Michael Malice: Christmas Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #347

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Michael Malice.

00:00:03.300 | This is a special holiday episode,

00:00:05.320 | and it is made extra special

00:00:07.540 | because it's announcing the release

00:00:09.040 | of Michael's new book called "The White Pill,

00:00:11.880 | A Tale of Good and Evil."

00:00:14.100 | Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas

00:00:16.560 | in politics and philosophy,

00:00:18.240 | and we have a lot of fun disagreeing.

00:00:21.040 | But there's no question that he has a deep love for humanity

00:00:24.560 | and puts his heart and soul into his work,

00:00:26.920 | especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book.

00:00:30.400 | So I ask that you support him

00:00:32.680 | by buying it at whitepillbook.com.

00:00:35.720 | That should hopefully forward to the Amazon page.

00:00:39.220 | As always, we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit

00:00:43.320 | without coordinating for the chaos

00:00:46.000 | that makes life so damn interesting.

00:00:49.080 | This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love,

00:00:53.520 | which is the best way to celebrate the holidays.

00:00:56.900 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:58.880 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:00.840 | in the description.

00:01:02.160 | And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malice.

00:01:05.800 | We probably should have coordinated this better,

00:01:10.280 | shouldn't we? - Yeah.

00:01:11.120 | - I think so.

00:01:12.320 | Have you, since this is a Christmas special,

00:01:16.040 | a holiday special, have you been a good

00:01:18.200 | or a bad boy, Michael, this year?

00:01:21.240 | - Well, that's interesting.

00:01:22.080 | One of the people in the book, Granville Hicks,

00:01:24.880 | his autobiography starts with, "I was a good boy."

00:01:27.660 | And he wasn't a very good boy.

00:01:29.300 | - On a scale of one to 10?

00:01:31.560 | - I'm trying to think of what bad things I've done.

00:01:35.660 | Oh, okay, there's that.

00:01:36.620 | Okay, wait, that's not, that was, that was not a--

00:01:39.380 | - That's all right.

00:01:40.220 | - I would say nine.

00:01:42.100 | - Nine? - Yeah.

00:01:43.500 | I try to do the right thing.

00:01:45.300 | - Okay. - What about you?

00:01:46.900 | Is it gonna be a one or a zero?

00:01:48.040 | - Yeah, no, I'm extremely self-critical.

00:01:49.940 | I push the zero. - Okay.

00:01:51.940 | - I reach for the zero.

00:01:54.060 | - Well, mission accomplished.

00:01:55.640 | - So this episode is announcing the release

00:02:00.080 | of "The White Pill," a book you wrote,

00:02:02.000 | which is, I've gotten the honor, the privilege,

00:02:05.680 | the pleasure of being one of the first people to read it.

00:02:08.680 | - So I'm really, I don't know if nervous is the word,

00:02:11.200 | but you are the first person who has read it

00:02:14.800 | that I am speaking to about it.

00:02:16.800 | - My first, my last, my everything.

00:02:18.560 | - Yes.

00:02:19.400 | - You say that to all the girls, but I'll take it.

00:02:21.760 | - All the fembots.

00:02:22.720 | - All the fembots.

00:02:23.920 | But yeah, it was a truly incredible book.

00:02:25.660 | It's basically a story of evil in the 20th century,

00:02:30.020 | and throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope.

00:02:35.020 | And that's the idea of "The White Pill."

00:02:36.880 | So there's the blue pill and the red pill.

00:02:39.440 | There's the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical,

00:02:42.280 | maybe apathetic, just giving up on the world,

00:02:46.380 | given that you see behind the curtain,

00:02:48.320 | and given that you don't like what you see,

00:02:51.000 | given that there's so much suffering in the world,

00:02:52.640 | you give up, that's the black pill.

00:02:54.120 | And the white pill, I suppose, is even though

00:02:56.920 | you acknowledge that there's evil in the world,

00:02:58.920 | you don't give up.

00:03:00.160 | - Yes.

00:03:01.000 | - So if you're listening to this,

00:03:02.840 | and you're a fan of this podcast--

00:03:04.240 | - You go to whitepillbook.com, it'll go to it.

00:03:06.360 | - Whitepillbook.com, and if you don't know how to spell,

00:03:09.560 | we'll probably have a link that you can click on.

00:03:11.960 | So for people who also don't know,

00:03:13.720 | Michael Malice is not just a troll,

00:03:17.280 | not just a hilarious, comedic genius

00:03:20.960 | who hosts his own podcast,

00:03:22.160 | but he is an incredible, brilliant author.

00:03:23.920 | Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography, Kim Jong-il.

00:03:28.240 | So that's a story of North Korea.

00:03:30.080 | The New Right, A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.

00:03:33.560 | That's the story of the extremes

00:03:38.320 | of the United States political movements,

00:03:41.600 | and then the anarchist handbook

00:03:43.280 | that's talking about the ideologies,

00:03:45.480 | the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism.

00:03:48.040 | But on top of that, you're now going in,

00:03:51.240 | going into the darkest aspects of the 20th century

00:03:55.680 | with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill.

00:03:58.880 | So let me ask you, let's start at the beginning.

00:04:03.480 | At the end of the 19th century, as you write,

00:04:05.760 | the terms socialist, communist, and anarchist

00:04:07.800 | were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably

00:04:10.400 | because the prophesied Marxist society

00:04:12.760 | was one in which the state had famously withered away.

00:04:16.080 | There was a great disagreement

00:04:17.360 | about what a socialist system would look like in practice,

00:04:20.440 | but two things were clear.

00:04:21.840 | First, that socialism was both inevitable and scientific,

00:04:25.960 | the way of the future,

00:04:27.000 | and second, that the capitalist ruling class

00:04:30.200 | were not going down without a fight.

00:04:31.920 | So what are the key points of disagreement

00:04:35.000 | between the socialists, the anarchists, the communists

00:04:37.800 | along that, at that time?

00:04:39.960 | At the end of the 19th century,

00:04:41.640 | at the beginning of the 20th century,

00:04:43.840 | the possibility of the century laid before us

00:04:46.280 | that eventually led to the first and the second World War.

00:04:49.240 | - The idea when the Industrial Revolution came,

00:04:51.160 | and Marx was very much a product

00:04:53.200 | of Industrial Revolutionary thinking,

00:04:55.360 | was, okay, now that we have technology,

00:04:57.600 | now that we have science,

00:04:58.720 | we can scientifically manage society.

00:05:01.280 | We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson

00:05:03.680 | and this kind of idea of progressivism

00:05:05.720 | that we could use technology and kind of not,

00:05:09.880 | capitalism, in their view, unfettered capitalism,

00:05:12.720 | was wasteful, you're making too much stuff,

00:05:14.640 | you have surpluses, you have shortages.

00:05:17.400 | If we produce just exactly what we need

00:05:19.520 | and you have these people, engineers,

00:05:21.160 | they're engineering society,

00:05:22.600 | then everyone will be happy

00:05:24.200 | and you won't have to have any suffering or waste.

00:05:26.680 | So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella.

00:05:31.600 | It's not used in the term that it means today

00:05:33.760 | of necessarily state socialism.

00:05:36.520 | It just meant the idea

00:05:37.400 | of having society scientifically run.

00:05:40.120 | So you had a huge argument, there are different wings,

00:05:42.680 | you even had it from the beginning,

00:05:43.960 | with Marx versus Bakunin,

00:05:45.840 | 'cause Marx was for, obviously, state socialism,

00:05:49.560 | the absolute state running everything.

00:05:51.640 | Although even with Marx and Engels,

00:05:55.120 | it was a means to an end.

00:05:56.800 | After man is remade in his very nature,

00:05:59.720 | then the state withers away and everyone's equal

00:06:01.560 | and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation.

00:06:04.360 | Bakunin was the opposite.

00:06:06.080 | He regarded the state as inherently immoral

00:06:08.560 | and wanted to have kind of like workers' collectives

00:06:11.680 | and things like that and ultra-localized control.

00:06:14.240 | - So the end was always stateless.

00:06:15.760 | It's just that some people viewed the state

00:06:17.880 | as a convenient, effective intermediate state.

00:06:20.920 | - Well, I think at least Marx and Bakunin,

00:06:22.760 | there were plenty of others who just regarded it,

00:06:25.320 | have the state owners, have the workers control

00:06:28.600 | the production via the state.

00:06:30.480 | - By the way, how does my hat look?

00:06:32.040 | - It looks great, festive.

00:06:33.600 | - It's good?

00:06:34.480 | Is this side better than the other side?

00:06:36.000 | - I think you want it on this side so people can see you.

00:06:38.640 | - Oh, no, no, no.

00:06:39.480 | I want it.

00:06:40.320 | You know like when you have like hair over your eye?

00:06:43.160 | - Peekaboo hair, it's called.

00:06:44.280 | Veronica Lake, I think was her name.

00:06:45.680 | - And then I just glance flirtatiously

00:06:47.640 | towards the camera sometimes.

00:06:49.120 | I gotta, stay, don't go.

00:06:50.880 | - Sure.

00:06:51.720 | - Yeah, put on gloves.

00:06:55.240 | - Oh, oh.

00:06:56.080 | No glove, no love.

00:06:58.680 | The bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them.

00:07:05.440 | So you have to get new ones every time.

00:07:09.920 | - And now I glance flirtatiously after that.

00:07:14.120 | I'm sorry.

00:07:14.960 | Okay, but we're gonna get into Marx.

00:07:16.160 | Go ahead.

00:07:17.000 | - So there were other socialists who did not regard

00:07:21.480 | this kind of end times where the state

00:07:23.000 | would do it their way at all.

00:07:24.240 | And there were various strains in between

00:07:27.240 | where you'd have some capitalism and some socialism.

00:07:30.620 | The concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking

00:07:35.440 | in the Labor Party, came out of the Fabian socialists

00:07:38.440 | in Great Britain.

00:07:39.760 | Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

00:07:42.720 | And then when that was too on the nose,

00:07:44.160 | they changed it to a tortoise,

00:07:45.360 | meaning we're gonna get to socialism slowly

00:07:48.120 | in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog.

00:07:51.560 | And also the big part of this thinking at the time,

00:07:55.080 | this is again, the late 19th century,

00:07:57.280 | is the idea that there's gonna be

00:07:58.760 | a worldwide workers' revolution.

00:08:00.800 | It wasn't going to be that in one country,

00:08:03.960 | it was gonna happen and then all the other countries

00:08:05.680 | would be capitalists.

00:08:06.520 | The idea was, all right, the workers in Germany

00:08:10.080 | have more in common with the workers in America

00:08:12.880 | than the workers in Germany have

00:08:14.200 | with the capitalists in Germany.

00:08:15.400 | So the idea is, all right, the working class

00:08:17.760 | all over the world at one point,

00:08:19.040 | they're gonna be like, we're being exploited.

00:08:21.800 | It's getting worse and worse for us.

00:08:23.160 | We can't feed our families.

00:08:24.800 | We're getting injured and so on and so forth.

00:08:26.440 | And there's no compensation for this.

00:08:28.520 | We're just gonna overthrow our chains

00:08:30.040 | and we're gonna run everything ourselves.

00:08:31.680 | We're the ones running it already anyway.

00:08:34.180 | And this was a-- - Doing all the work.

00:08:37.360 | - And we're doing all the work.

00:08:38.360 | So why shouldn't we be getting all the benefit?

00:08:41.640 | - What's the role of violence in all of this?

00:08:45.080 | - So this was a big source of contention.

00:08:48.400 | So the Fabians, for example, in Britain,

00:08:51.200 | who were all socialists, they were very heavily

00:08:53.800 | of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box.

00:08:57.220 | We can advocate and agitate and get the people

00:09:01.400 | to be voting for their own self-interest

00:09:03.440 | and furthering the state at the expense

00:09:05.640 | of the capitalist class.

00:09:07.280 | Then there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists

00:09:10.160 | who were like, if voting changed anything,

00:09:14.520 | they wouldn't let us do it.

00:09:15.840 | And the only way to have a revolution

00:09:18.480 | is to have a revolution, to kill, to overthrow,

00:09:23.480 | to seize these factories.

00:09:25.880 | And this was a big argument.

00:09:28.600 | And it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end?

00:09:33.940 | Is it legal to be giving speeches,

00:09:36.140 | advocating for violence and revolution?

00:09:38.760 | Is it legal?

00:09:39.600 | Johann Most, who I discuss in the book,

00:09:41.500 | and in the "Anarchist Handbook,"

00:09:42.980 | he published a book in the 1800s

00:09:45.860 | about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs.

00:09:48.780 | And this is a big free speech concern at the time

00:09:51.360 | because now anyone in their own house can make a bomb

00:09:54.660 | and kill lots of people.

00:09:56.900 | And this is something that was happening

00:09:58.980 | with enormous frequency at the time.

00:10:00.820 | And people tend to think,

00:10:02.340 | 'cause we have these kind of prejudices,

00:10:04.300 | or we only remember what's happening now.

00:10:06.220 | But this was, I mean, World War II,

00:10:09.020 | oh, excuse me, World War I got started

00:10:10.700 | with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

00:10:13.600 | There were lots of people,

00:10:14.780 | McKinley's another one who I discuss in the book,

00:10:16.600 | his assassination.

00:10:17.820 | There was lots of violence happening very regularly.

00:10:22.500 | And with the creation of dynamite,

00:10:24.220 | it kind of exponentially became more dangerous

00:10:26.860 | and threatening.

00:10:27.700 | Even now on Wall Street,

00:10:29.300 | there was a bomb that went off, I think, in the 1920s.

00:10:31.980 | And the shards of shrapnel are still

00:10:33.540 | in the JP Morgan building, I believe.

00:10:35.660 | - Do you ever think, if you were alive during that time,

00:10:39.260 | what you would be doing?

00:10:40.700 | You think of yourself as an anarchist?

00:10:42.860 | - Right.

00:10:43.700 | - Would you be, where would you be?

00:10:44.900 | Would you be a socialist, a communist?

00:10:46.860 | Which parties would you attend, figuratively and literally?

00:10:50.140 | - Well, the thing that was so interesting back then

00:10:52.420 | is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge Lujan,

00:10:55.780 | and she ended her days in Taos, New Mexico.

00:10:57.860 | She founded an artist colony.

00:10:59.580 | And she had an apartment on 9th Street

00:11:02.540 | and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a chateau salon.

00:11:06.180 | And everyone got together and talked.

00:11:07.780 | And you'd have Emma Goldman, who was an anarchist,

00:11:09.300 | Margaret Sanger, who invented Planned Parenthood

00:11:11.100 | and advocated for birth control.

00:11:12.940 | And you'd have the people from the Wobblies,

00:11:14.580 | the hardcore labor unions.

00:11:16.240 | And everyone kind of, Ed Sheeran Mencken didn't attend,

00:11:18.980 | but he was friends with them all.

00:11:20.580 | So there was this very weird,

00:11:23.580 | with the birth of modernism in art

00:11:25.300 | and in kind of modernist thinking,

00:11:27.560 | there was this idea of like, all right,

00:11:29.740 | like this was the first time

00:11:31.140 | where you could be intellectual as a class,

00:11:33.500 | where there really was this space

00:11:34.820 | for people who are thinkers.

00:11:36.220 | And they just sat around being like, all right,

00:11:38.100 | like, what are we gonna do with ourselves?

00:11:40.580 | And you had it in modern art, you had it in literature,

00:11:43.300 | you had it in politics.

00:11:45.660 | So it was a very exciting time where people were like,

00:11:49.260 | all right, like everything is now on the table.

00:11:52.020 | What are we gonna do with this?

00:11:53.180 | And they very much were aware that this was a break

00:11:56.300 | with the pre-industrial revolution

00:11:59.980 | kind of farmer labor era.

00:12:02.020 | - Do you see, do you think for you,

00:12:04.000 | violence would be compelling?

00:12:05.400 | - No, first of all, I'm just too small.

00:12:07.900 | But second, I just--

00:12:10.080 | - Dynamite doesn't care about your size.

00:12:13.080 | - Yeah, but I mean, retribution does.

00:12:14.940 | And I think, I don't know,

00:12:17.460 | but to me, violence is the kind of thing

00:12:19.780 | where you think you're running it, but it's running you.

00:12:23.020 | Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song.

00:12:28.020 | So whenever I hear even contemporary times

00:12:30.420 | where people are advocating for violent actions,

00:12:33.300 | it's like, when you start a fire,

00:12:35.220 | you're not like, I'm just gonna burn down this house.

00:12:37.920 | And there's many cases over and over

00:12:41.820 | of people who are building bombs

00:12:43.680 | or trying to assassinate someone or things like that.

00:12:46.700 | And it ended up literally, literally, literally

00:12:49.500 | blowing up in their own face.

00:12:52.020 | And violence doesn't really work necessarily

00:12:56.260 | because if you have an assassination,

00:12:58.460 | you're not assassinating the presidency.

00:13:00.940 | If you take out a president,

00:13:03.020 | there's another president instantly there.

00:13:04.580 | So what have you accomplished?

00:13:05.420 | Someone's husband, dad is gone.

00:13:08.900 | You replace them with someone who now is in a position

00:13:11.140 | to crack down and retaliate with even more violence.

00:13:14.740 | So the calculus for me isn't there.

00:13:18.260 | Would I be advocating for it then?

00:13:20.100 | Who knows?

00:13:20.960 | But I mean, I don't know if I'd be able to have the space

00:13:25.100 | to be, I certainly wouldn't have the space

00:13:27.260 | to be a podcaster or like a media personality.

00:13:30.380 | That wasn't really a thing.

00:13:32.140 | To some extent, it was in the 1920s

00:13:34.540 | with the Algonquin Roundtable

00:13:36.060 | and all the people from the New Yorker magazine.

00:13:38.620 | But they were all drunks.

00:13:40.420 | It was very much a weird kind of situation to be a thinker.

00:13:45.420 | - What would you think you would do?

00:13:48.500 | Work at a carnival?

00:13:49.380 | You look good in lipstick, so.

00:13:51.220 | - Thank you.

00:13:52.580 | I look good in anything.

00:13:54.180 | What would I, I don't know.

00:13:55.580 | I mean, you're not building robots.

00:13:56.980 | I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right?

00:13:58.340 | - Okay.

00:13:59.180 | - I didn't mean a car, I meant the person.

00:14:00.620 | - I understand.

00:14:01.460 | Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me.

00:14:03.740 | - It wasn't witty at all.

00:14:05.540 | 'Cause you wouldn't be an Einstein

00:14:06.580 | 'cause he was an immigrant.

00:14:07.940 | - So I wouldn't work with an immigrant?

00:14:09.260 | What does that even mean?

00:14:10.100 | - No, you wouldn't have been a Tesla-like figure.

00:14:12.060 | There's already a Tesla,

00:14:13.060 | so you wouldn't literally be Tesla.

00:14:14.180 | That's why you said a Tesla.

00:14:15.420 | - Oh, a Tesla.

00:14:16.500 | Okay, so all right.

00:14:17.340 | I take you for the explanation.

00:14:19.380 | See, Michael doesn't only make funny things,

00:14:21.980 | he also explains them for you.

00:14:23.420 | - It wasn't funny.

00:14:24.260 | - Mansplains them.

00:14:25.100 | - It wasn't funny at all.

00:14:26.260 | - That I agree with.

00:14:27.420 | - Okay.

00:14:28.260 | - Okay, so yes, when you achieve--

00:14:31.940 | - See, this is why Kanye didn't like you, it's this.

00:14:34.540 | - All right, I'm downgrading you from a nine down to an eight.

00:14:38.780 | And if you keep talking like this,

00:14:41.900 | a five is a real possibility.

00:14:45.500 | - All right, so the kind of vacuum that's created

00:14:48.900 | with violence is usually filled with a harsher figure.

00:14:53.900 | So you don't think violent revolution

00:14:58.980 | ultimately leads to positive progress in the short term?

00:15:02.580 | - Well, sometimes it does.

00:15:03.420 | The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example.

00:15:06.260 | And overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully,

00:15:09.660 | was a positive example.

00:15:11.100 | But again, when violence happens, people get scared

00:15:15.700 | and they want the violence stopped immediately,

00:15:17.540 | and that's a call for authoritarianism.

00:15:19.860 | And you see it time and time again.

00:15:21.500 | And they also want retribution.

00:15:23.260 | They were like, "Bring this back to normal."

00:15:25.420 | And they don't really worry about things

00:15:26.820 | like civil liberties or things like that.

00:15:28.900 | And then it also creates this space for invasion

00:15:34.180 | from foreign sources or demagogues.

00:15:37.020 | Like, "Oh, look, they're killing us in the streets.

00:15:38.660 | "Now you gotta support me."

00:15:40.020 | It's a very deadly game, obviously.

00:15:44.220 | - I remember somebody told me that, I forget where it was,

00:15:49.020 | but they told me that from the very beginning

00:15:51.180 | it was obvious that communism is an evil system,

00:15:54.980 | or a system that leads to evil.

00:15:57.620 | And to me, at least, that's not,

00:15:59.520 | if I had to put myself in the beginning of the 20th century

00:16:02.180 | or at the end of the 19th century,

00:16:03.820 | that's totally not obvious.

00:16:05.580 | They are trying to elevate humanity.

00:16:08.780 | The basic worth of a human being,

00:16:11.340 | of a hardworking human being, of the working class,

00:16:13.740 | of the people that are doing the work and are striving

00:16:15.620 | and just really trying to build up society

00:16:19.300 | with their own hands, it just seems like a beautiful ideal.

00:16:22.340 | So I guess the question is,

00:16:24.620 | can you see yourself believing in that,

00:16:27.180 | in the ideas of socialism and communism?

00:16:29.860 | Yeah, let's say if you were living in Russia.

00:16:32.260 | - Oh yeah, easily.

00:16:33.140 | So first of all, I don't think anything

00:16:34.860 | is obvious in politics.

00:16:36.780 | It's not obvious that humans have rights.

00:16:41.060 | It's not obvious that liberty is better

00:16:42.780 | or the markets either.

00:16:44.580 | Whether you're for a welfare state

00:16:46.900 | or you're for more free markets,

00:16:48.420 | neither of those is obvious.

00:16:49.460 | Both of them involve an enormous amount of thought

00:16:52.260 | and background information.

00:16:53.420 | So when someone says something is obvious,

00:16:55.700 | in politics they really mean something is apparent.

00:16:57.940 | Well, it's not apparent on its face

00:16:59.940 | that if we all get together

00:17:01.820 | and promote a society based on equality

00:17:04.740 | and we all chip in that it's gonna really be good

00:17:08.300 | for everyone.

00:17:09.140 | I mean, that to me is the promise of communism.

00:17:13.020 | And it was also very appealing to many people

00:17:17.180 | because it was new.

00:17:19.500 | So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways.

00:17:23.460 | There's all these negative consequences.

00:17:25.220 | You have all these slums.

00:17:26.780 | You have people getting fired

00:17:29.260 | and then they have no recourse.

00:17:30.980 | You have women with 10 kids

00:17:32.900 | and they can't feed their kids.

00:17:34.300 | Infant mortality.

00:17:35.180 | You don't have sanitation.

00:17:36.780 | You don't have food.

00:17:38.380 | Everyone's illiterate and uneducated.

00:17:40.460 | And then you're saying, look,

00:17:42.260 | if we all chip in together,

00:17:43.420 | everyone will have clothes,

00:17:44.380 | everyone will have food,

00:17:45.220 | everyone will be educated,

00:17:46.380 | everyone will do their part.

00:17:47.740 | It's gonna be rough in the short period.

00:17:50.020 | That's a very compelling case to be made for communism.

00:17:54.300 | It's really easy in many ways

00:17:56.700 | when something hasn't been tried

00:17:58.700 | to make it sound compelling

00:18:01.740 | because you just talk about how great it's gonna be.

00:18:04.380 | And then no one,

00:18:05.620 | people are always arguing about Venezuela and Sweden,

00:18:10.060 | like, oh, you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden.

00:18:13.220 | You don't want it to be like Venezuela.

00:18:14.780 | The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela.

00:18:16.460 | They voted for Sweden.

00:18:17.380 | They ended up with Venezuela.

00:18:19.140 | So it's, I think,

00:18:21.700 | and the thing with the communism,

00:18:23.060 | especially at that era,

00:18:24.700 | it was very much correlated

00:18:28.060 | with people who are too smart for their own good

00:18:31.420 | because they had the idea that

00:18:33.260 | if we're just put in charge,

00:18:35.180 | instead of these business people

00:18:38.220 | or these heirs to great estates,

00:18:40.700 | if the people who are smart and get it, like us,

00:18:43.940 | I don't mean you and me,

00:18:44.780 | like the people at the time who were advocating for it,

00:18:46.980 | once we're in charge,

00:18:48.460 | since we're good people

00:18:50.020 | and we want what's best for everyone,

00:18:52.260 | we're gonna make sure everyone's taken care of.

00:18:54.500 | And they always talked about

00:18:55.820 | how much they cared about the little guy.

00:18:57.660 | And so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot.

00:18:59.740 | And they're like, look,

00:19:00.580 | if the guy in charge is very much concerned

00:19:02.740 | with the little guy,

00:19:03.580 | he's not gonna slip between the cracks

00:19:05.220 | and it's just gonna be absolutely great.

00:19:07.380 | And we don't have to worry about

00:19:09.540 | the capitalist class just basically exploiting people

00:19:14.220 | and having these huge estates

00:19:15.820 | while these people can't even feed their own families.

00:19:18.260 | - Since we have a little bit of momentum,

00:19:19.900 | can you steal me on the case for socialism?

00:19:23.100 | At that time and even today.

00:19:25.820 | I don't know if it's,

00:19:27.100 | I don't know if there's a rhyme

00:19:29.300 | and similarity to those,

00:19:33.220 | to socialism as implemented at that time

00:19:35.340 | and what could possibly be implemented today,

00:19:37.660 | but maybe you can dance between the two.

00:19:39.700 | - The steel man argument for socialism is,

00:19:42.440 | if you have everything up to private industry,

00:19:46.700 | you do not have a guarantee

00:19:49.020 | that someone won't fall between the cracks.

00:19:51.780 | And the other concern is,

00:19:53.820 | in any other context,

00:19:55.140 | if someone is let's suppose mentally ill, right?

00:19:58.180 | Through no fault of their own

00:19:59.660 | and they are or someone's handicapped,

00:20:01.860 | they can't feed themselves

00:20:03.300 | or mentally disabled or something like that.

00:20:06.060 | If you have everything up to charity,

00:20:08.140 | some, if you see this with like endangered species, right?

00:20:11.820 | The species that are cute,

00:20:13.700 | it's easy to raise money for them or protect them.

00:20:15.580 | Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no one cares about,

00:20:19.060 | you can't raise money for it.

00:20:20.820 | People's interests are to what they find interesting.

00:20:23.700 | So if someone is,

00:20:26.300 | someone who's like not socially appealing in some way,

00:20:28.780 | whatever capacity,

00:20:30.180 | they're gonna fall between the cracks and they're screwed.

00:20:32.960 | Under socialism,

00:20:34.140 | if you have a government taking care of everything,

00:20:37.180 | no one is left behind.

00:20:38.980 | You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low

00:20:42.700 | and the worst of the worst are still going to make sure

00:20:45.640 | that they're not starving the street or just left behind.

00:20:49.180 | So that is a big moral case

00:20:51.980 | to be made for having the state running everything.

00:20:55.060 | In terms of economics, it's a lot harder,

00:20:58.300 | but the argument there would be,

00:21:00.140 | it's why it's not fair,

00:21:02.780 | a term which in my view does not actually have a good

00:21:05.420 | meaning, but it's not fair that

00:21:07.620 | because you were born a Rockefeller

00:21:10.380 | and I was born in Poland,

00:21:12.780 | that you never have to worry about food

00:21:14.540 | for the rest of your life.

00:21:15.720 | Whereas I have to worry about,

00:21:17.420 | you know, paying for a doctor for my kid.

00:21:20.200 | Like you just, you won this lottery when you're born

00:21:22.660 | and now I have to be screwed

00:21:23.840 | and I have to respect all your property, why?

00:21:26.120 | So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism.

00:21:31.120 | And the other argument is,

00:21:33.420 | if you have a media apparatus

00:21:37.540 | that is operated under profit seeking principles,

00:21:41.540 | it is going to feed into people's worst qualities,

00:21:45.860 | most basic animal like qualities

00:21:47.740 | and sensationalist qualities,

00:21:49.420 | and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control.

00:21:52.660 | Whereas if the government, which represents all of us,

00:21:55.200 | all of us is running things,

00:21:57.680 | then everyone will have a right to have their voice heard

00:22:01.360 | and won't be manipulated.

00:22:02.920 | That's the argument.

00:22:03.760 | - What about the reaching towards the stateless version?

00:22:07.460 | Sort of, because you espouse the ideas of anarchism,

00:22:12.720 | it kind of has the same conclusion,

00:22:15.180 | which is reaching towards the removal of the state

00:22:17.720 | to where we, I guess, have some distributed

00:22:21.320 | reallocation of resources that are "fair."

00:22:24.200 | - But the thing is, the Marxist vision

00:22:26.780 | of the state withering away and becoming anarchism,

00:22:31.000 | it's really kind of like the underpants gnomes,

00:22:33.960 | because it's like--

00:22:34.800 | - Tell me more.

00:22:35.640 | - I will.

00:22:36.460 | Step one, you have Marxist--

00:22:38.280 | - Tell me slowly.

00:22:39.160 | I'm sorry.

00:22:41.260 | - You have full communism,

00:22:43.360 | the state's running everything, including education.

00:22:45.940 | Step two, question mark, step three, anarchism.

00:22:48.440 | So their idea was that after enough time,

00:22:52.720 | the nature of man himself was going to change,

00:22:56.800 | and then the government would be superfluous

00:22:58.940 | because we would all be equal,

00:23:01.760 | and we would all naturally,

00:23:03.340 | or socially, whatever term they would use,

00:23:06.000 | want to act the part that we would need to do.

00:23:10.340 | And in fact, Reagan had a great joke about this,

00:23:13.140 | where there were two commissars, I think, in Moscow,

00:23:17.540 | and one of them, they're walking around,

00:23:18.800 | they're going, "Is this it?

00:23:20.280 | "Have we done it?

00:23:22.320 | "Have we reached full communism?"

00:23:23.280 | The other goes, "Oh no,

00:23:24.120 | "it's gonna get a hell of a lot worse."

00:23:25.760 | So that's kind of the counterargument to that.

00:23:29.800 | - Do you think culture, society,

00:23:32.420 | can change the nature of man?

00:23:34.260 | - No.

00:23:35.360 | - So no matter, you don't think this idea that,

00:23:39.240 | for example, America has been founded on,

00:23:41.280 | that all men are created equal,

00:23:43.700 | that that idea can't permeate the culture,

00:23:47.420 | and thereby change how we see each other,

00:23:51.080 | how we think of the basic worth of a human being,

00:23:54.320 | and thereby change our nature?

00:23:55.680 | - That's epigenetic.

00:23:57.400 | I don't think that changes the nature of man.

00:24:00.580 | I think, for example, if I say someone,

00:24:03.160 | which I agree with,

00:24:04.000 | that someone is innocent until proven guilty,

00:24:06.080 | they're not literally innocent.

00:24:07.520 | They're regarded in a legal context as innocent,

00:24:09.880 | but that person is or is not a murderer,

00:24:11.720 | a thief, or so on and so forth.

00:24:13.320 | So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal,

00:24:18.320 | but as Thomas Sowell pointed out,

00:24:20.800 | a human being isn't even equal to himself

00:24:22.600 | over the course of a day.

00:24:23.760 | Twins who are genetic clones are not equal to one another.

00:24:26.800 | So it is a important thing legally,

00:24:30.520 | and it's a good yardstick, but it's not literally true.

00:24:34.120 | - But don't you think that law becomes ethics?

00:24:36.240 | So we, that idea of justice starts to,

00:24:42.720 | we start to internalize it, that we just,

00:24:45.300 | the way we behave, the way we think about the world?

00:24:47.620 | - No, I think it's a complete red herring,

00:24:51.060 | because no one is--

00:24:52.980 | - No, you're a red herring.

00:24:54.660 | - Okay.

00:24:55.500 | - See what I did there?

00:24:57.100 | - Seletka.

00:24:57.940 | Because someone is, people are still going

00:25:02.940 | to always prefer their family to strangers,

00:25:05.220 | or their in-group to out-group.

00:25:07.020 | So in terms of if you're gonna have equality,

00:25:09.120 | that means it's gonna not matter to you

00:25:10.940 | whether someone is your mom

00:25:12.540 | or someone is someone down the street,

00:25:15.100 | and I don't see how that will ever become the case.

00:25:18.460 | - Do you think it would be possible

00:25:20.580 | if you were an intellectual,

00:25:22.140 | like you are at the beginning of the 20th century,

00:25:25.700 | would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century?

00:25:29.020 | - No, I don't think at all.

00:25:31.060 | I think there was so many out-of-nowhere turns

00:25:36.060 | that no one would have seen them coming.

00:25:38.740 | And as an example, Lenin seizing power

00:25:42.860 | and making the Bolshevik Revolution a reality

00:25:46.460 | was regarded as utopian and insane.

00:25:49.900 | The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous,

00:25:52.780 | and it was quite literally unprecedented.

00:25:54.920 | The fact that, so that's a very big one.

00:25:58.460 | - Which aspect of it, sorry to interrupt,

00:26:00.660 | which aspect was hard to predict,

00:26:02.180 | that a singular figure with just some ideas

00:26:04.360 | would be able to take so much power?

00:26:06.620 | - And maintain that power and remake that society

00:26:09.820 | so drastically, so quickly, despite such opposition.

00:26:12.780 | - Also not just a set of temporary protests

00:26:15.260 | by hooligans that lead to turmoil in the short term,

00:26:19.620 | but then stabilizes,

00:26:20.780 | but literally changes the entirety of the society.

00:26:23.060 | - Yeah, Ludendorff, who was the German general,

00:26:24.980 | he's like, all right,

00:26:25.800 | we gotta get the Russians out of World War I.

00:26:28.980 | He's the one who's like, all right,

00:26:30.160 | let's get this lunatic Lenin,

00:26:31.500 | who already tried and failed to have a revolution in Russia,

00:26:35.020 | let's send him back there,

00:26:36.420 | and he's just gonna cause problems to everybody,

00:26:38.420 | and it's gonna be great,

00:26:39.260 | 'cause it's gonna weaken Russia,

00:26:40.500 | and then our Eastern Front isn't gonna have to be a problem.

00:26:44.100 | And then to his surprise, and everyone else's,

00:26:46.700 | including anarchists and communists worldwide,

00:26:50.660 | they pulled off this October revolution,

00:26:53.640 | and then for a while, it's like, all right,

00:26:55.340 | I mean, I think my understanding is even people at the time

00:26:58.900 | in St. Petersburg and in Moscow were like,

00:27:01.660 | what does this even mean, right?

00:27:02.980 | Like no one took it seriously,

00:27:04.860 | and then very quickly, you had the Cheka,

00:27:07.420 | and the secret police,

00:27:08.780 | and all these other kind of implementations

00:27:11.060 | of the communist state, and people are like,

00:27:13.620 | oh, they're not messing around,

00:27:15.860 | but they're like, all right,

00:27:17.020 | this is not gonna last for long,

00:27:18.900 | and the USA, the US and A,

00:27:21.600 | we didn't even recognize the Soviet Union's legitimacy

00:27:24.020 | for a very long time, there were no diplomatic relations,

00:27:26.500 | and after a certain point, it's like,

00:27:28.940 | if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government,

00:27:31.980 | who's the government of Russia or the Soviet Union?

00:27:34.540 | Is it the Tsar?

00:27:35.380 | Like you have to recognize it,

00:27:36.740 | it's just they're not going anywhere,

00:27:38.420 | so that was something that was not,

00:27:40.720 | I think, very predictable.

