Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez
Uploaded: 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
We're out.
So what's up, man?
How are you?
Thanks for having me, Joe.
I'm very excited to be here.
It's always interesting to meet somebody that you only know from their tweets.
You know, I only know you from your tweets, which I found very interesting, and
then I
started reading your book or listening to your book where another person reads
it, and
I've seen some interviews of you, so I thought it'd be fun.
To have you in there.
Cool.
Have a little chit-chat.
Great.
Thanks for having me, Joe.
My pleasure.
So you just got back from Ukraine?
I know.
I'm totally throwing a wrench in the agenda.
No, there's no agenda.
We're supposed to talk about cancellation or whatever, but yeah, for a bunch of
reasons,
I just up and went to Poland and Ukraine to see what was going on there.
So this was just your own idea to just take a trip?
Not totally.
One of the gigs I have, I have a gig at a DC think tank, and one of my
colleagues who's
done like real in-the-field correspondent work before, proposed a trip, and a
bunch of people
expressed interest, and I'm basically the only one who didn't wimp out and went
with
them.
So it was just you and this one guy?
And we had, you know, drivers and fixers and stuff, because I don't speak any
Slavic
languages, and you basically need it to sort of navigate that world.
And also, in a wartime economy, regular transport doesn't work, so you need to
get around somehow.
And so we did have, we tended to have a driver, usually.
So what is that conversation like?
So when someone says, hey, let's go to Ukraine, like, what was the goal?
Was it just to see it firsthand?
Was it to get, is there any information that you can get when you're on the
ground that would
sort of clarify the situation for you?
Yeah.
I mean, we can get into this, but I think the view that you see of Ukraine from
the United
States, I think, is so blinded by both American domestic political, you know,
priorities and
the whole, the whole kaleidoscope that is the Twitter experience.
I thought you have to go there to see the real thing.
And, you know, it's history with a capital H in the sort of, you know, Francis
Fukuyama
a sense of, you know, this is, this is a real, this is a real invasion, the
likes of which
we haven't seen in Europe in whatever, 70 plus years.
And it's just something that I've lived in Europe, I have an EU passport, so I
feel a
little bit European in that regard.
So I think I engage with the story a little bit differently than maybe than
Americans do.
And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself.
So when you went there, was this idea related at all to business, to your...
Oh, no, no, no.
So this was just for your own edification?
Well, I did, I am doing a story.
So there's a publication that I occasionally pitch stories to called Tablets, a
Jewish magazine.
The Israelis are doing a bunch of stuff on the Polish border to get Jews out.
And so there's a whole Jewish angle to the story.
And then also just, so I have a sub stack, which I should probably plug, I
guess, the pull
request.
What is it?
The pull request.
Pull?
P-O-L-E?
Yeah, P-U-L.
It's like a nerdy term.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, P-U-L.
A pull request is like when a coder is actually coding a piece of software.
It's like they request that the main code base pull from them.
And so it's like saying, hey, read my shit and like integrate it with your shit.
Oh, okay.
And so in some sense, it's like, it started as a, similar to my book, like, so
I've worked
in tech for a long time.
I've had a whole career in the advertising industry.
I was an early member of Facebook's ads team, which is what the book is about,
which we'll
probably get to.
And the thought was I wanted to give a perspective on tech from the insider
perspective rather
than the outsider perspective.
And from there, it's gone into religion, culture, and then now even geopolitics
as my interests
kind of meander through the world.
So, so you went there partly to write about it for your sub stack.
But I mean, the only reason you can justify going, right?
Because again, and this is, it's funny, this is one of the things I almost, if
it hadn't
been for this and also this other consideration, I probably would have pushed
on to Kyiv, actually.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, but your producer, like, I emailed him from Ukraine.
He's like, dude, like, I'm here.
Like, it's hard to get out.
Like, can we do this during Zoom?
And he's like, no, absolutely not.
And I briefly considered, I wasn't really going to do it, but I briefly
considered just
going to Kyiv and then pulling the power move of like, I'm in Kyiv.
I cannot leave.
We have to do it.
Well, we would have to do it another time.
Yeah, exactly, but I didn't want to run the risk of that and I wanted to do the
show.
And so I started hauling ass back.
It would be interesting to have you on Zoom with bombs going off in the
background, though.
It would suck if you died on Zoom while we're in the middle of a podcast.
It would suck, but I have to say from the cold-hearted, you know, marketing
perspective,
it'd be great for engagement.
Not for you.
Not for me.
It's like you're going to capitalize on that.
Yeah.
So how many days were you over there for?
I was there about a week and a half.
So I spent a lot of time on the Polish border.
So getting to the serious side of the story, which I know we're joking, sort of
giles humor,
but it's a very serious story.
There's a whole refugee situation going on.
So about 10 million Ukrainians the UN has declared are displaced.
And that means either internally they've moved around Ukraine or externally
they've left.
And so a quarter of the country is basically a refugee at this point.
Wow.
I know.
So how many people is that?
It's like day 25 or day 26.
What is the entire population?
It's about 40 million.
So we're talking about 10 million people that are...
Holy shit.
Over 3 million of which have left Ukraine at the last count, which is a big
number.
Wow.
And most of them are crossing the border with Poland, which is the country to
the west of
it, or Romania or Slovakia, some of the other countries, mostly Poland.
And so the trip actually started.
I flew into Warsaw.
And my first experience of like, this is not normal little Disneyland Europe,
you go to
the Warsaw train station, which tends to be the terminus for a lot of the
refugees that
come across the border.
And, you know, it's basically a refugee camp.
The upper floor of the train station is taken over by families.
And, you know, every family has like a blanket, maybe half the size of this
table.
And one of the interesting things about the Ukrainian refugee situation is that
it's almost
all like, I'm talking like 80, 90% women and children.
The Ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of, I think, 18 to
60 to leave.
And also many Ukrainian males are just volunteering.
They don't want to leave.
They want to fight for their country.
And so whether you're in, you know, the Warsaw train station or whether you're
standing, as
I was standing many times at the actual border, watching them walk across, it's
literally,
you know, a mother in her 20s and 30s with like two or three kids in tow, maybe
a cat in
a carrier with like a little rolly bag, and that's it.
Just picture an unending stream of that walking across the border.
They're walking because usually they don't, well, some of them probably did
walk to the
border, the most desperate ones.
They usually don't walk.
They take some conveyance, either a train or bus, but getting those through the
border
is basically impossible.
So they literally abandon however they got there and just walk across.
How many people are there that are like you, that are observing and just
witnessing?
There's a good number of journalists, particularly in the western part of
Ukraine, which is relatively
safe.
You know, it wasn't like I was there with bullets flying around me or anything
like that.
You know, I was joking with friends like, you know, I don't know that this is
any more
dangerous than walking across San Francisco's Tenderloin.
To be honest in the scheme of things.
So it wasn't like that dangerous.
So, but there's a lot of journalists in the western part.
There are some journalists who are in the dangerous parts.
Isn't Sean Penn there?
I think he, yeah.
I think he's been there this entire time.
Yeah.
But there's like teams from NPR, New York Times, CNN, who are doing like real
war reporting,
which I was not doing.
I know a journalist was killed recently.
There was more than one.
Yeah.
There was, yeah, there was a guy who, I think producer who worked for Fox News.
And then there was a former New York Times journalist who was killed.
And they were on the front line in Kiev, which is indeed very dangerous.
And so when you were there, you didn't have a specific goal other than to just
kind of get a visual and experience it and sort of see for yourself.
What was surprising?
So to be clear, I did have a goal as a side thread to me, I'm converting to
Judaism.
So there's a Jewish side to my life and what the Israelis are doing.
So Ukraine has something like over 300,000 Jews.
And then, you know, the plight of what the Jews are going on there, I think was
one specific intent.
But you're right that broadly, I didn't have a specific intent.
What surprised me the most?
Two things, I would say.
One is, again, the scale of it.
Like it's literally millions of people of leaving.
And I think, again, coming from the U.S., Europe has reacted to this crisis in
a unified, just like all-consuming way that I think obviously you don't see
here because we're not next door to it.
But if you go to this – again, let me paint you a picture.
And I've got a bunch of photos that I'll be posting on my sub stack this week
and next week.
You go to a border's checkpoint.
The Polish police will only let you go so far unless you're actually crossing,
which I did eventually.
You've got this constant stream of, again, mothers with early bags and kids.
And then you've got basically a refugee camp there of everything from Polish
Boy Scouts to Jose Andres, that Spanish chef who has all these food programs.
He has a major presence there.
Every stop, there was basically his world food kitchens or whatever it's called,
serving up food.
And then those who are ill get tended to.
And then they have buses going to another larger refugee camp.
And then there they try to find rides for them and sort of sort it out.
And what's fascinating is that, you know, the Polish state has pretty good
state capacities, a lot of firefighters, police, soldiers.
Like, there's a lot of – but the actual care for refugees, like the food, the
chocolate bar the kid gets, is mostly – or almost exclusively – volunteers
and NGOs.
And there isn't that much top-down organization.
Like, you go there and it's like – it's like every little NGO or every little
tribe that has some refugees that are coming out.
Like, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses are there.
So you walk across and there's somebody holding a sign that says JW.org.
They're not proselytizing.
I interviewed them.
They're not proselytizing.
They're just there for other Jehovah's Witnesses that are coming across and
hoping to help them.
Once again, you've got some Jewish charities that are helping the Jews that are
coming across.
Everyone – I talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have
a foundation and they're helping – because a lot of the – you know, people
are infirmed.
And those are the ones hardest hit by war because you've got a, you know, a 24-hour
train ride.
You've got someone who's ill and needs medical care.
How do they get out?
That can often be difficult.
So I think that's one big surprising thing.
And then the other surprising thing was in Ukraine itself.
Like, I've been in conflict zones before, like the West Bank, North Ireland,
the Indian-P