Michael Malice: The White Pill, Freedom, Hope, and Happiness Amidst Chaos
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§01Transcript · 00:00–10:22§02Transcript · 10:24–19:00§03Transcript · 19:02–26:59§04Transcript · 27:03–35:39§05Transcript · 35:41–44:03§06Transcript · 44:05–52:37§07Transcript · 52:40–1:01:28§08Transcript · 1:01:33–1:09:38§09Transcript · 1:09:40–1:19:00§10Transcript · 1:19:02–1:28:19§11Transcript · 1:28:22–1:36:34§12Transcript · 1:36:35–1:44:22§13Transcript · 1:44:23–1:51:46§14Transcript · 1:51:49–2:00:02§15Transcript · 2:00:03–2:08:28§16Transcript · 2:08:30–2:16:34§17Transcript · 2:16:35–2:25:16§18Transcript · 2:25:18–2:34:30§19Transcript · 2:34:34–2:42:39§20Transcript · 2:42:40–2:50:53§21Transcript · 2:50:54–2:59:25§22Transcript · 2:59:28–3:02:46§01Transcript · 00:00–10:22
The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, his second time on the podcast.
He's an anarchist, political thinker, podcaster and author.
He wrote Dear Reader, which is a book on North Korea, and The New Right,
a book on the various ideological movements at the fringe of American politics.
He hosts the podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y-O-U-R.
And in general, there's a lot of live shows on YouTube
that are at times profoundly absurd and at other times absurdly profound
and always full of humor and wisdom.
He is the Joker to my Batman and the caviar to my vodka.
His masterful dance between dark humor and difficult, even dangerous ideas
challenges me to think deeply about this world.
And when that fails, at least smile and have a good laugh at the absurdity of it all.
This episode has much of that.
His outfit, for example, the exact inverse of mine
with a white suit and a black shirt is just one example of that,
of the humor, trolling and brilliance that is Michael Malice.
Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite, business management software,
Athletic Greens, all in one nutrition drink, Sun Basket, meal delivery service and Cash App.
So the choice is success, health, food or money.
Choose wisely, my friends.
And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that Michael is in many ways a man of radical ideas,
but also a man with kindness in his heart.
Those two things are great ingredients for a fascinating conversation.
I hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year
who also have radical ideas about politics, science, technology and life.
At times, often perhaps, I might fail at asking the challenging questions
that should be asked, but I will try my best to do so
and hope to keep improving every time.
Mostly, I come to these conversations with an open mind and with love.
Unfortunately, that kind of approach can be taken advantage of in many ways.
It can be used by reporters or just people online later to highlight how or why
I'm ignorant or worse, I'm generally not a good human being.
In the context of this, I have two options.
I could either be cautious and afraid or second, be kind, thoughtful and fearless.
I choose the latter, hopefully while still being open, fragile and empathetic.
Again, I strive to be like the main character of The Idiot by Dostoevsky.
That's my New Year's resolution.
Be kind and do difficult things, difficult conversations,
difficult research projects and difficult entrepreneurial adventures.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts,
follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.
And now here's my conversation with Michael Malice.
Knock, knock.
You're stealing my bed?
I'll kill your family.
That's not how a knock-knock joke works.
Knock, knock, Michael.
You don't do knock-knock jokes with Russians.
Because if we have to knock at the door,
turn down the TV, you got to sit quiet.
We hope they go away.
You don't do that back in the Netherlands.
You know this.
It's triggering.
Who's there?
I can't even do it now.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Leon.
Leon who?
Leon me when you're not strong, Michael.
Well, that will never happen.
I stole elegantly, eloquently that joke from you.
The lie detector term.
That was a lie.
Elegantly and eloquently.
Well.
Yeah, you crossed it on a sheet of paper.
That means it's real.
The reason I bring it up is because you had the guts,
the brilliance to do a knock-knock joke.
Not once, but three times with Alex Jones.
I think it was like six.
I had a runner.
OK.
Maybe they started to sort of melt together in this beautiful
art form that you've created, which is like these kind,
loving knock-knock jokes with Alex Jones.
So you got a chance to meet him and talk to them twice with
Tim Pool.
Yeah.
In a long form conversation.
What was it like talking to Alex Jones, both on the deep
philosophical, intellectual level and staring the man in his eyes
and doing a knock-knock joke about Olive.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Olive.
I love you, Alex.
Well, there's a lot to explain.
Where do you start?
I've been on his show, InfoWars, a few times when I was
researching my book, Then You Write.
So I had had conversations with him before.
One of the things that I appreciate about Alex is he is a
lot more self-aware than people think and has a good sense of
humor.
And I also like a good twist ending.
So if you set people up and all these jokes are these kind of
vapid, you know, all of you jokes, and the last one's about
building seven, they're not going to see that one coming, nor
will he see that one coming.
I even had another one about Sandy Hook, which I didn't do on
the air because he was being like a good sport.
So I didn't, but that was the dagger that was kind of behind
my back if necessary.
But it was a good mechanism toward, I like it when things
work on several levels.
It was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation
guarded.
And this every so often, this is kind of hitting the control,
delete and bring it down to a certain point of calmness.
What about the love thing?
I mean, you're saying that that was a buildup to the dagger,
but it was also somehow really refreshing to get that little
jolt, like that pause.
You don't get that in conversations often.
Like I'm a huge fan of Rogan and he'll have a three hour
conversation, but at some point just pause and be like, I love
you, man.
Like it's in the cheesiest way possible because that seems
to be, it somehow hits the hardest then.
I don't know.
I don't know you didn't intend it that way, but with Alex
Jones to sit there and to say, I love you.
That was like that.
I just haven't never heard that before.
And so it struck me as like, not just funny for what you're
doing, but just like, whoa, we just took, because conversations
are all about like this ranting, especially with Alex Jones,
just like ranting about this or that, this part of the world.
Like, can you believe this shit?
That kind of thing.
But like to pause and be like, this is awesome.
I don't know if you felt that way, but.
Oh, I definitely felt that way.
So it was actually very fun.
I'll give you the backstory of how that happened.
It was, it was, it was silly because Tim calls me up and
there's this expression in marketing, don't go past the sale.
Right.
So if you're trying to sell someone a car and you're like,
it's got this feature, this feature, that feature.
And they're like, you know what?
I'm going to buy the car.
If you keep talking, you can only make them lose the sale.
You just get them to sign and get, get out of Dodge.
So Tim calls me up and he goes, okay, uh, here's what we're thinking.
This is top secret.
Alex is going to be on the show.
We want you on as well.
And I've never said yes to anything as quickly in my life.
Um, and then he keeps talking and I'm like, Tim, this, you
don't have to sell it.
I interrupted him.
I go, you don't have to sell it.
Why are you by the way?
I think because, um, I am kind of an agent of chaos and Alex is in his own way, an
agent of chaos and what is provides an opportunity in this kind of news media
space that you and I travel in.
It's the kind of things where none of us three, you know, as we said on the
show, knew what it would be like.
If you, you know, to certain within certain parameters, what, you know,
Megan Kelly or Wolf Blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be
like in a conversation to some extent, none of us had any idea that I knew they
didn't know I was bringing knock knock jokes.
Yeah.
Um, so that was kind of what was so excited.
I said at one point, I'm kind of envious of the audience because this is, there's
so many exciting things that are happening and that the internet and podcasting
provides people an opportunity to do that.
It was great.
Yeah.
That, that was the greatest pairing.
With Alex Jones that I've ever seen by far.
So like, so I immediately knew now this isn't a knock on Tim, but I don't
even know if Tim was prepared.
Tim was not prepared for this.
How could he be prepared?
Well, so I mean, I don't know if Tim is used to that.
I think Joe Rogan is more equipped, prepared for the chaos, just
the years he's been in it.
Like I immediately thought this is the right pairing for Joe Rogan.
Cause Alex Jones has been on Joe Rogan a few times, three times.
My favorite so far was with Tim Dillon.
Right.
For Jan, yeah.
But Tim was clearly, uh, Tim Dillon was also kind of, uh, uh, a genius in his own
right, but he was kind of a fan and he was back and he was stepping away.
He was almost like in awe of Alex Jones where, uh, you were both, you were
in awe of the experience that's being created and at the same time,
fearlessly just trolling the situation.
I mean, to do a knock knock joke to stop me, that just shows that
you're in control of the experience.
No, you're like riding the experience.
That immediately was like, this needs to be on Rogan.
So I hope that happens as well.
You're on your own, of course, on Rogan, but just you, that's an experience.
That's the, whatever, this gotta be a good name for it.
§02Transcript · 10:24–19:00
Like Jimi Hendrix experience, there's no Michael and Alex.
It's taken.
Well, I don't know how many years you can, you can restart the experience.
Because I feel, sorry to interrupt you.
I feel a very big responsibility, especially in 2020 to provide fun and
something cool and something unique that hasn't been done before for the audience.
I think this has been a very rough year on our audiences psychologically
and in other aspects of their lives.
So I feel if I'm going to be there, I'm going to put on a show and it's also
going to be great because it also alienates the people you don't want.
Right.
So there's a lot of people who sit there and be like, oh, he's telling
knock people who are too cool for school.
Uh, where they're like, oh, he's telling knock, knock jokes.
This is stupid.
I'm like, good.
If you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle with a
kid or with, without, you know, by yourself, that's on you and it's something
very, something I think is the enemy of cynicism and this idea that like, oh,
this is too silly and amethyst.
Like we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives.
I think it's something we could use more of.
It's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of have
be condemnatory about that or to do it in a certain very corporate fake way.
So it is something I encourage a lot, something I enjoy doing.
Um, and again, I like with the first time I was on Tim, I had a propeller
beanie on, you know, with the motorized and a lot of people were like, I can't
take anyone seriously who dresses like this.
I go good.
If you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of the ideas themselves,
you're not someone I want on my team.
Are we going to address the outfit you're wearing?
We can address it.
Sure.
You know, for those who are colorblind, Michael's wearing the, or just listening
to this, Michael's wearing the exact opposite, the inverse from, uh, from
another dimension outfit, which is a white suit and black shirt.
Uh, so genius.
Okay.
So, uh, you just see the next two looks I've planned.
Oh no.
Yeah.
They're great.
Well, obviously this relationship is going to end today.
So it's over.
Okay.
Is there some deep philosophy to the humor is, uh, this
goes to our trolling discussion.
Is there some, is there like chapters to this genius or is this just, uh,
what makes you smile in the morning?
Well, I mean, I think you're honestly, in this case, using
the word genius a little loosely.
I don't think this is particularly genius, but I do think it is fun.
It is exuberant.
It is joyous.
Um, I think the, the bigger my audience has gotten, um, and the more I actually
communicate with, you know, fans, I do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal,
maternal instincts.
It's, which is very, very odd.
I did not expect to have them.
What do you mean?
Who's the dad?
I'm the dad and the mom.
I remember, and it may have been similar for you.
I'm curious to hear it for young, smart, like, um, ambitious men, like 24 to 27
for me was a very rough period because that's the window where a lot of people
get married and they kind of check out.
And if you're very much kind of finding your own road, um, you don't know what's
happening.
No, one's in a position to really guide you or help you.
And it's, it's, it's tough.
It's a very tough window.
And what I'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position, but now
instead of them stumbling along for some of them, I'm the one who could be like,
no, no, no, no.
It's not you.
It's everybody else.
And to be able to give them that semblance of feeling seen to use a
cliched expression, to feel normal and that no, no, you're the, you're the,
you're the heroes here.
They're the background noise.
Um, it's just really very, uh, flattering and humbling to be in that position.
You have many minds, right?
There's the thoughtful kind.
Uh, Michael, there's like, I'm going to burn down the powerful.
Yeah.
Michael.
And then there's like, I'm going to have this just lighthearted trolling of the
world, which, and which of those are most important to the 24 to the 27 demographic.
I think it's, it is the combination.
You know, it's like if you're making a meal, you know, chicken Kiev, you need the
chicken, you need the ham, you need the butter sauce.
Um, because I think people, when you're young, you need to see someone who's
fought the fight for you and who's won.
So it's very easy to be defeatist.
So this is what winning looks like.
No, this is not, this is most assuredly what winning does not look like, but in
my normal clothes, a little bit more.
Uh, this is a good time to mention that clothes wise you're, you're wearing
sheath underwear and people should buy sheath underwear, use code malice20.
If you go to sheathunderwear.com use promo code malice20.
What I love about the, why I'm glad to promote the product and wear it.
It's the most comfortable underwear I've ever worn.
And you have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals.
That's, that's what you, I thought there was like a punchline coming.
No, it's a very nice aspect of the product.
Yeah.
But I think what, here's something else just as it goes back to, we're just
talking about, there are so many, and this is going to segue into this.
There are so many small companies who've been devastated this year.
We have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops.
Uh, like we've seen in 2020 who are innovators and making something happen.
And when you're just like one dude, who's producing a product,
they're a sponsor of mine.
I'm happy to, first of all, it's funny that I'm pitching underwear,
but pitching, but it's also.
Something I enjoy.
She says small business.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's microscopic like a thimble.
So this isn't a sponsor of mine, but this is a good segue.
So this is Russians.
We celebrate new years.
Yeah.
It's November.
We have dead motor was, he comes down, puts a present under your pillow.
So this is a company called JL Lawson.
He's a fan of yours.
He's a metal worker.
And he said, can I give you something to give to Lex?
I have one of his worry coins.
I'll tell you what it is.
He's not a sponsor.
This is not, I'm not getting paid for this.
So what a worry coin is, I carry around in my butt.
If you have raw denim, it's great.
Cause it brings you fades.
So you carry it around with you all the time.
It says worrying.
It's like paying a debt.
You don't owe.
Right.
And I carry this around and for now, it's been like a year.
Next time you're worrying, and this is good advice.
If you don't have a worry coin, go think about 10 years ago.
Yes.
And what you were worried about then.
And then think about, did any of those things pan out?
And some of them did, but you were able to handle it.
And that's a good way to maintain perspective.
So JL Lawson's the company.
He sent me this present.
I said, let me give it to Lex on air.
So enjoy.
So I also open it up.
Yeah.
JL Lawson and co to Lex from Anthony.
Yeah.
And I said, make something mathematical for Lex.
I don't even know what's in there.
You don't know what's in there.
No.
And it got through a TSA.
Could be a bomb.
It could be just like this episode.
Make sure you unwrap it close to the mic because it drives you for crazy.
That's really the best part.
Or is this what unboxing video looks like?
This conversation is going to be a big hit on the internet.
With the unboxing community.
I need to have an excited look on my face to make sure that the reaction
video is be an unboxing and a reaction video.
Lex screaming reacts.
and a reaction video.
- Like screaming react.
It's another box.
It's just a series of boxes.
- Lex, big fan since hearing you on Rogan months ago.
Most of your guests are over my head,
but still enjoyable.
- Aw.
- Like this episode, Michael was kind enough
to want to share my work with you.
Keep doing what you do.
Anthony Lawson.
Thanks Anthony.
- There's a lot in there.
- What is in there?
- I'll open some.
- Okay.
- All right.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Show it to the camera
and then make sure you look excited or not or disappointed.
- No, this is cool.
This is a worry coin like I was showing you.
- Oh, nice.
- So you hold it in your hand
and when you can do this with your thumb,
§03Transcript · 19:02–26:59
if people have anxiety or whatever.
- Oh, there's a lot of cool stuff in here.
Fibonacci coin.
- Oh, see, yeah, that's the math stuff.
- That's really awesome.
This is really cool.
- Wait, you got a big one in there too.
- That's what she said.
(laughing)
- I'm telling you,
last time you offended me saying I don't have humor.
- So I...
(laughing)
- The spin tray, micro brass and copper bronze.
By the way, the packaging is epic.
- I think that's his top.
He makes tops.
- Cool.
- Yeah, you spin it in there.
- It's the two different bronze and copper.
- I think he's the only one who makes these machined tops.
- And then he's sitting here, I guess.
- Yeah, but you could spin him in that section.
- Got it, cool.
Where's the worry thing?
- Here's the worry coin.
- Anyway, I wasn't listening.
What were you worried about 10 years ago?
- 10 years ago, 2010.
What would I have been worried about then?
- The government?
- No, that's not a worry.
- What was the North Korea book?
- That came out in 2014.
I went there in 2012.
Came out in January 2014.
It still pays my rent with the royalties.
- The North Korea book?
- Yeah.
This is why it's so much better.
- I gotta talk to you about self-publishing
'cause you brought that up.
- I'm doing the next book's also gonna be self-published.
- Can we talk about self-publishing?
- What's the whole idea of publishing,
like having a publisher and an agent?
'Cause there's a bunch of people
who've been reaching out to me
trying to get me to write a book, which is ridiculous.
- Why?
- There's people who are brilliant folks like you,
like Jordan Peterson, that I think have a lot of knowledge
to share with the world.
I think what I feel I can contribute to the world
in terms of impact is to build something.
Meaning like engineering stuff.
- Okay.
- Like a book.
- A book has to be engineered,
and I'm not using it loosely.
You have to engineer a book.
- No, for sure.
What I mean is like literally a product
with programming and artificial intelligence.
I wanna build a company, I want to,
'cause I have a few ideas that I feel I'm equipped.
And it has to do with your intuition
about the way you can build a better world, you individually.
Like what can you add to the world that's a positive thing?
And for me, I feel like the maximal thing
I can add to the world is at least to attempt
to build products that would add more love in the world.
And like, so I wanna focus on that.
The danger of the book for me, or any kind of writing,
and even this podcast is a little bit dangerous for me,
is like, it's fun.
- That's for sure.
(laughing)
- It's fun.
It's like it takes you into this place
where you start thinking about the world,
you start enjoying and playing with ideas,
you start, and like just your book on,
Hey Dear Reader, but also the new right,
like clearly you and I probably think similarly
in the sense that you did a lot of work.
- Yes, this next book is killing me.
- Yeah, as you mentioned often,
it's clear like on your YouTube channel,
which I'm a fan of, you often, it just comes out like,
you mentioned all of these books that you're reading,
it just comes through you, that you're suffering
through this and it changes you.
And it's clear that you're thinking deeply
about the world because of this book.
And I feel like if you do that, that's like,
when I first came to this country,
I read the book, The Giver, I need to read it again.
It's like, the red pill thing, it changes you
in where you can never be the same person again.
And I feel about a book in that same way.
The moment you write a book,
of course it depends on the book.
I could also just write like in my field,
a very technical book.
- No, that's a terrible idea.
- Yes, but that's okay, that doesn't really change you.
That's just like sharing information.
But like something where you're like,
how do I think about this world?
Can you just leave that behind you?
- I get it, dude, it's being pregnant.
It never escapes your brain, I'm telling you.
You're absolutely right.
- Yeah, I don't know.
It does seem to change you.
But the reason I bring that up
is 'cause there's this whole industry of people
that seem to not really contribute much
to the publication process,
but they make themselves seem necessary
for like if you wanna be in the New York Times
bestseller list kind of thing.
But also just being like reputable,
which I'm allergic to that whole concept.
But do you think it's possible to be
on the New York Times bestseller list
and be a reputable author and still be self-published?
- Not what you would wanna do.
Like people like Mark Sisson, I think is his name.
He wrote like "The Primal Blueprint."
So like if I'm getting the names correct,
he's the first paleo guy, right?
So he self-published it, it sold gangbusters,
but that would be on their health chart, I believe.
And it's a little bit of a different situation.
You would be reaching much more for the mainstream.
You'd be giving up a lot if you go through a publisher,
especially financially.
But yeah, you are not going to have the cred
because the publishing is a cartel.
The New York Times is part of this cartel.
And if you don't publish within this cartel,
they will do what they can, as any cartel has to,
by necessity of being cartel, to pretend you don't exist.
So they will, I was, I think, the first one
to have an hour on Book TV for Dear Reader,
'cause that was a Kickstarter book.
But this is something that people--
- Dear Reader was a Kickstarter book.
- Yeah.
This is something people would have to be aware of.
So you would be giving up a lot,
but you'd also be giving a lot to work with a publisher
'cause you're losing like a year and a half of your life
because they're glacial and they don't care.
- Well, that's my problem, it's not the money.
I mean, the money is whatever percent they take,
10, 20, 30, 50%--
- They're taking a huge chunk.
So if I sell a book through St. Martin's, it's a dollar.
If I sell a book through Amazon, which is Dear Reader,
that's $6.
So that's what, 87%, it's something crazy.
- But for me, what bothers me isn't the money,
for me personally, for me, what bothers me is incompetence.
Like whenever I go to the DMV or something like that--
- Can I interrupt you?
- Yeah.
- Let's talk incompetence.
- Yeah.
- New Right comes out last year.
- Yes.
- I get on Rogan, get on Rubin,
I call them and I said, "I got on these shows,
"is there money in the budget for travel?"
And they say, "We don't have that budget."
Fine.
- By the way, you got on those shows with no help from them.
- Correct, oh yeah, that's not even a question.
The reason they would want you to do a book
is 'cause they know you could get,
the only reason people get book deals nowadays, literally,
is 'cause they know that person can market their own book.
That's the only way.
And I got on Rubin, I got on Rogan,
and they go, "We don't have the money for travel,"
which is fair, "they can do Skype."
They told me this in writing.
And I'm like, "Okay."
- They can financially cover Skype?
(laughs)
- No, but it's like, "Hey, Joe, yeah,
"we don't have the budget, but you're gonna do Skype,
"hello, hello?"
(laughs)
So there is, another friend of mine
was on a show on CNBC with Nassim Taleb.
And they said, "Nassim wants a copy of the book."
And they're like, "Oh yeah, it's like four o'clock on Friday,
§04Transcript · 27:03–35:39
"so we're closed, so."
And he's like, he went there, picked it up,
and walked it the two blocks.
So there is, it's almost cartoonish.
And it's not incompetence, it's past that.
It's something almost, you can't really believe it.
I've had two friends who have been
literally rendered suicidal
because this was such a huge opportunity for them.
And it was like watching their kid
get beaten in front of them.
And I had to talk them off the ledge.
So it's, people do not appreciate how bad,
here's another example.
- The apathy of bureaucracy, something like that.
- I did this book, "Concierge Confidential."
There's a typo in the first chapter,
it ends with, "I'm about to, T-O-O."
They didn't fix it for the paperback.
Who cared?
It's just like, well, okay.
Yeah, great book, by the way.
It got NPR, gave it one of the books of the year.
So that was cool.
- So why participate in this?
- Because otherwise, New York Times
is gonna pretend you don't exist.
Getting booked on some shows might be more difficult,
although I think that's collapsing in real time.
You're not gonna get reviewed necessarily
on places like PW or some others.
- So the new book you're working on,
do you have a title yet or no?
- "The White Pill."
- "The White Pill."
Are you self-publishing that?
- Oh yeah, for sure.
- And what's the thinking behind that?
Just because you already have a huge following
and a big platform and--
- It's six times the cash.
If I finish the book in December,
I could have it out in February.
If I finish the book in December with a publisher,
it's gonna be out in December at the earliest, 2021.
Why am I giving up 10 months of my life?
- Well, this is the big one.
Do you have any leverage?
Do authors have leverage to say, "F you"?
Can you just say, "Can you?"
- What do you mean?
- Meaning like, "I wanna release this book in two months."
- Oh, no, no.
I mean, you'll have a contract
and then your agent can fight it,
but they don't have the capacity to rush things through.
- Yeah, I guess if the, 'cause I've heard big authors,
I don't know, Sam Harris, all those folks,
talk about like, they've accepted it, actually.
They've accepted, they're like,
"Yeah, it takes a long time to--"
- I'm not accepting it.
- But you're kind of implying
that a human being like me should.
- I'm saying these are your options.
- Right.
- So--
- I just hate it.
I hate the waiting because it's incompetence.
It's not necessarily the wait.
If I knew it wasn't, you know,
if it was the kind of people that are up at 2 a.m. at night
on a Friday and they love what you're doing
and they're helping create something special,
that's the sense I get with some of the Netflix folks,
for example, that work with people.
I just, I don't know anything about this world,
but you get like Netflix folks who help with shows.
You could tell that they're obsessed with those shows.
- Yeah, you're not gonna get that publishing.
If you hand, like I handed the book in,
I think it was July.
I didn't hear anything from my editor until December.
- Well, can we actually talk about the suffering?
- Sure.
- The darkest parts of writing a book.
So let's go to the full Michael Malice, Stephen King mode
of what are the darkest moments of writing this book?
And what is it, maybe start with the white pill.
What's the idea, what's the hope,
and what are your darkest moments around writing this book?
- So people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill,
the red, therefore the matrix.
The red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact
by the corporate press entertainment industry
is in fact a carefully constructed narrative
designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power
and everyone else under control.
And I guess one of my expressions is you take one red pill,
not the whole bottle.
Because at a certain point you think everything's a lie
and you're kind of no capacity for distinguishing truths.
- You're full of good one-liners.
- Well, thank you.
I'm full of something, that's for sure.
And what I saw in this space
is a lot of these red-pilled people
got very disheartened and cynical.
And one of my big heroes is Albert Camus,
and he said the worst thing is cynicism.
And that's something called the black pill,
which is the idea that it's just,
we're waiting for the end, it's hopeless.
And I don't see it that way at all.
And I'm like, all right, I have to address this
and not just with some kind of cheerleading,
everything's gonna be great, guys.
Here is why I am positive.
And not that I'm positive the good guys are gonna win,
but I'm positive the good guys can win.
And that's all you need,
because if your, God forbid, kid is kidnapped,
and there's a 10% chance that you can save them,
you're not gonna be like, well, I don't like those odds.
This is your country, this is your values,
this is your family.
I don't think it's much more than 10%.
And even if you lose, you will take pride
in that you did everything in your power to win.
- Is there a good definition of good guys
in the sense that-- - The ones who wear white.
- There's layers to this.
You're like modern day Shakespeare.
Is there a danger in thinking Adolf Hitler
was probably pretty confident
that he led a group of good guys?
- Listen, if Hitler did anything wrong, why isn't he in jail?
My Czech friend thought of that joke.
Actually, he says it in his accent, he goes,
if Hitler's so bad, why isn't he in the jail?
- That's a good point.
He's probably still alive, right?
- And look, yeah, hopefully.
- Oh boy, two of the three people listening to this
are very upset right now.
What were you even talking about?
Oh, how do you know what is good?
- There's lots of standards of good.
But if you're, for me, to be a good guy is
if you want to leave the world
a little bit better than you found it.
That, to me, is the definition of a good guy.
And I think there are many people
that that's not their motivation at all.
- It's about your motivation.
- Well, it's also about if your motivation
is at all correlated to reality.
No one thinks we're the bad guys, that's correct.
But are you taking steps to check your motivations
and also take a certain amount of humility?
Because if you're going to start
interfering with other people's lives,
you really better be sure you know
what you're talking about.
- The control of others,
if you do have centralized control
or then you kind of, you become a leader of a group,
you better know, you better do so humbly and cautiously.
- And also have steam valves, right?
So in case things go wrong, let's have,
I'm sure this is a lot happening with AI,
or whatever, or computers.
Like, okay, if something goes wrong here,
how do we have a workaround
to make sure it doesn't cause everything to collapse?
- Yeah, the going wrong thing,
I mean, the whole, the feedback mechanism.
Like, I wonder if people in Congress
think that things are really wrong.
- It's working for them.
- Are you sure?
Because-- - No, I'm not sure.
- Because I'd like to believe that the people
that at least when they got into politics
actually wanted, some of it is ego,
but some of it is wanting to be the kind of person
that builds a better world.
- Sure, I also think it's diverse.
Some are gonna have different motivations than others.
- But once you're in the system
and trying to build a better world,
how do you know that it's not working?
How do you take the basic feedback mechanisms
and actually productively change?
I mean, that's what it means to be a good guy,
is like, hmm, something is wrong here.
And that's why I like the Elon Musk,
think from first principles.
Like, wait, wait, wait, okay.
Let's ask the big question.
§05Transcript · 35:41–44:03
Can this be, one, is this working at all?
Like, the way we're solving this particular problem
of government, is this working at all?
And then stepping away and saying,
as opposed to modifying this bill or that bill
or this little strategy, like increase the tax by this much
or decrease the tax by this much,
why do we have a democracy at all?
Or why do we have any kind of representative democracy?
Shouldn't it be a pure democracy?
Or why do we have states,
like representation of states and federal government
and so on?
Why do we have this kind of separation of powers?
Is this different?
Why do we have term limits or not?
Like big things.
Like, how do you actually make that happen?
And is that what it means to be a good guy?
It's like taking big revolutionary steps
as opposed to incremental steps.
- Well, I don't know that you could be a politician
to be a good guy, to be honest.
And let me give you a counterexample,
someone who you could tell is not being a good guy.
Joe Biden said he was,
he regards the Iraq war as a mistake, okay?
You and I have made mistakes in our lives, I'm sure.
None of our mistakes have caused
tens of thousands of people to die.
If, let's suppose I'm, for yourself.
That's fair, okay, I'll take that.
I don't build the kill bots.
If I were a chef, let's take it out of politics,
and in my restaurant, somehow, accidentally,
someone ate something and they died.
A, I would feel horrible.
But more importantly, I would be like,
we need to look through this system
and figure out how it got to the point
where someone lost their life,
because that can never happen again.
And we need to figure out step by step.
I'm not a gun person, but there's this checklist
of if you're holding a gun, there's five things to do.
And if you get too wrong, you're gonna be,
it's like, assume every gun is loaded,
only point it at something that you wanna kill,
and there's three other things.
And it's to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
So if I made, if I'm that chef,
and I would have to not only feel guilt,
but take preventative action to make sure,
this has no possibility of happening again.
If you look at the staff he's putting in,
it's the same warmongers that would have advised him
to get into the Iraq War on the first time.
That is, to me, is not a good guy.
That, to me, is someone who does not feel remorse
for their responsibility in killing not only many Americans,
but some of us think that dead Iraqis
isn't necessarily ideal either.
- Okay, let's talk a bit about war.
Maybe you can also correct me on something.
The first time I found myself into Barack Obama
was, I don't know how many years ago this was,
but when I maybe heard a speech of his
about him speaking out against the war.
- Yeah.
- And him, I think it's on record
saying he was against the war,
before it was happening.
- But he wasn't in Senate at the time,
so it was very easy for him to say this.
- But see, people say that.
People say that.
People say it was easy,
and some people say it's strategically the wise thing to do,
given some kind of calculus, whatever.
But I, to this day, give him,
that's the reason I've always given him props,
in my mind, this is a man of character.
I also personally really value great speeches.
I think speeches are really important for leaders,
'cause they inspire the world.
It's like, one of the most,
best things you can contribute to the world is great,
like, through intellect,
mold ideas in a way that's communicable
to a huge number of people.
- Yeah, it's better to persuade than to force,
in every instance.
- That's where I disagree with Chomsky.
He said, if you're,
Chomsky's whole idea was that,
if you're a really eloquent speaker,
that means your ideas aren't that good.
- That's nonsense.
- Yeah, so, I think that's a way for him to describe,
like, I speak in a very boring way.
Maybe that's the pitch for this podcast.
I speak boring so that the ideas are the things you value,
and it's also useful to go to sleep.
But the, that's why I really liked Obama
throughout his life, and still do.
But when I first, like, saw this as,
for some reason, you can disagree,
I thought he's a man of character,
is to, when most politicians,
most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power,
I think were for the war,
or too afraid to be against the war.
That's why I liked Bernie Sanders,
and that's why I liked, like, in the early days,
Obama, for speaking out against the war.
And not, like, in this weird activist way,
not weird, but not saying I'm an activist,
this is, but, like, just saying the common sense thing,
and being brave enough to say the common sense thing,
without, like, having a big sign,
and saying I'm going to be the anti-war candidate,
or something like that.
But just saying this is not a good idea.
- Yeah, and I think it's, for those of us
who are old enough to remember,
it's pretty despicable what happened with Tulsi in 2020.
She was the biggest anti-war candidate,
and she was marginalized within her own party,
which I guess you can make sense,
she's just a congresswoman from Hawaii.
But the corporate press did everything in their power
to diminish her and pretend she didn't existed.
And for those of us who remember where 12 years prior,
when George W. Bush had
the Republican National Convention in New York,
and it was, like, the biggest protest in history,
and the Iraq War led to democratic landslides
in 2006 and 2008, to have that completely not part
of the Democratic Party in 2020
is both shocking and reprehensible.
- Hey, Michael.
- Is it?
(laughing)
You don't have to say, "Hey, Michael,"
you just say, "Knock, knock."
- No, it's not a knock-knock joke.
- Oh, okay, hey, Lusha.
(laughing)
- What did the volcano say to its true love?
- What?
- I love you.
(laughing)
- These jokes work better
when you know how to speak English.
- It was actually in Russian, I did Google Translate.
Okay.
Back to your book, "In the Suffering."
You somehow turned it positive,
and as one who's wearing,
who's the representative of the black pill
in this conversation, what are some of the darker moments,
what are some of the hardest challenges
of putting together this book, the white pill?
- Content, content, content.
So if I'm having a page about Reagan taking on Gerald Ford
in the 1976 presidential primaries,
I'm gonna have to read, like, 20.
So, and it's the thing, like,
if there'll be sometimes I'll remember some quote somewhere,
and then I have to spend an hour trying to find it,
because I want it to be as dense
with information as possible.
- Like, how do you structure
the main philosophical ideas you wanna convey?
Is that already planned out?
- No, the book changed entirely from its conception.
So my buddy Ryan Holiday had a series of books,
still does, where he takes the ideas of the Stoics,
and he applies them to contemporary terms.
He has this whole cottage industry
that he's doing very well with.
And I'd asked him years ago if I could do that with Camus,
and he's like, "Sure, go for it."
And I was going to rework Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus,"
and I read it recently, I reread it,
and this wasn't the book I remembered at all.
And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna write the book
that I remembered.
But the more I was writing it,
one of the things I always yell at conservatives about,
there's a long list, is they don't talk about
the great victory of conservatism,
which was the winning of the Cold War without firing a shot.
And I said, "You can't expect the New York Times
"to tell this story because the blood is on their hands."
And I'm like, "Well, Michael,
"instead of complaining about it, why don't you do it?
"Why don't you talk?"
That is a great example of the good guys
winning over the bad guys.
§06Transcript · 44:05–52:37
And that's become, A, the victory is beautiful,
but also pointing out to people,
when people are like, "Oh, things are worse
"than they've ever been,"
they don't appreciate how bad things were in the '30s,
what Stalin was doing overseas,
and how people in the West were advocating
to bring that here.
So that's kind of pointing out how bad things were
and how good they became.
And you don't have to be a Republican or conservative
to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism
and the peaceful liberation of half the world.
- So that's a picture of the good guys winning.
- Oh, yeah.
- Well, how does that connect to Sisyphus?
And maybe to speak deeper to life
and whatever the hell this thing is,
which is what I remember the myth of Sisyphus being about.
So where does the threat of Camus
sort of lie in the work that you're doing?
- So the myth of Sisyphus,
which I had remembered incorrectly,
is actually just a five to seven page coda
to the whole book at the very end.
Like you only need to read that little essay
called "The Myth of Sisyphus."
The broader work is about Camus' concept of the absurd
and the absurd man within literature.
And it's just like, I don't really care
about this character in Dostoevsky
and all this other stuff that you're talking about.
It's of no relevance.
But the myth of Sisyphus, the myth itself, not the book,
or the essay of his, is this Greek character,
and Sisyphus is forced in hell to roll a rock up a hill.
For eternity, at the very last moment, the rock falls away.
And Camus' takeaway from the story
is that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
And there's several interpretations of this,
but one is once you accept
that you are living an absurdist existence,
once you own your reality, it loses its bite.
And you can start with that as your kind of baseline.
- And bite is suffering.
- And hopelessness.
So I think when people look at how much ridiculousness
is happening in America and it's escalating,
you can either think, oh, all is lost,
or you can, and I think you and I
have lived our lives like this,
you can live life more like a surfer,
whereas you're never gonna control the ocean.
But you can sure enjoy that ride and stop,
if you're trying to control the waves, yeah, you're done.
But if you're like, all right, I've got my board,
I'm gonna see where this takes me,
surfing, from what I understand, is a pretty fun activity.
And also sometimes dangerous,
but you'd have to ask Tulsi about that.
- So we were offline talking about Stalin
and the evils of the Soviet regime.
- Yeah.
- One of the things I mentioned,
I watched the movie "Mr. Jones,"
but it's about the 1930s, called the more,
what would you say, the torture of the Ukrainian people
by Stalin.
One interesting thing to me,
that I'd love to hear your opinion about,
is the role of journalism in all of this.
And also about 1930s Germany.
So what's the role of journalists and intellectuals
in a time when trouble is brewing,
but it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking
to understand that trouble is brewing.
Like if you were a journalist,
or if you were just like an intellectual, a thinker,
but also a voice in the space of public discourse,
what would you do in 1930s about Stalin, about Haldemar?
And what would you do about Nazi Germany in 1937, 1938?
- So that's really funny that you asked that,
because currently how the book is structured,
it's like, books often follow three act structure, right?
So act three is the 80s, act one is the 30s,
and act two is gonna be like,
all right, let's suppose you were in the 30s.
Are you just gonna give up?
Like, are you just gonna be like,
well, we're screwed, and you'd be right to say,
things are gonna be very bad for a long time.
Or are you going to be one of those few who are like,
we're gonna do something about this,
and we're gonna go down swinging.
There are two books I can recommend,
which are just masterpieces that are written by women,
that just are historians that are just superb.
There's a book called "Beyond Belief" by Deborah Lippstadt.
She talks about the rise of Nazi Germany
as seen through the press.
And what was amazing,
and she does a great job empathizing with the press
and understand their perspective,
is we remember, and Chamberlain gets a bad rap,
Neville Chamberlain, for kind of appeasing Hitler,
because not that long ago, they had the Great War.
They had World War I,
and they had the carnage
that the earth had never seen before.
And when you had people made out of meat,
meeting industrial machines,
and plastic surgery was invented as a consequence of this,
they're coming back mangled and disfigured, and for what?
And this was a world where the Kaiser
was the most evil person who ever lived.
And we all had the Western propaganda about the Han,
and all the rapes, and all this barbarism,
and blah, blah, blah.
So not that long later,
when you're hearing all this propaganda,
which was factual, about Hitler,
it's like, we heard this.
We heard this 20 years ago.
This was all lies.
Give us a break.
And she has all the quotes from the different agencies
and how they addressed it.
Plus, they had very limited information.
It's not like Nazi Germany was an open society
where reporters can walk around,
and they were under a lot of pressure as well
in those areas.
- And Hitler himself was pretty good at,
he let some stuff slip,
but usually he made it seem like he wants peace.
He wants world peace.
- This was amazing.
They were making the argument that
because all these Jews were being beaten up on the street,
this proved, this was the hot take of the day,
that Hitler was weak,
because since Hitler's a statesman,
and he can't control these hooligans,
that shows his control and power is tenuous,
and this is all gonna go away.
- By the way, I mean, Hitler thought that too.
He was kind of afraid of the branchers, whatever.
He was afraid of these hooligans a little bit.
They were useful to him,
but at a certain point, yeah, they can get in the way.
That's why he wanted to get control of the military,
the army, their regiment.
If you wanna take over the world,
you can't do it with hooligans.
You have to do it with an actual army.
- And then you had Kristallnacht,
which was a nationwide pogrom,
and then all the news agencies universally were like,
"Oh, crap, we got this wrong,"
and the condemnation was universal.
So that book traces the West's reaction
to what's going on there,
and including the reaction to the incipient Holocaust,
as people being, you know, what they knew,
when did they know.
There was not ambiguity about people.
I think there's this myth that she dispels
that they didn't know the Holocaust was happening
or they didn't care.
They were aware,
but they were already at war with Nazi Germany.
Like, literally, what else could they do at that point,
you know, to rescue all these Jews?
So that's a superb book, and Ann Appelbaum,
I think the book is called "Red Famine,"
came out fairly recently, and she brings the receipts.
And she's a, you know, this is something I really hate
with the binary thinkers, where people think,
"Oh, you know, if you're a Democrat,
"you're basically a communist."
They call Joe Biden a Marxist.
It's just like, you know, she's a hard lefty.
She has TDS, but this book just systemically
lays out what Stalin did.
- By the way, I'm triggered by the binary thinkers,
and for those who don't know,
TDS0011 is Trump Derangement Syndrome.
- Yes, so they, you know, forced the starvation
of this entire population, and they, it's not only that,
it's like they knew if you weren't starving
by looking at you, that you were hiding food.
So they'd come back to your house at night
and break your fingers in the door,
or take, burn down your house,
and now you're on the street without food,
because you lied, 'cause this is the people's food.
You're a kulak, you're a landowner.
And very quickly, a kulak, which meant, like,
peasant landowner, became anyone who had a piece of bread.
And it was systemic and ongoing,
§07Transcript · 52:40–1:01:28
and many people in the press did not believe it.
There was a British journalist, I believe,
who got out of the train, Ukraine,
like one town earlier, and walked,
and he described all this, and he was mocked and derided,
and this is just anti-Russian propaganda,
because at the time, in the '30s,
this was, socialism had come to fruition.
This was a noble experiment.
I'd seen the future, and it works,
as I think Sidney Webb was the guy who said that.
And the premise was, let's see what happens.
We've never tried something like that.
And they were perfectly happy
to have this experiment happen overseas
at the price of the Russian people,
because it's like, you know what?
Maybe this'll be paradise on Earth.
And there's a, I address this in my book as well,
there's a superb essay, I think, by Eugene Genovese,
and he talks about the question,
the question being, what did you know,
and when did you know it?
What did you know about the concentration camps?
What did you know about the starvation?
What did you know about children being taught at school
to turn in their parents for having some extra bread?
And his conclusion is, we all knew,
and we all knew from the beginning, every bit of it,
and we didn't care, because we were more interested
in promoting this ideology.
So when people are kind of thinking
the worst thing on Earth is like Robert E. Lee's statue
being taken down to Washington, D.C.,
we were being told,
and especially in a much more limited news information world
where now you have literally anyone can have a Twitter,
but how many outlets were there,
that this is, we're backwards, they're the future,
they're scientific, we have the vagaries of the market,
which led to the Great Depression,
and when you see what was being put over
on the American public at the time,
anyone who thinks things are as bad now
as they've ever been is simply delusional or ignorant.
- Yeah, I would say just as a small aside,
that's why reading, as I'm almost done
with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,"
- Oh, yeah.
- Is, it's a, refreshes, resets the palette
of your understanding of what is good and evil in the world
that I think is really useful now.
Like, you know, what helps me be really positive
and almost naive on Twitter and in the world
is by just studying history.
- Yeah.
- And comparing it to how amazing things are today,
but in that time, what would you do?
What does a brave mind do?
And not just acts of bravery,
but how do you be effective in that?
And that's something I often think about.
It's sometimes easy to be an activist
in terms of just saying stuff.
It's hard to be effective at your activism.
- One of the big questions historians have constantly
is how did this happen?
A, is to make sure it doesn't happen again,
but this is Germany.
This is not some kind of weirdo cult nation.
They're very advanced, very,
in the land of poets and philosophers.
How did it get to that point
that they're just shooting children
and everyone's cheering for this?
- Specifically on the antisemitism and the Holocaust.
- No, totalitarianism, the cult of Hitler
and just this whole kind of thing.
- Sorry to interrupt, but there's two sides.
I don't know if you want to separate them.
One is the totalitarianism and the entirety
of the Nazi regime, and then there's the Holocaust,
which is like, you know, going, I would say,
like very specifically, as I think you're about to describe,
is like, you know, targeting Jews very much so.
I don't know if you see those as two separate things.
- I think they're very interconnected,
but I think if you look at it,
everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up Anne Frank,
but if you look at the numbers,
they'd be the ones calling the Stasi on her
or whoever the people were at the time,
and not the Stasi, obviously,
and patting themselves on the back for it.
- So sorry to pause on that.
That's a really important thing.
If you're listening to this,
that, and you were in Germany at the time,
you would have likely been willing to commit
or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against Jews.
Like, you have to really sit with that idea,
that it would have been somebody who just sees this
and is not bothered by it,
and also very likely kind of understand this
as a necessary evil or even a necessary good.
- Yeah, and I think people think
that they would be the abolitionists marching on Selma.
The numbers don't add up to that at all,
and I think the question would be,
what social, my friend was on Tinder, my friend Matt,
who's a great dude, and the question was,
what's the most controversial opinion you have?
This is in New York, and the girl wrote, "I hate Trump."
And what people perceive themselves
as being courageous in saying and doing,
and what is the actual social costs of you saying
or doing this are two very disconnected things.
And we're also trained by corporate media
to have completely vapid, uninteresting, banal ideas,
and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries.
There are people who still in New York will take pride
'cause they have a gay friend.
And it's like, first of all, who cares?
But second of all, you are not a hero.
And that person's not your prop, by the way.
That's another big problem.
- Which is why I'd like to give Richard Wolff a shout out
for being an intellectual who talks about communism.
I think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now
to speak about communism seriously.
There's difficult waters to tread, is that the expression?
There's difficult paths to walk.
I love watching a robot try to use idiom
in a language he doesn't know.
- Zero, zero, one, one.
I'm quite deeply hurt by the binary comment.
- Are you?
Your feeling has gone from one to zero.
(laughing)
- Yeah.
- What is love?
- My buffers have overflown.
No, but there's difficult, I feel like communism
is universally seen as a bad thing currently
in intellectual circles.
- Yes.
- And I think maybe some people disagree with that.
People say like far left people are trying to,
there's some people who argue the BLM movement
is some kind of harm of a Marxist.
I mean, I don't really follow the deep logic in that,
whatever, but it's just--
- Well, they said they were formed by Marxism,
the founder, co-founder.
- Yeah, but stating that is different than--
- There's Marx the totalitarian,
there's also Marx the revolutionary.
I think they're talking more like we're revolutionaries,
we're gonna overthrow the status quo.
- Yeah, right, but we can have that further discussion,
but I just don't think they speak deeply
about political systems and saying communism
is going to be the righteous system.
There's not a deep intellectual discourse, what I mean.
But if you were to try to be on stage
with the Jordan Peterson,
like to me the brave thing now,
it would be to argue for communism.
It'd be interesting to see, not many people do it.
I certainly wouldn't be willing to do it.
I don't have enough, first of all, I don't believe it,
but second of all, it's a very difficult argument to make
because you would get so much fire,
which is why I like Richard Wolff,
he's one of the people who is quite rigorously showing
that there's some good ideas within the system of communism,
specifically saying that attacking more
the negative sides of capitalism.
So saying that there is,
that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism.
I mean, I disagree with that, but I think it's a--
- I love how something is like,
we've got a body count of 60 million,
but this, everything is, and potentially,
like water can drown everyone on earth.
So this is incoherent.
- Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad,
but nuclear energy is good.
- Sure, well, nuclear weapons also can be good.
You can easily make the argument,
which I don't know that I subscribe to,
that nuclear weapons prevented boots on the ground war,
and it would cause them to be much more contained.
- And they're also quite effective
at changing the direction of an asteroid
that's about to hit earth,
as I've learned from a movie. - Armageddon.
- Yeah, Armageddon.
And they're actually useful, as Elon Musk has claimed
for application for, prior to colonizing Mars,
§08Transcript · 1:01:33–1:09:38
making it more habitable.
- Oh, okay.
- So it should change. - Gotta do something.
(both laughing)
- But, but, but, yes, but I guess what I'm saying
is there's place for nuance,
and there's some topics so hot, like communism,
where nuance is very difficult to have.
And I feel like with Nazi Germany,
it was a similar thing at the time.
- Let me tell, you wanna talk about Jeanette Rankin,
who was one of my favorite people?
So Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress.
She was elected before women's suffrage
was passed the constitutional amendment for Montana.
She was elected in 1916.
She was one of a handful of people
to vote against the US going into the Great War,
which was the right call at the time.
She was a pacifist, Republican as well, coincidentally.
She lost her seat, ran again in, was it 1940?
Got the seat again, and was the only person to vote
against getting into World War II.
It was not a unanimous choice.
Jeanette Rankin was the one person,
and she said, "You can no more win a war
"than you can win a hurricane."
So she's one of these interesting, and talk about bravery.
You're the one vote after Pearl Harbor to say,
"We're not doing this."
And I mean, the pressure she must've been under at the time
is, and of course, many people are not interested
in hearing her perspective.
She's crazy, she's evil, blah, blah, blah.
It's also funny, someone on my Twitter,
when I talked about her, goes,
"Maybe she had Hitler's sympathies."
Like, yeah, Ms. Rankin was a big fan of Hitler.
That's, you figured it out, guys.
- Do you think there's an argument to be made
that United States should not have gotten involved
in World War II?
- Oh, easy, an easy argument.
The argument, there's, I talk about this in The New Right.
So on internet circles, there's something called
Godwin's Law, which means the longer
an internet conversation goes on,
the probability someone gets compared to Hitler becomes one.
In certain New Right circles,
the longer the conversation goes on,
the more likelihood that the argument will become,
we should have been in World War II also becomes one.
And the argument is, at the very least,
stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other off,
and then go in and knock off the weaker one.
And you're gonna be saving, destroying two nightmare systems.
And I think that's an easy argument to make.
Now, it's hard to pull off after Pearl Harbor,
but in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a tough sell.
- What about after Pearl Harbor?
- I mean, that's what I'm saying, after Pearl Harbor,
how are you gonna sell that to the people?
The argument is blah, blah, the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, there's no scenario
where that doesn't happen, really,
if you're, unless you're going in way earlier.
But even so, Hitler had said,
if the Jews launch another war,
we're gonna wipe them from the face of the earth.
So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler
as an argument for this.
Another thing he did, which was diabolical,
is in order to make it that people could not accept Jews
as refugees, if they were gonna leave Germany,
they had to be penniless.
So now you have, it's not like they're coming over
with money and they can take care of themselves.
No, no, they're gonna be completely destitute.
- Makes it harder to accept them, yeah.
- Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language,
it's a tough sell.
- So speaking of Goodwin's Law,
what do you make of this condition,
Trump derangement syndrome?
- Yeah.
- And the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler?
- I think it's despicable.
And I'll give you an example, something parallel
that I think more people should be regarding as despicable.
Earlier in 2020, we were all told
that unless we were in Syria immediately,
the Kurds were gonna be exterminated.
They invoked the Holocaust.
This is gonna be another genocide.
And if you're not for this, you should,
you're basically forcing another Holocaust.
None of the people who use this argument,
we didn't go to Syria, the Kurds were not exterminated,
just vanished from the news, had any consequences
for using this kind of a comparison.
So I think it's really kind of fatuous.
And I think it's amazing that people think Hitler's
the only tyrant who ever lived.
Like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler.
You know how you know he's not Hitler?
Because you can tweet at him,
and no one comes to your house to kill your family.
Like that's kind of a big difference.
Also the difference between Trump and many of his critics
is that his grandchildren will be raised as Jews.
So that's also kind of a,
and Deborah Lipschitz talks about this a lot.
The New York Times at the time,
there's another book called "Buried by the Times"
which talks about the New York Times in the World War II.
Because the idea that Jews weren't white was a Hitler idea.
The New York Times at the time,
Salzburger, wanted to be against this idea.
So they specifically downplayed the antisemitism
as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive.
So the argument that you can separate Nazism
from antisemitism is a historical debate people have.
And my perspective is, I think it's,
I do not find it convincing that you can separate those two.
I think antisemitism was essential to Nazism.
I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism
have very big differences.
- Do you think antisemitism is fundamental
to who Hitler was?
Or was it just the,
so this is the interesting thing is like,
it was a tool that he saw as being effective?
- No, he believed it.
- So why do you see those as intricately connected?
Could Hitler have accomplished the same amount
or more without the Holocaust?
- Yeah, 'cause think about how many resources
you got to divert at a time
where you have Operation Barbarossa with Stalin.
So why are they so connected?
Is it because Hitler was insane?
Or was he a bad strategist?
- He was obviously a bad strategist.
He took, he had no need to open a second front.
His generals, my understanding, told him this is crazy.
It didn't work out for him at all.
I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war,
it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect.
There's a book about, I forget what it's called,
where it talked about him at that point
was just high all the time on amphetamines
and that could have affected his thinking.
- Yeah, there's a really good book on drugs.
I mean, I forget what it's called,
but yeah, it's a really good one.
- But it was, I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel
of the Nazi mythology.
And this kind of one universal figure
to explain this kind of skeleton key.
- But it could have been the communists.
I mean, that could have been the source of the hatred.
So like-- - But the communists
didn't get Germany into World War I,
like he said the Jews did.
- It seems to me that the atrocity of the Holocaust
is the reason we see Hitler as evil.
- No, the reason we see Hitler as evil
is 'cause of World War II propaganda still.
Because we don't see Stalin as evil.
- Right, that's my main point. - We don't see Mao as evil
to that extent.
I think that-- - Why?
Like, why would you say that?
- You know why? - The nature
of that propaganda.
- Because I think a lot of the problem
for the certain type of mentality
is Hitler didn't mass murder equally.
So as long as you're killing just one group,
it's a problem.
But if you're murdering everyone equally,
all of a sudden it's like, eh, what are you gonna do?
So the fact, like you were saying,
the Haldimard is not common knowledge,
the fact that Mao's 50 million dead
are not common knowledge,
and Richard Nixon can be raising a glass to him in China,
these are things that I think the West
has not done a good job reconciling.
- Knock, knock. - Who's there?
- Frank. - Frank who?
- Frank, you for being my friend, Michael.
- And the heart attacks will say,
Frank, you for being my friend.
- Is it, is it, is it?
- You gotta do it like this.
- Okay, all right. - Yeah.
- Okay.
Now back to Hitler.
(laughing)
§09Transcript · 1:09:40–1:19:00
Do you think Hitler could have been stopped?
We kind of talked about it a little bit
in terms of how to, what is the brave thing to do
in the time of Nazi Germany, but do you think,
I mean, I'm not even gonna ask about Stalin
in terms of could Stalin have been stopped,
'cause probably the answer is there's no,
but on the Hitler side, could Hitler have been stopped?
- I think a lot of these things,
a lot of luck has to play with it.
He was almost assassinated.
If you mean by like the West, it's very hard.
I mean, yeah.
- By the German people too, I mean, could,
like if politically speaking, there was a rise to power
through the '30s, through the '20s really,
I mean, like can whoever, it's not about Hitler,
it's about that kind of way of thinking,
that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble,
and sometimes on a mass scale,
could that have been stopped in Germany
or maybe in the Soviet Union?
- Well, I think this is one of the best arguments
against radicalization in the States,
which is how do you engage when you have like 30%
of the population who are members of a party,
which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing
the existing democracy?
Stalin gave orders that the communists
who had a pretty sizable population, the Reichstag,
that their target shouldn't be the Nazis,
but the liberals and the social Democrats,
and they invented the term social fascist for them.
So instead of, they're just like jihadis,
instead of taking their sights on Nazism,
they set their sights on the moderates,
because they figured the choice between Hitler and us,
we're gonna win, and this was a huge gamble,
and they were all killed or had to flee,
and the ones who fled were killed also by Stalin,
so that's my understanding.
So this is an easy way where he could have been
certainly heavily mitigated.
- What about France and England,
that it was obvious that Hitler was lying,
and they wanted peace so bad
that they were willing to put up with it,
even after Czechoslovakia?
This is the anti-pacifist argument,
which is like they should have
threatened military force more.
- But then the other anti-pacifist argument is,
if you're gonna, remember Barack Obama had the red line,
if you cross this red line in Syria, we're gonna go in,
and Assad or whatever's like, yeah, cool,
and he's like, oh, okay, well, sorry.
So if you're a threatening force,
there's the great song lyric,
don't show your guns unless you intend to fight, right?
So it's very clear with free countries
through what's in the press,
whether the institutional will is there
to follow through on these threats,
so I think it would have been very hard for Chamberlain
to rally the British people to take on Hitler
just after the great, I mean,
the suffering that Britons took on the Great War,
they still, obviously, it means so much more to them
than it does to us in the West.
- What about, what do you make of Churchill then?
Like why was Churchill able to rally the British people?
Why was he, like, do you give much credit to Churchill
for being one of the great forces
in stopping Hitler in World War II?
- I don't think that's really in dispute.
I think he was very much regarded
as this kind of the right man at the right time,
and I think Chamberlain took a gamble.
The expression peace in our time was Neville Chamberlain
when he signed the appeasement with Hitler,
and he goes, "We now have peace in our time,
"now go home and get a good night's sleep."
That's what he said, 'cause he's like,
"All right, he's gonna stop here."
And it's not impossible that if you just gave,
like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait,
it's not impossible that he's not gonna invade Saudi Arabia
next, something like that.
- Let's see, okay, but everything I've read,
it's like, of course, there's, it's not impossible,
but when you're in the room with Hitler,
you should be able to see like man to man,
like to me, a great leader should be able to see
past the facade and see like, yes,
everything in life is a risk,
but it seems like the right risk to take with Hitler.
Like it's surprising to me, I know there's charisma,
but it's surprising to me people did not see
through this facade.
- I really hate the idea of hindsight
in everything being 2020,
and I think it's a very good idea generally,
not most thinking generally, not in this specific instance,
to give our ancestors more credit
than we tend to give them,
'cause people often, here's a great example
from another context, which is lightning rods.
People always talk about religious people being stupid
and superstitious, and they weren't,
they often were very well reasoned.
An example of this is lightning rods,
which is every year, whatever town,
the church was the tallest building,
and that's the one that always got hit by lightning
and got caught on fire.
Now, what, it's a coincidence that it's always the church?
Like that makes logical sense.
Now, they didn't realize, well, it's because it's the tallest
and therefore that attracts the electricity,
and in fact, when they invented lighting rods,
this was a controversy 'cause it's like,
well, how is God going to show his displeasure
if now it's striking this lightning rod
and not burning down the church?
So a lot of times, things are a lot more coherent
than we give them credit for,
and again, Chamberlain, he's the head of a parliamentary
party, so he does not have the freedom, in a sense,
that a Hitler would to be like, all right,
we're doing this again, boys.
We don't know what it's like in the room with Hitler.
Come on, that's, we really have no idea.
- But I think you have to think about that, right?
- Yeah, but you can, I can very easily see him in the room
being very calm and charming, and then you think,
okay, the guy with the speeches is the act,
and he's putting on a show for his people,
and this is the real one.
- Okay, so let's take somebody as an example.
Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin.
- Yes.
- Okay.
I don't know why saying his name makes my voice crack.
(both laugh)
- 'Cause you're scared he could hear you.
It's like Beetlejuice.
Vlad, yeah.
- So there's a lot of people that--
- Was he the one who built you?
(both laugh)
- No, that was a collaboration.
What's, it's a double-blind engineering effort
where I was not told of who my maker was.
There's a backstory, but--
- There's a talking cricket, Pinocchio.
You'll be a real voice.
- I talk about him quite a bit
because I find him fascinating.
Now, there's a really important line that people say,
like, why does Lex admire Putin?
I do not admire Putin.
I find the man fascinating.
I find Hitler fascinating.
I find a lot of figures in history fascinating,
both good and bad.
And the figures, just as you said,
that are with us today, like Vladimir Putin,
like Donald Trump, like Barack Obama,
it's difficult to place them
on the spectrum of good and evil
because that's only really applies
to when you see the consequences of their action
in a historical context.
So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil.
And based on our discussion about Hitler,
that's something I think about a lot,
which is in the room with Putin,
and there's also a lot of historical descriptions
of what it's like to be in the room
with Hitler in the 1930s.
There is a lot of charisma.
In the same way, I find Putin to be very charismatic
in his own way.
The humor, the wit, the brilliance,
there's a simplicity of the way he thinks
that really, if taken at face value,
looks like a very intelligent, honest man,
thinking practically about how to build a better Russia,
constantly, almost like an executive.
He looks like a man who loves his job
in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't,
meaning he loves laws and rules and how to--
- He has no adversarial press, so that's gonna help.
- Yes.
- And he's popular with his people.
That's also gonna help enormously.
- I'm talking about strictly the man,
directly the words coming out of his mouth.
Like all the videos and interviews I watch,
based on that, not the press, not the reporting.
§10Transcript · 1:19:02–1:28:19
You can just see that here's a man
who's able to display a charisma that's not,
like I can see, that's why I love Joe Rogan,
is like you could tell the guy is genuine
and is a good person.
And you could tell immediately that
once you meet Joe that he's going to be offline,
also a good person.
You could tell there's like signals that we send
that are like difficult to kind of describe.
In the same way, you could tell Putin is like,
he genuinely loves his job
and wants to build a better Russia.
There's the argument that he is actually
an evil man behind that charisma,
or is able to assassinate people,
limit free press, all those kinds of things.
Like that's, what do we do with that?
So what do human beings like journalists
or what do other leaders,
when they're in the room with Putin,
do with those kinds of notions
in deciding how to act in this world,
in deciding what policy to enact,
all those kinds of things.
Just like with Hitler,
when Chairman is in the room with Hitler,
how does he decide how to act?
- Well, let's go back to like my wheelhouse,
which is North Korea, right?
So when your entire world is based on being against Trump
and everything Trump does is buffoonery
or kind of productive,
the conclusion of your reporting
is gonna be pretty much given.
I was very hopeful that there would be
some positive outlooks or outcomes rather
of Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un.
It looked like there was a space
for things to go a bit better.
I talked about it a lot at the time.
And Trump was under no illusions
about who he was dealing with.
People pretend that, oh, he was kind of naive.
He had one of the refugees at his State of the Union,
you know, lifting up his crutch.
The first thing he sat down and talked to Xi Jinping about
in Mar-a-Lago right after he became inaugurated
was North Korea.
Barack Obama said that when he sat down Trump
in the White House during the transfer of power,
he said North Korea is the biggest issue.
So I think a good leader,
whether or not you consider Trump a good leader,
has to be aware of, all right,
I'm gonna have to have relationships of some kind,
even if it's adversarial,
with some really evil, evil, horrible people,
which Kim Jong-un clearly is.
- Well, I don't think there's anybody
that has a perspective that North Korean,
Kim Jong-un or Il are not evil, right?
- Correct.
- But with, in 1930s Germany,
isn't it a little bit more nuanced?
- Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet,
and he's just a blowhard, and he's an anti-Semite, sure.
But he's-- - What about, like,
before the war breaks out,
like, what about the basic, actionable anti-Semitism
when you're, like, just attacking, hurting--
- We're talking Kristallnacht,
or we're talking about the Night of Long Knives?
- Kristallnacht, so it's the Night of the Broken Glass.
- Yeah, yeah, no, Long Knives is when he assassinated
a bunch of his people, that was something different.
- Yeah, so like, when you're actually attacking
your own citizenry.
- Yeah, that was universally condemned, Kristallnacht,
and that was very shocking, its level of barbarism
to the West, because I think we still want to believe,
understandably, that things aren't as bad as they seem.
We would rather, this is why, you know,
the North Korea book I did, "Dear Reader,"
is used in a humorous framework,
because if you have to look, it's like looking to the sun.
If you stare at it straight on, it's very hard to do,
so you have to kind of look at it obliquely,
and then you're kind of realizing
the enormity of the depravity.
And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing
for a very long time, and there's a difference between,
okay, you know, we're gonna sack these villages
and persecute people, and we're gonna systematically
exterminate them, there's still levels
of evil and depravity.
- So you did write the book, "Dear Reader,"
on Kim Jong-il, "Dear Reader,"
the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il.
So that's the previous leader of North Korea,
current one is the un-- - Jong-un.
- No creativity on the naming.
- Well, no, this is intentional,
'cause it's a throwback to the dad.
- So there's been only three leaders in North Korea?
So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin,
and unlike these, I think it's important to understand
that the history of those kinds of humans,
the history of North Korea is not well written about
or understood, which is why your book
is exceptionally powerful and important.
So maybe in a big, broad way,
can you say who was, who is Kim Jong-il
as a man, as a leader, as a historical figure
that we should understand and why should we understand them?
- So I wrote "Dear Reader" by going to North Korea
and getting all their propaganda,
which is translated into several languages,
'cause the conceit is everyone on Earth
is interested in them and wants to mirror their ideology.
- And he died in 2011. - 2011, yeah.
- And you wrote the book in 2012.
- I went there in 2012, I wrote the book, came out in 2014.
So Kim Jong-il is, though not an intellect,
North Korea's version of Forrest Gump,
in that when they write their history,
whenever something happens, he's there.
And by telling his life story, it's in the first person,
he's telling the history of North Korea.
So I wanted to write the kind of book where in one book,
and it's the kind of reading you could do
in the beach or the bathroom,
you're gonna get the entire history
and know everything you need to know about North Korea
in one accessible outlet.
And it's, what people don't appreciate about North Korea,
there's several things, how bad it is.
And this didn't happen overnight.
This was very systemic,
that what this family did to that country,
where piece by piece, they did everything in their power
to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world,
ramp up the oppression, keep any information from coming in.
And they're very creative and innovative
in their style of manipulation and control.
So there is a farcical element.
Let me give you an example.
So people in the West kind of get it wrong.
They talk about, oh, they talk about when Kim Jong-il
played golf for the first time, he gets 17 holes in one.
There's this one story about Kim Jong-il shrinking time.
And this is a story, it sounds supernatural, but it's not.
So Kim Jong-il is at a conference, the Dear Leader,
and someone is giving a talk.
And while that person is giving a talk,
Kim Jong-il is taking notes and working on his work.
And he has an aide who keeps interrupting him
with questions and the speaker keeps stopping.
And Kim Jong-il says, "Why are you stopping?"
Goes, "I see you're doing these other things."
And he goes, "No, no, I can do all these things at once."
Everyone's shocked.
And they said, "This is why Kim Jong-il looks at time
"not like a plane, but like a cube, and he can shrink time."
And my friend goes, "Do they mean multitasking?"
And yes, Kim Jong-il is the only person in North Korea
who's capable of multitasking.
So in order to elevate him,
they basically make everyone else in North Korea
completely incompetent.
And that has a purpose because should the leader go away,
this country is gonna collapse overnight.
So they laugh in the West
about all these newspapers show him at the factory
and he's at the fish hatchery, at the paper plant.
They say the difference in North Korea
is that the leader goes among the people
and does what he calls field guidance.
So he will go in that farm and be like,
"This is what you need to do."
And he'll go here and he's so smart, he's good at everything
and thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us.
And he's not removed from the people
like in every other country.
- Why does that seem to go wrong with humans, do you think?
That this kind of, the structure
where there's this one figure, this authoritarian,
this totalitarian structure where there's one figure
that's a source of comfort and knowledge.
- Kim Jong-il is not good at farming.
Kim Jong-il is not good at the machinery.
It's all a complete lie.
Or the things he'll point out
will be things that are completely obvious.
So here's another example that they use.
In North Korea, they have something called
the Tower of the Juche Idea, which is an obelisk,
which looks like the Washington Monument,
but it's completely different
'cause it's got this like plastic torch at the top.
§11Transcript · 1:28:22–1:36:34
And they talk about in their propaganda
how all the architects got together and they said,
"Oh, we should make this the second tallest
"stone obelisk in the world."
And Kim Jong-il says, "No, let's make it the tallest."
They're like, "Oh, we never thought of this before."
And the way it's presented as it,
and like he's the first person to think of this,
like these architects are having a brainstorming session
at the Tower of the Juche Idea.
They're like, "All right, we gotta do something innovative
"to put North Korea on the map.
"What can we do?
"How about second biggest?"
He's gonna go for this.
And then he's like, "Oh, we never thought of this."
It's so, because I present it at face value,
people sometimes say the book's a satire.
It's not a satire.
I downplayed all this stuff.
It's a farce.
Here's another example.
North Korea is very big,
and I think Russia is to some extent too,
on amusement parks, fun fairs, they call them,
in the British style,
because this is a chance for the people
to all get together.
And there was this amusement park.
It's almost like South Park, Cartman,
where there's all these rides.
And Kim Jong-il's like, "I'm not gonna let any elderly
"or children take these rides
"until I put myself in danger and ride them myself."
And they go, "But dear leader, it's drizzling."
And he goes, "No, I have to make sure these rides
"are gonna be safe for everyone,
"even during the light rain."
They go, "Well, can we go on these rides with you?"
"No, no, no, I have to be the courageous one."
And he's riding all the rides,
and they're standing there crying at his courage.
But that's what's,
and you ask all the thing in one power,
it's like, listen, I'm quite confident
that those fun fair engineers are in a position
to ride Modest Mouse, whatever it's called, by themselves,
and be like, "Yeah, okay, this is good for the kids."
Although to be fair, some of those amusement parks
are pretty rusty and dangerous.
- Yeah, but that kind of propaganda,
I guess what I'm playing a devil's advocate,
is like, it's comforting and it's useful,
but it does seem that that naturally leads
to an abuse of power.
- No, it's not, how can it be used correctly?
No one person has the intellect or the mind
to understand the entirety of an economy,
let alone every individual field of interest.
- Well, for example,
you can have an artificial intelligence system
that understands the entirety of it.
- Did your affect just completely change?
The mask slipped?
I guess you could have an artificial intelligence system.
(both laughing)
- But the question is, can that,
I mean, the human version of that is like,
you can hire a lot of experts, right?
You can be an extremely good manager.
- Yeah, and since everything's dynamic,
they're not gonna have the data to kind of manage it well.
- It seems that there's a,
like what George Washington allegedly did,
it seems like most humans are not able to fire themselves.
You're not able to like,
- Yeah, you're right.
- Ultimately be a check on your own power,
but that's not, if I was like,
if I was creating a human,
it's like, that's not an obvious bug of the system
that we would not be able to fire ourselves
to know when we have,
I mean, it seems like that's something
you have to know always.
Like that's something I often wonder is like,
am I wrong about this?
- Well, this is what we talked about earlier.
What are the safety valves to make sure that, okay,
if I am incorrect or my knowledge is finite,
Plato's cave kind of thing,
what mechanisms are in place that my mistake
or limited information isn't gonna have
deleterious consequences?
And North Korea does not really have that.
And as a result, they had polio in the '90s.
- So there is a, you write about it straight,
but there's a humor to it
because it's an absurdly evil place, I suppose.
- Yeah.
- A bunch of people, I asked,
I said that I'm talking to you
and a bunch of people asked questions.
- Oh, I gotta hear from the plebs.
You asked me before we started recording,
I specifically said no, it was in my contract.
- Yeah, and I gave you all the pink Skittles or whatever.
But they--
- So pink, you don't think.
- I'm trolling, Michael.
Let me explain to you how that works.
If people should go at malice.locals.com
and sign up and pay,
I think the membership fee is several thousand dollars.
It's very, it's not--
- It's not for the layman.
- Yeah, but the service is excellent.
You get a coat with it.
But yeah, I went there,
posted a lot of really brilliant people there.
People should join that community
if you find Michael interesting
or if you just wanna go and say,
well, he's wrong, it's a great place to have that--
- It's not a great place for that, I assure you.
- Yeah, a lot of really kind people.
So anyway, there's a bunch of people
asked that we should talk about humor.
- Okay.
- So pretend, hypothetically speaking,
that I'm a robot
asking you to explain humor to me.
So dear reader, I mean, there's a humor,
there's just so wonderfully dance
between serious dark topics
and then seriously dark humor.
Can you try to, if you were to write like a,
I don't know, a Wikipedia article,
maybe a book about your philosophy of humor,
what do you think is the role of humor in all of this?
- A joke is like a baby.
You can't dissect it and then put it back together
and expect it to work.
Trust me on this one.
Despite, no matter how you carve that thing up,
it's not gonna be working the next day
and you need it to sew those little sneakers
with those hands.
- Oh.
- I don't know that humor is something
that is very explainable.
People, there's something called claptor
where this is like the worst kind of humor
where people applaud 'cause they agree
with what you're saying as opposed to laptor.
Well, that's the kind of--
- That's the poetry reading?
- Yeah, and the drag queens do that too.
I think 'cause they have the nails.
This, you laugh, it's a visceral reaction.
When someone on Twitter is insisting,
you know, that's not funny,
you're not in a position to make that claim.
And let's go back to North Korea.
I had a refugee I knew and he went to high school here
and he was talking to his buddies and they said,
"Hey, remember when we were kids, we had Pokemon?"
And he goes, "Oh yeah, except instead of Pokemon,
"I watched my dad starve to death," which is the truth.
Now, who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke?
I don't know what it's like watching anyone,
including my dad, starve to death.
And my dad's fatty so he's not going hungry anytime soon.
So it's very bizarre to me
when people feel comfortable precluding others
from making jokes, especially,
and I think this is a very Jewish thing,
like this kind of gallows humor,
especially when it's laughing about a personal loss
or experience that they've had.
Humor is a great way to mitigate pain and suffering.
But it's also, I think this is why it's a Jewish thing,
it's a black thing,
when you are a marginalized community or poorer, it's free.
Telling stories, telling jokes or songs,
you don't have to have money,
but you can have joy and happiness.
And I think that's why you find it so much more
in kind of lower status communities
than you find in wasps who are notoriously humorless.
- Which is strange because people pay you a lot of money
for the jokes you do, so it's not really free.
- Yeah, well, no, they don't have to pay me.
It's appreciated but not expected.
- I find my voice cracking every time
I try to make a joke.
Like I fail miserably at this.
Some people--
- You're still in beta, that's why.
- Alpha.
§12Transcript · 1:36:35–1:44:22
- Sure.
- Being an alpha's like being a lady.
If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
- No, I meant alpha version, not alpha male.
- Okay.
I don't know if you're a robot gobbledygook.
- I'm not going there, okay.
- Who are you talking to?
- In my own head, I'm talking to myself in my own head.
Okay, speaking of North Korea,
some people say that, you know,
I've read that comedy is about timing.
Well, first of all, do you agree?
And second of all--
(laughing)
- No, I'm serious.
It's very much about timing.
- You're saying yes, that timing, yeah, it's funny.
Okay.
- Isn't it comedy is tragedy plus timing?
Isn't that the full reference?
- What is it, the interrupting cow knock-knock joke?
I'm not gonna do it, but--
- That's not a timing thing.
It's more of a repetition and then the twist ending.
- No, the moo.
- Oh, the moo, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Interrupting cow.
You're thinking of the banana one.
- Anyway, I'm not going there.
Yet, you're--
- Who are you talking to?
- In my own head.
- You have a thick floor.
Do you have any earpiece?
Are you small wonder?
Do you stand sleeping in a wardrobe?
- Yeah, God, that's so British.
But yet, you're very--
- I don't wanna say in a closet
'cause that has connotations.
- Let's both come out of the closet for a second.
- I love you. - And let's talk about--
- I love you, Lex.
I wasn't saying I love you, Alex.
I was saying I love you, Lex.
- Oh, you're talking to me.
- Yes, through the screen.
- So, you think about me when you're with another man.
- I watch you when you're sleeping.
- Okay, so you're--
- Like the Vengal song, "Eternal Flame."
- You're really active on Twitter.
- Yeah.
- And somebody else asked
on your overly expensive membership site.
- My grift site.
- How do you find humor different in writing on Twitter
versus spoken humor?
So, if-- - Oh, that's a great question.
- If humor is about timing,
how do you capture the timing and the brilliance
of the whatever is underlying humor
in a context of Twitter?
Like, another way to say it is,
how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on Twitter?
- So, with Twitter, you have to be the first one
to the punchline.
So, when Ron Paul had his stroke,
I was immediately being like,
he's still the most articulate libertarian.
He's doing a great Joe Biden impression right now.
All the libertarians got ass-mad.
And people are like, too soon.
Or like when someone dies, you're making the jokes about them.
It's like, when do you wanna make the jokes
about someone just died a week later?
It doesn't make any sense.
Now, you might--
- Too soon is perfect timing.
- Or you could say, it's not appropriate ever.
But too soon does not make sense in this context.
So, that is something that I enjoy doing.
It's also fun ruffling people's feathers,
which is something I enjoy doing.
I think spoken versus writing is very different
because when you are having good banter with someone,
for me as the audience, knowing that it is on the spot
really adds an element of humor
'cause then it's like, wow, this is fun.
It's like a ping pong match or something.
Whereas in writing, you're losing the tone,
you're losing the relationship of a dynamic conversation.
And a lot of times the joke
is just gonna be a different type of joke.
- Well, it's funny, but Twitter, there's a sense,
especially your Twitter, that you just thought of that
and you just wrote it.
- Yes.
- Like there's a feeling like it's literally you talking
as opposed to what I imagine is there's some editing
or it doesn't look like it.
Whoever your editor is should be fired.
(laughing)
There's an interesting effect actually.
If I want to say something, I don't know,
about something that's bothering me
about the presidential election or something like that.
Like what is the actual central idea
that I'm trying to convey to myself?
Like if say I was having a hypothetical conversation
with myself.
- Okay.
- What?
No, not going there.
(laughing)
Why am I putting my pants back on?
I'm more comfortable this way.
Promo code malice20, sheathunderwear.com.
Okay.
(laughing)
- That's sheath, what's the website?
- Sheathunderwear.com.
- Sheathunderwear.com, promo code malice20.
And I forgot, why is that underwear really nice?
- Because it has a dual pouch technology
to keep your man parts separate.
They've also got woman stuff,
but I don't know how that works.
There's a thing going somewhere.
- And the material's really refreshing.
I mean, it's really a good--
- And it makes your ass look good.
- That's promo code malice20.
- And it's made by a former vet 'cause he was in Iraq.
So that's why I like promoting it.
- Yeah.
But when I'm writing the tweet,
it forces me to think deeply about the core of the message.
- Okay.
- But what I found, this really interesting effect,
I don't really do much editing on the tweet.
I'll just think and then I'll write it.
And then when I post it, like submit,
I immediately see the tweet very differently
than it was in my mind.
I often delete, I delete, I don't know,
some percentage of tweets about two, five seconds after.
- Wow.
- I don't know, it's something, once you send it,
it's why the Gmail send features,
undo send features really nice.
It's like, it just changes the way I see the thing.
So--
- That's very interesting.
- But I really love it that you can delete it
because when I say stuff out in the wild,
like to other humans, like--
- Other humans.
- Spoken word is like, you can't delete what you just said.
And I often regret the things I say, like on the spot.
Like I shouldn't have said that.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- I don't have that.
(laughing)
- Well, again, whoever your editor is,
what is it, Edith Piaf,
Jean-Eric A. Han.
- Wow, your French is as bad as your English.
I don't have any tweets I regret
because if I sent a tweet that I regretted,
I would make amends.
I would make it a point if I was needlessly offensive
to somebody or hurtful or accidentally,
I would make sure to fix it and go out of my way
to make sure that person feels vindicated
and validated by accepting my apology.
That has never happened, had to happen, thankfully.
I'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait.
Recently, some people have come after me pretty hard.
And my perspective is that it's not really about me.
It's either I represent something to them.
I'm just some jackass with a Twitter.
So if you're getting this riled up over me,
it's not really about me.
Maybe I'm delusional, but that's how I look at it.
So if they are trying to provoke me
into this kind of heated exchange, I will never do it
because I'm not interested in it.
And I don't think there's gonna be any,
it's like Jeanette Rankin, you can't win.
It's just gonna be like trying to win a hurricane.
There's no hero here.
- Well, let me ask you about this
'cause somebody also asked it
on your overly expensive membership site
that they were saying that they're an academic.
They wonder 'cause I'm an, quote unquote,
I'm not an academic,
§13Transcript · 1:44:23–1:51:46
but I do still have an affiliation with MIT.
The word academic is just dirty.
It's like-- - It is.
- Which is a problem that needs to change.
Just like the word nerd is dirty.
- No, academic needs, is gonna be the next front to open
and they're gonna be very vilified.
We're coming for them and it's gonna be very, very ugly.
And I cannot wait.
- No, but there needs to be a place,
a different term for people who love research
and knowledge and-- - Oh, that's true.
- Like you have to-- - No, you're right, 100%.
- You're right.
So like you have to clarify what you mean by academic.
And right now the word academic means a very,
in the intellectual public discourse, it means the enemy.
And there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve
that targeted vilification, but like a lot that don't.
They're just curious people.
- Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
- Building robots that will one day destroy you.
Voice cracks every time I make a joke.
- You're not, 'cause it's just--
- I can't do this. - 'Cause you're not
making a joke, it's you're telling a joke.
- I'm editing.
Can I delete that joke?
Okay, it's not even a joke.
Building robots that will one day kill us.
Humans-- - Oh, God willing.
- God willing, humans are the joke.
That's why I'm cracking.
My voice is cracking.
(laughing)
- What were even, what was I even fucking saying?
Academics.
But why--
- My local, someone had a question, they're an academic.
- Right, they're an academic.
They're saying like, are you worried that, you know,
in academia, associating yourself with a sort of somebody
who has, who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas,
like the two examples they gave
is Michael Malice and Joe Rogan.
Does Joe have any radical,
I wouldn't consider him radical at all.
- Well, we can talk about it.
- But Joe is, I think, a bad example.
He's quite centrist to me.
- Well, he could have, for example,
like what has Joe been attacked on?
Is, for example, on the topic of like transgender,
- Athletes and sports. - Athletes and sports.
There's, what else?
I mean, he's been pro Bernie Sanders and--
- That's hardly radical.
- Pro Trump or like giving Trump a pass.
- Yeah, not anti-Trump.
- Not anti-Trump. - Yeah.
- What else?
Just--
- But none of these are radical.
- Meat, meat stuff being pro meat versus anti-vegan.
- Yeah.
- You know, all those kinds of things.
But you can be misconstrued and saying,
there's, I think, a highlight,
and my mom actually wrote to me about this,
which is hilarious. - Yoshika.
- Yoshika, thank you.
I like how you jotted it down.
That's when it's important.
- Well, let me see, your mom wrote to you, Yoshika.
- That's a sign, my voice cracks,
a sign when Michael Malice makes a funny joke
is when you jot something down.
(laughing)
- Yoshika.
(speaking in foreign language)
- He writes it, and then the next time he just crosses it out.
(laughing)
It's a good point, yeah.
It's like Joe Biden, the debates.
Okay.
- I did also just crap my pants.
(laughing)
- So--
- It's like a mud slide down here.
- There is a, I mean, he's a comedian.
You have a comedian side to you, right?
I mean, you've talked a lot. - Humorist, yeah.
- Humorist side, yeah, humorist.
So you can misconstrue Joe as being
somehow a radical thinker,
and the same one could be done with you.
And his question was,
are you worried about associating yourself
with folks like that?
- Am I, or are you?
- Me, me.
- Yeah, that's my question.
- And is that something,
do you see yourself as somebody
who's dangerous that I shouldn't be talking to?
And in the same way,
do you ever think about guests on your podcast
or people you talk to publicly,
associate yourself with publicly,
and think that there is somebody that crosses that line
that you shouldn't talk to?
- Yes, so I interviewed, in the new ride,
I interviewed up to full-blown Nazis
in the last chapters of Chris Cantwell,
but that was in the context of that book, right?
So there's lots of people who,
people want me to have on my show,
and the way I look at it is like
you have a table and tablecloth, right?
And let's suppose the table is three feet wide,
the tablecloth is two feet wide.
So if I move the tablecloth to the right,
I'm gonna lose people on the left.
I can only cover so much space.
And the further you go on the fringe in one direction,
the more mainstream you're going to lose
in the other direction.
So I'm very much making a conscious choice
not to talk to, being, people will say I'm cowardly,
and that's absolutely true, I'm being fearful here.
I would prefer not to talk to some of those
who would alienate some of the more mainstream people.
And here's a perfect example of why.
On my birthday last year,
I woke up seven o'clock in the morning to go pee,
and I checked Twitter, it's whatever,
and Jeb Bush had followed me, Jeb.
And I, it's 7 a.m., you're not really awake,
you're like, wait, what?
And then I thought maybe it was a fake account,
but it's in the verified tab.
Oh, you don't have this,
'cause you're not verified on Twitter, that's a shame.
So people who are mad around Twitter.
- Twitter does not respect robots.
(Lex laughing)
- They ban bots, you're lucky you haven't been banned.
- Zero, one.
- Zero, zero, it's zero, zero, zero.
- Those are my pronouns.
(Lex laughing)
- So it was Jeb, Jeb, Governor Bush,
and I corresponded with him,
and I asked him on the show,
and he decided not to for various reasons.
Very politely, he's like, just politics is so bad right now,
I don't wanna talk about it.
I respect that for him.
If I am in a, if I'm creating my show
where he's going to get heat,
for who, and get canceled,
oh, you can't be on the show, he has these other guests,
I don't wanna lose that opportunity,
because, as we were talking about earlier,
me and Alex Jones and Tim Pool,
I think a lot of people would be very excited
to see me sit down with Jeb Bush.
And I told him in writing, and I meant this,
I wouldn't be clowning him, I wouldn't be disrespectful,
it would be a lot of fun.
There's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes,
and I would do my best to bring that out,
and talk about what it's like being a blue blood,
to be born into his grandfather,
Prescott Bush was a senator from Connecticut,
marrying a woman who didn't speak English,
how does that work when your family's royalty,
and things like that.
So I had a lot of fun questions for him,
and that's kinda, you're gonna have to choose
one or the other.
- Well, you do a really good job with that,
like Ben Shapiro does a good job with that too,
which is, you can have a trolly side,
a humor side, where you tear down
the power structures and so on,
but you can also have a serious side,
and it's a safe space for people
from all walks of life to walk in,
and you're not adversarial.
- Never, I take the word guests seriously.
If they're gonna be on my show,
I'm not going to have them have negative consequences
as a result of being on my show.
- That said, I mean, maybe in my case,
I'll be honest and say that I find Alex Jones
outside of the conspiracy stuff,
for some reason, maybe you can explain,
maybe you can psychoanalyze me,
but I find him hilarious to listen to.
§14Transcript · 1:51:49–2:00:02
- He's a performer, he's very performative.
- But there's a lot of people that don't see
the humor of it, and they see the serious consequences
of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds,
and they see the danger of it.
And I personally, I'm often tempted to talk to Alex
in a podcast format, but I think I'm trying
to convince myself that I never will.
For me, I feel unsafe talking to Alex
because I can't truly be myself, which is like--
- Yeah, you'd have to be on.
- Naive and honest.
And actually, generally, when I talk to humans,
I want to see the best in them.
And I think that's, I often think about
if I talked to Hitler in 1935, 1938--
- You got a list of names to give him?
(laughs)
- Well, yeah, I mean, that's how you get the interview.
Come on, let's be honest.
Who are we kidding?
I would, you have to give away one of your,
I would probably give away my brother, so--
- How many brothers do you have?
- Well, just one.
- Okay.
- Too many.
- What, I wanna be an only child.
- He's the older brother, he used to pick on me, payback.
You know, it's only, he had a good life.
- You should think of it more as Stalin,
I so interrupt you, because Hitler, you're Jewish,
so you're already gonna have very adversarial,
it's not gonna be a normal, he's not gonna perceive you
as a human in a sense, right?
- Right, Stalin, you're right.