00:27:43.700 | The Great Depression, in retrospect,

00:27:46.060 | there were certain things that were predictable,

00:27:47.500 | but it was not at all the case that it needed to last

00:27:50.160 | as long as it did in the States as FDR made it do,

00:27:53.180 | so there's all sorts of things.

00:27:54.900 | I mean, if they fought Germany's remilitarization,

00:27:59.900 | World War II could have been prevented

00:28:02.860 | if you didn't have the Treaty of Versailles.

00:28:04.620 | Would you have the hyperinflation?

00:28:05.880 | Would you have Hitler?

00:28:06.900 | These are all, I think, choose your own adventure moments

00:28:09.780 | where things could have gone in other directions.

00:28:11.540 | I don't believe this kind of idea,

00:28:13.700 | this is a very Marxist idea that history is inevitable,

00:28:17.820 | and once you start with certain premises,

00:28:19.900 | the contradictions kind of unfold.

00:28:21.660 | I think that's ridiculous.

00:28:23.480 | - I feel like there's power in the Santa Claus outfit.

00:28:26.320 | - Yeah?

00:28:27.160 | - I mean, it's a fundamentally communist idea, right?

00:28:31.040 | - How? - Santa Claus.

00:28:32.100 | - Arbitrary redistribution of wealth.

00:28:34.500 | - It's not redistribution.

00:28:35.920 | - Well, at least I decide who's good and bad.

00:28:38.900 | Only I, only I know this,

00:28:42.280 | and I mean, I am somehow getting funding from somewhere,

00:28:45.740 | right? - No.

00:28:46.580 | - Okay, listen, I have so much to teach you.

00:28:51.380 | - You have a workshop. - Little Michael.

00:28:52.740 | Workshop, yeah, and how many people do you think

00:28:55.740 | are employed in this workshop?

00:28:57.780 | - They're slaves.

00:28:58.820 | - Yes.

00:28:59.780 | - I don't know, how many elves are in the workshop?

00:29:01.880 | I think the rest of you are gonna have to look into it.

00:29:03.780 | No, anyway, and the red colors and everything.

00:29:05.540 | Is that the biggest holiday of all time, Christmas?

00:29:08.100 | Like, just in terms of the intensity of the festivities?

00:29:12.500 | - No, I think Christmas is a very recent phenomenon.

00:29:15.500 | I think historically it was not a big deal.

00:29:17.860 | - No, I know, historically it has not been,

00:29:19.340 | but in terms of how much it captivates,

00:29:22.900 | how intense it is, I guess from a capitalist perspective,

00:29:25.820 | like how much is going on, how visual it is,

00:29:28.020 | how intense it is, how it grabs a whole population.

00:29:30.540 | I think it's because the idea of Christmas

00:29:33.160 | is probably one of the most powerful holiday ideas.

00:29:38.120 | Easter's probably up there.

00:29:39.560 | Easter's obviously up there 'cause you have Christ resurrect,

00:29:41.920 | Christ dying, his resurrection, so that's kind of a big one,

00:29:44.800 | but Christmas is this symbol of brotherhood

00:29:48.540 | and kindness and magnanimity.

00:29:50.640 | You know, one of the things I despise about our culture

00:29:53.880 | is this, and something I'm fighting very heavily

00:29:56.160 | with this book, or at least attempting to,

00:29:57.920 | is this glorification of cynicism,

00:30:00.240 | this kind of like, oh, you like this song, that's cute,

00:30:02.800 | stupid, whereas Christmas is the one time of year

00:30:07.160 | where you could be happy and joyous and kind,

00:30:11.600 | and people don't get to roll their eyes at you.

00:30:14.120 | They get to stop being too cool for school,

00:30:17.020 | and they get to be like, you know, I enjoy your friendship,

00:30:20.720 | you're my sister, my brother, my dad, my mom, whatever,

00:30:24.100 | and it was Ayn Rand's favorite holiday.

00:30:27.880 | I adore it, especially Christmas in New York,

00:30:30.960 | and it's just this idea of like, even though we're cold

00:30:34.620 | and it's dark outside, you know, it's still this kind of,

00:30:37.480 | like it's still cozy, and let's hope the next year is,

00:30:42.240 | 'cause with Russians, Dneprovsk Santa comes on New Year's,

00:30:46.760 | so it's kind of like, let's make this next year

00:30:48.400 | an even better one, so it's very much

00:30:50.080 | the holiday of hope and joy.

00:30:52.880 | - And like love for family, for friends, for friendship.

00:30:55.720 | - And kindness and benevolence, yeah.

00:30:57.720 | And like almost the whole, that whole rat race

00:31:00.440 | of chasing material possessions and all that

00:31:03.280 | gets put on hold for a brief moment,

00:31:05.360 | and it just all goes quiet.

00:31:06.760 | - But it's also like giving people material possessions,

00:31:08.720 | like here, like I value you,

00:31:10.200 | this is something that brings you joy, yeah.

00:31:11.920 | - Yeah, you write in the book, which by the way,

00:31:14.560 | people should go get, buy it right now,

00:31:16.760 | if you support this podcast,

00:31:18.800 | or if you support the ridiculous outfits

00:31:20.680 | that Michael wears, the more books you buy,

00:31:23.800 | the more outfits he is gonna wear.

00:31:25.360 | I've got two, my next two appearances in the show,

00:31:28.400 | assuming I don't burn this bridge,

00:31:30.000 | I've got some good ones.

00:31:31.080 | - This bridge has been burning for a long time.

00:31:35.680 | We've been going across the road by canoe at this point.

00:31:39.560 | Next time we're gonna be swimming.

00:31:41.260 | - How the hell are you gonna swim?

00:31:45.240 | You're made out of lead.

00:31:46.480 | - Yeah, that's true.

00:31:47.680 | Sink to the bottom, get dragged across by rope.

00:31:50.760 | Okay, you write in the book, cynics like to lie

00:31:53.520 | and call themselves realists,

00:31:55.040 | hoping for positive outcomes,

00:31:56.800 | can thus be dismissed as being naive or utopian.

00:32:00.820 | Can you elaborate on this point,

00:32:02.240 | just like you said right now?

00:32:03.640 | It seems like a,

00:32:06.400 | I don't know if it's a fundamental characteristic

00:32:10.360 | of our society today, or just societies throughout history,

00:32:14.300 | but there is a cynicism.

00:32:16.000 | You write in the Soviet Union,

00:32:17.400 | it was a really, there's a deep cynicism.

00:32:20.200 | - That was good at the end, yeah.

00:32:23.760 | - But there is a cynicism today as well,

00:32:25.960 | at least in public discourse.

00:32:27.280 | - Yes.

00:32:28.240 | - Why does it happen and how can we fight it?

00:32:31.080 | - I think it is easy

00:32:34.880 | to be like, "Eh, everything sucks."

00:32:37.940 | You know, I had my friend Lux,

00:32:41.280 | she was a blogger, she was an author.

00:32:44.500 | She had this great line, 'cause we worked in media,

00:32:47.520 | and she's like, "If you're at a party

00:32:49.120 | "and someone starts talking about a new app or website

00:32:51.860 | "and you don't know anything about it, just say,

00:32:53.720 | "Oh, I was on that for a while, it sucked."

00:32:55.780 | (laughs)

00:32:56.620 | And that's all you need to say.

00:32:58.100 | I'm like, Lux, that's a great line.

00:32:59.680 | But I think it is, and especially,

00:33:03.020 | I'm sure you experienced this as well with your family,

00:33:05.900 | I certainly did with mine.

00:33:07.640 | There is this idea, especially in Russian culture,

00:33:10.540 | but in American culture to some extent as well,

00:33:13.060 | where if you have aspirations,

00:33:16.860 | I remember there was this show called "Russian Dolls."

00:33:19.320 | It was, "Oh, I just got it."

00:33:21.740 | Like the Matryoshka, okay, I just got it, that's the name.

00:33:24.080 | Okay, the show was called "Russian Dolls."

00:33:25.900 | It was about Brighton Beach,

00:33:26.820 | which is the Russian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

00:33:28.780 | It was supposed to be their version of Jersey Shore.

00:33:30.880 | It was on Lifetime and it had no ratings.

00:33:33.600 | And I remember the last four episodes,

00:33:35.340 | they had to burn them, so they just ran it

00:33:36.660 | through like 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. one day.

00:33:38.620 | And there was this one scene where one of the girls,

00:33:41.280 | I forget her name, probably Natalia,

00:33:43.320 | and she'd been in college,

00:33:44.900 | and she had been wondering what she wanted to major in.

00:33:50.220 | And this story was so perfect,

00:33:52.020 | I'm sure I've told it before.

00:33:53.420 | And she took an aptitude test and she went with her mom

00:33:56.140 | to get like Manny Pettis or something.

00:33:58.020 | And she goes, "Mom, you know, I've had like 80 majors.

00:34:00.020 | "I didn't know what I wanted to do."

00:34:01.700 | And she goes, "I took this aptitude test.

00:34:03.120 | "It really made sense to me.

00:34:04.780 | "I am gonna go to law school.

00:34:06.440 | "I wanna be a lawyer.

00:34:07.320 | "This is something I enjoy."

00:34:08.300 | And the first thing out of her mom's mouth

00:34:09.820 | is how are you gonna pay for it?

00:34:11.380 | And the girl, and I really related,

00:34:13.480 | 'cause if you didn't have this Russian upbringing,

00:34:15.260 | you watched it, you would think her reaction

00:34:17.020 | was completely insane.

00:34:18.460 | She just lost it, just screaming.

00:34:20.620 | She's like, "People pay for law school all the time.

00:34:23.060 | "I'll figure out a way."

00:34:24.180 | Why is your first reaction to look for a problem?

00:34:26.760 | Why is your first response to be like,

00:34:28.840 | "Oh, are you sure you've thought this through?

00:34:30.780 | "I have been struggling with one problem for years,

00:34:34.120 | "what I wanted to do for a living.

00:34:35.800 | "And now like as soon as I solve

00:34:37.700 | "this one big problem of identity,

00:34:39.620 | "your first reaction is like, let's find a new problem."

00:34:41.980 | Why is that your, instead of,

00:34:43.340 | "Let's figure out how we're gonna pay for it."

00:34:45.660 | And that kind of approach is so deadly

00:34:49.580 | and it gnaws at you.

00:34:53.060 | And I always, I don't like giving people advice

00:34:55.620 | because who the hell am I?

00:34:57.620 | And also if I don't know the context of the problem,

00:34:59.460 | I'm not informed enough to give advice.

00:35:01.220 | But this is piece of advice that I do for comfort giving.

00:35:03.620 | If you are someone who has around you

00:35:06.860 | people who as soon as you have any accomplishment

00:35:09.780 | or any hope that their first reaction is to be like,

00:35:12.280 | "Well, what about this?"

00:35:13.780 | You have to get rid of them or sit them down,

00:35:15.700 | maybe give them a chance.

00:35:16.920 | Because that is something that is such so demoralizing

00:35:21.520 | and it drains you.

00:35:22.860 | And it's like, the example I've used all the time,

00:35:27.220 | all the time, all the time.

00:35:28.700 | I say, if you wanna be an author, right?

00:35:31.420 | You can go to any bookstore

00:35:33.440 | and look at all the shitty, shitty books,

00:35:36.020 | like the "White Pill."

00:35:37.380 | And you could say to yourself,

00:35:38.960 | "I could be the shitty author."

00:35:40.500 | You don't have to be Hemingway.

00:35:41.660 | So people should buy your book just to know

00:35:44.500 | that it doesn't take much.

00:35:45.980 | It really does not take much.

00:35:47.580 | - What shitty writing is all about.

00:35:49.620 | And boring.

00:35:51.660 | - Yeah, you could just pick a random period in history

00:35:55.220 | and just write a bunch of crap about it.

00:35:57.660 | And put a pretty stamp on the cover and just go.

00:35:59.860 | - It was pretty, yeah.

00:36:01.660 | But I mean, like for you, right?

00:36:03.340 | I don't mean you, Lex, but--

00:36:05.740 | - I was raised by the wolves.

00:36:07.140 | - The wolf bots.

00:36:09.420 | There's lots of standup comedians

00:36:11.500 | who aren't Jerry Seinfeld, right?

00:36:14.020 | If you wanna be a podcaster,

00:36:15.260 | you don't have to be Joe Rogan.

00:36:16.500 | You could be someone who's got a medium audience

00:36:18.900 | and are enjoying it.

00:36:19.940 | So the idea that something has to be,

00:36:23.260 | you have to be a massive superstar or you're a failure

00:36:25.500 | is also ridiculous, but that's cynicism.

00:36:28.060 | - I mean, you can even be a failed comedian

00:36:29.980 | like Dave Smith.

00:36:30.980 | Yeah, I don't.

00:36:33.500 | This is a generic name I came up with as an example.

00:36:36.620 | I think he has a podcast of some kind.

00:36:38.740 | - I like it. - Yeah.

00:36:39.900 | Not very funny.

00:36:40.740 | I don't know why he would call himself a comedian, but--

00:36:42.740 | - You mean he's being ironic.

00:36:44.180 | - Don't you think?

00:36:47.100 | Yeah, so even then you could do something special.

00:36:50.820 | - I remember what you did with me in the movie theater.

00:36:53.020 | - What's that?

00:36:53.860 | Oh, you continue.

00:36:56.100 | Can you explain the jokes?

00:36:57.260 | 'Cause I can't.

00:36:58.300 | - I'm not explaining jokes.

00:36:59.480 | I'm wearing lipstick.

00:37:00.660 | It's not enough.

00:37:02.040 | - Now I remember what you did to me in a movie theater.

00:37:05.300 | And you wore lipstick that night too.

00:37:07.180 | - Not when I was done.

00:37:08.960 | - People for sure will think,

00:37:10.420 | this feels like a gay porn.

00:37:12.420 | Like a very long intro.

00:37:14.980 | - 'Cause we're not wearing pants?

00:37:16.620 | - Yes, there's many reasons why this feels like this.

00:37:19.420 | And the outfits and just everything about this.

00:37:22.400 | - How would you know?

00:37:25.260 | - I am my friend.

00:37:26.540 | I have stories.

00:37:28.260 | - I thought I don't have friends.

00:37:29.900 | - They're all suspiciously named either Lex or Lux

00:37:34.820 | or some variation.

00:37:35.980 | Like you lack complete creativity.

00:37:37.820 | Just like in the writing room.

00:37:40.180 | - Or Lux.

00:37:41.020 | Yeah.

00:37:42.260 | - It's like you didn't even use a thesaurus for your book.

00:37:46.060 | The same words over and over and over.

00:37:47.960 | The sad thing about the cynicism is like,

00:37:52.580 | I don't think it's just a Russian thing.

00:37:54.700 | I think the people--

00:37:56.860 | - Let me trust you 'cause I didn't finish

00:37:58.300 | what you were saying earlier.

00:37:59.140 | In America, it's not just a Russian thing.

00:38:01.100 | In American culture, if you have a sitcom or a musical,

00:38:07.100 | it's regarded as less legitimate than a drama.

00:38:11.300 | If something's gotta be about someone struggling

00:38:13.340 | or someone suffering,

00:38:14.840 | whereas this is like a joyous, happy story,

00:38:17.180 | maybe something like Pixar.

00:38:18.940 | Sure, they have conflict and they're going for something,

00:38:20.780 | but overall, the background the universe is taking in

00:38:24.140 | is very joyous and happy.

00:38:25.640 | That is regarded artistically as less legitimate

00:38:29.420 | than something which is dark and the background is despair.

00:38:33.660 | And that very subtly sends a very, to me, pernicious message

00:38:38.660 | that what's real is despair and happiness is the aberration.

00:38:43.700 | And I think if you have that as your mindset,

00:38:46.460 | you're setting yourself up for maybe not failure,

00:38:48.860 | but certainly not happiness.

00:38:50.360 | - Yeah, but that's in the figures,

00:38:54.380 | the ideas that the culture elevates.

00:38:55.980 | But at the local personal life of parents and teachers,

00:39:00.260 | that still happens a lot.

00:39:01.660 | In Russia and here, just my whole life,

00:39:04.660 | especially 'cause I'm a weirdo,

00:39:06.820 | I've been kind of told to basically be less weird.

00:39:11.820 | There's a kind of sense in where there's a certain path

00:39:21.220 | you're supposed to take in life.

00:39:23.500 | And every time you have a little bit of success

00:39:25.540 | on those very specifically defined paths,

00:39:28.300 | you're pushed to do more and more and more on those paths,

00:39:30.600 | as opposed to celebrating the full complexity

00:39:32.660 | of the weirdo that each one of us is.

00:39:34.940 | And I certainly am.

00:39:36.180 | And I just, teachers, even friends, and certainly family,

00:39:41.180 | have constantly been very cynical about my aspirations,

00:39:47.220 | my dreams, and so on.

00:39:49.020 | I think that actually created

00:39:52.340 | a deeply self-critical engine in my brain

00:39:55.100 | that I think ultimately was productive

00:40:00.100 | because it was also balanced by just an internal,

00:40:05.100 | maybe through genetics, thing I have of optimism

00:40:09.080 | about the world, of just seeing the beauty in the world.

00:40:11.640 | But it is weird looking back how much people that love me

00:40:16.340 | were trying to bring me down.

00:40:18.480 | - Yeah. - It's so strange.

00:40:19.480 | - It's also very hurtful for me

00:40:21.080 | because when I graduated college,

00:40:22.720 | it was important for me to be self-made

00:40:25.680 | and not take money from my family.

00:40:27.640 | And I remember my grandma, this was a huge argument,

00:40:30.860 | an ongoing argument.

00:40:32.260 | And one time, as she was leaving my house,

00:40:35.020 | she slipped money in under the door and I threw it out.

00:40:38.220 | And it made me so angry.

00:40:40.500 | Or like one year for my birthday,

00:40:41.720 | she gave me, I think, like $500,

00:40:43.380 | which was a lot of money when you're like 22 or 23.

00:40:46.460 | And I was so pissed because that told me

00:40:50.900 | that they didn't believe that I'd be able to feed myself

00:40:54.220 | or make it on my own.

00:40:55.860 | And I understand their mindset,

00:40:58.080 | but it's like I'm not, I wasn't, you know,

00:41:01.740 | I was never hungry.

00:41:02.860 | Like maybe I couldn't, I remember I'd have to wait

00:41:05.360 | on the subway 'cause I couldn't afford a cab.

00:41:08.340 | But that was a sacrifice I had to make.

00:41:09.740 | You know, I had to wait that half hour.

00:41:10.780 | So it was a huge source and remains a source

00:41:15.500 | of enormous tension and contention.

00:41:18.300 | And I think also, I'm sure speaking to your upbringing,

00:41:22.340 | in their minds, unless you're going into an office,

00:41:25.260 | you can't pay the rent.

00:41:26.300 | It doesn't make sense.

00:41:27.500 | So-- - But there's,

00:41:29.620 | just like you said, forget the office, forget all that.

00:41:32.500 | No matter what, there's always,

00:41:35.940 | whatever you accomplish in life,

00:41:37.340 | you always do, you're always negative

00:41:41.380 | about your current position.

00:41:43.360 | You always come up with another problem, just like you said.

00:41:45.900 | - I remember-- - There's always,

00:41:46.980 | it's like a self-generating problem box.

00:41:50.240 | - Yeah, I remember I didn't speak to my dad for a few years

00:41:53.560 | and then I'm like, let me give this guy another chance.

00:41:55.940 | And in that time period, Harvey Pekar,

00:41:58.180 | the author of "Subject of American Splendor,"

00:42:00.940 | the movie and author of the series of comic books,

00:42:03.100 | he and I became friends

00:42:04.100 | and he was writing a graphic novel about me.

00:42:06.940 | And when I met with my dad, I'm like,

00:42:09.860 | oh, someone's writing a book about me.

00:42:12.460 | And he goes, I know, so?

00:42:14.780 | And it was one of those moments where I'm like,

00:42:17.180 | wow, you're an asshole and not the kind of asshole I am.

00:42:20.620 | You're just like not a good person.

00:42:22.580 | And I don't know or really at this point care

00:42:26.160 | what the motivation or if there was no motivation

00:42:29.200 | with the visceral emotional reasoning for that.

00:42:32.040 | But that kind of thing is something I,

00:42:34.780 | much later now in life, have absolutely no tolerance for.

00:42:39.920 | - Well, in my own private life,

00:42:42.800 | I try to forgive and love those people.

00:42:45.360 | But it is, there've been a few in my life like this.

00:42:49.600 | And I think they are incredible people

00:42:52.320 | if you allow yourself to see it, but they're flawed.

00:42:54.920 | And so I try to forgive them.

00:42:58.380 | That said, it is true that the people

00:43:01.260 | that are close to you, especially family,

00:43:02.820 | have a disproportionate psychological effect on you.

00:43:05.140 | So you have to be very careful

00:43:07.340 | having them in your life too much.

00:43:09.460 | Like one thing is to love them

00:43:12.020 | and the other is to actually allow yourself to flourish.

00:43:15.220 | Surround yourself with people that help you flourish.

00:43:17.140 | And like you said, the advice there is really powerful,

00:43:20.500 | especially early on, to have people that believe in you,

00:43:24.960 | in whatever crazy big dreams you have,

00:43:27.800 | that pat you on the back and say, "You got this, kid."

00:43:30.160 | - And here's the other thing.

00:43:32.640 | If you try and you don't make it to that Rogan level,

00:43:38.480 | it's okay.

00:43:40.040 | Like I have several books that I've written

00:43:42.560 | that are on my hard drive that have not been published.

00:43:45.200 | And there were a lot of work.

00:43:46.840 | And it was really disappointing when they went out

00:43:49.360 | and no publishers were interested in it.

00:43:50.720 | Maybe I'll publish them one day, maybe I won't.

00:43:52.600 | Point being, it's fine, I tried.

00:43:55.480 | - Is it a romance novel?

00:43:56.760 | - One is, one is a--

00:43:59.000 | - Gay romance novel?

00:44:00.200 | Does it have a guy in a Santa outfit?

00:44:03.000 | - Can you please stop asking me to send you gay pornography?

00:44:08.680 | He's calling me up all hours of the night.

00:44:11.000 | I need more gay porn.

00:44:12.560 | I need some ones, I only have zeros.

00:44:14.760 | - Yeah, never enough.

00:44:18.100 | This one almost got a book deal.

00:44:19.480 | This would have been, it was 16 years ago.

00:44:21.480 | It was a ladlet novel.

00:44:24.000 | - What kind of novel?

00:44:25.120 | - Ladlet, it's like Nick Hornby.

00:44:27.440 | - What? - Nick Hornby.

00:44:28.520 | About a boy.

00:44:29.360 | So there was a little mini genre of these books

00:44:31.800 | about young men trying to struggle their way through.

00:44:34.240 | It's a whole little, there's a whole little series

00:44:36.520 | of them, Fight Club is adjacent to that.

00:44:39.920 | It's not literally ladlet.

00:44:41.240 | - I feel like you would write

00:44:43.800 | a great Fight Club type novel.

00:44:46.240 | No? - You know,

00:44:47.060 | as much, and Chuck Palahniuk,

00:44:48.400 | it's my understanding, admitted this.

00:44:50.080 | Fight Club is one of the few things

00:44:51.960 | where the movie is better than the book.

00:44:53.960 | - Oh, that's interesting.

00:44:56.920 | But the movie's so iconic, yeah, for sure.

00:44:59.920 | But still, isn't there a deeply philosophical,

00:45:03.580 | it's kind of like David Foster Wallace novels.

00:45:06.120 | Doesn't Fight Club capture some moment in time

00:45:08.920 | that's very kind of--

00:45:09.760 | - I was hanging out with Kurt Metzger

00:45:11.120 | a couple weeks ago, comedian, very failed--

00:45:12.720 | - Name drop. - Yeah.

00:45:14.040 | Hey, Kurt. - Watch out.

00:45:15.280 | - And he had this great story.

00:45:17.780 | He was hanging out with Patrice O'Neill,

00:45:19.100 | the late comedian. - Name drop.

00:45:20.500 | - One of the great comics of all time.

00:45:22.620 | And Patrice goes, Kurt was talking about

00:45:27.700 | how much he liked the book or the movie Fight Club,

00:45:29.620 | and Patrice's like, that is the whitest book on Earth.

00:45:33.420 | He goes, your problem in life

00:45:34.940 | is you don't have enough violence.

00:45:36.780 | Your problem in life, you need someone to beat you up.

00:45:38.900 | That's not a problem for me.

00:45:40.860 | - Yeah, well, I mean, but still,

00:45:43.400 | it is a very white book,

00:45:44.760 | but it still captures a kind of anger and an angst

00:45:48.600 | and a certain subculture in society.

00:45:50.640 | - Yes, yes. - That's really powerful.

00:45:51.720 | That probably led to, in some part,

00:45:54.360 | to the thing you wrote about in the new right.

00:45:57.460 | - Oh, for sure. - When you came about.

00:45:58.480 | - I mean, it was this kind of,

00:46:00.040 | there's that line in the movie where Edward Norton says,

00:46:03.640 | "I'm a 30-year-old boy."

00:46:05.240 | This kind of question of what is it,

00:46:07.160 | sorry to be Matt Walsh,

00:46:08.200 | but what does it mean to be a man, right?

00:46:09.960 | What does masculinity mean?

00:46:11.800 | Why are so many men at such a young age feeling so lost?

00:46:16.440 | This idea that if I fill my house with nice furniture,

00:46:19.000 | that's still not gonna be fulfilling to anyone.

00:46:21.840 | - Matt Walsh is--

00:46:23.200 | - He's from "The Daily Wire."

00:46:24.120 | He just did a documentary called "What is a Woman?"

00:46:26.300 | - Can you explain?

00:46:27.140 | I don't know who he is.

00:46:27.960 | - So Matt Walsh is someone who works for "The Daily Wire."

00:46:31.440 | - Yes.

00:46:32.280 | - And he just recently did a documentary called

00:46:34.120 | "What is a Woman?"

00:46:35.600 | I think it was called.

00:46:36.600 | And he went out to lots of people working in gender theory

00:46:39.520 | and all that thing.

00:46:41.120 | And he asked them to define,

00:46:42.160 | and he went to the Maasai in Africa, the tribe,

00:46:45.600 | and to talk to people about transgenderism, non-binary,

00:46:48.760 | which is a word I know you hate.

00:46:50.320 | And the documentary was surprisingly well done.

00:46:53.560 | - Is that like a passive-aggressive compliment?

00:46:56.980 | Surprisingly well done.

00:46:58.280 | - Well, because Matt is very aggressive on Twitter.

00:47:02.600 | We follow each other.

00:47:03.760 | And there was a lot of opportunities in this film

00:47:08.680 | for him to really be like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:47:11.520 | And instead, to his credit, he let the people speak.

00:47:15.280 | And it's possible it was edited a certain way.

00:47:18.040 | Of course, it was obviously edited.

00:47:19.640 | But when he just asked them,

00:47:20.960 | "Can you just define a woman for me?"

00:47:22.360 | And playing dumb, or not playing dumb,

00:47:24.040 | just saying, "What's your opinion?"

00:47:25.480 | A lot of the people he was speaking to

00:47:26.960 | were getting extremely agitated.

00:47:29.920 | So it worked in that kind of context as well.

00:47:32.840 | It was not his usual style.

00:47:34.660 | - Speaking of which,

00:47:36.880 | do you ever regret your behavior on Twitter?

00:47:39.080 | - There were a couple of times, but very rarely.

00:47:43.660 | - Can you describe the big strategy

00:47:46.520 | before we dive back into the October revolution?

00:47:49.580 | - My strategy--

00:47:51.760 | - Do you have a strategy, or is it,

00:47:53.920 | does it come from the heart?

00:47:55.640 | Or does it come from the brain?

00:47:57.560 | - It comes from, "I want to have fun."

00:48:01.520 | So that's literally what it comes down to.

00:48:02.800 | It's like, this is--

00:48:03.640 | - Girls just wanna have fun.

00:48:04.840 | - Are you drunk?

00:48:06.760 | What is in there?

00:48:08.720 | - I'm very cheeky.

00:48:11.760 | I have the holiday spirit,

00:48:13.160 | even though it's not the holidays.

00:48:14.640 | - Oh, that's eggnog in there.

00:48:15.480 | - Delirious.

00:48:16.320 | I did not sleep much last night.

00:48:17.680 | I've been, which is, I think the second time we talked,

00:48:20.640 | or the third time, the second time,

00:48:22.720 | I stayed up almost all night.

00:48:24.440 | - Oh, I know.

00:48:25.280 | I keep track of when you come and go.

00:48:26.560 | So my door camera points at your garage,

00:48:29.320 | so I know when you're leaving or coming home.

00:48:32.120 | - My camera points at your bedroom from the inside,

00:48:36.040 | but I shouldn't have told you that now.

00:48:38.760 | - Let me ask you this,

00:48:39.600 | 'cause this is something that's been bothering me.

00:48:41.040 | There was a chair that you threw out.

00:48:42.560 | - Yep, it was broken.

00:48:44.400 | - And I was looking at my camera,

00:48:45.680 | and I'm like, "Let me see when he threw this out."

00:48:47.520 | And then one time you went to the garbage

00:48:49.160 | and you adjusted it to make it stick

00:48:50.640 | out of the garbage even more.

00:48:51.680 | What were you doing there?

00:48:53.000 | - Was I, oh, to make sure that people know

00:48:58.120 | there's a chair in there.

00:48:59.240 | - Is that really what you, why?

00:49:00.480 | - Well, like the garbage person,

00:49:01.680 | so they'd notice the chair, so they don't get,

00:49:03.560 | like, I always think I don't want them

00:49:05.480 | to get hurt or whatever.

00:49:06.640 | - Oh, okay.

00:49:08.520 | - Like, they open the thing, it's like, "Ah, chair."

00:49:11.360 | I don't know what I was thinking.

00:49:12.840 | - Okay, it was really odd.

00:49:14.040 | - I didn't know how to get rid of a chair.

00:49:15.240 | It was broken, it was cracked, and I didn't,

00:49:17.320 | it was a problem.

00:49:18.160 | - So Twitter for me, my point is to have fun.

00:49:22.480 | It's also fun to kinda smack down people

00:49:25.280 | who I regard as bad actors,

00:49:27.520 | and also kinda to promote news that I find interesting

00:49:30.400 | that maybe isn't as prominently part of the culture

00:49:33.240 | as it might otherwise be.

00:49:34.320 | - Do you think sometimes you draw too broadly

00:49:37.680 | the category of people that are bad actors,

00:49:39.480 | and then thereby sort of adding to the mockery

00:49:44.480 | and the cynicism in the world?

00:49:46.440 | - I don't think mockery and cynicism are at all synonymous.

00:49:49.880 | I think cynicism means everyone sucks.

00:49:51.680 | I don't think everyone sucks.

00:49:52.680 | I think it is undeniable that a lot of people suck.

00:49:57.420 | - What if I told you most people don't suck?

00:50:00.560 | Could you steel man the case that most people don't suck?

00:50:04.240 | - Sure, I can do it in a cynical way, honestly.

00:50:06.440 | It's quasi-cynical way.

00:50:07.800 | I think most people are neither here nor there.

00:50:10.640 | Most people just kinda go with the flow.

00:50:13.060 | They're amiable.

00:50:14.080 | Human beings are social creatures.

00:50:16.120 | They wanna get along.

00:50:17.740 | They don't wanna cause problems.

00:50:19.160 | They don't have the capacity to be the target of a problem.

00:50:22.400 | So most people, I mean, if most people sucked,

00:50:26.840 | then going anywhere would be an excruciating ordeal, right?

00:50:30.120 | Like literally, the airport's annoying,

00:50:32.740 | but if most people sucked, it would really be annoying.

00:50:35.440 | Going to the supermarket would be really annoying.

00:50:36.980 | So I don't think most people suck,

00:50:39.180 | but I do think that in public discourse,

00:50:43.180 | there are lots of people who are dishonest

00:50:47.980 | about their agenda.

00:50:49.600 | For example, I could be someone

00:50:53.700 | who's promoting a certain ideology,

00:50:56.040 | but I'm in the payroll of a candidate,

00:50:58.320 | or my think tank needs this to happen,

00:51:00.400 | or I'm being paid for something like that.

00:51:02.400 | So that sort of thing, I think, happens all the time.

00:51:04.600 | There's the line I have in the book, Upton Sinclair.

00:51:07.120 | I forgot how he worded exactly,

00:51:09.320 | but it's very hard to convince someone of something

00:51:11.640 | if his payroll depends on him

00:51:13.120 | not being convinced of it, right?

00:51:14.680 | So I think things like that are...

00:51:17.160 | The thing I'm really excited about

00:51:18.200 | with what Elon's doing with Twitter,

00:51:20.180 | and I'm just ecstatic about this,

00:51:22.800 | is to have the context now.

00:51:25.600 | So you'll have a politician making a claim,

00:51:27.600 | and they're gonna word it in certain ways.

00:51:29.280 | My favorite example is when people are like,

00:51:31.600 | if you look at the years 2002 to 2020,

00:51:35.280 | terrorism in America, it's like,

00:51:37.080 | did anything happen in 2001?

00:51:38.680 | Is there a reason you just coincidentally started in 2002?

00:51:41.960 | Things like that.

00:51:42.880 | So when people are manipulating things

00:51:46.360 | to force an outcome that they want,

00:51:47.600 | and to promote an idea that they want disingenuously,

00:51:50.200 | to have that underneath that in Twitter now,

00:51:52.520 | where the audience provides context,

00:51:54.840 | I think is something extremely useful,

00:51:58.720 | and it's a great way to nip propaganda in the bud.

00:52:01.700 | And propaganda pervades the entire political spectrum,

00:52:04.640 | of course.

00:52:05.840 | - The interesting thing about Twitter

00:52:07.160 | is also the discussion about free speech and so on.

00:52:09.320 | I think it's interesting to discuss free speech

00:52:13.080 | and the freedom of the press

00:52:14.160 | from the context of the Soviet Union.

00:52:15.640 | - Sure.

00:52:16.680 | - Let's return to the October Revolution and Lenin.

00:52:19.680 | What was the October Revolution?

00:52:24.340 | What, who was Lenin?

00:52:25.720 | What are some interesting aspects of this human being,

00:52:28.840 | and also this moment in history that stand out to you,

00:52:31.360 | that are important to understand?

00:52:32.800 | - I think the interesting thing about Lenin

00:52:37.800 | is he was a zealot,

00:52:41.720 | and he was a visionary,

00:52:43.680 | and he really kind of meant it.

00:52:46.080 | And I'm skipping ahead a little bit,

00:52:48.720 | but Lenin also was someone who was strategic.

00:52:52.880 | So at a certain point when they were trying

00:52:54.800 | to advance communism throughout the Soviet Union,

00:52:57.960 | and the costs were outweighing the benefits,

00:52:59.880 | he did a strategic retreat.

00:53:01.160 | He did the new economic policy,

00:53:03.040 | you had a rise of kind of these small capitalists

00:53:05.640 | coming back, you could hire people again.

00:53:07.920 | And for the hardcore people in the Soviet Union,

00:53:11.040 | hardcore communists, this was a huge betrayal.

00:53:13.200 | It's a step back.

00:53:14.640 | He didn't do it because he was some kind of crypto capitalist.

00:53:17.960 | He did it because he's like,

00:53:18.800 | "All right, we know where we gotta get to,

00:53:21.120 | "but we have to go at a certain pace,

00:53:22.620 | "and we have to adjust as we go along."

00:53:24.280 | So to have someone who is that much of an ideologue,

00:53:27.760 | and that much of a visionary,

00:53:29.400 | but still to have any element of pragmatism to him

00:53:34.120 | is I think a very rare combination.

00:53:37.720 | - And that pragmatism, do you think that's ultimately

00:53:39.800 | where things go wrong?

00:53:41.000 | That's where you sacrifice the ideas.

