Celebrity subjects the both of you to your fair share of criticism. How do you deal with people attacking you online?

Staples: I do not care. Why does it matter what somebody else has to say? Do you care? What if you told the dude at Target, “You bag my groceries horribly.” Do you think he’ll be like, “Fuck, my life is over”? They don’t care; it’s just a job, it’s not that serious. It’s just the Internet.

André: I care a lot; I’m very sensitive. I’m an Aries. I need everybody to like me. I’m insecure, and I need the validation of strangers to feel whole. So, I need every single racist 12-year-old on the Internet to like me, or I don’t feel complete.

Staples: How many “niggers” do you get a day?

André: [Laughs.] Several. I’d say several. How many n-bombs are dropped? It depends on what I post.

Staples: But, see, there are different types of n-bombs. You have the nuclear n-bomb, which is like, “Nigger, go back to Africa.” You have the n-car bomb, which is like, “Yo, wassup, nigga? When are you comin’ to Iowa?”

André: [Laughs.] It’s a spectrum. I think I get the entire spectrum.

Staples: I also saw The Revenant, and they were calling Native Americans “tree niggers,” and that is not cool. I’ve been wanting to say that on-camera for a minute. Motherfuckers are mad at Quentin Tarantino, but you can call someone a “tree nigger” when you’ve murdered almost all of their people? That’s not cool. Let’s not pick on Quentin Tarantino when you’re calling someone a “tree nigger,” because I don’t know if that’s actually a term. I definitely feel like that’s something they made up for that movie. Quentin Tarantino shot a fucking movie with cowboys in Wyoming and they’re saying “nigger” over there, and at this very second, someone just said “nigger” inside of a liquor store or inside of a Cracker Barrel. That just happened right now. I’m not sure they were calling Native Americans “tree niggers.” That sounds like some new shit.

André: They were freestyling pejoratives.

Eric, you’ve been known to respond to criticism on Instagram and Twitter.

André: Yeah, I go in.

Do you read the comments?

André: Yeah, I do.

Staples: Everybody reads the comments.

André: You do because you’re like a kid with a sore tooth—you have got to touch it. You can’t get too mad; it’s just lunatics. A lot of them are overwhelmingly positive. Nobody that’s talking shit about you on the Internet would say it to your face.

Staples: When you respond to most people who have something negative to say, they just want you to say something to them: “Oh shit, bruh, I didn’t think you’d reply, I fucking love you!”

André: Yeah, I get that all the fucking time. I go in on them, and then, “I was just joking man, I love your stuff!”

Staples: People have an overbearing need to project their inward doubt and hatred and emotions onto the outside world. I’ve had a lot of people online say they’re going to kill me at my shows. A lot of people say they’re going to punch me in the face—never happened. It’s just people being sad because their life sucks. I feel bad for those people; everybody deserves a right to be happy. But people just look at the wrong thing. We’ve made it so that you have to be special or a celebrity or some shit like that [to be happy]. It’s awful. A shitload of people feel like there’s no value in being an actual human being or a regular person. We’re all alive and doing okay and could be worse, but we make it seem like if you’re not an entertainer or an actor or someone with a high social profile on the Internet that your life is fucking worthless. So, you can’t really get mad at them. They’re going through something.