YouSaid · the spoken record

Molly Jong-Fast

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-06-23
most recent: 2025-06-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I did this book because I thought it was what I should be doing. I don't love talking about myself. I'm not so interested in it. I'm not so interested. And I also don't, I mean, look, I matter in the fact that there are interesting things to take from my experience, which I think can help people, but I don't love to talk about myself. And I don't think that I am so universal. You know, I grew up in a very weird way. I'm largely an only child. I'm an alcoholic. You're sober alcoholic but an alcoholic. I just think my experience is very sort of siloed and weird. But I think that story is interesting and people can relate to it. Whereas I'm quite interested in what's going to happen in American politics because it's going to affect all of us.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get out of their comfort zones. But I do think that's a real thing. I am worried still. I think there has to be new anti-corruption laws that come into place. There has to be more focus on norms and institutions. I mean, there certainly are things I'm quite worried about. But I do think that there, I mean, I'm sort of 60-40 that it's going to be okay. You know, I wrote these pieces about what I got wrong during the 2024 cycle. And one of the things I really did discover is that I'm a little overly optimistic. So, you know, but I still see a way through.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's what I would say I would have been really, really incredibly worried had Democrats lost that judicial election in Wisconsin because that would have been, I think, game over. The fact that Elon Musk poured 30 million plus plus plus into it and they lost, I think is a big deal. If Democrats can win back the House in the midterms and the elections go off without a hitch, then I will feel pretty confident. That said, there needs to be a huge reckoning within the Democratic Party. The gerontocracy has to be dealt with. They need to elevate people who are good communicators and not just their friends. They have a real problem with connecting with voters. I think a lot of it has to do with just their reliance on traditional media and their inability.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fox News. You don't have that Thank God. But the one thing I would say also is like Newsom did a podcast and what he did, which was wrong, was he platformed those people. What he should have done is gone on Charlie Kirk's podcast, not brought Charlie Kirk to his people. So go on their podcast. Don't necessarily bring them to yours.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't Newsmax, everything you don't like, whatever the most, you know, objectionable, even if you don't ideologically jive with it, even if you feel that they say bad things about vaccines, you should go on everything. That's my feeling.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I think that they should have a really strong primary process where everybody gets out there and is on the stage and is having the conversation as many people as possible and those people, I don't know who the picture should be, but I think that the pick should be someone who goes everywhere, who goes on Theo Vaughn and the Milk Boys and who goes on Joe Rogan and who will literally go on everything. There is no path to the presidency that doesn't lead through every single news influencer, even the ones you don't like. The one thing I think the online left did really, really wrong, and I am guilty of this too, and I think it was a huge mistake, is the idea that you should only go on things that agree with you. You should go on everything. You should go on the Fox and Fox and Friends and everything.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So little of people's attention, and you just have to be everywhere. And I think one of the worst moments for me was those Google searches on Election Day where people didn't know that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race? Like, this is a country of 300 plus million people. They are not reading the newspaper. They are not, like, you just have to get in front of them any way you can. And it doesn't matter if your message is brilliantly tailored or not. And in fact, I think the worst thing Democrats do to themselves is talking points. There are some really, really smart Democrats who you can't hear what they have to say because they are like, you know, McKinsey talking point to McKinsey talking point. And I actually think just talking like a human to another human is the way to go.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trump is Trump. Republicans cave to him. They set this emotion. Democrats had a hard time trying to push back on these authoritarian impulses. Part of it was because it's very hard to be sort of the one party that believes in norms and institutions. That's an impossible situation to be in. Part of it was that they really got in their own ways. You know, they thought too much about themselves. Like a lot of times you all hear people will say, well, it's the online left that is having too much power. But I actually think that it's not. I actually think that the problem isn't, I mean, maybe at one time it was, but I think really the problem now is the consultant class that gets in there and says, you can't say this, you can't say that. You have to be careful. You shouldn't do that interview. You shouldn't do this interview. Like if we learn anything from Donald Trump, Donald Trump went everywhere. He said crazy stuff. It didn't matter, right?”