David Marchese

Very tricky.

You mean the current Israeli administration?

Has your humanitarian group, CORE, has it looked at trying to help in Gaza?

October 7th, you mean?

You know...

I'm sure there's some part of you that blanches at the word celebrity, but you are a celebrity.

And being a celebrity activist or humanitarian, whatever label one wants to put on it, cuts in different ways.

You can bring positive attention to a cause, as you did in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, or as you're doing with Ukraine.

or your celebrity can, in some cases, overshadow the cause.

I think the example here would be your Rolling Stone piece about the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, which even you referred to as a failure because you had written it hoping to start a conversation about U.S.

drug policy, and mostly it became a conversation about...

you and how you got access and el chapo's approval and you know even in some cases your writing of the story so my question is do you feel like you have any control over the relationship between your celebrity and how it shines a light on the issues that you care about first of all i would i would agree with everything you just said and i would also you know project that out to every daily journalist in the world

What other lessons did you learn from the El Chapo story?

Right.

I get what you're saying.

What's in your glass, by the way?

What are you drinking this morning?

Lots of people can get involved in politics.

And for a lot of reasons, whether it's humility or whether it's timidity, not a lot of people...

have the thing that you seem to have, which is the desire or willingness to be a man in the arena, you know, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt.