Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malus.
00:00:04 Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I’m proud to call him my friend.
00:00:12 He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all
00:00:19 the time.
00:00:20 And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malus in the Tupagalovi language that I’m
00:00:27 increasingly certain I’ll never quite able to get the hang of.
00:00:32 Hello, comrade.
00:00:36 So Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of my favorite books.
00:00:40 It’s an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution
00:00:46 of 1917.
00:00:48 So for people who haven’t read it, it’s animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become
00:00:54 as bad or worse than the humans.
00:00:57 So comrade, if we lived on this farm, in the book Animal Farm, which animal would you most
00:01:04 rather be?
00:01:06 Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin, the raven Moses, the humans, Mr.
00:01:13 and Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep?
00:01:17 I’m gonna go with the Milton answer, which is it’s better to rule in hell than serve
00:01:22 in heaven, right?
00:01:24 It’s better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
00:01:27 Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs.
00:01:29 So I guess I’d be a cop.
00:01:32 At the very top.
00:01:33 So the leader, the main pig, Napoleon versus like the others.
00:01:37 I would say it’s not, it’s sure it’s an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think
00:01:42 Orwell’s point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.
00:01:46 I mean, it could very easily be read as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler, or many
00:01:50 of these others.
00:01:51 I’m a huge George Orwell fan.
00:01:55 One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of
00:02:01 many of these undisputably left wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarian
00:02:09 communism.
00:02:10 And the three I could think of top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time
00:02:15 are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third.
00:02:20 Something that leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly
00:02:25 invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don’t have the exact quote off the top of my head,
00:02:29 but something to the effect of every word I have written should be taken as a defense
00:02:34 of democratic socialism against totalitarianism.
00:02:37 So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore, in many ways anti communist.
00:02:44 We like to parse things out, you’re going to laugh, into binary fashions that left good,
00:02:51 right bad, or right good, left bad.
00:02:53 But historically speaking, it would just not fall away into these camps as easily as people
00:02:58 would like.
00:03:00 And I think it is important for those of us, it takes a lot more courage to fight the right
00:03:06 from the right or to fight the left from the left, because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen
00:03:12 or your fellow travelers are going to regard you as a traitor to the cause.
00:03:15 So every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these three figures, among others, who
00:03:21 not all even if they hadn’t done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that
00:03:27 all of us can learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model.
00:03:34 So
00:03:35 what was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism?
00:03:38 Is it basically freedom, the value of freedom?
00:03:42 Let’s go through the three of them.
00:03:43 So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure, you know, we’ll talk about her later,
00:03:47 I’m sure she got deported from the United States with her partner in crime, Alexander
00:03:52 Birkman, literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie’s main man
00:03:58 in the Pittsburgh steel mill strike.
00:04:00 She got deported to the Soviet Union.
00:04:03 And they’re like, oh, you want socialism?
00:04:05 Because at the time, the anarchists were regarded as socialist, you know, go choke on it.
00:04:09 And she’s there.
00:04:10 And she was watching in great horror what was going on.
00:04:13 And she actually went to Lenin’s office and she goes, this isn’t what we’re about.
00:04:16 The revolution is about the individual and free speech and everyone working together
00:04:21 to further society.
00:04:23 And he told her that, you know, you know, free speech is a bourgeois contrivance.
00:04:26 And regardless, you can’t have these circumstances in the midst of a revolution.
00:04:30 And when she left the Soviet Union, and you know, she went to Britain.
00:04:34 And at the time, before the 1917, there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles
00:04:40 about what would the revolution look like, right?
00:04:42 Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model?
00:04:44 Would there be the Marxist model?
00:04:46 Obviously, the Bolsheviks ended up winning.
00:04:48 But even then, it wasn’t obvious because there was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
00:04:51 And what people, you know, you and I know what those words mean.
00:04:54 But Bolsheviks were kind of funny because Bolsheviks means bigger and Mensheviks means
00:04:59 smaller.
00:05:00 The Mensheviks had the numbers.
00:05:01 It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks.
00:05:06 And Lenin, you know, destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously.
00:05:11 Beforehand, you know, there was the idea like, okay, with all these cockamamie ideas, we
00:05:15 have to work together.
00:05:17 You know, we don’t know what’s going to look like for the cause.
00:05:19 Then as soon as he sees power, he’s like, yeah, yeah, we’re not doing that kind of pluralism
00:05:22 anymore.
00:05:23 This is going to be the right approach.
00:05:25 So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman.
00:05:29 She wrote a book that they titled, My Disillusion with Russia.
00:05:32 And I remember this one anecdote, which I’m going to discuss in the forthcoming book,
00:05:36 where she goes to Britain and the British were very red at the time, they really had
00:05:40 something called the Fabian Society, which was the predecessor to the British Labour
00:05:44 Party, which were like, all right, we’re going to get rid of liberalism and have a socialist
00:05:49 kind of nation.
00:05:50 And she gave talks, and there was this one time where she gave a talk and she started,
00:05:55 and there was a standing ovation, by the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop, because
00:05:58 she dared to look at these people in the face, something they’d been fighting for all their
00:06:03 lives and saying, you know, we’ve been to the future and it works.
00:06:07 And she’s like, guys, this is worse than the czar.
00:06:10 You know, people are under house arrest, you’re not allowed to have, you know, newspapers
00:06:13 are being shut down if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.
00:06:16 And you know, she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously.
00:06:20 So she is, you know, deserves huge accolades in that regard.
00:06:24 I brought her up and we were talking about with our conversation with Yaron Orwell, I
00:06:28 think you don’t need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction
00:06:34 to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state.
00:06:39 And Camus, who might be my all time great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being
00:06:44 a man of conscience, you know, he joined the Communist Party and for a lot of people in
00:06:48 the States, you hear, oh, you joined the Communist Party, so I need to hear, it’s all you need
00:06:51 to, he was a communist, all you need to know.
00:06:53 He joined the Communist Party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in
00:06:56 France and other locations.
00:06:58 And he took Nazism, as did many others, of course, very, very, very seriously.
00:07:03 He wasn’t some committed communist, but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know,
00:07:08 be part of the underground in Vichy France, and so on and so forth.
00:07:11 So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him, which is kind of a misquote, Howard Zinn
00:07:17 is the one who actually said it, that it is a job of thinking people not to be on the
00:07:21 side of the executioners.
00:07:23 And he very much felt, if you read his speech when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, in
00:07:27 the 50s, where he goes, it’s basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying
00:07:33 himself.
00:07:34 I don’t think I’m ever going to be a man on the level of Camus and what he’s accomplished,
00:07:39 but I think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point
00:07:46 out, you know, this is the leftism at its best when, you know, giving voice to the voiceless,
00:07:51 when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people, and they might not
00:07:56 be educated, literate, or have any power at all.
00:08:00 He’s the guy who’s like, you are ruining humans, these humans matter, and I’m not going to
00:08:06 let you look the other way and act like you don’t know what you’re doing.
00:08:10 So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism, or we look at the fictional Animal
00:08:14 Farm, what’s the heroic action then?
00:08:17 So Camus joined the Communist Party, there’s a bunch of different heroic actions, some
00:08:23 more heroic than others, not just for the, you know, hero is the wrong word, in terms
00:08:29 of like effectiveness, what’s the effective action, I guess is what I want to ask.
00:08:33 As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind, what’s the heroic action?
00:08:38 That’s a tricky question, because a lot of times in the West, heroism is regardless intertwined
00:08:42 with martyrdom, right?
00:08:44 So it’s kind of this idea of like, you have to speak to, you know, Camus always talked
00:08:47 about justice, let justice be done though the heavens fall.
00:08:50 This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience, and that you have to do the
00:08:55 right thing, even the consequences might not be what you like.
00:08:58 And I think that is a good loose definition of heroism.
00:09:01 So if you meet, I’ll give you one example of heroism.
00:09:03 This was on Twitter, and I really feel bad that I don’t remember the guy’s name.
00:09:09 This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was, and you know, there’s the Nazi guards
00:09:13 keeping everyone along.
00:09:16 And if you were certain, I think if you were under 12, they killed you or something, there
00:09:19 was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not, there was some circumstances.
00:09:24 And he asked the mom how old this kid was, and she’s like, he’s 14, and she’s like,
00:09:28 no, he’s 12.
00:09:29 And she’s like, no, he’s 14.
00:09:30 She goes, he’s 12.
00:09:32 And she realized what this Nazi was telling her even in that circumstance, and it ended
00:09:36 up saving the kid’s life.
00:09:37 So I think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism,
00:09:47 humanism and venerating the sanctity of human life.
00:09:51 I think that, and I think it’s also important to pick your battles.
00:09:56 I don’t think if, you know, he got, that Nazi over there got in a bullhorn and said, hey,
00:10:02 this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s not going to help anyone do anything.
00:10:06 So I do think, you know, people a lot of times attack me for my anarchist views, like, oh,
00:10:11 you know, would you call the police?
00:10:12 Would you use the roads?
00:10:13 Would you pay your income taxes?
00:10:15 You know, I got in an argument with Tim Pool, because there was that couple, I think it
00:10:19 was at Missouri or Illinois when they had their guns and they were being arrested and
00:10:24 they basically took a plea deal and he said, you should have fought.
00:10:27 I go, it’s a lot easier to say you should fight, but we don’t know what circumstance
00:10:32 someone is under.
00:10:33 And what these totalitarian regimes did very, very well, as you know, is if you were a target
00:10:40 and they can’t get through to you, that’s fine, you have a family.
00:10:43 So you can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw and you can stand up to all the torture, cool,
00:10:49 what are we going to do about your wife?
00:10:50 What about your mom?
00:10:51 One thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids up to 14 and up could get the death penalty
00:10:57 for certain crimes.
00:10:59 So after that, the rule was from the NKVD, if you were interrogating someone, they would
00:11:05 have death warrants for the kid’s child on the desk visible.
00:11:09 So I’m interrogating you asking you to commit to, I’m sorry, to admit to some crime that
00:11:14 you’re not committed.
00:11:16 And those piece of paper, it’s Svitlana, she’s got a death warrant.
00:11:19 You’re going to admit to any crime you want.
00:11:22 So this is something Americans, this is even the case right now in North Korea, which I
00:11:26 know you had Yonmi Park on, it’s something I talk about a lot.
00:11:29 Let’s talk about it instead of the hypothetical, but this is happening right now on earth.
00:11:33 You can look at the map on Google.
00:11:35 The great leader, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea said, class enemies must be
00:11:39 exterminated three generations.
00:11:41 So North, when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum from Ascender
00:11:46 says the family is the basic unit of society, unit.
00:11:50 North Korea takes that seriously.
00:11:52 The family is punished as a unit.
00:11:54 So if someone does something wrong, three generations have to pay the price and you
00:11:58 often don’t know who it is that got you all in trouble.
00:12:01 There’s not a trial.
00:12:03 This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible.
00:12:07 It’s a lot easier to be brave when it’s just your skin.
00:12:10 It’s something when it’s your child, your loved ones, every man becomes a coward.
00:12:17 But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for The Guardian to say, I don’t
00:12:21 vote.
00:12:22 There’s no consequences to me.
00:12:23 There’s no possibility of consequences to me.
00:12:25 This is the wonderful thing about living in a free country.
00:12:29 It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union and say, I’m not going to vote.
00:12:35 And what would that courage accomplish?
00:12:37 Very little.
00:12:38 Heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with no consequences
00:12:43 is a bit overrated.
00:12:45 There is some aspect, like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about
00:12:50 the Nazi soldier, which is quietly privately in your own life, live the virtues that you
00:12:58 want the rest of the world to live by.
00:13:01 Yes.
00:13:02 So like without writing about it is not as heroic as living it quietly.
00:13:08 I’ll give you a great example of this.
00:13:10 I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids, if you know someone’s in town
00:13:17 and it’s their birthday with nothing to do, take them out.
00:13:19 And I say, I do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs and I go, think about it this
00:13:24 way.
00:13:25 The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.
00:13:29 That could be you.
00:13:30 Like you have that capacity to be that person and you’re making that day feel special.
00:13:34 They’re going to remember for a long time.
00:13:36 What’s the cost?
00:13:37 30 bucks, 25 bucks.
00:13:39 So it’s very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle
00:13:48 and make things a bit better at almost no cost.
00:13:51 And they just literally don’t think in those terms.
00:13:54 And one of the things Camus talked about, he’s often described as an existentialist,
00:14:00 which he did not like that term.
00:14:01 He regarded himself as an absurdist, is the idea that we’re basically blank canvases.
00:14:06 And this isn’t something that is dangerous.
00:14:07 This is an enormous opportunity.
00:14:09 And you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want to
00:14:14 be.
00:14:15 You don’t have to be, I don’t know, George Washington or one of these great heroes of
00:14:18 all time.
00:14:19 But everyone out there has the capacity to be, excuse me, to be a hero to their kids
00:14:26 or to be a hero to maybe some, there’s nursing homes and there’s old people who are lonely.
00:14:30 I think that you take in a dog that’s on its last legs.
00:14:35 These are little things, Terry Shepherd does that a lot, I regarded him as a hero.
00:14:41 These are not Terry Shepherd, I’m blanking his name.
00:14:43 These are things that people do that aren’t heroic in the sense of Superman, but that
00:14:48 I find admirable extremely and I think are very underrated because these people aren’t
00:14:53 championed.
00:14:54 Is this some kind of weird, passive, aggressive and direct way for you to tell me that I should
00:15:00 take you off for your birthday on Monday?
00:15:03 Is that why you gave that whole speech?
00:15:05 That wasn’t it at all.
00:15:06 That was a joke, Michael.
00:15:07 No, it was a failed joke.
00:15:09 Nevertheless.
00:15:10 There was no punchline.
00:15:12 Without failure, we would not have triumph.
00:15:15 Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism?
00:15:19 Sure.
00:15:20 What do you think is the difference?
00:15:24 In your ideas about anarchism too, it seems like those are somehow intricately connected
00:15:33 because existentialism is connected to freedom and freedom is connected to anarchism.
00:15:40 Sure.
00:15:41 But I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.
00:15:46 He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it’s true, we shouldn’t talk
00:15:50 about it.
00:15:53 What people don’t appreciate is how human beings can have contradictory ideas in their
00:15:57 minds at the same time.
00:15:59 One would think, okay, someone’s a Democrat, they think ABC, therefore they think DEF.
00:16:04 People would have all sorts of contradictions and it’s not at all clear and they’ll have
00:16:08 a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated and is capable of doing
00:16:12 this.
00:16:13 So Sartre, you would think he’s this radical individualist, this sense of ultimate freedom,
00:16:19 but he’s defending the Soviet Union.
00:16:20 Camus, on the other hand, would probably be, was very much like a social Democrat.
00:16:25 He didn’t really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn’t be.
00:16:29 His essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, is one of the great masterpieces of all time,
00:16:35 an attack on the death penalty, not in terms of no one’s evil or it’s wrong to kill murderers,
00:16:41 but in terms of what does it do for a society?
00:16:44 If you have someone who takes a person and locks them in a room and says, in two years,
00:16:51 I’m going to murder you and you lock them for that.
00:16:53 This is not someone we regard as moral, we regard this as someone who’s a complete monster,
00:16:57 but that’s what the state does with the death penalty.
00:17:01 And he challenges us to think, is this the kind of people we want to be?
00:17:07 And again, he’s saying, I’m not saying killing a murderer is wrong.
00:17:11 I’m not saying evil is wrong.
00:17:12 His entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil.
00:17:17 But are we the kind of people who want to be doing these things that in any other context
00:17:22 we regard as torture or depraved?
00:17:25 So I’m much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.
00:17:28 So he was probably against war in that same way.
00:17:31 So I don’t, I have to admit, I don’t know much about the political side of Camus.
00:17:36 Well, and I don’t think his political side is that interesting or relevant.
00:17:38 What I find, sorry to interrupt you, what I find fascinating about Camus and what I
00:17:42 think about on a daily basis from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based
00:17:48 on conscience, that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your head on the
00:17:53 pelt at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity
00:17:59 true to my values?
00:18:00 Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?
00:18:06 That kind of mindset, did I, if someone is weak, am I using that as an opportunity to
00:18:11 exploit them or to harm them?
00:18:13 Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person because maybe they didn’t
00:18:17 have circumstances that were as beneficial as other people had.
00:18:23 Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning, it really
00:18:29 borders on nihilism.
00:18:31 So he regards, his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on
00:18:39 nihilism.
00:18:41 He regards cynicism as the worst value people can have.
00:18:46 And I agree with him 100%.
00:18:48 A lot of times people call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to
00:18:53 be a, you know, I had this quote in the new write where I said, I’d rather be naive than
00:18:57 a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world
00:19:01 at large.
00:19:03 Camus, this is the metaphor I use and I find it very inspirational.
00:19:07 I thought it was in his work, but I guess I thought if it described it to him.
00:19:11 There’s two types of people, you imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas
00:19:17 on an easel standing in front of this mountainside.
00:19:21 One people be like, why is this blank canvas here, you know, what was this, what’s going
00:19:25 on here?
00:19:26 And just be confused.
00:19:28 Whereas the other type of person will be like, there’s a blank canvas here in this beautiful
00:19:33 countryside, what a great opportunity.
00:19:35 I can paint this river, I could paint that bird, I could paint my friends or myself in
00:19:40 the background, infinite choices.
00:19:42 And this is a gift that I have been given.
00:19:45 And I think that also ties very heavily into what I was, I went to yeshiva as a kid, which
00:19:49 is Jewish school.
00:19:50 What we were taught incessantly how to look at life is this beautiful gift that God has
00:19:56 given you and that God wants you to be happy.
00:19:59 He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way.
00:20:03 I remember the first time I went into a church and they were asking questions about the Jewish
00:20:08 concept, the afterlife.
00:20:09 They weren’t familiar with Jewish thought.
00:20:11 And it took me a second because I didn’t really have answers.
00:20:13 And then I remembered what we were taught, which is, let’s suppose you’re at this banquet,
00:20:18 the best chef on earth, and the table is so heavy because you’ve got steaks and you’ve
00:20:22 got chicken and you’ve got sushi and the wine’s flowing and you’ve got your Dr. Pepper and
00:20:29 Mr. Pibb and the store brand, everything you want.
00:20:31 And you’re looking around at this amazing bounty, right?
00:20:34 And then you turn to this best chef on earth and you’re like, oh, so what’s for dessert?
00:20:39 I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane.
00:20:44 You have this, eat the meal.
00:20:45 I promise you, if I could deliver this meal, the dessert’s going to be okay.
00:20:50 So this focus on the afterlife when we’ve been given this amazing gift on this earth
00:20:56 is a very kind of different mindset from both the Jewish tradition as I’d been taught and
00:21:01 the Camus mindset.
00:21:02 Obviously, Camus was an atheist, didn’t believe in an afterlife.
00:21:05 This concept that life is meaningless, but that means you have that opportunity to find
00:21:13 value, to seek for truth, to seek for happiness.
00:21:17 And Camus has this quote, it’s ascribed to him, it’s like a meme.
00:21:20 I’ve never found the source, so maybe he doesn’t really say it, but he says, maybe it’s not
00:21:24 about happy endings, maybe it’s about the journey.
00:21:26 And I think when you have that mindset, and as you and I, I think you and I both found
00:21:30 this because neither of us, when we were kids, thought we’d be doing this, right?
00:21:34 But now that we are really fortunate.
00:21:37 Definitely this.
00:21:38 Yeah.
00:21:39 And definitely that.
00:21:40 Yeah.
00:21:41 But now that we’re fortunate enough to do this, and that we’re blessed enough that there’s
00:21:43 people who find this of value and interest, and we could pay the rent doing this, there’s
00:21:47 not a day that goes by where I don’t think you and I think, this is pretty absurd, but
00:21:53 it’s also pretty wonderful.
00:21:54 And as a consequence of us thriving, it also shows other people that happiness is possible
00:22:00 on this earth.
00:22:01 And I think cynicism is the lie.
00:22:05 It’s not just the worldview, it’s a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth.
00:22:10 Or it’s only possible if you sell your soul and you’re a bad person, you screw other people
00:22:16 over.
00:22:17 I reject that in every aspect.
00:22:20 As you said, my birthday is coming up.
00:22:21 I’ve been feeling just a lot of really great things have been happening very, very recently.
00:22:27 So it affects me very heavily emotionally, especially when I see the response it gives
00:22:33 to the kids.
00:22:36 So it’s one thing to say, this is what I’m for.
00:22:38 But when you can provide proof of concept that what you’ve been advocating does result
00:22:43 in positive responses.
00:22:45 I got a message from this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago.
00:22:50 And then he was like, look, I found your work, I found some other stuff.
00:22:54 And now I realized I’m going to make something of myself.
00:22:56 I was born in a meth house, you know, whatever, 19, 20 years old, I should be in the garbage.
00:23:02 But I’m going to try to be a stand up because I have opportunity on this earth.
00:23:06 Even if he fails as a stand up, you know, he’s still such whatever he does, washing
00:23:11 dishes, there’s no shame in that.
00:23:13 Is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don’t really like?
00:23:18 But as compared to the alternative of like, I’m going to kill myself.
00:23:20 This is heaven.
00:23:21 Well, I think there’s beauty to be discovered in all of it and all of those experiences.
00:23:27 Yes.
00:23:28 So, but at the same time, so I often think about I just recently reread The Idiot by
00:23:34 Dostoevsky.
00:23:35 I often feel like the idiot.
00:23:38 That’s why when I say I’m an idiot, I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot,
00:23:43 which the world sees you as naive.
00:23:45 I don’t think he’s naive.
00:23:46 I don’t think I’m naive, but I tend to see the good in people and the good in every moment.
00:23:53 And the world often is cynical.
00:23:57 And in fact, especially in what we do, often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical.
00:24:04 This is very much an urban, elite, educated mindset, where if you write a book about someone
00:24:11 who’s, let’s suppose, a drug addict or a prostitute, that has heft and that’s valid.
00:24:15 But if you’re writing a book about like a love story, you know, two people fall in love
00:24:19 and they’re in roller coasters or carousels, that’s less legitimate.
00:24:22 I hate that.
00:24:23 I hate that.
00:24:24 I hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between
00:24:29 thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity.
00:24:34 And I’m not saying a drug addict or prostitute is depraved, but they’re basically their worldviews.
00:24:38 Unless it’s dark and twisted, it doesn’t really count as art.
00:24:40 And I despise that mindset, that subtext.
00:24:43 So the internet and people around me often will call me naive.
00:24:47 Because I don’t know.
00:24:48 I think the word they want is innocent.
00:24:49 Don’t you think?
00:24:50 It’s a better word.
00:24:51 But it’s not that innocent.
00:24:52 No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart, I know you fairly well at this
00:24:56 point, believe that goodness is possible and that people can, if not be good, at least
00:25:02 be better than they were yesterday.
00:25:04 See, even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there’s not wisdom in that.
00:25:09 Presumes that somehow that’s, oh, isn’t that beautiful to live that life of a child who
00:25:16 sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future, but just wait
00:25:21 until they grow up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think.
00:25:26 But that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room.
00:25:31 And don’t you want to be, if the world is like that, don’t you want to be the guy who
00:25:36 takes it on and changes it for the better?
00:25:39 So it’s like saying, well, you know, cancer is everywhere.
00:25:42 It’s inevitable.
00:25:43 Well, don’t you want to be the one who says, not anymore.
00:25:45 I’m here and I’m going to make that change and I can see it being better than it is now.
00:25:51 So I think you and I have the same analysis of your worldview and I don’t think that there
00:25:58 is a good word for it.
00:25:59 So I guess it’s this idea of inherent benevolence might be wordy, but I think that’s more accurate
00:26:05 because, you know, you and I did not have such easy lives growing up, to put it mildly.
00:26:11 You constantly talk about just horrific aspects of life.
00:26:15 So to claim that you kind of don’t know that they exist or you sleep under the rug is completely
00:26:20 not accurate to your work and your mindset.
00:26:25 Can we talk about World War II and the Soviet Union?
00:26:30 Sure.
00:26:31 So on Sunday, June 22nd, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, which was the surprise
00:26:41 invasion of the Soviet Union.
00:26:43 If I could read to you a few lyrics from a song that for some reason is stuck throughout
00:26:49 my childhood.
00:26:50 It was a famous song during that time.
00:26:54 Двадцать второго июня ровно в четыре часа Киев бомбили, нам объявили, что
00:27:02 началась война, война началась на рассвете, чтобы больше народу убить, спали родители,
00:27:09 спали их дети, когда стали Киев бомбить.
00:27:14 The song talks about Kiev, like that moment as part of that operation that Kiev was first
00:27:21 bombed and it was announced on June 22nd.
00:27:24 The song says at exactly four o clock that the war has begun.
00:27:28 For some reason this song haunts me because the exactness of that time and this realization
00:27:39 that at any moment you can have this thing happen to you in your own personal life.
00:27:46 Maybe we had something like 9 11 happen where everything changes and it’s just like haunting
00:27:52 because it makes me think that at any moment something like that could happen that changes
00:27:57 everything and I just think about like normal life going on in Kiev at the time and then
00:28:05 all of a sudden the bombs are dropping and they announce that the war has begun and you
00:28:10 thought you were going to stay out of the war.
00:28:23 This is something that is very intensely emotional for me because you and I are both Russian
00:28:28 Jewish so to know that my grandparents and my great grandma were told that the Nazis
00:28:37 are coming and this wasn’t a dress rehearsal and that if they get here, which they do,
00:28:45 they did, Lvov is very western Ukraine, that 100% you and all your relatives are going
00:28:50 to be murdered.
00:28:56 There’s a monument now in Lvov where I’m from about this but I don’t think either of us
00:29:02 can imagine what it’s like to think that we’re about minutes or whatever hours or there’s
00:29:13 just the Russian army standing between us and everyone we are related to are going to
00:29:20 be murdered for no reason and what’s the closure here?
00:29:29 They evacuated a lot of people but they didn’t evacuate enough and to know that there is
00:29:35 this force coming to 100% murder you, this isn’t some kind of the TV news being hyperbolic,
00:29:45 they’re coming to kill you and if they get you, they will kill you.
00:29:52 We all think about war like, oh, we hope America wins in Iraq, but if America got their ass
00:29:57 get kind of in Vietnam, it’s not really going to affect America in the sense that you’re
00:30:03 going to have the body bags and all the kids being killed and that’s something that I’m
00:30:06 not super in the rug, but no one in America thought the Vietnamese are going to come here
00:30:11 and kill them, right?
00:30:12 They were secure in their person.
00:30:13 So to have that sense of we really need to win because if we don’t win, we are 100% if
00:30:23 we, they, the Russian army doesn’t win, we are 100% all going to be slaughtered and often
00:30:30 in not just a bullet to the head and in sadistic ways is something that to know that people
00:30:36 who share my blood saw and went through is very hard for me to kind of wrap my head around.
00:30:45 And there’s no possibility to delude yourself.
00:30:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:30:49 Because I mean, they, they would, as the song also talks about, but that they would burn
00:30:55 the factories.
00:30:56 So it’s basically saying we’re in the war now.
00:31:00 This is like, this is your life.
00:31:02 Yeah.
00:31:03 Like this is our life now.
00:31:04 You know how you, yesterday you worried about like, oh, I misplaced my pen.
00:31:07 Where is it?
00:31:08 Like, it’s like, yeah, this was paradise.
00:31:11 Most of us are going to just, our life now is that most of us are going to die.
00:31:17 And if we want to prevent all of us from dying, we, we have to fight.
00:31:23 And we also can’t sit down in some kind of weird, like, desert island or, you know, plane
00:31:30 crash situation and be like, let’s decide between us who’s going to be the first to
00:31:33 die.
00:31:34 Maybe the like Titanic, the Titanic, right?
00:31:36 They sat down and there were like women and children in the lifeboats.
00:31:40 You know, they had this rational agreement.
00:31:41 You don’t have those choices in a war.
00:31:44 So it’s, it’s something that I, it’s, it’s just very chilling and it’s something I don’t
00:31:52 really have the emotional space to understand or grapple with.
00:31:58 Even, you know, obviously I’ve been to North Korea, you can see it and so on and so forth.
00:32:04 You and I can’t, or anyone listening to this, except for maybe on me and people like that,
00:32:10 you can’t imagine what that’s like to live it.
00:32:13 We can’t, I, we can’t imagine what it’s like to live in those situations where it’s not
00:32:18 like before Hitler came, everyone’s, you know, dancing around and having a great time.
00:32:23 I mean, imagine how, what that life is like where your preference to Hitler is starving
00:32:29 and waiting on line for hours for bread and to have the secret police and your friend’s
00:32:33 attorney went and your phones are all tapped and you’re a prisoner.
00:32:36 But to you, this is infinitely better than the alternative.
00:32:40 Like these are the choices that, you know, our family had to deal with.
00:32:45 It’s something that no matter how much you, it’s like a, let me put it in terms of people
00:32:50 can understand, you know what I mean?
00:32:51 It’s like your first bad breakup, right?
00:32:53 Like that’s a much simpler thing to wrap your head around because it’s like, if you’ve never
00:32:57 had it, you can’t really, but when you feel it, it’s just so intense, but you can’t tell
00:33:02 someone what’s like, we could sit down for days and hours and have people tell us, but
00:33:07 until it’s the totality of your environment and your life and your mindset, I remember
00:33:13 my grandma, she would talk about it like, when you’re that hungry, all you’re thinking
00:33:30 about is bread because your brain won’t like, you know, human beings, you know, we’re evolved,
00:33:36 we have instincts, whatever, and the mind is telling you food, food, food, food, food,
00:33:42 and that there’s kids thinking this and that they’re not going to get the food.
00:33:48 And imagine being a parent and you’re watching your kids without food and knowing they’re
00:33:54 not going to get the food.
00:33:56 And the fact that this happened in North Korea in the nineties, I met a refugee and he had
00:34:04 to watch his dad starve to death.
00:34:07 And thank you.
00:34:11 And we have no concept of what it’s like.
00:34:19 I mean, we kind of, you know, it’s just like last night here in Austin, all the places
00:34:25 were closed and I couldn’t get my protein powder.
00:34:28 And this is the extent of my suffering when it comes to food, you know, or if I couldn’t,
00:34:34 there was a restaurant that I went to in Brooklyn where for some faqaqta reason, they weren’t
00:34:40 serving sashimi, they only had sushi, so I had to have the rice and the carbs.
00:34:44 To live a life where that is the extent of your food problems as opposed to the choice
00:34:51 is either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24 seven.
00:34:55 You know, my grandma told this story of how they had a close call, it was her and her
00:35:00 brother and her mom, my great grandma who passed, and I think there was like either
00:35:05 helicopter overhead or something, and my great grandma jumped on top of my grandma’s brother
00:35:11 and not my grandma.
00:35:12 So she basically did a Sophie’s Choice, my grandma’s name is Sophia, and chose the brother.
00:35:18 And this is something that she felt, you know, all her life that her mom had chosen her brother
00:35:23 over her.
00:35:24 But these little things that happen, these little kind of decisions we have to make in
00:35:29 life.
00:35:30 Or there’s a book I read called Five Chimneys, I think, this woman who was an Auschwitz survivor.
00:35:37 And what she talked about what people don’t appreciate, it’s not necessarily the slaughter
00:35:42 and the torture, it’s that there’s no rhyme or reason to it.
00:35:46 Like she talked about how they had a camp just for people from Czechoslovakia, and they
00:35:51 were treated better than the Jews, and then one day they just killed them all, right?
00:35:55 And she’s like, I still don’t understand why they’re giving them food and treating them
00:36:00 well, and then the next day they’re all killed, and we will never get answers, you know.
00:36:04 And things like she talks about how they decided to kill all the kids, and they didn’t really
00:36:12 either for some reason they didn’t have the courage to or they wanted to be cruel, so
00:36:16 instead of shooting them, they just kept walking them in the snow until they all died.
00:36:20 So it’s things like this, that the fact that you and I dodged these bullets, and that we
00:36:26 can be here and be doing this and, you know, running our mouths for a living, I think about
00:36:33 it all the time, and it’s just very disturbing to know, and I know you know this as well,
00:36:43 that there’s lots of places on earth where if people had a choice, they would kill us
00:36:46 on sight and be proud of themselves for it.
00:36:49 Yeah, there, I don’t know what to make of the contrast, you were talking about the fact
00:36:54 that you’ve been truly happy the last few weeks and months, there’s been a lot of moments
00:37:00 of happiness and joy, and that joy is built on a history of human suffering.
00:37:08 Like in your roots, in your blood, is a lot of people that were tortured that suffered,
00:37:13 so that you could have this joy, and you have both the, you have the responsibility to truly
00:37:18 be grateful for that joy.
00:37:20 But it also shows that there’s the happy ending, that it does end, and a good note that it
00:37:24 does get infinitely, infinitely better.
00:37:27 And that I think there’s a, I don’t like using the word responsibility, but there is an opportunity
00:37:34 for those of us who did dodge that bullet, to give testimony to these people.
00:37:41 And more importantly, to give testimony to the people who are going through this now.
00:37:46 So one of the reasons I talk about North Korea so much, why I wrote Dear Reader, is because
00:37:51 it’s very easy, and this is human nature, I’m not condemning people, I think that’s
00:37:57 just how people are wired.
00:37:58 When you see an Asian country with Asian people, and things are bad over there, I think in
00:38:04 the West it’s like, oh, Asia, they’re all crazy, they’re wacky, they eat dogs or so
00:38:08 on and so forth, some weird stereotype, and they think of them as kind of Martians.
00:38:12 So it’s important for people who aren’t of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on
00:38:18 behalf of these people, because it’s very different how just people just naturally react
00:38:22 when you have a Westerner talking about this.
00:38:25 Instead of it becoming them over there, it becomes, you know, this could have been us
00:38:31 very easily.
00:38:32 I have a friend, Peter Vahansky, great dude, and I was showing him photos when I was in
00:38:36 Pyongyang, and he goes, this looks like a Russian city with Asian people.
00:38:40 It completely disturbed him.
00:38:42 So that was one of the reasons I did go to North Korea, because that was as close as
00:38:46 I would get to see what your family went through, to see what my family went through, and they’re
00:38:50 still living under this regime.
00:38:54 And one of the things I fought very hard to do with Dear Reader, which I was successful
00:38:58 in amazingly, and I said, I could die now.
00:39:02 I feel like if you just move the needle a little bit, then you’ve kind of paid your
00:39:08 due for your time here on this earth, to have it change from being a laughing stock.
00:39:14 And I think Team America did a good job.
00:39:17 They made Kim Jong Il into a clown and they made a joke of it, but you’re going from nothing
00:39:22 to joke.
00:39:23 So at least now people are aware of it that it exists, right?
00:39:26 And then I and many others took it from a joke to like, guys, this is really, really,
00:39:32 really bad, and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is.
00:39:35 And I think now there is an understanding, other than a few people who are just looking
00:39:38 at it through a Trump lens and wanting Trump to fail because Trump’s an asshole and that’s
00:39:41 fine, to be like these poor people.
00:39:45 And it’s really unfortunate because there’s a segment of Western culture who thinks that
00:39:50 correctly, often when you’re complaining about or discussing the plight of another country,
00:39:58 that’s just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade.
00:40:01 Like the Kurds in Syria, you know, we’re talked about, if we don’t in Syria tomorrow, it’s
00:40:04 going to be another genocide, blah, blah.
00:40:06 I’m not saying let’s invade North Korea and things like that.
00:40:09 All I’m saying is, you know, thank God that this isn’t your life.
00:40:14 I bring this up all the time.
00:40:15 The woman who was my guide when I was there, I’m aware of what she’s up to now.
00:40:22 She’s extremely rich by North Korean standards, but she’ll never be in a position to buy medicine.
00:40:28 She’ll never be in a position to go on a vacation.
00:40:31 Things that you and I just, you know, whatever, she can’t go on the internet.
00:40:36 She can’t get an encyclopedia.
00:40:39 She can’t better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning
00:40:44 better yourself as a person in service to the state.
00:40:47 So I mean, it’s also frustrating because there’s only so much that I can do as an individual.
00:40:54 What’s your takeaway about human nature from looking at North Korea and looking at how
00:40:59 the rest of the world is looking at North Korea?
00:41:02 This is a great question.
00:41:03 I think about it fairly often.
00:41:05 I always say human beings are animals, right?
00:41:08 When you say someone’s an animal, it’s like a slur, like he’s like a beast.
00:41:12 Animals are capable of enormous kindness, empathy, sympathy.
00:41:16 You know, they look out for one another, groom one another.
00:41:19 There’s a thing with apes where they groom each other for parasites and even if there
00:41:24 are no parasites, they pretend there’s parasites just to have that kind of bonding.
00:41:28 You see infinite photos online of like cats raising puppies because the puppies, mom died,
00:41:34 things like this.
00:41:35 That’s part of being an animal.
00:41:37 Part of being an animal is also just the most monstrous cruelty.
00:41:42 Killer whales, you know, there’s this big PC move to not call them killer whales and
00:41:46 just call them orcas.
00:41:47 They will murder blue whale pups, calves, excuse me, and play with them and not even
00:41:53 eat them.
00:41:54 So they just murder for the sake of fun.
00:41:58 Even cats, you know, kill birds all the time, things like this.
00:42:00 So it runs the whole gamut.
00:42:03 And I think it’s, you know, when Yaron and I were on your show, I don’t think Lord of
00:42:07 the Flies is accurate.
00:42:08 I don’t think Hobbs is how reality works when you’re in that kind of state.
00:42:14 But I think we’ve seen countless examples of human beings, especially when human beings
00:42:21 have power over someone who’s powerless, of allowing themselves to engage in not just
00:42:28 harm, but cruelty.
00:42:31 And that is something as Soviets, you and I are very painfully aware of.
00:42:35 It’s not just about the oppression, which as bad enough as it is, it’s that mediocre
00:42:40 person with that little bit of power.
00:42:43 And now they’re standing between you and your daughter having medicine, and they love it
00:42:50 to make you dance, to be like, oh, you need me to get this medicine?
00:42:54 Make you go through hoops?
00:42:56 Because now they feel like for the first time in their life, they’re in a position of strength
00:42:59 and power.
00:43:00 I think that is, in many ways, the more common nature of evil that what Hannah Arendt talks
00:43:05 about the banality of evil, then someone who’s like an SS guard, you’re shooting someone
00:43:09 in the head.
00:43:10 Like that, I think we could all wrap our heads around to some extent, like, okay, I’m a military.
00:43:14 It’s not easy.
00:43:15 I have to execute people pulling a trigger, you could kind of have this mental disconnect
00:43:18 between the finger and the victim.
00:43:20 But like that little day to day stuff, like, are you doing the right thing on a day to
00:43:24 day basis that I think is far more common, and far more disturbing aspect in certain
00:43:29 senses of the human psyche.
00:43:30 Yeah, there’s something especially disturbing about a weak man, given power, and just abusing
00:43:43 that power.
00:43:44 There’s something about not just weak, but like, mediocre at everything it does, or less
00:43:49 than mediocre.
00:43:50 A great example of this, which I’m also talking about in the next book is Ceausescu, who was
00:43:55 the dictator of Romania.
00:43:56 So you know, the Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood in, you know, popular culture.
00:44:02 But the different countries in the second world, the Soviet bloc, some are more liberal
00:44:06 than others, some are more sane than others.
00:44:08 And Ceausescu, at first was one of the, you know, more Western friendly, more the free
00:44:13 ones.
00:44:14 Then he met the great leader Kim Il Sung from North Korea, and he had the idea to impose
00:44:17 a personality cult on Romania, and it’s the kind of things like forcing people to breed
00:44:22 because he wanted to make people taller.
00:44:24 I think he made like the biggest building in all of Europe, the People’s Palace, but
00:44:28 it was just for him, while there’s no electricity, you know, elsewhere.
00:44:31 But you look at this guy, you know, Stalin’s a badass, right?
00:44:34 He was a bank robber.
00:44:35 If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk.
00:44:37 Lenin was clearly intellectual.
00:44:39 These were powerful Trotsky, these were powerful men with huge egos, huge force of personality.
00:44:46 But you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could, like for example, on my driver’s license,
00:44:52 instead of my address, I’m not giving my real address, being like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Avenue,
00:44:56 by mistake it says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5th Street, right?
00:44:59 So you can imagine him being in the post office and me giving him my ID to get my package
00:45:04 and him being baffled because this says street, this says Avenue instead of understanding.
00:45:08 And this, the look on his face, this dullard, that you can see how, you know how sometimes
00:45:12 I’m going to, can I curse?
00:45:15 Fuck yes.
00:45:16 Yeah.
00:45:17 So if you know, like how if you’re in the airport and you see someone and you look at
00:45:18 them and an adult and you think, okay, this person was born fucked up, just like on sight,
00:45:21 like something’s wrong with them.
00:45:22 How are they traveling alone?
00:45:24 You look at Ceausescu, you look at him, you’re like, something’s not right with this guy.
00:45:28 Not in the sense of like evil, but in the sense of he’s a simpleton, right?
00:45:31 And now he’s in charge of this whole country and everyone’s taught to regard him as one
00:45:35 of the great geniuses of all time.
00:45:37 And it’s this, the idea, this mediocre nobody, this guy would have in any other culture been
00:45:43 accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job where he’s like, okay, he works
00:45:49 at the mail service and he’s bad at it, okay, fine, he’s not hurting anyone.
00:45:52 And now as a result of this, he’s responsible for mass death, secret police, and incarceration.
00:45:58 And you know, one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, which I’m sure many people see
00:46:03 as well, if you go on YouTube, it’s his speech, and it’s the first time the crowd turns and
00:46:08 his head kind of like, because they start booing him, which was unheard of.
00:46:11 And he was shot with his dog faced wife not that long after, it was just a great moment.
00:46:16 But it’s things like this, I agree with you, that mediocre, weak person is now in a position
00:46:22 of power over somebody else.
00:46:24 And that sense of vindictiveness, like I’m going to feel strong for once in my life,
00:46:29 but it’s going to be at your expense.
00:46:31 That I think is, you know, human nature, it’s most primal.
00:46:34 And every time I meet a person in this world, you’re the first person to get me to cry on
00:46:39 a fucking podcast.
00:46:40 Fucking the robot gets me to cry.
00:46:41 What the fuck is going on?
00:46:43 Every time I meet a weird person, somebody, to me, heroism is also taking a risk to rebel
00:46:52 against mediocrity.
00:46:55 Like in the most simplest of ways, like the license address, like taking a risk to break
00:47:02 the little bit of rule that nobody will know about, to take that little bit of a leap of
00:47:07 like that little protest against the bureaucracy.
00:47:11 Like that Nazi guard where he just spoke out, he’s like, hey lady.
00:47:14 That’s a big one.
00:47:15 Oh, that’s a big, sure.
00:47:16 I mean, like literally at the line at Starbucks or something like that.
00:47:19 Like even in the tiniest of ways, when I see people just like, it’s almost like that little
00:47:26 like glimmer in their eye, a wink, like we’re in this together, there’s all this conformity
00:47:32 all around us.
00:47:33 That’s at a different time could have been Nazi Germany, could have been a Stalinist
00:47:38 Soviet union.
00:47:39 Sure.
00:47:40 We’re in this together.
00:47:41 We’re going to rebel against that conformity by just taking the risk, that little bit of
00:47:47 risk against mediocrity.
00:47:48 I don’t know.
00:47:50 And then once again, I see this in companies too.
00:47:55 When I see the mediocrity, I see this, I used to work at Google, I see it in Google and
00:48:00 when the companies grow, that mediocrity is overwhelming.
00:48:04 The Peter principle, right?
00:48:05 The Peter principle.
00:48:06 Yeah.
00:48:07 My hope is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer, that risk taking, the leap
00:48:16 of faith, whatever the heck that is, the leap out of the ordinary, out of the conformity,
00:48:21 out of the mediocrity.
00:48:22 So this is where you and I disagree.
00:48:24 I think most, a lot of people are not capable of that.
00:48:28 They’re accustomed to it.
00:48:30 I don’t know if they’re not capable.
00:48:32 I understand your position.
00:48:34 I’m disagreeing with it.
00:48:35 I’m saying I do not think they’re capable.
00:48:36 I think a lot of people effectively don’t have souls.
00:48:40 They do not have a conscience in this sense where they’re going to look at an issue, bring
00:48:45 their critical thinking and say, all right, I am going to do the right thing, although
00:48:51 I’m taking a risk.
00:48:52 Do you think thinking is involved or is it just taking that leap?
00:48:56 There’s something about that basic human spirit.
00:48:58 Forget the thinking part.
00:49:00 It’s just saying, I’ll take that risk, taking that adventure, the same thing that got people
00:49:06 to explore the seas throughout human civilization, explore land, explore the oceans, that exploration.
00:49:18 We’ve done stuff this way all this time.
00:49:21 I’m going to take a leap and that comes out of nowhere seemingly.
00:49:25 But those people are the heroes, but I don’t think that’s universal.
00:49:30 I’m going to use a very gauche example.
00:49:33 There was a show called Scare Tactics, which was basically a candid camera, but they would
00:49:37 scare people.
00:49:38 They’d have vampires, whatever, a hidden camera and people’s reactions.
00:49:45 Sometimes the prank didn’t work out like they expected.
00:49:48 There was one where they were hiring the people who were the marks, the contestants so to speak,
00:49:54 was hired to be a security guard.
00:49:56 You have to watch this factory overnight and you get paid.
00:50:00 But the setup was some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle of the night
00:50:05 like in rags and they were saying they were keeping us prisoner here, blah, blah, and
00:50:10 just watch the person reaction to this.
00:50:12 There was one security guard where he basically forced them back into the building and they’re
00:50:19 working us 24 seven, we’re getting beaten.
00:50:20 He’s like, I’m here to do a job, get back in there.
00:50:24 You watch this and it never even enters his head to be like, something’s wrong here.
00:50:30 He was given his orders, he’s following his orders and to me, that is not uncommon and
00:50:37 that person, although they look like you and I, there’s something essentially human missing
00:50:43 with them.
00:50:44 Now, very quickly, the reaction is, well, it’s one step from there to Nazism.
00:50:49 I don’t think it’s something that, I’m not saying this person should be killed, but I’m
00:50:54 just saying to expect that every human being has the capacity to have that defiance, especially
00:51:02 at a cost to their own life, that I think is not realistic.
00:51:07 But at the same time, I feel like an octopus on the eighth hand, it is those few of us,
00:51:13 or if you want to include me in this, who do make these tiny little protests, who look
00:51:20 the other way when someone is hungry, who’s stealing food from the supermarket, right?
00:51:25 It’s like, all right, I’m going to pretend I didn’t see anything.
00:51:30 Those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate the
00:51:37 validity of the human experience, whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery.
00:51:42 I think almost everybody in the world can derive deep meaning and pleasure from having
00:51:48 done those courageous acts, and I also think they have the capacity to do them, to discover
00:51:54 that meaning and happiness.
00:51:55 So you’re the cynic, then why aren’t they doing it?
00:51:57 They haven’t gotten a chance to, like I’ve never tried LSD or DMT, you haven’t gotten
00:52:05 the chance to try this amazing journey, which is taking the risk.
00:52:09 That’s nonsense, because as you just said two minutes ago, everyone has that chance
00:52:15 every day to do the right thing.
00:52:17 We have the chance to do a lot of things and we don’t realize.
00:52:20 There’s a lot of stuff right in front of our nose that we don’t realize, because you have
00:52:24 to kind of wake up to it.
00:52:26 Sometimes you need the catalyst, there needs to be some kind of thing that happens that
00:52:33 wakes you up.
00:52:36 The fact that most people don’t take the small acts of rebellion doesn’t mean they don’t
00:52:42 have the capacity to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it.
00:52:49 Then it’s a discussion about how to create societies that get more and more people to
00:52:55 be free actors and free thinkers.
00:52:59 That’s the question.
00:53:00 That probably leads us into a discussion of anarchism and so on, but I just think we are
00:53:04 very young as a species.
00:53:07 We’re trying to figure out how to get ourselves to first be collaborative, but at the same
00:53:14 time be free spirits.
00:53:16 I think both of those are within human nature for most of us.
00:53:19 I think another big concern is that there’s enormous disincentives, and this is Michael
00:53:25 Malus speaking, for human beings to be kind and for tenderness.
00:53:31 I think, especially when you’re young, you know what I mean, when you’re immature, a
00:53:36 lot of times someone will reach out to you with kindness or vulnerability and you think
00:53:40 it’s funny to kind of dunk their head in the water in a pool or something like that.
00:53:44 When you get older, there’s this one example of this.
00:53:50 This was in the 90s, and there was a woman.
00:53:53 She became a stripper or something like that or whatever it was, but she had this amazing
00:53:58 body.
00:53:59 She was just gorgeous.
00:54:01 The show was, she was talking about how when she was in high school, she was bullied a
00:54:04 lot and that there was this football player.
00:54:07 He messed with her every single day.
00:54:10 One day, she even threw pickles in her hair and her hair smelled like pickles and it was
00:54:13 laughing at her.
00:54:14 This really screwed her up, I mean, up to that show.
00:54:17 They took her backstage and they brought out the football player, and now he’s a dad and
00:54:21 a regular dude.
00:54:22 He’s like, do you know why you’re here, and he’s like, no, and they’re like, oh, what
00:54:26 were you like in high school?
00:54:27 He’s like, I was kind of a jock, bully, whatever.
00:54:30 They brought her out, and he didn’t even remember her really, and she just starts crying about
00:54:34 the pickles and whatever, and this is something that affected her for 20 years, and I’ve never
00:54:38 seen a clearer example of someone who wanted to kill themselves than this guy.
00:54:43 The guilt on his face, and he’s looking at her, and he’s desperate to be like, what can
00:54:48 I do to take your pain away, to make it better?
00:54:54 He was just crippled by it because he knew there’s nothing he could do.
00:54:57 He knew he 100% did the wrong thing.
00:54:59 He knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly.
00:55:02 You can imagine, I got to screw over this lady to feed my family, that’s fine.
00:55:08 At the time, it meant nothing to him, so of course he didn’t remember, and he was just
00:55:11 paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt.
00:55:14 One of the reasons I always try to do the right thing isn’t because I’m an inherently
00:55:19 good person, which I do not think I am, I don’t think anyone is inherently good, but
00:55:23 because I will feel guilty about it for a very, very long time because if you do the
00:55:29 wrong thing, this is a very Camus idea, if you do the wrong thing to a good person, that’s
00:55:35 really, really bad because what kind of person are you?
00:55:39 In the same way that everyone can be that guy who takes someone out for their birthday,
00:55:44 everyone has that ability for someone who did the wrong thing to someone who’s a normal
00:55:48 person and do you want to be that guy as well?
00:55:52 My friend, Bittstein, he’s a big Bitcoin person, my biography ego in hubris is like $500 now
00:56:00 on eBay, it’s hard to find, came out in 2006.
00:56:04 He had told me that you can get it on torrent, it’s downloadable, and I’m like, oh, I thought
00:56:11 if you’re my friend, you’d want to buy it.
00:56:13 At the time, it was not $500, I assure you, and he goes, I did buy it, I’m just telling
00:56:18 you that you could also get it for free, this information that you might want to use.
00:56:22 And I snapped at this kid who was doing right by me and I felt, it just stuck in my head,
00:56:30 I’m like, you’re an ass.
00:56:32 And then years later, I apologize, he had no memory of this at all and I’m glad to be
00:56:36 able to reiterate the apology again.
00:56:38 But a lot of times I’m extremely aggressive on Twitter and in other venues, I always try
00:56:45 to and maybe I fail and that’s my moral failing, always do it as a counter attack.
00:56:51 If you’re going to start going personal, if you’re going to start being aggressive against
00:56:55 an individual, I’m not going to necessarily hold back when I reciprocate.
00:57:00 And it’s something that is very common on social media, but I don’t think it is normal.
00:57:05 Just because a lot of this, you’re talking about the quiet little rebellion, just because
00:57:09 everyone else around you thinks it’s okay to just go up to people and attack them in
00:57:14 the most personal ways, impromptu because of their views, really just take a step back
00:57:19 and realize what you’re engaging with.
00:57:21 Now, if that’s the fight they want, then my Soviet cruelty could come out and that’s kind
00:57:26 of why I don’t drink because I do enjoy it, but at the same time, be aware of what you’re
00:57:32 doing.
00:57:33 And again, this goes back to Camus’s sense that conscience really is what makes us human
00:57:39 beings.
00:57:40 That’s the thing I was saying, I don’t think most people think in terms of conscience.
00:57:44 They don’t think it, we are taught, this is that creeping cynicism that, oh, grow up.
00:57:51 When you’re an adult, you have to make sacrifices, blah, blah, blah.
00:57:55 And even if I buy that for a second, which I don’t, but if I have to make sacrifices
00:58:00 sometimes, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to make a sacrifice of my values in this
00:58:05 moment.
00:58:06 If I have to maybe be at work and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names, I have
00:58:10 to be humiliated, but I got to put food on the plate.
00:58:13 That doesn’t mean it’s okay later if I’m at a party and I’m just extremely offensive to
00:58:18 someone for no reason.
00:58:21 My own flavor of a little bit of rebellion.
00:58:26 Sometimes I use the number two.
00:58:28 You know, you’re very witty on Twitter and Twitter likes mockery and wit and a counter
00:58:45 attack is, Twitter loves that, somebody who’s skilled at it.
00:58:51 My own flavor of a bit of rebellion is to say things very simply, bordering on cliche
00:59:03 with authenticity and like genuinely meaning the words I say, but knowing that those words
00:59:09 would be, are easy to attack.
00:59:13 And that sometimes those attacks can hurt because people would just mock me.
00:59:20 People don’t like earnestness because they’ve been taught to be too cool for school.
00:59:24 So there’s this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated.
00:59:29 Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism of institutions or something like that, almost
00:59:38 as if I have a deep wisdom about the way the world is broken.
00:59:42 But when you speak very simply about beautiful things in life, it’s very easy to sound like
00:59:50 you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
00:59:52 And I kind of, I stick by that.
00:59:55 I don’t know where that’s going to end up, but it’s like the idiot from Dostoevsky.
00:59:59 It feels like that’s the right thing, even if it hurts when I’m attacked for it.
01:00:05 I do something similar sometimes, which is I’ll have some innocuous comment about like
01:00:09 bubblegum.
01:00:10 I mean, just it’s not to be in political.
01:00:12 And a lot of times people will respond to this paragraph of just invective about like
01:00:18 blah, blah, blah, and then this, and you say this, and you’re an ass, and just really trying
01:00:22 to get at me.
01:00:24 And in those situations, there are very specific circumstances, I will respond and I mean it
01:00:29 every single time.
01:00:31 I will say, I wish your parents had been kinder to you or your mom or your dad.
01:00:36 Because even if I’m some idiot on Twitter, who’s just talking about bubblegum, and this
01:00:40 is your, I’m not talking about politics where I can see how people get emotional, COVID,
01:00:44 my grandma died, now you’re talking about her.
01:00:46 And I realize this isn’t about me.
01:00:50 Like I’m someone you’ve never met making some inane point about nothing, and you’re getting
01:00:55 agitated about this.
01:00:57 It’s clearly something else that’s going on here.
01:00:59 And someone taught you, someone had to teach you that this is how to respond in this kind
01:01:04 of very kind of harsh way.
01:01:07 And a lot of times they won’t say anything or get deleted.
01:01:11 And I hope every single time, there’s no asterisk here, that they take a second, and they realize
01:01:19 that the way that they were talked to growing up was not acceptable, that they don’t have
01:01:25 to carry this forward.
01:01:27 And that they don’t have to be kind to me, I’m nobody to them.
01:01:31 But take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset you want to be your norm, as opposed
01:01:36 to a weapon you pull out of your pocket sometimes where it’s warranted or even when it’s not
01:01:39 warranted.
01:01:40 I think there’s a lot of those people out there, and we forget how hard it is for a
01:01:50 lot of people to grow up, how they’re trained from their parents or the single parent, that
01:01:55 the only way they’re going to get attention is by acting out, that when they do good things,
01:01:59 it doesn’t get comment.
01:02:01 But if they do bad things, they get a smack upside their head.
01:02:04 That I think is far more common than we realize.
01:02:07 And it’s not hitting the kid that’s going to last, the pain is going to give five seconds.
01:02:12 But when you’re training this child, helpless child, is something that’s really, really
01:02:17 bad.
01:02:18 I don’t know if it always can be mapped to that.
01:02:20 I always wonder about them, what their motivations are.
01:02:24 And I just kind of, whenever I think about them, I think only positively.
01:02:28 And I don’t even think about the childhood thing.
01:02:31 I think, I don’t know.
01:02:35 I kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage where we enjoy the derision of
01:02:42 others.
01:02:43 We go through stages of being…
01:02:44 I enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be, you know, Billy Eide had that quote,
01:02:48 like, I like it when people are mean to me, I stop pretending to be nice.
01:02:51 But like, what’s the worst thing someone can say about you?
01:02:53 You’re not, what harm are you doing?
01:02:56 Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are, the conversations suck and the people
01:02:59 are losers.
01:03:00 Okay.
01:03:01 No, the main thing I would say is I’m way more popular than I deserve to be.
01:03:05 What does deserve mean?
01:03:07 The reality is there’s people out there that just enjoy hating on others and I don’t fault
01:03:17 them for it.
01:03:18 Like, I don’t even think of them as haters.
01:03:21 I think of them as just people that in this particular part of their life are enjoying
01:03:25 this activity of deriding others on the internet.
01:03:32 I’m not sure what to do with that.
01:03:34 I just don’t want to, I don’t want to allow myself to think badly of them, I guess is
01:03:38 the thing.
01:03:39 I’m the one saying don’t think badly of them.
01:03:41 I’m saying that I don’t think they’re inherently bad people.
01:03:43 I think that their thinking is screwed and that I’m steel mounting them.
01:03:48 I’m saying, let’s assume everything you’re saying about Lex is true.
01:03:51 This is an opportunity for you to outdo Lex.
01:03:53 Like it’s…
01:03:54 No, but are you saying they should stop hating because I’m saying like, maybe they shouldn’t
01:03:59 just keep…
01:04:00 I don’t believe in should, right?
01:04:01 I’m an anarchist, but I’m saying if this is your belief about Lex, you know what it is?
01:04:07 I made this comment in my book, The New Right, when people make fun of Andy Warhol and they’re
01:04:11 like, oh my God, he painted a soup can and now he became a millionaire.
01:04:15 I could do this.
01:04:16 Well, why don’t you?
01:04:17 So basically if I go up to you with a check and I say, I will give you a million dollars,
01:04:22 you could see the check, you got to paint a soup can, what am I waiting for?
01:04:27 So clearly there’s a disconnect in their thinking between what they’re perceiving and the reality.
01:04:32 Because if it was as simple or as, maybe not simple, but as possible for them as they perceive
01:04:38 it to be, why are they leaving comments instead of outdoing you?
01:04:42 How great would it be for them to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground?
01:04:46 I don’t know how that would work because it’s not the NBA, but…
01:04:48 No, but you want to point out, you do this too on Twitter.
01:04:50 You want to point out the hypocrisy, the fraudulence of others, right?
01:04:57 Sure, but what are you, you’re not claiming anything other than this is, the following
01:05:01 is the conversation between me and Machique, whatever his name is, right?
01:05:06 I got the voice down, dude.
01:05:07 I got it down.
01:05:08 I’ve been walking around my house doing my Lex impression.
01:05:11 I’ve been leaking motor oil everywhere.
01:05:13 Yeah, but yeah, I don’t know.
01:05:16 I don’t know.
01:05:17 I don’t know what to make of it because I think there’s a more general statement to
01:05:21 be made.
01:05:22 Like I see Twitter this way too.
01:05:23 When I read a tweet, I try to read it with like the best possible interpretation, meaning
01:05:30 like what is the wisdom in this tweet, right?
01:05:33 As opposed to what I think a large number of people, not a large number, but some fraction
01:05:40 try to see what is the worst possible interpretation of this tweet.
01:05:43 And they want to, they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation.
01:05:49 Like they want to, there’s people, I’m already aware of this with me and certainly with a
01:05:54 lot of people, they’re waiting for me to fail.
01:05:57 They want me to be like, this guy talks about love all the time.
01:06:01 They want me to be some dark, like a Bill Cosby type character.
01:06:04 They want you to be in pain.
01:06:05 Yeah.
01:06:06 They want you to be in pain because they don’t.
01:06:07 Why?
01:06:08 I’ll tell you exactly why.
01:06:09 Because this is why I’m so for being white pilled and being for hope.
01:06:13 Because if you are black pilled, meaning if you think it’s pointless, we’re all done.
01:06:18 You’re just wasting your breath.
01:06:19 If you have any counter examples to this thesis, if there’s even a little bit of hope, your
01:06:25 entire hypothesis falls through, right?
01:06:27 So it’s kind of how like you have all these stories of people who are like painting swastikas
01:06:32 who aren’t Nazis, but just to show that, oh, there’s all this Nazism.
01:06:35 So I’m going to kind of force the conclusion.
01:06:38 So for them, when they see you thriving, you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show,
01:06:45 but you’re demonstrating that people can succeed.
01:06:47 This bothers them.
01:06:48 So you are.
01:06:49 Anyone can succeed.
01:06:51 That bothers them.
01:06:52 Yeah.
01:06:53 So because that, why haven’t they?
01:06:54 So now you’re a counter to their worldview and that is going to cause anxiety when you
01:06:58 have data that contradicts other data in your, in your worldview.
01:07:01 This is the, in your mindset, this is a big issue for them.
01:07:04 Yeah.
01:07:05 So to anyone listening to this, they’re annoyed by the look of my face.
01:07:09 Remember that you could probably do way better than me and you should.
01:07:12 But also what would you failing look like?
01:07:15 Like let’s suppose this podcast went from whatever views you had to 100 views an episode.
01:07:21 That’s still success.
01:07:22 You are talking to people you like, having conversations about important issues.
01:07:26 You’re having a good time.
01:07:28 They’re having a good time.
01:07:29 How is that a failure?
01:07:30 If I have dinner with a friend of mine, there’s zero viewers and we enjoy that time.
01:07:35 That is the height of human success.
01:07:38 When you are sharing happiness, joy, joy over love.
01:07:43 So what’s the difference between joy and love, Michael Malus?
01:07:46 Uh, I think joy is easier to attain.
01:07:49 It’s more common.
01:07:50 You could share it with everyone.
01:07:53 Give me an example of joy.
01:07:55 Like what was the moment of joy for you recently?
01:07:58 I could give you a great example of joy and this is part in the absurdist mindset.
01:08:02 Okay.
01:08:03 I love having a bad meal at a restaurant and I’ll give you, you can see why.
01:08:09 You go with your friend.
01:08:10 It takes you 45 minutes to get seated.
01:08:13 Okay.
01:08:14 I’m starving.
01:08:15 Waiter’s not paying attention to you.
01:08:17 They bring your water.
01:08:18 It’s got a hair in it.
01:08:19 They get the food wrong.
01:08:20 Yeah.
01:08:21 It comes out again.
01:08:22 It’s ripe, but it’s cold.
01:08:23 At a certain point you’re like, okay, I’m hungry.
01:08:26 I’m living an anecdote.
01:08:28 This is something that you, if you were at dinner, we could talk about this for years
01:08:31 because how great is it that the worst thing that’s happening to me is I got to wait an
01:08:37 hour for this meal that’s going to be cooked wrong, right?
01:08:40 That to me is joy is a holding on to that idea that happiness and thriving are possible
01:08:48 even when in the moment it’s, uh, everything’s going the wrong way.
01:08:53 Doesn’t every moment have the capacity to, uh, fill you with joy then?
01:08:57 Yes.
01:08:58 Yes.
01:08:59 So it’s both the shitty moments and the good moments.
01:09:00 Yes.
01:09:01 But that, see, that’s the way I usually talk about love is like, I love life.
01:09:07 Yes.
01:09:08 And in that, because life can generate every, everything, the pain, the loss, but also just
01:09:15 like simple or complicated bliss, all of that, I just love all of that.
01:09:20 And that, because it fills me with a kind of, I guess, joy, but joy has a connotation
01:09:26 that it’s supposed to be somehow positive, like you’re supposed to be smiling.
01:09:30 To me, you know, man’s search for meaning with Viktor Frankl, you know, just it’s, you’re
01:09:38 in the Holocaust, you’re in a concentration camp, just having a little bit of food that
01:09:42 you didn’t expect you will have.
01:09:45 Or even just thinking about food.
01:09:47 Or what about there’s a kid there, you tell them a funny story and you crack them up.
01:09:51 Yeah.
01:09:52 Like you take away this child’s pain for like five minutes.
01:09:54 That is the height of joy.
01:09:55 Yeah.
01:09:56 So to me, like all of like life is like infinitely full of possibility for joy.
01:10:01 Yes.
01:10:02 And that’s what I mean by love, because oftentimes like romantic love is what people think about
01:10:07 when they think love.
01:10:08 But to me, it’s all like part of the same thing.
01:10:11 And it’s almost like love, romantic love, or love with a friend, friendship is like
01:10:17 you both notice each other.
01:10:20 It’s like dogs, they look at each other and then they look at the thing they’re interested
01:10:23 in.
01:10:24 You both notice each other and that moment of joy.
01:10:27 You share that moment of joy together.
01:10:28 Yeah.
01:10:29 Like the restaurant.
01:10:30 The restaurant.
01:10:31 Yeah.
01:10:32 If you’re both almost without conspiring, notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal
01:10:39 is.
01:10:40 And like that, again, that little glimmer of realization, that’s what makes life beautiful.
01:10:46 You mentioned your grandmother in Lvov.
01:10:49 You were thinking of returning there.
01:10:52 The plans got a little bit delayed, but what are you hoping from that trip of going back
01:10:58 to Russia, going back to Ukraine?
01:11:01 What do you hope to get out of it, but what do you think you will feel?
01:11:07 A lot of things.
01:11:08 First of all, I’m going with my buddy, Chris Williamson.
01:11:11 He hosts the Modern Wisdom Podcast.
01:11:13 He is one of my closest friends.
01:11:15 We’ve never met.
01:11:16 Oh, really?
01:11:17 We’ve never met.
01:11:18 He’s in Britain.
01:11:19 He’s trying to get his ass over here to Austin.
01:11:23 He’s filling out his form right now.
01:11:24 He’s too good looking.
01:11:25 It’s a crime.
01:11:26 I call him Apollo and I’m Loki.
01:11:29 So right away you have a buddy comedy because we’re going to film it, right?
01:11:32 You have these two guys who on paper are very dissimilar, but we’re very, very close.
01:11:36 In which way are you similar and close?
01:11:40 I think we’re both very intense people, very strong emotionally.
01:11:47 We’re both very ambitious in the sense that, not in terms of career, but we want to grab
01:11:52 life by the short hairs kind of thing.
01:11:55 We are just both good experiences.
01:11:58 Did he bench more than you or like in the gym?
01:12:02 Of course.
01:12:03 The guy’s jacked.
01:12:04 He’s just…
01:12:05 Because he’s so good looking.
01:12:06 I think he’d be one of those guys who’s mostly biceps.
01:12:09 Oh no, no, no.
01:12:10 If you go to his Instagram, Chris Will X is the handle.
01:12:14 It’s head to toe.
01:12:15 It’s just sculpted.
01:12:16 Oh, wow.
01:12:17 So he’s perfect in every way.
01:12:18 That’s great.
01:12:19 He…
01:12:20 What flaws does he have?
01:12:21 Because I need…
01:12:22 He has bad taste in friends and his accent is all crazy.
01:12:29 He pronounces it…
01:12:30 He’s an underwear muddle, so now I spell it M U D L.
01:12:35 Just us two, British and American, and just two different dudes, it’s going to be a lot
01:12:39 of fun.
01:12:40 Although, to be fair, as you know, I’m an underwear model now as well, so…
01:12:43 Yeah.
01:12:44 We’re going to talk that in a second, maybe, but yeah, sheathunderwear.com.
01:12:49 Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear.
01:12:52 Are we going to get some pictures eventually?
01:12:53 I think we might.
01:12:54 Yeah.
01:12:55 Yes, I have them on my phone.
01:12:56 We’ll have them.
01:12:57 We could share them right…
01:12:59 You could slice it in right here.
01:13:01 So to be able to go with someone who is a very close…
01:13:05 I mean, we meet and talk like every day, right?
01:13:08 So to someone who generally cares about you, who’s…
01:13:12 He’s very, very grounded, right?
01:13:15 So like a lot of times I’ll have like some concern and he’s really good, and if you listen
01:13:19 to his show, at slicing through the noise and being like, hold on a second, I can’t
01:13:23 do the accent yet.
01:13:24 Have you considered A, B, and C because, you know, whenever I had this situation, this
01:13:28 is what I did.
01:13:29 He was really good with that.
01:13:32 So to have a…
01:13:34 First of all, just like two buddies on a trip is really a lot of fun.
01:13:37 Second of all, I know that it’s going to be very intense.
01:13:41 So for you, you left Russia much later than I did.
01:13:44 How old were you?
01:13:45 Thirteen.
01:13:46 Thirteen, right.
01:13:47 So you remember it, I’m sure, very, very well.
01:13:48 I left when I was one and a half too.
01:13:49 I don’t remember it all.
01:13:50 To go to the streets where, you know, my family had to go through this stuff to see the…
01:13:57 They came to Lviv, they slaughtered all the Jews.
01:13:59 I mean, to have that little memorial there that’s there now, and to just look around
01:14:04 and know, yesterday, basically, they came here, they rounded everyone up.
01:14:08 And also, from the other side, you had the Stalinists coming in and starving all the
01:14:12 people.
01:14:13 It’s just to know that so much horror and death.
01:14:16 There’s this quote I saw once about a woman who went to Auschwitz and she just made the
01:14:21 comment like, grass grows here.
01:14:23 Because we think, you know, that when it comes to the nature of evil, that you’re going to
01:14:27 go there, there’s going to be this pits of hell or whatever.
01:14:29 There’s birds, you know, there’s, you know, robins hopping around looking for the worms
01:14:34 or whatever.
01:14:35 They think it’s perfectly nice and you stand there to understand that so much suffering
01:14:39 happened here or there is going to be very jarring.
01:14:43 I know that it’s going to be an issue because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian.
01:14:47 And to speak Russian to Ukrainians is like a big deal.
01:14:50 So that’s going to be a concern.
01:14:51 I’m also worried about going to Russia because every Russian has this idea that even though
01:14:56 they’ve just met you, they feel that they’re in a position to tell you what you’re doing
01:15:00 wrong with your life, what you should be doing, if they’re a cab driver, I have no tolerance
01:15:04 for unsolicited advice on it based at all.
01:15:07 That’s going to be horrible.
01:15:08 They’re going to be telling me I need to speak Russian better because ты говоришь по
01:15:10 русски как даунчик.
01:15:12 I’m not hearing it.
01:15:13 I’m not interested in hearing it.
01:15:15 So that I think, and also, you know, given my upcoming book, The White Pill and covering
01:15:21 what happened back in the day under Stalinism and later to see this was the Ljubljanka,
01:15:26 this was the basement where they would, you know, this is something that people might
01:15:30 not realize.
01:15:31 There’s a superb film, The Death of Stalin, which is kind of, that’s what I do with North
01:15:35 Korea, you know, puts a humorous spin on it.
01:15:37 Then when you take a step back and you realize what they’re actually saying, it’s just like
01:15:40 it’s very, very disturbing how when Stalin was dying, he had a stroke, he’s laying there
01:15:45 in a pile of his own piss, he’s unconscious.
01:15:48 Right before he died, he thought the doctors were all plotting against him.
01:15:52 So they were being tortured to confess that they were trying to murder him.
01:15:56 They had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers to attend to him and they did it.
01:16:01 So this kind of thing to like go there, like Red Square and see this is where it happened,
01:16:07 to see Lenin’s body, like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at.
01:16:11 It’s going to be really, because I’ve worked so much in this space, jarring and intense
01:16:17 and emotional.
01:16:19 And as intense as it is for me sitting here talking to you about it, to see it and to
01:16:22 see the faces and to see Cyrillic everywhere, you know, other than Brighton Beach in Brooklyn,
01:16:28 it’s going to, I’m sure it’s going to do a huge number on me because as Western and as
01:16:34 a Tupoi Mirikanyets as the Russians will say I am, this is still where I came from.
01:16:39 So no matter, to see it face to face, I don’t know how I’m going to react, but I don’t think
01:16:43 it’s going to be like, meh.
01:16:45 You’ve assembled a number of essays from anarchist thinkers in a new book called The Anarchist
01:16:51 Handbook.
01:16:52 You mentioned Emma Goldman.
01:16:55 What interesting things do these thinkers agree on and what do they disagree on?
01:17:00 The Anarchist Handbook.com is the website.
01:17:03 It covers from the 1790s to, I think my essay is the last one from 2014, which a friend
01:17:09 of mine who’s kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audio book.
01:17:14 Also podcast.
01:17:15 Podcast.
01:17:16 I never had, but it’s not a podcast anyone would have heard of.
01:17:19 It’s like Tom Woods but even worse.
01:17:20 So what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government and also the malevolence of
01:17:29 state actors and the consequences of governments.
01:17:34 So they range in terms that most people would easily regard as either left or right wing.
01:17:41 But it tackles the nature of government and also creates positive non state alternatives
01:17:48 from really many different angles.
01:17:50 The slogan I have is the black flag, which is the traditional flag of anarchism.
01:17:54 The black flag comes in many colors.
01:17:56 So they were really all over the map in terms of what they’re for, but their disagreement
01:18:01 is about the nature of state and the nature of power.
01:18:04 And it’s very edifying because this is an ideology that’s been in many ways swept under
01:18:09 the rug.
01:18:10 I want to seriously grow up that I can allow people to sit down and read these essays and
01:18:16 see for themselves just how beautiful this tapestry over the decades and centuries has
01:18:22 been woven about people who genuinely believed in freedom as the most important and how to
01:18:28 maximize that for society.
01:18:32 So maybe it’s useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there.
01:18:36 So one is Leo Tolstoy.
01:18:39 Oh yeah.
01:18:40 Who I think not many people know is an anarchist.
01:18:46 Yes.
01:18:47 A Christian anarchist.
01:18:48 An anarchist.
01:18:49 Yeah.
01:18:50 So he came to despise government for his deceit and his violence.
01:18:56 But to him, the Christian principles of nonviolence, I think are important.
01:19:00 Oh yeah.
01:19:01 And it’s kind of pacifist kind of mindset of, you know, it’s better to someone to punch
01:19:06 you than to punch them back.
01:19:07 So he’s in that way, at least I’ve read he influenced MLK and Gandhi.
01:19:12 What do you think about this flavor, color of the anarchist flag of nonviolence, nonviolent
01:19:19 opposition?
01:19:20 I will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring up MLK because he’s become so
01:19:26 corporate and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him.
01:19:29 One of the things that Martin Luther King did so very well was that he forced people
01:19:35 to face the consequences of what they were putting forward.
01:19:40 You want to be racist.
01:19:41 You want to be for Jim Crow.
01:19:42 You want to be for segregation.
01:19:43 Okay.
01:19:44 It’s easy for you to do that from your living room.
01:19:46 Now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits being attacked by dogs, being
01:19:52 attacked by fire hoses and beaten by cops just so they could sit on the front of the
01:19:58 bus.
01:19:59 And now for a lot of people who were still racist, who were still had animus toward black
01:20:03 people are watching this and it’s going to be a lot harder to be like, I’m okay with
01:20:09 this.
01:20:10 I’m okay with human beings, even ones I regard as somehow bad or inferior to be beaten and
01:20:15 attacked by trained dogs and they’re not doing anything in response.
01:20:20 That strikes to, I think, a very basic nature of, especially American, like, okay, whatever
01:20:26 you’re for, I’m not for people getting beaten and attacked when they’re not really doing
01:20:30 anything.
01:20:31 I think pacifism is something that’s very easy to make fun of, but people don’t underestimate
01:20:38 how powerful it is for someone to say, you can do what you want to me.
01:20:43 I’m not going to fight you back.
01:20:45 I just want to live peacefully and have the same rights as you.
01:20:49 And to say, screw you, you should get beaten.
01:20:52 That’s a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.
01:20:55 So I think he was really, and Gandhi, of course, as well, were excellent in that regard.
01:21:00 There’s a little bit of Machiavellianism to it.
01:21:02 They’ve both been beatified in regard to saints, but their strategy worked very, very well
01:21:08 for their purposes.
01:21:09 So I think just all of us, when you see someone in this kind of Christian, I know you’re wrong,
01:21:16 obviously, it’s nothing very highly Christianity, but if he’s someone who’s willing to take
01:21:21 a punch and to say, you could do whatever you want to me, I’m not going to hurt somebody
01:21:26 else instinctively, and maybe this is kind of a hack.
01:21:32 Most people want to side with that guy, step in between and be like, oh, okay, let’s take
01:21:35 a step back, because whatever led to this is not tenable.
01:21:39 We need to go back to the drawing board if the consequence is people are having these
01:21:43 as a result of my decisions and actions.
01:21:45 So I think that aspect of anarchism is very, very, in certain contexts, healthy, and much
01:21:53 smarter and more sophisticated than people give it credit for.
01:21:57 And let’s also point out that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, and he wrote Anna Karenina.
01:22:03 So this was not some naive or innocent, whatever word you want to use.
01:22:07 He knew the nature of evil.
01:22:08 He knew how bad things get.
01:22:10 So he wasn’t saying at all that human beings are inherently nice and kind.
01:22:15 He was saying it’s much more effective to not fight back and to force them to face that.
01:22:21 I’ll give you another example.
01:22:22 I was on the show Trigonometry, and I was talking to the host, and one of them talked
01:22:28 about how someone he knew had been the Gulag, or his mom was born the Gulag grandma.
01:22:35 And after Stalin died and the Soviet Union liberalized and lots of the people in the
01:22:39 Gulags were freed by Khrushchev and so on and so forth, I didn’t know this, many of
01:22:44 the, or some, let’s say some, of the guards of the Gulags killed themselves because they
01:22:49 had genuinely believed that everyone in these camps was there for a reason.
01:22:54 And when they found out that these people were completely innocent, didn’t even have
01:22:58 trials, and that they were the ones forcing them to work themselves to death and starve,
01:23:02 they couldn’t deal with that guilt.
01:23:05 So when you are a pacifist or non retaliatory and you’re forcing someone who’s using force,
01:23:13 like look what you’re doing, look what you’ve become.
01:23:15 For some people, some people don’t care, like the guy in Scare Tactics, like I mentioned
01:23:19 earlier, where for a lot of others, they’re going to be like, okay, is this who I wanted
01:23:24 to grow up to be?
01:23:25 They will have that little flame of conscience that you and I talked about earlier.
01:23:27 They will be like, how did I get to the point where there’s this lady who wants to ride
01:23:32 the bus and she’s lovely dressed, put together, and I have a, sending a dog on her?
01:23:39 What kind of person am I?
01:23:40 For some of those people, they’re going to be like, okay, I can’t be a part of this.
01:23:45 I don’t even understand the politics.
01:23:46 I still am racist, but I’m not going to take part in this atrocity.
01:23:51 Well, that was for him from the individual perspective, perhaps he calls that Christian,
01:23:58 but listening to that voice of conscience, like whatever that is in you.
01:24:04 So for Tolstoy, it seems like anarchism from the individual perspective is silencing the
01:24:13 rest of the world and listening to the, for him, probably God given voice of conscience.
01:24:20 And so that’s what it means to live, embody anarchism for him.
01:24:25 And to embody Christianity, I would think he would say.
01:24:27 But he would see those as basic.
01:24:29 Yes, correct.
01:24:30 Yeah.
01:24:31 So in terms of forms of government, the Christian government is one that’s no government.
01:24:37 Yeah, correct.
01:24:40 What do you think about that as advice for an individual?
01:24:45 Turn the other cheek.
01:24:46 Do you think, I tend to believe that that’s a really good way to live.
01:24:50 I think it’s very underrated.
01:24:52 And this is me talking.
01:24:53 I think a lot of times when someone, let’s suppose you’re having an argument and, but
01:24:59 you have to pick your battles, right?
01:25:01 Let’s suppose you’re having a heated argument and someone says something very cruel to you,
01:25:04 where you have attempted to double down and hit back twice as hard.
01:25:07 But if it’s someone who at all cares about you, where they’re just in the moment and
01:25:11 you just stop and you just say, did you hear what you just said to me?
01:25:14 For some cases, that person will take a step back and be like, just like when I snapped
01:25:19 at Michael at Bitstein years ago, I’d be like, wow, okay, this is bad.
01:25:24 This is bad.
01:25:25 I’m sorry.
01:25:26 And they kind of, it’s kind of like they have to get to 10 before they control delete to
01:25:31 use your language.
01:25:32 Thank you.
01:25:33 Yeah.
01:25:34 Buffer overflow.
01:25:35 I appreciate that.
01:25:36 And for some, they’re going to, they’re going to just twist the knife.
01:25:39 But I think this is a very useful technique.
01:25:41 And also you can also sleep well at night cause you could be like as much as this person
01:25:47 tried to hurt me, I still didn’t reciprocate.
01:25:51 And yeah, I, I took that punch and it sucks, but at least I never said anything that I
01:25:56 could feel guilty about.
01:25:58 Exactly.
01:25:59 Do you think that’s ultimately a good way to implement anarchy in your personal life?
01:26:05 Anarchy, implementing anarchy in your personal life just means respecting people’s boundaries.
01:26:12 It means not forcing people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t want to do.
01:26:18 I think you then have to take a case by case, like there’s so many human interactions that
01:26:25 are required for life and there’s tension and all those kinds of things.
01:26:29 It’s not always.
01:26:30 Am I being naive?
01:26:31 Are you innocent?
01:26:32 You’re being so naive.
01:26:33 No.
01:26:34 Did you put the hat on?
01:26:35 The hat’s on the other head now.
01:26:36 Well, I had to take off the hat cause it’s like Frodo with the ring.
01:26:41 I was starting to feel like powerful.
01:26:43 I wanted to give you orders and I’m like, no, I just, I think there’s a ways of dealing
01:26:49 with the tensions that are natural to human interactions that can’t be simply, you know,
01:26:58 it’s not as simple as saying you want to respect the freedom of others and the boundaries of
01:27:05 others.
01:27:06 It’s like you both have to agree on stuff and work something out.
01:27:10 And the mechanisms of that agreement, the game theory of that agreement requires different
01:27:15 hacks and strategies.
01:27:16 And the question is for an anarchist collective that’s well functioning, what kind of hacks,
01:27:27 what kind of ways of behavior are more likely to be productive and not, you know, that that’s
01:27:33 almost like the question, do you want to turn the other cheek or do you want to stand your
01:27:37 ground really firmly?
01:27:39 When somebody is an asshole to you, you walk away.
01:27:42 Or when somebody is an asshole to you, you turn the other cheek and give them a chance
01:27:46 to rise to the best version of themselves and then find a common ground kind of thing.
01:27:52 It’s an open question of how to form those collectives when there’s people with difficult
01:27:56 childhoods and all that kind of stuff.
01:27:59 Well, this also comes down to what is your relationship with this person?
01:28:03 Is this out of character?
01:28:04 If you and I got into a disagreement, all of a sudden, you started getting very personal.
01:28:08 First of all, I’d be very hurt.
01:28:09 But then I’d be like, this is out of character for Lex.
01:28:11 I’m sure I could be like, whoa, let’s take a pause here.
01:28:13 Like you’re getting heated.
01:28:14 I’m trying to work this out.
01:28:16 What’s going on here?
01:28:17 And you get a kind of a meta conversation.
01:28:19 But again, you and I have a relationship of mutual respect.
01:28:21 So as opposed to if it was a stranger who just wants a piece of you, it’s just like
01:28:28 you are coming at me not correct.
01:28:29 I don’t have to reciprocate in kind.
01:28:31 I’m not going to shoot you, but I’m not going to pretend that you deserve respect when you’re
01:28:36 treating me with such contempt.
01:28:39 I do defer, especially with people I know, because this is smart long term game theory
01:28:44 as well as the right thing to do.
01:28:46 I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt at first, right?
01:28:48 Because if you’re going to go aggro, you can’t go back.
01:28:51 You could always go from like, let me hear them out and then then I could go aggro.
01:28:54 So there’s a big asymmetry there.
01:28:56 Yeah.
01:28:57 And that’s, I mean, I don’t think anyone has the answer to this question is, is that the
01:29:02 right strategy?
01:29:03 To me, game theoretically, it seems the right strategy is to…
01:29:06 With reciprocity is what game theory says is the right strategy.
01:29:09 They did the prisoner’s dilemma and they found tit for tat is the one that’s the most advantageous.
01:29:13 So that’s for when it’s perfectly rational actors.
01:29:16 But when you have, I mean, there’s noise that there’s a, I think, benefit to just, even
01:29:23 if they keep being shitty to you, still being nice to them.
01:29:27 Well then there’s the inverse where girls are turned off.
01:29:30 Some people are like, if you’re in a relationship and not just girls, but like some people,
01:29:34 when you’re kind to them, they find you less attractive, right?
01:29:37 That is kind of this weird, what am I supposed to do?
01:29:40 Like you’re only into me if I’m mean to you.
01:29:43 I don’t want to be mean, but then I’m getting punished for doing the right thing.
01:29:46 That’s another tricky one.
01:29:48 And I mean, this is nothing that necessarily do with anarchism so much as like, you know,
01:29:52 human beings are infinitely complex.
01:29:54 We don’t often know the backstory.
01:29:55 Like for example, just yesterday, Jay, who’s here is one of my closest friends.
01:30:00 I had a dinner with a bunch of people.
01:30:02 I couldn’t bring a plus four, so he wasn’t invited.
01:30:06 He didn’t know the circumstances.
01:30:07 He just thought we were having dinner without him.
01:30:09 He was hurt.
01:30:10 Once I spelled it out, he completely understood and I felt horrible because for me to have
01:30:14 any of my friends feel left out is just a very, very cruel thing.
01:30:19 And I felt bad and I’m glad to apologize again publicly that that’s ended up being the circumstances.
01:30:23 But yeah, a lot of times we’re also in Plato’s cave.
01:30:27 When you’re dealing with somebody else, you have very, very limited information about
01:30:30 their background and circumstances.
01:30:32 And that’s why I will always, if it’s someone I even have a little bit of a relationship
01:30:37 with, try to give them the benefit of the doubt because I found, especially this comes
01:30:41 from being a coauthor, when you coauthor books and you’re walking in other people’s shoes,
01:30:45 you don’t know a lot of the information.
01:30:47 So a lot of times it’s just a misunderstanding.
01:30:51 But isn’t that a fundamentally anarchist question of how we figure out this puzzle
01:30:56 of human complexities in order to form voluntary collectives?
01:30:59 Like when you have to figure that out, how to make people feel good, how to make people…
01:31:04 I agree.
01:31:05 That’s fair.
01:31:06 I think not only anarchists have to think about this as my point, of course.
01:31:10 Well…
01:31:11 But we have to think about it more than others do.
01:31:13 Right.
01:31:14 I feel like I should try to argue against anarchism at some point, out of love, out
01:31:19 of love.
01:31:20 Okay.
01:31:21 And so because people…
01:31:22 Out of joy.
01:31:23 People enjoy seeing me, what is it, when like Ben Shapiro argues against like a 20 year
01:31:29 old feminist.
01:31:30 Ben Shapiro destroys high school students with facts and legends.
01:31:32 This is this video of Michael Miles destroys a Marxist, Russian, communist pig.
01:31:40 So anarchism is opposed to hierarchies.
01:31:43 Well that’s left anarchism, anarcho communism, yeah.
01:31:45 The state.
01:31:46 But there are many hierarchies that are not the state.
01:31:48 We have a hierarchy here.
01:31:49 This is your show.
01:31:50 I’m differential to you.
01:31:51 Right.
01:31:52 But they’re…
01:31:53 Okay.
01:31:54 Rigid hierarchies.
01:31:55 Forced hierarchies is the…
01:31:56 Forced hierarchies.
01:31:57 Forced hierarchies.
01:31:58 Okay.
01:31:59 So humans, when left on their own accord, they form hierarchies naturally.
01:32:04 Yes, inevitably in my opinion.
01:32:06 Inevitably.
01:32:07 Which is why I disagree with the left anarchists.
01:32:08 I think it’s not a coherent thing to argue for nonhierarchical relationships, even in
01:32:14 theory.
01:32:15 It doesn’t make sense to me.
01:32:16 And I know the old school anarchists will call me stupid or uninformed, but I’ve never
01:32:22 been able to even wrap my head around this claim that you could have relationships without
01:32:25 hierarchy.
01:32:26 Right.
01:32:27 So this is a certain sense in which we’re living in an anarchism now.
01:32:30 And I don’t mean just like, because the nations, as you’ve said, are in anarchism relative
01:32:36 to each other, but isn’t the United States just a collective that was formed in anarchy?
01:32:42 And this is just the collective that we’re operating under, this hierarchy that was naturally
01:32:47 formed.
01:32:48 It wasn’t…
01:32:49 Well, the United States was not naturally formed.
01:32:50 It was formed by force and by fiat.
01:32:51 But to your point, I stress this throughout the book.
01:32:56 I always say this anarchism is not a location, it’s a relationship.
01:33:00 So yeah, you and I do have a hierarchy and this is your show, but neither of us really
01:33:05 has an authority over the other.
01:33:06 Like I’m here voluntarily.
01:33:08 You can kick me out if you want.
01:33:09 I can leave it anyone.
01:33:10 Neither of us has the power to force the other to be in this relationship we’ve chosen.
01:33:13 My lawyer, I defer to his judgment.
01:33:17 He’s not forcing me to do it.
01:33:18 He gives me his advice and I could take it or leave it.
01:33:20 Same with the doctor.
01:33:21 So there is a clearly like who’s in charge and who’s not in charge, but they’re not in
01:33:25 a position to impose their will on everybody else.
01:33:27 And you could very easily see John is Stephanie’s lawyer and Stephanie is John’s doctor.
01:33:33 And in each of those contexts, one has this position of ostensible authority over the
01:33:37 other.
01:33:38 So anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing.
01:33:42 It is the norm of human relationships where you meet people.
01:33:46 You’re not necessarily equal.
01:33:48 Someone’s going to be taller, someone’s going to be stronger, someone’s smarter, wealthier
01:33:50 with others.
01:33:51 So you’re not at all thinking I am here and I could tell you what to do and you are legally
01:33:57 or morally obligated to follow my wishes.
01:34:01 That is the basis of anarchism.
01:34:03 So in what way is the United States imposing by force something on you, do you think?
01:34:09 If you leave your house, you will go to jail.
01:34:12 My money being taken from me via taxation.
01:34:15 But don’t you have the freedom to not operate under that?
01:34:19 No, but that’s like, yeah, like technically if someone comes up to you and mugs you and
01:34:22 says your money or your life, you are making a choice.
01:34:26 But what the anarchist argument is, they’re not in a position to force you to make that
01:34:30 choice.
01:34:31 That is not morally binding, even though they have practically the power to force you into
01:34:35 that dilemma.
01:34:37 But you have the freedom to live under the United States or not.
01:34:41 So even…
01:34:42 Yeah, the argument is if you don’t like it, leave, right?
01:34:46 Not necessarily leave like geographically, but there’s ways to live outside the force
01:34:53 of the United States.
01:34:55 There’s ways, it’s just very difficult to operate that way.
01:34:57 But that’s like saying you could outrun the mugger, which is true, but the issue is does
01:35:01 that mugger have the right to tell you at gunpoint, you’re either giving me your money
01:35:08 or I’m going to shoot you or secret plan C, you get to run away.
01:35:12 Is that person a moral actor?
01:35:14 And the anarchist answer is never.
01:35:16 And just one more thing, the anarchist view is the difference between that mugger and
01:35:21 the government is only an air of legitimacy.
01:35:25 Literally they’re morally identical.
01:35:27 So is it possible that every hierarchy that gets big enough and successful enough such
01:35:33 that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides, isn’t it always going to be amoral
01:35:41 in your sense, the way the United States government is amoral?
01:35:44 I don’t want to say just like the United States government is amoral because that implies
01:35:47 the United States government is uniquely or especially amoral.
01:35:50 Governments, I apologize.
01:35:51 I just want to clarify that because I know you didn’t mean that and I don’t want that
01:35:53 to be the implication.
01:35:56 Can you repeat the question?
01:35:57 I’m sorry.
01:35:58 So like won’t every Okay, so that’s right.
01:36:01 So that’s progressive economics.
01:36:03 So the argument is in any market at a certain point, things tend to centralize and then
01:36:07 that organization de facto can dictate price, can dictate so on and so forth.
01:36:12 That is completely historical.
01:36:14 If you look at any market, the trend is always towards decentralization, the music industry,
01:36:20 right?
01:36:21 When we were kids, there were four or five record labels.
01:36:23 They were the ones who made all the songs that you’re going to see in the Billboard
01:36:25 Top 100 with a few exceptions.
01:36:27 Now anyone can go to direct to market.
01:36:30 If you look at TV stations, right, it went from CBS, NBC, ABC, then you got Fox, then
01:36:35 you had cable, which is 100.
01:36:36 Now you have satellite, which have sounds around the world and you have YouTube, which
01:36:39 is literally infinite.
01:36:40 So as technology improves and as wealth increases, which is a function of free enterprise, you
01:36:45 are going to always have more and more choice, even within a monopoly, Coca Cola, right?
01:36:52 This is an example I used, I think in the new right, when we were kids, every terrible
01:36:56 comedian would be like, oh, now that I’ve got diet caffeine free Coke, what’s next?
01:37:02 It’s like, yeah, that’s good.
01:37:03 You want to have, what was his name, Cayman, the guy who invented the Segway.
01:37:08 If you go, Dean Cayman, if you go into some restaurants right now, you will have those
01:37:14 machines.
01:37:15 You have like 80 kinds of Cokes and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add
01:37:19 to it.
01:37:20 Grape, cherry, lemon, lime, so on and so forth.
01:37:22 So in any field, you’re going to have more and more competition.
01:37:27 You’re going to have less competition and less choices when the state gets involved
01:37:31 because the state wants control.
01:37:33 The state wants one big neck with one leash around it and that way it could just pull
01:37:37 that dog in one direction or another.
01:37:39 And you saw this last year with the lockdowns, Carol Roth wrote this amazing book called
01:37:44 The War on Small Business and she talked about, we have seen for the first time in history
01:37:49 a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business towards organizations like Target
01:37:55 and Amazon who made trillions of dollars last year.
01:37:59 Whereas mom and pop, which to me at least is like the acme of American achievement.
01:38:03 You come to America, you have a fruit stand, a laundromat, you make socks, whatever it
01:38:08 is, you’re that unique artisan creating something special.
01:38:11 They’re the ones who didn’t last whereas Target and Amazon did.
01:38:14 So when you have the state involvement, it will always be in favor of Jeff Bezos and
01:38:18 for the simple reason that it’s going to be a lot easier for Jeff Bezos to get Nancy Pelosi
01:38:23 and Mitch McConnell on the phone than it is for me making socks on Etsy.
01:38:27 Your sense is that there’ll be less and less over time Jeff Bezos is like whatever industry
01:38:34 we look at, there’s be less, there’s a trend towards decentralization across all industries.
01:38:42 And when I say decentralization, I just mean choice, right?
01:38:45 So if you look at again, networks, you’re going to, if you were in the 80s and you had
01:38:50 a network just for LGBT issues, first of all, it’s going to be complete heretical.
01:38:55 That’s not going to happen and there’s not going to be enough necessarily people identifies
01:38:58 that to have an audience.
01:38:59 Then there was something called logo.
01:39:01 They have that and there’s lots of other shows like that in this way.
01:39:03 So more specific, look at websites.
01:39:06 I am positive that you and I, if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs, would find
01:39:12 thousands of websites about different breeds and all this other stuff 20 years ago, 30
01:39:17 years ago, like you’re going to have two books and they’re not going to be dynamic as these
01:39:21 new breeds are developed.
01:39:24 So at the same time it does, following on your argument, it does seem easier to move
01:39:31 and immigrate from state to state within the United States and to other countries.
01:39:37 Do you think that’s a form of freedom that embodies anarchism where you can resist the
01:39:45 force of state by choosing where you live?
01:39:47 To some extent, but the line of people, some of these boomers will go at me on Twitter
01:39:51 if I’m going after the police or something and be like, if you don’t like America, get
01:39:55 out of here.
01:39:56 And I tell them freedom means I do what I want, not what you want.
01:39:59 Freedom means I don’t have to move.
01:40:01 You don’t have to move.
01:40:02 Free speech is a good example.
01:40:04 It doesn’t mean I have to be on Twitter, right?
01:40:05 Twitter has the right to ban me.
01:40:06 But what I’m saying is I’m saying something and you don’t like it, too bad.
01:40:11 You’re the one who has to accommodate me because I have a right to do what I want with my person
01:40:15 as long as I’m being peaceful.
01:40:18 So I guess I’m trying to get to the difference between the state and what you would naturally
01:40:24 want in anarchy, which is like a security company, all of those things.
01:40:31 They will, as they become successful, start looking more and more like the state.
01:40:36 Because you get to elect, you give them money, they have leaders.
01:40:42 What’s the difference between a government and a very successful service provider in
01:40:49 anarchism?
01:40:50 Well, this gets a little confused in America as big companies necessarily are hand in hand
01:40:55 with the government ended up in bed with them.
01:40:57 The answer to this question is a long, complicated one.
01:41:00 And thankfully, it’s all in the Anarchist Handbook.
01:41:02 There was an essay by Murray Rothbard who Dave Smith, this is the essay that converted
01:41:06 Dave Smith.
01:41:07 So maybe it’s not as good as it could have been otherwise called Anatomy of the State.
01:41:11 And Murray Rothbard points out that state is the only agency in a country which gets
01:41:16 its goods through force.
01:41:18 The state is the only agency that is not a producer, but inherently a parasite because
01:41:23 it does not get its money voluntarily, but through taxation and by imposing its values
01:41:28 on a country.
01:41:30 That is what makes a state uniquely different from, let’s suppose, an Amazon or a Barnes
01:41:34 and Noble or a Target.
01:41:36 Jeff Bezos does not have the authority or the moral legitimacy to get an army and go
01:41:42 into somebody’s house, whereas Andrew Cuomo or Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and Barack Obama
01:41:48 certainly do.
01:41:50 But is it possible that to reframe, so Jeff Bezos does if he hires a security force, also
01:42:00 is it possible to reframe taxation as a form of payment?
01:42:06 If it was done much better, if you could pay this collective that we call government in
01:42:11 ways where you could pay for things that you care for, your money would be much more directly
01:42:18 contributing to the things you care for.
01:42:21 If you care for a service like healthcare, you’ll be able to buy essentially insurance
01:42:25 from the government.
01:42:26 Why am I buying insurance from the government as opposed to insurance from an insurance
01:42:29 company?
01:42:30 What do you perceive as the difference between a tax and a price?
01:42:33 Do you see the difference?
01:42:34 Yes, I know on the surface level, I’m trying to get deeply to say there’s a lot of similarities.
01:42:40 But what I’m saying is there’s one essential difference, which is taxes are imposed on
01:42:45 you and you have no choice.
01:42:48 Here’s an example.
01:42:49 My book, Ego and Hubris, my biography, it goes for $500 on eBay.
01:42:53 Someone paid for it.
01:42:54 Some crazy person.
01:42:55 People were showing me that it’s on Amazon for $3,000, something like that.
01:42:59 You could put a million for it.
01:43:01 You could charge whatever price you want.
01:43:03 The question is, is someone paying that $3,000 for it?
01:43:05 Is someone paying that million for it?
01:43:07 It’s actually the buyer who establishes the price because the seller can put any price
01:43:11 that he wants, $80 trillion.
01:43:14 But unless someone’s paying that amount and clearing the market, that price has literally
01:43:18 no real meaning.
01:43:19 It’s not an indicator of value or worth or market price.
01:43:22 Taxation, on the other hand, is by fiat.
01:43:25 I can decide it’s fair that you, Lex, have to pay 40% and Joe has to pay 45%.
01:43:32 Joe and Lex are in no position to be like, this price is too high.
01:43:36 Not only is that money set just completely out of their hands, for people who are employees,
01:43:43 it’s taken out of their paychecks before they even see it.
01:43:45 So they don’t even have the choice to be like, you know what?
01:43:48 I agree that the government has the right to pay taxation.
01:43:50 Here’s my check for 40%.
01:43:52 It’s going on.
01:43:53 It’s a completely different paradigm than you are when you’re paying for price.
01:43:56 The government provides a lot of services in the current system.
01:43:59 But there’s no service the government provides that would not be provided better, more efficiently,
01:44:05 and with more choices in a market.
01:44:07 That’s a hypothesis.
01:44:08 No, that’s very likely.
01:44:09 Well, that’s not a…
01:44:10 I can demonstrate this to you very easily.
01:44:11 I love it when you get flustered.
01:44:15 This is what people like.
01:44:17 It’s so cute.
01:44:18 The robot’s…
01:44:19 Don’t make me put on the hat again.
01:44:21 The robot has a fire.
01:44:22 There’s smoke coming out of his ears.
01:44:26 What is price?
01:44:28 I will tax love.
01:44:33 I think of the government as a kind of subscription service.
01:44:36 No, no.
01:44:37 That’s the anarchist view.
01:44:38 The anarchist view of private security would be a subscription service.
01:44:42 So that’s exactly correct.
01:44:44 But everyone hates when you sign up to a gym, and then you realize in the contract, it’s
01:44:50 very difficult to cancel that membership, and then they up the price.
01:44:54 There’s a lot of unpleasant things with a subscription service that then you can elect
01:45:00 to go to another subscription service.
01:45:03 Or you could go and Yelp and complain, and if there’s enough people to do that, the gym
01:45:06 will be receptive.
01:45:08 Look at the power of Yelp versus the power of the vote.
01:45:11 Well, we could talk about that too.
01:45:13 So you’re saying Yelp is more effective than voting.
01:45:18 The thing is, I agree with you, but you take a further step.
01:45:25 You say that Yelp is ethical and moral, and voting is amoral.
01:45:31 Or like not voting, but government is amoral.
01:45:34 So like it’s not only is one more efficient than the other, you’re saying like, because
01:45:38 I would say government sucks at doing what it does, and it’s gotten a lot better at it,
01:45:44 and I believe it can keep getting better as it gets smaller and it leverages companies
01:45:50 more and more.
01:45:51 But you’re saying, no, no, no, government is fundamentally as an idea gets in the way
01:45:59 of companies that should be doing those things anyway.
01:46:03 I just think that companies, when you take away government, will start looking like government.
01:46:07 Just because something looks like something does not mean it’s the same.
01:46:11 If someone puts out a yarmulke and tefillin and they go to shul, they’re not Jewish.
01:46:16 Right.
01:46:18 The basic objection you have with government, because you can leave, like I apologize that
01:46:23 this is that stupid Twitter cliche statement.
01:46:26 But your opposition to this idea of leaving the United States is that it’s just, it’s
01:46:34 a lot of effort.
01:46:35 It’s too much friction.
01:46:36 That’s not the option.
01:46:37 The opposition is in the introduction to the book, I say anarchism can be summed up in
01:46:43 one sentence.
01:46:44 You do not speak for me.
01:46:46 Everything else is application.
01:46:47 So the claim that somebody I’ve never met or who I voted against, let’s say, I hate
01:46:53 Donald Trump, I despise him, I want Hillary Clinton to be president.
01:46:56 Too bad Trump’s your president, that’s not what I want.
01:46:59 The idea that this person can come on me and make any claims onto one second of my time,
01:47:05 as opposed to try to persuade me, that is something that I, an anarchist, regard as
01:47:09 inherently evil and nonsensical.
01:47:12 But to operate large organizations, like you see this with cryptocurrency, there’s governance,
01:47:18 you have to make difficult decisions.
01:47:20 It’s a block size wars for Bitcoin.
01:47:22 Sure.
01:47:23 So you will, there is a voting mechanism often with membership when you’re a subscription
01:47:27 service.
01:47:28 But see, the thing is, you’re using these words and you’re switching definitions.
01:47:31 Because like, if I go to a store, I can technically say I’m voting for Tropicana orange juice
01:47:35 as opposed to another one.
01:47:37 But to kind of say, oh, well, you’re making a choice there for every choice is a vote.
01:47:41 I don’t, I think that that’s something that the Venn diagram is not.
01:47:44 No, I literally mean vote in this case, not money.
01:47:47 Okay.
01:47:48 There’s some decisions, like, should Bitcoin have increases block size?
01:47:52 Okay.
01:47:53 There’s a bunch of different, they’re called soft forks or hard forks.
01:47:56 Oh, I’m not saying you should never vote, like stockholders have to vote, right?
01:48:00 Exactly.
01:48:01 But there’s no pretense.
01:48:02 Here’s, let’s look at this.
01:48:04 If you want to build robots, right?
01:48:06 You would sit down with the company, you would, you guys would be like, we should do this
01:48:09 kind of robot, we should do this kind of robot.
01:48:10 The stockholders would have a vote or the board in proportion to their investment in
01:48:14 the firm.
01:48:15 Me, who knows nothing about robots, the idea that I’m in a position to walk in and be like,
01:48:22 this is what you should do is crazy and bizarre and wrong because I’m not in a foreign position.
01:48:28 So what democracy does is it forces people who run businesses well to run businesses
01:48:33 poorly by people who don’t know how to run businesses at all.
01:48:37 That’s the, that’s one of the many concerns.
01:48:39 But you’re saying that’s the fundamental property of the state.
01:48:43 I have a sense that the state could become as effective as what we think of as companies.
01:48:47 I mean, as.
01:48:49 This is why they can’t, because the state does not have access to data the way that
01:48:53 firms do.
01:48:55 And this is one of Ludwig von Mises’s great points, what he called the calculation problem.
01:48:59 If I’m looking at comic books, right, and I have Detective Comics, if Detective Comics
01:49:04 26 is a thousand and Detective Comics 28 is a thousand and Detective Comics 27 is 50,000,
01:49:12 that is telling me that even if I don’t know anything about comics, that Detective Comics
01:49:16 27 is either very, very scarce for some reason or very, very desirable.
01:49:21 It’s the first appearance of Batman, whatever, but you don’t need to know that to just look
01:49:24 at this data and be like, okay, this is the market, tell me something.
01:49:28 If prices are set by the government, which the government is a monopoly, I have no way
01:49:33 of picking those winners or losers.
01:49:35 I don’t have that data of supply and demand of an entire nation or a world of people making
01:49:40 individual decisions and having price be dynamic and informing me as the organization where
01:49:47 I should allocate my resources.
01:49:49 So the price is a really strong signal that allows you to operate a voluntary collective
01:49:58 where people get what they want and don’t get what they don’t want.
01:50:01 And it tells me what to produce, what not to produce.
01:50:04 And it also is great because if I see this podcasting industry, which didn’t exist five
01:50:08 years ago, and now these people are making bank, that tells me as someone who is an investor,
01:50:15 they’re making 50%, whatever, 10% profit on their capital.
01:50:19 In the plant industry, it’s 2%.
01:50:22 If I’m going to further my capital to this 10%, and that’s going to lower the profit
01:50:26 rate as that builds up.
01:50:29 And that is how markets are regulated, voluntarily.
01:50:32 But the word government, I just think it’s possible to have collectives of human beings
01:50:38 that represent others based on their voluntary…
01:50:42 Yes, of course, you have private governance.
01:50:46 Any company, you can have a CEO, you can have a board of directors.
01:50:50 But then you, I just, it starts to look very similar to me, a successful private governance
01:50:57 mechanism at a scale of the United States starts looking a whole lot like the current
01:51:04 government of the United States.
01:51:07 Even Amazon, I don’t think is anything close to the federal budget, size wise or budget
01:51:12 wise or power wise.
01:51:13 No.
01:51:14 So you’re saying you just, it’s not even state, it’s almost like anything at that size.
01:51:19 You want to keep things smaller.
01:51:21 And I don’t, markets are not going to combine to that level of the state because Jeff Bezos
01:51:29 will never be in a position to tell everyone in America, I’m going to take 40% of your
01:51:34 money before you even see it.
01:51:35 That to me is actually unclear.
01:51:37 We don’t know that to be true, where that Google or Amazon can’t grow to the size.
01:51:41 If you take away the US government, I’m not so sure that Amazon can’t grow to the size
01:51:46 of the US government.
01:51:47 Okay, so worst case scenario is we’re back where we started, right?
01:51:52 That’s not worst case scenario.
01:51:54 But the concern is that Google is going to be the federal government?
01:51:58 That’s not the concern.
01:51:59 I’m saying like, this is what it looks like when Google is the federal government.
01:52:02 It’s not, it’s like, to me, the US government is our best attempt so far to have large scale
01:52:10 representation of people’s interest.
01:52:12 It really sucks, but it’s our best attempt so far and the question is how to improve
01:52:16 it.
01:52:17 Like if you take away all, if you take away the US government, I’m trying to see how do
01:52:21 we improve on that level, that scale of representation of people’s interest.
01:52:27 Let me give you one example that people could wrap their hands around very easily.
01:52:30 I’m against government police monopoly, I’m for private security, right?
01:52:34 You don’t have to be an anarchist to understand this.
01:52:37 Can everyone agree, or at least as a hypothesis, everyone can wrap their heads around, here’s
01:52:42 a big concern, 911, right?
01:52:44 I’ve heard this 911 call, it’s very chilling.
01:52:47 There’s a kid in a closet, his family’s being murdered outside, right?
01:52:50 He has to call 911, he’s whispering.
01:52:51 It’s horrifying to hear.
01:52:53 There’s no reason why the number I call for my family’s being murdered is the same number
01:52:59 I call for the fire department is the same number I call for an ambulance.
01:53:02 What if instead it operated like Uber?
01:53:04 You have buttons on your phone, if there’s a real emergency, like someone’s gun flyers,
01:53:09 someone’s being killed, you press this and it sends instead of the one police district,
01:53:14 whatever company is nearby, you have a bunch of them and they’re the ones who are going
01:53:18 to come to your house to save you.
01:53:20 People can wrap their heads around that very easily.
01:53:22 That is one very clear way to go from having a government security monopoly towards having
01:53:27 a more free enterprise system.
01:53:29 So when you apply that to pretty much anything, it doesn’t become that complicated of an alternative.
01:53:34 So what I would, you’re going to criticize this, but I believe the government, it’s like
01:53:42 the parenting thing we’ve talked about earlier, I think it creates a safe space for gov, for
01:53:49 I’m for safe spaces, so I’m not going to laugh at you about that.
01:53:52 I want people to be safe.
01:53:54 But for a safe space for entrepreneurship.
01:53:57 So I believe that good government, hold on a sec, give me a sec, give me a sec.
01:54:02 Sure, sure.
01:54:03 I’m sorry.
01:54:04 I’m sorry.
01:54:05 You’re right.
01:54:06 You’re right.
01:54:07 I’m sorry.
01:54:08 I think government gives a opportunity for companies to out compete it.
01:54:11 Yes.
01:54:12 UPS, FedEx, 100%, not a question.
01:54:16 So I believe you need to have private schools, government to give a chance for UPS, FedEx,
01:54:23 for SpaceX, oh there’s an X in there, to pop up and then government will naturally back
01:54:30 off from that place.
01:54:32 So like you, but you need the innovators to step in and build the thing.
01:54:36 Okay.
01:54:37 Like you can’t just.
01:54:38 When has government ever backed off though?
01:54:39 That never happens.
01:54:40 I back, well, from FedEx and UPS, from SpaceX, from Amazon.
01:54:47 Wait, wait, hold on.
01:54:49 The US Postal Service still competes with FedEx and UPS.
01:54:52 So here’s the other thing.
01:54:53 Not nearly.
01:54:54 Not well, but they still exist.
01:54:55 And the point is.
01:54:56 They’re dying.
01:54:57 But UPS and FedEx are taxed.
01:55:00 So not only are they paying for their own company, they’re paying for this competitor.
01:55:04 This is the essential difference.
01:55:06 Imagine if you didn’t have UPS, excuse me, the federal government and no post office.
01:55:10 So you had FedEx, you have DHL, you have US Postal Service and many others.
01:55:13 How about in this scenario, UPS has the capacity to take 20% of FedEx’s DHL and couriers money
01:55:22 and put in their own pocket and they never have to do anything in return.
01:55:25 This is going to be an enormous advantage of UPS.
01:55:28 And then when you add the addition that UPS is not necessarily going to be more efficient
01:55:32 than the others, this is going to be a huge distortion in the market.
01:55:35 Can you imagine if your podcast, you just automatically got 20% of the views of everybody
01:55:39 else?
01:55:40 I mean, would there be any incentive for you to be great?
01:55:42 Or you could just sit in your laurels and do whatever you want even more than now.
01:55:47 It’s hard to imagine more than now.
01:55:48 That’s because you’re a robot and lack imagination.
01:55:51 I think there just has to be, of course you can do it completely without government, but
01:55:56 government…
01:55:57 That’s all I need to hear.
01:55:58 Okay.
01:55:59 That’s all I need to hear.
01:56:00 Show’s over.
01:56:01 Show’s over.
01:56:02 What else you can do without government at the end?
01:56:03 Let us try.
01:56:04 The question is that safety net that’s needed for entrepreneurship, that’s needed for, I’m
01:56:09 sorry to say, but I have a sense that there needs to be a bit of a safety net for freedom.
01:56:14 I’m much more comfortable with saying you need a safety net for freedom than you need
01:56:18 one for entrepreneurs.
01:56:20 The beauty of markets is with your startup, if you have a startup and it completely fails,
01:56:25 the only person who’s screwed is you and your investors.
01:56:28 If I’m a government and I make a startup, the entire society fails, like the Iraq war.
01:56:32 If I have this cockamamie plan, everyone else doesn’t have a choice.
01:56:36 They are both funding it and sometimes even drafted or forced into it.
01:56:40 The safety net, the antlers, getting back to the early anarchists, one of the things
01:56:44 that I admire about them, the inaugural communists, the old school left anarchists, is people
01:56:49 don’t remember what context they were in.
01:56:51 They were in context without a welfare state, they’re immigrating in huge numbers from
01:56:55 Eastern Europe, you go to the Tenement Museum in New York, people like 12 to a room, kids
01:57:00 are working in factories, they’re either working in factories or they have to starve.
01:57:03 It’s not that their parents didn’t love them, it’s that the parents didn’t have birth control,
01:57:06 which was a felony, and they also were in a position to put food on the table for their
01:57:09 kids because they’re uneducated and the jobs are paying nothing.
01:57:13 You could understand why Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Proudhon, and all these other figures
01:57:17 were like, this is untenable, we see Carnegie with 80,000 mansions, whereas this lady whose
01:57:24 husband died at age 30, who’s never been to high school or even junior high school, has
01:57:29 10 kids, how’s she going to put food on the table, it’s not going to happen.
01:57:33 You could understand why they would be like, all right, we need to seize this money and
01:57:36 distribute it around the people, that makes a lot of sense.
01:57:39 In a contemporary context, where food is much cheaper, where shelter to some extent is more
01:57:44 available, when medical care, we’re so oblivious to how bad things were that we see things
01:57:53 are bad now, so we assume that they were better than in some contexts.
01:57:56 They were much, much worse there in many contexts.
01:57:58 So if you’re going to make an argument for government, for me, the strongest argument
01:58:03 is like food stamps or like free lunches for children, because I agree that would be very
01:58:08 inefficient and it’s going to probably make them obese because you’re going to have Nabisco
01:58:13 lobbying to make sure that if you’re going to have this protein, you’re not going to
01:58:18 give the kids an Oreo, aren’t you?
01:58:19 These kids are poor, you want them to have some pleasure and that’s going to have deleterious
01:58:24 effects.
01:58:25 But if the choice is an inefficient government program and mass starvation, that is one where
01:58:29 as an anarchist, I could easily see making the argument for that one.
01:58:36 Even though I think very clearly private charity would be more efficient and distribute it
01:58:39 more effectively.
01:58:40 But at that point, I don’t really care about efficiency.
01:58:42 If you’re throwing out food to make sure these kids get fed, I don’t care.
01:58:46 So would engagement in military conflict be one of the biggest negative things about the
01:58:53 state to you?
01:58:55 Yeah, of course.
01:58:57 War is the state at its worst.
01:58:59 So if we take away war or make it defensive instead of aggressive, yeah.
01:59:05 I mean, wouldn’t that be a huge step forward if war instead of regarded, we’re always,
01:59:09 this is what drives me crazy.
01:59:11 We’re taught as kids in school that war is a last resort.
01:59:15 And I agree with that.
01:59:16 And yet when you look at the corporate press, war is always the first response.
01:59:21 And these people do not talk about what war means.
01:59:26 They’ll show examples during the Bush years of soldiers coming home in caskets, which
01:59:31 already is an unacceptable price in many cases for me.
01:59:34 But they don’t even pretend to care about the people overseas whose countries we’ve
01:59:39 ransacked and lives we’ve ruined.
01:59:41 And it’s just like, well, what are you going to do?
01:59:43 Not ransack those countries?
01:59:44 So that war to me is the state at its worst.
01:59:48 See, I think that there is value from small government that doesn’t engage in wars.
01:59:55 I do think that the kind of collectives that you imagine functioning well would look like
02:00:01 the best version of government that I imagine.
02:00:04 So I see them as the same.
02:00:08 I think a lot of it is just terminology.
02:00:10 I have no problem saying that I’m using the word anarchism incorrectly and to go for what
02:00:15 you want.
02:00:16 I have no problem with that or anything, really.
02:00:19 Because like I said, life is beautiful.
02:00:21 But nevertheless, you wrote the essay, why I’m not going to vote this time or ever.
02:00:29 Why I won’t vote this year or any other year or any year.
02:00:33 And the basic idea.
02:00:34 I hope you do a better job reading it than you just read that title.
02:00:37 I guess you’ll take as many takes as necessary.
02:00:42 I’ll read it in Russian and then pay somebody to translate it.
02:00:45 This isn’t even Russian at all.
02:00:46 He’s just making up words.
02:00:47 Where’d you find this guy?
02:00:48 You get what you pay for.
02:00:49 Yeah, exactly.
02:00:50 This is anarchy.
02:00:51 This is what you wanted.
02:00:56 Like your basic summary is, let me see, if pressed, the simplest explanation I have for
02:01:09 refusing to vote is this, I don’t vote for the same exact reasons that I don’t take communion.
02:01:16 No matter how admirable he is or how much I agree with him, the Pope isn’t the steward
02:01:22 over my soul, nor is any president the leader of my life.
02:01:27 This does not make me ignorant or evil any more than not being a Christian makes me ignorant
02:01:32 or evil.
02:01:33 If I need representation, I will hire the most qualified person to do so.
02:01:38 Isn’t voting our current best developed way of hiring the most qualified person to represent
02:01:44 you on some things?
02:01:45 No, because if I have a lawyer and the lawyer screws up, I can fire him.
02:01:50 If I vote for someone, I don’t get who I want.
02:01:53 I get for who my neighbors want.
02:01:55 So that makes no sense.
02:01:57 Representation means I want you to speak for me.
02:02:00 Whereas voting is like, I kind of want you, but I’ll take what I can get and I’m going
02:02:04 to take what I could get regardless.
02:02:06 So what’s the point?
02:02:08 In governments, again, that’s what Bitcoin is.
02:02:11 You want to be represented in deciding what to do, but once…
02:02:15 Wait, Bitcoin isn’t picking a person.
02:02:17 They’re not picking a president of Bitcoin.
02:02:19 They’re picking an idea.
02:02:20 Yeah.
02:02:21 It’s more like a referendum.
02:02:22 And to me, a referendum is much more coherent and defensible than it is voting for a representative
02:02:29 because if I’m voting for Joe Biden, I’m saying this person speaks for me for abortion, taxation,
02:02:35 environmental policy, immigration, war, right?
02:02:38 The odds that unless you’re a complete NPC, that this one person will speak for you for
02:02:42 everything and will deliver what he promised and has the power to deliver what he promises
02:02:47 is not true.
02:02:48 Whereas if I have Brexit, if I say I want Britain to remain part of the European Union
02:02:54 to say yes or no question, that makes a lot more sense to me.
02:02:57 But even that is not pure democracy because going back to the idea of the circulation
02:03:02 of elites, which James Burnham talked about, Pareto and Moscow and all them, you’re still
02:03:06 going to have someone telling you what you can and can’t vote for and how these questions
02:03:11 are framed.
02:03:12 So in contradiction to what the left anarchist said, some element of hierarchy is always
02:03:17 going to be inevitable.
02:03:21 So listen, I agree with this aspect very much so that we should be voting for ideas and
02:03:27 issues not voting for leaders, for leaders to represent us across the full spectrum of
02:03:33 issues.
02:03:34 It seems to make no sense.
02:03:35 Okay, good.
02:03:36 Yeah, this is great.
02:03:38 But I do think there should be a leader, I do believe in voting for representatives to
02:03:44 debate, to be communicators of ideas to us.
02:03:48 But let me start to interrupt you, but you could have those two things.
02:03:52 For example, wouldn’t this be an improvement if they have that now, you have a referendum,
02:03:56 you want tax rates to be 30 or 40, whatever percent, you have the guy leading the campaign
02:04:01 for 50, fight for 50, then you have the lady leading the campaign for 40, fight for 40,
02:04:05 they’ll go out there, they can have debates, they can talk about the issue, but you’re
02:04:09 still not voting for one of them, you’re voting for the issue.
02:04:12 That makes much more sense to me than I’m going to vote for him and hope that he puts
02:04:16 forward 50 and that depends on 99 other senators.
02:04:18 Exactly.
02:04:19 But also, I mean, I do like the idea of voting for certain people to debate certain ideas.
02:04:23 Yes, I think that’s a major improvement.
02:04:25 But the final vote should be based on the idea.
02:04:27 So okay, so we agree.
02:04:29 That would be nice to have, plus no wars, and then you’ll stop tweeting so aggressively.
02:04:35 And to decriminalize things that don’t hurt people.
02:04:39 Drugs.
02:04:40 Drugs especially, prostitution is a big one.
02:04:43 And this is me talking, all cops are criminals.
02:04:47 There’s no one, or maybe other than abused children, who needs access to the police other
02:04:52 than sex workers.
02:04:54 They’re the ones who are the most likely to really put themselves in danger situation,
02:04:58 so they need to be able to call security, because that’s why they have pimps.
02:05:02 Because you’re a woman dealing with some strange dudes who are a lot of the time going to have
02:05:06 weird kinks, you want to be able to be sure, even if you don’t approve of prostitution,
02:05:11 think it’s horrible, that she’s not going to be raped and murdered and have no consequences.
02:05:15 And if you’re going to say, oh, well, she’s a prostitute, she can’t be raped.
02:05:19 Just think for a second, if you’re agreeing to sleep with somebody, and then he starts
02:05:23 choking you and beating the crap out of you and saying it’s now it’s a dom situation,
02:05:26 that is clearly beyond the pale of salt.
02:05:29 And the same thing with drugs, heroin, cocaine, crack.
02:05:35 The people that need help the most are the ones who are addicted to those drugs and putting
02:05:40 punishment.
02:05:41 Let’s suppose you think drug dealers should be in jail, right?
02:05:44 It is very hard for me to say that someone who sells cocaine should be treated or in
02:05:51 the same building as someone who rapes children, or as a murderer.
02:05:55 These are not similar types of evil, even if you believe that that drug dealer is an
02:05:58 evil person.
02:05:59 Yeah, I have.
02:06:00 I mean, there’s an essay in there called by Alexander Berkman, who was Emma Goldman’s
02:06:06 partner on prisons and crime.
02:06:09 And this is leftism at its best, forgetting the person is forgotten.
02:06:13 And the fact that we have the world’s largest prison population, the fact that so many people
02:06:17 are just like, oh, you commit a crime, just put them in jail, throw away the key.
02:06:20 At the very least, if you want to be totally immoral about it, it’s expensive.
02:06:24 And second of all, the concept that all criminals should be locked in a room together in these
02:06:28 kind of largely inhuman conditions, and that’s going to help people.
02:06:31 I don’t think that that’s the ideal mechanism.
02:06:33 Yeah, I tend to believe, I usually don’t speak so negatively about politicians, but I do think
02:06:40 that politicians have done more evil in the war on drugs than did the people that are
02:06:46 supposed to be the criminals in this picture.
02:06:49 And I’ll give you another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power.
02:06:52 Hunter Biden, and I’m not making fun of him, I’m not taking shots at him.
02:06:56 He had an article in the New Yorker, where he talks about when he was in LA, he was buying
02:07:01 crack and there was a misunderstanding or like he left the crack pipe in the Hertz car
02:07:05 and then blah, blah, blah, there’s an issue.
02:07:07 He’s admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter.
02:07:11 And I’m sure this was within the statute of limitations.
02:07:13 There was no possibility he was going to have consequences.
02:07:17 Kamala Harris, who was a cop, talked about when she was in college, she was smoking weed.
02:07:22 And it’s like, I don’t begrudge you guys smoking your crack or smoking your weed, but for other
02:07:27 people who are poor or maybe just had the short end of the stick, this is years of their
02:07:32 life being destroyed.
02:07:35 At the very least, even an arrest is a traumatic situation.
02:07:37 If you have a weed or cocaine or crack, you’re arrested, that’s really going to screw up,
02:07:42 it’s going to do a number on you being locked up.
02:07:44 So to have that double standard to me is completely unacceptable.
02:07:48 And that has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat.
02:07:51 George W. Bush was a coke head back in the day.
02:07:55 He talks about overcoming his addiction, and I’m glad that he did, more power to him.
02:07:59 But just to have this kind of, you know, it’s just really kind of disturbing to me, and
02:08:04 this is my anarchist brain, like how prevalent drug use is in college.
02:08:07 I think there’s a joke on South Park, like, there’s a time and a place to try drugs, and
02:08:11 that’s called college where people experiment.
02:08:13 But all those college kids, which are going to become next generation’s elite, don’t really
02:08:17 have that worry that if they get caught, then anything’s going to happen to them.
02:08:21 But that kid in the street who did not have that good upbringing, even if he’s a piece
02:08:25 of crap, like he’s not going to have a different punishment, I think that’s just really at
02:08:30 his base on American.
02:08:33 So in contrast to Tolstoy, let me ask you about Emma Goldman.
02:08:37 You wrote that if anarchism believed in rulers, then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed
02:08:44 queen.
02:08:45 Yes.
02:08:46 What ideas defined her flavor of anarchism, would you say?
02:08:51 Emma was really an old school radical.
02:08:56 She was a radical among radicals.
02:08:58 I don’t know what ideas, I mean, what would define her was anarchism, obviously.
02:09:04 There’s the violence.
02:09:05 I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus somebody like Tolstoy.
02:09:11 Oh, sure, for sure.
02:09:12 So basically, Emma and Alexander Berkman, their mentor was someone named Johann Most.
02:09:17 And Johann Most was a very early free speech, not very early, but he was a free speech concern
02:09:22 because he published a pamphlet in Europe that was translated in the States about how
02:09:26 to build dynamite.
02:09:28 Because his idea was, all right, you have this oppressive government, this oppressive
02:09:32 police force that use batons and bolts against us.
02:09:36 The only way for us as the working class to level the playing field is through dynamite
02:09:40 and here’s how you build it.
02:09:42 So the question is, all right, is this something that could be allowed to be legal now that
02:09:46 you’re allowing the layman to, in his own house, build bombs?
02:09:50 So Johann Most, basically, they had a big parting of ways because when Alexander Berkman
02:09:56 tried to assassinate Frick, Johann said, no, no, no, this is not something I’m for.
02:10:02 And in fact, they thought with this assassination, this failed assassination, this would be the
02:10:07 thing that’s fired off the revolution because you had the strike, the Pinkertons involved,
02:10:11 Pinkertons getting killed, strikers are getting killed.
02:10:14 This is what Marx predicted, they’re gonna light the spark and everything’s gonna come
02:10:18 falling down.
02:10:19 He ends up going to jail for 13 years instead, Alexander Berkman does.
02:10:23 And then Goldman and Berkman had a big issue because when Leon Salgas killed McKinley
02:10:28 in 1901, it was really, it’s kind of humorous in retrospect.
02:10:32 He gets arrested and they’re like, why’d you kill the president?
02:10:34 He goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman and she’s like, oh, damn it, she’s on the
02:10:39 run.
02:10:40 I don’t even know this guy.
02:10:42 And she made the point about like, why is it worse than the president being killed and
02:10:47 somebody else?
02:10:48 We’re all equal.
02:10:49 And you would think if you’re against capitalism, against the ruling class, this would be your
02:10:53 first target.
02:10:54 But Berkman, who went to jail, who tried to assassinate someone, he had said, McKinley,
02:11:01 this is your villain?
02:11:02 He’s just a party hack.
02:11:03 He’s like a symptom of the times, this is foolish.
02:11:06 And Goldman disagreed with him.
02:11:08 He thought it wasn’t necessarily justified, but it may have done something that was defensible.
02:11:14 So the three of them, you know, had their differences on the use of violence.
02:11:19 And in fact, when she came back from Russia and was denouncing it in her book, My Disillusionment
02:11:24 in Russia, My First Disillusionment in Russia, the last chapter she goes, look, I’m not saying
02:11:28 I’m against violence.
02:11:29 When there’s the revolution comes, we’re going to have to use force.
02:11:32 She goes, but it’s not the force of the state against the working class, against the masses.
02:11:37 This is exactly what we’re opposed to.
02:11:38 This is a complete obscenity to our principles.
02:11:41 So that was interesting.
02:11:43 The fact that she was a, her periodical Mother Earth was a clearinghouse for many prominent,
02:11:49 you know, ideas of the day that weren’t anarchist, but were certainly radical.
02:11:52 So she was a bit, and also she was like tiny, she was like 5.1.
02:11:55 So to have this little woman who was so feisty and…
02:11:59 Talk back to Lenin.
02:12:01 Talk back to Lenin.
02:12:02 She took on Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover was the one who deported her.
02:12:07 Someone who just…
02:12:08 And the thing is, you have to be careful because I think just like war, it’s very easy to glamorize
02:12:14 violence and to regard it as something admirable or heroic, like you’re fighting for the cause.
02:12:20 But if you take it out of the romanticism, you’re like, you’re killing someone who had
02:12:24 kids.
02:12:25 You are, you know, killing someone with a family.
02:12:27 You’re making your, if you’re going to shoot someone, they’re probably going to retaliate
02:12:30 twice as hard.
02:12:32 Violence sings its own song and this is a very dangerous road you’re going down.
02:12:35 So you really need to be careful about what you’re preaching here.
02:12:41 And you know, she kind of had this mixed feelings about it, but that is certainly not Emma Goldman
02:12:46 her best.
02:12:47 Emma Goldman her best was about the ultimate freedom of the individual, of caring about
02:12:54 people who are desperately poor, who despised the corporate idea that we all had to be made
02:12:59 into cookie cutters and be interchangeable and all have to start work at the same time.
02:13:04 And basically our entire lives slave for corporation that have nothing to show for it while they
02:13:08 get wealthy and you have no opportunity for either productive work or creative work.
02:13:13 So that I think the valorization of kind of the lowest of the low is something I find
02:13:19 very admirable.
02:13:20 There’s a quote of hers, which I think even for those of us who are, you know, for property
02:13:24 rights is left anarchism at its best, but she goes, go and ask for work.
02:13:30 If they don’t give you work, ask for bread.
02:13:33 If they don’t give you bread, take bread.
02:13:35 So the idea that like, if you’re that poor and you’re honestly trying to work and work
02:13:38 isn’t available and you steal food to keep alive, that you shouldn’t feel guilt about
02:13:43 it.
02:13:44 I don’t know that I would disagree with that.
02:13:46 I think that there’s something to be said at that point where it’s just like, you know,
02:13:50 if property rights come between that and mass starvation, it’s going to be very hard for
02:13:54 anyone to make the case for property rights.
02:13:56 Now, my argument is when you have free enterprise, food becomes so plentiful that now obesity
02:14:00 is an issue.
02:14:01 But at the time she did not have, of course, have that data to access.
02:14:06 Is there somebody you left out from the book that you thought about leaving in like some
02:14:12 interesting figures?
02:14:14 Yeah, there’s a couple.
02:14:15 So Chomsky would have been one, of course, because he’s probably one of the biggest anarchist
02:14:22 thinkers in contemporary times.
02:14:26 I was on the fence about Herbert Spencer because he’s not an anarchist.
02:14:30 Chris Williamson’s reading the chapter for the book.
02:14:32 He coined the term Survival of the Fittest and the chapter is called The Right to Ignore
02:14:35 the State from his book, Social Statics.
02:14:37 It was deleted from later editions, but people found it and reprinted it.
02:14:42 And Randolph Bourne, he was an early progressive.
02:14:47 He was the only one or one of the very few fighting against entering the Great War.
02:14:51 And he had an essay called War is the Health of the State, which is basically about how
02:14:55 states love war because it gives them an excuse to increase their power.
02:14:59 And it’s very hard to argue against increasing state power in a time of war.
02:15:03 But since he was not himself an anarchist and there was plenty antiwar in there already,
02:15:07 I didn’t include him, but those would be the ones.
02:15:09 Is there some people that you think the public would be surprised to learn that they are
02:15:16 at least in part anarchists?
02:15:17 Like I saw that Howard Zinn is supposedly an anarchist.
02:15:20 I mean, is there, like, just like Tolstoy is an anarchist.
02:15:25 Is there some people like that that you think in our modern life that would be surprised
02:15:29 to learn they’re anarchists?
02:15:31 I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
02:15:34 I mean, you could say Carl Hess, who was like Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter from the 1964
02:15:38 campaign, but he’s hardly a household name.
02:15:41 I mean, I think a lot of people would not ascribe to that term, but are certainly informed
02:15:48 with this complete distrust of all authority.
02:15:51 Murray Rothbard had an essay, if I didn’t include anatomy of the state, I was going
02:15:54 to include this one.
02:15:55 It’s much, much shorter.
02:15:57 And his question was, who are our allies and who are our enemies?
02:16:00 And the point he made is there’s lots of people who would call themselves anarchists who are
02:16:04 of little use, whereas someone who is still like a minarchist or for government, but genuinely
02:16:10 hates the question Rothbard had is if there’s a button and you could press that you would
02:16:14 end the state, would you press it so fast your finger would get a blister?
02:16:18 Those are allies, even if they’re, you know, somewhat of a minarchist.
02:16:22 So I think that is kind of a better lens of looking at it.
02:16:26 And I don’t think anyone needs to really ascribe to anarchism as a whole ideology in so far
02:16:31 as you’re seeing right now, many people in certain fringe elements are just essentially
02:16:36 or are decreasingly fringe and increasing mainstream elements are realizing that this
02:16:42 idea that whatever the state does is somehow morally binding or legitimate is something
02:16:47 that at least bears strong questioning.
02:16:50 Sure.
02:16:51 And I mean, I guess there’s a lot of groups like the libertarians, for example, have some
02:16:57 element of that.
02:16:58 Oh, sure.
02:16:59 For sure.
02:17:00 I mean, I think that’s the beginning of the ways of government.
02:17:02 And also, I think what I love, I mean, if there’s one issue where I would want people
02:17:07 to have this kind of analysis, it is war.
02:17:10 And it is like, okay, are you really sure?
02:17:13 Because this is 100% going to result in a lot of people being killed, a lot of people
02:17:18 being traumatized, a lot of people who are never going to recover, children, innocent
02:17:23 people.
02:17:24 Are you really sure this is the right thing to do?
02:17:26 And I think a lot of times if the answer is, well, it’s the profitable thing to do.
02:17:30 And that is, I think, again, government at its absolute most venal and worst.
02:17:37 You Michael Malice in many ways are a New Yorker.
02:17:40 Oh, yes.
02:17:41 I’ll give you one example.
02:17:43 I don’t know where Austin is on the map.
02:17:45 No idea.
02:17:46 Not even kidding.
02:17:47 But does it even matter?
02:17:48 It doesn’t matter.
02:17:50 But nevertheless, you’ve decided to move to Austin.
02:17:53 Yes.
02:17:54 Why do you think you’re moving to Austin, or why do you moving both to Austin and away
02:17:59 from New York?
02:18:00 This was one of the both, I hate it when people talk like this, but I’m gonna do it anyway.
02:18:05 This was one of the hardest and easiest decisions of my life.
02:18:08 It was hard because I’ve lived in New York since I was two, other than college.
02:18:13 It’s the only home I’ve known.
02:18:14 I know it intimately.
02:18:16 I know all the cool spots.
02:18:17 I love it with every fiber of my being or I did.
02:18:20 It was very much, you know, ingrained in my personality, my outlook about what cities
02:18:25 can be and can’t be and should be and shouldn’t be.
02:18:29 Deciding to move was not done.
02:18:31 But when you see your crew, your chosen family, one by one whittling away, it’s not easy.
02:18:39 They all left.
02:18:40 There’s just a couple of us left in New York.
02:18:43 And I don’t see any mechanism by which New York is going to improve.
02:18:47 Things are getting much worse all the time.
02:18:49 It’s just completely outrageous.
02:18:51 Here I would have a huge crew.
02:18:54 I didn’t realize how much cheaper real estate is than in New York.
02:18:57 This is another way.
02:18:58 So New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth who are completely oblivious to the
02:19:01 rest of the country.
02:19:02 So for a long time, the argument was New York versus LA, right, for certain types of people.
02:19:06 And they would say LA is cheaper in terms of rent.
02:19:08 So in New York, let’s suppose the rent is a thousand, LA was 700, but you have to get
02:19:12 a car.
02:19:13 I’m like, this is kind of a wash.
02:19:14 So I assumed Austin would be like 80% of New York prices.
02:19:18 And I’m looking at these houses and for like 700,000, you could get a house here that would
02:19:23 cost like 3.5 million in New York.
02:19:26 And you could have a gun.
02:19:27 And it’s just like, I could have a yard and I could have a dog and I could have a three
02:19:30 bedroom and I could have, you know, aquariums and my weird plants.
02:19:35 So to have all that, and it’s just to have, I am very, very lucky that I have such a supportive
02:19:44 crew.
02:19:45 And they were also very smart because they sat me down and they said, whatever excuse
02:19:49 you have not to move here, we are going to make sure that doesn’t count.
02:19:53 So my buddy Matt said, because I have a huge library, he goes, I will go to your house
02:19:59 and I will pack every single book you own myself so you can get that as an excuse the
02:20:04 other way.
02:20:05 I don’t know how to drive and you do this, she’s like, we’re going to take driving lessons
02:20:09 together.
02:20:10 There goes that excuse.
02:20:12 How do I find an apartment?
02:20:13 They’re like, we’ll go to with the realtor and we’ll take pictures for you.
02:20:17 We’ll report back.
02:20:18 You can trust our judgment.
02:20:19 And I’m like, that’s great.
02:20:20 I would do that.
02:20:21 That sounds like fun shopping for houses that have to buy them.
02:20:23 Then Matt just yesterday had the idea goes, come here, rent a furnished apartment for
02:20:29 a few months.
02:20:30 You don’t have the pressure of buying.
02:20:32 And it’s just, it’s going to be an easy transition.
02:20:34 The rent’s not going to be anything compared to New York.
02:20:36 I’m like, these are all very valid things.
02:20:39 You’re here.
02:20:40 Lots of other people.
02:20:41 Yeah, that’s what this is.
02:20:43 I made sure that’s renting month to month.
02:20:47 Oh, this is rental.
02:20:48 This is rental.
02:20:49 Oh, you didn’t realize this.
02:20:50 I thought you bought this.
02:20:51 No, no, no.
02:20:52 This is rental.
02:20:53 We can talk.
02:20:54 Why?
02:20:55 I thought you bought it.
02:20:56 No, it’s rental.
02:20:57 Well, I really value freedom.
02:20:58 Yeah, of course.
02:20:59 Who are you talking to?
02:21:00 I’ve heard of this thing, freedom, it’s really great.
02:21:05 But not everybody in the implementation of freedom is different for everybody.
02:21:08 Of course.
02:21:09 I don’t want to make a statement about others.
02:21:14 I’ll just speak for myself.
02:21:15 I think when you buy a house, that is not just a wise financial decision or all those
02:21:22 kinds of reasons that people have, investment, all those kinds of things.
02:21:26 I think it’s also a hit on your freedom because the positive way to frame that is you make
02:21:32 it a home.
02:21:33 Yes.
02:21:34 You have a deep connection to it.
02:21:35 But the negative way to frame it is you’re now a little bit stuck there.
02:21:39 Yeah.
02:21:40 And you may stay there way longer than you should when much better opportunities for
02:21:44 life come up.
02:21:46 There’s stages in life when you’re not sure exactly what the future will hold.
02:21:50 I would argue that’s very often the case, basically at every stage in life.
02:21:54 I just want to make sure I maximize the freedom to embrace the most ambitious, the craziest,
02:22:03 the wildest, the most beautiful opportunities that come by.
02:22:07 You’ve actually brought this up too, because I said I really enjoyed the conversation with
02:22:10 you and Yaron, talking to you and somebody else, and I think you make a really significant
02:22:19 effort.
02:22:20 You’ve said this before, but it really is true and it stands in contrast to other folks
02:22:26 who are also good conversation.
02:22:27 You really make an effort for that person to meet the person.
02:22:32 Oh, for sure.
02:22:34 You made me realize it’s kind of an art form, but it’s also just, it’s a thing worth doing
02:22:45 of putting in that effort and that leap of humanity to reach the, whether you’re talking
02:22:51 to Dave Rubin or Alex Jones or Joe or me, just those are different human beings and
02:22:58 they’re taking that leap.
02:22:59 It’s fascinating.
02:23:00 I mean, do you have, how do you think about that?
02:23:04 I’m a huge introvert as you are, I think.
02:23:08 I feel very, very, very lucky that I get to get on a mic and run my mouth and for some
02:23:18 people, for some reason, people like this.
02:23:20 So I know what it’s like to have a good convo and I know what it’s like to have a bad convo.
02:23:27 So before I’ll do a show, I will have like some things I would want to talk about.
02:23:33 And then I’ll think about how to say them in an engaging way.
02:23:36 So I do my homework in that regard.
02:23:38 I’m also very good at, or I pride myself at taking people who are cerebral or intellectual
02:23:45 and making them a little bit silly, but also making them feel safe to be silly because
02:23:49 I’m not going to be making a buffoon of them that we’re having fun as opposed to disrespecting
02:23:55 the person.
02:23:56 I think we all saw that with Yaron, who’s very cerebral, very serious, but we were all
02:24:00 cracking jokes and he was having a good time and he knew even if I’m making fun of him
02:24:05 to his face, it is coming from a place of kindness and he’s in on the joke and we’re
02:24:09 all having fun.
02:24:11 That is something I try to do as much as possible.
02:24:15 I had an episode of my show a couple of weeks ago and someone who’s been a friend of mine
02:24:20 for a long time and someone I admire a lot, Elizabeth Spires, she was the founding member
02:24:25 of, founding editor of Gawker, she’s worked for the Observer for Jared Kushner, her resume
02:24:31 second to none and she was on my show and she was talking, her politics are pretty straightforward
02:24:37 like corporate journalist, blue pilled politics and my audience was very upset that I wasn’t
02:24:41 pushing back or whatever.
02:24:43 I’m like, my job, if someone is coming to a place where the audience is at least going
02:24:48 to be somewhat hostile, is not to make her have negative consequences for doing something
02:24:54 that she didn’t need to do.
02:24:56 My job is to make sure that the experience is a positive one for her as the host.
02:25:02 So when I’m the guest, I always feel that my job is to make the host look good and make
02:25:07 the host not feel like it’s work and the audience really likes that because instead of it being
02:25:11 an interview or intense, it is a conversation, nine of us know what’s going to happen and
02:25:16 so this is something I think about a fair amount and I try to apply and insofar as it’s
02:25:21 successful, I’m delighted and there’s times when it’s not successful and that’s a shame
02:25:26 but all we could do is do our best.
02:25:28 Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation with her.
02:25:30 I was surprised by the dislikes and all that kind of stuff.
02:25:34 Well, one of the things I always talk about is I don’t care what my friends politics are.
02:25:38 I care about if I’m having a bad day, can I call them up and ask for advice and Elizabeth
02:25:43 has been there for me in the past and then when I do it on a camera in front of mics,
02:25:47 people freaking out.
02:25:48 I’m like, I’m practicing what I preach.
02:25:51 My, the relationships are more important than someone’s political views and it’s not hypocrisy
02:25:57 at all to demonstrate that and not to push back.
02:26:01 And there was great humor there.
02:26:02 You’re both a bit of trolls in very different ways but nevertheless, that connection, the
02:26:07 humor and the mutual respect and love that was all there, yeah, it’s just fascinating.
02:26:14 You’ve talked to Alex Jones a couple days ago.
02:26:16 Sure, yeah.
02:26:17 I haven’t seen him many times before but you’ve had him on your podcast.
02:26:21 This week, yeah.
02:26:22 This week.
02:26:23 I was kind of surprised that he mentioned that human animal hybrids was like the number,
02:26:31 the main conspiracy that people should look into to open their eyes to the, you know,
02:26:38 to all this, to the globalists, to all the conspiracies that are out there.
02:26:42 Was that surprising to you?
02:26:44 No, because I came in there with questions and I was very focused on corralling him and
02:26:51 having it be like kind of a coherent intellectual conversation.
02:26:54 That was a really, really good, it was only an hour but it was a very good conversation.
02:26:58 Yeah, thank you.
02:26:59 I, the response was overwhelmingly positive and I’m like, all right, I’m in a unique position
02:27:04 because Alex, I met Alex, well, that’s not true, but I was on Alex, with Alex on Tim
02:27:08 Pool a couple of times.
02:27:10 It was mayhem, it was anarchy and I’m like, all right, let me get.
02:27:14 But the thing is what people enjoyed is I was the one who was basically able to translate
02:27:18 Alex’s ease.
02:27:19 He’s obviously very performative and a lot of times Alex will say things that are not
02:27:23 really particularly controversial, but he’ll say them in such a way that it sounds crazier
02:27:29 than it is.
02:27:30 You know, I think Joe’s made this observation as well.
02:27:32 So what I wanted to have him on my show is, all right, let’s go through all these conspiracies
02:27:38 which have validity, which don’t.
02:27:40 And I knew if I asked him, because he’s got a lot of historical knowledge, even if you
02:27:43 think of a lot of it’s nonsensical, let’s sort out the wheat from the chaff, you know,
02:27:49 because everyone has someone crazy in them.
02:27:50 I have this expression, you take one red pill, not the whole bottle, you take the whole bottle
02:27:54 of red pills, you assume literally everything in the media is a lie, that’s just not a coherent
02:27:59 position to have.
02:28:00 Is the weather a lie when they tell you that temperature is going to be wrong tomorrow?
02:28:03 So that was fun to watch him go through that.
02:28:05 And he felt bad because he felt incorrectly, in my opinion, that he was needlessly aggressive
02:28:10 and disrespectful toward me on Tim.
02:28:12 I didn’t feel disrespected at all.
02:28:13 It got heated, but I didn’t take it personally.
02:28:15 People have heated debates all the time.
02:28:17 So I think he promised me he wouldn’t interrupt and would be deferential, but that because
02:28:21 he promised to be on his best behavior, that gave me an opportunity to address him seriously
02:28:27 and not to bring the clown aspect out of him, which is easy to caricature him.
02:28:32 My friend Ethan Suppley, who I’m sure people know, played basically a character based on
02:28:36 him in The Hunt, because Alex is kind of this cartoon archetype.
02:28:40 So it was really fun to get another side of him.
02:28:45 And also, it’s just fun being on his show, just him being bombastic and just trying to
02:28:49 be the calm voice of reason.
02:28:51 And for once, the trickster was Apollo.
02:28:52 Well, I like this thing he said before.
02:28:57 And that’s what makes me the most interested in Alex is the Nietzsche quote about gazing
02:29:03 into the abyss.
02:29:04 I think he said on your show that he has become the abyss or something like that.
02:29:08 I think that makes him fascinating that when you really take conspiracy theories seriously,
02:29:14 the kind of effect it has on your mind.
02:29:17 That to me is fascinating.
02:29:18 Well, can I say one thing, that term conspiracy theory?
02:29:22 If you ask any layman, look, it’s like this, you say, do you like puppies?
02:29:26 I hate them.
02:29:27 Do you like baby dogs?
02:29:28 Oh, they’re the best, right?
02:29:29 People, the human mind is capable of doing this.
02:29:31 So if you ask people, do you think extremely powerful people often get together and manipulate
02:29:38 data or rules in order to further their power and control and maintain it?
02:29:43 I think 90 plus percent of people would be like, of course.
02:29:46 Then you say, oh, so you believe in conspiracy theories.
02:29:48 Oh no, that’s for crazy people.
02:29:49 Those concepts are identical.
02:29:51 Now that term is used for people who are like, all right, there’s conspiracies in government
02:29:58 to experiment on people like Tuskegee.
02:30:00 This is not in dispute.
02:30:01 The CIA has unsealed things, Operation Mockingbird, so on and so forth.
02:30:05 And at the same time, conspiracy theory applies to people who say 9 11 never happened and
02:30:09 those are holograms.
02:30:11 Now it’s the same word for both, but these are not at all equal truth claims and they
02:30:16 do not at all have equal evidence to them.
02:30:18 But it’s very useful for powerful people to have that term in the zeitgeist because then
02:30:22 I don’t have to explain or defend.
02:30:24 It’s like, only lunatics are going to look further on this.
02:30:27 Do you really want to be a lunatic kid?
02:30:29 And that takes care of the issue.
02:30:31 Unfortunately the same problem applies, language applies to a lot of other areas.
02:30:35 100%, that’s the nature of language, yeah.
02:30:37 It’s used not just to communicate, but to obfuscate.
02:30:39 Obviously that could be fixed by coming up with different words to label conspiracy theories
02:30:46 that are much more likely to be true.
02:30:48 Yeah, like power elite analysis is another, is basically conspiracy theory.
02:30:53 This is the black pill versus white pill question with the abyss.
02:30:59 Do you think thinking about these things can destroy the mind, can make you deeply cynical
02:31:06 about the world?
02:31:08 Yeah, because if you are thinking that you are not aware of, or no one is aware of who’s
02:31:15 controlling things and that the level of their control, it gives you the sense of powerlessness
02:31:20 and hopelessness.
02:31:22 And my counter is the people in charge, one of the reasons I’m an anarchist, are nowhere
02:31:27 near as smart and crafty as you think they are.
02:31:30 And certainly maybe the ones complete in the shadow maybe are, but the ones who are in
02:31:34 the public face most certainly are not, as social media has demonstrated, when you look
02:31:38 at how senators and Harvard professors tweet, these are not, you know, intellects that you’re
02:31:45 in awe of, to put it mildly.
02:31:47 So I think that kind of takes the bloom off the rose to a great extent.
02:31:52 You mentioned that you’ve been doing a lot of amazing things, been truly joyful recently.
02:31:57 But I don’t know if you have a bucket list.
02:32:02 Is there items on the bucket list you haven’t done yet?
02:32:05 Are you pretty much satisfied and happy, and if you die today, if I murder you, you’ll
02:32:11 be happy?
02:32:12 I could die today.
02:32:13 Is there an item on the bucket list you want to get done?
02:32:17 I don’t, yeah.
02:32:20 Deep Sea submersible.
02:32:21 That would be number one on the bucket list.
02:32:24 Why?
02:32:25 Because that’s where all the most interesting zoology is.
02:32:28 And to be in a place where like virtually no human being has been, and to see these
02:32:35 gods mistakes and their natural environment.
02:32:38 My friend coined that term gods mistakes.
02:32:40 If you look at deep sea creatures, you can imagine god making some animal being like,
02:32:44 oh god, this is hideous, I’ll just throw them on the ocean, no one’s gonna see this.
02:32:48 So that would be my number one bucket list thing.
02:32:51 I would say go to the White House as a guest would be a bucket list thing.
02:32:55 Russia, go to Russia would be a bucket list thing.
02:32:59 I want to go, these are secondary, like go to Eritrea would be a bucket list thing.
02:33:04 I’ve got a long list of books I need to write.
02:33:06 That’s that’s, I don’t know if that’s really a bucket list per se.
02:33:12 There’s not that much, what I’m at a point in my life is once you cross up certain things,
02:33:18 you basically, instead of driving the car, start surfing.
02:33:21 And just amazing thing, I talked to you about this medical thing, you know, before we started.
02:33:25 At a certain point, and I’m sure this happens to you, because your platform is a lot bigger
02:33:29 than mine, all sorts of things start coming your way that you never would have thought
02:33:32 of.
02:33:33 And you’re like, this is pretty darn cool.
02:33:35 So to be, and that’s happening at an escalating rate.
02:33:38 Like I’m at a point now where I get stopped every day by people.
02:33:43 So that’s going to be a weird thing for me to get adjusted to.
02:33:47 Like without exception, everyone who has ever stopped me on the street has been cool.
02:33:53 And it’s been a pleasant experience.
02:33:54 There was one exception at an event where someone was genuinely on the spectrum and
02:33:58 they didn’t understand like distance and you don’t touch people and that, but that’s as
02:34:02 bad as it got.
02:34:04 So that is something that’s going to be weird for me to have to deal with over the next
02:34:09 couple of years.
02:34:10 But you know, it’s the price you pay and it’s hardly a small price when people come up to
02:34:14 you and say you’ve made my life better.
02:34:16 But it’s just weird when you go and like, like I was at the gym and then someone tweets
02:34:20 like, did I see you at the gym just now?
02:34:22 It’s kind of weird.
02:34:24 And I’m sure it’s the same for you when you’re walking around and you don’t think about it,
02:34:27 but people know who you are and you don’t know who they are that you’re being watched.
02:34:30 Even though it’s not malevolent, it’s still just, you don’t get prepared for that.
02:34:34 Michael, there were, there will be two really big names that wanted to do this podcast.
02:34:42 We’ll do this podcast that I considered to do episode 200 with.
02:34:46 But then I realized why the hell talk to somebody famous when I could talk to somebody I love
02:34:54 that nobody knows or cares for.
02:34:56 You just hit a random number generator.
02:35:00 Yeah.
02:35:01 Just, I listed all the Russians I know and who is the easiest to get.
02:35:04 You’re the.
02:35:05 Yeah, who’s the most desperate for camera stuff.
02:35:07 He’s got a shitty book out, we can talk about that for five minutes.
02:35:12 This garbage cut and paste that he did.
02:35:15 Uh, it turned out okay, I think slightly above average.
02:35:20 Michael, I love you.
02:35:22 You’re an incredible human being.
02:35:24 It’s an honor that you would talk to me and you’ll be my friend.
02:35:26 Thanks so much for doing this.
02:35:27 Uh, the respect that I got, uh, when you asked me to be the guest for the anniversary episode
02:35:34 was similar to the respect when my two friends, Josh and Zoe, they were going to get married
02:35:38 at city hall and they said, we want someone to witness at the Basque.
02:35:41 So it’s one thing when people tell you they like you and respect you, which I had growing
02:35:46 up.
02:35:47 It’s another thing when they show it.
02:35:48 And this is something that I do not take lightly and I hope no one takes lightly.
02:35:51 And if someone does right by you and shows you respect, going back to kind of taking
02:35:56 out for dinner, thank them, buy them a candy bar, buy them a soda, do something to show
02:36:01 that you don’t take it for granted.
02:36:03 Because I think what you and I both want to do is increase human kindness as much as possible.
02:36:09 And I’m going to look at the camera, be kind to yourself, because a lot of you deserve
02:36:16 it.
02:36:17 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice and thank you to Gala
02:36:23 Games, Indeed, BetterHelp and Masterclass.
02:36:27 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
02:36:31 And now let me leave you with some words from Jack Kerouac that perhaps begins to explain
02:36:37 the nature of and the reasons for my friendship with Mr. Michael Malice.
02:36:42 The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad
02:36:47 to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say
02:36:53 commonplace thing but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders
02:37:00 across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes
02:37:05 ahhhhh.
02:37:09 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.