00:53:45.880 | - Pragmatism in this case was good

00:53:48.360 | because by taking a step back,

00:53:51.280 | he kind of gave himself some breathing room

00:53:54.420 | to allow the revolution to continue, to win the civil war.

00:53:57.940 | There was a big moment where Germany,

00:53:59.900 | it's just there's lots of like little funny anecdotes

00:54:01.840 | that I learned while researching this book.

00:54:03.600 | So Germany and Russia, they were negotiating a ceasefire

00:54:08.600 | 'cause Germany wanted Russia out of the war.

00:54:12.460 | And basically Germany was like,

00:54:13.820 | "All right, we'll let you leave,

00:54:16.080 | "but you have to sign this treaty

00:54:17.780 | "and basically hand over all this land

00:54:19.380 | "that we're currently occupying."

00:54:20.840 | It was just parts of Ukraine, parts of Poland.

00:54:23.980 | And Lenin tells Trotsky to stall,

00:54:26.500 | he's just run the clock because he was of the belief

00:54:29.980 | that now that they've taken power in Russia,

00:54:32.420 | you're gonna have a worldwide workers' revolution.

00:54:34.020 | So he's like, "Just stall them."

00:54:35.620 | And he stalled, he stalled, and at a certain point,

00:54:37.260 | Germany's like, "All right, you're signing this tomorrow

00:54:39.260 | "or we're invading."

00:54:40.540 | And Trotsky basically said,

00:54:42.060 | "Yeah, so we're leaving the war,

00:54:44.520 | "but we're not signing anything."

00:54:45.740 | And the Germans are like, "What?"

00:54:47.300 | And he's like, "Yeah, well, that's what we're doing,

00:54:48.700 | "so hey."

00:54:50.920 | And basically, eventually he had to sign the treaty

00:54:53.840 | and cede huge parts of the land and a lot of money.

00:54:57.800 | And this was a very precarious moment for him

00:55:01.520 | to maintain control of Russia.

00:55:04.040 | And people were telling him,

00:55:06.160 | "You've lost huge amounts of territory,

00:55:09.040 | "you've blown it, you should be in jail."

00:55:11.440 | And he's like, "Watch your mouth,

00:55:13.060 | "because if you look forward to the future,

00:55:14.740 | "it'll be clear which one of us is more likely

00:55:16.800 | "to be the one ending up in jail."

00:55:18.040 | And he was absolutely right.

00:55:20.260 | - This was Trotsky or Lenin saying?

00:55:21.620 | - This was Lenin saying this to Karl Radick.

00:55:24.460 | - So who are these figures here?

00:55:26.300 | Who's Trotsky, who's Lenin, who's Stalin?

00:55:28.900 | What are some interesting aspects of all of this?

00:55:31.900 | What are, sort of just to linger on it,

00:55:34.420 | the personalities, the ideas that were important?

00:55:37.380 | - Well, Trotsky came late to Bolshevism.

00:55:39.860 | He was really the brains, in many ways,

00:55:42.700 | of the October Revolution.

00:55:44.300 | He was an amazing strategist.

00:55:46.100 | He never forgot that he was an amazing strategist,

00:55:48.940 | had a very high opinion of himself.

00:55:50.580 | - And by the way, the October Revolution, 1917,

00:55:53.380 | that's a key moment.

00:55:55.000 | Of course, the Russian Revolution lasted a long time,

00:56:00.180 | but this was a key moment of, what,

00:56:04.380 | a phase shift towards success of the Bolsheviks.

00:56:07.900 | - Well, that was the moment.

00:56:08.740 | That was like, "All right, we are the government now.

00:56:10.820 | "And now we have to make it."

00:56:12.460 | You know, like Thomas Jefferson said,

00:56:14.440 | I think it was Thomas Jefferson, no, it was Ben Franklin,

00:56:16.880 | "A republic, if you can keep it."

00:56:18.140 | It's like, "All right, we've made our own kind of government

00:56:20.660 | "if we can keep it," 'cause that was the big question.

00:56:22.460 | You had an international blockade,

00:56:23.900 | you had the white armies, the czarist forces

00:56:25.600 | who wanted to restore czarism,

00:56:27.100 | or at least the parliament right before Lenin took over.

00:56:30.900 | So this was a big kind of, no one's,

00:56:34.020 | you know, in some ways, it was like the 2016 election.

00:56:36.860 | It's like, "All right, we vote in Trump.

00:56:39.340 | "Well, what's this gonna look like?"

00:56:40.740 | Like, no one had any idea

00:56:43.260 | of what a Trump presidency was gonna look like.

00:56:44.860 | All we knew was this guy's on Twitter running his mouth,

00:56:47.080 | he's insulting people, and he's had all these views,

00:56:49.320 | some are over here, some are over there.

00:56:50.520 | - And the funny thing is the Russians hacked both elections.

00:56:53.480 | (Lex laughing)

00:56:55.200 | - See? - That's true.

00:56:56.920 | It was Putin and the gremlin.

00:56:58.920 | So Trotsky was, you know, Lenin's right-hand man.

00:57:02.980 | And he was, you know, enormous.

00:57:05.960 | And to this day, he remains this kind of figure

00:57:09.680 | who is supposedly a less authoritative,

00:57:14.700 | authoritarian, anti-Stalinist version of communism

00:57:18.660 | that people can endorse.

00:57:21.660 | And Stalin, of course, was Lenin's successor.

00:57:24.340 | At first, there was a triumvirate running Russia

00:57:26.820 | as Lenin was recuperating from strokes.

00:57:28.900 | Then very quickly, well, not very quickly, but gradually,

00:57:31.300 | and then suddenly Stalin became an absolute dictator

00:57:34.140 | and he had a series of purges and so on and so forth,

00:57:38.220 | which solidified his control over the country.

00:57:41.860 | - And of course, for Stalin, Trotsky later,

00:57:45.360 | but throughout, as you write,

00:57:48.080 | seemed to almost take on a supernatural character

00:57:51.200 | wherein everything that went wrong in the USSR

00:57:53.920 | was due not just to his views,

00:57:56.360 | but to his direct orders from abroad.

00:57:58.680 | And of course, George Orwell, brilliantly,

00:58:03.080 | in probably my favorite book of his, which is "Animal Farm,"

00:58:05.840 | and also in 1984, portrayed Trotsky

00:58:09.920 | as Snowball in "Animal Farm" and Immanuel Goldstein in 1984,

00:58:14.920 | is this embodiment of this evil

00:58:18.580 | that we always have to be fighting.

00:58:20.340 | And you need that in order to hold on to power.

00:58:24.340 | You always have to have that enemy.

00:58:26.020 | - Right, so that's something I talk about

00:58:28.580 | in "The White Pill" as well.

00:58:30.180 | When things start going wrong,

00:58:31.900 | they always have to have scapegoats, right?

00:58:34.100 | And there's this Russian anecdote.

00:58:35.940 | What the Russians like to do is

00:58:37.180 | you can't say things out loud,

00:58:38.900 | but if you make jokes, you can say unspeakable truths.

00:58:41.960 | And there's this one anecdote where there's a Russian leader

00:58:45.120 | and things are going bad, and he looks in his drawer

00:58:48.600 | and there were two letters from his predecessor.

00:58:50.760 | And he opens the first letter in a panic,

00:58:52.560 | and the letter says, for advice,

00:58:54.320 | and the letter says, "Blame everything on me."

00:58:56.220 | So he goes out there and he's like,

00:58:57.460 | "Oh, my predecessor sucked.

00:58:58.760 | "He was terrible, blah, blah, it's his fault."

00:59:00.520 | And everyone's like, "Okay."

00:59:01.600 | And then there's a calamity again, and he's like, "Oh, crap."

00:59:03.960 | So he goes back at his desk and he reads the second one,

00:59:06.420 | and it says, "Sit down and write two letters."

00:59:08.640 | So when things start going wrong as they constantly did

00:59:13.460 | throughout the history of the Soviet Union,

00:59:16.180 | or any totalitarian authoritarian country,

00:59:19.560 | it's someone has to be the blame.

00:59:21.120 | Since we know that our ideology is true

00:59:24.640 | and scientifically true, if it's not working in reality,

00:59:28.080 | given the perfection of the ideology,

00:59:30.300 | someone must be intentionally undermining it

00:59:33.480 | and causing the disconnect between thought and reality.

00:59:37.400 | And in the Soviet Union, there was the kulaks at one point,

00:59:40.480 | then it was the wreckers, the doctors,

00:59:43.240 | it was just different, the capitalists.

00:59:44.480 | There was always someone, and Trotsky was called a fascist

00:59:48.280 | and was accused of plotting with Hitler

00:59:50.240 | and all this other stuff.

00:59:51.840 | - And you also write, "The problem with communism

00:59:54.420 | "is that eventually you run out of possible scape boat."

00:59:58.120 | - Scape boats.

00:59:59.200 | - Scape boats, you run out of boats.

01:00:01.720 | - You do run out of boats.

01:00:02.880 | - Who's gonna carry them?

01:00:06.080 | Eventually you run out of possible scape boats.

01:00:09.360 | It's my second language, this English thing.

01:00:14.440 | I'm a failed podcaster, I'm a failure.

01:00:19.680 | Eventually you run out of possible scape boats for failure,

01:00:22.680 | at which point acknowledging or even noticing

01:00:25.120 | that something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason.

01:00:28.400 | - Yeah, so I saw that in North Korea, right?

01:00:31.320 | Wherever you went in North Korea, something was wrong.

01:00:34.680 | So if you have four buttons for the elevator,

01:00:36.760 | one would be mismatched, every wall had a crack,

01:00:39.800 | every floor had a stain, the bathroom would be rusted through

01:00:43.480 | when you wanted to flush the urinal.

01:00:45.120 | But if you are someone who points this out,

01:00:47.760 | you're a troublemaker.

01:00:48.840 | Oh, you're saying something's wrong,

01:00:51.080 | you're criticizing the operation.

01:00:53.480 | First of all, you're threatening the person who's in charge

01:00:55.800 | 'cause now they're incompetent

01:00:57.120 | and now that's a big red flag for them.

01:00:58.920 | But second, if you're just going around saying,

01:01:01.840 | "This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong,"

01:01:03.480 | even if it's objectively true,

01:01:05.360 | you're a troublemaker and you're a counter-revolutionary.

01:01:07.640 | So at a certain point, everyone just has to put on blinders

01:01:10.600 | and pretend that everything is fine.

01:01:12.480 | One example I use in the book, an extreme example,

01:01:14.880 | was there was a photography professor

01:01:17.120 | and he pointed out to his class, and he was an older man,

01:01:20.140 | that before the revolution,

01:01:21.320 | the quality of photographic paper was better.

01:01:23.480 | And he was, I think, executed for this heresy.

01:01:26.240 | So yeah, you have to pretend.

01:01:28.960 | I'm reading a book right now

01:01:29.800 | about the Chinese Cultural Revolution

01:01:32.880 | and there was an academic,

01:01:34.920 | I forget his name, Hu Shi, I think,

01:01:36.480 | and he points out that in these countries,

01:01:39.480 | not only do you not have freedom of speech,

01:01:41.540 | you don't have freedom of silence.

01:01:43.240 | You can't just sit there quietly.

01:01:44.640 | You have to say how great things are

01:01:46.320 | and how much you're enjoying and how wonderful they are

01:01:48.400 | instead of just keeping quiet

01:01:49.880 | 'cause if you keep quiet, that's suspicious.

01:01:52.040 | - Yeah, those...

01:01:54.080 | - They're always singing those songs

01:01:57.480 | about how happy they are and how great everything is.

01:01:59.480 | And if everyone else is singing, who are you to not sing?

01:02:02.900 | (silence)

01:02:05.060 | - Yeah, those pictures, especially when it's Stalin

01:02:08.860 | giving speeches and everyone's applauding,

01:02:11.060 | any dictator, you don't wanna be

01:02:14.300 | the first person that stops applauding.

01:02:16.900 | - Stalin had to have a button, is my understanding,

01:02:19.140 | at a certain point to tell people to stop applauding

01:02:20.980 | 'cause like you said,

01:02:22.340 | if you're the first one to stop clapping,

01:02:23.900 | people are gonna notice.

01:02:25.140 | And why'd you stop clapping?

01:02:26.220 | You don't like Stalin?

01:02:27.700 | - But just imagine being one of those people clapping.

01:02:30.500 | - But that's the thing.

01:02:31.940 | They always had a sword over their head

01:02:33.900 | but they all had a lot of blood on their hands too.

01:02:35.700 | It's a very, very precarious life.

01:02:40.060 | - But there's also, I mean, 1984 does a good job of this.

01:02:43.840 | What is that, like two minutes of hate or something like this?

01:02:47.860 | You lose yourself in the hysteria of it.

01:02:52.180 | So there's some level of which, at first,

01:02:55.420 | you're sacrificing your basic individualistic ability

01:02:59.700 | to think but then you get lost in this kind of wave

01:03:03.420 | of emotion and you give into it.

01:03:05.780 | You allow yourself, it's like a mix of fear and then anger

01:03:09.060 | and then you direct that anger towards like Snowball

01:03:12.940 | or Trotsky or whoever the, and like, what is that?

01:03:16.860 | - You're also losing yourself in the crowd.

01:03:18.500 | - Yeah, you're losing.

01:03:19.340 | - 'Cause you're like, it's not just I'm angry,

01:03:20.540 | everyone I know, we're all angry together.

01:03:22.180 | So you really are becoming a part

01:03:23.620 | of something bigger than yourself

01:03:25.020 | and having this kind of communal,

01:03:26.340 | very primal emotional experience.

01:03:29.300 | It's like the opposite of Christmas, right?

01:03:31.380 | Christmas, we're all together, everyone's sharing their joy,

01:03:34.840 | everyone's sharing their love.

01:03:36.260 | This is the opposite, literally the opposite.

01:03:38.180 | Like everyone's together sharing their hate

01:03:39.620 | and anger and rage but you're all kind of having a mind meld.

01:03:42.860 | - But I wonder what it's like to be an independent thinker

01:03:47.660 | in those moments, like allow yourself to think.

01:03:50.940 | - Well, we know 'cause there were a lot of them

01:03:53.300 | and they were all punished enormously.

01:03:56.060 | - So they can be noticed, you can notice them.

01:03:58.460 | - Oh yeah, you even notice it in America.

01:04:00.100 | America's a free country,

01:04:01.140 | but when people start asking too many questions,

01:04:03.340 | it's like, where are you going with this?

01:04:05.460 | If you're in an office, even in a corporate setting,

01:04:08.900 | you're a troublemaker, you're making problems for everyone.

01:04:12.300 | Why can't you be normal?

01:04:13.760 | Why can't you be just like everybody else?

01:04:15.700 | So people do not like having to be made to think

01:04:20.340 | and they certainly despise having to be made

01:04:23.740 | to justify themselves because that's a threat

01:04:26.860 | to their status and to their power

01:04:28.140 | and this applies in totalitarianism

01:04:29.840 | or applies to Dunder Mifflin.

01:04:32.400 | - I still can't believe you're wearing lipstick.

01:04:37.340 | - I'm not.

01:04:38.180 | - Goes to show you can pull lipstick on a pig.

01:04:42.840 | (laughs)

01:04:45.900 | - It's like a snowball.

01:04:47.060 | I think you've just been on a bender, that's what I think.

01:04:55.380 | - It's been rough, it's been rough, it's been rough.

01:04:58.080 | I feel like I can be myself in this outfit.

01:05:04.500 | I honestly feel like I could just go around in this outfit

01:05:07.180 | and just be weird 'cause everyone will accept you

01:05:12.180 | if you're wearing a Santa outfit.

01:05:14.180 | You can say anything in a Santa outfit, right?

01:05:17.500 | - Have you seen "Bad Santa"?

01:05:18.900 | - Yeah, "Bad Santa," exactly.

01:05:20.140 | - You can't say anything.

01:05:21.660 | My fuck stick.

01:05:24.500 | How did Stalin come to power?

01:05:26.300 | If we return back to those early days,

01:05:30.620 | post-October Revolution, with Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin,

01:05:35.060 | how did he come to power?

01:05:36.500 | - So what Stalin did very cleverly,

01:05:39.220 | Stalin was, he worked the system,

01:05:41.740 | he was, but he was very much in the background

01:05:44.780 | and what he did better than Trotsky

01:05:46.740 | is he was much more of a politician.

01:05:48.380 | He was a glad hander, he made friends within the party,

01:05:52.100 | he made people feel respected and appreciated

01:05:54.700 | and Lenin trusted him.

01:05:56.860 | After Lenin's stroke, Stalin was basically the one

01:05:59.220 | who was keeping track of him.

01:06:00.700 | Lenin asked Stalin at one point to kill him

01:06:03.620 | 'cause after the strokes, he was incapacitated,

01:06:05.300 | Stalin talked him out of it, but at the same time,

01:06:08.260 | Lenin was like, "If I need someone killed,

01:06:10.460 | "this is who I need to talk to."

01:06:12.260 | Stalin, if you look at photos of him when he was young,

01:06:14.340 | he was a stud, he was a gangster, he was a bank robber.

01:06:20.300 | So he basically worked the system

01:06:22.180 | and you had the Trotskyites on one hand

01:06:24.700 | who were much more to the left.

01:06:26.500 | Stalin's big, I would guess, I would call it a heresy,

01:06:30.660 | was he put forth the idea of socialism in one country,

01:06:34.340 | whereas like, we're just gonna make it work here

01:06:36.780 | in what became the Soviet Union.

01:06:38.140 | Trotsky idea, and this is really kind of the Marxist idea,

01:06:41.300 | is that the workers' revolution has to be worldwide.

01:06:44.340 | This is just a worldwide kind of new era of humanity

01:06:47.400 | where Stalin's like, "No, no, no,

01:06:48.460 | "we're just gonna make it here,"

01:06:49.580 | and then later behind what became the Iron Curtain.

01:06:52.380 | But this was, sure, this was an ideological division

01:06:55.780 | between the two, but what happens in totalitarian countries,

01:06:59.900 | it happens in any kind of like,

01:07:01.460 | when you have intermingling of religion and government,

01:07:04.820 | things that are ideological disputes,

01:07:08.220 | like the Aryan heresy.

01:07:09.220 | The Aryan heresy in Christianity

01:07:10.460 | is that Christ is subordinate to God the Father, right?

01:07:13.060 | Whereas the contemporary Orthodox version,

01:07:15.860 | it's one God and three persons, excuse me.

01:07:18.020 | So they're all co-equal aspects of God and heaven.

01:07:21.380 | But that was an excuse to be like,

01:07:23.020 | "You guys are evil, you're on the side of the devil,

01:07:24.720 | "we're gonna kill you."

01:07:25.560 | So these little disputes about ideas

01:07:29.720 | are often a convenient cover

01:07:31.780 | for people to have a power struggle

01:07:34.500 | in the guise of being like,

01:07:35.820 | "It's not that I'm about wanting to be more powerful,

01:07:37.420 | "I'm just on the side of the truth,

01:07:38.380 | "and you're speaking lies,

01:07:39.300 | "and that's dangerous to the revolution

01:07:40.620 | "or to the true faith."

01:07:41.940 | So he squeezed, but the thing is,

01:07:45.380 | Trotsky had the seeds of his own defeat

01:07:47.580 | because per Trotsky, the party is always right.

01:07:50.740 | You cannot be right against the party, right?

01:07:52.900 | So if you have this kind of party structure,

01:07:55.520 | and the party is saying, "You're wrong,"

01:07:58.780 | as an individual, you are wrong,

01:08:01.280 | 'cause the collective is what makes decisions,

01:08:03.380 | the collective, the workers,

01:08:04.780 | are who have the knowledge and the information.

01:08:08.340 | And it is important for you to kind of subordinate

01:08:13.180 | your selfishness, your individualism to this greater good.

01:08:16.500 | So he kind of set himself up in many ways.

01:08:21.280 | - Is it clear to you why Trotsky lost that power struggle?

01:08:26.380 | So you just explained that he set himself up,

01:08:28.860 | but you can see how different ideologies

01:08:31.140 | can be used to achieve different ends.

01:08:35.300 | Is there another alternative possible trajectory

01:08:37.300 | where Trotsky could have been the head of the Soviet Union?

01:08:40.660 | - It would be very hard because he was Jewish.

01:08:43.260 | So when they were seizing power,

01:08:45.940 | Trotsky explicitly said, "I can't be in charge, I'm Jewish."

01:08:48.820 | So the Soviet Union remained extremely anti-Semitic.

01:08:52.380 | One of the reasons so many Jews became communists

01:08:54.820 | in the Soviet Union, because the promise was,

01:08:57.020 | once the communists took over,

01:08:58.580 | we're not gonna have pogroms anymore.

01:08:59.980 | Pogroms was you had these Jewish ghettos,

01:09:01.900 | and under the permission or encouragement of the czar,

01:09:06.340 | just gangs of people go through killing, raping,

01:09:09.900 | robbing, stealing, rioting for days,

01:09:11.940 | and just a complete massacre.

01:09:13.860 | And the idea is like, under communism,

01:09:15.820 | everyone's gonna be equal,

01:09:16.660 | we're not gonna have this anymore.

01:09:17.780 | They still had it, but to a lesser extent.

01:09:19.860 | But since Trotsky was Jewish, his real name is Lev Bronstein,

01:09:24.860 | it was almost impossible to have a scenario

01:09:29.420 | where he was going to be in charge.

01:09:31.260 | And Stalin fed into that to some extent.

01:09:33.300 | Also this kind of idea of Jewish internationalism,

01:09:35.540 | it's like, okay, he doesn't really have loyalty to Russia.

01:09:38.020 | And many of the people who were Jewish,

01:09:40.260 | who were high up in Stalin's government administration,

01:09:46.180 | they very much had to prove their loyalty to communism

01:09:50.100 | as opposed to Judaism.

01:09:51.340 | - Throughout the 20th century,

01:09:52.540 | what was the relationship between communism

01:09:56.580 | and Jews in the Soviet Union?

01:09:59.940 | In terms of antisemitism,

01:10:04.020 | the ups and downs of antisemitism,

01:10:05.580 | it seems like it lessened, it was lesser and greater

01:10:09.660 | in different parts of the 20th century.

01:10:12.420 | - Well, it's the kind of thing where if something was bad,

01:10:17.420 | there's this Russian rhyme,

01:10:20.100 | like (speaking in foreign language)

01:10:24.460 | Like if there's no water in the sink,

01:10:26.740 | who drank it all, the Jews.

01:10:28.060 | So if something goes wrong,

01:10:30.460 | there's just a convenient historical scapegoat,

01:10:32.900 | it's the Jews' fault.

01:10:34.100 | So this is something that's towards the end of his life

01:10:37.540 | very much, and this was after World War II,

01:10:39.700 | Stalin was getting ready for another kind of series

01:10:42.460 | of programs there.

01:10:43.420 | All these Jews were getting kicked out of their jobs,

01:10:46.700 | Jewish doctors were getting sent to the Far East

01:10:48.900 | instead of being in cities.

01:10:50.740 | The newspapers started talking about rootless cosmopolitans,

01:10:54.820 | which was a term the Nazis also used

01:10:56.900 | to kind of regard Jews as others or as aliens.

01:11:00.500 | And this was going to be,

01:11:02.020 | and they were very clever about it.

01:11:04.220 | In Pravda, and I talk about this in the "White Pill,"

01:11:07.660 | in Pravda, there were articles, letters to the editor,

01:11:11.140 | they were like, "You know,

01:11:12.620 | things are getting so anti-Semitic,

01:11:14.820 | we really should round up all the Jews

01:11:16.820 | and send them elsewhere for their own safety."

01:11:18.620 | So they were kind of setting the ground rules

01:11:22.060 | or the basis to have this sort of program come back,

01:11:27.060 | but spoiler alert, Stalin dies,

01:11:30.860 | and immediately all of this gets reversed

01:11:34.620 | and the new administration rehabilitates the doctors

01:11:38.940 | who were accused of trying to hurt him

01:11:40.500 | and all this other sort of thing.

01:11:42.140 | - What is it about the scapegoats in society?

01:11:46.540 | Are we always going to be looking for scapegoats?

01:11:49.060 | What do you learn from human nature

01:11:50.420 | that this seems to keep happening?

01:11:52.060 | - I think there's a book called "The Nurture Assumption,"

01:11:55.720 | and I discuss this in the new right.

01:11:58.660 | And what the author learned is that humans

01:12:02.180 | define themselves by opposition.

01:12:04.820 | So if you have a group of people and it's kids and adults,

01:12:08.620 | the kids will see themselves as kids

01:12:10.260 | 'cause we're as opposed to adults.

01:12:12.340 | If the adults leave,

01:12:13.820 | the kids see themselves as boys and girls,

01:12:16.100 | 'cause I'm not a girl, I'm a boy,

01:12:17.460 | I'm not a boy, I'm a girl.

01:12:18.900 | So they divide.

01:12:20.580 | So this idea, which is a very lefty idea,

01:12:24.100 | that human beings naturally all get along is not accurate.

01:12:26.860 | And the best example of this is, look after 9/11,

01:12:29.980 | look where there's a war.

01:12:31.220 | Nothing unites a popular,

01:12:32.660 | it's not like when times are thriving

01:12:34.700 | that everyone's all working together.

01:12:36.460 | When things are bad and there's an enemy,

01:12:38.660 | the Japanese are Pearl Harbor, it's Al-Qaeda,

01:12:42.380 | that's when everyone really comes together

01:12:44.820 | 'cause now we have someone to be against.

01:12:47.000 | So there will always be, someone has to be the outgroup

01:12:52.000 | and we have to be the ingroup as opposed to them.

01:12:55.260 | - But there's a viciousness to the actions you take

01:13:00.420 | towards the outgroup that varies throughout history.

01:13:04.140 | Some, like the degree of viciousness can cross the line

01:13:07.860 | towards atrocities, towards genocide.

01:13:10.180 | - Right.

01:13:11.020 | - And that's the question of,

01:13:12.380 | why does it sometimes do that?

01:13:15.600 | Why does it sometimes cross into genocide?

01:13:18.300 | I understand it's a useful thing to have the other to blame

01:13:21.760 | in this world, especially when times are rough,

01:13:24.500 | but why does that sometimes lead to a sort of action

01:13:28.820 | that says I'm going to murder,

01:13:30.700 | I'm going to torture the other?

01:13:31.540 | - I think the question really is why sometimes it doesn't.

01:13:35.420 | - Right.

01:13:36.260 | - And one of the things I learned when I was doing

01:13:37.540 | the New Right is a lot of the Nazis,

01:13:41.500 | you use that term loosely speaking, neo-Nazis,

01:13:43.260 | they make the point that like, oh,

01:13:44.820 | when the Holocaust happened,

01:13:45.960 | it really wasn't that big of a deal

01:13:47.260 | and that only became a big deal in the decades later.

01:13:49.620 | And this just shows the power of Jewish influence.

01:13:51.460 | And I'm like, this to me is a great thing.

01:13:55.140 | It's a great thing that we sat down pretty recently,

01:13:59.460 | historically, and we're like, wait a minute,

01:14:02.260 | guys, when we have a war or we have conquest,

01:14:06.580 | you don't have to just start killing everyone.

01:14:08.880 | Like this is something that's bad and wrong.

01:14:11.420 | And certainly in the last 60 years, 70 years,

01:14:15.340 | this is something that people have come to take for granted,

01:14:17.900 | but that wasn't the case before.

01:14:19.100 | It would always be, or not always, but often,

01:14:21.700 | if you conquer, you just go wild

01:14:24.140 | and just start slaughtering masses of people.

01:14:27.580 | It's, who's the guy from Harvard?

01:14:31.620 | And he- - Steven Pinker.

01:14:33.100 | - Steven Pinker, I'm sorry, I forgot his name.

01:14:34.700 | So he just talks about like, we know,

01:14:37.700 | this is one of the reasons also why

01:14:39.740 | there was so much skepticism when the Holocaust started,

01:14:43.000 | because this was regarded as something that was barbaric.

01:14:45.560 | This is from the Middle Ages, from the biblical times.

01:14:49.020 | We don't do this anymore, we're civilized now.

01:14:51.420 | So genocide is historically the norm.

01:14:56.140 | I think it's also harder to pull it off emotionally

01:14:59.980 | when you have the visuals and when you have the audio

01:15:03.060 | and when you have the voices of the people being slaughtered.

01:15:06.220 | We don't know, if this was 2000 years ago

01:15:09.620 | and people in the Bible, like go kill this group,

01:15:12.100 | go kill that group, we don't have their names,

01:15:13.820 | we don't have the visuals, we don't have anything.

01:15:15.600 | But when you see someone being like,

01:15:19.880 | there was a book about, I think the Rwandan genocide,

01:15:22.840 | and the title is, "We regret to inform you

01:15:25.200 | that tomorrow we will be executed

01:15:26.720 | with all of our families," like a telegram.

01:15:28.720 | And like, when you get a telegram like this,

01:15:30.640 | it's very different than reading some history book

01:15:32.960 | about the Assyrians killed the Phoenicians.

01:15:35.600 | It's like, I don't know who this is,

01:15:36.440 | I don't know who that is, right?

01:15:37.920 | So I think this is something that has changed very recently.

01:15:42.320 | There was this kind of interesting moment

01:15:44.560 | just that speaks to the way technology

01:15:47.880 | has liberated people from violence.

01:15:50.940 | Kristallnacht, which was a moment

01:15:52.680 | in the lead up to the Holocaust,

01:15:55.480 | where basically, with Hitler's blessing,

01:15:58.520 | you had a nationwide burning of Jewish businesses,

01:16:02.080 | synagogues burnt down, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the Kaiser,

01:16:06.800 | he said, "For the first time in my life,

01:16:08.280 | I'm embarrassed to be a German."

01:16:09.520 | But that was a moment where worldwide,

01:16:11.680 | even plenty of people who did not think very highly

01:16:14.200 | of Jewish people were like, "This is a wrap.

01:16:18.800 | This is a complete nightmare."

01:16:20.880 | But 200 years ago, 100 years ago,

01:16:23.480 | maybe not literally at Kristallnacht,

01:16:25.000 | but there's an outgroup and we hate them

01:16:27.320 | and we're gonna kill 'em and it's fine.

01:16:29.400 | - And you think it's even more difficult now

01:16:32.800 | with the internet to do that kind of thing?

01:16:34.720 | - Yeah, I'm not, now, more difficult doesn't mean

01:16:36.480 | it doesn't happen or it can't happen.

01:16:38.040 | I'm not saying that at all.

01:16:39.480 | But I'm saying that we know a lot

01:16:42.720 | about what's going on in North Korea,

01:16:44.440 | probably the most secretive country on earth.

01:16:46.320 | There's a lot of atrocities in Eritrea,

01:16:48.360 | which is kind of known.

01:16:49.560 | So I think it's also, like, if you think about it,

01:16:54.320 | if you're how many years ago, 300 years ago,

01:16:57.320 | you only know the people in your village

01:16:58.960 | and they're all probably gonna look like you

01:17:00.120 | so on and so forth.

01:17:01.320 | Whereas now, if I'm on social media

01:17:03.600 | and there's someone from any country

01:17:05.240 | and maybe their picture looks a little different,

01:17:06.760 | they use the same anime picture as somebody else,

01:17:08.800 | but they're putting forth their ideas,

01:17:11.040 | you do see the humanity in them

01:17:12.560 | and you do see a sense of familiarity

01:17:14.920 | and a familial bond with them.

01:17:17.320 | And when you hear about these things,

01:17:19.080 | you know, when I, again, like I did when I did Dear Reader,

01:17:21.520 | no one, I was on Al-Qaeda and I was on Alex Jones,

01:17:25.280 | no one pushed back about like, oh, the North Koreans.

01:17:29.240 | They were all like, this is horrible.

01:17:31.040 | If I had a magic wand, I'd give them food.

01:17:33.840 | I wouldn't have them live in fear.

01:17:36.240 | And this is something that I don't think was the case

01:17:39.000 | a couple of hundred years ago.

01:17:40.520 | - That said, I'd love to get your thoughts

01:17:42.560 | about what's going on in Iran, the protests.

01:17:45.400 | It seems like the regime there

01:17:47.280 | is able to crack down with violence.

01:17:50.240 | - My thoughts about Iran, let me just,

01:17:51.960 | there's something else about Iran which I think is interesting

01:17:54.520 | this whole idea of care for what you wish for.

01:17:56.920 | Because people have this, and something I kind of,

01:17:59.480 | one of the reasons I have the white pill

01:18:01.160 | is Americans really are very naive

01:18:03.160 | about the nature of evil, right?

01:18:04.880 | They really think that a dictator has a weird mustache

01:18:08.320 | and he's banging the table and he's like a crazy person.

01:18:12.080 | And it's often not the case.

01:18:13.720 | But they also think if something is bad,

01:18:16.680 | therefore the alternative is gonna be better.

01:18:20.120 | So you had the Shah of Iran and he was kind of authoritarian

01:18:25.280 | and no, he's not a good guy.

01:18:27.480 | So in 1979, there were a lot of people like,

01:18:30.040 | this guy's horrible, he's oppressing the Iranian people,

01:18:33.640 | let's get him the F out of there.

01:18:35.520 | He's so bad that whatever comes after it

01:18:38.680 | has to be an improvement.

01:18:40.320 | And it's like, no, that's, if you think,

01:18:42.880 | I mean, this drives me crazy when conservatives are like,

01:18:46.760 | Joe Biden's the worst president we ever had,

01:18:49.080 | like this is destroying America.

01:18:50.520 | I'm like, you have no idea how bad things can get.

01:18:55.440 | The fact that you are in a position to complain

01:18:59.140 | means we got our ways to go.

01:19:02.360 | - Yeah, every time you say that Donald Trump

01:19:05.160 | or Joe Biden is the worst president ever,

01:19:07.640 | that warms my heart.

01:19:09.000 | (Zubin laughs)

01:19:10.480 | Because you're allowed to say that.

01:19:12.200 | - Yes, yeah.

01:19:13.560 | - It's like, I just let it, it's like music.

01:19:16.720 | 'Cause you're allowed to be pretty,

01:19:19.440 | in response to a president's tweet, you can write that.

01:19:22.480 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:19:23.800 | - And it still lives there and nobody arrests you.

01:19:28.320 | - Yeah.

01:19:29.520 | - Which is a rare thing in human history.

01:19:31.560 | - Yes.

01:19:32.400 | - And still rare thing in the world.

01:19:33.560 | I mean, it does seem that Iran, the current regime,

01:19:38.320 | is able to crack down on communication channels.

01:19:41.000 | It's still,

01:19:41.840 | it's surprising to me how much power a government can have.

01:19:47.840 | Like they could use violence to control the population.

01:19:51.680 | - Right.

01:19:52.560 | - And nobody's gonna do anything about it.

01:19:55.140 | - Well, I just--

01:19:55.980 | - The rest of the world just watches.

01:19:58.800 | - But here's the thing, right?

01:20:00.080 | Because if the rest of the world starts doing too much,

01:20:03.280 | then they have a justification to crack down even more.

01:20:05.840 | This regime, this protests are not legitimate.

01:20:08.520 | These are, this happened constantly in the Soviet Union.

01:20:10.480 | These are foreign provocateurs.

01:20:12.560 | This is meddling in our country,

01:20:15.200 | curfew, lockdown, mandatory searches, everyone's a spy.

01:20:21.640 | So that narrative is a very convenient one

01:20:23.720 | for people who are authoritarian.

01:20:25.320 | I know a lot of people who are Persian,

01:20:28.920 | as I'm sure you do as well.

01:20:31.000 | Very hardworking, very bright, great people.

01:20:35.120 | And all you could do is hope

01:20:38.360 | for a peaceful liberalization of it.

01:20:41.560 | But here's the, people don't realize

01:20:42.840 | how liberal Iran used to be.

01:20:45.840 | Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol used to be friends with the Shah.

01:20:49.800 | And if you read his diaries,

01:20:51.360 | he talks about how he knew things

01:20:52.680 | weren't going well for the Shah

01:20:53.920 | 'cause they had less caviar at the table.

01:20:55.840 | But like this is, he was really kind of,

01:20:58.920 | there's I think a poor understanding in America,

01:21:03.800 | and I'm not sure why,

01:21:05.560 | of what these liberal Muslim countries are like.

01:21:09.760 | I gave a talk in Bodrum in Turkey,

01:21:12.440 | which is like a resort town in Turkey.

01:21:14.600 | And I had thought previous to that,

01:21:17.160 | or I had suspected if push comes to shove

01:21:20.160 | and they have to choose people in Turkey

01:21:21.680 | between the West and like Al-Qaeda,

01:21:24.000 | not Al-Qaeda, but like, you know, hardcore Islam.

01:21:26.800 | They're gonna choose hardcore Islam.

01:21:28.000 | You go there and you're like, oh, this is like Los Angeles.

01:21:31.240 | Like these people are so liberal,

01:21:33.280 | so, and they're the first to be killed.

01:21:36.040 | They're the first targets.

01:21:37.560 | So that, people like that in Iran are who my thoughts are.

01:21:41.040 | And with the, I gotta tell you,

01:21:42.320 | like nothing makes me more of a feminist

01:21:45.680 | than seeing the women in countries like this

01:21:48.480 | fight for the right to education,

01:21:50.880 | the right to dress as they please.

01:21:53.520 | Maybe we don't need them driving, but you know, that's okay.

01:21:56.520 | - There he is with that characteristic brilliant humor

01:22:02.080 | that you're so loved for,

01:22:06.600 | and should probably be banned for on Twitter.

01:22:09.720 | I'm doing my best.

01:22:10.840 | Every time you tweet, I just report, report, report.

01:22:13.840 | Please stop this man.

01:22:15.640 | - You don't have like a script to just--

01:22:18.320 | - Exactly, well, actually, funny enough, I do.

01:22:22.720 | But I don't abuse my power.

01:22:25.240 | I wear the ring like Frodo, and I respect the power.

01:22:29.880 | - But you look like Gollum.

01:22:31.240 | - That's not what your mom said last night.

01:22:34.920 | - She said you're hung like Gollum.

01:22:38.040 | - I'm not going down that road with you.

01:22:42.720 | I'm not holding hands another time.

01:22:45.520 | I learned my, fool me once.

01:22:47.960 | Okay, my close childhood friend is from Iran.

01:22:52.280 | - Oh, wow, okay.

01:22:53.120 | - And I talked to him a lot.

01:22:57.160 | I wanted to go to Iran.

01:23:01.600 | - But it's so far away.

01:23:03.280 | - I can see it from my house, my friend.

01:23:05.280 | I would love to take that trip, even now.

01:23:09.760 | It's just culturally, so all the different little pockets

01:23:13.440 | of local cultures that make up Iran.

01:23:15.320 | I just heard so many amazing things.

01:23:17.200 | - Yeah, my friend Paul went there.

01:23:18.280 | He had an amazing time.

01:23:19.360 | He just absolutely loved it.

01:23:20.520 | He thought the people were awesome.

01:23:22.120 | It was so interesting, very developed.

01:23:25.800 | Just like Tehran is, I mean,

01:23:27.880 | the history in Tehran is insane.

01:23:29.800 | - Yeah, I would really love to visit.

01:23:34.400 | Now we return back.

01:23:36.160 | I don't know how we ended up in Iran,

01:23:38.720 | but let us stroll back to Stalin taking power.

01:23:42.760 | What role did the suppression of speech,

01:23:45.440 | the censorship, the suppression of the freedom of the press

01:23:50.400 | have in Stalin taking hold, taking power?

01:23:54.960 | In Lenin, in Trotsky, in Stalin having power?

01:23:58.200 | - Well, it was a very useful mechanism

01:24:00.680 | to direct public opinion

01:24:04.240 | and inform public perspectives and everything.

01:24:07.200 | So first of all, there was a lot of news

01:24:09.800 | about how great things were.

01:24:12.920 | You have a bumper crop here.

01:24:14.680 | Grains never better.

01:24:16.040 | There's another anecdote where President Kalinin

01:24:19.680 | is talking about how on Karl Marx Street in Kharkiv,

01:24:24.680 | there's all sorts of new skyscrapers being built,

01:24:27.600 | and it's just absolutely amazing.

01:24:28.760 | And some of the audience gets up and goes,

01:24:30.320 | "Comrade, I work on Karl Marx Street.

01:24:33.240 | "I walk there every day.

01:24:34.200 | "There's none of these skyscrapers."

01:24:35.560 | He goes, "See, that's your problem.

01:24:37.040 | "You're trusting your eyes

01:24:38.020 | "instead of reading something and learning

01:24:39.520 | "what's in the papers."

01:24:40.760 | So there was this kind of disconnect between,

01:24:43.400 | I forget, you probably know the joke,

01:24:47.440 | like (speaking in foreign language)

01:24:49.320 | like "Pravda means truth,

01:24:50.480 | "but there's no truth to be had in Pravda"

01:24:51.720 | is like kind of the Russian line.

01:24:53.240 | The point is, it very much,

01:24:56.360 | and the other thing, this is,

01:24:57.800 | my mom wasn't particularly politically motivated,

01:25:01.000 | but she talked about how you didn't have to be smart

01:25:04.760 | to realize how dishonest it was,

01:25:07.800 | because one day, someone is the great hero

01:25:11.240 | of the Soviet people,

01:25:12.920 | and the next week, he's been a traitor

01:25:15.560 | and a class enemy and the worst.

01:25:17.120 | And then sometimes they reverted,

01:25:19.000 | and it's like, okay,

01:25:20.400 | they couldn't even keep their story straight.

01:25:22.960 | And in fact, at a certain point,

01:25:24.280 | when Gorbachev liberalized,

01:25:26.720 | they had to cancel tests

01:25:28.120 | because the history books had to be rewritten so quickly.

01:25:31.160 | So, and the thing that also with these newspapers

01:25:36.240 | is there was a lot of,

01:25:37.080 | it was very monotonous,

01:25:38.840 | because you had the same message over and over.

01:25:42.680 | A lot of these papers were about

01:25:44.560 | kind of speaking to the lowest common denominator,

01:25:46.480 | lowest common denominator,

01:25:47.640 | Stalin's great, everything's great,

01:25:49.640 | overseas bad.

01:25:50.920 | So it very much was about not informing,

01:25:55.840 | but creating a certain perspective

01:25:59.280 | in the public at large.

01:26:00.920 | And also, you were educated as a citizen

01:26:05.080 | on what you're supposed to think and say.

01:26:07.600 | So you have, a lot of this was this kind of

01:26:10.120 | private truths, public lies situation.

01:26:14.080 | So you could read the paper and at your factory,

01:26:16.760 | you could be like, oh my God,

01:26:18.400 | this guy, Karl Radec, great.

01:26:19.960 | He's like, oh my God, yeah, he's amazing.

01:26:21.320 | You knew what to talk about,

01:26:22.840 | and you knew how to look at it as well.

01:26:25.960 | And then when you get home,

01:26:27.040 | you could just kind of be more honest with family.

01:26:29.680 | - But the question is,

01:26:30.520 | to which degree does this propaganda

01:26:32.400 | and this ideology infiltrate your actual thinking?

01:26:36.720 | You give examples of scientists infiltrated science.

01:26:41.000 | - Oh yeah.

01:26:42.000 | Basically, Lysenko is the textbook example,

01:26:45.880 | Lysenkoism in biology.

01:26:47.480 | So because Marxism is materialist,

01:26:50.440 | they didn't like the idea that genes pass on

01:26:54.000 | from one generation to the next.

01:26:56.440 | So Lysenkoism kind of was a rejection

01:26:58.960 | of Mendel and that kind of genetics.

01:27:02.200 | And if you reject genes,

01:27:04.760 | you're really going in a bad direction in terms of biology.

01:27:07.520 | The Soviet Union's biological program

01:27:09.680 | became an international laughingstock.

01:27:11.200 | At one point, Lysenko claimed

01:27:12.960 | he crossed a tomato and a potato.

01:27:15.640 | You had things where they said they had nuclear,

01:27:19.400 | which is, wait, we have fission,

01:27:21.400 | but they said they invented fusion or heavy water

01:27:24.200 | or hard water or whatever it was.

01:27:25.680 | Point being, in cultures like this,

01:27:29.600 | your way to achieve status

01:27:34.200 | wasn't necessarily about your accomplishments,

01:27:36.360 | but about your loyalty to orthodoxy.

01:27:39.120 | So if you were saying things that got to a result

01:27:42.080 | that was congruent with the broader ideology as a whole,

01:27:46.080 | that was much better as a means of furthering yourself

01:27:49.640 | in the arts or in the sciences

01:27:52.600 | than if you had something that was innovative,

01:27:54.760 | because if you're innovative, it's like,

01:27:56.160 | well, how do I fit this in

01:27:57.560 | with the broader ruling ideology?

01:27:59.200 | The problem with totalitarianism,

01:28:00.400 | one of the many problems, is everything,

01:28:03.280 | literally everything has to be perceived

01:28:06.560 | through the lens of ideology.

01:28:08.520 | So, and that is, there were scientists who were arrested

01:28:13.520 | or at least fired because of their theories

01:28:16.880 | about sunspot developments,

01:28:18.120 | 'cause it was regarded as un-Marxist.

01:28:19.960 | There was an epidemic and all these horses got sick,

01:28:24.960 | and because the vaccine didn't work on the horses,

01:28:28.680 | the bacteriologists were arrested,

01:28:30.440 | 'cause they were regarded as wreckers.

01:28:31.640 | It's like, we gave you a job, you didn't do it,

01:28:33.880 | you're undermining the socialist state.

01:28:35.680 | So, it's kind of a backward series of incentives,

01:28:39.680 | and it's designed to maintain at all costs

01:28:42.680 | the ruling ideological superstructure.

01:28:44.960 | - But you draw a small distinction

01:28:46.640 | between the ideology and the ideological superstructure

01:28:49.360 | and the propaganda.

01:28:50.480 | Aren't those kind of intermixed together?

01:28:52.640 | - Well, the ideological's like in the sciences

01:28:54.720 | and what's true in genetics or what's true in astronomy,

01:28:57.080 | that doesn't really percolate out to the masses, right?

01:28:59.040 | So, the Pravda is maybe covering this scientist is great

01:29:02.840 | or these discoveries are great,

01:29:04.380 | but it's not necessarily the same as day-to-day

01:29:07.120 | or glorifying political leaders.

01:29:09.040 | - But the Pravda is a manifestation of the idea

01:29:11.480 | that truth can be conjured up.

01:29:13.800 | - Yes.

01:29:14.640 | - It can be constructed and it can be altered quickly,

01:29:16.720 | and then, I just, I wonder, so 1984 caricatures that,

01:29:21.720 | I wonder to what degree it really could control

01:29:26.360 | the way you think.

01:29:27.280 | That, like how many people it affected.

01:29:30.880 | - I can give you an example, a very easy one.

01:29:32.880 | So, again, regarding North Korea.

01:29:36.240 | Kim, the great leader Kim Il-sung,

01:29:38.040 | who was the founder of North Korea,

01:29:39.940 | had a tumor on the back of his neck

01:29:42.740 | and it was too close to the skull, the spinal column,

01:29:46.880 | so they couldn't operate on it,

01:29:48.120 | and throughout his life, it got bigger and bigger.

01:29:50.220 | And I got mixed messages in my research

01:29:53.060 | about whether North Koreans knew about it

01:29:55.100 | because they always photographed him from this angle.

01:29:57.860 | And I met a refugee and I asked him,

01:30:01.820 | "Did you know that he had this tumor?"

01:30:03.580 | She goes, "Yeah, yeah, when people played him in the movies,

01:30:05.380 | "they would, you'd make up there."

01:30:07.340 | And she goes, "It was an old war injury."

01:30:10.040 | And I go, "Why would a war injury get bigger

01:30:12.920 | "throughout your life?"

01:30:13.920 | And she just stood there and she was like,

01:30:16.420 | "Holy," but she never questioned it,

01:30:18.700 | but it was the kind of thing

01:30:19.540 | where they put the idea in her head,

01:30:21.100 | and since there was no reason to question it,

01:30:22.660 | she just kind of went with it her entire life

01:30:24.580 | until I talked to her, Audrey, her name.

01:30:26.580 | Hi, Audrey.

01:30:28.980 | - Hi, Audrey.

01:30:30.180 | I wonder what percent of the population is like that.

01:30:32.500 | - Here's the thing.

01:30:34.100 | If there's a cost to me questioning Lysenko

01:30:37.700 | as a great scientist and there was no benefit,

01:30:40.340 | why wouldn't I just go with what's going

01:30:42.760 | to keep me and my family safe?

01:30:44.900 | - But I also mean just the psychological.

01:30:47.580 | There might be a very local psychological cost.

01:30:52.340 | So not a cost you're going to jail,

01:30:53.580 | but a cost like you're gonna kind of ruin the conversation

01:30:57.280 | by bringing it up, kind of like--

01:30:59.380 | - Yeah.

01:31:00.220 | - I'm just trying to--

01:31:02.020 | - It's like Debbie Downer, right?

01:31:03.060 | Wah, wah. - Yeah.

01:31:04.340 | - But there's also the whole metaphor

01:31:05.980 | of like there's two fish in the river,

01:31:07.260 | one says, "Man, the water's really great today,"

01:31:09.340 | and the other one goes, "What's water?"

01:31:10.860 | Like a friend of mine, Adriana,

01:31:13.420 | her mom came to the West and they went to a supermarket,

01:31:16.900 | and the mom just in front of all the Fanta,

01:31:18.700 | this is just crying.

01:31:20.940 | And she's like, "What's going on?"

01:31:21.820 | She goes, "They told us we had more food than you."

01:31:24.940 | And when something is, you can under think this story,

01:31:29.940 | this guy's an enemy of the people, he was the hero,

01:31:33.540 | he just offended someone, this is bullshit.

01:31:36.100 | It's almost impossible psychologically

01:31:38.820 | to think I'm living in "The Truman Show,"

01:31:42.140 | and that everything in the media is not just wrong,

01:31:47.100 | but a carefully constructed narrative and a lie.

01:31:50.100 | Like what, they're never gonna tell the truth?

01:31:51.940 | And how are you, you know, like what?

01:31:54.280 | And even if you do understand that,

01:31:56.860 | how would you even read between the lines

01:31:58.420 | to deduce what the truth is?

01:31:59.900 | - Yeah, it must've been a strange experience.

01:32:02.020 | There's stories of soldiers,

01:32:03.820 | the Red Army soldiers throughout World War II,

01:32:06.660 | as they go to different countries, even Romania,

01:32:09.380 | but in Europe, just to understand

01:32:13.300 | that people live much better than they did,

01:32:16.460 | than the soldiers did back in the Soviet Union.

01:32:18.300 | - And that's why a lot of times when they went back,

01:32:19.860 | Stalin had them killed because they saw too much

01:32:21.980 | or sent to the camps.

01:32:23.920 | (sighs)

01:32:26.160 | - So just to linger on this idea of free speech.

01:32:28.440 | So there's constant discussion about free speech

01:32:32.160 | in this modern debate about social media

01:32:33.960 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:32:34.800 | What's your take on it?

01:32:37.200 | Grounding it, not in some kind of shallow discussion

01:32:41.520 | of free speech we have today,

01:32:42.600 | but more in the context of Pravda

01:32:44.600 | and the suppression of speech in Stalinist Russia.

01:32:52.560 | - I hate the term free speech

01:32:55.380 | because it's used in many different contexts.

01:32:57.420 | Some I agree with entirely, some I disagree with at all.

01:33:00.220 | I don't think everyone has something to say

01:33:04.540 | or something to add to the conversation.

01:33:07.300 | And I have my locals community and it used to be,

01:33:12.300 | I think the boilerplate language is,

01:33:14.540 | come support free speech and free discourse.

01:33:17.160 | And I changed that because I don't like that term.

01:33:20.440 | Because people will tell you with some reason

01:33:23.780 | that, oh, if you block me on Twitter,

01:33:25.740 | you're voiding my free speech.

01:33:27.620 | It's like, all right.

01:33:28.460 | So I don't like that term as a whole.

01:33:30.760 | But one of the points of the white pill

01:33:33.180 | and something I see enormous parallels with today,

01:33:36.420 | if you have one news outlet or three news outlets

01:33:41.420 | with identical ideology,

01:33:44.500 | you're not going to be able to get to any kind of truth

01:33:49.220 | or any kind of useful information.

01:33:50.760 | It's all gonna be pre-filtered for you.

01:33:52.220 | It's like a baby bird

01:33:53.400 | and you're eating the mother bird's vomit, right?

01:33:55.820 | But if you have what we have increasingly now

01:33:59.600 | with technology,

01:34:01.040 | if you have a world where everyone has a camera

01:34:03.360 | on their phone,

01:34:04.500 | if you have a world where anyone

01:34:06.280 | can put their ideas out there,

01:34:08.040 | maybe they're banned from certain outlets,

01:34:10.520 | but they're not literally vanished

01:34:12.340 | like they were in the USSR,

01:34:14.200 | that is very healthy.

01:34:16.540 | That is something I'm enormously supportive of

01:34:18.800 | because back in the day,

01:34:21.620 | if you only had the TV crews with cameras,

01:34:24.080 | you can only see what they're capturing

01:34:26.420 | and they could edit it.

01:34:27.760 | Whereas now, we saw this recently during COVID, right?

01:34:32.520 | You had these reporters with masks on and they're talking,

01:34:36.760 | but the cameraman wasn't wearing a mask.

01:34:39.320 | So you'd have the people on the street being like,

01:34:41.120 | look, they don't believe it.

01:34:43.680 | Or as soon as they would start filming,

01:34:45.440 | the guy took the mask off and they'd film them.

01:34:47.040 | And they go, you are lying.

01:34:49.160 | You don't believe this.

01:34:50.320 | You're putting this on for some purpose,

01:34:52.000 | whether you're leaving the efficacy of masks or not.

01:34:53.900 | That person clearly does not,

01:34:55.120 | is only putting on for show.

01:34:56.400 | So that's, or crimes.

01:34:59.080 | It's people are anti-police.

01:35:01.840 | They say, okay, the cop said this.

01:35:04.440 | Did he draw the gun in the sky necessarily?

01:35:06.400 | So on and so forth.

01:35:07.440 | It is so much better when everyone has access

01:35:11.780 | to as much of the information as possible

01:35:14.360 | and can make that informed decision themselves.

01:35:16.440 | Now there certainly is space for informed people

01:35:21.000 | to be like, no, no, no, no.

01:35:21.840 | This isn't what it looks like.

01:35:22.980 | If you look here, if you look there,

01:35:24.640 | it's cropped here, so on and so forth.

01:35:26.600 | But that's still much more useful

01:35:28.660 | than just having that 20 second clip

01:35:32.160 | that someone has decided to edit for you.

01:35:34.960 | - So like truth has a way of,

01:35:36.600 | because everything is so interconnected,

01:35:39.040 | truth, no matter what,

01:35:40.120 | has a way of finding its way to the populace.

01:35:42.600 | And also there's a big asymmetry in terms of trust.

01:35:47.240 | So if I tell you a hundred truths and one lie,

01:35:52.040 | that lie is equal, I'm screwed.

01:35:54.780 | 'Cause once you catch me in a,

01:35:56.620 | you don't have to kill someone every day

01:35:57.800 | to be a murderer, right?

01:35:58.680 | You only have to do it once.

01:35:59.880 | So if you catch me in a brazen lie,

01:36:03.240 | you're gonna look at everything I say after that

01:36:05.160 | with an enormous grain of salt.

01:36:07.160 | So that is another big asymmetry in favor of truth.

01:36:10.480 | If someone trusts you, you have to be honest all the time

01:36:13.760 | and you're gonna make mistakes.

01:36:15.320 | You can own those mistakes and be like,

01:36:16.520 | "Hey, this is why I made the mistake.

01:36:18.240 | This is why I said such and such."

01:36:19.880 | - Okay, but the flip side of that,

01:36:21.280 | which has been disheartening to me,

01:36:24.000 | is that people on the conspiracy side,

01:36:26.680 | conspiracy theory side of things,

01:36:28.380 | I've noticed how easy it is to just call something a lie.

01:36:33.200 | - Yes.

01:36:34.280 | - And then that becomes viral.

01:36:36.040 | For some reason, there's a desire for people,

01:36:38.800 | yeah, for anyone who points out

01:36:40.280 | that the emperor's not wearing a clothes,

01:36:41.640 | even when the emperor is fully clothed.

01:36:43.640 | So I don't know what that is,

01:36:46.040 | but that really seems to mess with this truth mechanism.

01:36:48.960 | So when it becomes viral to call people a liar,

01:36:52.700 | whether they're a liar or not,

01:36:54.600 | it's like you feel like on unstable ground

01:36:58.080 | because to me, that idea of revealing a lie

01:37:02.300 | that somebody told is a really powerful mechanism

01:37:04.600 | to keep people honest.

01:37:05.920 | But when you're misusing it, crying wolf too much,

01:37:08.760 | it seems to break the system.

01:37:11.600 | It makes me nervous because there's also like--

01:37:14.200 | - But just, if someone is a liar,

01:37:16.320 | that doesn't mean literally everything they say is a lie.

01:37:18.680 | - No, but what is a lie and what isn't?

01:37:20.520 | I just noticed that there's money to be made

01:37:23.200 | in calling out something as a lie.

01:37:25.500 | It's just the conspiracy theories, straight up.

01:37:31.200 | The first thing, some traumatic event happened,

01:37:35.840 | give an explanation that's not the mainstream explanation.

01:37:38.440 | No matter what, whether it's true or a lie,

01:37:40.480 | there's a lot of virality and money to be made in that.

01:37:43.920 | And that makes me nervous

01:37:45.580 | because it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

01:37:48.120 | It becomes anti-establishment ideas are viral,

01:37:51.680 | whether they're true or not.

01:37:54.360 | - Sure, but I think establishment ideas are powerful

01:37:57.440 | whether they're true or not.

01:37:58.800 | So I think--

01:37:59.760 | - On the whole, I think you're right.

01:38:01.600 | On the whole, it's good to test the power centers,

01:38:04.460 | but it just makes me nervous in our attention economy

01:38:09.460 | that the sexy thing seems to be

01:38:12.860 | the anti-establishment message.

01:38:15.180 | And then it feels like that becomes a drug

01:38:18.080 | where you, everything, anything the establishment says,

01:38:22.680 | anything institutions say,

01:38:24.200 | anything the mainstream says must be wrong

01:38:26.140 | because it comes from the mainstream.

01:38:27.500 | - I have that line that you're supposed to take one red pill

01:38:30.920 | not the whole bottle.

01:38:32.620 | I am certainly one of those people who is of the idea

01:38:36.140 | that they are dishonest by more open that they're honest.

01:38:39.480 | That said, there are people who are of the belief,

01:38:43.540 | to use an extreme example,

01:38:45.060 | that Trump is still the shadow president.

01:38:47.480 | And there's gonna be these QAnon mass arrests.

01:38:51.160 | I thought this was something that like the Daily Beast

01:38:54.300 | made up to make fun of MAGA,

01:38:56.640 | but I was just in the phone with my buddy last night

01:38:58.540 | and he was like, "No, no, if you go to Truth Central,

01:39:00.380 | "they're like all over there.

01:39:01.320 | "And if you disagree with them, they call you

01:39:03.440 | "controlled opposition or a grifter or so on and so forth."

01:39:06.180 | - Is it on 4chan or where?

01:39:07.780 | - Truth Central, Trump's social media outlet.

01:39:10.340 | - Oh, Truth, no, Truth Central.

01:39:12.660 | - Yeah, but he forgot the name of it himself.

01:39:14.980 | So he's like, "That's why I had to create a joke."

01:39:16.660 | - You gotta explain the jokes.

01:39:18.060 | You gotta explain the jokes.

01:39:19.020 | You do like the way Twitter puts that context.

01:39:22.300 | You gotta do the joke and then pause

01:39:24.860 | and like turn to the camera and explain.

01:39:27.100 | - And have a laugh track.

01:39:28.260 | But yes, so people know where the jokes are.

01:39:29.980 | That's real humor.

01:39:31.160 | - Yeah, and then we just clap.

01:39:33.780 | - And then everybody clap.

01:39:35.080 | I think for the last two years, especially vis-a-vis COVID,

01:39:40.540 | the overwhelming message was the experts know

01:39:44.080 | what they're talking about.

01:39:45.500 | And if you are questioning this, you're a Vax denier

01:39:48.920 | and you basically should be read out of polite society.

01:39:51.900 | And one obvious counter example to this

01:39:54.520 | was social distancing.

01:39:56.220 | If social distancing was efficacious,

01:39:58.720 | why were there no attempts ever to bring it back, right?

01:40:01.920 | When you had different waves.

01:40:03.200 | And if it wasn't efficacious, why was it so insistent

01:40:07.100 | that we do it, all do it at the very beginning?

01:40:09.320 | In fact, in many places, you'll still see the signs

01:40:11.360 | on the floor where it's six feet apart.

01:40:13.360 | So there's an incongruity there.

01:40:15.620 | And I think we are forgetting as a people,

01:40:19.360 | the intensity with, and understandably to some extent,

01:40:22.660 | if you have this worldwide deadly plague,

01:40:24.320 | like it's gonna be go where the leakiest hole is.

01:40:27.840 | So you really gotta kind of get everyone on board.

01:40:30.320 | But to the vehemence with which we're told,

01:40:33.480 | we know what we're doing.

01:40:34.920 | This is the way to solve it.

01:40:37.440 | If you don't do it, you're causing mass death.

01:40:40.120 | That I think fed in very heavily to people's enormous sense

01:40:44.440 | of skepticism toward establishment sources.

01:40:47.640 | - Speaking of the plague, you opened the book with--

01:40:49.920 | - Oh, yeah, that quote from Camus.

01:40:51.440 | - It's a strong, strong quote.

01:40:53.160 | - Camus brings me to tears.

01:40:54.560 | And it's funny 'cause I reread "The Myth of Sisyphus,"

01:40:57.000 | which I had been recommending to people.

01:40:58.320 | I'm like, this book is not good.

01:40:59.600 | But he's got, his ethos is my favorite

01:41:02.520 | of all the philosophers.

01:41:03.440 | - It sounds like "The Myth of Sisyphus" was a myth.

01:41:06.080 | - He says-- - Laugh track, cute.

01:41:10.100 | - All I maintain is that on this earth,

01:41:13.200 | there are plagues and there are victims.

01:41:15.700 | And it's up to us so far as possible

01:41:18.160 | not to join forces with the plagues.

01:41:20.840 | And why I have that as the introductory quote to the book

01:41:24.480 | is I think morality and ethics

01:41:27.720 | are very, very complicated subjects.

01:41:30.140 | There's lots of gray areas where you don't know

01:41:32.320 | which way to choose.

01:41:33.920 | But at a base level, he has another quote

01:41:36.680 | that's ascribed to him he never actually said,

01:41:38.820 | but something about, is the duty of thinking people

01:41:42.040 | not to be on the side of the executioners.

01:41:44.760 | If you are, we should do whatever we can

01:41:48.200 | not to have blood on our hands,

01:41:50.360 | not to be murderers, not to want death.

01:41:54.560 | And that in and of itself is a big pill

01:41:58.040 | for a lot of people to swallow.

01:41:59.420 | We're all brought up, taught that war is a last resort.

01:42:04.420 | And yet when it comes to international affairs,

01:42:07.560 | it's always often a first priority

01:42:09.880 | and people are champing at the bit

01:42:11.920 | to start going in and killing people.

01:42:13.920 | And what war means isn't good guy soldiers

01:42:17.080 | versus bad guy soldiers.

01:42:19.080 | My concern is always with the civilians,

01:42:21.400 | with the kids who become orphans,

01:42:22.960 | with the wives who become widows and things like that.

01:42:26.040 | And then communities which are ruined forever.

01:42:29.060 | So I love that quote of his.

01:42:32.440 | I mean, the book started,

01:42:34.680 | it was going to be a recontextualization of Camus' thought.

01:42:38.320 | I was gonna rip off my old buddy, Ryan Holiday,

01:42:40.920 | what he did with the Stoics and do about Camus.

01:42:43.280 | And then when I started rereading Camus,

01:42:44.680 | I'm like, oh, I've read more into him than is really there.

01:42:48.340 | And then it went into a whole other direction.

01:42:50.480 | - So you wanted to do almost

01:42:53.080 | like an existentialist manifesto.

01:42:57.120 | So like one must imagine Sisyphus happy?

01:43:00.360 | - Well, more like Camus for today

01:43:02.280 | and what his philosophy can teach us,

01:43:04.120 | like Ryan did with his many books about the Stoics.

01:43:06.920 | Yeah.

01:43:07.740 | And it was gonna be called "The Point of Tears."

01:43:11.600 | - Live to the Point of Tears?

01:43:13.880 | - Yes, but the title was gonna be "The Point of Tears."

01:43:15.360 | - No, I know, but from that line.

01:43:16.800 | - Man must live to the-- - That's a good line, right?

01:43:18.200 | He has so many good lines.

01:43:20.020 | - Yeah.

01:43:20.940 | - Maybe it's not about--

01:43:21.780 | - Probably shitty in bed though, right?

01:43:23.160 | - Well, no, he was a big Lothario.

01:43:25.000 | He was probably pretty good. - What's Lothario mean?

01:43:26.400 | - He got around.

01:43:27.380 | What?

01:43:32.140 | - What percent of the audience of humans on Earth

01:43:34.460 | do you think know the word Lothario?

01:43:36.400 | - What percent of them have a computer?

01:43:38.700 | Look it up.

01:43:40.160 | - Lothario.

01:43:41.060 | - It's not some weird term. - Lothario.

01:43:42.880 | - L-O-T-H-A-R-I-O, Lothario.

01:43:44.820 | - Lothario.

01:43:45.900 | A man who behaves selfishly in a response

01:43:48.320 | to being in sexual relationships with women.

01:43:50.720 | They're seduced by a handsome, in quotes,

01:43:53.080 | they're seduced by a handsome Lothario

01:43:54.640 | who gains control of their financial affairs.

01:43:57.080 | - Oh, I didn't think, I always thought of his more

01:43:58.920 | as just someone who's like a stud.

01:44:00.800 | - Like a player, but no. - Yeah, a player, yeah.

01:44:02.400 | - There's a malevolent--

01:44:04.480 | - Oh, I didn't realize that, okay.

01:44:05.520 | Well, then he's-- - Selfishly.

01:44:06.640 | - Okay, that's not him.

01:44:07.680 | - Irresponsibly, and a man too.

01:44:10.300 | Although Ayn Rand would be proud, selfishly.

01:44:14.920 | - Well, no, no. - What's wrong with selfish?

01:44:16.020 | - She wouldn't like that kind of selfishness.

01:44:17.860 | That's exploitative. - Behaves,

01:44:19.460 | a man who behaves selfishly and irresponsibly

01:44:22.900 | in his sexual relationships with women.

01:44:24.900 | Huh, yeah, okay, so he was just a player.

01:44:29.580 | - No, not a, maybe a stud.

01:44:31.140 | I don't think he was promiscuous particularly.

01:44:32.780 | - Nietzsche didn't get, he got,

01:44:35.000 | he didn't never got laid, right?

01:44:36.220 | - He had syphilis, he died of syphilis.

01:44:37.620 | - Oh, like the, it was from prostitutes.

01:44:39.220 | - Was it, okay, possibly, yeah.

01:44:40.820 | - You're asking me like I knew the guy.

01:44:42.380 | I heard it's from, he never had a deep,

01:44:46.960 | loving, fulfilling relationship.

01:44:48.440 | He had a very skewed understanding

01:44:49.840 | on the way he wrote about women.

01:44:52.680 | Although somebody wrote to me and said

01:44:54.560 | that's a mischaracterization,

01:44:57.000 | that he was actually very respectful of women.

01:44:58.760 | - Yeah, but he had that line,

01:44:59.600 | if you're going before a woman, bring a whip.

01:45:01.380 | Wasn't that him or did that show up in her?

01:45:02.220 | - If I were to quote you from your Twitter,

01:45:05.500 | I think I could make a very convincing argument

01:45:08.640 | that you're sexist, racist, and probably a Nazi.

01:45:12.120 | - Well, I do own like some of Hitler's stuff.

01:45:15.360 | - Exactly.

01:45:16.540 | - I got the--

01:45:17.380 | - I rest my case.

01:45:20.180 | - I feel like I'm a Nuremberg.

01:45:21.840 | (laughing)

01:45:23.520 | I'm gonna be hung by his own tie.

01:45:26.360 | This isn't a tie, it's a noose.

01:45:28.920 | - You should have thought about that

01:45:31.120 | when you were saying all those things.

01:45:33.520 | Okay, what do you think of the leak of the Twitter files?

01:45:37.520 | - I was so happy that Elon gave the information

01:45:42.520 | to Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss,

01:45:49.840 | who are both, by any metric, lefties,

01:45:52.720 | who are both professional journalists

01:45:55.120 | of longstanding with great resumes,

01:45:58.680 | and overnight now they're doing PR for the world's,

01:46:01.520 | which all the way to the party line was,

01:46:03.520 | the fact that you had all these corporate journalists

01:46:07.400 | now having to play catch up

01:46:09.320 | and not having control of the microphone,

01:46:11.920 | to me, was just absolutely amazing.

01:46:15.840 | I think transparency is what brought down,

01:46:20.320 | in many aspects, the Soviet Union,

01:46:22.360 | and what will bring down what negative aspects

01:46:24.640 | of the regime we have here.

01:46:27.000 | When you see the machinations behind the scenes,

01:46:31.040 | and then when you see the rationalizations after the fact,

01:46:34.600 | you realize, oh, these people are not acting in good faith.

01:46:37.600 | The fact that, for example, the New York Post article

01:46:40.920 | about the Hunter Biden laptop,

01:46:44.160 | and how the New York Times covered it as well,

01:46:46.120 | they didn't mention any kind of dick pics,

01:46:48.200 | Twitter made it so I couldn't even DM you

01:46:52.040 | the link to the New York Post article,

01:46:53.760 | which was a tool they had previously used only

01:46:56.800 | to prevent child pornography.

01:46:59.800 | So that shows to what extent they were willing

01:47:03.960 | to put their thumb on the scale,

01:47:06.660 | but it also shows that for any layman,

01:47:11.480 | when they're looking at this,

01:47:12.520 | to realize what you are perceiving as news or information

01:47:17.520 | is very much sculpted, edited, and guided

01:47:22.600 | by powerful people who have a vested interest

01:47:25.320 | in maintaining their power.

01:47:28.900 | - I think, to me, the important lesson

01:47:30.360 | is this is not a left or right thing.

01:47:32.160 | - Oh, not at all.

01:47:33.000 | Power versus powerless, yes.

01:47:34.920 | - And also the important lesson there,

01:47:37.200 | I think at least in the case of Twitter,

01:47:39.280 | in our society, it's a slippery slope.

01:47:43.100 | You don't get there overnight.

01:47:44.880 | You start using those tools a little bit,

01:47:47.700 | a little bit to slow down misinformation,

01:47:50.320 | to just a little bit,

01:47:51.520 | you start sending emails to each other a little bit,

01:47:55.880 | and it becomes more and more,

01:47:57.520 | you start forming justifications,

01:48:01.680 | you start getting a little more and more comfortable

01:48:03.520 | kind of talking about this stuff.

01:48:05.160 | I think there are several ways to fight that.

01:48:08.760 | One is having hardcore integrity up front,

01:48:10.880 | so don't even open the door.

01:48:13.040 | But I think realistically, human nature is what it is,

01:48:15.720 | and so I think the only way is through transparency.

