Name: Joe Rogan Experience #738 - Molly Crabapple
Uploaded: 2015-12-17T00:44:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #738 - Molly Crabapple' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-12-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #738 - Molly Crabapple' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-12-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #738 - Molly Crabapple

- Dude, I'm so happy to be here.
- Dude, I'm so happy you're here.
I've been reading your book and it's fucking excellent.
You're a really good writer.
- Thank you so much.
I killed myself doing that book.
That is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
- How long did it take?
- About two years.
- Wow.
- And when I got the deal, I had this delusional idea
that it would be like writing 25,000 word essays.
And this was so wrong.
This was so, so, so much harder
than anything I'd ever done.
- Why was it so much harder than writing essays?
- Well, when you write essays,
you are doing like these kind of short things.
It's limited.
You have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
No characters, no dialogue, you know, simple narrative.
Whereas this man, like keeping a plot together
over 300 pages, and then that plot is your life,
which by definition has no plot.
- Right, oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, was it hard to recall all the moments in your life
and do them justice?
- So hard.
And also for this book, 'cause I work as a journalist,
I fact-checked it as best I could.
But nothing is more personally painful than fact-checking
the ends of various friendships and relationships
and realizing what a jerk you were at the time.
- Yeah, I can only imagine.
Yeah, I don't wanna 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 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, all judgments aside,
let's just, give me your version of what happened,
and I'll tell you what I think happened.
And you're like, oh my God,
I don't know what the fuck the truth is anymore.
- Yeah, I have this one thing where there is this one girl,
she recalled something, and she recalled it one way,
and then when she realized that it was actually two days later
than she thought it was,
which made it look like there was an article she had written
which had contradicted it,
she kept insisting it hadn't happened.
And I was like, man, here's your Twitter,
here's my Twitter, here's the Twitter of the two other people
who are at brunch, here's the email confirming it.
It happened on this day.
And finally she was like, I just give up.
I give up, but I don't remember it.
- Yeah, it's very strange when people are confronted
by that fact, too.
- Yeah, I had a friend that I'm no longer friends with
that insisted something,
and then when my other friend jumped in and said,
that's not what happened at all,
it was a psychedelic drug talk.
I'm trying to beat around the bush
like I'm on regular radio or something.
But he was insisting that he got me
on this psychedelic drug the first time,
and my other friend was like, no, that was mine.
It was my drugs, I was there.
Like, what are you talking about, man?
And then he just sort of stopped talking to us.
Just like ended the conversation.
- Kind of sulked off,
and then comes back later with a new subject.
- Well, people love to, you know,
they love somehow or another to get glory from the past.
And like, somehow or another,
it's one of those things that never works,
sort of like name dropping.
Like name dropping has never worked ever.
No one has ever said,
I'm really good friends with Leonardo DiCaprio.
And someone's gone, whoa!
- Let me give you a movie now!
- You're fucking amazing!
No, immediately people go,
oh, this guy's a name dropper.
You know, or he just happens to say it,
it 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 can smell it in a sentence, you know?
It's just like, it comes off in the air.
So this book is, it's fucking super intimate.
Like you, you like, just cut the skin away
and open your chest up
and just the whole world could see your soul.
You know, you peeled it out.
- I tried my best.
I mean, I just wanted to do something honest, you know?
- Well, it's definitely that, I guess.
I mean, I don't know.
I wasn't there, obviously.
Two years is a long time to write something.
Like did you, how many times did you have to go back over it?
- 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 of words.
And then I had to like cut away
at the horrible, ugly block of marble I had made.
And then finally something cool emerged.
- Yeah, they all say that.
All the great writers say that.
Like my friend, Steve Rinell always uses this quote.
You have to kill your babies.
- Yeah, exactly.
- That's what they say, right?
That's like the common writer's conversation.
Kill your babies.
- But then you can keep your babies in another document
and you can devote like one essay per baby
where they make sense.
- That's similar to standup comedy in a lot of ways.
Like one of the hardest things about comedy
is recognizing like 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 punchlines.
Like, but I love this part.
I love saying it.
This is like my favorite part,
but that favorite part doesn't necessarily
enhance the whole thing.
So you have to kind of chip it away
and then the whole thing will be better without it.
But it's hard to do, right?
- Oh God.
I mean, the best piece I ever,
of advice I ever got when I started writing
was my friend Lori, who's a really cool journalist,
said to me, "The worst articles I've ever written
are the ones where I try to say everything about a subject."
- That makes sense.
Yeah.
Well, your style is really interesting too,
because one of the things that's really cool
is 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 like 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.
- How many days were you doing this every day?
Or like how will you find the time?
'Cause I know you're so busy doing journalism,
you're busy doing art.
Like how'd you find the time to do this?
- I was a really horrible person to be around
for quite a few months.
I have the coolest boyfriend in the world.
Thank you, Fred, for putting up with me during this.
- Powerful Fred.
- Fred is awesome.
I had a few things.
First, I had friends with a house in the country
and they let me stay there for a number of weeks
and they didn't have internet signal in a lot of it.
So I didn't bring any of my fun books that I like to read.
So I was just stuck.
It was just me and this fucking thing
and we're gonna beat each other.
I rented a lot of hotel rooms.
I had an editor who put a beat down on me
and was like, you can't keep going off to other countries.
You actually have to write this book
that I contracted you for.
At one point he was like, are you fleeing to Warzone
so you don't have to look at your book contract?
Is that how it's going?
I just, I think towards the end,
I didn't do anything but work on it.
I just became this horrible troll beast
that didn't wash her hair
and would growl at anyone who came near
living entirely on coffee and just made it.
That was how I did it.
That is a good way to do it, right?
If you can get somewhere without the internet.
Yeah.
I used to write a lot on airplanes.
I used to look forward to airplane flights.
I'd be like, okay, I'm stuck in this seat.
There's no internet access.
And then what the fuck do the airlines do?
They put internet on the goddamn planes.
I know, and then you're like, oh, I need to see what someone says about me on
Twitter.
Oh, no, someone was wrong on Twitter.
I must remedy this.
Yeah, I'm going to go on Amazon and buy a new pair of sneakers, you know?
Exactly.
It's so easy to just get distracted nowadays.
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 stuck.
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 cabin.
It's so romantic, right?
To be off in a cabin in the woods by yourself working on your great work.
Except whenever I'm actually there, I want to, like, dig holes in my arms
because I'm like, where is the Wi-Fi signal?
There is a guy that I tweeted about today.
There was an article that I tweeted where this guy decided he wanted to live by
himself
in the, I think it was in Northwest Territories.
He was going to do it for a solid year.
But he made it six months.
And then he had a satellite phone.
He's like, come get me.
I can't fucking do this anymore.
But he was just going crazy, like, by himself for six months.
And it's a fascinating story.
This is the guy right here.
Norwegian adventurer spent six months alone in the Northwest Territory
wilderness.
And it's really cool because the guy is very good at describing, 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, you know, people romanticize this idea of being this hermit that's
off in
the woods.
You know, the monk that's out meditating in the forest by himself.
But that shit is like, it's like holding your breath.
It's kind of cool for a little while.
But you don't 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 strong guys, in my opinion.
Like, one of them I consider really a genius.
But he had been in solitary for 14 years, man.
14 years.
And, um...
Who is this?
His name is Andre Jacobs.
He was part of this group of whistleblowers called the Dallas Six that, um...
Basically, they were giving information about guards doing, um...
Beating people up and being racist in this prison in PA.
And they were all in solitary.
And the guards retaliated.
And then when one of the other guys, Carrington, sued the DA for not protecting
him from the
guards, the DA turned around and charged them all with rioting.
And I got really into the case because I was like, this seems semantically
interesting.
How do you riot if you're in solitary?
I consider rioting a group activity.
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.
That's hilarious.
They called it rioting.
So, I did an investigative piece.
Eventually, I got, like, video and stuff.
And it was bullshit.
And I really hope their trial goes well in February.
But as part of it, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to two of the guys.
I mean, you suffer real mental trauma from doing that.
And, like, no one, even, like, the smartest, toughest, best person who has,
like, a really
loving mom that is really devoted to giving them, you know, all the books and
all the support,
even that person will suffer, like, real trauma from that.
Yeah, I've always wondered, like, when Bradley Manning was arrested and then
later became
Chelsea Manning and spent, how many years was he, she, you know, whenever the
transition