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel okay. I mean, look, I think that it's the closest to McCarthyism, right? I think the straightest line is McCarthyism. I do think what's really amazing about Trumpism is two things. One, he's not so good at this. That is what's so striking. For example, these law firms that went along with Trump A lot of them are now getting pushback from their clients. So I do actually think that I actually feel a little better because I think that even though a lot of billionaires have really caved to him in a disgusting way that was shocking, but it turned out it wasn't necessary. Like they could have just pushed back and survived. And so I feel like it's a really amazing cautionary tale for all of us, which is that you can be brave and you can do the right thing. And there's no incentive, in fact, for caving.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the best moment is my brother goes, like, you better hope that you get put in jail because that was the best thing that ever happened to Grandpa. He was like grandpa. Got next level when he was put in jail.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a little bit curious to see it, but it's like a coin. I've seen it before. But I did have this amazing moment with my brother. And I said to him, you know, Trump could put me in jail.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last year that Stalin was giving it out. Which is really a dubious honor, I would say, at best. My father found the Stalin Peace Prize in the garage. Was like, oh my God. And he dropped it. And now he can't find it again”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he tried to be a Republican intellectual. So that was sort of an avenue that was available. I don't know that that's an avenue that is available. I don't know how intellectual I am. But I just want to say one other thing about my grandfather, which is he was jailed. He was definitely a communist. He did refuse to name names. He did win the Stalin Peace Prize.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember that heavily and didactic novels about liberalism and communism. And he wrote political columns. So he had that similar thing where he was both things. And he was sort of a public intellectual, for lack of a better word, though he was not a high-level public. You know, he wasn't Or Gore Vidal. He was like this sort of Timu Buckley, or, well, not Buckley, but Timu Gore Vidal, but not gay.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where I say, I'm really disappointed that your boss can't speak, like my new thing is I feel that Democrats should be speaking like normal humans. That I feel like would make them more effective.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I would say is there are two things I aspire to do, right? Make sense of what's happening and also make people feel better. Those are really the two jobs. And so I try to read everything. Everything comes from reporting. Or from sources. And there's really good reporting coming from the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and even Propublica, the Economist. So I just read everything. I talk to as many people as I possibly can. I also, one of my favorite things I do, which you're not supposed to do, but I do do, is I complain to calms people about the many things that I think their bosses are doing wrong. Which makes me profoundly disliked. But I do do that where I say, you know, I'm really disappointed. And I do this Jewish mother thing, which I do with my kids”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of myself as an opinion journalist, so it tends to be that you come through journalism, but there are opinion journalists who come through other activities. So I think of myself as an opinion journalist who is more interested in prose. Spend enough time now in that world that I'm very careful. Which is good”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that Think I thought the way it happened where he sort of got in there and the party was, the Republican Party was like, no. And then he was able to sort of defy gravity was very much as a novelist because I feel like originally I was a novelist. That really captured my imagination not in a good way, in a sort of, you know, as someone with both an anxiety disorder and an eye for drama, but also satire, it was a cataclysmic moment in American life. And I think it was for a lot of people.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other things. I also think what happened to me was when Obama came into presidency, I thought, okay, it's going to be okay, right? Like we're going to fix all the stuff now where the really smart people are going to get in government and they're going to fix stuff. And then I thought, oh, and then Hillary's going to be president and this will all sort of work out. And then it was like, oh no. None of this is going to work out. And that got me involved in writing about politics.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had all these kits, I wrote novels, I had all these kids. I went back into writing. I started writing columns in 2015. I went to the place where I had written when I was like a kid and just wrote every week and wrote these political columns. I just had a realization that I didn't have to write about myself anymore that. I could write about politics. It was much more interesting and had nothing to do with me as a person in the world.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, don't be hard on yourself because everybody feels like they're not doing it the right way. I mean, I think that's uniformly true. You just do the best you can. I always think like put the oxygen mask on yourself first, worry about your kids and then your parent last. I really do because the kids, you only have the kids. Such a short time, and then they grow up. I think you prioritize the kids before the parents. That's my take. And then I also think you just do the best you can. Like you're not going to, especially if they're sort of in that nether world, there's only so much you can do. Sometimes they'll be mad at you. I mean, the biggest lesson I've ever learned in my life is not to take things personally. That people are doing what they're doing, and maybe it has to do with you, and often it doesn't.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, like where they want to get mad at you about things. And so I do think I have, I can have that conversation.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I do think what's nice is with my kids, I can be like, you know, this wasn't the best moment for us, you know. And I'm sorry I gave you an eating disorder. Or, you know, those kind of things.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it is that I know when I used to get mad at my mom, she would be like, kill me. I was the worst. And you're like, no, no, I just want to criticize you a little bit. And I just want to have like a real conversation about something when, you know.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel like I'm a better parent. I also get along like my brother. I love my brothers, my half-brothers.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we all want to fix our relationships with our parents, and I think we all want to connect about them. Because I do think we're sort of told that we're supposed to have a certain kind of relationship with our parents, that we're supposed to love them and mourn them. But the reality is a lot of us don't feel like that. And I think that there is a real, there's something nice about knowing that you don't have to be the daughter in the movies, that you can just have very mixed feelings about your parents.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I did have that realization, which I think is worth talking about, which is that if you're an unhappy child, your unhappy childhood, you just constantly trying to get in there and fix it. Whereas these people who are happy children.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just not how I, you know, I don't, I'm like a normal person. So I certainly have desires of grandeur like I would like the book to sell a lot of copies. And I think I do help people in the book. Like I do think you read it and you think like, oh, you can really sort of do this and do that and it be okay. And like, I think the most useful stuff in the book is the stuff where Mac gets sick and I talk about how you deal with the kids when the husband is sick. Like, because that, I think, is actually really useful because a lot of people get cancer. And I think one of the things I was able to do was sort of help them stay in their lives and not get too involved with ours so that they didn't get too involved with their dad being sick, which I thought was really a good thing I did. But, you know, it's just this salaciousness of it and the alcoholism and the, you know, who cares what happened to my childhood. Like it's over. That stuff.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The me in this equation, the normal human who is not particularly, I don't like it. Like, I don't feel great about it. But I also feel about that.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About Well, I mean, look, my mom wrote a book that had a lot of stuff that made a lot of people really unhappy, including like Alan John, right? Who's dead now? That guy was just a, he was like a private person. So if you were just apples to apples, me writing about our experience together is absolutely not comparable. I also think that Really, what Erica John cared about was her literary legacy more than anything. So she made me, you know, for years and years and years, she said, I made you my letteriary executor. I want to have a Dideon like, I mean, she wasn't Diddian then, but she knew that what she wanted was the thing that Norman Mailer doesn't have, but Joan Diddian does have, right? That legacy of mattering. That's all she wanted. So in this way, that book does help with the legacy of Erica Johnson.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So it was very strange. I mean, I knew she would give a cogent answer because. I knew she has always felt that way. You know, she's always said you have a right to write anything you want. But it's sort of a misrepresentation because she's not like, I don't think she's capable of making decisions per se So it's like a very ethically cloudy moment.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She recognizes me, but she doesn't recognize my kids anymore. Or she sort of knows they exist, but she can't remember who they are or what they are. I mean, what was genuinely weird about the Times thing was, you know,”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I love that you got that was so cool. That's really cool getting any of the good. Yeah, thank you. So my mother, you know, I visit her at the nursing home. We put her in a new nursing home that I think is much nicer. And we have this wonderful man who sits with her during the day called Johnny. And we went out for Mother's Day brunch. We have, you know, we and I get the kids over there so she gets to see the kids. It's okay. It's not very sort of it probably should be, but I see her and it makes me really sad.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life that was this sort of fantasy. And what happened instead was they got together and they were going to kill each other and she was an alcoholic and he had a lot of issues with his dad and everything just imploded. And then they couldn't, it just was all of the sort of worst of everything. Oh, but my husband has this great shrink and he is very brilliant and writes books called George Macari. And George Macari said to Matt Greenfield about me, he said, sometimes the children of narcissists become stuck on trying to fix their relationships with their narcissistic parents. Despite the fact that there's not any role for them to play and that they over sort of become overly guilty because of that. And that made so much sense that it made me think that that's what I did.