GQ Style: I've been curious about smoking weed, I guess... Especially when people talk about it helping with creativity.
Aziz Ansari: "To me, the argument for drugs is that you live your life with this one perspective all the time. Why not just see what it's like from a different perspective? To be on some crazy drugs."
What's the most fun drug you've ever done?
"I've done mushrooms a few times, but I've never done much beyond that. I gotta be in the right environment to do drugs. Could you imagine if I was on mushrooms right now? It's like, everyone in this restaurant knows who I am. Do you realize how terrifying that would be? So I really have to be somewhere alone, away from everybody."
How are your paranoia levels generally?
"I'm pretty comfortable with myself."
What's the most annoying question that people ask about Master of None?
"You know what I'm glad about? After the first season, I fucking ran out of things to say about diversity. But after the second season, there hasn't been anything, like, very annoying—there's just things that you get asked a lot. Like: What about season three? Which is obviously a question people have to ask, but for me it's a little stress-inducing. Alan once said it best: It's like we just gave birth to a kid and they're like, When are you gonna have another kid?"
...So you're focusing on living good?
"It's not about living good, necessarily. I don't want to be a guy that's, like, running away from having a normal life. You know? If I keep living like a vagabond… I'm in Japan for two months, France for a month. I'm going to live in Italy. At a certain point, that feels like you're running from something."
I heard you deleted the Internet from your phone. And that you deleted Twitter and Instagram and e-mail. No way that's true, right?
"It is! Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on The New York Times to see if there's a new thing, it's not even about the content. It's just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. You're not going to be able to control yourself. So the only way to fight that is to take yourself out of the equation and remove all these things. What happens is, eventually you forget about it. You don't care anymore. When I first took the browser off my phone, I'm like, [gasp] How am I gonna look stuff up? But most of the shit you look up, it's not stuff you need to know. All those websites you read while you're in a cab, you don't need to look at any of that stuff. It's better to just sit and be in your own head for a minute. I wanted to stop that thing where I get home and look at websites for an hour and a half, checking to see if there's a new thing. And read a book instead. I've been doing it for a couple months, and it's worked. I'm reading, like, three books right now. I'm putting something in my mind. It feels so much better than just reading the Internet and not remembering anything."
Are you an optimist? You feel like it'll all work out no matter what?
"I'm not saying it doesn't matter... I don't think me reading the news is helping anything. I think it's hurting me. It's putting me in a bad state of mind. And I could see how someone could hear that about me and be like, Oh, you're ignoring what's happening in the world ’cause you don't want negativity in your head. That seems very selfish. Maybe it is. I don't know. It's not like I was reading it and then, like, immediately taking action in a way that was helping to fix problems. I can still cut checks without reading the articles. I cut my checks, man! [laughs]"
Read the full interview at GQ.
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