know where they're like oh a girl you know girl shot my leg but I it's not a theological thing damn it it seems so good though I know really it seemed 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 cuz 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 you they're they Isis is scared of getting they're scared of

48:21getting killed by soldiers if we really allocated if that was true though and we really allocated our resources correctly I think there's probably enough really mean in the world we could put together a hell of a Army I think I think so too with tons of motivation could you imagine just jet Jets and bombers and and missiles all being piloted by women like that's it only women only women going after Isis because if they get killed by these women they're and they don't get to go to heaven I think I think you would have to do like a more I think that the bombings aren't doing against Isis I think the um what ypg is doing is you know I think it'd have to be more on the ground thing on the ground yeah well especially in Afghanistan right this there's that's one of the things that people have always had a problem with invading Afghanistan it's essentially a series of

49:10mountain ranges occupied by Warlords there's not like it's not a lot of access it's not so easy to get to well the thing with Isis is what they do is they I mean they move in you know they occupy cities like a military occupation they try to you know marry people and build families and they try to insert themselves as as much as possible into the fabric of a city and that's part in part it's them making it so that if if you you know bomb raqqa you would be murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were just too poor to get out so they do it strategically sort of embed themselves as a human shield yeah exactly and like there are so I mean the majority of rqa is they're like farmers who couldn't afford to get out cuz 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

50:03on television was it a year or so ago where he was talking about eminent military action against Syria and the whole country went what are they crazy and then it just 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 mind like look what happened in Iraq look what happened in Afghanistan look at the the massive negative reaction the American public has had to all these military actions you're going to start up a new one on in Syria for what reason cuz somebody got gassed because they gassed people like what what what's going on that we need to sacrifice American lives over there exactly like what's the cause of all this I mean what's really sort of so tragic about Syria is that um Obama um this this is me saying an

50:55opinion that's not necessarily mine but it's opinion that I've gotten from speaking to refugees it um a lot of people I think felt very LED on by what Obama said and they felt like oh there's going to be you know some support or I don't know some action against Assad because I mean what everyone thinks about American intervention or non-intervention what Assad did is a crime against humanity on a massive scale what what whatever we think you think we should have done what he did was horrific and anyone who isn't serious and you know who was at the receiving end of that would very often want someone else to interv 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 trapnel and dropping them on populated areas targets

51:54schools targets hospitals uh destroyed uh large swads of Aleppo and this isn't this isn't me saying um this isn't me saying that I think the US should have intervened because I I I still don't know but I I'm very against the US intervening in general and anything because I think we always it up but he also factually did do those things it's just hard to imagine that someone's capable of doing like that it's just where people can get to where people can get to in their minds that that allows them to do like that I think what it was was his one of the things that was quite influential was his father uh put down a sort of incipient Insurgency opposition thing uh in a city called Hama by killing 20,000 people and like bombing the out of the city and it it it put put it down and I think that perhaps in his mind he thought that he could do the same when there was an

52:57uprising against him but obviously that you know wasn't what happened well that's um I mean that's the story of Saddam Hussein and his sons as well you imagine being the son of an evil brutal dictator yeah and you're just like well those Sons always end up like these Nero figures don't they I mean it's like the father is very often like a thuggish military guy and 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 with like Jil also exactly yeah and UD and cus is that what his name yeah those 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

53:48they didn't like to their dogs and their dogs would tear them apart like whoa like and then they would watch of course but the the the fact that a person can get to that place that a person can get to that place where they in the weirdest way we're flexible in a beautiful way you know you can see someone who can create beautiful songs and art and they can touch people with their words and their thoughts and their deeds and you know they can they can be something inspirational and amazing but we're also flexible in this horrific way where they could play upon the worst fears and the worst the the 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 wanly and do it with no for no real reason they could do it sadistically for fun for recreation the fact that that that's the same Beast

54:48that it's just they're human beings and it's like I mean there could obviously be some anomalies in the brain itself but essentially a good portion of what makes a person who they are is their environment and their life experiences and the nurturing and like how they're raised and what they're exposed to and we get we're so flexible and pliable because we want to survive that we're capable the same species during the same time period we're not talking about like cave people that cannibalized because they didn't have books they didn't understand it was bad and they had 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 can fill in the blank there's a lot of beautiful people out there that do things but my friend Justin Ren who's um from these photos

55:38over here who goes to the Congo he lives with the pygmies for six months a year and he 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 cuz is like this beautiful manifestation of like experiencing like friendship and love from these people 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 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 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

56:25get me wrong wrong you're your pro people I'm a huge fan of people I I love people I think we're amazing but we're also horrible you know it's it's what we're capable of is so strange cuz like you know like you or I are not capable of those things so for us to see that like what we consider a horrible person in America is like someone who's says something horrible on you know on Twitter about race or something like that or someone who's uh you know dispar in about President Obama or you know there 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 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 I don't believe in a race to the bottom it shouldn't be like well you haven't like

57:19thrown someone to the dog so you're cool you know like no it's definitely not that no but I I I I definitely I I definitely hear where you're coming from H 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 got to shame me for my baby punching shaming shaming is a new thing right when did shaming come around I mean I 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 shaming like these terms are very new these like these are like these new Concepts I mean I think that they they're new coinages to uh describe to describe um you know old Behavior and

58:11the truth is I 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 to random women like that is jerk-ass behavior and people should tell you that you're being a jerk for it unless she's really into it that's her thing if she's if she previously expressed she previously expressed a uh desire for that yeah they have like an established relationship you're a dumb oh you get over here like yeah yeah no pre previous consent but you know to 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 if someone is like you stop calling random women 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

58:55there'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 I've sort of seen this take place this slow acceptance of what is the ultimate inevitable reality and it it kind of freaks me out sometimes I have to get out of the tank because I just can't handle it because I 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 there going to be no shells it's we're going to just have to somehow or another like you know how you have friends like I have friends that uh I'm almost too close to them I know everything they do you know like what' you do ah you why'd you do that oh my God what are you doing I just lost my mind and but you know everything like we're going to know that

59:42about 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 TW 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 uh revealed what other people were thinking and made us like really dislike them for it in a lot of ways right yeah yeah well also the anonymity the ability to reach out to Molly and just say some mean anonymously you know you're just this little egg I'm a little egg you know that's all your your icon is and you know you have a bnch a series of letters that represent your egg and you're like you Molly crab apple you I read your I didn't believe that's how it went down I think

60:32you're a attention yeah yeah and then you read that you're like ow you know you Anonymous person searing my soul with your hate I haven't I mean I don't like I I get a lot of like as as I'm sure you do I think okay so this is the thing sometimes the thing that H 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 100 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 Comm like the idea of the 1% being like the real problem in America being the successful people I think if you got the 1% of all the successful people together only 1% of them would be evil I I really believe that I

61:24think 1% AC like 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 three million like if there's a hundred people one of them's going to suck and if you have 300 million you have three 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 they hate words of the one will just be overwhelming and every now and then Molly your book's amazing like likewe it's all Li cling to this yeah you'll you'll try to find it I mean I've watched people in SC like I had like we were talking about Lance Armstrong and I looked at the mentions that Lance

62:13Armstrong gets on Twitter like anything he writes like anything he WR like had a great time you know uh doing these uh this race was it as good at times when you're running away from drug tests oh sake like they they can't help it's like they people just love to dig they just love to reach out that rib cage and pull out your heart they can't help it they know they can and it's also a new ability that human beings have sort of cultivated over the last couple decades 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 other basement so yeah I mean why why why don't I say like your dad's basement your girlfriend basement there's so many other basement these people could be in like why do I have to put them all in their mom's basement cuz it's somehow or another for a man the

63:01most pathetic thing like Mom I'm down here Mom stop yelling I'm down here telling people they're wrong on the internet I me you're typing up a stor and trying to hurt ltime feelings recycling lying yeah I like I like that that was that was a that was a good good personification of that it's what 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 like no no I'm a I'm a winner and I I I think you 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 in the that like really took

63:57him down and and you could have challenged your like meanness in a positive and winning Direction but if you really looked at the essay honestly you'd have to take down the whole sport itself I mean you really wouldn't if you want to take down Lance Armstrong you'd have to take him down by his individual act actions in defending his actions in the sport yeah that that's that's he admits that he he's pretty open about the fact that he up and that he made some pretty horrible choices that's it the the sport itself like if you really wanted to write an essay you'd write what the 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

64:44your meanness into a positive direction that really tore down yeah that's a weird thing about blogs too though there's a lot of PE i' 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 communic you it would be a different thing like what it is is like it's like a a message tied to the claw of a raven that you're sending out like it's it's so it's such a one-way thing it's it's not it's not really an effective way to communicate cuz you're not really trying to communicate what you're trying to do is hurt somebody like when you see attack blogs the worst yeah there there's some that deserve it like if you could write an expose on someone who

65:37runs some horrible business that is using slave labor fill in the blank on some terrible scenario that you could expose yeah I mean the the world should see it like okay here Matt Tai's expose 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 are written are just about like random celebrities or you know like you're just like why why are you that invested in Tyler Swift like how do you have so much opinion I me it's Taylor I I'm I'm a dork I don't know anything well I'm a dork too haters going to hate hate hate that song I like that song goddamn because I have daughters and I have a wife that goddamn song is playing all the time they play in the car when I'm with them I'm like that's okay you could you could play that one I like that one cool that's awesome

66:26but I'm embarrassed that I like it no no it just it 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 under that but it's like yeah like mean takedowns of like some singer like come on really this terrible person really in 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 well 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 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

67:18out the people who are doing that I remember there was this like who made a bunch of Twitter accounts to um write that women who worked in Tech but then just random women who didn't like were and he really fixated on this one woman who was a programmer at tour which is an anonymous web browser and he like made Seven Twitter accounts at one point to like tell her she was a and so finally she was like 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 she got his IP address tracked down where he worked and posted his name in his workplace and with the line that was like this classic she wrote should have used T and and I was like you know if you went up to a bunch of women or if you went up to a bunch of women at bars and just screamed like in their face like eventually either them or their boyfriend or

68:13someone 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 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 that's going to get seven Twitter accounts just call some woman a no no one feels bad that that that he got doed the poor guy got doxed well he was just expressing himself and exercising his first amendment rights no I think um 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 I really believe that it's we're maybe 10 years away from being able to read each other's thoughts oh God God could you imagine yeah it's going to be very strange but all the romance and things is going to be gone

69:00because 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 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 email 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 RO ah you're into me you why you why you playing there's going to be no playing cool there's going to be no you know that all you know you you're when you go to apply for a job you're like well you don't like me so I'll just get out of

69:46here like you you think I'm a loser so you're not going to hire me there's not going to be any Illusions so all a lot of romance is going to be gone a lot of lot of the fun of things is not knowing you know we don't like that though no I'm I'm an artist I I I I like I like the not knowing I like the mystery sometimes so it's fun as long as it works out obviously it's worked out for you you're a young woman you're already 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 like it's worked out for you all this romance but for some people this just not happening for them and they're like God damn it I just think it would be better if there was no secrets but 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

70:37either 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 in sort of this form speaking with our mouths making noises with our faces interpretating it interpreting it in our own minds and and listening to other people say things and sort of establishing what they're meaning is that it is that is this is going to be forever this this going to be how you no no way just like a monkey climbed off of a tree and and you know and eventually became a person 200 plus thousand years later or whatever the 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

71:34of not knowing and you know it's amazing and it all works out well it's it's temporary this is a little when we look back in time too the amount of time that we've spent in this state currently the internet state has been so brief but so Transcendent absolutely it 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 like really good articles I was reading about um the refugee stuff was by this Iraqi journalist that I always plug because he's so brilliant Abdul 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

72:24like once you get from Turkey to Greece once you do that little 4-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 the ENT 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 I more than 20 years cuz 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 van in the middle of the night and they got out and there was a guy behind them that had a a stick like a they 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

73:19their footsteps Jesus yeah yeah and they they did it through the middle of the night and um they eventually got to some sort of Border Town whether was in Arizona or whatever and uh they made their way and infiltrated into cities and eventually found jobs and barely survived barely fed themselves and man you just imagine that life and then there's all these people we've got to tighten up our borders what the man like that that tighten up that the Border I mean Trump's like idiot idea of that wall that's not even like physically possible to build cuz they 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 this is where we are right now yeah I don't think he necessarily is a

74:08presidential candidate I don't buy it you think you think it's to make the other ones look moderate and reasonable no I don't think it's some 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 these important issues in a way that only he can because he's independently wealthy and he's not Bound to You know the um the 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 and we're going to keep out the Mexicans yeah and meanwhile everybody wants to kill him and you his face is falling off his bones it's just it's so bizarre it's so Coen brothers esque that like he really does seem like satire I mean he's like the ultimate American satire president candidate did you ever

74:59interview him like back before this no no I've never met him nothing I uh I once uh confronted him at a press conference in Dubai it's like one of my my finest moments I I no I was really scared because Dubai is 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 thou 60,000 a year I think and so he guys 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

75:46his ass kissed and I wave my hand around and I I say you Mr Trump you've been saying how you know this all stands for luxury and your construction guys are getting $200 a month are you satisfied with that and his mouth shriveled I've never seen it like shriveled in this little tiny Rose butt of hate and I got so yelled at but um he yelled at you he didn't yell at me that the the underling yelled at me who's the under the underling from the mradi pr firm that was there what did they say that's not an appropriate question how is that not appropriate I know and then the next question was Mr Trump you stand for luxury and Dubai stands for luxury is that why you and Dubai like each other tough tough stuff uh so did he answer you or no he didn't he didn't answer me he just like mouth Shel and like ivanka's mouth went all small like everyone's mouth went really small with

76:33anger ianka this is a long time ago right there is that the drawing you made yeah yeah that's the drawing I made he was so angry at me CU because I took like a little ctitious 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 what yeah yeah he he like the ass kissing he said that he built the greatest architect 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 used they used for projects and how these people like wound up going out of business and they you know they couldn't they couldn't battle him financially and like it's like this wave of people that hate him in that whole construction

77:22business I don't know who's right and who's wrong WR about those disputes but the idea that you could take that model which is already problematic in America and then take it ramp it up in a giant way in Dubai that piece that Vice did on those people that are um in Dubai that are trapped where they take their passports I think 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 C just openly weeping they were showing this like hole in the ground where they have to and they were showing how poor the water is and they had promised them uh 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

78:15would 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 yeah it's totally like that and then the other really 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 scary it's so scary that it's again

78:56what 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 you don't care about these people that are risking their lives to make these giant buildings that are 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 the summer and these gigantic buildings they make make they make these crazy structures over there cuz they they almost have an unlimited budget it's almost like they have like 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 gigantic building where you could fly inside you know and then you have planes that you could fly indoors like I shouldn't even have said that cuz

79:49someone in Dubai is probably listening and ding a light bulb went off in their head yes and indoor flight course and it's what's so strange is like I was prepared to like hate Dubai how Dubai look 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 um building alberge did you go in it um I went on to the ground floor and I bought a $20 cup of coffee $20 yeah $20 oh my God how' it taste like a cup of iced coffee it was that was just sort of a velin 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

80:40I was like Vera is also beautiful and look at how that was made and it was this weird thing because you you think about how Splendor is always made and how like the most beautiful things in the world you know 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 it's 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 the 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 the the the disparity of wealth is just unimaginable one of the kind of interesting things

81:34that uh they did in Abu Dhabi which actually I I kind of I 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 Emira you get uh free healthcare housing get a stipend uh emirati women are like super super educated most most of the phds are emirati women so like that's awesome but the thing is the flip side of that is like citizens are only 10% of the population and it's like 90 90% of the people the people who do everything like the engineers the shop the shop workers the maids the um you know construction dudes like the people who do every manner of work are not citizens and have no rights to anything wow that's a trip we're you know we're looking on the outside at that that place I mean I I've

82:26I'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 these people have done a great job in constructing these things but the guy the guys that I I was with um some of them uh went to uh they went to Dubai because we had the night off and I I was tired I decided to stay home they went to Dubai we're going to go to bar and you know have a just places you can go to drink like you have to drink in certain CU it's illegal to have alcohol but there's some sort of weird loophole and they said it was all Russian prostitutes they said it's just like these predatory coyote women that had like crossed over and just like looking to to just uh pocket cash from banging all these rich dudes I was like whoa like my friend went to a bar and he

83:19said I'm not bullshitting this bar might have been 80% hookers and I go that he goes I've never seen anything like it in my life yeah women go over there to like to make to make some serious money um I bet you can I bet you can 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 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 cuz 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 they just but they were openly showing affection on the beach and they were thrown in jail I'm like whoa how about this this another one this is the craziest one there was a

84:06British man who um he had eaten 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 uh he tested positive for heroin and they put him in a 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 is an executive at brillstein gray which is a very uh prominent Los Angeles uh Entertainment Group and uh she had um what is that that people take it's a it's a natural thing oh um you take it when you want to go to bed valan no no no no no it wasn't that it was melatonin yeah yeah she had melatonin melatonin yes you can't have melatonin they arrested her locked her up took her

85:11passport put her in a jail cell for 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 like 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 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 R some of the here what 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

86:06Keith Brown Robert Dalton on trial for alleged possession of 0.3 G of cannabis 0.03 unnamed 20-year-old on trough alleged all cannabis mostly I had this one dude I met there he he's at moradi and he was really his name is Ahmed Mansour and he I mean like he's so brave right because you have so many privileges like as an emirat especially he came from like a good family and everything you know you can really just Coast if you're Emira and you're you know from a well-off family and he made a web Forum that let people um discuss uh 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 for him and they 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 9 months and they infected him with scabies when he

87:00was in jail and then when they let him out infected him purposely yeah that's what he said he said that they like gave him a blanket that had scabies on it and then when he was out he had this series of uh unfortunate events that happened uh over $100,000 accidentally disappeared from his bank account and no one knows how it got how it got missing and then like on two occasions uh guys just sort of jumped out beat the 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 thatuh yeah could you imagine if you like pissed off some royal family and they just hired some dude they pay him and your job is to with this guy forever like that's it that's your job or you know if you're like some sort of a rich

87:50billionaire character you could hire a bunch of people you could have a whole team you know and their job is just to with people there's this one guy I don't like him let's go get him that wouldn't be hard like if you're like some Trump guy and you've got billions of dollars and someone like Molly crab apple makes you feel like at some Dubai press event and like this this is what we're going to do I'm going to hire a team and I'm going to with Molly Krab Apple's life I mean that's a reality like someone who's that wealthy they could do something like that that's scary yeah they definit they definitely they definitely could yeah they could hire some just every time you go out to your car your tires are flat like what the at a certain point though you'd probably put up like a little cam on your car and you know yeah or you'd hire some people too yeah exactly it' be like War of the

88:37proxies 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 uh Istanbul is like one of my favorite cities ever it's just so gorgeous and it's so exciting and you walk down like is Jessi which is um sort of the main street in a neighborhood called bolu and it's like there's like lights and all these couples hand inand and everyone's playing music there's like kids selling flower crowns it's just like it feels like the sort of Boulevard that every other Boulevard in the world was trying to be it's so magic and I mean I could I could just walk around Istanbul like any time of day or night and I would never not like have my heartbeat fast for that City wow so that's your favorite spot that's my favorite spot do you think you could ever be an expat move to Istanbul and

89:30they're arresting a lot they they have a bad record unfortunately for arresting journalists there one of the uh one of my yeah one of my colleagues advice uh this um brilliant uh Kurdish dude um Muhammad rasul he is like currently in jail right now for doing journalism in turkey and vice is like you 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 he's not Isis this is so embarrassing and aain and yeah he's he's rotting in a jail cell there how long's he been there oh God it's over I think it's going to be going on three months now and they I don't think they've even really charged him yet they've just like leaked statements to the Press whoa but um that that aside I you know the the political repression aside I

90:24really do find assemble to be a marvelous City no place is perfect they charge him so what is his actual what what is their grievance with him what is the actual issue he was going with these two British Vice journalists and they were covering uh clashes between the uh 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 they've been actually like deporting and with a lot of journalists who have been doing this but I think I think it's like they the two British guys got out because you know they're British whereas if you're an Iraqi kurd like no who's gonna who's gonna 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 yeah that's that's a horrible story too that's one of the

91:13weirdest aspects of the United States rep 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 allies moderate and like meanwhile they like they sentenced a poet to death for poetry in Saudi recently how bad was it poetry though was it like death's jam slam comedy you know those things why why are you poetry shaming why are youe why you why do you have to free verse shame right now you know yeah freee freee call it no is isn't free verse when you make poetry that doesn't like Rhyme or have any meter or anything hiu no Hau 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 cuz people take themselves so seriously and I was with a buddy of mine and we were high as you should ever be

92:02while 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 H 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 for Preposterous just like you know that really just pretentious save the world type poetry I do done by 20-year-old white guys with dreadlocks yeah yeah I I I do I do I mean I 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 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 trying to express himself

92:59and 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 will clap and cheer and he's so he's sat down on this loose leaf binder and wrote all this stuff out and he's just feels like he's really got and one day he'll look back at that and go what a 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 publishes it if you like if you die then someone will publish the collected papers of Joe Rogan and this will be your most famous thing like a bit in there about Wonder Woman like trying to explain Wonder

93:45Woman it's so bad but I was you know 21 years old or whatever the I was at the time it's like it's just that's what you're you when you suck and when you're young I mean it takes a while to get good at suck 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 cuz 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 I sucked from the start and it was really

94:30hard 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 the ones I think all my friends that that are really good they'll tell you they're they were terrible I have um two young daughters and one of the cool things is watching their art like they're really into art especially my seven-year-old is really into it she draws every day oh that's so cool and um I watch her early stuff like I save all her stuff and I or at least representations like you know like some of it and watching like the 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 abil you know her ability to draw things and draw representations and and figure out like perspective and sizes and we were going

95:21through this book yesterday she has this um how to draw uh figures book and it was the weirdest thing because um it was these princesses and she's trying to draw princesses and um I'm 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 there's like balls and sticks and you try to like make the framework and then you add the clothes to the framework and yeah totally but the women's legs were like more than twice as long long as they should have been oh when you're trying to do those like fashiony cartoon drawings everyone is like so stretched out and what's weird is that you get so used to seeing that that when you see like cartoon people done at their real proportions they all look like weird and stubby yeah well that's got to be weird for because it doesn't seem that way for

96:12men 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 is 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 it's 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 going to stand up and I'll stand up next to

96:56the wall and what we're going to do is we're going to mark on the wall where the top of my head is and where my waist is oh that's so cool 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 you notice like they're pretty much the same or at least close but the women in these cartoon things you're supposed to draw were no 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 I go well think some people think that it looks better to make people that aren't real that that are like longer than reality but like why do we accept that because like if there was a woman and she had like like a normal proportion body but enormous tits just freakish tits like everybody would look at that and go what the are you

97:43making these kids draw you know but for for whatever reason like having the and and by the way some people have freakish tits like there there's there's people that for whatever like there's that that poor dude who can't go to the airport without getting Frisk cuz he has this giant hog he has like some 20-in dick like they got the world's largest dick and like they they always check his pants they think he's carrying drugs or something well there's women out there that are just naturally born with a normous 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's just doesn't exist yeah 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's like

98:31this figure is nine heads and a fashion figure which what they called it which is you know the figure for a fashion illustration was like so many more heads than like any other figure and so it was like that crazy elongated thing and exactly what you're saying with like the crazy daddy longlegs 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

99:22or 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 B basically like on death's door like yeah she's hot like no that's weird it's it's weird to see someone all cracked out and skinny like that being the most you know the most obvious representation of like a a beautiful person in nice clothes I mean I think it's you know fashion models aren't 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 fash 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 um I think that I don't know I think the idea is

100:17that you can just hang any clothing on them and it doesn't affect the hang of the clothing so it's like almost like they're as close to being like a Cod 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 a 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 cuz to be healthy like 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

101:07healthy it's a total genetic thing so much so this is the weirdest aspect of it so much so that if a woman has fake boobs like you know they're fake you know there's no disconnect at all you're absolutely aware that she has gone through surgery to cut her skin stuff bags of water in there that make them stick out you're like oh but they stick out more like men will be more attracted sexually and the sexual attraction is supposed to at least represent wanting to breed with that person like you 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 like we if aliens came down from another or even historians cuz I guarantee you like we were talking about like Bradley Manning and Chelsea Manning there's going to come a time in whatever not Soo distant future the next hundred

102:04years they're just going to be able to turn you into a woman you know you're going to say like I don't want to be a woman anymore I'd like to be a man they'll make you a man for a year and you're like H I like being Molly better you go back to being Molly instead of Mike Molly and Mike the show right and you I think they're going to be able to do that with breasts they're going to be able to do that with everything they're going to be able to manip genetics to the point where um have you ever seen um or listened to there's a Radio Lab uh episode on crisper I haven't no what's that crisper is a 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've figured out how to utilize that that sort of method to manipulate eventually

102:52the human DNA to the point where they're going to be able to change your traits they're going to be CH 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 be to do some freaky and this is just one invention that is I think 2012 it was invented and by the time 2032 rolls around who the knows what they're going to have I think we are really close to be able to 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 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

103:43to be alive but the thing is though like with 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 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 exam that's a really good example cuz 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

104:27that makes you look good or professional or authorative or all of these other things even though like they're just like stuff that you're wearing I wonder if that's a true the the same with hermit crabs oh 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 with animals doing things like how about animals that can actually man have you you ever paid attention to octopus at all um octopi you know I'm like I'm pretty shamefully ignorant you might have to educate me here I had well apparently cuttlefish are just as bizarre if not more but my friend Remy Warren is a um he's a host of a show called apex predator where they um they monitor they they sort of um try to emulate the different uh

105:19attributes that certain Predators have and how they survive and see like if there's like some human version of that and and um they they they like check out like how uh it's called Heron is that those tall Birds her herons herons how do you say that Heron herons um like how they walk with their crazy long legs and then stab at the water looking for like frogs and 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 and it's really fascinating but when he started talking about octopus he's like dude you have never they are aliens like look at these things like look how they can change their colors like this is real

106:09they can change their colors and immediately adapt to their environment to the point where they're indistinguishable from the background this is amazing wow oh they're insane they're insane they can 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 not but in the texture they do all kinds of they can change themselves to look more like Predators or like dangerous things it's 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 um there's some new project that they're doing right now now um where they're trying to map the ocean floor and they're without a doubt they're going to discover some freaky fish life marine life down there that we've never uh encountered before but just these creatures we're just

107:08starting to learn what these things are doing like look at that it's like like a flower or something blossoming like on fast motion oh my God what is octopus that's an octopus but it looks like a looks like a tiny like a w or something yeah it looks like a video game character you're running yeah but watch this it it it can merge with these um 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's little tiny I mean it's it curls its tentacles up into little tiny legs and runs on two legs it's incredible they're amazing wow and look it's like like like a teardrop shape that's so cool yeah it's it's amazing I would always draw octopuses just because they're like fun to draw with all the tentacles and stuff but my God yeah I had no idea I had no idea like and the fact they can do it

108:00like that they just change like what a weird world and they communicate with each other somehow through that and we don't know how we know they're really 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 like really dwelling on lately when it comes to marine life and dolphins and orcas and I'm 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 jump for fish or starve it's your choice and um I've I've thought about it like our ideas about what is intelligent like we don't

108:51think that something's intelligent unless it does exactly what we do when we when we think of intelligence we say okay well Molly send me an email I send her an email back I know she's intelligent she's communicating through an email the dolphin doesn't know how to make an email he's an idiot you know like but they don't need email like 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 you know years and years being apart from each other even though to us they all look the 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 as like what represents

109:36intelligence all that stuff's stupid cuz 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 you're under the water like if you be like I'm going to hoard all the fish in my thing and then like kill them and then I'll like sell you the fish for kelp that's a great idea yeah they'd be like what you know doph I'm going to write you a letter from my laptop like there's no internet down here stupid there's no like you're a crap dolphin yeah your your your laptop's not going to work underwater it's GNA so all of our ideas about what 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 cuz we we the only intelligence that can not just manipulate our our environment that's local but our environment globally like

110:25we can we we can essentially change the weather we can spray we can Cloud seed and make it rain and play 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 it actually causes it to rain and they've been doing it like once a week for years they have rainstorm forms that they manufacture we're freaks we're Freaks and our intelligence is fundamentally built on dissatisfaction which I mean we have to have because we're also like weak and not apex predators necessarily and we're getting weaker I think too I think that's part of it you know if you went back to the early humans and you compared like our tendons and bone structure and are they are they really humans are they are they stronger than

111:16us I always thought they were like shorter and stuff theander dolls were but there're not really humans right they're like a type of and then how they uh 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 5 foot 5 foot2 and but like 220 lbs just gorilla like with super thick bones and thick heads and and they 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 it's uh and then they're always finding these 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

112:06they found some large tooth that uh turned out to be not Cate 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 I'm sure you've heard of like that The Hobbit people they found the island of fores like that was 14,000 years ago that's not that long ago I mean that's not before the beginning of recorded history is it well or it's a little bit before a little it depends on Whose version of the beginning of recorded history is there's a a bot a bunch of people that believe um there's this guy that I have had on my podcast a few times now his name is Randall Carlson and he's an expert in um cataclysmic events and uh especially asteroidal impacts and and uh him and this guy Graham Hancock have uh worked together and Graham Hancock wrote this book called Fingerprints of the Gods it

112:59was a really controversial book in the 90s and then now he has a new one called magicians of the Gods which is it sort of shows how much of his early work that was like 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 built these like how who are how are they here and archaeologists sort of tried to put like vague dates on them and the idea behind it was that Civilization has not evolved and it's not progressed on a a straight plane but rather there 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 EX Extinction and then they've risen back up again so like science has like found

113:47quite a few of them but one of the big ones they keep pointing out is that there's uh somewhere around 12,000 years ago there was a series of uh impacts on the earth and this has been proven by science now because over the last few years they've discovered this stuff called I think it's called Triton but it's essentially called nuclear glass and it exists around where they um do nuclear tests and it also at 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 yeah 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 their theory is that that wasn't exactly the beginning but that

114:42was 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 just bombarded with rocks from the SK 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 would 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

115:28that 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 15 books on or something like that it's that thin sits right in my backpack I mean the what that's crazy it's crazy it's like this magicians thing but also you could potentially like drop a server that had the only copy of something and have that only copy disappear be vanish 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 they were checkpoints and um it had a lot of and he um had a his iTunes account was

116:23something that like it just you the country that it was tied to you couldn't buy good eBooks on so I remember I was getting him I got him all these pirated copies of like 1984 and like James Baldwin and catch22 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 yeah there's a lot of limits of it our entire Society is dependent upon the grid if the grid goes down almost none of this stuff is effective but by the same token he could smuggle all these books past checkpoints and no one knew he had them right yeah no I mean there's there's definitely if you're in a war torn area like that it's it's a great it's just to me it it freaks me out when I think of if

117:16something like that happened like there was um a 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 super volcano erupted um 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 I know if there was like the zombie apocalypse I I'd be like food or something yeah and if we broke in a Home Depot like there's a Home Depot that's like a few miles from here how many people could get a hammer from there there's a lot of people out here you there's not enough there's not enough hammers yeah I mean we we wouldn't even I mean we'd hope the shelters that we have hold up but then

118:04where are we going to get food like what unless we get into the ocean and go fishing like what are you 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 that 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 they're all these useless plants like what wouldn't it be amazing if like cities were filled with plants that grow fruit and all the 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

118:50of it but we're so rich they we like NOP pine trees you know I want Oak I want a beautiful Oak here like we don't you know we don't support the the the the trees and the the the plants around us that we can actually eat I remember one time I was in um Spain and I was like 17 I was broke and I was with my my my friend and we saw like wow these orange trees steal a lot of oranges and we like climb up the tree and we like steal all the oranges and then we like peel them and then they're like bitter and dry and we're like these are decorative oranges they tricked us they tricked us with they're they 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

119:39last, plus years bad person for picking fruit from a tree how strange it's this just and it's also probably those were what oranges really tasted like before we started with them I refuse to believe that that's a cruel world well they 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 I want to believe that like prehistoric oranges were a tasty treat and these were not I don't know I I I ate an apple the other day and me and my friends were laughing while we're eating these apples we're like these things have definitely been with like they were big big giant and they were so juicy we're like what kind of genetically modified are we eating right now cuz these are just not normal apples giant juicy delicious apples probably in like the middle of Apple off

120:28seon 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 I not 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 um seven and I lived in farak away 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 those are the crab apples and I believe that um I believe I stole some of them and I believe they're very sour is as I remember them yeah they're very sour I ate one of those when I was a little kid well more than once I'm sure when I was a little kid growing up in Massachusetts I remember biting into those things