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he's like subsequently apologized to me and said I should have fought harder, I should have, I don't, I think it was very hard for him and for her to, you know, my grandfather had introduced them and I think they thought in 1975 when they met or 74 that they were going to get together and they were both going to become these famous writers and they were going to live in Malibu and have this”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was So, I mean, if you want to get into this sort of nitty gritty of the divorce, they had this really just epic divorce She, in the end, he kind of gave up and went away. Not the best answer, but people didn't have joint custody back then. Right.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that, oh, yeah. No, it's a good question. So do I still feel guilty? The answer is not really, but with my father, I think”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Admission made me feel so great she couldn't do it, my dad said. She couldn't even spend one hour with you. The most she could do was half an hour.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you don't A couple of days later, I called my dad, my one remaining parent. I was in a taxi heading to CNN to do a late night panel. I told him that mom wasn't dead yet, but that she wasn't exactly in there anymore. I told him that all she did was sleep and drink. I told him how guilty I felt. I said that I shouldn't be at the CNN studios. Wherever I was, I felt I should have been somewhere else. I should have been spending more time with my kids, with my parents, with my dogs, with my cancerous husband. My dad tried to reassure me in his own peculiar fucked up way. You know he said When you were a little girl, the nanny and I used to try to get your mom to spend time with you. We tried to get her to spend just an hour a day with you.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I also think she was not, there was just a lot of, I mean, you have to remember, it is also the 70s and 80s. And like people didn't parent the way they do now, right? I mean, we didn't have car seats. Everybody smoked. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, when I was three years old, I drank the bottoms of everyone glasses of champagne at a mitzvah. And everyone thought it was adorable. Like it was just a very different way to grow up. And there were other kids I met who were the children of famous people who also were sort of dragged along and sort of treated like”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And your grandmother wants. Yeah, grandmother was, too. Yeah. But I had in my DNA just such the ism, if that makes sense. So I was extremely ill-prepared for that childhood. But I got through it. And my mom, you know, she had people who sort of took care of her.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So for me, I think I was uniquely poorly designed for that childhood because I was dyslexic. So that was a real problem. And I was also, you know, I got sober at 19 because I really was an alcoholic. Like I really was, you know, I do believe that there are some people who are born alcoholics. And I really had that DNA where I just.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And yeah, that's not so good. So they had these outsized influences in the culture and she could never get in that group. And that was very hard for her.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that. You know, she was glamorous and interesting and smart. You know, it's important to remember that the world in which I grew up in”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not my fault. Not my fault. I actually think that Martha was really mad at my mom because years later, my father got married, remarried a few years later, not that many years later. And Martha was really wanted to do the wedding, which I feel like was a sign that she was not pleased.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Did you ruin Martha Stewart's marriage? At first, she said, This is very Eric Junk. She said, what happens in Frankfurt stays in Frankfurt? The book fair. I was like, okay. And then she said, many people slept with Andy Stewart.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I can have sex. I can, I don't have to be married to the first person I sleep with. You know, it was just sort of a, it was like you don't have to be what your parents told you you needed to be. And remember, my mom was born in 1942. So I think what was hard for her was she really did want to be an academic. My grandfather was very, he had three daughters and his whole thing was everyone needed to be an academic. They all needed to get graduate degrees. My mother went to Barnard. She was a good student. She was actually with Martha Stewart at Barnard.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was So, yes, it was very shocking. It published in 1973, I think the way to think of it is contextually the pill. Right game changer, but it takes a little while to sort of get into the culture 1973 Fear of Flying and also Roe v. Wade the same year. And from what I understand from people coming over and telling me about it, which I think is sort of the most useful kind of thing is that people, there were many women who read that book and were like, I've been doing it wrong.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He never liked me. Yeah, I know I've had that conversation. Lucky seems actually a little scarier than my mom. Because she's very active.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I feel like this kind of thing when you get really drunk and embarrass me in front of everyone I know, I feel like that doesn't feel like you loving me. And, you know, like very therapized and she could not and she'd be like, you hate me. Right. If you hate everything, you know.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT