CALIGULA MMXX: The 40th Anniversary

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Reliving Penthouse Classic Cinema

It was the boldest move in cinema history: presenting the most celebrated and respected actors of the day in a film that could only be described as pornographic. Bob Guccione, founder of this magazine, set his sights on decimating the boundaries between art, sex, and cinema and succeeded to such a potent degree that even 40 years later, no theatrical event has come close to matching the scope and scandal of Caligula.

Writer Gore Vidal was one of the most distinguished literary minds of his time; his daring 1964 novel Julian famously compared the decadence of modern society to fourth-century Rome, making him a logical choice for producer Franco Rossellini to bring on board to script Caligula. Vidal, rooted in the reputable culture surrounding a best-selling author, described his script as “an analysis of how power corrupts,” and envisioned Caligula as a historically accurate, visually traditional, and wholly serious film documenting the actions of the most debauched and sadistic ruler in history.

Guccione, while complimenting Vidal as an “intellectual colossus” and “formidable historian,” wanted to push the boundaries of cinema, and after agreeing to join the production as financier and producer, hired critically acclaimed auteur of avant-garde cinema Tinto Brass as director. Aligned with Guccione, Brass imagined the film as a bombastic satire on the corrupting influence of power, retooling the script to emphasize the complicity of the senate and bringing on board Academy Award-winning set designer Danilo Donati to construct grand, expansive sets suggesting the excess and flamboyance of the Roman Empire.

At various points, Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson were rumored to be in the running for the titular role. But the dubious honor of portraying one of the most nefarious men in history ultimately went to Malcolm McDowell, a young English actor riding high in Hollywood from his landmark role as the amoral lead in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Teresa Ann Savoy, who had starred in Tinto Brass’s previous film, Salon Kitty, portrayed Caligula’s sister. The cast also included John Steiner as the cunning and ambitious advisor Longinus, and three British acting icons: Helen Mirren as Caligula’s promiscuous wife, Caesonia; Sir John Gielgud as Nerva, the wise and impertinent imperial counselor; and Peter O’Toole as syphilitic Emperor Tiberius.

From sets to costuming, no expense was spared in the extravagant production, but the differences between Caligula and a traditional epic film were immediately noticeable. In addition to the presence of a curated collection of exotic Penthouse Pets on-screen, McDowell remembered: “I’d look over and there would be two dwarves and an amputee dancing around some girls splayed out on a giant dildo.” When the very respectable Sir Gielgud arrived on set, O’Toole prodded, “Hello, Johnny! What’s a knight of the realm doing in a porno film?”

Helen Mirren recalled naked bodies everywhere, expressing that the experience of making Caligula “was like showing up for a nudist camp every day. You felt embarrassed if you had your clothes on in that movie.” She cheekily added, “It was like being sent down to Dante’s Inferno.”

With production underway, the budget quickly ballooned to twice that of Star Wars, and Guccione later complained that enough footage was shot to “make the original version of Ben-Hur about 50 times over.” Filming was rife with conflict: Vidal and Brass butted heads constantly, leading to the director banning Vidal from the set; and a spiteful Donati got a jab in by building the major set piece of Caligula’s pleasure ship at such an enormous scale that it filled the entire production studio, ensuring that the massive creation was nearly unfilmable and limiting the furious director considerably.

The mighty triumvirate of Vidal, Brass, and Guccione was a marketing dream come true: three titans in their respective fields, united for a creation unlike anything seen before on the cultural landscape–certainly unique in film history. Caligula, however, would end with two of the three creators forcibly distancing themselves from the finished film.

As soon as filming was completed, Brass was unceremoniously fired, and it was revealed that Guccione had been shooting hard-core pornographic scenes on the multimillion-dollar sets at night with the intention of overseeing completion of the movie himself. The end result was a curiously edited version of the film — heavy on spectacle, light on continuity. Brass was understandably devastated, and sued to have his name removed as director of a film so far afield from his vision.

Vidal was likewise infuriated by the developments surrounding Caligula, and also sued to have his credit removed. “My name is being used to give prestige to a pornographic film which could be denounced for obscenity,” he complained, adding that “‘Caligula’ is Latin for ‘turkey.’”

In the end, the film’s script was credited as being “adapted from a screenplay by Gore Vidal,” and Brass’s credit was changed to “principal photography by.” Only Guccione stood by the finished product, placing his name above the title as “Bob Guccione presents” and crediting himself with “additional scenes by.” Guccione oversaw a series of editors on the movie, with no one accepting final responsibility; in the end, the film bore the simple credit of “edited by the production.”

The finished version of Caligula premiered in the U.S. on February 15, 1980. Critics immediately picked up on the troubled production. Roger Ebert called it “worthless,” yet admitted that as he exited the theater, hundreds of people were lined up, waiting to see the film. Even with the $7.50 ticket price (double the cost of a regular movie ticket), attendance was so high and screenings so frequent that the film reels quickly needed to be replaced from wear. “History is filled with their nameless gravestones,” Guccione said of the critics, “while the names of the men and women they spent their lives attacking live on.”

Malcolm McDowell, for his part, stands behind his performance in the film, commenting, “I’m proud of the work I did in Caligula. There’s no question about that.” But he also says the Guccione-edited release was “an absolutely outrageous betrayal and quite unprecedented.”

Caligula has anchored one of the most enduring speculative discussions in cinematic history: What could the film have been if completed by other hands? Now, a monumental development will provide an answer to this long-standing question about a different final shape for this controversial creation. For the film’s 40th anniversary, Penthouse has opened the vaults containing the original camera negatives — long believed to have been lost — and a new edit conforming to Gore Vidal’s script is being produced by author and filmmaker Thomas Negovan and director E. Elias Merhige.

This new 40th anniversary version, titled Caligula MMXX, is Penthouse’s first feature-film production since the original Caligula premiered, and will be unveiled in a limited theatrical release in the fall of 2020.

“The story of Penthouse’s Caligula is legendary,” says Negovan. “It occupies a unique place in movie history as being widely considered both the worst film in history and also very possibly the finest film never completed. Of course the opportunity to help bring into the world what we’ve all imagined this film could be was a priceless honor. The immaculate footage we’ve uncovered confirms McDowell’s statement of pride: scene after scene reveals an incredibly dedicated and gripping performance.

“With 96 hours of footage and so many disparate opinions clashing and boiling over during the actual filming process,” Negovan continues, “this isn’t just a film restoration project, it’s an archeological dig. It’s been thrilling beyond words to see so many scenes that had long been thought lost forever — hours and hours of absolutely magical performances by Helen Mirren, Sir John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, and John Steiner, all unseen since they were performed on set over four decades ago. This resurrection of a lost masterpiece will be the most important film event of the year.”

It’s a thrilling turn of events, this new life for a boundary-breaking, fiercely debated film. Stay tuned for more information on its autumn debut.

Helen Mirren behind the scenes.
The Penthouse Caligula Coin
Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and John Gielgud on break.
Director Tinto Brass (left) with Bob Guccione on set.
Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren
Malcolm McDowell speaks with Bob Guccione on set.
Malcolm McDowell as Caligula

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Drugs During Wartime and After

Posted on by Team Penthouse

You Can’t Unring a Bell

From the ancient Greeks’ use of poppy juice to the Napoleonic armies bringing hashish back to Europe from Egypt, soldiers have been getting fucked up for a long, long time.

Sometimes the drugs (and drinks) were meant to boost ferocity — the colonial British navy and their “Dutch courage” of rum, say, or the Nazis’ pioneering use of amphetamines. A drugs-and-combat overlap can also be found in the British powers slipping dashes of cocaine into their Tommies’ rum portions during World War I, and the deployment of child soldiers high on drugs in Sierra Leone at the turn of our own century.

Self-medicating has played its own understandable role, with soldiers in war and wounded or traumatized veterans back home turning to drugs or alcohol when their prescriptions, treatment, and surgeries have proved lacking. The stress and physical damage of war have always pushed soldiers and ex-soldiers to find ways of soothing mind and body.

On the other end of the spectrum from substances meant to calm and relieve pain are stimulants intended to raise vigilance and ward off fatigue. Think of the American pilots during the Cold War monitoring the skies wired on “pep pills,” otherwise known as speed. Or the legions of Americans who have fought the twenty-first-century terror wars swearing by legal and illegal energy drinks — caffeine-laced Rip It, Boom Boom, and Wild Tiger, a Middle Eastern product, among the legit favorites.

Patrolling Iraqi highways for 40 hours at a time, hopped up on liquid nicotine, may not be as flashy as stories of whiskey ragers in trenches or heroin binges in the jungle, but the short-term effects were still interesting. And now there’s concern about the long term: A recent study suggests a link between excessive energy-drink use in combat zones and post-traumatic stress.

As for marijuana — aka weed, dope, reefer, pot, Mary Jane, ganja, and the list goes on — it’s woven into firsthand accounts of the Vietnam War. On the pop-culture front, the drug makes an especially vivid appearance in Oliver Stone’s acclaimed 1986 feature film Platoon.

When Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor, newly arrived in-country, enters the haze-filled “underworld” tent and parties with experienced soldiers, he (and we, the viewers) accepts weed-smoking as the norm for American soldiers in ’Nam. And the scene is not without justification. According to author Lukasz Kamienski’s Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War, nearly 70 percent of American servicemembers reported using marijuana during their time in Vietnam (with a striking 34 percent reporting heroin use).

Fifty years after this Southeast Asia conflict, active-duty soldiers and servicemembers aren’t similarly blazing up — at least not in such mass numbers. Even if the collective urge to partake was the same, advancements in drug screenings, and the military’s steady use of those screenings, would make it impossible.

But it’s a different story when it comes to post-service veterans, particularly younger ones.

According to the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), one in five of its members reported using medical marijuana. And over 80 percent of IAVA members support the legalization of cannabis for healthcare purposes, suggesting a big generational shift in the acceptance of marijuana being used as treatment.

Much like American society itself, the Department of Veterans Affairs finds itself in a tricky position with regard to marijuana. According to Pacific Standard magazine, “VA doctors are allowed to discuss cannabis use with veterans and tailor VA-prescribed medications to their cannabis use, but they cannot recommend or direct a veteran’s use of cannabis.”

They can’t even do this in states where cannabis is legal, because the VA has to follow federal law. So until Uncle Sam changes, the VA can’t join this widespread evolution in attitudes toward marijuana use.

One of the soldiers from my old scout platoon knows all about this bind. Thirty-two-year-old Philippe Dumè of Trenton, New Jersey, put it this way in an email:

“As a combat veteran on medicinal marijuana, it’s still somewhat of an obstacle where and if I want to use my medical marijuana card…. In the VA, there’s no such program [for this], because cannabis is still considered a Schedule I drug. In my opinion, I think that cannabis should be considered as an alternative medicine in the VA. It really does help out with the side effects.”

Dumè proved himself worthy in combat — trust me, I was there — as an able and devoted infantryman. (Longtime readers may know him better as Specialist Haitian Sensation from the Kaboom days.) Now he’s proving himself worthy as a veterans’ advocate. Dumè is part of an advocacy group called Black Cannabis that “seeks to provide opportunity for those who have been unrepresented in the legal cannabis industry” — specifically minorities, women, LGBTQ, and felons.

Until I talked with Dumè about Black Cannabis, I hadn’t really given much thought to how quickly legal marijuana has become corporatized, or how access to it predictably benefits the already privileged. So I’m proud of him and how he’s using his combat bona fides here, because, as his organization says, “For generations the War on Drugs has devastated communities of color.”

That’s unequivocally true. And for these communities to get a piece of the weed-business pie seems not only right, but fundamental to American values and progress. This is the land of opportunity, after all.

Dumè is part of a new generation of military veterans, one that’s not hiding away their war demons from the rest of society. It’s a generation that’s not ashamed to say, “Hey, this stuff helps and I don’t care who knows it.” And America’s recognizing that.

One California-based cannabis company, Flower Co., offers a steep discount for military veterans, which cracks me up. It’s smart business and allows the company to wave the flag and support the troops. America’s gonna America, one way or another, I guess.

Now it’s high time (sorry, couldn’t help myself) for the federal government to catch up with its citizens and the private sector. Until it does, vets like Dumè and his colleagues in Black Cannabis will have to man the gap.

Dopeworld

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Drug Lands

Driven to get a deeper understanding of the global narcotics scene, Niko Vorobyov hit 15 countries on five continents, talking to everyone from a Japanese yakuza hit man to cartel leaders in Mexico and Columbia. A former drug dealer himself, Vorobyov chronicles his journeys in an epic new book, Dopeworld: Adventures in Drug Lands.

It’s immersive journalism at its best, giving readers a ride-along as the Russian-born, London-raised writer meets cocaine farmers, heroin cooks, crack-era kingpins, drug-war crusaders, Iranian opium smokers, Moroccan hash makers, and Brazilian gangsters. Vorobyov has an insider’s grasp of the international drug game, and made use of contacts from his dealing days to gain entry to secretive, sometimes dangerous criminal worlds.

The book’s sweep includes a history of humanity’s relationship with psychoactive substances, and a look at issues like prohibition regimes, law-enforcement approaches, legalization, and the nexus between organized crime and drug distribution.

A drug user when he was young, Vorobyov began selling weed, coke, and MDMA in London, eventually moving kilos of drugs in an enterprise that included two assistants and a network of suppliers. At one point he got stabbed, and nearly bled to death. Busted in 2013, he was sent to jail and served two and a half years.

Prison fucked with his head. Vorobyov paced inside his cell, working out, down to the minute, how long he’d be locked up. Desperate for distraction, he binged at the prison library, which is where he discovered Mr. Nice, a memoir by drug smuggler Howard Marks, and Ioan Grillo’s El Narco, which exposed the way drug gangs threaten the very stability of Mexico.

Inspired by these and other accounts of the drug underworld, Vorobyov, once he had his freedom back, started down the path that would, years later, result in Dopeworld.

Penthouse sat down with the witty, engaging author and asked him about his journeys, prison time, the drug war, legalization, and what it’s like to hang with hit men.

What made you want to write this book?

I wanted to shine a light on a dark world that’s all around us. To do that, I wrote something that mixes genres. It’s a social-political-historical book, but it’s also got a layer of gonzo reporting, like Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I met El Chapo’s family, smoked hash with the police in Iran, and took part in an ayahuasca ritual in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon. It’s also kind of a fucked-up travel book, the sort of thing that, when it’s on sale at airport stores, could scare the shit out of people flying to Mexico.

Why would someone with your drug-dealing background want legalization?

It depends on what you mean by legalize. Do I think heroin should be sold in supermarkets? No. I mean, obviously, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about being locked away for dealing, but I’ve tried to educate myself about the drug problem and see other points of view. I’ve been to countries like the Philippines and Iran where they hang drug dealers or just shoot them on the spot. And guess what? There are still drugs in the Philippines and Iran, but the people who actually do have a drug problem are too scared to come forward and do anything about it because they’re afraid of getting killed, arrested, or shunned.

I think prohibition, globally and historically, has failed, and we need to start looking at other options. Legalization of at least some drugs — like ecstasy or shrooms — should be on the table.

How does the war on drugs vary, or not vary, around the world?

In every country there’s a lot of bad science and propaganda about what drugs actually do. And it’s always us against them — either minorities get targeted by the drug war, or the poor. Me and my team were out dining near a slum part of Manila one night and somebody got killed just outside our restaurant as we were eating. They drove up on a motorbike and popped two caps in a guy’s head.

That was the first time I’d seen someone’s brains where they’re not supposed to be. They have a president there, Rodrigo Duterte, who’s a psycho and just wants to kill all addicts and dealers. Since 2016, there’s been something like 26,000 killed, either from police murders or vigilante death squads. That’s basically a genocide. They say they’re going after drug kingpins, but really it’s just the poor getting fucked in the ass.

There’s a chapter about drugs in the Middle East. What did you learn?

I thought it would be interesting to see how these ultra-conservative, religious Middle Eastern societies deal with the problem of drugs. I’d heard a story about the Alaei brothers — two doctors in Iran — who were imprisoned for helping their addicted patients. I got in touch with one of them and found that in the nineties they set up a free clinic for drug users, sex workers, and HIV sufferers. Iran’s the first stop on the smack track from Afghanistan and it is traditional to smoke opium there, so there was a lot of heroin about. But the government doesn’t want to admit this happens. They want everyone to think their citizens are good, pious Muslims.

A clinic like the one the Alaei brothers opened meant not everyone was acting entirely in-line with scripture. In 2008, they were accused of “spying” and thrown into Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. But even there they continued their work, setting up health programs for prisoners, and even a weekly newspaper. Finally in 2010-2011, they were freed after an international outcry and now live in exile, teaching online classes to medical students in Syria.

What are your thoughts on Portugal’s decriminalization of drugs?

The police in Portugal don’t care if you’re carrying a gram in your pocket. It’s an administrative offense, like a parking ticket, so if you’re a kid smoking pot you won’t get a record that follows you the rest of your life. Not only that, but the Portuguese government poured money into free treatment and harm reduction, like handing out clean needles and teaching people how to take drugs safely. And it’s been extraordinarily effective. They’re not locking people up in the millions and they have the lowest overdose rate in Europe.

I wonder how far that would get in the States before everyone freaked out about “handouts.” I think what they’ve done in Portugal is great but they haven’t gone far enough. There’s still a hard core of addicts. Also, dealing — coke, weed, etc. — is still illegal. My good buddy Mario’s a Lisbon club promoter but I haven’t heard from him in a while — maybe cops got him.

What have you concluded about America’s opioid crisis?

You could argue that the crisis is an example of why we shouldn’t legalize anything. You’ve got Big Pharma — supposedly trusted doctors and drug companies — giving people highly addictive drugs, all above-board. And it’s caused a higher death toll than the Vietnam War did. The opioid crisis is complicated, but a lot of people I talked to were led to heroin by prescription drugs, and then either lost their prescription or couldn’t afford it. They don’t have that problem in Switzerland and other countries where you can go to a clinic and shoot up diamorphine for free. So it seems to me the problem is still black-market smack being taken illegally.

What’s the drug situation in Russia, where you were born?

Heroin used to be the big thing. In the nineties, my friends used to hustle and steal every day just to score a bag of dope from the gypsy village. Now everything’s gone online, on the dark web, but unlike in the West, it’s tricky to get drugs delivered straight to your house. Instead, once you send the money, you’ll get the GPS coordinates where to find the goods, along with some photos of where they are stashed. For instance, it’ll be under such-and-such a tree, when you take the first left in the park. It’s like a little quest or scavenger hunt.

What’s prison like in Britain?

My prison was called HMP Isis, so you could say I was in Isis before joining Isis became a thing. There’s some people out there who say prison is like a holiday camp, but I think they’ve just been booking the wrong holidays. I’ve gotta say there is violence, there are drugs, there are gangs, but mostly it’s just boring and depressing.

Every time you watch a movie or a TV show about prison they gotta make it more exciting than it actually is. I mean, I can’t speak for women’s prisons in America, but on shows like Orange is the New Black they have way too much freedom — like they can walk around and go get finger-banged in the chapel whenever they wanted.

It’s also a very stressful environment. There’s a sense that this is it — you’re fucked now. No one’s coming to get you. When you and me get stressed, we can go outside, take a walk, talk with our friends. But when you’re in prison, you’re stuck alone in a tiny cell till they let you out, and you start going crazy. When I was inside, there were so many cutbacks they didn’t have enough staff to run the show properly, so sometimes we’d be locked up 23.5 hours a day. Suicides were sky-high that year.

How’d your encounter with a yakuza hit man go?

The yakuza are the Japanese mafia, and between cutting off fingers and full-body tattoos, they also handle the drug business. In Japan, that usually means crystal meth. It’s hard for me to verify what he was saying and one thing I learned quickly in jail is people talk a lot of shit. But based on what I’d seen and read about the Japanese underworld over the years, there were enough details to make it sound plausible. He was a Spanish Filipino whose father abused him horribly, and he grew up with a lot of anger and was always getting in fights until finally he met some people who could exploit his anger.

Japan’s a very safe country but the stories he was telling me were like an ultraviolent Takashi Miike movie. He told me about one time his crew went robbing a group of immigrant dealers. No one heard from them again, and he still has nightmares about chopping up bodies. In another life — if you added an unhealthy obsession with his mom — this guy might have been a serial killer, but it shows how organized crime takes those same instincts and unleashes them for a profit.

When you began your journeys, were you already envisioning this book?

It started out as letters to the outside while I was in prison. People thought it was funny when I wrote to complain about having no rights and shit. For example, the prison admin wouldn’t accept that I changed my religion to “Jedi.” When I got out, I started doing a few articles and slowly got the idea to write a full-length book. So I started booking flights to faraway places and taking notes on what I saw. But I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing, not even a title, until I hooked up with the same agent as Howard Marks. That’s when the mess of my thoughts started coming together into something people could actually read, and the rest is history.

What did you learn about the American criminal justice system?

One of the kingpins I talked to was Freeway Ricky Ross. If you wanted some crack in the eighties in L.A., he was the man to call, and he ended up getting a life sentence — one that was later reduced. But listening to him talk, the ’hood was already a fucked-up place when he was growing up. Who’s more to blame — Ross seizing the best financial opportunity available to a teenager who couldn’t read in South Central, or the system that produces thousands like him?

It’s a vicious cycle. You’ve got successive generations of politicians, from the hard-right Reagan to the supposedly liberal Clinton, putting every other black man in prison — many for nonviolent crimes — and then we wonder why the inner city’s so fucked up. And of course African-Americans have already been done dirty by slavery and Jim Crow, and the prison-industrial complex is just a continuation of that.

Along with all your field reporting, did you do other kinds of research?

Ever since I was in prison I’ve been hitting the books hard — maybe too hard! I’ve probably read every major book on drugs or drug trafficking there is. The books that most inspired me are Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream, about the war on drugs all over the world, El Narco, a history of Mexican narco-trafficking, and McMafia, Misha Glenny’s book about global criminal syndicates.

I also had to sample a lot of wares — all in the name of science, of course.

Talk about how the drug war in the U.S. evolved.

The driving force behind marijuana being banned in the 1930s had to do with one man: Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of a federal narcotics bureau under Hoover and a few presidents afterward. This was just after Prohibition ended — the alcohol prohibition — so Anslinger and his bunch of narcs had nothing left to do. So rather than sit around with their dicks in their hands waiting to get redundant, they went out and created new jobs through a lot of fearmongering. They basically said smoking weed would make you kill your whole family. And there was racism — you had a lot of black jazz musicians who were smoking “reefer,” and you also had Mexicans who were smoking “marijuana” — that’s partly why in America they say marijuana instead of cannabis, because it sounds more Mexican.

Which also means, interestingly, there was a period in twenties America when smoking weed was legal, but you weren’t allowed to get a beer. Harry was a racist and he’d treat white people with an addiction different to black people. He died in the seventies but his spirit lived on. We saw the pattern again in the eighties with the so-called crack epidemic — this picture of “crackheads” showing up to steal things every night, “crack mothers” and their babies, etc.

These were real problems but the way it got spun by the media and Ronald Reagan led to militarized police and mass incarceration on a scale never seen before. In no other developed country do police shoot so many unarmed civilians, and no other country in the world locks up so many of its own citizens. The cure was worse than the disease.

What do you want people to come away with after reading your book?

Well, some people say quitting cigarettes is even harder than coming off heroin, yet we say using one of these is evil and scummy and the other’s just a bad habit. Why? Is it really because heroin makes you go out and steal things and get infected with AIDS, or is it just the way our society treats drug addicts? Why’s it okay to go out, get drunk, and have a fight on Saturday night, but if you wanna stay home and smoke a joint, the guy you got it from has to go to prison?

We’ve been so programmed for decades. I want readers to think about whether there can be another way. But in writing Dopeworld, I didn’t want to make it preachy, or all facts, facts, facts. I wanted it to be a little bit funny, a little shocking or out there. You don’t always wanna read a PhD thesis, you wanna be entertained! So hopefully I’ve done that.

What’s next for you?

Move to an island in the Bahamas, get some strippers and beer, and party like it’s 1969! No, what I’m hoping to do is to make Dopeworld a sort of franchise. So we’ve got a Dutch edition coming up with an exclusive chapter about the gangster world of Amsterdam — “Gangsterdam,” we’re calling it. I’m hoping to sell the rights to more countries and write exclusive chapters for these places. For example: Hamas versus the opioid addiction problem on the Gaza Strip, for Arab-Hebrew editions. I’ve also got another idea for a book I’ve been working on called How to Break Out of Jail, with different prison-break stories from around the world.

Screenshot from the dark web … not in English
Locally branded cocaine in Brazil
Cannabis legalization protests in Portugal
Homemade “shabu” (methamphetamine) in Manila, Philippines
A statue of Malverde, the unofficial patron saint of drug traffickers
A Russian gangster graveyard
A member of the Yakuza

Seth Ferranti is a former federal prisoner whose writings have been featured on VICE, Don Diva, and Gorilla Convict. He’s author of the crime series Street Legends, the comic series Crime Comix, and writer/producer of “White Boy” on Starz. … You can find Dopeworld at Amazon to expand your knowledge.

Digital Crack

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Try it. You’ll like it. …

There was a long chunk of time in the late 1800s where it was perfectly acceptable in polite society to do as much cocaine as you could handle. Thomas Edison, Ulysses S. Grant, Sigmund Freud, and William Halsted, the father of modern medicine, all sang the praises of cocaine in the heady early days after its discovery. Back then, mass-market brands sold wine fortified with cocaine, cocaine tea, even cocaine-laced margarine. Rich capitalists consumed it for pleasure, then handed it out to their employees to increase production.

Since nobody had any idea how cocaine toxicity works, and barely any conception of addiction other than as a spiritual failure, no one thought this could possibly be a bad thing until habitual users like Halsted and Freud started developing debilitating addictions, by which time cocaine abuse was epidemic within poor American communities. When Congress passed America’s first drug laws in 1914, cocaine had done enough damage that its effects are still being felt a century later.

Since the mid-1990s, we’ve been acting just like those naive Belle Epoque cokeheads with another enthralling miracle: the internet. We’ve been gorging on it, seeking out even more places–phones, cars, kitchen appliances–where we can cram it in, like the crazed addicts we are, refusing to believe that a tomorrow will ever come.

Only it’s becoming hard not to notice dawn starting to rise on our digital binge. Looking up from our phones, we’re realizing we’re more strung out than we’d like to admit. Internet addiction has made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of mental illness, and digital rehab clinics are popping up around the country. Like those Americans a hundred years ago, we are waking up to the fact that this problem isn’t going to simply fix itself, and are finally taking steps to address it.

But it’s worth noting that as bad as America’s first cocaine epidemic was, it doesn’t compare to how bad things got on the other end of the twentieth century, when crack unleashed in America’s cities an unstoppable tsunami of desperate addiction and militarized violence that no one was prepared for. So what’s going to happen when somebody eventually invents something that makes our current internet binge seem tame by comparison– something capable of causing major mental, Internet addiction is a real thing, and it’s only getting worse. The question now is, what are we going to do about it? DIGITAL CRACK emotional, financial, or even physical damage to millions of people at a time?

What’s going to happen when someone figures out how to make digital crack?

I spent the fall of 2017 completely engrossed in the dumbest videogame I’ve ever played. AdVenture Capitalist has only the barest minimum of story line and mechanics to qualify as a game. Graphically, there’s not much more than a bunch of rapidly moving progress bars, and there’s zero attempt at emotional connection. The point of the game is to earn virtual money by buying and operating virtual businesses, all of which you do by pressing a few buttons. Then you spend your loot via buttons that push themselves, and from there all you have to do is enjoy the feeling of watching your dollars multiply from mere billions and trillions to ridiculous, cosmological denominations such as novemdecillions and vigintillions.

It may seem unsophisticated and straightup stupid, but AdVenture Capitalist is incredibly well-designed for what it’s meant to do, which is to create and then satisfy a compulsion to make “money,” and then use your undivided attention to sell you ads. It’s not fun, but it’s still pleasurable: the joy of smoothly functioning routine, the warm fuzzy feeling of acquisition.

I was in desperate need of a habit like that. I was in the midst of a brutal divorce, alone and isolated and suddenly without my usual coping mechanisms, since I’d just made the decision to get sober after admitting that my relationships with booze, benzos, and coke weren’t as healthy as I’d insisted. AdCap, as it calls itself, wasn’t as good as Xanax, but it was better than nothing. I’d check in on my mounting digital wealth a few times an hour, in between Netflix binges and compulsive Tinderswiping.

Since the early days of the drug revolution, sci-fi writers and futurists have predicted that technology would one day give us the kind of altered states of consciousness that until now we’ve relied on chemicals to produce. In the sixties, Philip K. Dick imagined a future where tabletop “mood organs” would let us dial-in our desired emotional states with an accuracy that psychopharmaceuticals could only wish for. And as soon as virtual reality had taken its first baby steps, technoutopians began promising that computergenerated trips as potent as chemically generated ones were just around the corner.

I existed in a blue-lit cocoon of digital indulgence, still spending my days jabbing at my brain’s pleasure centers with whatever was within reach, still every bit the addict, just with a new habit.