- Yeah, that would be much easier,
or Kim Jong-un, or something like that.
- Like, you have to think, like how,
okay, this is a good question, is,
in that spirit, why don't you jot something down?
(laughing)
If you--
- Lutz loves Hitler.
(laughing)
- All right, we'll cross it out in a second.
- Approve.
- I think this is a really good example
of a difficult figure that's controversial
that people bring up to me a lot,
and you've interviewed twice, which is Curtis Yarvin.
- Yeah, Manches Mall Blok.
- Manches Mall, AKA Manches Mall Blok,
which is his pseudonym that he goes by in his blog.
Can you tell me about who he is?
- Sure.
- Why is he interesting, what of his ideas are interesting?
- Well, briefly, he invented the concept of the red pill.
So, Curtis, Manches Mall Blok had a blog
called Unqualified Reservations,
you can still find it online.
It's very verbose, he writes at length, very, very bright.
His perspective is very heretical.
So a lot of things that we take for granted
in our liberal democracy, he regards as not only incorrect,
which is downright absurd, and he does not take
what many people view as the basis of American political
discourse as the basis for his thought.
So, when you're starting with someone
who is basically repudiating kind of the Western worldview,
or not the Western worldview, like the American milieu,
a lot of people are gonna, of course,
regard him as dangerous or someone who is verboten.
He's a very bright person.
- Why is he such a toxic figure?
- Because if you are blue-pilled,
if you are the guardians of what is acceptable discourse,
then you have to make sure your forts are secured,
and that any figure outside of this acceptable discourse
has to be marginalized and regarded
as radioactive as possible.
You don't want to let in these kind of ideas
that would be destructive to your hegemony.
- Well, so, let's dig into it.
So, like, he, I've read a few things by him,
but then I hear that, in a bunch of places,
him being called a racist, a white supremacist,
neo-fascist, so on.
I go to his Wikipedia.
- Yeah.
- There's a view on race section.
Let me read it.
- Okay.
- "Yarvin's opinions have been described as racist,
"with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery,
"including the belief that whites have higher IQs
"than blacks for genetic reasons.
"Yarvin himself maintains that he's not a racist
"because while he doubts that, quote,
"all races are equally smart, the notion, quote,
"that people who score higher on IQ tests
"are in some sense superior human beings is, quote, creepy.
"He also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery,
"though he has argued that some races
"are more suited for slavery than others, quote,
"it should be obvious that,
"although I'm not a white nationalist,
"I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.
"Yarvin wrote in a post that linked approvingly of,"
I don't know these people, "Steve Saylor."
- Steve Saylor, yeah, he's from--
- "Jerry Taylor and other racialists."
- Yeah, so--
- Okay, so one of my questions is--
- Let me just say one sentence.
In the same way that you mentioned that guy earlier
who was defending some aspects of communism,
and that is, in some context, acceptable,
when you think about it, it's like,
this should be radioactive.
- Right.
- The fact that he is engaging with these ideas
in anything other than this has to be reputed at all costs
is what renders him, to a large extent, a racist.
- That's really interesting.
So there are some topics you can be--
- Nuanced.
- Nuanced, and some not.
And communism is still a topic that you can be nuanced about.
- Right.
- It's difficult, but you can be.
Race, and this, like, talking about slavery
and IQ differences based on race
is a topic that, I guess, is radioactive
to a degree where you can't even say anything,
even if it's, like, nuanced,
or not even, like, making a point,
it's like touching it as you make another point.
- And understandably, you can understand that.
I'm gonna steel man their point,
'cause you can understand the point.
It's like, you're just talking about Hitler.
Once this foot gets in the door
that some people are inherently slaves,
or some people are inherently better than others,
it really quickly, you know, collapses.
So that would be their perspective.
- But that's what, like,
if I were to give criticism of his--
- But let me just say one more thing.
Racist is also used to describe Alex Jones.
Alex doesn't talk about race.
Racist is a shorthand
for a certain percentage of the population
to let you know, do not bother investing
in this person any further.
They are off limits.
- Definitely, racism and sexism is a thing
that's now used to shut down conversation
that's quite absurd by a small percent of the population.
- But Jared Taylor and Steve Saylor,
Jared Taylor interviewed him for my book,
he would be regarded in any sense as a racist.
- What's the difference between racist and racialist?
- So racialists, I mean, this is splitting hairs,
and now I'm gonna be all radioactive.
Jared Taylor runs something called Amren,
and this is, I mean, his perspective
is that there are inherent differences to the races,
and you cannot live side by side well.
Whites and blacks should not be living side by side.
- By the way, for people who don't know,
this is out of context,
you have written a great book
that includes some of these concepts called The New Right,
which not includes these concepts,
but talks about-- - Doesn't, yeah.
- Well, it's more about the growth of the community
around the alt-right and all those kinds of world.
- Right, so, and his point about IQ,
it's like if you had a population, the Dutch, right?
I think they're the tallest people on the Earth.
And if you said, well,
the Dutch are the best people on Earth, why?
'Cause they're the tallest, it's like you're a crazy person.
So if someone is scoring low,
an individual on an IQ test,
that means they're somehow a lower quality person.
Well, maybe in one very specific aspect,
but I mean, if they're a good human being,
I've got friends who are low IQ,
all my friends are low IQ, frankly, compared to me.
Sounded like Trump there for a second.
- That's how you choose friends.
(both laughing)
- Well, I don't have any other choices.
No one's gonna be at my level.
- You're the smartest person since Abraham Lincoln
that I've ever seen.
- Unlike him, I actually am honest.
§15Transcript · 2:00:03–2:08:28
So he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas.
Here's another thing.
Like if you bring up that Aristotle said
that some people are born to be slaves,
he wasn't speaking about race,
he just meant people's souls.
H.L. Mencken, who's a great heretic
and early to 20th century figure,
one of his quotes that I say all the time,
which people have seen a lot in this past year,
that the average man does not want to be free,
he merely wants to be safe.
That I think is, I don't know,
I am not familiar with what Moldau saying about slavery
'cause his writing is ponderous,
but that certainly is something I think that is undeniable,
that I think more people are realizing
there's a large percent of the population
that is actively disinterested in freedom
and the moral responsibilities it entails.
- Well, I mean, really just the word slavery,
if you wanna make some kind of point
or even think about the topic outside the context
of this is a horrible thing that happened
in the United States history.
- And other countries' histories,
it's not unique to us, let's be clear.
- This is, I mean, very important
and there's slavery going on today
and a lot of people argue that sex trafficking
and all those kinds of things,
I mean, there's atrocities going on today
that talking about it in a way
that's not immediately saying
this is the most horrible thing that happened ever.
It's something I think about a lot
is like if I wanna say something controversial,
I should do so with skill, with care
and only about things I care about.
- Well, here's where I would disagree.
When I say things, I often say things that are controversial
or I will say uncontroversial things
in a controversial way
because it's a useful mechanism to alienate people
you don't want around you
because if there are people who are going to be shocked
by certain topics, like we should have ended World War II,
like even as a hypothesis, they just clutch their pearls,
they're like, oh, you want the Holocaust to happen,
I can't discuss most things with you
because you're not interested in having a conversation,
you're interested in your emotional response.
- Yeah, I think I see things differently.
Maybe this is a bit of a devil's advocate,
but what in at least the modern discourse
of like Twitter and social media and so on,
I find that if you do that,
you're not actually removing the people
that are not thoughtful and kind and so on,
you're actually attracting loud people.
Like a small number of them,
they come over and start yelling at you,
start yelling, they're basically ruin the party
by showing up and just screaming
and so all the thoughtful people leave.
- Well, that's why you have to be a very heavy blocker.
You have to block people on Twitter
'cause you have to cultivate your audience
and have them, like a lot of times people come at me,
I don't care, then they'll start attacking
members of my audience and then I'm like,
dang, I gotta block them because they've won this one
'cause I can't have that.
- Yeah, I don't know.
Unnecessarily provoking people feels...
- This is beta testing.
You try to break the system and see what works.
You put up as much pressure as possible.
This is very much computer stuff
that you should be able to appreciate.
- The point being when you have a program,
you're trying to intentionally sit there
and do as many mistakes to see what go wrong, right?
Is that not common practice?
- Yeah, exactly.
So you're saying that's a way to see
communication with the world
is you say something uncontroversial
in a controversial way and that blocks people.
- Or does it trigger them?
Do they roll their eyes?
What is gonna be their emotional response?
Are they gonna start yelling?
- The problem is the reason I can't think like this
or I can't because I'm not sure
about the points I'm trying to make always.
I'm not always 100% sure that I'm right about things.
So in being thoughtful, I'm afraid that I'll turn off
with an ineloquently phrased or even incorrect statement,
I will do damage that can't be undone
in terms of having a good conversation about a topic.
So I wanna be very careful about,
I'm not saying afraid, fear is not what I'm talking about.
I think fear is like not saying something out of fears
at the core of many of the problems of the world today.
But I'm just saying say stuff with care.
If I'm going to touch race as a topic,
it feels like you really should be deeply,
first have a point to make.
Like you really care about a point you wanna make.
And second, think deeply about how to say that point
in a way that communicates it the best.
And touching, I would say, listen,
I've, on your show, which is great,
I'd like to say thank you for having Mencious Molebug.
- You are welcome.
- That's the name of the show.
- Thank you for having me a couple of times.
It's great to sort of get him to, in this loose way,
to talk about different kinds of stuff.
- I don't think we talked about race at all.
- No, no, no, no.
- No, but I'm just bringing it back to what you were asking,
which is if you read the Wikipedia,
the perspective is gonna be
this guy talks about slavery constantly,
where it's completely disproportionate to his work.
- But even on your show, you can tell,
even outside of the race stuff,
that he's not ultra careful about, he's not--
- Nuanced.
- Yeah, he's not afraid to say something just like,
I would say, let me just criticize him,
my face is not you, this is me,
carelessly say something controversial.
- Right.
- I'm not saying, he doesn't go,
that makes him, it's a very different thing
than somebody who on purpose says
something controversial stuff, like Milo Anopoulos,
sorry, I forgot Milo, whatever his name is.
- Anopoulos, yeah.
- Yeah, which is really nice to see
that he's a genuine person who's thoughtful,
he doesn't mean to, but he just carelessly
seems to say things that I feel like
damage the rest of his body of work.
- I can't really speak for him,
but I would guess his point is,
once you're swimming in this kind of worldview,
you're going to be anathema already,
so there's no pleasing these people,
so why bother trying?
- Yeah, I think that's a deeply,
that's a black pill way of seeing the world.
- It's not a black pill at all.
- Because it's a cynical way, like these people,
so it's saying that you're,
it's a very kind of way of thinking,
like I'll say whatever I want,
whoever comes along with me.
- No, you just earlier said yourself
that racism has been weaponized
as a way to shut down conversation,
so I think his perspective would be,
I am so outside the mainstream in my worldview
that I know I'm going to be called racist,
so there's no point in trying to be nuanced
because I'm already going to get the scarlet letter.
- Yeah, I just disagree with that
because, for example, I am one person
that he turned off by his carelessness,
and I think I should be a good target,
I should be somebody-- - I think that's fair.
- And I'm just, like, it's very convenient
to think that there's ridiculous people out there,
which there are, who call everybody racist
and sexist currently, and then you can't please them,
so I'm not even gonna try.
No, but there's this gray area of people
that I don't listen to the outrage culture, whatever.
This Wikipedia article means nothing to me.
Like, I'm not going to-- - Right, I got you.
- What I'm more, I'm just seeing this careless person,
and if he's going to be careless about race like this,
I feel like if I walk along with him long enough,
I'm going to catch the carelessness.
I'm going to lose, like--
- I'll defend your perspective better than you can.
- Yeah, this is good.
I'm taking notes.
- I talked to Eric Weinstein
after you guys talked about me on your show.
- Reynolds Weinstein.
- We had a good conversation.
He invited me on his show.
- That would be an amazing conversation.
- And we got on the phone, and his concern, fairly,
he goes, "I don't want you to come on my show
"for the purposes of clowning me,"
§16Transcript · 2:08:30–2:16:34
and I would never do that.
- He might not be aware of who you, of--
- That's why he wanted to feel me out.
He's like, when he hears troll,
it can mean a lot of different things,
and we had a very good conversation.
It very much was very clear
that's not where the conversation would go,
but I think when you are going to be on someone's show,
there is a responsibility
that they're not going to have to pay a cost
for having you as their guest,
so if you were put off by how he was
in that live stream or two I did,
I understand where you're coming from.
I think he's very, very bright,
but you have a different audience than I do
and you're going for something different than I am.
- No, no, no, in my sense of--
- You wouldn't feel safe with him.
- Yeah, I wouldn't feel safe with him,
but he's borderline for me.
I would like to actually talk to him one day.
Alex Jones has crossed the other line for me.
- Well, you could do what you could do with me,
tape the episode and then never release it.
- No, it's one of those things where it'll be,
when there's finally,
they'll make a History Channel documentary
about you and I and how it all went wrong,
like the cult that we started
and everybody killed themselves.
And we'll release it then
because it'll be like unseen footage.
This is how it started.
It'll be black and white
in a basement somewhere in New York.
- Yeah, my mother's basement.
- This explains so much.
Okay, so I spoke to Yaron Brook
about objectivism and Ayn Rand,
he kind of argued,
he highlighted the difference between capitalism
and anarchism as around the topic of violence
and that having government
be the sort of,
the negative way to say it is like
having a monopoly on violence,
but basically being the arbiter of,
or the people that making sure
that violence doesn't get out of hand,
that would--
- Yeah, 2020 showed that, yep.
Government's great at that, yep.
- Well, what's, okay, without--
- This is the same with the straight face,
making that argument.
Good work, Yaron.
- All right, well, can you with a straight face argue
for the idea that in anarchism,
violence would not get out of hand?
- Sure, for one thing,
if your worst argument against,
one of my little quotes is,
"What are presented as the strongest arguments
"against anarchism are inevitably descriptions
"of the status quo."
So the argument is under anarchism,
you'd have warlords killing people
and then you'd have whoever's strongest
gets to just take over a neighborhood.
Well, we have that now.
We saw that the police are perfectly comfortable
disarming the population
and then when they try to protect themselves are punished,
we're happy to stand down.
You can only have that happen if you have a monopoly.
If they're, like, let's suppose you had
television stations, right?
And CBS said, "You know what?
"We're not gonna broadcast."
Cool, you don't broadcast,
we're gonna watch any of these other channels.
So the problem with having a monopoly
is everyone has to be dependent on this issue.
What's amazing about minarchism, which objectivists are,
is they will argue that government is really, really bad
at everything it does and it touches.
Therefore, it has to be in charge
of the most important stuff.
- Well, that's not therefore, but,
but there is a thing that's fundamentally different
than all the other things that--
- But Yaron Brook also said that no government has,
this is on your show,
has ever worked in the way he's proposing.
Now, objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy,
is based on objective reality.
And what she posited is,
you look and study the facts of nature,
study the facts of reality,
and deduce things accordingly.
And she very much regards herself
as part of the Aristotelian tradition,
as opposed to the Platonist tradition,
where the idea precedes reality,
and the idea is more real than what we see around us.
So what he's saying is, all the data, according to him,
contradicts his argument,
but still, he's going to make this imaginary government
that has never existed,
and there's no evidence that it can exist.
Let's talk about objective law.
To have access to the legal system,
which is something we want,
even just in terms of selling disputes,
when you have a government monopoly,
it's going to be more expensive,
more difficult for poor people.
The cost of hiring a lawyer is more expensive
than hiring a surgeon.
You can't say with a straight face,
this is the only way or the best way.
Okay, so, and the other thing is,
the argument for objectivism,
they have this, against anarchism,
they have this stupid claim, it's like,
what if, you know, you're a member of one security company,
and I'm a member of another,
and we have a dispute, and one shows up the door,
what happens now?
As if this is some insuperable argument.
Well, we have that on Earth.
Every country is in a state of anarchism
regarding every other country.
We don't have a world government.
So what happens if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico?
I have no idea.
I bet you don't have an idea.
What I'm sure of is that system has been worked out
ahead of time between the three countries,
and it's been worked out in such a way
that you and I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Same thing with cell phone companies.
If I'm on Sprint, you're on Metro PCS,
and I call you, who pays?
Does Sprint pay you?
Do they split the difference?
First of all, there's no objective way
that one has to work, but the thing is,
companies who have auto accidents,
they have arbitrage all the time.
Like if I run into you, they work it out,
and it never reaches our desk.
So the only thing that cops are good at
is keeping people, at any government monopoly,
is forcing people to be their customers
by keeping them unsafe.
- Okay, there's a few things I'd like to say there
that just explore some of these ideas.
So one, in terms of Canadian and Mexico and so on,
that it does, something has been worked out, perhaps.
- Not perhaps, don't say perhaps.
You know for sure that if you--
- There's a point I'm trying to make.
So let's say for sure it's been worked out.
There was a point in history where it wasn't worked out.
To work, to come to a place of stability,
there has to first be some instability.
So when you first, like for every kind of situation,
it's like dispute over space.
Like who gets to own Mars, that kind of thing.
There's a first for it, and then these different
competing institutions will have to figure it out.
And so there's the concern with anarchism, I think,
or with any kind of interaction.
You said brilliantly that there's an anarchism
relative to the, there's no one world government.
- Right.
- Alex Jones enters the chat, but.
(laughing)
- The, there's, the fear is that there's going to be
an instability that doesn't converge
towards some stable place.
- That is not the fear, that is the goal
under Ayn Rand's philosophy.
Markets have something that they always talk about
as being creatively destructive.
Which means you look at something that's been happening
for a very long time, every generation, every innovator
starts chipping away at it, he finds better ways,
marginal improvement, or it doesn't work,
and he goes broke.
When government tries to implement improvement,
we all have to suffer the consequences.
When an innovator does, it's a huge asymmetry.
If it hurts, it only hurts him.
If it succeeds, he becomes rich,
and we all profit as a consequence.
- But the fear of anarchism, I think,
§17Transcript · 2:16:35–2:25:16
is that it will be non-creative destruction,
it'll be just destruction.
Right, it's not like the instability.
- Let's give you, there's no, stability is one
of these words that sounds objective
but has no real meaning.
What field has stability?
If you had, let's suppose you want stability--
- Relationships.
- Let's talk about medicine.
Stability means we're not gonna invent new diseases
or new treatments, right?
If you mean stability in terms of a baseline of security,
we have that already.
Very few relationships turn violent.
Under an anarchist system, look at it right now,
if you look at a bar full of drunken young males
full of testosterone, if you look at a hotel
where everyone is not native to the area,
those are both far safer than the places
that the government has taken upon itself to protect you.
The parks, the alleyways, the streets, the subways.
We have right now a comparison of which is better
at keeping people safe, and it's very obvious
that when something is private and under someone's control,
and there would be layers of, there'd be more police,
but they wouldn't be a government monopoly.
The store would have someone, the street would have someone,
and you'd have your own personal security
that would be attached to your phone.
Having security as a function of geography
as opposed to a function of you as an individual
is a landline technology in a post-cellphone world.
- So you think it's possible to have,
psychologically speaking, as an individual
among the masses, to have a sense of security
even though there's not a centralized thing
at the bottom of the whole thing.
So there's not a set of laws
that are enforced based on geography,
like we have nations now.
You can have a set of laws that are enforced
in some kind of emergent, agreed-upon way.
So basically, I wanna go to a hotel
and trust that I'll be able to get a room,
and nobody's gonna break down the door,
and I don't know, take all my vodka.
- Let's take it a different way.
If you were worried about a hotel having bedbugs,
that's not something that government's involved in,
what mechanism, and that's not an unrealistic concern,
are there mechanisms right now that you can undertake
to make sure that's not the case?
- Yes.
- So it would be the same thing with,
I want to make sure I go to a hotel that has security.
It would be exactly the same thing.
And here's another example, kosher food.
People who keep kosher, Jews who keep kosher,
their food has to be prepared in a certain way.
It has to meet higher rabbinical standards, right?
If you look at food, it will have that certification,
the K, and there's even competition there.
There's the K, and there's the stricter U letter.
People don't notice it 'cause they're not looking for it.
You would have companies certifying different locales
for their level of security,
and it would take an hour to have an app
just like when you have toll roads, right?
That would tell you you're approaching an unsafe area,
you're not gonna be covered by us,
and you could have it color-coded very easily.
We could do this today.
- But the thing is, you're exactly correct,
but there's an assumption of you're already in a,
okay, you can give me a different word than stability,
but you're already in a place where the forces
of the market or whatever can operate.
The worry is like, initially,
you might not have enough stability
to where you can choose one place over the other
based on the security that they provide.
- We already have different types of security here
because we have federal government,
we have state governments, and we have local governments,
and these often contradict each other.
So the idea of the implausibility
of having different security companies
and having it be unstable or impossible,
we already have a very rough example
of it happening in real life.
- But all of it started,
the idea of, especially with Yaron,
is it all started with government monopoly of violence
saying, "No, kids, don't let violence get out of hand."
So how do-- - We had a civil war
where half the country was slaughtered.
- That's a display of the government
not having a monopoly on the violence, right?
It's like, that's the split.
- It had such a monopoly on the violence in the North
that it could draft people to fight others
that they didn't even care about.
- There's a South, so it's the government splitting.
It's like a giant iceberg splitting.
The argument is that you would have something
like a civil war much more often under anarchism.
- First of all, if you had a civil war much more often,
we don't have that with car companies, right?
There's no car company that says,
"I refuse to pay you," or whatever.
- That's not violence, sorry to interrupt.
And I'm playing-- - Hold on, let me finish.
It is violence because if I'm a company
and I'm saying that my cars can run over yours
with no consequences, this is a rough analog,
why has that not happened?
Now, in terms of having security system,
if I am free, just like switching cell phone
to go from one provider to another,
and this one company as part of its payment
doesn't want $50 a month, $100 a month,
wants my son, I'm not going to be a member
of this security company unless, in that case,
we're dealing with something like a Pearl Harbor
or foreign invasion where it's all hands on deck.
- Let's go by evidence.
How many places do we have evidence of
that you can have at a large scale?
- Why is that at a large scale?
- Because it feels like once you don't know the person.
- What about eBay?
eBay is an example of anarchist in practice.
I am selling something to someone whose name
I don't even know in a country that is
nowhere approximate to me, and eBay acts as the arbiter.
Sometimes I don't get the money after I get screwed over,
but that's far less than the taxation
that I have to give to the federal government.
- It's a great point, but it's in the space of finance.
If I could, if on eBay, you could also commit violence.
- Theft is violence.
- No.
- Yeah, if you give me 10 grand for a car
and I don't deliver anything,
you've stolen 10 grand from me.
- Yes, but there's something uniquely problematic
to being stabbed or shot.
- The reason you're stabbed or shot is because
the government, despite its contract,
is refusing to allow Second Amendment rights
to be implemented among the citizenry,
and the people who are making that the case are the cops.
They are the ones who are the traitors to the Constitution
and should be regarded as such,
whereas private companies are far more amenable
to market pressures than the state is.
- It's a strong argument,
but let's actually just briefly mention the scale thing.
Why don't you think we should talk about scale?
- Because if you had anarchism just in Vermont
or just in Brooklyn, fine.
The people make the argument you need anarchism
or else China's gonna invade,
but that's like saying, what,
do these little countries don't exist?
Does San Salvador not exist?
Some of them are violent, some of them are not,
but the point is they're not all,
at a moment's notice, about to be invaded.
Kuwait's an example of this.
Kuwait was invaded by Iraq,
and very quickly all the big countries
who were interested in having your stability, safe space,
got involved and kicked them out of Kuwait.
If you had this company
that was waging war on the population,
it seems quite likely that the other organization
would get together and put a stop to this
because they're not in a position
to provide this service of security to their customers.
- Okay, all this is brilliant,
but didn't you just say that we are actually
in a state of anarchism relative to other countries?
- Yes.
- So isn't this what emerges?
This is what, aren't we actually living
in a state of anarchism where we all have agreed?
- I haven't agreed to anything.
- So the basic criticism you have is
you're born on a geographical land,
a geographical area, and you're forced
to have signed a bunch of stuff just by being born
in a particular place.
So really, if you could just much easier choose
which space of ideas you are associated with,
that would be actually a state of anarchism.
- Yes.
- And you could have a military that you sign up with.
- Sure.
§18Transcript · 2:25:18–2:34:30
- And you're certainly not putting people in prison
to get raped because they're selling drugs.
- Yeah.
- And you're certainly not allowing everyone else
on the street who wants to be there.
- Can we say something nice about Ayn Rand?
- I can talk about nice things about her all day.
I own her copy of The Fountainhead, you know.
- What to you is Ayn Rand's best idea,
one that you find impactful, insightful, useful
for us in modern society that you think about?
- That your life has meaning and productive work
is your highest value, and that you shouldn't apologize,
and this is something I despise,
you shouldn't apologize for saying,
I want to be happy and I'm going to work toward that.
And that, as a few others, that you owe nobody else,
some random stranger, a second of your time.
You see this a lot on Twitter and social media,
people demanding a debate, or demanding you act
a certain way, and engage with them.
You don't owe them anything.
So I think those are some of her best ideas.
And she teaches you how to think.
Ayn Rand does not have all the answers,
but she has all the questions.
- Do you think, what do you think
about the whole selfishness thing?
I mean, are you triggered by the word selfishness?
- It's really unfortunate what she does,
because you were just talking earlier
about mold bug being carelessly.
She, this is indefensible in my opinion.
So she talks about the virtue of selfishness,
and she claims that when people talk about selfishness,
they mean concern primarily with the self.
They don't.
When people talk about selfishness,
they mean in a sociopathic way,
concern exclusively with oneself, right?
They mean like, oh, if someone is dying on the street,
I'm not gonna even waste a second saving them,
because I'm selfish.
So she sets up this complete caricature of the term.
When she's attacking selflessness in her best sense
is when there are people who have no sense of self.
They have no values of their own.
They have no goals of their own.
Everything that's in their mind is gotten secondhand
from the culture at large,
and there's nothing unique or special
from their perspective worth fighting for.
So when she attacks, when she advocates for the self,
she basically means self-development,
self-improvement, and achievement.
So I think that word choice is really false
and needlessly off-putting.
- Yeah.
Controversial, perhaps for the purpose
of being controversial, I don't know.
- But it's just, it's not accurate.
That's not what people mean by selfishness.
- Yeah, I would say it's one of the reasons
probably her philosophy is not as much adopted
or thought about is like, it's funny,
like the use of words means something.
Exactly as you said, that's my criticism,
that's just my bug, which could be incorrect criticism,
by the way, so I'm not exactly sure.
Can we talk about some modern day chaos and politics?
- Yes, please, I hate chaos.
- Speaking of your hatred for chaos,
let's talk about secession.
- Oh yeah, I was the first one on this trip.
- Yeah, you were, well, the Civil War beat you to it,
but-- - Sure,
in contemporary times.
- In contemporary times, you were on this.
Can you talk about what is the idea of secession?
What are the odds that it might happen?
What does it mean for the United States
in some way for different states to secede?
- Sure, America's been one country
with several cultures since the beginning.
There's absolutely no reason for someone,
this goes back to the anarchist idea,
if you despise Donald Trump, which is your prerogative,
if you think Joe Biden is a clown, which is your prerogative,
there's absolutely no reason for you to be governed
by someone you disapprove of.
This is an incoherent, nonsensical concept.
The only reason we even take it as a hypothesis
is that we're trained to the contrary since kindergarten.
A secession, I don't know along what lines,
but increasingly, it's becoming harder and harder
for people to have conversations.
I think social media, and this is something people
despise social media for, I think this is something
that social media has done well, which I'm advocating for,
is it tends to kind of run through ideas
through like an evolutionary process
and drive them to the logical conclusion.
So it's very hard to be a moderate online
'cause there's gonna be people pushing through your ideas
through several cycles, and then you're gonna end up
at some kind of more pure,
or if you wanna dislike it, extreme perspective.
Having these different pockets,
it's not really governable 'cause people fundamentally
have different worldviews.
So I don't know what secession would look like.
I think the number is really increasing
at an exponential rate.
I do not think-- - The number of supporters.
- Of supporters.
I think the claim that this can only be accomplished
through violence is false, it's a lie.
Just like any divorce doesn't have to involve
beating your ex-husband or ex-wife.
So, and I'm very much looking forward to this
becoming a reality far quicker than I ever expected.
- Well, do you think there's a value
of competing worldviews being forced
to be in the same space? - Yes, but within a context.
So we can agree, if group one thinks A, B, and C
are the fundamental aspects of their worldview
and argue within that, and group two thinks D, E, and F
and argue within that, so you're gonna have
a lot of argument within those space.
But if there's fundamental differences in worldview,
there's no reason to be, especially when each views
the other as completely incoherent and unreasonable.
- Do you think there's a line of fundamentally different
worldviews that, along which a secession will happen
in the United States?
Like is there something that emerges to you
as a set of ideas that are like, what do you call that?
Like you can't come to an agreement over.
- Yeah, I think that's already happening.
Like with the masks, I think there's just two
fundamental perspective, and each one thinks
the other is insane and also deadly and destructive.
And I don't see how there's any discourse on this topic.
- So on the left--
- I wouldn't say it's left versus right.
I think it's people who are pro-risk
versus people who are risk-averse.
- Yeah, so risk-averse, and then there's like a hope
for the comfort of the sort of centralized science,
giving the truth, and then everybody must follow the truth
of the proper way to behave.
And then there's, on the other side, a distrust
of any kind of centralized institutions,
of anybody who might use control to try to gain
greater and greater power, and masks are a symbol of that.
And even if masks are or are not a--
- Efficacious, yeah.
- Yeah, effective way of stopping the virus,
which is really unfortunate to me from a perspective.
I happen to be on a survey paper about masks.
Like people don't seem to care about the data or so on.
- Correct.
- This has become just a nice point on which
to then highlight the difference between the two sides.
Yeah, it's really, I mean, it sounds kind of on the face,
kind of ridiculous that the secession
would occur over a mask.
- It wouldn't, but I'm saying this is an example
of something where there's a clean break.
- Yes.
- And risk-averse versus someone who's risk-seeking,
these are just two fundamentally different perspectives.
Do you want to have an NHS,
or do you have one of a market-based healthcare system?
You can make very valid arguments for both.
There's no reason for everyone to be under one.
- But you think that's not something that's,
you think that's irreconcilable, if that's the word,
- Yeah.
- That that's not in the space of ideas
that you can have in the same room together,
and they fight at each other and ultimately make progress.
That secession is the more effective way
to proceed forward.
- Yes.
- Well, do you see a possible world
where no is the answer?
Meaning, I know you say yes,
because you kind of lean on the side of freedom
and anarchism.
- Yes.
- Like you make, you want to make,
let me make an argument in terms of divorce,
which is in your worldview or your intuition
is you want to make secession as frictionless as possible.
- Of course.
- Along all lines, not just like states or whatever,
just like you want to choose, you want to be free.
- Yeah, and peaceful.
- Let me make my authoritarian Russian,
§19Transcript · 2:34:34–2:42:39
- Okay, Papa Stalin.
- Papa Stalin argument in terms of relationships.
Like when shit goes wrong in a relationship,
- Watch your language.
- Okay, there's only a place for one Stalin at this table.
Okay?
- Okay, I'll get to be Lenin.
- No, you get to be like Merkel
as our previous discussion with Putin.
Okay, don't let me unleash the hounds.
You know, you want to work through some of the troubles
before you get divorced.
Like you want to do the work in relationships sometimes.
Like it goes up and down.
- It's been 200 plus years.
It's done.
- But in the, listen, okay, so it's not a one night stand,
but you know.
- Look at Trump, this, I don't see the middle ground.
He's either a complete calamity buffoon
or he's been the first great president we've had
in like many, many years.
- So you think that there's something different now
than it was 20 years ago?
- Yes, social media and access to information.
- And the division will only increase, you think?
- Oh, yes.
- So Trump is not an accident of history.
- So they thought Trump was the river, but he was the dam.
Trump was the dam.
They thought he was the river.
So in that analogy, Trump being gone makes things worse.
- Yes, for that perspective.
Because now things are really gonna hit the fan.
- So what are the odds of secession?
- I don't know.
And my desperate hope is that it's peaceful.
But I think the number of people who are becoming
very comfortable with the violence
is making me very unsettled.
- Well, I see words as violence and your Twitter.
- It's like Hiroshima, times a million.
- Sometimes I curl up in the corner crying
after I check your Twitter feed.
But in all seriousness, you think it's possible
to do nonviolent secession?
- It's a good check of Slovakia.
Look at Brexit.
Brexit was a secession.
- Right, right.
So you can have--
- Civil War did not need to be fought.
That would have been a nonviolent secession.
And if you worry about slavery,
you could have bought off all the slaves,
import them to the North.
It still would have been cheaper and less loss of life
and probably better for race relations.
- Yeah, I don't know enough history to wonder about
how the Civil War could have been avoided.
- Well, that's how.
- Is, well, conversation?
So like--
- No, no, if they want to secede,
say, look, here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna let you secede,
but you have to end slavery.
They seceded because of slavery.
Here's the other thing.
There's like this, some circles of conservatism
have this myth that, oh, it wasn't about slavery,
it was about states' rights.
Well, if you go back, every state,
when they seceded, released a press release,
and they said explicitly, we're doing this 'cause of slavery.
So that is an abomination that needs to be taken care of.
But the way, other countries have ended slavery peacefully.
One of the ways to do it is pay them by all,
and we end up doing this after the war.
I think the South people got reparations,
the slave owners, it was just insane.
Bring them North, wanna go to Canada, whatever,
and you agree, and that's our peace treaty.
Because the people who died weren't the slave owners.
It was white trash.
And it was, that's who always,
and I hate that that's the term.
I can't think of a better one.
But that's who always ends up fighting these wars often,
disproportionately, it's poor people and uneducated people.
And I do not regard them as cannon fodder.
I think it's horrible.
- So what would it look like?
There'll be two founding documents?
- Yeah, they had their constitution.
- Which I don't know the history of that.
- Yeah, they had a constitution,
but it was much more decentralized.
- If secession doesn't happen.
- Yeah.
- You said that Donald Trump was the dam, not the river.
- Yeah.
- That sounds like Walt Whitman or something.
It's poetry, okay.
- Are you flirting with me?
- You know us, we don't flirt.
We just club and drag you to the cave.
- We hammer and sickle.
- And you don't wanna know about the sickle.
It's not good cop, bad cop.
- Bad cop, worse cop.
- Yeah, what do you think 2024 looks like
in terms of the candidates?
- It's gonna be Kamala Harris
as the Democratic candidate.
I'm really looking forward to Ted Cruz versus Mike Pence,
'cause they're both very good at debate.
That would be interesting to see
how they differentiate themselves.
But honestly, I mean,
things are gonna get really ugly really soon.
- What about Donald Trump coming back?
- He's not gonna do it.
So things, in my opinion,
I think things are gonna be really, really crazy in 2021.
And talking about the dam being gone.
- 2021, so this year coming up?
- Oh yeah, it's gonna be complete mayhem.
- What do you think, prediction-wise,
and this is empirical,
what do you think Donald Trump's Twitter feed
looks like in 2021?
At the end of 2021, we'll look back
and see what was the Obamagate exclamation points,
or we won.
- He is going to be, for the first time in history,
holding the Republican Party accountable to the base.
We've never had that happen before.
I think he's going to be holding their feet to the fire,
radicalizing them.
And given that they have the Senate,
where it's gonna be 50/50,
the Democrats have a three-seat majority in the House.
This is not a governing coalition for either.
It's going to be complete mayhem.
- What does that actually look like?
So what are the key values you think
that he's gonna try to push?
- I think it's just gonna be very contrarian.
He's gonna be holding them accountable
in terms of budgeting,
even though he never did that as president.
I think in terms of some kind of nominations.
Here's the thing, this is the first time since Nixon,
50 years, and things weren't as politicized then,
where an incoming president
doesn't have control of the Senate.
The Senate has the vote over cabinet positions.
I do not see a possibility of them not trying to pick a fight
on one or two of these nominations.
And that's gonna, and especially as revenge for Kavanaugh,
this is gonna get very bloody very quickly.
And I think Mitch McConnell,
there's a sadistic side to him.
He revels in being the brakes on the car.
And I think the base, it's just gonna be throwing just,
they're gonna want some bone.
It's like, oh yeah, we eliminated this one person.
So that's gonna get really ugly really quickly.
- You see it being quite divisive.
- Oh yeah. - A division increasing,
not stabilizing or decreasing.
- And I'll be doing my part.
- I know you'll be doing my part,
but I'm trying to do my part.
And like trying to be, like to me,
the division is shouting over people like Elon Musk,
people who are actually building stuff
and like accomplishing things in this world
in terms of like--
- Elon said he took the red pill.
- No, see, you're talking about the,
I'm talking about, forget Elon.
SpaceX and Tesla and actually the good sides
of like some of the things that Google is doing,
like actually building things,
like making the world's information searchable,
all that kind of stuff.
Like all the stuff, you know,
making actually the world a better place.
There's a bunch of technologies
that are increasing our quality of life,
all that kind of stuff.
I feel like they get like not much credit
or in our public discourse because of the division.
The division is just like,
it's clouding our ability to concentrate
on what's awesome about this world.
- Well, you know what would eliminate the division, right?
- Secession?
§20Transcript · 2:42:40–2:50:53
- Yeah.
- See, I don't,
it's hard for me to disagree.
It's hard for me to disagree because,
but at the same time, secession,
I'm a romantic at heart
and to me, divorce breaks my heart.
- Cool, but do you wanna live in a country--
- Cool story, bro.
- Yeah, but do you wanna live in a country
where Joe Rogan is regarded as an example
of someone who's spreading white supremacy?
I don't.
- Well, but see, I feel like that's not the country
we live in, that's just--
- The New York Times did it.
The cathedral does it on a regular basis.
- Well, the cathedral is, okay.
The cathedral, I guess you can maybe define the cathedral,
but it's like the centralized institutions
that have a story that they're trying to sell and so on.
- Yeah, this is Moldvick's concept,
but yeah, they basically set the limits
of permissible discourse and create a narrative
for the population to follow.
- But to me, that's a minority of people.
- Yeah, minority's always controlling everything
in any country.
The vast majority of the masses have no thought.
- Yeah, but minorities can be overthrown.
- Sure, the circulation of the elites, yeah.
- The way the, no, no, no, no,
and that's what progress looks like
is ridiculous people take power
and then they get annoying and new ridiculous people
that are a little bit better overthrow the previous--
- No, I think progress happens
despite the people who are in power, not because of them.
- Right, and so why is this a secession?
So is it always about overthrowing the powerful?
Is that how progress happens?
- No, I think progress happens despite the powerful.
The powerful are gonna do what's in their power
to maintain their power and they're gonna fight innovation
because it's a threat to their control.
- There's always gonna be the New York Times of the world.
There's always gonna be those--
- Sure, and let them have their own country.
- So it's two countries.
One has Joe Rogan, the other one has the New York Times?
- That's basically what's happening right now.
It's just geographically doesn't map out very well,
but culturally, yes.
- But that's just cultural stuff.
There's a layer of public discourse.
- Okay.
- I don't mean, that's what we're operating under now.
But there's actually progress being made,
like roads being built, hospitals being run,
all those kinds of things, different innovations.
That seems like secession is counterproductive to that.
- Right, 'cause one country would have all the roads
and the other would have all the hospitals.
That's a great point.
- No, that's not the point I'm trying to make.
It's just like, it just feels like the division
that we're experiencing in the space of ideas
could be constructive and productive
for building better roads and better hospitals
as opposed to using that division
to separate the countries.
They're all gonna have to solve the same problems,
it feels like.
- Sure, but they can solve them differently
and compete that way.
Mass is a great example, yeah.
We're seeing that right now.
Different countries have different mass mandates
and things like this.
- And the competition within the same structure,
within the same founding documents and same institutions
is not effective, you think, as effective as separating?
- It is effective, but there is a certain point,
which I think we have long passed,
where there is not a governing consensus
ideologically or culturally.
- Let me ask you a fun question, okay?
- Knock, knock. (laughs)
- Who's there?
Mars.
- God of war.
- The other one.
The planet.
So there is a kind of captivating notion that we might,
I'm excited by it, the human being stepping foot on Mars.
That to me is, it's like one of those things that feels
like it's, why do we want to engage in space exploration?
But I'm a bit with Elon Musk on this, which is,
it's obvious that eventually, if human species is to survive,
it's going to have to innovate in ways
that includes the space.
Like there's a lot of things we're not able to predict yet
that if we push ourselves to the limits of space,
like new ideas will come that'll be obvious
a hundred years from now,
and then we're not even imagining now.
And colonizing Mars, that idea that seems ridiculous,
exceptionally difficult, impossibly expensive,
is something that is actually going to be seen
as obvious in retrospect, and that we should engage in.
Okay, that's just to contextualize things.
The fun idea and experiment from a philosophical
and political sense is, what kind of government,
how do you orchestrate a government when you go to Mars?
We don't get too many chances like this,
but how do you build new systems, not in place of old ones,
but in a place where no system previous have existed?
- I think organically.
I hate that word, but that's the correct word.
You would have to figure out,
I mean, that's how America was built.
You had, it was a Jamestown colony,
and they tried to do communism here,
and it completely failed,
and they went to a more free market system
with the second wave of colonists, is my understanding.
For Mars, I mean, it depends on the population,
who the population was, the number of people.
I don't know, these are all kind of hypotheticals
that I don't really have any good insight in whatsoever.
I'm not a space person.
I hate astronomy, like I hate it.
- So a lot of people look up to the stars,
and they're filled with awe and wonder
about the mystery of the universe,
and you look up to the stars, and you feel what?
- I'm not looking up.
I'm looking at the Earth.
If you look at what's, I'd much rather,
given a choice between Mars and the deep sea,
I'd much rather spend a week at the deep sea
and all the life forms that are down there,
'cause they're literal aliens.
It's like things that are not literal,
but they're unimaginable to us, some of the things down there.
- Yeah, that's true.
To me, it's an interesting thought experiment
to see when you have 10 people, when you have 100 people,
how do you build an effective,
this is actually really useful for a company, right?
How do you build an effective company that does things?
It's not an obvious, despite everybody being
really certain about everything in this modern world,
to me, it's not obvious, like how do you run successfully
as a group of people?
- That's what I'm saying.
Organic means you have to look at who the people are
and tailor the organization to them,
as opposed to try to impose something.
- But you get to also select people.
- Right, 'cause it's not gonna be open borders on Mars.
- Oh, right.
I was gonna say, when you have one country,
it's all open borders.
Yeah, you're right, from outer space.
- Right.
- Some say they're aliens already there,
so you're gonna have to negotiate that.
- Sure, we're aliens, so.
- We're aliens to somebody.
- We're legal aliens.
- Do you think there's alien civilizations out there?
- Yes, of course.
- What do you think is their system of government?
- Anarchism, 'cause they're advanced.
- Do you honestly think there's
intelligent life forms out there?
- Of course, just the math, it's impossible that there isn't.
- So what do you make of all the stories
of UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff?
Do you think they've visited Earth?
- Yes, my grandfather was an air traffic controller
in the Soviet Union, and he said they would often
see these things that were not operating
the way we knew vehicles operate.
So that's good enough for me.
- So, I mean, do you think government
is in possession of some, like,
what do you think government is doing
with this kind of information?
Do you think somebody has any understanding
of UFO sightings or any kind of information
about extraterrestrial life forms
that are not known to the public?
- Yes, that's indisputably true.
I think the fact that so many of these sightings
are from aerodynamic professionals,
like pilots and things of that nature,
they are people who've seen it all, who are reputable.
If they are on record saying,
§21Transcript · 2:50:54–2:59:25
"I've seen things that don't make sense,"
and both the Russians and the Americans
thought it was the other one, that says something.
- Shouldn't that be a bigger problem?
Shouldn't that be bigger news and a bigger problem
if government is, in fact, hiding it?
- I guess, but what are they gonna do
with that information?
- It's a good question.
If a UFO, if an extraterrestrial spacecraft,
which most likely would be a crappy space,
it wouldn't be the actual aliens,
it would be some drone probe ship.
- AI. - Yeah, AI, yeah.
So what would you do with that information
as somebody that's in charge of,
you see how badly WHO fumbled the discussion of masks.
Masks, yeah, masks is one of them,
but everything really in terms of communicating
with the public honestly about what they know,
what they don't know, and that's a trivial one.
- Right.
- I don't know, they certainly feel incompetent
at being able to communicate effectively with the public
about something much more difficult,
much more full of mystery, like a UFO.
A thing, a piece of material that's out of this Earth,
forget organic material, I don't know.
To me, from a scientist's perspective,
it would be beautiful, it would be inspiring
to reveal this to the world.
Here's a mystery, and make it completely public.
Share it with China, share it with everybody.
- I think there is a domino effect
where the concern would be what else are you hiding from us?
And at that point, if you said,
no, no, no, this is everything,
people wouldn't believe you,
and you can't blame them for not believing them.
- Ah, yeah.
- And then it'd be like, show us the aliens,
they'd be like, we don't have them,
we just have the craft, you're lying.
- Speaking of aliens, offline, you mentioned elves.
- Yeah.
- And psychedelics. - Yeah.
- What do you think about psychedelics
in terms of the kind of places that can take your mind,
the kind of journey it can take you on?
Like, what do you think, what is,
what do you think the psychedelics do to the human mind,
and what does that say about the capacity
of the human mind, and just in general,
like the mysteries of all that's out there?
- I don't know that we understand what they do.
The way I heard it explained to me
is that much of the human mind
isn't about receiving information,
but blocking information, right?
Because there's so much data coming in any moment
that you basically have to train yourself
to see and to hear only what you want to see and to hear.
And that what psychedelics do is they tear that away,
and suddenly you're much more aware of what's out there,
and also you're gonna be noticing patterns
that you hadn't noticed before.
I know you had that researcher on the show,
and he kind of discussed this at some length.
I mean, Rogan is probably the person
who popularized DMT more than,
well, he's obviously the person
who's popularized DMT more than anything.
I don't know anyone who has, even researchers,
who have anything close to a coherent explanation
of why this drug, which exists everywhere,
would have this very specific, very extreme effect
on so many people who are going to be experiencing
such bizarre consequences as a result of it.
I think it's very interesting that,
this is talking about the government,
the CIA started experimenting with LSD.
They killed one of their own people, drove them to suicide.
And there was a lot of research into,
Terrence McKenna talks about this, into this field.
And then very quickly, once it got into the mainstream,
they shut it down, even though it's not addictive,
it doesn't cause you to go crazy or anything like that.
And there was a lot of propaganda against its use,
which I think, thankfully, is now somewhat receding.
I think in Colorado, just legalized mushrooms,
something like that.
And I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens
as a result of this.
- Yeah, and the interesting thing is,
there doesn't seem to be, for certain psychedelics,
like psilocybin, like mushrooms,
there doesn't seem to be a lethal dose,
which is fascinating.
Like Matthew Johnson, the Hopkins professor
that you mentioned, I'm definitely gonna do
one of his studies.
It's a really cool way to do what he calls a heroic dose.
- Oh, I wanna do it.
What do I have to do?
Let's do it. - I'll let you know.
So he is--
- A heroic dose, holy crap.
- Yeah, but it's safe.
- What's a, how many grams are we talking?
- I don't know, but it's just, it's big.
He says that--
- He's gonna have a kick.
- Yeah, so he says that, I mean, he also studies cocaine,
he studies all kinds of drugs,
and he's like, the psilocybin is--
- Heroic dose of cocaine kills you.
- Well, you can't, so you can't even come close.
So he says like, the problem with studying cocaine
is you have like people who are addicted to cocaine,
or war, or so on, you give 'em the kind of doses
that we can in part of the study,
it's like, it's nothing to them.
- Right, yeah, yeah.
- Psilocybin is the only one where like,
even like daily users, or like regular users,
like are blown away by the dose they give them.
- Oh, fuck.
(Lex laughing)
- So.
(Lex laughing)
- Okay, well, we're going back to Russia.
(Lex laughing)
- You can go to Russia in your mind.
- Yeah.
- You can go to outer space, maybe.
Maybe you'll become an astronaut,
or astronomer after all.
- Maybe I'll be Baba Yaga.
(Lex laughing)
- I'll let people look that one up.
- Holy crap, wow.
- What is love?
What do you think this thing is?
Like our attachment to other human beings?
And is it something that we should give
to just a few people?
- Yes, that's for sure.
When I was working with D.L. Hughley in his book,
he didn't use the term, but he was describing
like low-key depression.
And he talked about how he was in the airport,
and he noticed a girl had a red dress,
and he went up and thanked her,
and she was like, "What are you thanking for?"
And he had realized he hadn't registered color in weeks.
And I think love is like that.
When you see someone, and you just like,
"Oh, like your eyes are open.
"Like this is something I've never seen before.
"I want more of this," that kind of thing.
It really disorients and reorients your thinking.
- Don't you find that the world is full of that nonstop?
It's not just like a person either.
- Yes, but when it's in a person,
it's a whole other level, 'cause it's like,
I could have, this is gonna be great for years.
It's like, every day it's something new.
I mean, and that is rare.
- You think it's rare?
Find someone who you could talk to them for years
and not run out of things to talk to.
- Oh, that's true, for years, yes, yes.
- That's rare.
And know that they really, if you leave the room,
they will do right by you.
That's really rare.
- Well, from a Russian perspective,
you just don't give them another choice.
(Lex laughing)
This is (speaking in foreign language)
New Year, New Year's Eve.
- Yeah.
- So you've talked about secession
and the world burning down,
and you holding the match at the end,
standing with a big smile on your face.
- Yes, why so serious?
- But let me ask you,
if it doesn't include flame and secession and destruction
and laughing malice and makeup and a white suit at the end,
how do we bring more kindness and love to the world in 2021?
- Oh, easy.
Be comfortable saying, "I want to be happy."
And if there's someone who interjects
and gives you attitude, arms lengthen.
Surround yourself with people who also want to be happy.
Here's a great example.
My buddy, Chris Williamson, who I've mentioned before,
he's a podcaster, does Modern Wisdom.
He's an awesome dude, and we became friends,
§22Transcript · 2:59:28–3:02:46
very close friends this past year.
And he was in Dubai recently,
and he sent me pics from Dubai by the pool, just loving life.
And it took me a week, and then it clicked in my head.
And I'm like, "You know what?
"For some other people,
"if they saw him, underwear model, at the pool,
"they would think this is him bragging or humble bragging."
And that never entered my head.
I'm like, "Oh man, I'm so glad my boy
"can be having a good time and is sharing his joy with me."
That's the kind of people you need to surround yourself with
where it never enters their head to be resentful
or anything other than sharing in your bounty.
- What makes you happy?
- I'm happy all the time.
And one of the points I made in my life is,
I really hated, I really did not like to give advice
because I feel, don't give advice
until you know what you're talking about.
And to me, what makes me happy is being self-actualized.
I am in a position with my career
where I could be myself 24/7,
where I never have to engage in small talk,
where I never have to interact with someone I don't want to.
And I'm very blessed to have that.
Very few people have that.
And to have that be not only,
to have that be rewarded,
and having people find that something of value to them
makes me very, very happy.
But also being an uncle.
I have two little nephews.
They make me very, very happy.
Sure, my sister's raised in the Russian
so they talk like immigrants, but that's okay.
We're gonna change that.
We have to dismember her, that's fine.
That makes me happy.
And to be able to finish this book
and know it's gonna give people a sense of hope,
that's really validating.
- What are you most grateful for for our conversation today?
- (laughs) You're stealing my bit.
What am I most grateful for?
I am very grateful that I can come in here
not knowing what we're gonna talk about
and know it's not gonna be something
I have to be on guard about,
or I have to watch my words,
and that neither you or your audience
is going to be responding derisively.
I feel safe here.
- You're welcome.
(laughs)
- Spasibo.
- Thanks for talking to me, Michael.
It was awesome.
Thank you for listening to this conversation
with Michael Malice, and thank you to our sponsors.
NetSuite Business Management Software,
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So the choice is success, health, food, or money.
Choose wisely, my friends.
And if you wish, click the sponsor links below
to get a discount to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from Emma Goldman on anarchism.
People have only as much liberty
as they have the intelligence to want
and the courage to take.
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)