121:16they're like yeah so much hope yeah they're good for throwing at people though that's what used them for when kids nice nice Chuck them at each other small and hard like yeah well they you know little tiny hands get a good grip on the crab apple and really whip it nice nice um what else you got going on these days besides I know you're promoting this book and uh 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 yeah I'm getting to go to like Gore in Mumbai and 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 blasphemy but I think I I'm going to like lie on a beach

122:05in 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 um I've been studying um literary Arabic for the last year and I got pretty good at translating stuff written stuff really yeah yeah I'm really pretty of it I do this every morning uh so I'm translating a like long dialogue by the Syrian poet that's called sex poetry and the Revolution and it is badass so 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 cuz the thing with so strange about doing a memoir is it really is like sectioning off a chapter you know

122:57like SE 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 it 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 so awesome I feel so lucky yeah but it's if there's no space I mean can't absorb them yeah it's like that that Louis k thing about like never being bored you know I I mean I have that in the best of

123:49all possible ways I have like so many cool opportunities but if you never have like any any time to like be bored or be down you're just like bouncing from thing to thing and yeah I think what is the Louis CK thing about never being bored I'm not aware of it uh it was like a monologue that he had uh 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 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 probably just doing a bunch of Journalism stuff I work a lot with a really cool um syrian-american nonprofit that I'm going to plug here they're called a Karam foundation and um they how do you spell that k a r a m and they do something really cool cuz a lot of attention right

124:37now it's on the Syrian refugees that make it to Europe but they actually work with u people who are just placed inside Syria and then also people like on the border and for the last two years uh 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 uh dentists that fix all the kids' teeth they uh bring U eye doctors that get all the kids glasses that need it but then they also bring like U writers and philosophers and um Architects and like you know people who teach classes with the kids and I always I always do murals there I've done murals in two schools now and so next spring I'll probably be back with them uh painting lots of rebellious cats all over a School in Southeast turkey wow you live such a aad Brad and fascinating life I mean you've had so many really intense experiences and and

125:29and all over the place like both all the place professionally and creatively and then geographically there's so much going on like you you you're 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 I love so many things in it yeah but I think I think you're instincts are correct though you just it seems to me like you're just you've got so much going on all the time constantly in so many different Arenas yeah it's it's a lot but I don't know it must be 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 I mean you've done like so many things and I mean it's just cuz like I feel and perhaps you feel this way like the world is just so big

126:18and 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 require so much attention and focus it's almost like you can't can't enjoy too many things cuz you 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 it's weird because like my non-down time seems very recreational you know yeah yeah it's like it's super fun like I I don't want to like complain like wow I get to travel all over the world and meet Fascinating People and confront bastards boohoo for me and yet you know

127:07you know it at a certain at a certain point you know um this is a a big compliment but um uh and I don't mean this in 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 that's a massive compliment like I think that man is like a god amongst men he's a bad for sure but that image is just so much like I think of it as like uh the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved yeah with like all the horrible like monster like toad people oh it's so good I've got that on framed on my wall in my office a print from uh Stan's illustration of the Kentucky dery so cool have you ever had have you ever like had him on the show or do you want to go to Kent 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

127:57love to have him on just to talk to him about Hunter and like and what is like for 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 the whole story up cuz he thought that foreman was going to kill Muhammad Ali and he didn't want to see it so put a Richard Nixon mask on and swam around the pool yeah well he to this day or well not to this day obviously he's dead but considered that one of his biggest journalistic failures and he went into a giant slump after he did that because like he realized that his decadence and his Indulgence had actually gotten in the way of an amazing moment in history God just to realize like the like Beautiful Beast that like you rode to being who you were like was

128:49turning around and like becoming like sort of that was 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 Hunter it's 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 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 I can't even

129:43get 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 self 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 it's he's more of a slave to that than he is even the the work itself and the work itself is

130:42almost like something that he's eventually going to get to I'll get to that eventually I'll get that but it's just coca we we read off a list when Lance Armstrong was here yesterday of uh a typical day in the life of Hunter Thompson as far as oh God yeah it just starts with like massive what does it start with like ether or Coke what does it start with starts with uh it's like shivas Regal cocaine Dunhill cigarettes cocaine shivas Regal C like we read it all off it's Preposterous like you should be dead and then it it says at midnight Hunter S Thompson is ready to write and this is like after getting up at 3 oh God you spend your entire time like pouring like liquids into your head and then things but for a while it worked man he wrote some insane 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

131:34and then this magnificent thing like happened until it like horrifically ground down I got to be boring and I got to 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 uh 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 and just really really good stuff thank you so much thank you thank you and uh you can follow Molly on Twitter Molly crab apple on Twitter same thing on Instagram uh website mollyca.com go byy the book thank you so much Joe this is awesome thank Molly bye everybody that was so cool thank you that was great that was