Tech-based drugs were supposed to be some kind of miracle–a quintessentially American dream of altered consciousness without the risks or worldly impurity of physical substances. So far they’ve been a disappointment. Decades after we were promised virtual acid trips, the closest thing we have is the VR experience recently unveiled at the Tribeca Film Festival that attempts to give you the sensation of an ayahuasca trip by dropping you inside what looks like Tool album art reimagined as a 3-D animated screensaver. If you Google “digital drugs,” you’ll mostly see articles related to “binaural beats,” which are audio files that supposedly get you high purely through sound, yet are considerably less effective than spinning around fast three or four times.

The high that our smartphones, videogames, and constant internet connections give us isn’t, on its surface, very powerful, or very good. Picking up your smartphone isn’t like doing a line of coke, but it’s effective at what it does. The steady cycle of anticipation and reward, serotonin and dopamine, punctuated periodically by a surge of adrenaline whenever you beat a tricky level, win an auction, or read a tweet that you either strongly agree with or strongly disagree with, can numb you to pretty much anything happening beyond your phone’s bezel that you wish wasn’t happening, whether it’s a boring wait in line at the bank or the crushing feeling of existential failure. (The rise of both incel hikikomori shut-ins and videogame addiction seem to be two sides of the same coin.)

That buzz is only going to get stronger, if not necessarily better. It’s a law of human nature that once we find something that gets us high, sooner or later someone will figure out how to make it more powerful, more habit-forming, and almost invariably more toxic. It was dark ingenuity that drove us to discover how to distill spirits from wine and transform Sudafed into methamphetamine. It’s the reason why so many people are quitting weed these days because they can’t handle how high it gets them, and why you can’t buy any pills or powders now without worrying about them being laced with fentanyl. We will always push things as far as they will go, and then invent new ways to push them even farther.

There is no reason to assume that technology will be any different. At some point, probably in the near future, someone will invent some sort of killer app that will make the weak, jaggy buzz of our current state of digital addiction seem like allergy medicine compared to crystal meth.

When we think about digital addiction, we usually think about family members who can’t stay off Facebook or how hard it is to put Instagram down once you start scrolling. But we’re still in the Stone Age as far as what we can do with engineering digital highs and habits. There’s an entire field of study devoted to designing compulsive behavior so new and fastmoving that its definitive text, Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, published in 2014, is already starting to feel out-of-date. (Eyal’s new book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, is about how to resist the techniques he helped popularize.)

We’ve already discovered myriad ways to get people hooked on virtual things. Multiplayer videogames offer immersive hi-def escapism. Social media lets us mainline two of the strongest motivators of human behavior: social approval and envy. Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja give us little more than bright colors and mindless swiping and are almost disturbingly hard to put down, while Tinder and Grindr take bright colors and mindless swiping and add the very real chance of getting laid. These are all things that make digital life so miraculous, so captivating, even when it’s not being engineered to exploit our habitforming tendencies. It’s exciting and colorful entertainment, available at the push of a button. It’s the feeling that we can connect to anyone in the world from anywhere in the world. It’s an endless source of stimulation that we’re invited to indulge in as much as we can handle, and then some.

But we’re learning–and app designers are also learning–that those miraculous little feelings aren’t necessary. The trend in manufactured addiction right now is for minimalist, brutally efficient products that deliver the pleasure jolt from habitual behavior, but with a bare minimum of moving parts. TikTok has streamlined the entire concept of entertainment down to a firehose of context-free audiovisual stimulation straight to the neocortex that barely acknowledges concepts like character or narrative, but is terrifyingly easy to find yourself watching for the length of an episode of prestige television.

AdVenture Capitalist is only one of a growing field of “idle games” that not only barely hide their goal of dominating your attention in order to serve you ads, but weave jokes about it into their rudimentary gameplay. You don’t need anything sophisticated or particularly exciting from a technical standpoint–like VR or brainstimulating implants or anything else that could have sprung from a Y2K-era cyberpunk novel–when the mere promise of upgrading to a virtual pizza-delivery business is enough to keep you plugged in for hours at a time.

There are plenty of ways that our digital addiction could easily get a lot more harmful than just wasting our time and attention. If you look at the widespread decriminalization of gambling that’s sweeping the country, then look at tech’s current obsession with “micropayments” designed to reduce digital spending to an almost subconscious level, then spend an entire train ride next to someone compulsively slashing through Fruit Ninja, you might start to imagine what could happen if these things ever collided. (And with mobile sports-betting giving a multibillion-dollar boost to already booming revenues, the gambling industry’s sure to push even farther into digital.)

Tech will get more addictive even without doomsday-ish scenarios like hooking Candy Crush up to your bank account. The field of addictive design is built largely on research intended to help us battle our susceptibility to addiction, but as our understanding of addiction broadens, it only teaches us more ways of exploiting it. If we want to see what a truly addictive piece of technology looks like, we only have to let the market keep doing its thing.

No one needs to set out to invent a new kind of digital addiction capable of ruining the lives of millions in order for it to come into being. Putting something online often has unforeseeable, secondary effects, especially if it’s designed for sustained, intensive user engagement. Facebook wasn’t specifically designed to burn down Western democracy, but that doesn’t change how effective it’s been at doing just that. Digital crack could very well come in the form of something genuinely beneficial to most of the people who use it, but liferuiningly bad for a few.

Which is how a lot of the technology we use already works. Some people really do develop eating disorders from social media. Some people really do lose relationships, jobs, and money to their videogame habits. They’re still so few that they’re easy to ignore, but that’s certain to change.

Our phones and laptops and videogame consoles didn’t entwine themselves so deeply into our lives just because they’re convenient or fun. There’s something inherently addictive about interfacing with them, tapping at them and filling our senses with them and letting them take us out of our bodies and transport us into a blue-lit nowhere. Getting out of there and back into the real world can be hard sometimes. And it’s sure to get harder.

Miles Raymer is a writer living in New York.

Slime Sunday: A Social Artist

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The urge to make art boiled on the back burner in his brain, and he soon decided he needed a place to put everything he was making in his spare time. Protected by anonymity, he opened an Instagram account he dubbed @SlimeSunday and started posting.

It was a slow grow, but once it took off, things went viral, and Slime Sunday quickly became revered for his psychedelic digital art featuring warped women with faces that spiral into delectable shapes and colors. His digital work was punchy, warm, and filled with dreamlike patterns akin to an acid trip.

These days, however, Parisella has turned over a new stone: he’s gone analog. He hunts for vintage magazines at every bookstore and record shop in town, then sits down to literally cut and paste flowers, naked women, rockets, and fire; he then rearranges the spliced images into his own freaky, gorgeous collages that his 455K followers can’t get enough of.

“[My work] is a play on contrasting ideas,” the 28-year-old Parisella tells Penthouse. “Beautiful and grotesque are innate opposites, but when you combine them into one composition, the image somehow works. I get a lot of comments saying, ‘This is gross, but I like it.’ That statement itself shouldn’t make sense, but oddly it does.”

As frustrating as social media can be, Parisella recognizes that he has Instagram to thank for his success.

“The fact that a vast majority of people from the entire planet are all connected through one application makes it extremely easy for artists to get their ideas out quickly and effectively,” says Parisella. “Instead of a visual artist going to a curator, or a musician struggling to get a record producer to play their shit, they can just open ut up to the internet and there will most definitely be someone or an entire group of people out there who will like it.”

Cody Jinks, Music Lifer

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The Melody of One Life

On the “not” side of the ledger, you’re spared any cheese — in the lyrics or in the sound. Unlike some other contemporary country songs, in a Jinks tune there’s no crossover trendiness, shiny production, overprocessed vocals, or smuggled-in dance beats. There’s zero deference to pop music slickness of any kind. He doesn’t even sing about fun-loving, pickup-truck-powered lifestyles where it’s always summer and babes abound.

Nothing against such a lifestyle, which sounds better than a lot of ways to spend time on this planet. It’s just that Jinks’s inner song compass sends him in a different direction — down a grittier, darker, more real-world road than the paths you find in what’s been dubbed “bro country,” or in the more mainstream-focused country that’s gotten the big radio play over the years, and hews to what’s been called the “Nashville sound.”

In music made by this 39-year-old Fort Worth singer-guitarist, you get an anvil-steady baritone voice — the Texan’s pipes are strong, with a weathered quality, like he’s racked up a lot of mileage on those internal roads. The sound is stripped-down. He’s got an introspective mind-set that falls to brooding with or without the help of whiskey. And he sings lyrics about what tears us up the most inside (like losing love), the state of the world, the anchors of family and friends, and working your tail off at your chosen trade or profession.

In a Jinks song, there’s no sugarcoating. People might chase dreams, but that doesn’t mean they grab ahold of them — life is trickier than that. And some of those who do get to the top, especially the people running things, don’t always get there honestly, with integrity, by dint of their own grindstone efforts.

Jinks has great respect for regular people who stay at it, day in, day out, busting their humps, not complaining, like the woman in “Lifers” — also the name of his 2018 album, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard country chart — who for 20 years has been sticking with her dream of breaking through in Nashville.

“Here’s to the lifers/ The struggle-and-strifers/ Workin’ long after the day is done,” Jinks sings, having saluted a third-generation Waco farmer in an earlier verse, a guy with “mouths to feed and cattle to run.” As for his Nashville dreamer, who came to town “with a guitar and a song,” she’s been “playin’ them rooms but she ain’t got far,” yet there’s a “fire in her soul” that can’t be quenched, and she doesn’t listen to the naysayers.

“They don’t give up and they don’t give in/ When things don’t go their way,” sings this married father of two. And here he might be talking about his own first decade in the music business, which featured a ton of touring, a band breakup, a jump from one music genre to another, and zero help from record labels.

Tall and lean, with a brown bushy beard, tattooed arms, and a preference for T-shirts and jeans, Jinks spent his first six years as the howling, growling singer and rhythm guitarist in a thrash metal band called Unchecked Aggression. A fan of Pantera and Metallica, inspired by Dimebag Darrell and James Hetfield, Jinks gigged perpetually with his band, loading that van a thousand times, until early this century, on a hellish road trip to L.A., when the unit dissolved in the midst of copious drinking and constant squabbling.

Jinks, then 23, gave his frayed voice a rest, pondered his future, and stayed off stages for months. He had a year of junior college under his belt, a freight-dock loading job on his résumé, and not a lot to show for his Texas metal band tenure.

During this period of soul-searching, he picked up his acoustic guitar and noodled a country song. Then he noodled another. And another. It was a return to his musical origins, you could say. He grew up in a house soundtracked with country music. His dad taught him country songs on the guitar at 16. And Jinks’s memories included hearing a Merle Haggard song at age 3 — the earliest memory he has in his head — and his parents running out to see the Kentucky-born honky-tonk king Gary Stewart whenever he came through town.

“It was just one of those full-circle moments, man,” Jinks told the Lubbock Journal in 2015. After countless gigs playing songs like “Hell Razor” and “Smell of Blood,” two tracks on his former thrash band’s 2002 album, The Massacre Begins, he was strumming and singing songs in the genre his parents loved. “I went back to country music,” Jinks added, “because I always wanted to play it live.”

As for what kind of country music he plays — and if you follow this genre at all, you know subcategory slotting can be a loaded issue — people often put him in the “outlaw country” camp. But is that the right place?

“I don’t know any real outlaws,” Jinks told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I pay my taxes.”

The answer illustrates Jinks’s habit of wrestling with the questions that really matter in life, and giving short shrift to those that don’t. Plus, he might be a little hesitant to claim a mantle that belongs to some of his musical heroes, outlaw country icons like Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings.

That said, the lanky guitarist does wear a lot of black and dispenses with arrangement frills, just like some of his outlaw country predecessors. By his own admission, he left behind Nashville-style gloss after his first country album, which came out in 2008. Also, he’s from Texas, an outlaw country seedbed. And he’s roots enough to embrace the pedal-steel guitar as a worthy addition to a country song.

Moreover, he’s a musician who’s always done things his own way, rather than play the corporate game, kowtowing to a major label, sculpting an image with P.R. handling and social media amplification. What he’s done instead is build his career by writing brilliant songs (check out “I’m Not the Devil,” from a 2016 album of the same name; without assistance from big-label machinery, the record rose to No. 4 on the Billboard country chart) and touring.

“It’s kind of a DIY punk-rock mentality: Just get in the van and go,” he told the Fort Worth Weekly in 2012, shortly before his fourth country album, 30, came out. To Rolling Stone four years later, he said, “I’ve run my country band entirely like a metal band.” Early on, there was a big label interested in grooming him for the country mainstream, both in terms of his music and image. But Jinks said no to that plan, to preserve his independence.

“Too much hand-tying,” he remarked to Rolling Stone last year.

If Jinks doesn’t care to spend a lot of time talking about whether or not he’s a musical outlaw (“When people ask what kind of music we play, I just tell them ‘country,’” he said in 2016 — the ‘we’ meant to include his backing band, The Tone Deaf Hippies), he’s more than happy to discuss the musicians he loves.

“Merle Haggard is the greatest of all time,” he told Billboard in 2016, when the magazine premiered his cover of “The Way I Am,” a song written by Sonny Throckmorton but a hit for Haggard in 1980. Saying no other country artist had influenced him more than Merle Haggard, Jinks added, “The song is about working your ass off, being a man, taking care of business when others wouldn’t, and he’d rather be fishing. I completely relate to that.”

Jinks’s maverick approach has worked. He’s developed a fierce fan base nationwide, to go with those top-selling recent albums. “We go all over the United States, man, and people tell us, ‘Thank you,’” he told Rolling Stone when I’m Not the Devil came out. “I hear ‘Thank you’ more than I hear anything else. There’s no bullshit in our show. There’s no dancing, there’s no sparkle-bottom jeans. We get out there and we rip people’s faces off.”

After putting out his last album with Rounder Records, Jinks is back to his independent ways. Thanks to his bone-deep work ethic, he released not one but two albums on his own new music label, Early August Records, in October. Every song on both efforts displays striking emotional power and artistry, zero glitz or trend-chasing, and no attempts to be anything other than country music.

Meet Cannabis Pioneer Anuanette Gomez

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Pleasure Peaks CEO, Antuanette GomezLike most of us, cannabis enthusiast Antuanette Gomez, founder and CEO of Pleasure Peaks, first smoked weed in high school…just because. When she was nervously taking a hit of a joint, she never imagined that the psychoactive plant would someday become her bread and butter.

“I usually ended up being the one who got too stoned or would just eat everything in the fridge,” the 24-year-old Canadian recalls. “If you would have told me I’d have a successful career in cannabis back then, I’d say you were crazy.

Hailing from Toronto, the entrepreneur, who first trained as a holistic nutritionist, has dedicated herself to enhancing women’s sexual pleasure and health by using the world’s favorite wonder weed. Before launching Pleasure Peaks, Gomez cut her teeth as the executive director for the Canadian branch of Women Grow, an international organization focused on female leadership in the cannabis industry. While there, she mentored various cannabis startups seeking guidance on navigating the legal side of the industry.

Last year, Gomez was named a Forbes Under 30 Scholar, a program recognizing young entrepreneurs, and in 2017 Toronto Life magazine saluted her influence shaping the new pot landscape. These days, with her career soaring and life on the move, she is gearing up for the spring 2020 release of Pleasure Peaks products in the U.S. and Canadian markets.

At its inception in 2015, Pleasure Peaks used cannabis to help patients at a local chronic pain clinic dealing with endometriosis and cervical cancer. Four years later, Pleasure Peaks now offers cannabis education; workshops to help couples bring cannabis into the bedroom; live programming on their YouTube channel; and “Pampered Pussy Spa Days,” complete with hemp oil manicures, mimosas, and CBD detox teas.

The time seemed right to catch up with the dynamic Gomez, a pioneer in a rapidly expanding world where weed, women, and sexual health come together.

What inspired Pleasure Peaks?

I was a student of holistic nutrition, focused on how natural ingredients heal various ailments. When I began learning about cannabis, I realized Health Canada had already been using cannabis as a medical treatment for over 20 years. As a result of my work in a chronic pain clinic, I became increasingly curious about how plants, and cannabis in particular, could be combined with other modalities to treat chronic pain. I wanted to make people’s lives better through cannabis, because I saw from experience the positive impact it had on patients who were able to access that type of care.

The more I learned about chronic pain, the more I became aware of women who suffer from sexual pain. It also became evident that this experience is common for women, and that treatment resources are limited. Women have been suffering in silence for too long due to the stigma surrounding female sexual health and pleasure. I realized a huge gap existed in the market for medical products to help women manage sexual pain, and so it became my personal mission to fill that void.

It takes a certain type of courage to advocate for women’s sexual health within the context of the cannabis industry, but I’m determined to see how far I can go.

How do you see cannabis impacting the future of healthcare?

Cannabis has so many amazing medicinal properties and we’re just scratching the surface. I’m a cannabis geek and always interested in the latest technology and research. Sexual health is the least studied and funded area when it comes to the human body.

What’s the biggest misconception about the cannabis industry?

That cannabis is simply recreational. The general population still thinks that users just want to get high, but our job is to show them a different perspective on cannabis consumption. People are using cannabis in their sex lives to mitigate sexual anxieties, to push past sexual traumas, and increase trust and intimacy in relationships. We believe that cannabis can help us redefine the peaks of pleasure.

In America, there will always be certain states resisting this changed perspective. Why do you think Canada has been so supportive on a governmental level?

To put it simply, cannabis is part of Canadian culture, and we are super proud of that. In Canada, cannabis has been legal for medical use for over two decades. Canada has been at the forefront of cultivation and genetics, and we plan to keep it that way. With federal legalization in October 2018, we have seen Canada make major plays in international cannabis trading in Europe, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean. Cannabis is the biggest industry of the millennial generation and every country is trying to get a piece of the pie. Luckily for us, Canada is leading the way.

Why does cannabis make so much sense for the female body?

There are innumerable ways that cannabis can be used to improve sexual health and pleasure among women. Cannabis is a vasodilator for women just like Viagra is for men. Cannabis can be used topically to achieve similar effects, like increased blood flow to the genitals and greater sensitivity—these benefits are unique to women. Cannabis also helps to relax vaginal muscles to make it easier for women to achieve orgasm. It can help with sexual anxiety, especially when smoked or inhaled with a vape. Cannabis helps to lessen menstrual pain and general vaginal discomfort, and also manage pain from endometriosis. Perhaps most profound, cannabis can assist with the complex forms of pain inflicted upon survivors of rape. We have developed 16 different products to help ease these types of pain.

You can find Antuanette Gomez on Instagram at @antuanetteg, or check out Pleasure Peaks at pleasurepeaks.com.

Melissa Stetten: Amateur Expertise

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Melissa Stetten holding BasketballTime for Hoops

This past NBA off-season was bananas. Anthony Davis to the Lakers. Russell Westbrook to the Rockets. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, Brooklyn-bound.

Among half a dozen other big moves, Paul George said yes to the Clippers.

So did another superstar.

When Kawhi Leonard, the 2019 Finals MVP, opted for the Los Angeles team with zero championships, instead of the L.A. team with 16, I found myself checking the Twitter feed of Melissa Stetten, model, actress, podcast host, former VICE columnist, and five-nine shooting guard for an L.A. rec-league team called The Pistol Shrimps. Why? Because Stetten’s the most devoted Clippers fan I follow on social media.

She’s been tweeting about the Clippers for years. She has season tickets. She wears the gear. She talks all things Clippers on fan sites. In 2014, she even appeared onstage with then-Clippers Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan for a live read of the Space Jam script in an L.A. theater. Plus, there was this tweet in early July: “I don’t mean to sound dramatic but if Kawhi doesn’t sign with the Clippers I’ll kill myself.”

And when Leonard signed?

“OH MY GOD BEST DAY OF MY LIFE. [many, many emojis]”

With the eyes of the basketball world on the L.A. Clippers this season, it seemed fitting to kick off the new season by talking to a Clippers diehard. I asked Stetten about her fandom, the NBA landscape’s seismic shifts, and the all-women team she plays on, one featured in a 2016 documentary film produced by Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me. Aubrey Plaza, of Parks and Recreation fame, is a Pistol Shrimps teammate.

You grew up watching and playing basketball. Who’d you root for?

Being from Kalamazoo, which is equidistant from Detroit and Chicago, I was initially a Pistons fan. If we’re being honest, the real reason I got into basketball was MTV’s Rock N’ Jock series. Luke Perry rode a horse onto the court and I remember thinking, Basketball is so awesome. I also thought Dennis Rodman was the coolest person I’d ever seen. I was like eight years old when all this was happening, please don’t judge me. I eventually started following the Bulls in the late nineties. Michael Jordan, duh. 

How’d you become a Clippers superfan, à la Billy Crystal?

When I moved to L.A., I started dating a lifelong Clippers fan. He took me to my first NBA game—I couldn’t afford to go as a kid—and I was swept up. This was 2011, so Lob City was in full effect, Chris Paul throwing alley-oops to Blake Griffin. The fact that the team had never won a championship made me love them even more. It felt like I was going on this journey with them, decades in the making. Also, that whole thing with Blake tweeting a photo of a chair set against the front door of DeAndre Jordan’s Houston house to keep Mark Cuban from coming in and signing DJ to the Mavs in 2015 was one of the great moments in NBA history, and solidified my fandom forever.

Who are your favorite Clippers, past and present?

I defend every player on this team like they’re my children, but I do have a complicated relationship with Chris Paul. I cried when he hit that Game 7 buzzer-beater against the Spurs in the 2015 playoffs. I did the same when he and Blake got injured during the 2016 playoffs and Austin Rivers had to play with Frankenstein stitches above his cut eye. But these days, with Chris Paul gone, I’d say Patrick Beverley has won me over in his place. 

Blake, though, he was my number one. I screamed when I got an alert on my phone that he’d been traded to Detroit. I even talked about it in therapy. That’s how upset I was. He’s so dreamy and funny — basically the perfect man. He followed me on Twitter for a few years, but he doesn’t anymore, so he’s dead to me. JK! Blake, plz call me. 

The Kawhi signing aside, what’s a big Clippers fandom moment for you?

It had to be that live read of Space Jam with Blake and DeAndre. It was amazing. DJ did this Charles Barkley impression that had everyone dying. They were the nicest guys!

Both L.A. teams play at Staples Center—is it true the fan experience differs?

It’s shocking how different the vibe is. At Lakers games, I see lots of men wearing expensive shiny jackets and women wearing heels and child-size cut-off jerseys. I’m not hating on their outfit choices, but it’s a vibe I’m not really into. It seems like a lot of people are there for the social scene. Also, their time-outs and halftimes are boring. 

At Clippers games, we get fucking hot dogs blasted out of a cannon. Maybe the Lakers think they’re too cool to entertain, like the crowd should feel lucky to be in the vicinity of such greatness. Well, guess what, Lakers? You suck now, and I think you should look into dropping mini-parachutes with gift cards from the rafters to keep your fans interested. 

Can you provide a Pistol Shrimps capsule history?

Five years ago, my teammate Maria Blasucci wanted to start a team, so she emailed some of her lady friends and everyone was into the idea. We started practicing and then went to join a league, but there wasn’t one for women in the Hollywood area. So we sent out emails and Facebook posts asking if women wanted to play, and the response was overwhelming. The league has grown from six teams to almost 30. At first, people thought it was a joke. Like, “What are all these women in the entertainment industry doing? They know how to play basketball?” Yeah, bitch, not only do we know how to play, we play to win.  My team has won two championships. That 2016 documentary, The Pistol Shrimps, is streaming online somewhere. I think there’s a bootleg on YouTube, too.

Prediction time. Top four NBA teams in each conference?

East: 76ers, Bucks, Celtics, Heat.

West: Clippers, Rockets, Nuggets, and fuck the Lakers, I’m going Jazz.

Who’s in the conference championships? Who emerges?

East: 76ers and Bucks. I think the Bucks take it. They’ve got the Antetokounmpo brothers and the Lopez brothers. An indestructible force.

West: Clippers and Rockets. A team with Westbrook, Harden, and Capela seems insane, but the Clippers will win. They have to. Owner Steve Ballmer will literally explode if they don’t.

Who hoists the Larry O’Brien Trophy next June?

If the Clippers don’t win, I will climb Jerry West’s statue at Staples Center and set my custom “BOBAN RULES” jersey on fire. (Side note: I miss you, Boban Marjanovic.)

Any teams you don’t want in the Finals?

The Warriors need to go away. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of their fans. I’ve witnessed too many drunk bros getting kicked out of Staples Center for heckling Clippers players. They need to hop in their Teslas and Waze it back to Burning Man.

Since this is the Social Media issue, let’s end on one of your tweets. Can you remind us of Paul George’s full name again?

Of course. It’s Paul Ringo John George.

Follow Melissa on Twitter at: @MelissaStetten. Or check out her podcast, “Web Crawlers,” where she and L.A. writer Ali Segel explore weird mysteries and unexplained phenomena.

A CLIPPERS FRANCHISE MINI-HISTORY
1978The San Diego-based team gets its name, a nod to clipper ships
1984Relocation to Los Angeles
1987Team goes 12-70, the 3rd-worst NBA winning percentage ever
1996They almost move to Anaheim 
1998They start the season 0-17
2012They go 16-0 in December, 3rd perfect month in NBA history
2014Ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer buys the team for $2 billion
2024Projected date for a new arena in Inglewood
KAWHI LEONARD – THREE BEST SCORING YEARS
 Points/Game    FG%3pt%
2018-19, Raptors       26.649.637.1
2016-17, Spurs 25.548.538.0
2015-16, Spurs  21.250.644.3

Twitter Deactivated

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Consider a Less “Social” Society

On July 24, 2018, my final tweet read:

Talking to my buddy @bramsec (Eric Abrams) about the state of humor and Twitter … and you know what? Fuck this. I’m out. I’ll see ya’ll later. Catch me on @Instagram. #deactivated

The post was referencing the then-recent James Gunn/Disney debacle, wherein the famed director had been fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The reason: some salacious (and meant to be humorous) comments he’d made on our most beloved social media platform. Gunn’s temporary canceling — he’s since been rehired in what I deem a major score for free speech — came on the heels of Roseanne being scrubbed from her revived sitcom, also over a bad joke. She, perhaps by choice, perhaps not, has yet to resurface.

As a stand-up comedian, the axing of two very successful comedy-centric individuals had me spooked. These were big dogs put out to pasture in an instant. That sort of thing tends to scare a litter runt like me.

To be honest, I’ve been called out plenty on Twitter. But my perceived missteps never affected me financially. That’s thanks to my perpetual, albeit unintentional, level of anonymity. A lack of fame is a veil for financial protection. But there’s always the chance — or at least the hope — my profile status will one day suddenly change. And if or when it does, the trolls will start digging. The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah and SNL’s Melissa Villaseñor both faced heat over old, borderline questionable tweets when they made the overnight transition from the shadows to the spotlight.

So…I was done. Why take the chance of having my own words used against me? I wasn’t even sure if I’d ever tweeted anything that could be weaponized, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to start digging through my timeline to check.

Many of my colleagues were going on deletion sprees. It seemed everybody in entertainment was. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson erased some 20,000 tweets. I’m only aware of this because it made the news. Learning that some people’s accounts were not only being scoured for incriminating evidence, but also monitored for how much of that evidence was being trashed, was more than disheartening. It was frightening.

As fear continued to creep in, I started to reflect on my Twitter experience as a whole — what took place during the day-to-day. I quickly realized that folks in the entertainment biz weren’t the only ones having a tough go of it. It was everybody. Thoughts were no longer met with discussion, but degradation. Debates were devolving into digital bar brawls. When like-minded individuals aligned on perspectives, they considered one another brilliant. Anyone at odds with them were demonized. Virtue had somehow transformed into dogma, ideology into science, and opinions into hard facts. Hopping on Twitter to check in with the culture was like attending a biblical stoning to see “what the public was up to.”

So, my patience with and interest in this online community had been exhausted. It was time to shut the whole fucking thing down. I headed straight to my Twitter account settings.

It may have been an impulsive move. Maybe the real growth here would come from pressing on, and not pressing “Deactivate.” Perhaps learning to live with Twitter like a malady, versus cutting it out like a cancer, was the way to go. But that’s not where my head was at.

The extreme summer heat that day surely didn’t nurture clear thinking. It was only noon and the outside temperature in Los Angeles had reached 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Ninety-four degrees with 56 percent humidity in a goddamned city whose blazingly judgmental social climate already has you sweating bullets. Had I instead been sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in Vermont, amidst a cool, whispering breeze, with only the sights and scents of forest trees surrounding me, I might have acted otherwise. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

Click!

In the months that followed, socially, I felt calmer, clearer, and happier. Turns out, the Twitter experience had immensely soiled and narrowed my worldview. I’d flat-out forgotten there were other, more constructive ways to interact with people. Even if people weren’t interested in engaging in them, it was good to be reminded there was a better way. I liked being back in the real world, feet flat on the ground, my head out of the cloud. This new clarity proved there was undeniably something cleansing and, more importantly, something gained, from no longer jumping into the social media shit show.