01:48:18.560 | I hate the fact they got politicized.

01:48:23.400 | I really hate that the right have run with it,

01:48:26.320 | like, look, the left is planning the rigged elections

01:48:29.520 | and so on.

01:48:30.360 | To me, it shouldn't be left or right,

01:48:32.400 | it shouldn't be about politics,

01:48:33.440 | it's that transparency's good.

01:48:35.520 | Other companies should do the same.

01:48:37.080 | Facebook should do the same.

01:48:38.360 | And in fact, that transparency will protect Facebook.

01:48:41.840 | It will protect Google.

01:48:44.000 | Look, this is our situation, tell us what to do,

01:48:47.320 | and we'll do our best.

01:48:48.440 | - I remember when I was writing "The New Right,"

01:48:50.840 | Twitter's line was, "We're not gonna tell you guys

01:48:55.000 | what the metrics are by which we ban or censor people,

01:48:58.640 | because then bad actors are gonna navigate around them."

01:49:02.120 | And it's like, what are you doing?

01:49:04.240 | Like, just tell people in any establishment

01:49:07.560 | what are the rules for which behavior is permissible.

01:49:10.840 | If I go to a store, if I return the sweater,

01:49:13.720 | is it cash back, no refunds, or if I get store credit?

01:49:16.560 | You know what I mean?

01:49:17.400 | So that they were having this place

01:49:19.520 | which was presented as a huge

01:49:23.280 | international space for public discourse,

01:49:25.440 | and they're not telling you ahead of time,

01:49:27.280 | this is what we will tolerate,

01:49:28.760 | this is what we'll warn you about,

01:49:30.000 | this is what will kick you out overnight.

01:49:31.640 | That to me was crazy and outrageous.

01:49:35.120 | And I'm really pleased with to what extent Elon

01:49:39.280 | is being open with their policies.

01:49:43.680 | And what I really wanna commend him about is,

01:49:48.120 | now I'm triggered,

01:49:49.360 | because one of the things that he took over,

01:49:53.400 | he's like, "Our first priority is getting rid

01:49:55.360 | of child pornography and child exploitation."

01:49:57.320 | - Yeah, yeah. - Right?

01:49:58.160 | That was, he's like, "Racial slurs, homophobic slurs,

01:50:01.360 | anti-Semitic slurs, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

01:50:04.040 | Kids getting harmed is number one."

01:50:06.800 | And he fired the old task force

01:50:09.280 | 'cause they weren't doing their job.

01:50:10.880 | Eliza Blue, who you know,

01:50:12.160 | she had been on this for a long time,

01:50:14.800 | but people who were victims of child pornography,

01:50:16.920 | child exploitation, were emailing Twitter being like,

01:50:19.200 | "These are my images, get them off."

01:50:20.440 | And they're like, "Too bad, porn is allowed on Twitter."

01:50:23.440 | He starts trying to crack down on it,

01:50:25.000 | this is a very hard problem

01:50:26.640 | because these bad actors have mechanisms

01:50:30.120 | to evade being banned.

01:50:32.400 | They wanna get their,

01:50:33.840 | for lack of a better term, product out there.

01:50:35.960 | Forbes Magazine, who is an agent of the devil,

01:50:40.760 | had a tweet and they tweeted this nine times.

01:50:43.640 | You know, now that Elon's here,

01:50:45.520 | Twitter's child porn nightmare has gotten much worse.

01:50:49.160 | They tweeted this nine times.

01:50:50.680 | I looked up, anyone listening to this can look up,

01:50:53.160 | look at Forbes and do a search.

01:50:54.800 | They never mentioned this problem before.

01:50:56.960 | So now that Elon is doing something about it,

01:50:59.280 | now it's a problem for you.

01:51:00.280 | No, it's a problem, Elon's the problem.

01:51:02.160 | It's not the child porn that you guys had a problem with.

01:51:04.960 | And that to me is like, yeah,

01:51:06.760 | I understand that you think that Elon is a bad guy

01:51:10.560 | 'cause he's upset your Apple cart.

01:51:12.440 | This isn't a political issue.

01:51:14.320 | This isn't a gotcha moment.

01:51:15.680 | This is, all right, here are some tips.

01:51:19.200 | We talked to 10 experts, digital experts,

01:51:22.600 | and here are some techniques, Mr. Musk,

01:51:25.600 | that you might wanna take from us free of charge

01:51:28.600 | that will help you solve this.

01:51:29.720 | That would be a great article.

01:51:31.640 | - And I just wanna use this opportunity

01:51:33.360 | to say quite clearly and strongly

01:51:35.920 | that even though Twitter and other parts of the internet

01:51:38.840 | are interpreting some of my statements

01:51:40.560 | to mean I'm right, in this case,

01:51:43.320 | meaning leaning right, right wing,

01:51:45.440 | and in other cases, leaning left, left wing,

01:51:47.800 | I'm not, I'm apolitical,

01:51:49.440 | or at least I try to be in my thinking.

01:51:51.800 | Take one issue at a time.

01:51:53.280 | I do take an opinion on each issue at a time,

01:51:55.320 | but I hate camps.

01:51:56.520 | I try to avoid political camps in general.

01:52:00.000 | It just, it sucks that promoting transparency in this case

01:52:05.000 | or celebrating transparency

01:52:06.920 | is somehow connected to being right wing.

01:52:12.360 | - No, it's being made into a supposed euphemism

01:52:17.280 | for being right wing.

01:52:19.800 | - It's just, it sucks.

01:52:22.160 | It sucks, even though I'm wearing a red suit

01:52:24.360 | and this is a very red-themed conversation.

01:52:27.080 | - Well, I mean, the revolution was the color of blood.

01:52:30.240 | - I'm just gonna let it sit on that for a second.

01:52:38.400 | Okay, you mentioned New York Times Best Seller list.

01:52:41.480 | You chose to self-publish.

01:52:42.840 | - Yes.

01:52:43.680 | - Can we just linger on that decision?

01:52:45.800 | What are the pros and cons of self-publishing?

01:52:48.200 | - The cons are it is acceptable

01:52:52.200 | in our current business climate or cultural climate

01:52:56.160 | for corporate media outlets

01:52:58.320 | to pretend the book doesn't exist.

01:53:00.240 | - Yeah.

01:53:01.080 | - So basically, and there's reason for it.

01:53:03.560 | I can make the case to them pretty easily.

01:53:06.320 | If someone's doing it themselves, who is this guy?

01:53:09.240 | It's some crackpot writing crazy stuff

01:53:11.240 | from his basement, right?

01:53:12.360 | It's a little different, I think, for me,

01:53:13.720 | 'cause I'm an established author.

01:53:15.600 | C-SPAN gave me an hour on Book TV.

01:53:17.760 | - It's still a crackpot, but yeah, established.

01:53:19.800 | - For Dear Reader, I think I was the first one

01:53:21.200 | to get an hour on Book TV for a book that I did myself.

01:53:24.520 | So there is space for that.

01:53:26.360 | It didn't go through a vetting process

01:53:30.120 | the way a book going through a corporate publisher did.

01:53:33.320 | So those are the minuses.

01:53:35.640 | The pros are I can drop it and publish it immediately.

01:53:40.640 | If you go through a corporate publisher,

01:53:44.520 | you have to wait a year.

01:53:47.160 | You can have the book you want

01:53:49.320 | instead of getting past the editor.

01:53:51.480 | And some editors are very, very good,

01:53:53.080 | and there's a whole spectrum.

01:53:54.200 | Some of them, not so good.

01:53:55.400 | Some are good, some are not so good.

01:53:57.400 | I know the best, the real killers.

01:53:59.600 | - All right, there's good people on both sides.

01:54:02.000 | - Yeah, there's plenty of good people on both sides.

01:54:04.000 | And I don't mean the white nationalists

01:54:05.320 | who I condemn totally.

01:54:06.560 | But the thing is, in terms of money,

01:54:10.840 | you get six times as much profit when you self-publish

01:54:14.920 | than when you go through a corporate publisher.

01:54:17.400 | The buck stops here.

01:54:18.600 | In one of my books that I co-authored,

01:54:20.840 | I won't even mention the name,

01:54:22.240 | there is a typo and they don't care.

01:54:25.000 | They didn't fix it for the paperback edition.

01:54:27.400 | Here, since I'm going through Amazon,

01:54:29.520 | if there's a typo, I can fix it live and it updates.

01:54:32.200 | - Oh yeah? - Yep.

01:54:33.040 | - You can just update it. - Yeah.

01:54:34.240 | So that's very useful.

01:54:35.080 | - You can do like a Fight Club thing

01:54:36.560 | where you can insert a dick pic in one of the pages.

01:54:39.920 | - Okay, why are you so,

01:54:41.880 | why do you keep texting me to send you dick pics?

01:54:44.560 | - I didn't know. - Talk about no response.

01:54:45.760 | - Justin, you're, all right, all right.

01:54:47.160 | - All right, I get it. - That's why I'm not the editor.

01:54:48.840 | - I get it, North Pole, I get it.

01:54:50.600 | - Yeah.

01:54:51.440 | - The other advantage, just socially,

01:54:55.480 | is I think people are,

01:54:57.400 | like I found this with the Kickstarter I did for Dear Reader,

01:54:59.960 | people are much more excited to buy it and promote it

01:55:03.840 | and talk about it when they know you're doing it yourself

01:55:06.640 | instead of you're getting a big check

01:55:08.560 | from St. Martin's, HarperCollins, Penguin, whatever.

01:55:12.280 | - Are you also trying to use some kind of service

01:55:14.040 | to get it distributed to bookstores

01:55:16.040 | or are you just going to do Amazon?

01:55:17.480 | - No, just Amazon, yeah.

01:55:19.000 | - And that's probably where most sales happen.

01:55:21.440 | - The vast majority, yeah.

01:55:22.480 | So it's not gonna be in bookstores.

01:55:24.240 | - So how difficult is the process of getting it on Amazon?

01:55:27.600 | - So I'll tell you a funny story about how Amazon works

01:55:30.640 | and 'cause this was,

01:55:33.100 | I always planned for, because everyone,

01:55:36.160 | people's, here's another piece of advice I will give people.

01:55:40.320 | Your life will be a lot easier if you realize

01:55:42.080 | that the majority of people in every industry

01:55:43.720 | are bad at their jobs.

01:55:44.800 | Like once you have that realization,

01:55:46.360 | everything else makes sense

01:55:47.520 | and your life will be a lot easier, right?

01:55:49.680 | So when I did the "Anarchist Handbook,"

01:55:51.200 | which was a collection of essays

01:55:52.720 | from various anarchists throughout history,

01:55:54.880 | when I submitted it to Amazon,

01:55:58.520 | there was a lot of copyright issues

01:56:00.480 | 'cause they're like, do you have the rights to this essay?

01:56:02.240 | Do you have the rights to this essay?

01:56:03.280 | I had to go back and forth with them a lot

01:56:05.400 | to make sure I had copyright

01:56:07.440 | where everything was public domain.

01:56:09.040 | And the thing is you forward it, you update it,

01:56:11.880 | you give them the information, three days,

01:56:13.840 | there's another problem, it's not three days, so it's weeks.

01:56:16.480 | The other thing with their CreateSpace program

01:56:18.480 | is the paperback and the ebook, the Kindle,

01:56:23.480 | are approved independently.

01:56:27.000 | So just 'cause it's approved for one,

01:56:28.520 | it's not approved for the other.

01:56:29.640 | After I published "Anarchist Handbook"

01:56:32.000 | and it was a big success,

01:56:34.240 | they unleashed, enrolled, excuse me,

01:56:36.600 | a hardcover edition program.

01:56:39.480 | So I'm like, oh, great, I'll put in hardcover.

01:56:41.840 | They're like, sorry, this is too similar

01:56:44.160 | to Murray Rothbard's "Anatomy of State,"

01:56:46.960 | which is a pamphlet or short book

01:56:48.720 | that Murray Rothbard wrote.

01:56:49.600 | I go, well, wait, I have the entirety

01:56:51.960 | of "Anatomy of State" in here.

01:56:54.160 | I have permission from the Mises Institute in writing,

01:56:56.600 | which I'm giving to you, to reprint it.

01:56:58.840 | And you guys already have it been published for a year

01:57:01.880 | as a paperback and ebook.

01:57:03.640 | And they're like, too bad, blocked.

01:57:06.000 | So it's not available as a hardcover on Amazon,

01:57:09.840 | even though it's available,

01:57:11.080 | maybe now it's gonna be pulled as paperback and ebook.

01:57:13.600 | So with this book, I was anticipating,

01:57:16.080 | all right, there's gonna be some whatever.

01:57:18.760 | The thing with how it works is you have to upload it

01:57:21.320 | and hit publish, and then you gotta wait for the approval.

01:57:24.640 | I'm like, okay, this is gonna be who knows.

01:57:26.120 | I just wanted to get as fast as possible.

01:57:28.320 | 4 a.m., in less than 24 hours, I get a notification,

01:57:32.280 | congratulations, your book's available for sale.

01:57:34.440 | And I have to run downstairs and pull it from publication,

01:57:38.040 | 'cause otherwise it was out and I didn't finish editing it.

01:57:40.960 | So that's the situation there.

01:57:44.320 | - Oh, that's fascinating.

01:57:45.840 | But that's powerful.

01:57:47.080 | That's like, it's all in your hands.

01:57:49.160 | It's all on you.

01:57:50.000 | - Yes, and I think the program is great.

01:57:53.600 | It charts just like any other book.

01:57:55.520 | The quality of the books is great.

01:57:58.200 | I am very happy with, I have no contact with them.

01:58:04.200 | My buddy Tucker Max, he had a company that did this

01:58:07.080 | and they basically help people sell, publish their own book.

01:58:09.240 | They did Dave Goggins' book.

01:58:10.160 | I think you've talked to him, haven't you?

01:58:11.760 | - Yeah, maybe they emailed me or something.

01:58:13.480 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:58:14.320 | And he said, I have done dozens,

01:58:17.960 | maybe hundreds of books with them.

01:58:19.520 | I have never been able to get someone on the phone.

01:58:21.440 | So I don't know what's going on over there,

01:58:23.360 | but guys, if you wanna reach out to me, please call me.

01:58:27.520 | It's Michael@lexfriedman.com.

01:58:29.400 | (laughing)

01:58:32.720 | - Friedman is spelled wrong.

01:58:34.400 | - Yeah, if you ever have any complaints,

01:58:37.200 | please just @ me at Twitter about Michael.

01:58:42.720 | Now, why do you think so few established authors

01:58:47.720 | self-publish?

01:58:51.120 | I mean, it seems like it makes perfect sense

01:58:54.480 | in this modern society to be able to,

01:58:56.760 | when you finish the book,

01:58:58.360 | to publish it within a few days, a few weeks.

01:59:00.880 | I think I talked to Jordan Peterson about this at length

01:59:04.360 | and Michaela, his daughter, who I'm also good friends with.

01:59:06.800 | She's actually named after Gorbachev,

01:59:08.400 | who's the big hero of this book.

01:59:09.680 | - Also a friend?

01:59:10.960 | - Michaela, you know, I was in talks to interview Gorbachev

01:59:15.960 | and then COVID hit.

01:59:17.280 | And that's one of the big regrets of my life

01:59:18.840 | that I didn't get.

01:59:19.680 | I think if I met him, I would be on my knees,

01:59:23.360 | literally kissing his feet, crying.

01:59:25.520 | I mean, one of the big points of "The White Pill"

01:59:29.760 | is there were so many moments

01:59:32.360 | when they were calling him up,

01:59:34.320 | sending the tanks, we want another Tiananmen Square.

01:59:37.800 | And he's like, fuck you.

01:59:39.760 | So when you have anyone who has the capacity

01:59:43.640 | to murder thousands of people

01:59:46.640 | and chooses to withhold that power,

01:59:49.480 | like all I could do is applaud.

01:59:50.760 | - He resisted the cynicism.

01:59:52.400 | - Yes.

01:59:53.240 | Wait, so why the authors,

01:59:54.760 | why don't publish some of the books?

01:59:55.920 | I think they're still in the,

01:59:59.200 | you know how like there was this whole idea

02:00:00.640 | about how if you're a movie actor, you don't go on TV

02:00:02.920 | 'cause that like kind of ruins your brand.

02:00:04.800 | So, and that's kind of going away.

02:00:06.400 | There's a lot of shows where the lead

02:00:07.880 | is now like a former movie actor.

02:00:09.360 | And this is kind of like a big thing,

02:00:11.200 | like Matthew McConaughey,

02:00:12.360 | he had a TV show on HBO, I believe.

02:00:15.080 | So I think there's this kind of like, wait a minute.

02:00:17.520 | What's that?

02:00:18.680 | I didn't hear what you said.

02:00:19.520 | - I said, all right.

02:00:20.360 | Is it all right?

02:00:23.840 | All right, all right, all right.

02:00:26.320 | Matthew McConaughey, all right, all right.

02:00:28.920 | I don't know what that is, sorry.

02:00:31.040 | - Just I'll explain it.

02:00:33.880 | What, look at the context below.

02:00:35.320 | - Okay, so I think for them,

02:00:37.800 | it might be A, a loss of credibility to some extent,

02:00:41.760 | but B, their agent whose job is to sell them

02:00:46.160 | and get a big advance wouldn't be encouraged

02:00:49.000 | to self-publish 'cause their age,

02:00:50.160 | you know, so I don't think it's percolated

02:00:51.760 | to powerful people yet how feasible this is

02:00:55.280 | and how profitable it is

02:00:57.960 | and how they'll still be able to reach their audience.

02:01:00.920 | And I feel if, you know, I don't,

02:01:05.000 | if "Anarchist Handbook" wasn't such a gigantic success,

02:01:07.840 | I would be much more nervous about "The White Pill,"

02:01:11.920 | but the fact that it was

02:01:12.880 | and that I saw it from start to finish

02:01:14.320 | and I know the ins and outs,

02:01:15.480 | now I'm like, what are you guys bringing to the table?

02:01:17.520 | So that's taking a year of my time

02:01:19.120 | and introducing edits that I would not otherwise agree with.

02:01:21.720 | - I think for some people,

02:01:22.920 | a book is a sort of beacon of reputation.

02:01:27.320 | - Yes. - So it's really important

02:01:28.800 | to not, there's somehow not as much reputation

02:01:32.080 | associated with a self-published book

02:01:34.000 | unless it's successful.

02:01:35.440 | - Yes.

02:01:36.520 | - And then like the, it's success outshines

02:01:40.440 | the actual however it was published.

02:01:42.600 | I think, I guess David Goggins self-published his book.

02:01:46.080 | - 'Cause it used to be you self-published

02:01:48.240 | when you can't get a book deal,

02:01:49.560 | so it's like an admission of failure.

02:01:51.400 | - Yeah, so you would recommend it as something for authors?

02:01:55.560 | - No, I would recommend it as something for authors

02:01:58.160 | of a certain stature, for lack of better term.

02:02:01.200 | Because it is still, in terms of your resume

02:02:04.240 | and your experience, it's better to get a crappy advance

02:02:08.720 | and have a book with St. Martins that goes nowhere

02:02:12.680 | than a self-published book that goes nowhere.

02:02:16.040 | So the other thing is you have to make sure

02:02:18.420 | you have enough of an audience

02:02:19.460 | that you can move some copies.

02:02:21.400 | - What about OnlyFans?

02:02:22.840 | Would you recommend authors?

02:02:25.400 | How much money do you think you and I could make

02:02:27.080 | if we did bathtub scenes in OnlyFans?

02:02:30.240 | No, just chilling, just reading,

02:02:31.400 | like reading Animal Farm, just like while sitting--

02:02:34.280 | - Beastiality.

02:02:35.120 | (laughs)

02:02:37.520 | - I don't know.

02:02:38.360 | - Okay, Snowflake.

02:02:39.200 | Snowball, sorry, Snowball, okay, Snowball.

02:02:42.340 | - All right.

02:02:45.520 | - What was his name?

02:02:46.480 | - Snowball.

02:02:47.320 | - No, the horse.

02:02:48.640 | - Boxer.

02:02:49.480 | - I'm hung like a boxer.

02:02:50.520 | - I will work harder.

02:02:55.480 | - That guy, I think about that guy a lot.

02:02:58.040 | - Boxer?

02:02:58.880 | - Yeah, his motto was I will work harder.

02:03:01.360 | Anything that happens, like the pigs would take advantage

02:03:05.000 | and his response to everything,

02:03:07.080 | he was inspiring to me because he never gave in

02:03:11.000 | to the cynicism.

02:03:11.840 | - Right, and they killed him.

02:03:13.440 | - Yeah.

02:03:14.260 | - Spoiler, sorry.

02:03:15.100 | - But that's a good way to die, never giving in.

02:03:19.360 | - Well, yeah, there's a lot of that in this book

02:03:21.000 | about the people who are like,

02:03:22.280 | I'm not, you're not gonna break me.

02:03:24.160 | Like, I am bigger than this.

02:03:26.520 | - Did you ever believe in Santa?

02:03:30.080 | - I remember the day I woke up on New Year's

02:03:34.440 | and there was a present under my pillow

02:03:36.240 | and it was like, holy shit.

02:03:38.100 | 'Cause Dead Maroz left it.

02:03:42.360 | That's the whole thing, he leaves your present

02:03:43.640 | under your pillow.

02:03:44.480 | - Right, so you believed, but what,

02:03:46.020 | I thought the story was gonna be when you first realized

02:03:48.240 | he's not real.

02:03:49.960 | - I don't remember when I realized he wasn't real,

02:03:51.560 | but that story was, I did think it was real.

02:03:53.720 | I was like, oh my God.

02:03:55.000 | - And okay, there's this, 'cause I did too.

02:03:58.960 | And I remember, I don't think I can put myself

02:04:02.320 | in the mindset of the kind of person

02:04:04.000 | that believed he was real.

02:04:06.680 | 'Cause what did I think?

02:04:07.600 | What was my worldview that allowed

02:04:09.400 | like a giant person in a red suit to be real?

02:04:14.440 | Although I do remember, I think the first time

02:04:17.000 | that Santa Claus showed up to our,

02:04:18.720 | like lived in this very small apartment.

02:04:20.960 | And when he first showed up to our apartment,

02:04:23.700 | I just remember, 'cause he was really drunk and smelled.

02:04:28.760 | It was like a party, it was like a New Year's party

02:04:30.680 | or whatever.

02:04:31.520 | So one of the people dressed up as Santa Claus,

02:04:34.720 | I just remember this, wow, this gotten like real fast.

02:04:39.720 | Of course, I remember like thinking, of course,

02:04:44.120 | of course it would be, like, what was I thinking?

02:04:46.880 | What was I thinking?

02:04:48.280 | There's gonna be some perfect, like--

02:04:51.120 | - Being.

02:04:51.960 | - Perfect being, like better than,

02:04:54.400 | like the best of humanity.

02:04:55.760 | He was just a regular dude, kind of fat,

02:04:59.200 | but like not sexy fat.

02:05:00.720 | It was like, not really that jolly and kind of exhausted.

02:05:05.320 | And I really have not showered in a while, but also funny.

02:05:08.760 | - I remember, I love telling this story,

02:05:11.980 | how old I was and I must've been five or six.

02:05:15.480 | And it was just that age where you distinguish

02:05:17.620 | between what's real and what's not.

02:05:19.360 | So like Vikings and knights and ninjas are real

02:05:24.360 | and dragons and mermaids and elves are fake.

02:05:30.120 | And I was on the corner of Shore Parkway

02:05:32.400 | right before the park in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn.

02:05:35.340 | And around the corner wearing a denim vest

02:05:38.160 | was a little person, a dwarf.

02:05:41.920 | And I saw him and I was like, all right,

02:05:44.240 | back to the drawing board.

02:05:45.240 | Like, I don't know what's real or not anymore,

02:05:47.320 | 'cause I just saw a dwarf, so I don't know what's going on.

02:05:49.980 | - And since then, given your relationship with Alex Jones,

02:05:53.400 | you've continued the journey

02:05:54.520 | of not knowing what's real or not.

02:05:56.040 | - That's correct.

02:05:57.520 | - All right, let's talk about the next steps.

02:05:59.140 | After Stalin took power, he started to actually,

02:06:01.960 | implementing some of the economic, some of the policies

02:06:05.040 | in this idea of collectivization.

02:06:07.400 | - Yeah.

02:06:08.400 | - What's the story of that in the '20s,

02:06:12.120 | leading into the '30s?

02:06:13.560 | What was this idea?

02:06:14.800 | What was the relationship between the regime,

02:06:16.820 | the ideology, and the farmers?

02:06:18.800 | - Well, there's always been,

02:06:20.160 | and obviously very much to this day,

02:06:22.100 | an enormous amount of enmity, for lack of a better term,

02:06:27.040 | hatred between Ukraine and Russia.

02:06:29.360 | I mean, this is centuries in the making, if not more.

02:06:34.360 | And the Ukraine, or Ukraine now, but at the time,

02:06:38.720 | I'm speaking of the region,

02:06:40.400 | is and still is the breadbasket of Europe.

02:06:42.800 | It was very fertile lands.

02:06:44.120 | This is where the food comes from.

02:06:46.320 | And this was a issue also for Lenin,

02:06:49.800 | as I discuss in the book,

02:06:50.920 | 'cause when you had famines there,

02:06:52.880 | you have famines throughout

02:06:55.400 | what later became the Soviet Union.

02:06:57.600 | And the problem is, this happened in North Korea as well,

02:07:00.540 | in the '90s, when they don't have food,

02:07:02.960 | if you let in foreigners and feed your people,

02:07:05.760 | all of a sudden, you as the government

02:07:07.180 | are either superfluous or downright deleterious

02:07:11.600 | to their well-being, and that's a threat to your power.

02:07:14.600 | So Lenin let in an American organization in the early '20s,

02:07:18.360 | which was actually headed by Herbert Hoover, of all people.

02:07:21.240 | And after a while, Hoover left,

02:07:23.000 | because he found that the Bolsheviks

02:07:24.840 | were just taking the grain

02:07:25.840 | that the Americans were giving to feed the people

02:07:27.400 | and selling it for export while the people suffered.

02:07:30.040 | And one of the people who grew up in these starvation times

02:07:35.040 | was a young Mikhail Gorbachev,

02:07:36.680 | where he had, I think it was like a quarter

02:07:38.600 | or a third of his village starve to death

02:07:40.600 | during one of these periodic famines.

02:07:43.880 | Stalin's idea, this was a good mechanism for him

02:07:47.800 | to break the idea of Ukraine being an independent nation

02:07:52.800 | within its own identity.

02:07:54.760 | And he had this kind of liquidation of the kulaks,

02:07:59.440 | very famously, which thankfully is much more discussed now

02:08:02.600 | than it was maybe when you and I were kids.

02:08:05.120 | And a kulak, the real meaning, or the literal meaning,

02:08:10.120 | is kind of this wealthy landowner, right?

02:08:13.160 | But very quickly, it's kind of like, it becomes outgroup.

02:08:16.880 | So, there was a big incentive

02:08:21.080 | to call someone you didn't like a kulak,

02:08:23.120 | and then good luck to you,

02:08:24.080 | 'cause now the eyes of the state are on you,

02:08:26.080 | and you have to prove that you didn't hire people,

02:08:28.720 | you didn't have four cows,

02:08:30.460 | or how many acres, or so and so forth.

02:08:32.180 | They took a huge percentage of the population, the kulaks,

02:08:36.600 | and they just deported them.

02:08:38.200 | These are lands that they had for generations,

02:08:40.120 | and they just spread them throughout broader Russia.

02:08:44.600 | Many of them never made it, and many of them were killed.

02:08:47.120 | This was by design.

02:08:48.600 | - And the dark thing about the kulaks, like you said,

02:08:51.720 | when it becomes abused, when it becomes the outgroup,

02:08:55.680 | is the kulak is supposed to be wealthier

02:09:00.680 | than sort of the general farmer peasant.

02:09:04.960 | And so, basically, it gives you a mechanism of resentment.

02:09:07.920 | Anybody that's better off must be better off

02:09:10.600 | because they're a kulak, let's get rid of them.

02:09:12.520 | And it has, just from an economics perspective,

02:09:16.360 | even leaving ethics aside,

02:09:18.160 | it basically completely de-incentivizes productivity.

02:09:23.160 | It wants you to fail, because if you succeed,

02:09:26.680 | you're a kulak, and you're going to be tortured,

02:09:28.480 | you're gonna be deported,

02:09:30.160 | you're going to be derided, all that.

02:09:31.720 | - And also, you're poor 'cause he's rich.

02:09:34.120 | Like, that's a big part of it.

02:09:36.320 | So, while this was going on,

02:09:38.520 | and food was becoming a problem

02:09:40.160 | because you had poor weather conditions,

02:09:44.000 | there was a campaign about, oh, the reason you're hungry

02:09:46.960 | is 'cause the kulaks are hoarding all their grain.

02:09:50.160 | And if you're somewhere else in the Soviet Union,

02:09:53.520 | how are you supposed to know any better?

02:09:55.080 | 'Cause you're being told every year

02:09:56.480 | the crops are bumper crop, bumper crop, bumper crop,

02:09:59.000 | and now there's no food, there's no bread.

02:10:01.160 | And so, see, we produced all this bread,

02:10:04.160 | it's not getting to you

02:10:05.160 | 'cause the kulaks are hoarding the grain.

02:10:07.320 | So, they came in what became known as the Haldimor,

02:10:11.520 | and Ann Applebaum, who's a great historian,

02:10:14.760 | who, unfortunately, I disagree with a lot

02:10:17.520 | in contemporary politics,

02:10:18.480 | but who's done so much great work about the Soviet Union

02:10:22.440 | that I pretty much give her a blank check

02:10:24.160 | and whatever she wants to say nowadays,

02:10:26.720 | she wrote a great book about this called "Red Famine,"

02:10:29.360 | and these activists descended on these villages like locusts,

02:10:34.400 | and their job was to requisition as much food as possible,

02:10:38.440 | and they would come back at all hours of the night

02:10:41.200 | to make sure you weren't hiding food,

02:10:43.280 | and this is what was so pernicious about it,

02:10:46.440 | your own body would betray you.

02:10:48.560 | They could look at you and see that you're not losing weight,

02:10:51.520 | you've got those chubby cheeks, that means you have food,

02:10:54.720 | and that's the government's food.

02:10:56.760 | That is the food of the people.

02:10:58.120 | And if you are keeping food for yourself,

02:11:00.080 | you are stealing from the people.

02:11:01.720 | You're an enemy of the people,

02:11:03.040 | and you deserve whatever comes to you.

02:11:05.040 | And it got to a point where they're eating,

02:11:07.040 | they didn't have grain to plant for the next harvest.

02:11:10.820 | And what was even sicker is, you know,

02:11:15.300 | one of the big criticisms of communists, of the czar,

02:11:19.520 | was his internal passport system,

02:11:21.280 | that I can't go wherever I want within Russia,

02:11:24.440 | the Russian Empire, without permission.

02:11:26.800 | Stalin reintroduced this.

02:11:28.720 | So if your village was targeted, you can't leave.

02:11:32.360 | Now, some people got away,

02:11:33.880 | they tried to get to the cities and so on and so forth,

02:11:36.320 | but you get to the city and you're starving,

02:11:39.040 | you have no clothes, you're a kulak.

02:11:42.040 | I'm hungry 'cause of you,

02:11:43.040 | and now you're too lazy to work, get the F out of there.

02:11:45.720 | And there were stories, you know,

02:11:48.240 | I have them in the White Pill,

02:11:50.260 | of this like starving teenage girl,

02:11:51.880 | and she's begging for food,

02:11:53.920 | and the guy knocks, the shopkeep knocks the food out

02:11:56.720 | of her hand and she dies on the spot.

02:11:58.680 | And everyone in that line knew not to give her any food

02:12:02.320 | or any sympathy, because she's a kulak sympathizer.

02:12:04.960 | And very quickly, if you're a kulak sympathizer,

02:12:07.340 | all that has to happen is someone has to call,

02:12:09.520 | I think it was the NKVD at the time,

02:12:11.160 | you know, the different names, the Cheka,

02:12:13.160 | the secret police, and they have to be like,

02:12:14.680 | "Oh, you see, whatever her name was, Zhenya,

02:12:18.200 | "she was a kulak sympathizer.

02:12:19.580 | "We saw a kulak who was trying to shake us down for food

02:12:21.980 | "'cause too lazy to work, and she felt so bad for them.

02:12:25.000 | "So you might wanna check in on Zhenya."

02:12:26.760 | So yeah.

02:12:27.960 | - But in '32 and '33, Holodomor,

02:12:31.880 | it wasn't just small injustice here and there.

02:12:36.880 | It was mass starvation and suffering.

02:12:41.880 | - Yes, millions starved to death in the Ukraine alone,

02:12:45.440 | and by design.

02:12:46.500 | - So you mentioned Ann Applebaum's book, "Red Famine,"

02:12:52.360 | "Stalin's War in Ukraine,"

02:12:53.740 | but another excellent book on the topic.

02:12:55.920 | And by the way, thank you for recommending that to me.

02:12:57.760 | So it was--

02:12:59.080 | - Her work's amazing.

02:13:00.280 | - Yeah, it's a really, really powerful book

02:13:04.000 | about not just about Holodomor,

02:13:06.120 | but the context of Ukraine,

02:13:08.760 | basically the history of Ukraine that's relevant for today.

02:13:12.600 | - Yeah.

02:13:13.680 | - To understand, understand the relationship

02:13:16.380 | between Russia and Ukraine.

02:13:17.920 | But another great book is "Bloodlands, Europe

02:13:21.520 | "Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder.

02:13:23.320 | I don't know, I think you also recommended that to me

02:13:25.240 | at some point, or maybe not.

02:13:26.440 | - I haven't, but I'm familiar with that and read it.

02:13:29.160 | - So he does quite a bit of, it's brief,

02:13:33.400 | but extremely well-researched writing

02:13:35.160 | about cannibalism there.

02:13:36.920 | - Oh, God.

02:13:37.760 | - And that it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed

02:13:40.160 | famine in the Soviet Ukraine for parents

02:13:42.120 | to cook and eat their children.

02:13:43.800 | He writes, quote, "Survival was a moral

02:13:46.280 | "as well as a physical struggle.

02:13:47.720 | "A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933

02:13:50.820 | "that she had not yet become a cannibal,

02:13:53.380 | "but was not sure that I shall not be one

02:13:56.440 | "by the time my letter reaches you."

02:13:59.000 | End quotes.

02:14:00.160 | The good people died first.

02:14:01.640 | Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died.

02:14:04.980 | Those who gave food to others died.

02:14:07.400 | Those who refused to eat corpses died.

02:14:09.800 | Those who refused to kill their fellow man died.

02:14:12.620 | Parents who resisted cannibalism died

02:14:14.680 | before their children did.

02:14:16.200 | And there's stories in there about, yeah, cooking,

02:14:20.720 | cooking your children.

02:14:24.520 | The other thing about cannibalism, about famine in general

02:14:29.320 | that stood out to me, unlike a lot of atrocities,

02:14:32.920 | is the people that are starving are exhausted.

02:14:36.520 | They're basically unable to think.

02:14:38.700 | So they don't even have the energy to protest.

02:14:43.240 | It's a strange kind of way to kill thinking in the populace.

02:14:51.680 | I suppose it was obvious,

02:14:53.240 | but there's something fundamental about starvation

02:14:56.280 | where it slowly removes your humanity.

02:14:59.880 | - Yeah, there was a scene in the book

02:15:05.440 | where a lot of times people literally go crazy.

02:15:09.800 | And there's a scene where a mom,

02:15:11.200 | it's some nursing, a train station was nursing her kid

02:15:13.680 | and she was going mad from hunger

02:15:16.840 | and she starts beating the crap out of her baby

02:15:18.760 | and kicking it and then she just reverts to normal

02:15:20.400 | like nothing had happened.

02:15:21.700 | - Yeah, madness, you lose your mind.

02:15:26.120 | - Yeah, and I mean, I don't know

02:15:28.560 | what the physiological cause of this,

02:15:30.600 | I think it's, if someone has dealt

02:15:33.040 | with a glycogen depletion, it affects their mood,

02:15:35.080 | things like that, so taken to an extreme,

02:15:37.080 | who knows what happens when parts of the brain

02:15:39.380 | start functioning and start imploding.

02:15:41.280 | But yeah, what just happened,

02:15:46.240 | this is something that's really cool

02:15:47.520 | regarding the Holodomor.

02:15:49.040 | So there was one Western journalist,

02:15:53.280 | Gareth Jones, who was like,

02:15:56.360 | all right, something's not adding up here.

02:15:59.080 | So he was supposed to take a train through Ukraine

02:16:03.240 | and he got out early and decided to start walking

02:16:07.840 | through the countryside to go from village to village.

02:16:11.280 | And I'll get to his story in a minute,

02:16:14.120 | right before we started recording,

02:16:16.960 | I got this book in the mail,

02:16:18.040 | I ordered it on November 28th from Great Britain.

02:16:21.600 | It was the only copy available on the whole internet.

02:16:25.080 | It's called "Experiences in Russia, 1931."

02:16:27.520 | It is anonymous and it's,

02:16:30.600 | Gareth Jones wrote the introduction.

02:16:32.640 | It was published by the Alton Press in Pittsburgh,

02:16:34.660 | it was self-published and see, it just says forward,

02:16:39.040 | it just says by the author.

02:16:41.140 | So it was the author who went alongside Gareth Jones,

02:16:47.520 | Gareth Jones was someone by the name of Henry John Hines,

02:16:51.680 | who was heir to the Hines fortune.

02:16:58.200 | And you only know that if you start looking at the internet

02:17:01.400 | 'cause his name's not anywhere in this book.

02:17:02.960 | Well, I opened this book up right when I got it,

02:17:05.520 | right before we're taping and it's signed by him.

02:17:09.920 | And it took me a second, I'm like, wait a minute,

02:17:11.440 | who is this signed by?

02:17:12.400 | And it's H.J. Hines 'cause his name was Jack Hines,

02:17:14.680 | but it was Henry John Hines.

02:17:16.640 | So this is, I'm very excited

02:17:18.840 | that I had this little miracle in the mail.

02:17:21.440 | - Christmas miracle. - It's a Christmas miracle.

02:17:23.720 | - They traveled together? - They traveled together.

02:17:26.080 | So this book's a diary of their travels.

02:17:28.160 | - Why do you think so few journalists

02:17:30.680 | was able to do what he did?

02:17:32.480 | - So there were several reasons.

02:17:34.040 | First of all, if you were a Western journalist

02:17:36.200 | in the Soviet Union, you were under very strict circumstances.

02:17:41.200 | First of all, you could be deported at any time.

02:17:44.920 | You had no, there was no pretense

02:17:47.520 | that you have a right to be a journalist in,

02:17:50.880 | as especially as a representative of a capitalist

02:17:52.800 | by which they meant Western paper.

02:17:55.000 | Second, it was a complete nightmare

02:17:57.520 | getting your articles filed

02:18:00.040 | because you had a censor that you had to go through

02:18:01.760 | and the censor's job, whose life depended on it,

02:18:04.200 | was to make sure that your story was advantageous

02:18:07.060 | to the Soviet Union or at least neutral.

02:18:09.120 | And they had all sorts of techniques.

02:18:10.880 | You know, they could spy, they spied on you all the time.

02:18:12.700 | They followed you around 'cause you're a foreigner,

02:18:15.080 | but also that censor had to answer to somebody.

02:18:18.480 | So all the censor has to do is be like,

02:18:20.280 | "Look, I'm having trouble with my supervisor."

02:18:23.600 | And the reporter could be like,

02:18:24.720 | "Well, can I talk to the supervisor?"

02:18:25.960 | It's like, "Well, I'm sorry, that's not possible."

02:18:27.520 | And he's on deadline, but it's too bad.

02:18:29.540 | Bureaucracy doesn't recognize the needs of deadlines.

02:18:32.640 | So there was a big pressure, a lot of pressure

02:18:37.640 | on Western journalists to have to get through this net.

02:18:41.380 | And that's literally constant.

02:18:42.720 | You know, every story, it's gonna be a fight.

02:18:44.960 | So at a certain point, you're just gonna be like,

02:18:46.520 | "All right," and you're gonna pre-censor yourself.

02:18:48.780 | You know, if you know, "All right, if I include this,

02:18:51.680 | it's not gonna get through, what are you supposed to do?"

02:18:54.520 | I think human beings are naturally,

02:18:56.840 | and also a lot of these journalists were pro-Soviet.

02:19:00.320 | They thought this is the society of the future.

02:19:03.780 | At least everyone's trying to make it a better country

02:19:07.880 | for everyone, not like back home

02:19:09.800 | with a poor slip between the cracks.

02:19:12.240 | We gotta do what we can to make this work.

02:19:15.520 | And, you know, there was a lot of,

02:19:20.520 | I don't wanna say conspiracy, but within the industry,

02:19:24.200 | there was a consensus that the Stalin was the good guy,

02:19:28.680 | and we were, if not the bad guys,

02:19:30.280 | certainly not as good in certain regards.

02:19:33.020 | So when this news of the famine started percolating,

02:19:37.360 | all the other Western journalists besides Gareth Jones

02:19:40.240 | and Malcolm Muggeridge were saying this isn't true.

02:19:43.520 | It's nothing that they haven't seen before.

02:19:45.920 | The paper that took the lead in this was "The New York Times"

02:19:48.440 | with their guy Walter Duranty,

02:19:50.240 | who had previously won a Pulitzer,

02:19:51.960 | and had interviewed Stalin,

02:19:53.120 | which was an enormously rare honor for a Westerner.

02:19:56.040 | And he, because he has so much experience

02:20:00.120 | covering Russia and the Soviet Union,

02:20:02.720 | he basically took the lead,

02:20:04.040 | and other people followed his lead.

02:20:05.560 | You know, he was kind of the dean

02:20:07.520 | of the press corps in Russia.

02:20:10.160 | And he made a point, and the thing,

02:20:11.920 | there's so many quotes I have from him,

02:20:14.680 | where he's not only denying

02:20:17.360 | that this mass starvation is happening,

02:20:19.040 | he's also going after journalists

02:20:20.840 | who are questioning the narrative.

02:20:22.680 | And he, you know, he says things like,

02:20:24.440 | "Look, this is nothing

02:20:26.520 | "that the Russians haven't experienced before.

02:20:28.400 | "They're simply tightening their belts."

02:20:30.000 | And it's like, you only have to tighten your belt

02:20:33.040 | when you don't have enough food.

02:20:34.200 | It's not like they started a new exercise regimen,

02:20:36.520 | and now their body fat's dropping.

02:20:38.560 | That's, why would someone tighten their belt?

02:20:40.720 | So that was one.

02:20:42.040 | And the New York Times had a 13-page article,

02:20:47.040 | big headline, "Russians Hungry, Not Starving."

02:20:50.440 | And he went after Jones,

02:20:51.920 | he went after Magritch, I believe.

02:20:54.760 | Although he did go after Magritch,

02:20:55.960 | but the point being that this is just propaganda

02:20:59.200 | from people who want the Soviet Union to fail.

02:21:01.760 | You know, they don't understand

02:21:02.720 | what they're building here.

02:21:04.720 | You know, he had so many excuses, like,

02:21:06.400 | "Oh, you know, the reason all these Russians

02:21:09.720 | "are supposedly leaving their villages to go to the cities

02:21:12.560 | "isn't 'cause there's no food,

02:21:14.240 | "it's because they're nomadic, it's tradition.

02:21:16.560 | "They go from town to town looking for new experiences."

02:21:19.280 | And it's just, you know, at a certain point,

02:21:21.720 | and I think it was 1941, where he was eventually like,

02:21:24.960 | or '51 rather, I don't remember,

02:21:26.920 | he was like, "Oh, well, I guess I was kind of wrong."

02:21:31.160 | And it's like, he's like, "Any journalist worth his salt

02:21:33.440 | "can admit when he's wrong."

02:21:34.720 | And it's like, "Well, were you worth your salt?

02:21:36.640 | "Because you sure, you, he explicitly said

02:21:40.000 | "there's no point in sending out journalists

02:21:43.680 | "to look for themselves.

02:21:44.560 | "I've been through the countryside and everyone's fine.

02:21:46.760 | "And it's just that the loudest people are making noise,

02:21:49.360 | "whereas everyone else is doing the work and, you know,

02:21:51.840 | "trying, and this isn't about famine,

02:21:54.800 | "but it's about Westerners skeptical about collectivization,

02:21:57.760 | "which is just simply a new way of farming."

02:21:59.560 | And yeah, it was a new way of farming.

02:22:00.960 | And the results were by design,

02:22:03.160 | and also accidentally absolutely catastrophic.

02:22:06.240 | - How hard was it to see the truth at that time,

02:22:11.960 | do you think?

02:22:13.000 | Do you think that was a mistake

02:22:14.520 | that's understandable to make as a journalist?

02:22:17.440 | - If my job as a journalist,

02:22:19.980 | I have two bosses if I'm in Moscow.

02:22:23.560 | I've got my reporter in New York or London or whatever,

02:22:27.280 | but I've got my censor here.

02:22:30.040 | And he is making sure I have a house, that apartment.

02:22:34.720 | He makes sure I have food.

02:22:36.080 | He makes sure I have access to dignitaries.

02:22:38.600 | He's my lifeline.

02:22:40.120 | If I piss him off, I'm on the next plane out of town.

02:22:44.160 | So that-- - Is that enough?

02:22:45.680 | Is that enough to

02:22:47.000 | slowly suffocate the integrity of a journalist?

02:22:53.560 | - I don't think it was slow at all.

02:22:54.880 | And it was clearly enough.

02:22:56.480 | And because what are they gonna do?

02:22:57.320 | - I disagree with that.

02:22:58.760 | I think the failure of integrity

02:23:01.120 | has to come from the New York,

02:23:03.280 | on the American side.

02:23:05.440 | That it's just the flock of fish or whatever

02:23:07.840 | that all move in the same narrative.

02:23:10.880 | - Right.

02:23:12.060 | - I think journalists

02:23:13.160 | would like to be the kind of people that have integrity.

02:23:18.260 | So if they are conscious of sacrificing their own integrity,

02:23:21.280 | they wouldn't do it.

02:23:22.120 | If they're conscious of an act that's doing it,

02:23:24.680 | they wouldn't do it.

02:23:25.760 | So it has to happen like a lobster slowly boiling.

02:23:28.920 | - No, I think it happens when everyone else is,

02:23:31.920 | it's a Greek chorus, right?

02:23:33.360 | - Right, right, it's a chorus.

02:23:34.600 | But that's exactly, that's right.

02:23:36.320 | So it's not about the act.

02:23:37.880 | But they will, I mean,

02:23:39.400 | I've talked to journalists where I get the sense

02:23:43.440 | that they will sell their soul for access.

02:23:46.040 | - 'Cause that's their job.

02:23:49.200 | - Is it though?

02:23:50.360 | 'Cause what they do, what journalists do,

02:23:53.200 | I've seen American journalists.

02:23:54.960 | They take a huge amount of pride for having gotten

02:23:58.840 | the interview, whatever that is, the Putin interview.

02:24:02.040 | And first of all, they're glowing with pride.

02:24:07.960 | It seems like they're always showing off

02:24:10.260 | to the other journalists back in America.

02:24:12.400 | So they're glowing, showing off like,

02:24:14.320 | look, I got the access, you didn't.

02:24:16.520 | And second thing they're doing

02:24:17.780 | when they show up to that interview

02:24:19.360 | is they ask all the questions that signal

02:24:21.800 | to the other journalists that we're on the same side.

02:24:26.400 | They ask the most generic, aggressive questions

02:24:30.140 | to which they know the answers.

02:24:31.880 | They just, they want to basically get the access

02:24:36.840 | and ask the quote unquote hard-hitting questions

02:24:40.240 | that they know will not be answered.

02:24:42.320 | And this is the entire machinery of it.

02:24:44.480 | That's not, that's modern journalism.

02:24:47.080 | And I suppose at that time--

02:24:49.300 | - It was worse.

02:24:50.200 | - It was worse.

02:24:51.440 | They weren't even doing the hard-hitting,

02:24:53.200 | the display of hard-hitting questions.

02:24:55.520 | - Right.

02:24:56.360 | - It was PR pieces.

02:24:57.520 | - Think about what high status that is

02:25:00.640 | if I'm an American journalist in Moscow.

02:25:02.840 | I'm allowed in this secretive country.

02:25:05.920 | I'm the guy who's very privileged to have access

02:25:12.320 | to live in Moscow and tell Americans,

02:25:14.780 | which are all fascinated about this new society,

02:25:16.720 | the future, what it's like.

02:25:18.740 | And as soon as I kind of start questioning the narrative,

02:25:23.300 | I'm gonna get kicked out and humiliated very publicly.

02:25:27.060 | I thought you were in Moscow.

02:25:28.020 | What am I supposed to say?

02:25:29.420 | So, they, Eugene Lyons was,

02:25:34.060 | he's one of the heroes in the book.

02:25:35.380 | He was a young communist and I think it was United Press

02:25:38.140 | he was working for, they sent him there.

02:25:40.160 | And when he went there, he's like,

02:25:41.780 | oh, this is not what I thought it was gonna be like.

02:25:44.320 | This is horrible.

02:25:45.380 | And he turned very heavily against it.

02:25:48.060 | But he talks about how they would write one thing

02:25:52.420 | and say another thing and then think another thing.

02:25:55.180 | And each of those steps was just more and more

02:25:57.220 | like kind of lying in terms of maintaining your sanity

02:26:00.340 | and maintaining your narrative.

02:26:02.440 | - So, you reference Ann Applebaum and say that,

02:26:07.020 | quote, "Starvation was not simply a consequence.

02:26:09.580 | "It was the goal and it was the law.

02:26:11.340 | "Stalin intended to break the Ukrainians once and for all.

02:26:15.180 | "It thus became common for villagers to spy

02:26:17.540 | "and inform on one another.

02:26:18.980 | "Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain

02:26:21.900 | "might be the easiest and safest way

02:26:23.760 | "to procure food for one's family."

02:26:26.260 | - Yeah.

02:26:27.100 | - To what degree was this the intention?

02:26:31.700 | To what degree did Stalin anticipate this kind of suffering

02:26:36.540 | as a consequence of the collectivization policy?

02:26:39.580 | - I don't know that he intended the suffering

02:26:41.740 | to be a consequence of the collectivization.

02:26:44.180 | But it was quite apparent,

02:26:48.500 | and I think there's a pretty heavy consensus nowadays,

02:26:51.780 | that his goal was very much, 'cause Ukraine, again,

02:26:56.020 | resented the czar and had this kind of

02:26:59.380 | very contentious relationship with Russia,

02:27:02.400 | which obviously very clearly remains today.

02:27:04.660 | I mean, the hatred of Ukrainians

02:27:06.020 | for Russians preceded Putin's war.

02:27:08.540 | I mean, this is, even when I was a kid,

02:27:12.220 | I obviously don't remember it,

02:27:13.680 | but my parents just told me the hatred that they had.

02:27:15.900 | And understandably, I mean,

02:27:16.780 | they were basically under foreign occupation,

02:27:18.540 | what they regard as foreign occupation for--

02:27:20.460 | - So your parents talked about a hatred

02:27:22.560 | by Ukrainians towards Russians?

02:27:23.940 | - Oh, yes.

02:27:24.860 | Oh, yes.

02:27:25.700 | - I mean, I, you know,

02:27:26.860 | I certainly, having visited there this year,

02:27:31.460 | because of the most recent invasion in February,

02:27:36.300 | that hatred is nationwide and very intense.

02:27:41.160 | But I don't know, I think the feeling,

02:27:43.300 | the emotions were much more complex before.

02:27:45.720 | - But at the same time,

02:27:46.560 | at least they were under occupation before, right?

02:27:48.460 | And they couldn't speak Ukrainian,

02:27:49.660 | they had to speak Russian.

02:27:51.160 | So this was a thing.

02:27:52.480 | - But because of the forced intermixing,

02:27:56.980 | it's a more complex story.

02:28:00.420 | - Okay.

02:28:01.500 | But I mean, they weren't certainly fans.

02:28:03.500 | - Yeah, but there's people that came from Russia

02:28:07.780 | that are living there, they're marrying,

02:28:09.060 | they're falling in love, they're working with each other.

02:28:11.820 | So there is the bigger atrocity of the genocide of it,

02:28:15.180 | but there's also the reality of intermixing of peoples.

02:28:18.260 | - Well, sure, I mean--

02:28:19.100 | - There's the atrocity of slavery in the United States,

02:28:22.460 | but then there's also a reality

02:28:24.060 | that there's now an intermixing of peoples,

02:28:27.300 | and now they fall in love,

02:28:28.300 | and they live after slavery's abolished.

02:28:30.980 | That's just the reality.

02:28:32.220 | After the genocide,

02:28:35.060 | proceeds a kind of generational integration

02:28:41.120 | that still remembers, like the suffering reverberates,

02:28:44.460 | but there's still,

02:28:45.580 | it's a different culture that's created.

02:28:48.780 | And now, I think,

02:28:50.560 | I mean, I have complex story,

02:28:55.940 | most of my family's from Ukraine,

02:28:57.640 | and my understanding is grounded in Soviet Ukraine.

02:29:03.740 | But there is something in the last 30 years

02:29:08.100 | that's different,

02:29:09.440 | where now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

02:29:11.600 | there's a true, maybe renewed fight for independence,

02:29:15.960 | and that's a different thing.

02:29:18.080 | - But there's also a difference,

02:29:19.120 | like if I go to North Korea as an American,

02:29:22.020 | they're very friendly now, right?

02:29:24.660 | They don't perceive me as part of the yank devils.

02:29:29.560 | They're like, "Okay, you're an American,

02:29:30.900 | "but you come from America."

02:29:32.160 | So yeah, there's gonna be intermarriage,

02:29:34.100 | but that's a big difference

02:29:35.140 | between the perception of Russia as an entity,

02:29:39.780 | as opposed to some individual Russians.

02:29:41.980 | - I just, that wasn't the experience I've had

02:29:48.080 | talking to a lot of friends and family in Ukraine

02:29:50.600 | until the war started.

02:29:51.880 | - Really, so they really didn't have

02:29:53.320 | this kind of low-key animosity toward Russians?

02:29:55.400 | - No, there was a lot of factional conflict inside Ukraine.

02:30:00.400 | - Okay.

02:30:02.800 | - Now, the whole country is united.

02:30:04.960 | I think there's a clarity now,

02:30:07.440 | the war gave a clarity that wasn't there before.

02:30:11.600 | - No, this is, I was saying earlier

02:30:12.660 | how humans define themselves by opposition.

02:30:14.600 | So now that there's a war, it's like,

02:30:16.280 | okay, all this little stuff doesn't matter.

02:30:18.520 | We are all united 'cause we have a common enemy.

02:30:20.400 | - But there's also, as you know, there's regions,

02:30:23.520 | and there's just groups of different people,

02:30:27.800 | and then one of the big divides, of course,

02:30:29.580 | is the city versus rural,

02:30:31.520 | and then in the case of Ukraine,

02:30:32.920 | it's Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine.

02:30:36.760 | It's very difficult to know what the truth is,

02:30:38.840 | 'cause my personal experience is sampled.

02:30:41.160 | - Right.

02:30:42.000 | - I don't know how many Ukrainians I know,

02:30:44.280 | maybe like 30 or 40, before this trip, like 30 or 40,

02:30:47.440 | and then I'm close with just a handful.

02:30:49.960 | But then it's hard to know,

02:30:52.220 | 'cause you get a lot of Western press perspective,

02:30:54.360 | and you get the Russian perspective,

02:30:55.760 | and you get other perspectives,

02:30:56.880 | and it's very hard to know how much hate there is

02:31:00.720 | outside of this conflict.

02:31:02.640 | So my primary question is,

02:31:05.040 | and this is what I ask a lot of people

02:31:06.440 | when I visit Ukraine is,

02:31:08.240 | will you ever be able to forgive the Russians?

02:31:13.080 | And a lot of people said, "Never, never."

02:31:17.660 | So this isn't just about,

02:31:19.160 | assuming we win, they would say,

02:31:22.280 | assuming we win, we still will not ever forgive.

02:31:24.980 | Never, never forgive.

02:31:27.480 | And they said it in a way where like,

02:31:30.500 | not only us, but our children will never forgive.

02:31:33.800 | And it wasn't just, you know what,

02:31:35.400 | it wasn't just about Russia or the Russian leadership,

02:31:39.360 | it was about the Russian people.

02:31:41.020 | But a lot of people also said that

02:31:45.840 | this is our feeling currently, we understand.

02:31:48.640 | Like you're lost in the rage of war.

02:31:51.600 | - Yeah.

02:31:52.680 | - Because you lose so much.

02:31:53.520 | - But I mean, if you asked Americans,

02:31:54.920 | would you ever be friends with Germany or Japan,

02:31:57.040 | they'd be like, "Are you kidding?

02:31:58.360 | "After Pearl Harbor?"

02:32:00.000 | - Yeah.

02:32:00.840 | But of course, most Americans didn't feel Pearl Harbor

02:32:03.600 | is different.

02:32:04.720 | It's a good point when it's your own land,

02:32:08.680 | but when, imagine it wasn't just Pearl Harbor,

02:32:12.840 | but it was New York and Chicago and Dallas

02:32:17.840 | and all these cities being bombed.

02:32:20.400 | Yeah, yeah.

02:32:26.280 | - It's just a linger on this war in Ukraine currently.

02:32:31.280 | Does it break your heart to see what's going on there now,

02:32:36.240 | that it's on the same land as the same cities,

02:32:40.880 | the same stories are now brought back to the surface,

02:32:44.640 | like the generational pain as it was

02:32:47.880 | in the time that you're writing about?

02:32:51.060 | Do you think it's a fundamentally different country,

02:32:53.800 | different war, different situation,

02:32:55.280 | or do you hear echoes of the same?

02:32:59.160 | - I don't think it's the same

02:33:00.840 | because I think there is no one,

02:33:04.960 | or I mean, there is no one who is like,

02:33:09.280 | "I'm glad this is happening to the Ukrainian people," right?

02:33:12.680 | So even the people who are for Putin and for the invasion

02:33:17.200 | and whatever justification they might have for his war,

02:33:21.040 | no one is like, "Yeah, let's get those darn Ukrainians."

02:33:25.000 | I think there was that sense in America after 9/11

02:33:29.320 | when we invade Afghanistan and Iraq

02:33:32.280 | and there was like, "F those Iraqis, F those Afghan people."

02:33:35.380 | Whereas now, I think it's completely the opposite.

02:33:40.640 | I also think a lot of Russians, I'm sure if I ask them,

02:33:44.280 | they're not thinking like,

02:33:45.800 | "Let's wipe the Ukrainian people off the map."

02:33:47.720 | I think whatever reasons they have,

02:33:49.720 | it's not kind of going after this.

02:33:51.840 | Even if you have to kind of rile up people

02:33:53.600 | against the citizenry, it's not to that level

02:33:56.240 | of the hatred of the kulaks, hatred of those villages.

02:34:01.240 | - There's still a belief though amongst the soldiers

02:34:05.200 | outside of the big cities,

02:34:06.200 | their belief that the Ukrainian people

02:34:08.840 | who the Russian soldiers believe

02:34:10.360 | are their brothers and sisters

02:34:11.900 | are occupied by an evil regime.

02:34:14.040 | - Okay. - So you need to save them

02:34:15.440 | from the evil regime.

02:34:16.320 | - That's also very different from the Holodomor.

02:34:20.080 | And also there is dispute in the press

02:34:24.700 | about the causes, the consequences, the victims,

02:34:28.440 | the villains of Putin's war.

02:34:31.360 | But when it came to this,

02:34:33.240 | no one is denying that the war is happening.

02:34:37.240 | The New York Times isn't saying everything is fine

02:34:41.000 | and the only reason people are saying it's a problem

02:34:43.640 | is 'cause they hate Putin or they hate Zelensky.

02:34:46.120 | That's not a thing.

02:34:47.520 | And the fact that we have so much footage

02:34:50.320 | of what's happening in Ukraine.

02:34:52.840 | And you have, it takes two seconds to go on Google

02:34:55.880 | and you have a map of Russian advancement,

02:34:58.400 | what parts are they occupying,

02:35:01.080 | what parts are not under their control.

02:35:03.000 | I did a little live stream,

02:35:05.200 | I raised money for Ukrainian refugees to feed them

02:35:08.160 | 'cause that's my concern, just keeping people fed.

02:35:10.620 | There was none of that.

02:35:13.360 | And the two people who kind of spoke the truth,

02:35:16.840 | Gareth Jones was shot, I think,

02:35:18.440 | the day before his 30th birthday

02:35:21.080 | while he was uncovering news, I think it was in Mongolia.

02:35:25.920 | Malcolm Muggeridge had problem finding work

02:35:28.560 | when he exposed this.

02:35:29.840 | And I think, like we was talking about earlier,

02:35:33.560 | the ubiquity of things like cell phones and camera phones

02:35:37.720 | would make something like this,

02:35:39.920 | I don't know, I wouldn't say an impossibility,

02:35:42.160 | they could still do it,

02:35:43.560 | but it would be really hard to cover it up.

02:35:47.600 | - Well, sort of to push back on that,

02:35:49.800 | if you just look at Iran, I would draw a difference,

02:35:53.560 | I agree with you mostly,

02:35:54.840 | but I would also draw a different distinction

02:35:56.760 | when the atrocities happening to your own people

02:36:01.000 | versus there's a war.

02:36:02.320 | Ukraine is a sovereign independent nation,

02:36:04.720 | there's not a war between two nations.

02:36:06.840 | It feels like it's easier for journalists

02:36:08.680 | to somehow reveal the truth in that.

02:36:10.760 | When the atrocities happen within the Soviet Union,

02:36:13.800 | for some reason, that's easier to hide.

02:36:16.520 | That's easier for journalists to deceive themselves

02:36:18.640 | and easier for the authoritarian leader to hide the--

02:36:21.240 | - I think I agree with you.

02:36:22.480 | - And so that's the dark, I mean, that's why people,

02:36:25.880 | maybe you can educate me on this,

02:36:29.000 | but this is why I think people don't talk about

02:36:34.000 | Holodomor and other atrocities, the Great Leap Forward,

02:36:39.960 | because it's inside the country,

02:36:42.080 | versus the Holocaust, that's part of a war.

02:36:45.000 | Why is that that we,

02:36:47.340 | that we're too almost like afraid, too polite,

02:36:54.120 | too, what is it that we don't wanna cover the atrocities

02:36:57.120 | because it's inside the country?

02:36:58.200 | Like it's their business, so we don't want to touch it.

02:37:01.040 | Is that what, what is it, why?

02:37:01.880 | - I think it's that what we refer to as the news

02:37:06.240 | is in the business of selling narratives, right?

02:37:09.000 | And the narrative of the Holocaust is a very powerful one,

02:37:12.680 | which is if you let hatred of a subgroup in a population

02:37:17.680 | get out of control, this is the ultimate consequence,

02:37:23.240 | and this is something that we all have to be scared of

02:37:26.120 | and do everything in our power to avoid in the future

02:37:28.120 | for any outgroup.

02:37:29.620 | Whereas what's the narrative of the Holodomor?

02:37:33.520 | Sometimes governments kill their own citizens.

02:37:35.480 | There's nothing you could do about it.

02:37:37.240 | There's nothing we, I mean,

02:37:38.840 | they wouldn't have let us send food.

02:37:39.960 | They wouldn't acknowledge, like the newspapers,

02:37:41.800 | even Russia weren't acknowledging it.

02:37:43.440 | Like what's the, like this is some of the issues I had

02:37:46.760 | with regard to trying to advocate

02:37:48.760 | for the North Korean people.

02:37:50.280 | The reporters would be like,

02:37:51.120 | "Well, what can I do as an American?"

02:37:52.720 | It's a very natural question.

02:37:54.360 | And I'm like, "I don't know.

02:37:55.680 | "I like, all I know is how to speak to what is happening,

02:37:59.400 | "but in terms of next steps,

02:38:00.800 | "I don't have a good answer for you."

02:38:02.280 | So that is where the news kind of does break down

02:38:06.680 | if there isn't a story or a call to action,

02:38:10.160 | the kind of, you're kind of almost like having a movie

02:38:12.960 | with a cliffhanger and there's no sequel.

02:38:14.680 | It's like, what am I supposed to do here?

02:38:16.240 | Like, this is not scratching that itch,

02:38:18.360 | which for me, as a consumer of news, you know,

02:38:21.160 | a layman is like, okay, here's the story.

02:38:23.200 | There was a bad guy and the cops shot him

02:38:25.240 | or they took him to jail.

02:38:26.240 | And now the bad guy's caught, beginning, middle, end.

02:38:28.440 | Here, it's just like, Mao did this.

02:38:30.800 | A lot of people were executed and starved.

02:38:33.280 | Isn't that awful?

02:38:34.440 | Well, and Mao's still in power.

02:38:36.200 | Now Richard Nixon is raising a toast to him.

02:38:37.960 | Like, that story is just like,

02:38:39.680 | how am I supposed to feel about this?

02:38:42.120 | - Yeah, it feels like when there's tanks

02:38:44.600 | and there's war and there's military conflict,

02:38:46.880 | then it's more actionable.

02:38:48.640 | You can cover it.

02:38:49.600 | - Yeah.

02:38:50.440 | - I mean, it did seem like Nazi Germany,

02:38:52.520 | I don't know if the Holocaust was the thing

02:38:54.240 | that made it most coverable.

02:38:55.440 | I think it was that this is a threat

02:38:57.280 | to the entire civilization.

02:38:59.320 | - Well, yeah, we were at war with them, yeah.

02:39:00.960 | - That's what makes it coverable.

02:39:02.440 | And if the Holocaust was happening

02:39:04.240 | just inside that country, inside of Germany.

02:39:06.780 | Or even if it didn't expand beyond Poland.

02:39:10.400 | - Yeah, it would be like a footnote.

02:39:13.000 | It was in many ways a footnote.

02:39:14.280 | Like, many of the early steps toward it was like,

02:39:16.600 | they didn't cover it.

02:39:17.440 | It's just like, all right,

02:39:18.260 | they're being oppressive toward their own people, okay.

02:39:20.240 | - Especially given some of the,

02:39:21.760 | maybe if you negotiate certain peace treaties

02:39:25.240 | with the Soviet Union and with Germany.

02:39:26.720 | Like, you're too, the pacifist imperative.

02:39:30.320 | Oh, boy.

02:39:34.200 | Sorry, Santa.

02:39:35.100 | - Is that what you say every time you masturbate?

02:39:39.640 | No, after you're done.

02:39:42.560 | You know, sorry.

02:39:43.600 | I apologize.

02:39:44.920 | All right.

02:39:46.080 | Now, see, I hate it when you don't yes and,

02:39:48.600 | because it leaves me in a hole I dug for myself.

02:39:51.820 | And I sit there in a hole.

02:39:55.200 | In my sadness.

02:39:58.360 | How long have you been writing this book?

02:40:00.960 | I mean, how long? - Two years.

02:40:02.080 | - Mentally, it was like two years.

02:40:03.360 | Since you spend time with it.

02:40:05.280 | - No, almost three, two and a half, yeah.

02:40:09.120 | - And I suppose it stays with you much longer.

02:40:11.480 | Like you said, your family.

02:40:12.880 | So, in many ways, this is a book

02:40:16.040 | you've been writing your whole life.

02:40:17.760 | - I think that's fair

02:40:18.600 | that all my work's been leading to this, yeah.

02:40:21.080 | It's certainly the most, in my opinion,

02:40:22.480 | the most important thing I've done.

02:40:24.240 | - What stands out to you about Haldemar?

02:40:29.200 | What moments, what aspects of human nature stand out to you?

02:40:33.580 | (phone beeps)

02:40:35.820 | - I don't know, I think that story is,

02:40:38.540 | I don't wanna say story, but I meant like that incident is,

02:40:43.060 | I mean, I was familiar with it before,

02:40:44.900 | you know what I mean?

02:40:45.740 | So I kinda knew about it, you know,

02:40:47.740 | in part thanks to kind of the North Korean work

02:40:50.140 | and coming from Ukraine.

02:40:52.600 | The thing that was also kind of insane about it

02:40:56.580 | is that they were taking all this grain

02:40:59.220 | and not using it even to feed the Russian people.

02:41:01.220 | They were selling it for export for hard currency.

02:41:03.720 | I think what the takeaway there,

02:41:10.500 | and I think, again, this is something Westerners

02:41:12.580 | and especially Americans don't appreciate,

02:41:15.500 | they think that evil often has like a logic to it, right?

02:41:20.500 | And it's like, why would,

02:41:24.620 | like, because it makes no sense to them,

02:41:26.420 | like, why would they kill their own people?

02:41:29.220 | Therefore, it probably didn't happen, right?

02:41:31.140 | There's that thing.

02:41:32.620 | They really think like, okay,

02:41:34.540 | they can understand country A conquers country B

02:41:38.740 | and slaughters a bunch of people country B

02:41:40.940 | as a means of conquest.

02:41:42.100 | Like that kind of makes sense to them, they know that thing.

02:41:44.500 | But like, why are you starving all these people?

02:41:47.860 | Like, what are you gaining out of it?

02:41:49.380 | That doesn't make sense to them.

02:41:51.500 | And because it doesn't make sense,

02:41:52.820 | there's kind of like, well,

02:41:54.340 | it's probably more of the story that I'm hearing.

02:41:56.060 | And a lot of times there's not,

02:41:58.060 | it's just like evil for the sake of power.

02:42:01.020 | And we don't really have that,

02:42:05.380 | certainly anywhere near that scale and never have,

02:42:09.020 | certainly since America has been a thing.

02:42:13.900 | I mean, it's, and the fact that this is like the 30s,

02:42:18.420 | you know what I mean?

02:42:19.260 | This isn't that long ago.

02:42:21.100 | But I think also the narrative in some ways is

02:42:26.100 | how technology is also something

02:42:30.380 | that kind of people have mixed feelings about.

02:42:33.140 | Like I said this before,

02:42:34.220 | and this is something I really believe very strongly,

02:42:36.820 | the ability of information to be captured and spread easily

02:42:41.100 | is such an effective tool in exposing humanity at its worst.

02:42:46.100 | Because it's one thing if I sit here

02:42:51.380 | and tell you what I saw in these villages,

02:42:54.860 | it's another thing if I sat you down and showed you a YouTube

02:42:57.780 | and you and I don't know what it's like

02:42:59.900 | to look in the eyes of someone who's thinking

02:43:02.300 | about eating their own kids.

02:43:04.300 | I mean, and you see that face

02:43:06.420 | and you know it's not some CGI, it will haunt you forever.

02:43:11.100 | - Just looking at the different mechanisms

02:43:14.540 | that made all of this happen.

02:43:15.900 | So this is not just one guy, Stalin, having a policy.

02:43:19.340 | There's a whole system.

02:43:22.500 | I mean, one of it is just a system of fear.

02:43:25.380 | But how do you implement that system of fear?

02:43:28.100 | - Well--

02:43:28.940 | - There's a giant bureaucracy of fear.

02:43:30.460 | - Yeah, so what he implemented with the Great Terror is--

02:43:35.180 | - That's in the late 30s.

02:43:37.340 | - Well, it's throughout the 30s, but yeah,

02:43:39.540 | like it starts in the mid to late 30s.

02:43:43.420 | Basically, communism is based on the common good

02:43:47.460 | and the public good.

02:43:48.860 | And anything private, which was bourgeois, was a problem.

02:43:52.060 | When they were started, when the revolution came,

02:43:55.100 | the October Revolution,

02:43:56.380 | they wanted to recreate society entirely.

02:43:59.020 | And that included like, okay, let's make it so

02:44:01.660 | everyone eats in like cafeterias,

02:44:05.380 | so they're not eating by themselves.

02:44:06.620 | Let's design buildings so everyone has to share bathrooms.

02:44:09.460 | Like their whole plan was to have,

02:44:11.740 | eliminate any kind of concept of privacy at all.

02:44:14.500 | They also had this bizarre kind of radical idea

02:44:16.700 | of like attacking shame.

02:44:19.060 | So many of these, before the 1917,

02:44:21.660 | people were also very involved with like free love,

02:44:24.580 | 'cause the idea of like having this private bond

02:44:26.700 | between husband and wife was also bourgeois and old fashioned

02:44:29.100 | and we're the society of the future.

02:44:31.700 | That changed relatively quickly,

02:44:33.900 | but they were talking about things

02:44:34.900 | like raising kids communally and so on and so forth.

02:44:38.740 | So for Stalin, if you and I are friends,

02:44:42.580 | we have a bond that's a threat to him.

02:44:45.380 | The family's a threat.

02:44:47.300 | Any kind of organization is a threat

02:44:48.980 | 'cause it's a power center that is not between,

02:44:53.180 | a relationship between you and him.

02:44:54.180 | Now you have a relationship with somebody else.

02:44:55.820 | So he systemically went through that whole society

02:45:00.820 | and it became, there were certain things that became a crime.

02:45:06.220 | Then it became a crime to be a spouse

02:45:08.860 | of the enemy of the people.

02:45:10.340 | Now right away, I as a child become an orphan

02:45:13.220 | 'cause my dad was an enemy of the people.

02:45:15.140 | My mom is married to an enemy of the people.

02:45:17.740 | Now I don't have parents.

02:45:18.820 | They get arrested or executed or whatever.

02:45:21.100 | But now I have nowhere to go,

02:45:23.220 | but I can't go to my friend's house

02:45:25.400 | because their family doesn't wanna take in a child

02:45:27.540 | at the enemy of the people.

02:45:29.420 | You had this culture where everyone was very much encouraged

02:45:33.700 | to turn people in.

02:45:35.340 | And if you're arrested and tortured,

02:45:39.500 | you're like, okay, who are your accomplices?

02:45:41.780 | And now you just gotta name names people you knew.

02:45:44.460 | And then it becomes this whole chain.

02:45:46.060 | And it's like, how am I gonna protest my innocence

02:45:48.460 | if Lex just said, I worked with Michael

02:45:53.180 | and we were working with Trotskyists

02:45:55.100 | and we were plotting to overthrow Stalin.

02:45:56.940 | Lex testified to this.

02:45:58.960 | He signed a confession.

02:46:00.140 | What am I supposed to do now?

02:46:01.780 | So it worked its way in a most viral fashion

02:46:05.100 | through the whole society.

02:46:06.140 | There was this amazing moment where these poor people,

02:46:10.100 | peasants, 'cause obviously the powerless

02:46:11.620 | are often gonna be caught in the web.

02:46:13.780 | They were going to jail for being Trotskyites

02:46:17.140 | and they had to ask themselves, what's a Tractorist?

02:46:19.340 | Like they didn't even know who Trotsky was.

02:46:21.780 | And the other thing is ethnicity was a problem, right?

02:46:25.260 | If you were an ethnicity, you have more power

02:46:28.620 | with other members of that ethnicity

02:46:30.860 | than you have with this kind of broader Soviet culture.

02:46:33.580 | So he would just deport entire populations

02:46:37.020 | from their ancestral lands to other parts,

02:46:39.420 | A, to spread the population around,

02:46:41.060 | but also to break that link between the peoples

02:46:44.340 | and their lands.

02:46:45.220 | There was this 1937 NKVD order against Polish people

02:46:49.260 | where it's just like, if you had come from Poland

02:46:51.820 | or had been, just this whole list,

02:46:54.660 | and basically people were being arrested

02:46:56.260 | 'cause they had Polish last names.

02:46:59.020 | And I think it was a million people were killed,

02:47:02.060 | like some astronomical number.

02:47:04.420 | So there was this, anything that was a bond

02:47:08.700 | was a threat to him.

02:47:10.020 | And it went systemically.

02:47:12.020 | So after he had all these kind of executions

02:47:15.260 | of people who were like Lenin's people, the old Bolsheviks,

02:47:18.100 | then he went after, he started arresting the secret police.

02:47:21.660 | He arrested all the cops, he arrested all the judges,

02:47:24.260 | and all these prisoners got to see the judges

02:47:26.980 | who yelled at them for being counter-revolutionaries

02:47:28.980 | and spies, now they were in the jails.

02:47:31.140 | If you were a foreigner, there was a huge push

02:47:34.420 | from the Soviet Union toward African-Americans, right?

02:47:37.300 | 'Cause they're like, look, you were living

02:47:38.500 | in a racist country, here we have no racial inequality,

02:47:43.500 | come live here.

02:47:45.660 | A bunch of them went and they were all vanished.

02:47:48.620 | Anyone who knew information about the outside world,

02:47:50.620 | if you were a foreigner, Andre Babel,

02:47:53.740 | I forget his first name, he had a French writer

02:47:56.380 | he was friends with, he was arrested and shot

02:47:58.260 | 'cause he's a spy, 'cause you're friends with Melrose.

02:48:00.460 | And that means if you're not a foreigner, you're a spy.

02:48:02.420 | Speaking Esperanto became a crime.

02:48:04.660 | Having a pen pal, literally anything

02:48:06.940 | that was some kind of chain between yourself

02:48:09.260 | and someone else was a threat and was grounds for arrest.

02:48:13.300 | It was, the Russians would joke about how relieved

02:48:17.860 | they would be if someone knocked on your door

02:48:19.900 | in the middle of the night to tell you your house was on fire

02:48:22.140 | 'cause it wasn't the NKVD coming to arrest you.

02:48:24.780 | - And of course, most of the accusations

02:48:26.380 | probably were completely false.

02:48:28.860 | So not only 'cause you not do all of those things,

02:48:31.820 | you were also a victim of just random--

02:48:35.620 | - Being late to work became a felony.

02:48:37.820 | And also not doing your job became a felony

02:48:40.220 | 'cause now you're taking food or product away

02:48:43.980 | from the people and you're supposed to be there

02:48:45.500 | working for the people.

02:48:46.820 | There's this one story which I was doing the audio book

02:48:50.180 | and this is like, I still trying to get through

02:48:51.900 | without crying, this was 1920.

02:48:53.940 | They were a bunch of kids in Moscow who were pickpockets

02:48:57.020 | between ages 11 and 15.

02:48:58.860 | They rounded them up and they're like,

02:49:00.420 | "All right, point out your accomplices."

02:49:02.180 | And they would take them in the trams

02:49:03.620 | and you have to point out people,

02:49:04.980 | then they would take them back to the cellar,

02:49:07.500 | beat the crap out of these children

02:49:09.900 | and then they take them out again.

02:49:11.060 | And if they didn't point out to anybody,

02:49:12.700 | they beat them, they're like, "All right."

02:49:13.940 | So they just start pointing at random.

02:49:15.700 | And the thing that was really sick about this story,

02:49:17.660 | if that wasn't sick enough,

02:49:19.420 | is that the screams that the other criminals,

02:49:22.780 | the adult hardened criminals had to hear from these children

02:49:25.500 | as they realized they were being taken back to the cellar.

02:49:28.300 | It was just horrifying.

02:49:33.900 | - So they tortured people,

02:49:36.140 | they tortured confessions out of people.

02:49:37.860 | - Yes.

02:49:38.940 | - At scale.

02:49:40.020 | - Oh, yes.

02:49:40.860 | - And the dark aspect of this is it's all,

02:49:45.140 | it's like this weird, it's a bureaucracy of torture.

02:49:50.100 | - Yes.

02:49:50.940 | - So it's not like there's, what is it?

02:49:54.460 | The torturer is afraid of,

02:49:56.540 | like does it so that he doesn't become the prisoner.

02:50:00.500 | - Right, because then it's like,

02:50:02.020 | "Oh, you couldn't get a confession out of him?

02:50:04.420 | "Are you an enemy that people know as well?"

02:50:06.620 | And the thing that was even crazier

02:50:08.660 | is that a lot of these interrogators were frustrated

02:50:11.940 | 'cause they're like, "Look, we both know you're innocent.

02:50:15.500 | "Just sign this confession and make my life easier."

02:50:17.940 | They knew it was crap.

02:50:19.300 | Stalin joked about, Stalin joked about this.

02:50:22.780 | This is one of his little jokes.

02:50:24.380 | There was a kid who was arrested and he was said,

02:50:29.220 | oh, was forced to say, "You wrote Eugene Onegin,"

02:50:32.900 | which is a play.

02:50:33.740 | He goes, "That play was by Pushkin."

02:50:35.100 | And they tortured him and they tortured him, tortured him.

02:50:37.180 | And then his parents are walking down the street

02:50:39.100 | and they run into a secret police and they go,

02:50:40.780 | "Congratulations."

02:50:41.780 | And they go, "For what?"

02:50:42.620 | They go, "Your son wrote Eugene Onegin.

02:50:44.900 | "He admitted to it last night."

02:50:46.060 | Like, it's just like they could get you to say anything

02:50:49.100 | and what else was really, really sick,

02:50:51.220 | which they understood, is they lowered the death penalty

02:50:55.580 | for kids, I think it's either 14 or 12.

02:50:57.540 | I don't remember off the top of my head.

02:50:59.100 | And what Stalin's head of the secret police did

02:51:02.380 | is when you were interrogating someone,

02:51:05.380 | you either had to have some of that family member's

02:51:08.980 | possessions on the desk or a copy of the decree

02:51:13.660 | that's saying that they can go after your family.

02:51:16.940 | And the amount of people who would confess to anything

02:51:19.420 | when they saw their family was in danger

02:51:21.500 | and they knew this wasn't a bluff, was astronomical.

02:51:25.100 | And then it becomes a chain.

02:51:26.460 | 'Cause if you confess and I have your confession,

02:51:28.820 | how hard is it to get your neighbor?

02:51:30.620 | - What do you make of the, for most of the time,

02:51:35.220 | the NKVD was about the head of NKVD,

02:51:39.580 | Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.

02:51:41.700 | - No, Beria, yeah.

02:51:42.700 | I have a death warrant signed by him

02:51:45.340 | hanging in my kitchen that I acquired.

02:51:48.820 | He was one of the most evil people who ever lived.

02:51:52.080 | The thing that Americans don't appreciate

02:51:55.380 | is how clever some of this sadism is.

02:52:00.260 | So there was one actress,

02:52:01.860 | I think he took her back to his house

02:52:04.580 | and he asked her to, he tried to get her to sleep with him.

02:52:07.100 | And he promised her that if she did,

02:52:09.220 | her father and either her husband or her grandfather,

02:52:11.820 | I don't remember which one it was,

02:52:12.660 | is gonna be released from jail.

02:52:13.940 | Well, they were already dead at that point.

02:52:15.220 | He had them executed.

02:52:17.060 | They're still finding the bodies of the women he murdered

02:52:20.420 | in the grounds of his dacha, it's an embassy now.

02:52:23.100 | And the thing is Stalin knew,

02:52:24.620 | 'cause at one point Stalin,

02:52:25.740 | there's a picture of Stalin's daughter in his lap,

02:52:28.260 | and she was at his house one day and Stalin calls up,

02:52:30.580 | he goes, "Get out of there immediately."

02:52:32.020 | So he, like a good bureaucrat,

02:52:35.140 | he kept a list of all of his sexual partners.

02:52:38.340 | It's still sealed,

02:52:40.940 | but both him and his bodyguard had this list.

02:52:43.500 | - So just to clarify, he headed the operation

02:52:46.820 | that did this whole giant mechanism of forced confessions.

02:52:51.340 | He was part of expanding the Gulags,

02:52:53.140 | so he wasn't the head of the Gulags,

02:52:54.380 | but he was part of this giant machine.

02:52:55.940 | - And his famous quote was,

02:52:57.020 | "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

02:52:59.140 | - Yeah.

02:53:00.300 | But on top of that, what you're describing

02:53:02.340 | is he was also, related or not,

02:53:05.580 | was also just a mass rapist.

02:53:07.900 | - Yes, and there's some dispute

02:53:09.620 | about whether he went after kids with his rapes,

02:53:11.780 | but there's plenty of adult women that were targets for this.

02:53:16.020 | There was also another little joke about him

02:53:17.620 | about how Stalin is looking for his pipe

02:53:19.660 | and he can't find it and he calls Beria,

02:53:21.700 | and he's like, "Okay, I can't find this pipe."

02:53:23.500 | And in the afternoon he calls Beria again,

02:53:24.940 | he's like, "Oh, I found the pipe."

02:53:25.820 | He goes, "But Comrade Stalin,

02:53:26.980 | "we've got four people to confess to steal it already."

02:53:29.380 | So you have to laugh, but then you think about the nature

02:53:31.620 | of how it operates.

02:53:32.940 | - Well, and also the fact that this kind of person

02:53:35.580 | was allowed to run, I mean, I suppose,

02:53:39.380 | it's all different kinds of evil,

02:53:42.020 | and rape was just a part of the story.

02:53:44.500 | His own personal willingness to oversee torture

02:53:51.940 | and commit torture himself and rape.

02:53:55.100 | - But it's also what happens when you're in a country

02:53:57.340 | where it has no rights of any kind.

02:53:59.700 | - And by the way, I should mention

02:54:01.540 | that people should get your book and audio,

02:54:04.740 | when is your audio book coming out?

02:54:05.860 | - It's in a couple of weeks, so it'll be out shortly, yeah.

02:54:08.620 | - You gave me the great honor of voicing this man.

02:54:12.180 | - That's for the promo.

02:54:13.380 | - Yeah, for the promo.

02:54:14.220 | - Yeah, the video. - Excellent.

02:54:15.820 | I appreciate that.

02:54:17.080 | For a moment, I actually,

02:54:21.880 | it was really difficult.

02:54:23.560 | - Really? - Yeah.

02:54:24.760 | - It was just a sentence.

02:54:26.080 | - I understand, I understand.

02:54:27.960 | 'Cause it takes you to that place.

02:54:33.080 | - Oh yeah, 'cause he told her,

02:54:34.400 | "Scream if you want, doesn't matter."

02:54:36.520 | And he was right, that's the thing, he wasn't bluffing.

02:54:39.160 | You could scream, these women could scream their head off,

02:54:41.360 | no one's gonna come help him.

02:54:43.000 | He would drive around Moscow at night

02:54:44.600 | in his limo looking for victims.

02:54:46.640 | - But somehow me saying those words was tough.

02:54:48.920 | - I'm sure.

02:54:50.120 | - It was tough.

02:54:51.940 | - Because this is where we came from,

02:54:55.480 | do you know what I mean?

02:54:56.320 | This isn't just some kind of Tolkien villain.

02:55:00.040 | - But it also was tough 'cause I could see myself

02:55:02.280 | being somewhere in that machine somewhere.

02:55:04.360 | Somehow that put me right there.

02:55:06.080 | Any cog in that machine is committing evil.

02:55:15.440 | - Yes.

02:55:16.640 | - That's the dark thing.

02:55:18.720 | I think the higher you are to the top,

02:55:23.720 | the closer you are to the top,

02:55:26.040 | the more ability you have to stop it.

02:55:29.600 | But the less, the more freedom you have to stop it,

02:55:35.360 | I suppose.

02:55:36.200 | - To a point, yeah.

02:55:39.080 | - But like the little things.

02:55:40.560 | So Beria had the freedom to commit rape, or not to.

02:55:48.000 | And so he chooses to sort of increase the amount of evil

02:55:53.000 | he's putting out into the world.

02:55:55.840 | - But then you have to counterbalance that,

02:55:57.600 | as dark as this calculus is,

02:55:59.800 | after Stalin dies, that week they start

02:56:04.040 | making the gulag shrink.

02:56:06.080 | They start pulling back on the labor camps.

02:56:09.360 | So that is a big plus in his side.

02:56:15.760 | You start liberating, having this mass amnesty

02:56:18.080 | and freeing people from work camps.

02:56:21.440 | That's not minor things.

02:56:22.760 | So it's crazy.

02:56:24.200 | It's like, I'm not Saint Peter, right?

02:56:27.440 | I don't know, I'm not saying he's a good person,

02:56:30.520 | but it's kind of insane that someone can do things

02:56:33.920 | that everyone listening to this would regard as pure evil.

02:56:37.920 | And at the same time, this guy also, when the time came,

02:56:42.560 | saved tens of thousands of lives.

02:56:45.480 | - So in some sense, Stalin is the kind of cancer

02:56:48.760 | that permeates all the Soviet minds.

02:56:51.800 | And once it's gone, you almost wake up,

02:56:54.120 | "Wait a minute, what the fuck was I a part of?"

02:56:57.400 | - And Khrushchev, it was in '56,

02:56:59.920 | when he gave a secret speech behind closed doors,

02:57:03.980 | and he's just like, "All this criticism of Stalin was true.

02:57:07.120 | "This is completely not what Marxism,

02:57:09.000 | "he tried to salvage the system.

02:57:09.900 | "This is not what Marxism's about.

02:57:11.520 | "We can't have a personality cult.

02:57:14.080 | "Stalin killed all these top generals,

02:57:17.680 | "and when Hitler betrayed the pact and invaded,

02:57:20.780 | "Stalin didn't believe his buddy Hitler was gonna do this.

02:57:23.200 | "And as a result of this,

02:57:24.160 | "we lost a lot of territory and lives.

02:57:25.820 | "This is not a military genius.

02:57:27.320 | "This was Stalin being an idiot or a moron,"

02:57:31.280 | whatever term you wanna be.

02:57:33.200 | So, yeah, but the thing is, Khrushchev also was a butcher.

02:57:38.200 | He had a lot of blood on his hands.

02:57:40.520 | You don't take Stalin's seat

02:57:43.160 | without having overlooked a lot of murder and chaos.

02:57:46.040 | So, it's such a,

02:57:49.720 | that's why it's called,

02:57:50.600 | the subtitle of the book's "A Tale of Good and Evil."

02:57:52.600 | There's so much malevolence to go around.

02:57:55.680 | - What do you think was going through Stalin's mind

02:57:59.920 | in the '20s and the '30s?

02:58:01.600 | Did he directly allow himself to acknowledge

02:58:13.480 | the reality of the suffering he was causing?

02:58:16.880 | Like, what does it take to be that human?

02:58:19.280 | I'm almost interested to extract lessons from that

02:58:23.040 | for leaders of today.

02:58:24.500 | Like, how hard is it?

02:58:26.800 | Is it that Stalin is evil,

02:58:28.920 | or can you just delude yourself gradually

02:58:32.320 | into where you don't have a sense

02:58:34.300 | of the effect of your policies on the populace?

02:58:36.720 | - Well, you're not deluding yourself

02:58:38.440 | because you have around you an entire government

02:58:42.360 | of people telling you 24/7 how great you are,

02:58:46.400 | how thankful they are for you,

02:58:47.640 | how awesome you are, you're the best.

02:58:49.560 | So, that certainly gonna play into it.

02:58:52.480 | I've asked myself that question as well.

02:58:54.320 | Like, do these people believe their own bullshit?

02:58:56.400 | And I think the receipts are,

02:58:59.840 | when Elena Ceausescu,

02:59:01.120 | who's one of the four women on the cover,

02:59:03.120 | when she's being taken away to be executed in 1989,

02:59:07.160 | she's yelling at the soldiers,

02:59:08.680 | "How could you?

02:59:09.520 | I raised you like a mother."

02:59:10.960 | So, she at least believed her own bullshit.

02:59:13.520 | With Stalin, he was obviously extremely intelligent.

02:59:18.780 | I think it's kind of easy for us to kind of psychologize

02:59:22.960 | and say he's a sociopath, he's a narcissist,

02:59:25.200 | he's this, he's that.

02:59:26.280 | But at a certain point,

02:59:29.520 | like if you're surrounded by a culture

02:59:33.480 | dedicated to glorifying you,

02:59:35.520 | and everyone you meet is so happy to see you,

02:59:38.280 | and oh my God, all your pronouncements are so good.

02:59:41.400 | And you know what?

02:59:42.600 | If you make a decision that's wrong,

02:59:44.440 | the people around you,

02:59:45.320 | it's their job to tell you why it's not your fault,

02:59:47.680 | it's the fault of the wreckers,

02:59:49.120 | or it's the fault of Hitler, or whoever it is, the kulaks.

02:59:52.920 | At a certain point,

02:59:54.680 | the human mind wants to believe how great it is,

02:59:58.720 | especially someone in that vaunted position.

03:00:00.920 | But he had his low,

03:00:04.120 | there was this one funny,

03:00:06.120 | I'm using the word loosely, quote,

03:00:07.800 | when Hitler invades Russia,

03:00:10.200 | and he couldn't believe it,

03:00:11.760 | and he's just missing in action for days,

03:00:14.080 | 'cause how could Hitler betray me?

03:00:15.320 | We had a deal, birds of a feather.

03:00:17.520 | And he had this quote about like,

03:00:18.840 | "We've taken Lenin's legacy and shitted out our asses."

03:00:21.800 | I think he was very aware,

03:00:23.560 | that's no question that he was aware

03:00:25.640 | that in terms of being a philosopher or a thinker,

03:00:29.000 | he wasn't on Lenin's level, right?

03:00:30.920 | So that was, I'm sure, played a lot into his psychology.

03:00:35.920 | That he never quite lived up to the,

03:00:37.640 | like everything he tried.

03:00:39.640 | I mean, there's some sense of that,

03:00:40.800 | the collectivization,

03:00:42.140 | that this idea was a failure.

03:00:45.860 | The way he responds to the economic policy being a failure,

03:00:51.360 | is to lean in,

03:00:52.720 | and basically torture anyone who says it's a failure,

03:00:57.180 | and double down on the policy.

03:00:59.520 | Like that says something about--

03:01:00.760 | - But it wasn't a failure, it broke the Ukrainians.

03:01:04.920 | You don't think he believed early on,

03:01:06.960 | that's what it turned into,

03:01:08.980 | but you don't think in the very early days,

03:01:12.120 | there was a thought that collectivization

03:01:14.600 | is the right mechanism by which to enact communism.

03:01:19.600 | - But I think his goal was to break their spirit,

03:01:24.600 | and getting them fed was secondary, right?

03:01:28.920 | And given the fact that they stopped complaining,

03:01:32.040 | 'cause they're dead, he got what he wanted.

03:01:35.560 | He got a compliant population.

03:01:37.920 | - I mean, that's really interesting.

03:01:40.080 | I didn't, I wonder how much disagreement there is about,

03:01:43.860 | because if that was the goal from the beginning,

03:01:47.160 | that's a different level of evil.

03:01:49.240 | - I think that was clearly the goal.

03:01:50.440 | So his, like I said earlier,

03:01:52.680 | he broke with Lenin 'cause he wanted socialism

03:01:54.800 | in one country, right?

03:01:55.640 | That was his vision, right?

03:01:57.000 | And he was also very aware that what became the Soviet Union

03:02:00.840 | was extremely diverse, first of all, it's gigantic country,

03:02:03.800 | it's the big country on earth.

03:02:05.000 | It's not always gigantic, you had all these peoples,

03:02:08.780 | these nationalities within it

03:02:10.680 | that have had historical enmity,

03:02:12.520 | and they're not gonna have loyalty to Moscow.

03:02:14.320 | He's a Georgian himself, this was always a big problem.

03:02:16.880 | So that was what he wanted to do as well,

03:02:20.040 | is to homogenize and have them be standardized.

03:02:23.320 | And I don't see how you do that

03:02:26.120 | without either massive re-education,

03:02:28.560 | which is only gonna go so far,

03:02:30.520 | or really just crushing people's spirits.

03:02:34.240 | - So like a forced homogeneity.

03:02:40.360 | - Yeah.

03:02:41.200 | And the other big thing,

03:02:44.520 | a big element of Soviet culture and the Soviet mythology,

03:02:49.200 | I mean, he called, his name was,

03:02:51.160 | he changed his name to Stalin,

03:02:52.520 | I can't even pronounce his Georgian name,

03:02:53.640 | Djokas Vili or something like that.

03:02:55.040 | It means man of steel.

03:02:56.560 | So a large part of the,

03:02:58.080 | and this still remains in Russian culture to this day.

03:03:00.480 | I see in my family too, and like other Russians I know,

03:03:03.440 | there is this pride in ruthlessness,

03:03:06.360 | and this kind of like, I'm so tough,

03:03:08.360 | nothing's gonna affect me.

03:03:09.680 | Like, yeah, we're gonna suffer,

03:03:11.460 | but it's for a greater good or for the long-term,

03:03:13.560 | and not to be kind of sentimental or squeamish about things.

03:03:16.720 | Like that was a big part of it.

03:03:18.080 | - Don't take that away from me too, Michael.

03:03:20.400 | - What do you mean? - You've taken everything.

03:03:21.760 | - Am I wrong?

03:03:23.160 | - I admire, not stoicism, but that kind of hardness.

03:03:29.040 | I look forward to myself, that has nothing to do with Stalin.

03:03:32.440 | - But not to the extent that like, if some,

03:03:34.160 | like for example, like if you see someone suffering,

03:03:39.160 | and that's being used as a mechanism

03:03:42.640 | to get you to change your opinion,

03:03:43.720 | you're like, they're not gonna get to me.

03:03:45.600 | Like that is very much part of that Russian psychology.

03:03:48.000 | - Right.

03:03:48.840 | At least at that time.

03:03:51.200 | - Yes, I think still largely no.

03:03:53.380 | I'm not gonna be manipulated

03:03:56.360 | by someone else's suffering or weakness, that kind of thing.

03:03:58.840 | I think that's really part of it to this day.

03:04:01.040 | - I don't know, I don't know how much of it is character,

03:04:04.040 | how much of it is reality.

03:04:05.080 | - Sure, sure.

03:04:06.000 | I remember, I knew of someone who was,

03:04:12.520 | him and his fiance were Russian,

03:04:14.960 | and they had this big fight, she took off the ring, right?

03:04:18.720 | And she's like, he's like, that's it?

03:04:22.200 | And just like the way he told the story to me,

03:04:24.600 | she's like, what do you want me to say?

03:04:26.080 | Oh, don't leave me, baby.

03:04:27.800 | I can't live without you.

03:04:29.320 | Like that nasty cruelty.

03:04:31.920 | - I don't know, man, I know you're,

03:04:34.400 | I don't know if there's a Russian thing,

03:04:36.400 | that's just a people thing.

03:04:38.600 | - I don't think that's an American thing.

03:04:40.640 | - I think there's all kinds of flavors,

03:04:44.480 | and they're different by region,

03:04:46.760 | of the way that people are cruel to each other.

03:04:49.000 | - Sure, I'm not arguing that.

03:04:50.440 | - In America, New Jersey is different than Texas,

03:04:53.960 | is different than California.

03:04:55.160 | - You don't think Americans are a higher trust,

03:04:58.920 | more kind society than Russia, even today?

03:05:02.460 | - Higher trust, listen, I'm not going to,

03:05:06.320 | so first of all, I have very complex feelings

03:05:10.840 | about Russia today.

03:05:13.560 | - I'm talking about, that's like a January before the war,

03:05:15.640 | I'm talking about nowadays.

03:05:17.600 | - I think it's a complex psychological dynamic

03:05:20.880 | of what trusting means.

03:05:22.040 | I think Russians are generally less friendly,

03:05:26.080 | but have more intimate friendships.

03:05:29.400 | - Yes, I think that's true.

03:05:30.800 | - So it's just a different--

03:05:32.800 | - It's not different, it's just one is more trusting.

03:05:35.920 | - Which is more trusting?

03:05:36.760 | - Americans.

03:05:37.640 | - But then, this would define trusting different, because--

03:05:41.920 | - Okay, I'll give you an example.

03:05:43.040 | If someone's having a party in America,

03:05:44.760 | and people come over, okay, that's fine, everyone's welcome.

03:05:47.960 | If it's in Russia, it's like, who's that, who'd you bring?

03:05:50.980 | And there's much more of a, let me be sure that's okay,

03:05:53.200 | this person's here.

03:05:54.040 | - I don't know, maybe.

03:05:55.560 | - You don't have parties.

03:05:57.400 | - I have never been at a party.

03:05:59.040 | - And you don't come to mine.

03:06:00.480 | Ben Aspin was very sad.

03:06:03.640 | - Well, I love Ben, I love Ben.

03:06:05.640 | - Well, you should have showed it by showing up.

03:06:07.960 | - Man, I hide from the world,

03:06:09.880 | and I'm afraid of social interaction,

03:06:12.760 | and I just lay on the ground instead,

03:06:14.680 | and feel sorry for myself.

03:06:16.200 | - It's not bad Santa, it's sad Santa.

03:06:19.800 | - Well, I conserve my emotional energy

03:06:22.300 | towards this one day of the year.

03:06:24.200 | - Okay. (laughs)

03:06:25.620 | - Intensely spread my joy.

03:06:28.120 | All right, speaking of which,

03:06:30.900 | you tell a Christmas story in the book.

03:06:33.180 | - Are you spoiling that chapter?

03:06:34.860 | It's called Die Hard.

03:06:35.980 | - All right, well, I'm not gonna spoil it.

03:06:37.740 | It's really good.

03:06:38.820 | - I was very proud of that chapter.

03:06:40.380 | - Why?

03:06:41.220 | - Because the ending that's a Christmas story,

03:06:43.780 | it's just like, I know everyone reading it's gonna go

03:06:45.740 | Google it, be like, these can't be real, but it was real.

03:06:48.220 | - That it was a Christmas, yeah, sure.

03:06:50.820 | I mean, this has to do with the bigger picture.

03:06:53.100 | We don't have to do the big reveal,

03:06:55.820 | but the bigger picture of there was an iron curtain,

03:06:58.300 | and it was coming down in complex ways.

03:07:01.780 | How would you define the iron curtain?

03:07:03.980 | There's a set of ideologies,

03:07:05.460 | a set of countries united by an ideology,

03:07:07.580 | and a set of countries united by a different ideology,

03:07:10.540 | and there's a curtain that divided them,

03:07:15.260 | and it eventually came down.

03:07:16.740 | So how would you describe how it came down?

03:07:18.940 | - It came, I hate that I can never remember,

03:07:23.620 | ever, ever remember if this was Hemingway.

03:07:26.140 | No, it was Hemingway.

03:07:28.420 | - It was Mark Twain.

03:07:29.340 | - No, it came down two ways, gradually, then suddenly.

03:07:32.340 | The thing with the iron curtain and the Warsaw Pact,

03:07:38.100 | these were a bunch of nations run under communism,

03:07:42.620 | but they were all, almost all, under the sway of Moscow.

03:07:47.620 | So if they were going to make big changes,

03:07:50.580 | Moscow had to prove it.

03:07:53.740 | It was in the '50s when Hungary decided to rebel,

03:07:58.740 | or not rebel, liberalize,

03:08:01.260 | and they even were thinking of leaving the Warsaw Pact,

03:08:05.100 | and the Russians send in the tanks,

03:08:07.580 | and you had the development

03:08:08.540 | of what was called the Brezhnev Doctrine,

03:08:10.580 | which was the idea that it is the duty

03:08:13.340 | of all the Warsaw Pact nations,

03:08:15.700 | if another country tries to,

03:08:17.340 | and this was also in '68,

03:08:18.740 | in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia,

03:08:20.780 | if a nation wants to leave socialism,

03:08:25.100 | it is incumbent on those socialist nations

03:08:26.900 | to do whatever is necessary

03:08:28.900 | to make sure there isn't a counter-revolution.

03:08:30.940 | So they were very much under Moscow's thumb.

03:08:36.900 | And one of the big ways it changed was one man,

03:08:41.900 | and that was Mikhail Gorbachev.

03:08:45.140 | And he was the first Russian leader

03:08:48.460 | to be born after the October Revolution.

03:08:51.420 | He grew up, and his grandfather was arrested

03:08:54.340 | for being a Trotskyite,

03:08:55.460 | and the other one was arrested for this or that.

03:08:58.860 | He saw his village starve as a result of Stalin.

03:09:01.620 | So even though he was a very committed communist,

03:09:05.860 | he also was very and increasingly skeptical

03:09:10.180 | of authoritarianism.

03:09:12.180 | And in Poland, for example,

03:09:15.220 | you had the Solidarity Movement,

03:09:16.820 | and this was a labor union movement,

03:09:20.300 | and the government didn't know what to do.

03:09:22.060 | They were getting a lot of support from the peoples.

03:09:23.820 | They had strikes, and the Gdansk Shipyard

03:09:26.540 | was where one of them started.

03:09:28.220 | And basically, Moscow told them,

03:09:30.820 | "Either you crack down, or we're cracking down on you."

03:09:33.740 | And they're like, "All right."

03:09:34.660 | And they declared martial law,

03:09:35.940 | and they arrested the leaders, put them away.

03:09:38.540 | But then when Gorbachev was in charge,

03:09:41.740 | there wasn't a gun to their back,

03:09:43.380 | and it was the communist leaders themselves

03:09:45.340 | who were like, "You know what?"

03:09:46.380 | There was this really funny moment

03:09:47.380 | where Lech Walesa is meeting with Margaret Thatcher,

03:09:51.540 | and he's telling her what solidarity the movement wants,

03:09:55.660 | and she had been meeting with the Polish government as well.

03:09:58.220 | And she's like, "Look, tell them what,"

03:10:02.060 | 'cause they had tried,

03:10:04.420 | the government wanted her to tell them

03:10:06.060 | that we wanna negotiate and work things out.

03:10:07.700 | She goes, "All right, tell the government

03:10:09.060 | what it is that you're asking for."

03:10:10.460 | And he just points to the ceiling, and she goes,

03:10:11.820 | he's like, "Oh yeah, our meetings are bugged anyway."

03:10:14.740 | But they then had the freedom

03:10:17.700 | because they knew that Gorbachev wasn't forcing them

03:10:21.940 | to drive solidarity underground.

03:10:23.940 | So they had the idea of like,

03:10:25.060 | "Let's work together with these people."

03:10:26.580 | And as a result of this,

03:10:27.980 | Poland liberalized and freed itself fairly easily,

03:10:33.620 | and with a minimum of bloodshed in '89.

03:10:36.060 | And there was this whole argument for the Vietnam War

03:10:38.820 | with something called domino theory,

03:10:40.460 | which is if you lose Vietnam,

03:10:41.940 | then you're gonna lose Laos,

03:10:42.980 | then you lose Cambodia.

03:10:43.860 | One by one, the countries are gonna turn communist

03:10:45.500 | to the dominoes,

03:10:46.580 | but people didn't realize the reverse was true

03:10:48.980 | 'cause after Poland liberalized,

03:10:50.700 | then you have Hungary,

03:10:52.900 | then you have Czechoslovakia,

03:10:55.020 | then you had East Germany,

03:10:57.100 | and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

03:10:59.020 | So it's a great thing because as this is happening,

03:11:03.340 | the people are looking around and they're like,

03:11:05.780 | "Wait, that's it?

03:11:08.780 | "This has gotta be a trick."

03:11:10.260 | And it wasn't a trick.

03:11:11.260 | So one of my favorite books,

03:11:13.620 | which was a big inspiration for this one,

03:11:16.100 | was by my favorite historian.

03:11:17.620 | I apologize to David Petruccio and Arthur Herman,

03:11:20.860 | my second and third, they're tied.

03:11:23.140 | But Victor Sebastian wrote a book called "Revolution 1989."

03:11:27.740 | And he just talked about that year

03:11:29.460 | and how all these countries,

03:11:31.100 | one after another, liberalized.

03:11:32.620 | And it's just such a,

03:11:34.700 | and none of them thought this was possible.

03:11:37.180 | One of my favorite, favorite moments in this book

03:11:40.980 | is Helmut Kohl, who was the head of West Germany,

03:11:44.500 | is in Warsaw with Lech Walesa discussing the Berlin Wall.

03:11:48.420 | And Lech Walesa's like,

03:11:49.260 | "I don't think it's gonna be around

03:11:50.300 | "for another few years."

03:11:52.580 | And Helmut Kohl laughs in his face.

03:11:55.940 | And he goes, "Look, you're young.

03:11:58.340 | "This isn't how things work.

03:11:59.740 | "This is gonna take some doing."

03:12:01.980 | It fell the next day.

03:12:03.820 | And Helmut Kohl literally says, "I'm at the wrong party."

03:12:06.820 | And he got in a plane and got out of Warsaw.

03:12:09.260 | So there are, why this book has a broader message

03:12:13.580 | than the actual stories of these incidents

03:12:16.860 | is that as these wonderful things are happening,

03:12:20.580 | the universal consensus at the time is,

03:12:23.340 | it's never gonna happen.

03:12:24.900 | Or if it does gonna happen,

03:12:26.140 | it's gonna happen only through an enormous amount

03:12:28.500 | of carnage and blood.

03:12:30.140 | And when it doesn't, then everyone's like,

03:12:31.820 | "Oh, it was inevitable."

03:12:33.700 | You didn't say it was inevitable at the time.

03:12:35.220 | You only said it was inevitable after the fact.

03:12:37.180 | And the other thing that was really brought me a lot of joy

03:12:41.300 | is there are so many moments of men with guns

03:12:45.220 | saying, "We're not shooting anyone."

03:12:47.420 | 'Cause they wanted several Tiananmen Squares.

03:12:50.940 | They wanted it in East Berlin.

03:12:54.180 | They wanted it in Romania.

03:12:56.740 | They wanted it in Moscow.

03:12:58.300 | And these strong, tough, trained men with guns were like,

03:13:02.500 | "No, we're not shooting the civilians."

03:13:06.180 | And then everything else was history.

03:13:09.380 | - Yeah, just as surprising as the mass violence

03:13:12.940 | committed by police and the army on its own citizenry,

03:13:17.860 | equally surprising is when they choose not to somehow.

03:13:21.780 | - Yeah.

03:13:23.020 | - And what is that?

03:13:24.060 | How do you explain 1989?

03:13:27.740 | How do you explain this progress that happened so suddenly?

03:13:32.740 | How do you explain that at the beginning of the 20th century

03:13:38.540 | so much revolution happened that created communism?

03:13:43.080 | And how do you explain then the collapse of that

03:13:46.900 | across so many nations at the same time?

03:13:49.240 | - I think a large part of it had to do

03:13:52.620 | with the closer interconnections

03:13:56.020 | between people like Gorbachev and Thatcher

03:13:57.940 | and Gorbachev and Reagan.

03:13:59.460 | Because both of them visited Red Square.

03:14:01.820 | And in the years before, these are enemies.

03:14:06.060 | They wanna invade, they wanna kill us.

03:14:07.500 | The Americans thought this about the Russians.

03:14:09.220 | The Russians thought this about the Americans.

03:14:10.960 | Obviously not so much the British.

03:14:12.860 | And they got on really well.

03:14:17.260 | When Gorbachev came to Chequers,

03:14:19.060 | which is the prime minister's countryside estate,

03:14:23.020 | Thatcher sat him down and she's lecturing him

03:14:25.280 | about human rights and she's lecturing him about economics

03:14:27.740 | and she's lecturing him about this and that.

03:14:29.100 | And then she's lecturing him about why he's in a meeting

03:14:31.220 | while he's yelling at her.

03:14:32.380 | And he goes, "Mrs. Thatcher,

03:14:34.980 | I know you have a lot of strong opinions.

03:14:38.900 | I do too.

03:14:39.980 | I haven't been sent here to recruit you

03:14:41.580 | to the Communist Party."

03:14:42.500 | And she just started laughing.

03:14:44.100 | But right away, there was such a sense in the air

03:14:49.020 | of we can do better.

03:14:50.600 | We're spending all this money on missiles.

03:14:52.460 | We're spending all this money on the military.

03:14:54.560 | It's expensive.

03:14:55.820 | And for what?

03:14:57.580 | We don't have to be looking at each other as enemies.

03:15:00.260 | We can try to work together to kind of,

03:15:02.620 | at the very least, lower the volume and the heat.

03:15:07.540 | - How much credit do you give to Gorbachev the man?

03:15:09.700 | So meaning, how much power does a single individual have?

03:15:12.940 | - I could not give him more credit.

03:15:15.580 | I had a tweet last year where I said,

03:15:17.420 | "Who do you think is the greatest person alive right now?"

03:15:19.460 | And my answer by far would be Gorbachev.

03:15:21.220 | Then he died.

03:15:22.040 | I don't know who it is right now.

03:15:23.340 | - It's just funny because Gorbachev also had a tweet.

03:15:26.320 | (laughing)

03:15:28.580 | - But it was my big pic.

03:15:31.060 | - And he said, oh sure.

03:15:33.560 | That would be a good, now I wish I interviewed Gorbachev

03:15:38.860 | and asked him the famous question

03:15:40.940 | of what would you like best about Michael Malice.

03:15:44.580 | - Look, the transition after the Soviet Union fell

03:15:46.980 | to Russia and Yeltsin was not a smooth one by any means.

03:15:50.760 | As I say at the end of the book,

03:15:52.820 | it's not like they lived happily ever after.

03:15:55.300 | But my broader point is you take the wins

03:15:57.700 | when you can get them.

03:15:59.180 | People now had access to passports.

03:16:01.180 | They don't have to have, they can leave the country.

03:16:03.840 | They have food.

03:16:04.860 | They have access to information.

03:16:06.120 | It's somewhat censored, but it's certainly nothing

03:16:08.020 | like it was under the Soviet Union.

03:16:11.220 | And they didn't have to live in this kind of constant fear.

03:16:15.580 | And they had opportunities and it's such a step forward.

03:16:18.380 | And there was this one great moment,

03:16:21.220 | and Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia.

03:16:25.820 | He's also mayor of Moscow at one point

03:16:27.700 | or the equivalent of mayor.

03:16:29.580 | And he came here to visit NASA

03:16:31.820 | in the capacity of one or the other.

03:16:34.100 | And while he was there, he went to visit a supermarket.

03:16:36.500 | It was a Randalls then, I think it's a food town now.

03:16:38.860 | It still exists.

03:16:39.720 | I'm gonna go there.

03:16:40.560 | I'm gonna start bawling.

03:16:42.780 | And as he's looking around,

03:16:44.900 | he had never seen so much food.

03:16:47.660 | And this is food that even wealthy people

03:16:49.540 | in Russia don't have access to.

03:16:51.060 | And there's pictures of him just like this, like what?

03:16:53.900 | And the scene that really was poignant to me

03:16:58.020 | is on his flight back,

03:16:59.620 | he's sitting there on the plane like this.

03:17:02.460 | And he's like, they had to lie to the people

03:17:06.660 | because if they knew,

03:17:08.180 | they wouldn't have been able to get away with it.

03:17:10.340 | And that's the moment where it's just like,

03:17:12.020 | oh, this wasn't like skewed propaganda.

03:17:15.340 | This was like, they knew and it was a lie from A to Z.

03:17:20.100 | And he was just like, holy crap.

03:17:22.540 | And you can just imagine him on that plane,

03:17:24.260 | his brain reprogramming.

03:17:25.900 | Because if you're taught since you're a kid,

03:17:27.540 | and he was an older man, he was no dummy.

03:17:29.540 | You think, okay, the Americans are starving and poor

03:17:31.980 | and they're lynching people every day.

03:17:33.900 | And then you go to a supermarket,

03:17:36.140 | the most banal place on earth.

03:17:38.620 | And you see, I think one of the articles said

03:17:41.260 | they couldn't believe how big the onions were

03:17:42.820 | or something like that.

03:17:43.660 | And you're seeing this

03:17:44.500 | and you're seeing these janitors, school teachers,

03:17:46.940 | these aren't dignitaries.

03:17:48.180 | And they're regular people

03:17:49.180 | just picking whatever they want.

03:17:50.300 | And you're just like, it's like the equivalent

03:17:53.980 | of having a stroke.

03:17:54.980 | - I do think that that's one of the most powerful things

03:17:58.260 | is the grocery store.

03:18:00.340 | In terms of drawing a distinction between the two systems.

03:18:04.900 | - Yeah.

03:18:05.820 | - 'Cause you can show off technology and so on,

03:18:09.860 | but you can kind of sign right off technology

03:18:12.140 | as like, okay, that's the mechanism of the devil.

03:18:16.060 | But when you look at just fruit and veggies

03:18:21.060 | and like very big fruit and veggies and like,

03:18:24.980 | yeah, and fruit in particular,

03:18:26.880 | like certain kinds of fruit

03:18:27.860 | that are just not available in Russia.

03:18:30.020 | I mean, yeah, that really shows, wait a minute.

03:18:33.900 | - Yeah.

03:18:34.740 | - It's interesting, like when you're older

03:18:39.580 | and you have to face the reality

03:18:43.140 | that what you believe to be true,

03:18:45.660 | that your whole life has been based on a set of lies.

03:18:48.700 | - And you're right, not mistakes,

03:18:51.020 | not like a little bit like blatant lies

03:18:54.220 | from top to bottom, start to finish.

03:18:57.100 | I don't know what that's like.

03:18:59.140 | - How much, you start the book,

03:19:01.900 | I think you start the book with Ayn Rand.

03:19:03.900 | Yes. - Yes.

03:19:04.740 | - Yes.

03:19:05.580 | As one does.

03:19:08.380 | So before the revolution, she was born in Russia

03:19:12.220 | and she witnessed the revolution

03:19:15.160 | and moved to the United States in the 20--

03:19:17.900 | - 26, 1926. - 1926.

03:19:20.220 | I remember like it was yesterday.

03:19:22.260 | Anyway, you're right that she spent a lot of her life

03:19:25.900 | trying to convince Americans in the world

03:19:27.640 | that the negative effects of totalitarian government,

03:19:32.640 | just maybe using her as an example,

03:19:35.420 | but also this question,

03:19:37.620 | can we draw a distinction

03:19:38.740 | between authoritarian regimes and communism?

03:19:42.460 | Is it possible to still man the case

03:19:44.180 | that not all implementations of socialism and communism

03:19:47.860 | would lead to the atrocities we've seen in the Soviet Union

03:19:50.860 | and in China under Mao?

03:19:52.860 | Like when you, in studying all of this,

03:19:55.900 | how much blame do you put on the ideologies,

03:19:59.620 | on the Marxist ideologies

03:20:01.420 | versus the particular leaders and dictators?

03:20:04.000 | - Well, you have to blame the leaders a lot

03:20:06.340 | because they had different leaders

03:20:07.900 | in different countries were different from each other.

03:20:11.020 | Ducek, who took over Czechoslovakia

03:20:13.900 | and he tried to introduce socialism with a human face

03:20:16.820 | in the Prague Spring of 1968,

03:20:18.620 | he was like, all right,

03:20:19.740 | we got to do away with this authoritarianism.

03:20:21.820 | We got to have more free speech.

03:20:23.460 | He was thinking of introducing elements of democracy.

03:20:25.660 | Now then the Russians sent in the tanks,

03:20:27.700 | but the point is he certainly was someone who was like,

03:20:30.900 | all right, this has got to stop.

03:20:32.540 | This is just absolutely crazy.

03:20:34.180 | Khrushchev and Stalin were not the same animal at all.

03:20:40.580 | So I think the problem with communism in the Marxist sense

03:20:45.580 | is that you're going to have an introduce

03:20:48.860 | an element of authoritarianism

03:20:50.220 | simply because you can't have economic planning.

03:20:53.820 | If I don't have a price mechanism,

03:20:55.620 | I don't know how price is what is me knowing

03:20:59.420 | as a consumer or a producer,

03:21:01.660 | what should be produced or what there's a shortage of.

03:21:04.180 | As prices increase, that's a signal

03:21:06.200 | that we have a shortage here.

03:21:07.180 | As prices decrease, that means that there's a surplus here.

03:21:09.580 | But if I'm setting the price,

03:21:10.900 | I don't really know how much weed I need to produce

03:21:14.300 | if I'm compared to corn, as compared to shoes,

03:21:16.180 | as compared to Santa costumes.

03:21:17.780 | So that is a big problem.

03:21:20.140 | The other issue is if you have one agency, the government,

03:21:25.140 | having a monopoly on let's suppose the news,

03:21:28.860 | like you were talking about earlier with Twitter,

03:21:30.660 | it's going to be really hard

03:21:32.020 | to have any kind of objective discourse

03:21:34.980 | because everyone is going to be working

03:21:37.500 | for the same organization.

03:21:39.260 | That is going to cause a problem

03:21:40.580 | in terms of having a feedback mechanism,

03:21:42.340 | even in the best scenario,

03:21:43.900 | in terms of this is a problem, this isn't a problem.

03:21:47.260 | And when you have a monopoly, which is what a government is,

03:21:50.820 | I think people are very familiar

03:21:52.340 | with what the problems happen with monopoly.

03:21:54.220 | There's lack of accountability.

03:21:55.940 | Bureaucracies are faceless and then no one's to blame,

03:21:58.340 | but yet everyone kind of suffers as a consequence.

03:22:01.860 | So it doesn't necessarily have to be

03:22:04.660 | as authoritarian as Stalinism,

03:22:07.380 | but you can't have a government,

03:22:11.020 | which is authority by its nature,

03:22:12.980 | be this pervasive without a strong amount of oppression.

03:22:17.980 | Same thing with even if you just have like,

03:22:20.700 | let's say socialized healthcare,

03:22:22.420 | you're going to have to make it illegal

03:22:23.700 | for doctors to practice privately.

03:22:25.780 | You're going to have to have rationing,

03:22:27.260 | so on and so forth.

03:22:28.100 | Now that might be a price that people are willing to pay

03:22:30.620 | because you can't have infinite spending on healthcare.

03:22:33.420 | So something's going to have to give somewhere.

03:22:35.900 | So there is an element of authoritarianism there

03:22:38.180 | and people are comfortable with that

03:22:39.340 | and I can wrap my head around it.

03:22:41.060 | But if you're going to have one organization

03:22:43.980 | running literally everything in society,

03:22:46.340 | I don't see how you do that

03:22:47.900 | and have any measure of liberalism.

03:22:51.620 | - Why do you think Ayn Rand had so much trouble

03:22:54.020 | telling people the danger of Soviet Stalinism?

03:23:04.460 | - Well, I think a more pertinent question

03:23:08.740 | is why did Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman

03:23:10.940 | have so much problems?

03:23:12.180 | So they were hardcore--

03:23:13.940 | - These are anarchists.

03:23:14.940 | - Yeah, they're Emma Goldman's on the cover.

03:23:16.740 | They were deported from the US.

03:23:20.420 | J. Edgar Hoover saw them off at Ellis Island.

03:23:22.400 | They were sent to Russia.

03:23:24.320 | They were bloodthirsty revolutionaries.

03:23:27.260 | They had no shortage advocating violence when necessary.

03:23:30.500 | And when they went there,

03:23:31.740 | they were just like, this is a complete nightmare.

03:23:33.420 | They both individually had meetings with Lenin

03:23:35.500 | complaining about political prisoners,

03:23:37.460 | complaining about lack of free speech.

03:23:38.740 | He told them, this is a revolutionary time.

03:23:41.140 | You could do that later.

03:23:42.540 | And when they both left,

03:23:44.180 | she wrote her memoir was split into two books,

03:23:47.020 | "My Disillusionment in Russia"

03:23:48.220 | and "My Third Disillusionment in Russia."

03:23:50.020 | He wrote "The Bolshevik Myth"

03:23:52.220 | and she was in England and she gave a speech

03:23:54.980 | and she's just like,

03:23:55.820 | if you guys think this is for the workers,

03:23:57.660 | this is the biggest lie I've ever heard.

03:23:59.140 | Like they're oppressing the workers

03:24:00.900 | like no capitalist has ever imagined.

03:24:03.180 | And as she described it,

03:24:05.060 | like people were just shifting their seats,

03:24:07.180 | they were interrupting her.

03:24:08.340 | And when she opened her talk,

03:24:09.780 | she had a standing ovation.

03:24:11.180 | And when she was done, you could hear a pin drop.

03:24:13.140 | So they didn't wanna hear it

03:24:14.380 | because this was this kind of,

03:24:16.980 | and Eugene Lyons talks about it later.

03:24:18.540 | This was like the guinea pig theory of the Russian people.

03:24:21.460 | Like we're gonna experiment on them over there.

03:24:24.840 | If it works, great, we're right.

03:24:26.380 | If it's wrong, it's their problem.

03:24:27.740 | And sure, these animals squeal, but they're beneath us.

03:24:30.340 | And of course they're gonna make some noise,

03:24:31.580 | but this is a noble experiment,

03:24:33.980 | but they're experimenting on a country, several countries.

03:24:37.260 | So I think an ideology like this,

03:24:40.020 | which appeals to intellectuals,

03:24:42.420 | because if it works or if it's implemented,

03:24:45.260 | they're the ones who are gods in effect in a society,

03:24:48.860 | like their status cannot be higher.

03:24:50.820 | They really want this to work.

03:24:52.420 | Like they want a society where they are the new aristocracy,

03:24:56.660 | the most important people.

03:24:58.540 | And their criticisms of America,

03:25:00.340 | if they had a binary worldview,

03:25:02.180 | if America's bad and this is the opposite of America,

03:25:04.380 | then by definition, it's good.

03:25:05.860 | And the other binary that they bought into

03:25:08.740 | is the Nazis and the fascists hate the communists.

03:25:12.540 | And the communists, it's true, up to a point,

03:25:15.980 | hated the fascists and the Nazis.

03:25:18.100 | Okay, well, Hitler is evil.

03:25:20.540 | So this guy's against Hitler, we're with him.

03:25:22.820 | So that's an argument that's still made

03:25:25.500 | in schools growing up.

03:25:27.780 | When you talk about World War II,

03:25:28.900 | where they're like, we team up with Stalin,

03:25:30.460 | and they don't really talk about Stalin being a bad guy,

03:25:32.660 | but it's like, we worked with him to fight Hitler

03:25:34.660 | 'cause Hitler was a unique evil.

03:25:36.060 | Now that is certainly true that Hitler's a unique evil,

03:25:38.800 | but that doesn't mean or even imply

03:25:40.740 | that Stalin is somehow an angel or a saint.

03:25:43.960 | - Do you think some of the lessons of history

03:25:46.460 | are forgotten here in our modern political discourse

03:25:51.460 | that are important to remember?

03:25:52.980 | - I was so triggered 'cause I was in the supermarket

03:25:55.860 | and there was like a company that's selling Russian ice cream

03:25:58.580 | 'cause it meets these high level Soviet standards.

03:26:01.380 | And I'm just like, you think this is some kind of joke?

03:26:04.380 | You think this is some kind of kitschy punchline

03:26:06.700 | that you had decades of people who were taught in school

03:26:10.060 | to turn their parents into the police

03:26:11.860 | if they were hoarding grain,

03:26:13.220 | even if it cost them their own lives,

03:26:15.040 | where it was a crime to be married to someone

03:26:17.280 | who was an enemy of the state,

03:26:18.660 | where you had torture being the norm,

03:26:20.780 | where people were institutionalized

03:26:22.860 | because they were politically disadvantageous

03:26:24.980 | and they were called insane.

03:26:26.740 | Like this isn't just like, oh, this hammer and sickles,

03:26:29.420 | this cool, wacky symbol.

03:26:31.020 | Like the amount of blood under this symbol

03:26:33.860 | was just enormous.

03:26:34.940 | And so yeah, I think the lesson has very much been forgotten.

03:26:37.980 | - How did the ice cream taste?

03:26:39.700 | - It was fine.

03:26:40.540 | I'm a Baskin-Robbins guy, to be honest,

03:26:44.260 | but Van Leeuwen's does some great work.

03:26:46.220 | - Baskin-Robbins doesn't have any Soviet flavors?

03:26:49.500 | - No.

03:26:54.900 | - Those are dark jokes, dark jokes.

03:26:59.220 | I'm gonna self-publish a book of jokes.

03:27:02.040 | Coming out in a grocery store near you.

03:27:10.300 | Okay, what was the hardest part about writing this book?

03:27:15.180 | Spent two years writing it.

03:27:16.860 | - So when I write books for celebrities

03:27:20.220 | and I was co-authoring them,

03:27:21.340 | I did it kind of like method acting.

03:27:23.380 | I tried to get into their head as much as possible

03:27:25.620 | to kind of speak in their voice.

03:27:28.180 | And when you're dealing with children being tortured,

03:27:33.180 | harmed, starved, and you're trying to empathize

03:27:39.060 | with the characters, it's hard to take.

03:27:44.060 | The other big part I had, like I was saying earlier,

03:27:47.340 | is just I was just very, very concerned

03:27:49.820 | that I told this story and that it did it justice

03:27:53.900 | 'cause I think this is something that is,

03:27:56.140 | I still don't understand and I'm kind of angry about it

03:28:00.020 | that it's fallen on me to tell this story.

03:28:03.400 | This isn't some minor incident that happens

03:28:07.260 | in some random town in pick a state.

03:28:09.940 | This is half the world for 70, 80 years.

03:28:14.700 | And the fact that it's, this is the '80s.

03:28:17.460 | I mean, you and I are old enough to remember the '80s.

03:28:20.020 | There's a show, I remember the '80s.

03:28:22.220 | The fact that all these things have just kind of,

03:28:24.900 | we have this collective amnesia.

03:28:26.680 | And even amnesia, I think a lot of this stuff,

03:28:29.620 | even I was not known even at the time

03:28:31.720 | or it was kind of obscured.

03:28:33.080 | This is, I remember I was at The Blaze,

03:28:37.580 | which is a network run by Glenn Beck

03:28:39.460 | and they're conservatives and I have a lot of fun there.

03:28:42.740 | And I'm just sitting there and sometimes they veer off.

03:28:46.940 | They're like, oh, Biden's a communist.

03:28:48.540 | I'm like, okay, Biden's a communist.

03:28:50.460 | But I'm like, we talk so much about slavery

03:28:54.660 | and the Civil War, the atrocities.

03:28:55.940 | We talk about World War II and the Holocaust.

03:28:57.940 | I'm like, how is no one talking about this?

03:29:00.380 | And this was, can very easily be portrayed

03:29:02.380 | as like conservatism's big victory

03:29:04.340 | 'cause Reagan and Thatcher were so instrumental

03:29:06.260 | in guiding this to a safe landing.

03:29:08.820 | And I'm like, how is no one telling the story?

03:29:11.420 | And then one day my brain is like,

03:29:12.580 | you know, you write books for a living.

03:29:15.700 | This is kind of your job.

03:29:17.220 | And I'm like, all right, but I still don't,

03:29:18.980 | I still, I gotta tell you, I'm kind of confused

03:29:22.860 | that I'm the one who has to do this

03:29:26.340 | because this should be, you know,

03:29:29.620 | this should be 30 books like this.

03:29:31.380 | And this is a model to follow.

03:29:33.380 | - Yeah, and it's also that it's such recent history.

03:29:37.380 | - Yeah.

03:29:38.220 | - But it also kind of makes you realize

03:29:41.340 | that there might be other fights

03:29:45.940 | for progress going on right now.

03:29:49.220 | - Oh, yes.

03:29:50.060 | - In the world that we don't know about.

03:29:50.900 | So you wrote about North Korea.

03:29:52.740 | I don't know to what degree there's,

03:29:54.180 | could possibly be fights there for progress,

03:29:58.060 | but there could be, they could be boiling up.

03:30:02.380 | In China, there could be boiling up battles for progress.

03:30:06.580 | In other parts of the world, Russia, there could be.

03:30:10.240 | - And in America.

03:30:12.420 | - And in America.

03:30:13.500 | And these are all different kind of battles for progress.

03:30:16.140 | And they're all, sometimes,

03:30:20.060 | sometimes I, you know,

03:30:23.440 | we sometimes tend to criticize these battles for progress.

03:30:28.060 | Like if it's on the left,

03:30:30.100 | we'll call it like wokeism or whatever.

03:30:33.100 | And we pick extreme elements of it

03:30:36.220 | and show how silly and ridiculous it is,

03:30:39.140 | not realizing it, not acknowledging

03:30:41.340 | that there's a more civil battle going on underneath

03:30:45.700 | for actual, for respecting human dignity

03:30:50.700 | from all, for people from all walks of life.

03:30:54.420 | And the same, we tend to call anybody

03:30:57.180 | who questions mainstream narratives,

03:30:59.140 | conspiracy theorists, we dismiss them immediately.

03:31:01.700 | And they're ultimately fighting for progress.

03:31:03.860 | So people who criticize Falchi and everybody else,

03:31:06.420 | I don't know if they're,

03:31:07.980 | I think they want institutions that serve the public.

03:31:12.980 | They're fighting for progress too.

03:31:15.580 | And we tend to dismiss them.

03:31:17.100 | Like each side tends to caricature the other.

03:31:19.980 | But the battle for progress is happening.

03:31:21.780 | And I guess that's what you're,

03:31:23.500 | that's the hopeful message with the white pill, right?

03:31:27.340 | Is that there's progress being made.

03:31:29.900 | Somehow we're all making progress here.

03:31:32.300 | - I think more the hopeful message is that

03:31:35.640 | it's not possible that we have to lose.

03:31:38.740 | Like if someone tells you the straight face, you can't win,

03:31:41.860 | the enemy is too impressive and strong.

03:31:43.940 | I'm like, what are you talking about?

03:31:46.340 | I mean, look, this was the Soviet Union

03:31:49.540 | and it happened relatively quickly

03:31:53.540 | and relatively peacefully.

03:31:56.420 | I mean, again, and it wasn't because

03:31:59.020 | Honecker in East Germany was like,

03:32:00.660 | oh, I'm just gonna vacate my seat.

03:32:03.100 | He was like sending the tanks

03:32:04.980 | and the military guy said, no.

03:32:07.340 | So they wanted blood.

03:32:08.860 | There were plenty of people who wanted blood

03:32:10.580 | and would have been happy to have it.

03:32:12.300 | - So to you, maybe if not the fall of the Soviet Union,

03:32:17.300 | then the fall of the Iron Curtain

03:32:20.580 | is a great leap of progress in the 20th century.

03:32:25.980 | - I don't see how anyone can argue against that point

03:32:28.820 | with a straight face.

03:32:30.540 | - So that gives you hope that we,

03:32:32.580 | humanity were able to do that.

03:32:34.780 | - Yes, and at the same time,

03:32:37.940 | we were told at the time, give it up, be realistic.

03:32:42.460 | It's utopian to think this is going anywhere,

03:32:45.580 | maybe in a hundred years.

03:32:46.980 | Look, there's a reason Chekhov was on Star Trek

03:32:49.500 | because the idea is even the far future,

03:32:51.540 | you're gonna have America

03:32:52.620 | and you're gonna have the Soviet Union.

03:32:54.060 | Like this is the reality.

03:32:55.500 | It was called real politic.

03:32:57.180 | We're gonna have detente

03:32:58.180 | 'cause it's this permanent stalemate.

03:33:00.340 | We had the Vietnam War, we got our asses kicked.

03:33:02.900 | Russia's not going anywhere.

03:33:04.220 | America's not going anywhere.

03:33:05.700 | We gotta learn to live with each other, blah, blah, blah.

03:33:08.020 | And Reagan said,

03:33:09.300 | you don't wanna hear my strategy for the Cold War?

03:33:12.900 | Some people might say it's simple or even simplistic.

03:33:15.420 | Here it is.

03:33:16.300 | We win, they lose.

03:33:17.380 | And the people who won were the Russian people

03:33:21.740 | and the Ukrainian people and the Lithuanian people

03:33:24.060 | and the Polish people and the Romanian people especially

03:33:27.300 | and the Hungarian people.

03:33:29.260 | And it's just,

03:33:31.460 | there's so many moments of great joy that,

03:33:36.420 | just tears coming down my face because you're like in Prague

03:33:41.420 | when Dubcek, again, who tried to liberalize in 1968.

03:33:45.500 | And then when they sent the tanks,

03:33:46.980 | they deport him to Slovakia somewhere

03:33:48.500 | to do some forestry job.

03:33:49.860 | Like he appears in their big squares

03:33:51.900 | just waving from the balcony,

03:33:53.020 | like this ghost from 20 years prior being like,

03:33:56.740 | look, the spirit of '68 is still alive here

03:34:01.500 | in Czechoslovakia.

03:34:02.540 | And it was like a matter of weeks,

03:34:04.340 | the entire government resigned and then they liberalized.

03:34:06.780 | It's just so many things about just overnight,

03:34:11.780 | just change for the profound better.

03:34:14.700 | And people are so committed

03:34:19.980 | to making sure you don't have hope.

03:34:22.700 | And if things get better,

03:34:23.660 | oh, it doesn't really matter

03:34:24.500 | 'cause the broader picture never gets better.

03:34:26.300 | And there's lots of data to the contrary

03:34:29.220 | where that's happened before.

03:34:30.540 | And this isn't some magical faraway place.

03:34:32.980 | This is the opposite of magical faraway place.

03:34:35.740 | It's Eastern Europe.

03:34:37.460 | - And to me, I think one such narrative

03:34:40.380 | that people assume will always be true

03:34:43.940 | or just to a degree will always be true

03:34:45.860 | like in American politics is the extreme levels of division.

03:34:50.780 | And it seems to me like that too, we can overcome.

03:34:55.060 | So the division in American politics

03:34:57.900 | that seems to be counterproductive,

03:34:59.300 | I think that can be overcome.

03:35:00.760 | And I think the division in geopolitics currently

03:35:07.060 | with Russia, China, and the United States,

03:35:10.620 | particularly China and the United States can be overcome.

03:35:15.340 | And I think that requires great leadership

03:35:21.340 | that galvanizes the populace

03:35:23.220 | to the better angels of their nature.

03:35:26.340 | Like I have hope for that.

03:35:27.580 | People have become really cynical on social media

03:35:30.100 | and elsewhere in the way they talk.

03:35:32.180 | The liberals are destroying this country.

03:35:35.480 | The conservatives are destroying this country.

03:35:38.760 | This kind of language is becoming more and more popular.

03:35:41.500 | I think that's, I have hope that that's temporary.

03:35:49.620 | At least that's my white pill.

03:35:51.980 | I don't know if you have that kind of hope for,

03:35:54.460 | like what does hope look like for you in American politics?

03:35:59.460 | Forget American politics, American, the nation,

03:36:02.140 | the country, the people.

03:36:03.600 | - My hope,

03:36:07.820 | which I don't think is an unrealistic one,

03:36:15.740 | is that the next generation has a better life

03:36:20.740 | than you and I have had in this country.

03:36:25.860 | And I think anyone who thinks that America is over

03:36:30.860 | or is one president away from being destroyed

03:36:36.940 | cannot in good conscience call themselves a patriot.

03:36:40.900 | Because if you think America is so weak

03:36:44.420 | that it takes a Biden or a Trump or an Obama

03:36:49.300 | to irrevocably destroy it, then it's already a wrap.

03:36:52.520 | And I think that's just absolutely ridiculous.

03:36:56.460 | If you look what this country has survived,

03:36:58.340 | Great Depression, World War II, the Civil War.

03:37:02.620 | I mean, my God.

03:37:03.660 | So we've been through worse before.

03:37:05.700 | It wasn't always easy, certainly not.

03:37:09.540 | But I am,

03:37:12.660 | it's so hard for me as someone who's a hopeful person,

03:37:15.300 | not by my nature, I'm not Michael Kindness

03:37:18.420 | who does work for Random House,

03:37:19.540 | or at least he did last time I talked to him.

03:37:22.180 | I look at even like,

03:37:24.500 | the thing is when you speak positively, it sounds corny.

03:37:27.580 | That's how screwed up our cynical culture is.

03:37:29.660 | - Have you seen my Twitter?

03:37:31.020 | - Oh, you're verified now.

03:37:34.320 | So that's good.

03:37:35.160 | But even like something like Etsy.

03:37:37.620 | Like you can go on Etsy--

03:37:38.900 | - I paid $8 for that verification.

03:37:40.660 | (laughing)

03:37:42.900 | I earned it.

03:37:45.140 | - It's an opportunity for independent artists

03:37:47.660 | to create something special and cool.

03:37:49.980 | And I've bought a lot of stuff from them.

03:37:51.380 | That in and of itself is something that's pretty awesome.

03:37:53.860 | There's so much, I'm into shaving soaps, right?

03:37:57.100 | - Of course you are.

03:37:58.820 | - The point is there's like dozens of artisans.

03:38:02.000 | Every day when you have a shave, it brings you some joy.

03:38:06.580 | So there's just so many things that are wonderful.

03:38:09.520 | And I know there's people listening to this,

03:38:12.140 | rolling their eyes.

03:38:13.380 | How can you talk about shaving soaps when my daughter

03:38:16.940 | or when my wife or when blah, blah, blah,

03:38:19.300 | and I'm not disparaging or dismissing

03:38:22.140 | what you're regarding as a problem.

03:38:24.100 | My point is hope means the belief

03:38:27.660 | that it's not at all a certainty

03:38:30.060 | that this problem will be insurmountable.

03:38:32.460 | That's all it means.

03:38:33.760 | - What do you look forward to in 2023?

03:38:39.300 | Since this is a holiday special.

03:38:41.000 | - Honestly, like if I look forward to a lot of young people

03:38:47.680 | realizing that they still have lots of opportunity

03:38:53.360 | in this country and taking control of their own selves

03:38:57.820 | and realizing they can be a better person tomorrow

03:39:01.280 | than they are today, that the entirety of their identity

03:39:03.680 | is not a function of a culture,

03:39:05.480 | which may they may not identify, or government,

03:39:07.240 | which they may not identify with or like,

03:39:09.100 | or think is deplorable and realize, you know what?

03:39:12.600 | I have it in me to improve and find joy and happiness.

03:39:16.240 | And also the fact that that is so compelling and contagious.

03:39:21.160 | That is what I would want in 2023.

03:39:24.100 | And also for New York to get nuked.

03:39:26.000 | - So those two things could be accomplished.

03:39:30.920 | - Can I go back and switch the order?

03:39:32.280 | 'Cause I think New York won.

03:39:33.780 | - Oh, the jokes, the jokes.

03:39:38.320 | - And one day, friends, if you work hard enough

03:39:41.440 | and believe in yourself.

03:39:42.560 | - You too can nuke New York.

03:39:44.360 | - No, you too can spend your days dressing up,

03:39:49.360 | grown men dressing up in a Santa outfit

03:39:59.360 | and putting on lipstick and having hours upon hours

03:40:03.480 | of conversation with each other and loving every second.

03:40:06.880 | Thank you for writing this really, really important book.

03:40:09.080 | Please buy "The White Pill."

03:40:11.680 | I love you, brother.

03:40:12.520 | - I love you too.

03:40:13.360 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:40:15.720 | with Michael Malice.

03:40:16.880 | To support this podcast,

03:40:18.000 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:40:20.480 | And now let me leave you with some words

03:40:22.480 | from Shel Silverstein.

03:40:24.200 | Listen to the muscles, child, listen to the don'ts.

03:40:29.200 | Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.

03:40:32.580 | Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me.

03:40:36.240 | Anything can happen, child.

03:40:38.360 | Anything can be.

03:40:39.880 | Thank you for listening.

03:40:42.080 | I hope to see you next time.

03:40:44.000 | (upbeat music)

03:40:46.580 | (upbeat music)

03:40:49.160 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Michael Malice: Christmas Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #347

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