Not that it all came without concern. When you break from the pack, certain fears are sure to rear their ugly heads. A part of me felt like I had cut myself off from information and interaction, like I’d permanently ditched my cell phone or resigned from using email. In truth, it was just the opposite. New channels of communication opened up, while the old corroded ones were shut down and sealed off.

Clicking “Deactivate” was like hitting the flush button in an airplane bathroom. Waste, filth, and impurity, magnificently sucked away in a flash. Gone was my anxiety about being smeared, my dismay about being shamed, and any foreboding thoughts of being bullied. I’d ended an abusive relationship. There were no more concerns like, “What will I be yelled at for today?” or “How long before I’m told I did something wrong?” or “When will the brigade of insults begin?” It often takes getting free and clear of a toxic force for you to realize the damage it’s truly doing. For me, using Twitter was like living next to a Superfund site; over time, the poison covertly took its toll.

Flash-forward a year or so from that fateful day in July. I’m still Twitter-free, and my understanding of my relationship with the social network continues to deepen. Back in my tweeting days, I’d often wonder, Why do we use this platform in this fashion? This wonderful interface, constructed to provide a truly democratic experience, where individuals can exchange ideas evenly, has only transformed us into crazed dictators. “What did you say?! Blocked!” “You think what?! Reported!” What a horrible representation of us.

But over the last 14 months, I’ve come to realize Twitter isn’t the malignancy I once made it out to be. It’s just a minor symptom of a much greater disease: our addiction to self-sensationalism. We seem to be at our happiest in this country when we’re screaming “YOU’RE TERRIFIC!” in the mirror, or “YOU’RE FUCKED!” out the window. What better place to indulge these twisted proclivities than an app that lives right in your pocket, accessible at all times, for any impulsive lashing-out or self-aggrandizing thought that pops into your head.

Sadly, the old-school social interactions I so greatly looked forward to weren’t all that different from the newfangled ones online. I quickly noticed an undeniable increase in provocative discussions only being conducted in hushed tones, and people tapping out of most conversations once they got heavier than “What did you think of the Game of Thrones finale?” Common communication is barreling toward a one-sidedness that would put most fundamentalist televangelists to shame.

Turns out, Twitter isn’t a bad representation of us. Twitter is us. And for that reason, most folks feel like they can’t live without it. And maybe that’s true.

Full disclosure: As of the publication of this piece, I am about to reactivate my account. Hypocritical? Probably. Experimental? Possibly. I’d like to think I’m reentering the relationship with a fresh understanding of myself. I have new boundaries, different expectations, and interest in real growth. I’m more in touch with what I’m looking for this time around. And if things don’t go exactly how I want them to, I’ll just jump ship again. After all, I’m a self-indulgent, self-centered addict of self-sensationalism…just like everyone else.

Joe DeRosa is an American stand-up comedian, author, musician, actor, producer, director, editor, television writer, and podcast host.

Social Media Battles: From Daniel Pearl to Donald Trump

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Tweets DO Fail Us Now

At age 36, I’m part of the last American generation that remembers life before the internet, before social media. Try explaining to the youngsters what dial-up was, the importance of a good (and cryptic) AOL away message, or how it took two hours to download one naked photo of Jenny McCarthy. Times were tough.

Over the last two decades, the internet’s changed substantially, and so has the way we use it. Social media’s been at the vanguard of this evolution. From Friendster to Blogger to Snapchat to whatever newfangled site teenagers adopt tomorrow, the platforms we use to communicate and present ourselves on say a lot about us as a society, and as people. Through it all, the American military’s been at war on the far edges of the world, fighting and killing and trying, as best they can, to stay connected with the homeland and their loved ones.

The trajectory of social media is also a trajectory of the forever war. To see the connection between the two, look no further than how the conceptual projects conjured up in Silicon Valley garages get utilized in dire, spartan conditions by soldiers and Marines. The military brass didn’t always like social media, sometimes they even tried to ban it, but (cue Jeff Goldblum-from-Jurassic Park-voice), technology finds a way.

American war and social media, strange bedfellows for sure, yet they have been intertwined for 20 years now. Here’s a tracing of that history.

Fall 2001-Winter 2002: 9/11 happens. Early conspiracy theories fester on chat boards. America invades Afghanistan. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan, and beheaded nine days later. Video of his execution spreads across social media like wildfire. A new age of psychological warfare is upon us.

2002: The Afghan Wireless Communications Company is awarded the first Global System for Mobile license and contract in Afghanistan. The fall of the Taliban government means many things, including real internet access. This does not come close to ending the war, but one can presume it does bring the dick pic to Afghanistan, which is not nothing.

2004: Military blogs, aka “milblogs,” begin to emerge from bases across Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing to readers raw, unvarnished combat stories. One of the most popular, “My War: Killing Time in Iraq” by infantryman Colby Buzzell, details the author’s experiences during the Battle of Mosul. It subsequently gets shut down for operational security violations.

The Pentagon initially responds to the rise in unapproved social media postings by service members by shutting off access to popular blogging sites and YouTube. This does not have the intended effect of controlling information.

2006: Milblogs become mil books. A slew of blogs-turned-books get published, including Buzzell’s My War, and collected anthologies like Doonesbury’s The Sandbox and Blackfive’s The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches From Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony is that in ten years, no one will read either books or blogs (wokka wokka).

June 2008: Yours truly gets his blog, “Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal,” shut down during a tour in Iraq. Don’t make fun of your battalion commander on the internet, kids, it will get back to him! Your intrepid hero gets yelled at a lot, but that’s pretty much it — partially because a lieutenant colonel at the Pentagon argues that crushing me for blogging is the exact wrong lesson to take away from social media. Is the Green Machine actually learning about twenty-first-century communications?

January 2011: The U.S. Army issues an official social media handbook. I’m sure every soldier out there has read it cover to cover! Given more and more bureaucratic oversight (official and otherwise), service members begin to transition away from public blogs and identifiable Facebook pages to anonymous message boards and Twitter accounts when sharing the real dope. Alas, this scenario is not covered in the handbook.

May 2011: Navy SEALs ice Osama bin Laden, then drop him into the ocean for the sharks to feast upon. Word spreads through Twitter before President Obama officially announces it to the globe. “America, Fuck Yeah!” gets uttered everywhere in earnest. Celebrators gather at the White House. This is the closest thing to a Victory Day parade we’ll ever get, and for one dark spring night, things seem okay again.

January 2012: Video of U.S. Marines urinating on corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan goes viral. The video — a few months old at the time of its release — causes immediate blowback, and is cited as the reason for a number of “green on blue” attacks by Afghan soldiers on Coalition service members. One of the Marines involved dies a few years later of a prescription drug overdose. He’s buried with honors at Arlington, as his military career was much more than that short clip shown the world over.

April 2012: After years of being a horrific urban legend, a military widow learns of her husband’s death in Afghanistan, not from an official next-of-kin visit, but from a Facebook post.

June 2014: At the peak of the ISIS “caliphate” in the Middle East, ISIS social media extremists taunt First Lady Michelle Obama with a meme, using a doctored photo of her holding a “#BringBack Our Humvee” sign. Beyond the trolling, the meme is a reminder that American arms and war machines sometimes end up in the hands of the enemy, a stark complication in an era of local partnerships and coalition-building.

September 2017-2018: Fourteen years after his death in Afghanistan, former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman becomes a meme. Conservatives angry about Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protest turn to the square-jawed likeness of Tillman for comfort — a bizarre projection, given Tillman’s own iconoclastic worldview and nontraditional politics. President Trump gets involved, using Tillman’s memory and the meme to attack Kaepernick. Tillman’s widow issues a thoughtful statement asking that her fallen husband’s memory not be politicized; given that it’s over 20 words, however, it’s unlikely the members bothered to read it.

Matt Gallagher is a U.S. Army veteran and the author of the Iraq memoir“Kaboom”and the novel“Youngblood.” His next book,“Empire City,”is an alternate history and will be published in April.

VidCon 2019: Penthouse on the Town

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Houston, We Have No Problem

More than 30,000 people descended on the Anaheim Convention Center this past July for the tenth annual VidCon, and Penthouse joined the party, meeting some of today’s hottest online video talents.

Billed as the world’s largest celebration of digital content creators, VidCon attracts both social media pros and their diehard fans. And judging by the size of the crowd—and their enthusiasm—the popularity and reach of influencers is stronger than ever.

But we’ll leave the discussions about Big Tech, monetization, and the perils of online popularity to mainstream media outlets. Instead, we got down to brass tacks and asked some of our favorite YouTubers what they would do if they had the chance to create an adult movie—and got some offbeat answers.

Gamer Jacksepticeye said, “I want to write an artsy porn movie with no dialogue at all. Like a David Lynch kind of thing. Just really long, panning shots … people are just having sex and the camera goes by them.”

Ethan Nestor, who created the gaming channel CrankGamePlays, quipped, “It would definitely be some spaghetti-based thing. Instead of the pizza delivery man, it would be the spaghetti deliveryman and he just throws all of the spaghetti on the bed. And there’s sauce everywhere and everyone is covered in sauce.”

Comedian Shayne Smith had a porn parody on his mind, explaining, “I want to do the Plow-Her Rangers, which is a Power Rangers spin-off, where they have to fight Rita and they have to get all large and then fuck a Zord. It’s a whole thing.”

The infamous PimpMunkX kept it simple and fucked up. “PimpMunk does everybody…except children. But, of course, animals are good.”

Should we merge all these ideas? We’ll wait.

And they even took photos. Imagine.

Crush on YouTube Star Wonderhussy

Posted on by Team Penthouse

So many of today’s YouTube stars seem to make their marks posting videos of inane things like makeup tips, squeezing zits, or simply blathering about themselves ad nauseam. But there’s one special lady who caught our attention, not just because she’s a gorgeous badass, but also because she’s doing something cool. Meet Sarah Jane Woodall, aka Wonderhussy, the Las Vegas-based nude model/writer turned YouTuber who spends her days cruising the desert in her Toyota 4Runner, camping, sampling hot springs, and exploring abandoned mining camps, ghost towns, and derelict brothels.

We caught up with Woodall on the phone in New Mexico, where she was helping one of her online followers collect rare acorns; afterward she’s headed back to Nevada to check out a Facebook-formed Area 51 raid “to see them aliens,” for which over two million people have signed up. “It’s gonna be a shitshow,” Sarah tells us. Be sure to check out her YouTube channel, Wonderhussy Adventures, to see for yourself.

Where did the moniker “Wonderhussy” come from?

I used to write a column for a local paper, which had started a website that was an “adult” guide to Vegas — what’s it like to go to a brothel or a strip club, etc. But the paper was so conservative, I couldn’t post photos with nudity, I couldn’t say anything interesting. So I started writing my own blog so I could say whatever I wanted, and I came up with the name “Wonderhussy” because it’s sort of emblematic of, “Fuck this — I’m gonna say what I want to say and be who I want to be! People think I’m a shameless hussy? Well, I’m gonna be the best damn hussy there is.”

How did you transition from writing to YouTubing?

I couldn’t monetize my blog using Google AdSense, because it was considered an “adult” website. I guess because I posted nude photos, or maybe the keywords I used? But I was driving back from Burning Man and I passed this abandoned building. I pulled over and went in, and as I was shooting, I was describing what I was seeing and figuring out in real time that it was an old brothel. I put the video up on YouTube and it got a really good response. People started emailing me, saying, “That’s called URBEX [urban exploration]. You should do more videos like that.” And right around that time, I discovered I had all this money waiting for me in my YouTube account from the ads that were appearing in the videos I’d posted over the years.

So now you do this full-time?

Yeah, man, I do YouTube full-time! But it’s not very lucrative, and it’s kind of an idiot’s game. They know everyone wants to be a star, so they own all your content. They can shut you down at any time, and you’re basically busting your hump just so they can make money, and then they throw you a few crumbs.

That said, I’m enjoying it.

Has there been anything you’ve shot that you couldn’t post?

Yeah, I got busted by the ranger at Lake Mead and had to take some videos down. Lake Mead is this huge reservoir outside Vegas that’s evaporating rapidly because there’s not meant to be that many people living in the desert, sucking up the water. There are a couple of abandoned marinas that are totally dried up, and I made a video of one that had some park service housing — the homes were almost brand-new, just sitting there with the doors swinging open. The video got a couple hundred thousand views, and that got the attention of law enforcement out there, and so I got this phone call from them, telling me to take it down. Ever since then, I’ve been super cautious about the kinds of places I go in, and what I post online.

It still seems like a pretty great way to make a living.

It is, but you’re completely owned by YouTube, so Google basically has you by the balls. There’s this whole thing now called the “Adpocalypse.” You get all your advertising revenue from the commercials they run on your videos. But then these ads were appearing on some pretty sketchy videos, like crazy right-winger, racist bullshit. So now they’re very cautious about the content being “advertiser-friendly.” They give you a red, yellow, or green light on your video. If it’s red, it doesn’t comply with YouTube’s terms and it’s not allowed to be posted at all, and you get a strike on your account; green light, you’re good to go and you can make money; yellow light means they’ll run your video but they won’t post any ads on it — they deem it unsuitable for most advertisers. One time I got a yellow light on a video, which couldn’t have been more G-rated. So they told me to look at the keywords in the description, which was “Ghost town 45 minutes from Vegas strip” — and the word “strip” had triggered their algorithm. So I took out the word and it got a green light.

How do you find the abandoned places you visit?

As a nude model, I was working for these amateur photographers who had these ideas of photographing a naked chick in an old busted building. So I was constantly scouting for new abandoned places, and I ended up getting more into the scouting than the modeling. I find a lot of places through Google Maps, and by driving around randomly. Now it’s gotten to the point where people email me tips of places to check out.

You seem to like exploring sites connected to conspiracy theories.

I’m not a natural-born conspiracy theorist, I’m just more interested in the idea of conspiracy theories. I don’t know, conspiracy theories used to be so much more fun. Now they’re getting creepy, like Pizzagate and “deep state.” I recently got into Bigfoot — that’s my kind of urban legend. It’s old-school, it’s fun. I went up to Oregon in June and decided to look for Bigfoot while I was there. It started out as a joke, but then I got up there and I was reading about it and watching all these Bigfoot videos, and I started thinking, Geez, maybe there’s something to this.

A Moment on Gary Vaynerchuk

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Back in August, Gary Vaynerchuk — entrepreneur, CEO, social media Yoda, and a massive fan of the New York Jets football team — took his grind to Australia.

That’s a favorite Vaynerchuk word: grind. You’ll also find him using language like hustle, side-hustle, and a curse word that iPhones autocorrect to ducking.

A Belarus-born, New Jersey-raised multimillionaire in his early forties, Vaynerchuk hit Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne before heading southeast to Auckland, New Zealand. He spoke before thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, digital dreamers, and business professionals looking for tips on better leveraging social media and the internet.

The crowds were hoping to hear GaryVee, as he’s popularly known, deliver inspirational, no-nonsense talk about laser-sighting your focus, maximizing your schedule, and giving the middle finger to personal insecurity and naysayers.

And that’s what people got.

The gym-trained, snug-T-shirt-wearing Vaynerchuk has the energy of the Tasmanian Devil in the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. He charges through a succession of 16-hour workdays, his wild, scanning eyes suggesting someone who’s just downed a dozen Red Bulls. But unlike the grunting, cyclonic “Taz,” Vaynerchuk, who got his start working in his father’s New Jersey liquor store, is hyper-verbal, disciplined, strategic, and socially skilled. With his cropped, unfussy hair, panther-like stride, and online acumen, Vaynerchuk projects a vibe that’s half tech nerd, half Navy SEAL.

An early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Uber, Vaynerchuk today is CEO of VaynerMedia, a digital advertising agency with 800 employees, offices in New York and London, and clients like Budweiser and Toyota. He’s also chairman of VaynerX, a media and communications company with multiple brands under its umbrella, and a cofounder, with his younger brother A.J., of VaynerSports, an athlete representation firm.

His online reach is large, with two million Twitter followers and a 6.6M Instagram count. He has a YouTube channel, The #AskGaryVee Show, with 2.2M subscribers. He’s the host of a top-100 global podcast, “The GaryVee Audio Experience,” and appears in a crisply produced online documentary series, DailyVee, which gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at his head-spinning schedule — a medley of meetings, interviews, talks, content creation, and location-hopping, one thing after another, at the clip of a Gatling gun.

On his YouTube show, Vaynerchuk responds spontaneously to viewer questions selected by staff but which he hasn’t seen. Its name gave him the title for his 2016 book, AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media & Self-Awareness. A best seller, that effort followed Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World, published in 2013. Last year, Vaynerchuk released another hit book, one whose title nodded to his first e-commerce venture, selling wine: Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Built Their Business and Influence — And How You Can, Too.

It was in the mid-90s, with Vaynerchuk still a college student in Boston, when he realized the nascent internet could be a retail gamechanger. He’d been taking the train down to New Jersey on weekends to work in his dad’s store, Shoppers Discount Liquors. Following his branding instincts, he persuaded his dad to change the store’s name to the more upscale Wine Library. Then he launched WineLibrary.com, giving the family business a digital dimension.

Vaynerchuk’s timing was perfect. People were just beginning to buy online. Annual store revenue rocketed from $3M in 1997 to $45M by 2003.

In 2006, Vaynerchuk debuted Wine Library TV, a web-video series, shot in a makeshift studio above the liquor store, where the vintner’s casual style proved appealing. Seated at a table before a single stationary camera, Vaynerchuk would taste-test wines before spitting the liquid into a metal bucket plastered with Jets decals. At its height, the show grabbed 100K views per episode, and grew legit enough to feature Wayne Gretzky and CNBC’s Jim Cramer as guests.

During his Australia trip in August, Vaynerchuk sat down with a Sydney podcast host. DailyVee episode 574 documented parts of the interview. Unshaven, wearing a black beanie and sneakers, Vaynerchuk was asked if he ever worried about burnout.

In response, he sounded a central theme: the importance of confidence in career-building and entrepreneurship. He said it wasn’t necessarily hard work that produced burnout, but rather the psychic drain of insecurity and lack of self-esteem.

If you dreamed big and believed in yourself, as Vaynerchuk did as a young man — and still does in 2019, his plans for the future extensive — that was energizing, from hour one to hour 16. It was fuel, because you were convinced the hard work would pay off.

After making this point, Vaynerchuk grew animated, gesticulating, and moved on to another GaryVee theme: the importance of living within your means.

“It’s not how much you make,” he told the podcaster, “it’s how much you spend.”

He conjured a 25-year-old urban professional, a type familiar to him from New York City, complaining that he doesn’t earn enough to support his lifestyle.

“Of course if you take fucking Uber everywhere, and eat out every night, and need the freshest, fucking flyest, flexiest clothes, you’re gonna need a fuckload of money,” Vaynerchuk observed. “Why not take the train? Why not cook every night?”

Given Vaynerchuk’s focus on hustling your ass off — on grinding — it was almost shocking to hear him tell the Sydney podcaster that he’d like to make happiness his primary message during the next ten years, and focus more on balance in life.

He’ll counsel people to define success for themselves, he said. If they can be happier making less money while doing something rewarding, he’s all for that.

“Work a lot,” the digital entrepreneur and marketing guru continued, only if you enjoy this approach to life, or your financial obligations require it.

As for Vaynerchuk’s own big dreams, he’d like to own the Jets some day. For now, he’ll settle for a decent season.