Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malice.

00:00:04.880 | Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton,

00:00:09.120 | and I'm proud to call him my friend.

00:00:11.960 | He makes me smile, he makes me think,

00:00:15.120 | and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all the time.

00:00:20.360 | And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malice

00:00:24.960 | in the Tupac Galova language that I'm increasingly certain

00:00:28.880 | I'll never quite able to get the hang of.

00:00:32.640 | Hello, comrade.

00:00:34.120 | Nice to meet you.

00:00:36.320 | So Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of my favorite books.

00:00:40.720 | It's an allegory about, at least I think,

00:00:44.000 | about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

00:00:48.680 | So for people who haven't read it,

00:00:50.400 | it's animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become

00:00:54.480 | as bad or worse than the humans.

00:00:57.520 | So, comrade, if we lived on this farm,

00:01:01.360 | in the book Animal Farm,

00:01:02.920 | which animal would you most rather be?

00:01:06.320 | Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin,

00:01:11.520 | the raven Moses, the humans, Mr. and Mrs. Jones,

00:01:14.720 | the dogs, or the sheep?

00:01:17.120 | - I'm gonna go with the Milton answer,

00:01:19.680 | which is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, right?

00:01:24.200 | - It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

00:01:26.960 | - Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs.

00:01:29.720 | So I guess I'd be a cop.

00:01:31.040 | - At the very top.

00:01:33.080 | So the leader, the main pig, Napoleon versus like the--

00:01:35.880 | - Snowballing the others.

00:01:37.280 | I would say it's not,

00:01:38.880 | it's sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution,

00:01:40.920 | but I think Orwell's point was this is broader

00:01:43.960 | towards most totalitarian dictatorships.

00:01:46.360 | I mean, it could very easily be read

00:01:48.400 | as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler

00:01:50.400 | or many of these others.

00:01:51.760 | I'm a huge George Orwell fan.

00:01:55.200 | One of the things that I think people on the right

00:01:57.880 | need to appreciate is the courage of many of these

00:02:02.880 | undisputably left-wing voices

00:02:05.840 | who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarianism,

00:02:09.680 | totalitarian communism.

00:02:10.840 | And the three I could think off the top of my head

00:02:12.160 | who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time

00:02:15.120 | are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third.

00:02:20.120 | Something that leftists like to throw in the face

00:02:23.400 | of people on the right who constantly invoke Orwell

00:02:26.360 | is that Orwell said,

00:02:27.360 | and I don't have the exact quote off the top of my head,

00:02:29.200 | but something to the effect of,

00:02:30.360 | "Every word I have written should be taken

00:02:34.000 | "as a defense of democratic socialism

00:02:35.560 | "against totalitarianism."

00:02:37.240 | So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore,

00:02:41.920 | in many ways, anti-communist.

00:02:44.160 | We like to parse things out, you're gonna laugh,

00:02:49.160 | into binary fashions that left good, right bad,

00:02:52.320 | right good, left bad.

00:02:53.640 | But historically speaking,

00:02:54.960 | it does not fall away into these camps

00:02:57.480 | as easily as people would like.

00:03:00.400 | And I think it is important for those of us,

00:03:03.120 | it takes a lot more courage to fight the right

00:03:06.760 | from the right or to fight the left from the left,

00:03:09.160 | because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen

00:03:12.200 | or your fellow travelers are gonna regard you

00:03:13.960 | as a traitor to the cause.

00:03:15.520 | So every chance I get, I will sing the praises

00:03:19.000 | of these three figures among others

00:03:21.720 | who not only, even if they hadn't done what they had done,

00:03:24.760 | just lived just amazing lives that all of us can learn from

00:03:29.760 | and admire and regard as somewhat a role model.

00:03:34.720 | - What was the nature of their opposition

00:03:36.680 | to totalitarianism?

00:03:38.640 | Is it basically freedom?

00:03:41.120 | - Well-- - The value of freedom?

00:03:42.400 | - Let's go through the three of them.

00:03:43.680 | So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure,

00:03:46.920 | we'll talk about her later, I'm sure.

00:03:48.720 | She got deported from the United States

00:03:51.080 | with her partner in crime, Alexander Berkman,

00:03:53.360 | literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick,

00:03:56.360 | who was Andrew Carnegie's main man

00:03:58.640 | in the Pittsburgh Steel Mill strike.

00:04:00.800 | She got deported to the Soviet Union

00:04:03.240 | and they're like, "Oh, you want socialism?"

00:04:05.440 | Because at the time, the anarchists

00:04:06.640 | were regarded as socialist.

00:04:08.120 | You know, go choke on it.

00:04:09.160 | And she's there and she was watching in great horror

00:04:12.600 | what was going on.

00:04:13.560 | And she actually went to Lenin's office and she goes,

00:04:15.560 | "This isn't what we're about.

00:04:16.800 | "The revolution is about the individual and free speech

00:04:19.920 | "and everyone working together to further society."

00:04:22.880 | And he told her that, you know,

00:04:24.640 | "Free speech is a bourgeois contrivance

00:04:26.560 | "and regardless, you can't have these circumstances

00:04:28.880 | "in the midst of a revolution."

00:04:30.720 | And when she left the Soviet Union,

00:04:32.560 | and you know, she went to Britain.

00:04:34.200 | And at the time, before 1917,

00:04:37.200 | there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles

00:04:40.560 | about what would the revolution look like, right?

00:04:42.680 | Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model?

00:04:44.640 | Would there be the Marxist model?

00:04:46.200 | Obviously, the Bolsheviks ended up winning,

00:04:48.240 | but even then it wasn't obvious

00:04:49.480 | because there was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks

00:04:51.560 | and what people, you know,

00:04:53.200 | you and I know what those words mean,

00:04:54.400 | but Bolsheviks were kind of funny

00:04:56.520 | because Bolshe means bigger and Menshe means smaller.

00:04:59.680 | The Mensheviks had the numbers.

00:05:01.360 | It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks

00:05:04.400 | and the Bolsheviks were called Bolshe.

00:05:06.080 | And Lenin, you know, destroyed all his foes

00:05:08.840 | in a very merciless way, obviously.

00:05:11.280 | Beforehand, you know, there was the idea like,

00:05:13.640 | well, all these cockamamie ideas,

00:05:15.360 | we have to work together.

00:05:17.040 | You know, we don't know what it's gonna look like

00:05:18.240 | for the cause.

00:05:19.080 | And as soon as he sees power, he's like, yeah, yeah,

00:05:20.640 | we're not doing that kind of pluralism anymore.

00:05:23.040 | This is going to be the right approach.

00:05:25.720 | So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman.

00:05:28.920 | She wrote a book that they titled,

00:05:31.000 | "My Disillusionment with Russia."

00:05:32.400 | And I remember this one anecdote,

00:05:33.840 | which I'm gonna discuss in a forthcoming book,

00:05:36.240 | where she goes to Britain

00:05:37.360 | and the British were very red at the time.

00:05:39.600 | They really had something called the Fabian Society,

00:05:42.360 | which was the predecessor to the British Labor Party,

00:05:44.880 | which were like, all right,

00:05:45.720 | we're going to get rid of liberalism

00:05:47.680 | and have a socialist kind of nation.

00:05:50.800 | And she gave talks and there was this one time

00:05:53.240 | where she gave a talk and she started

00:05:55.200 | and there was a standing ovation.

00:05:56.520 | By the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop

00:05:58.620 | because she dared to look at these people in the face,

00:06:02.240 | something they'd been fighting for all their lives

00:06:04.280 | and saying, you know, we've been to the future and it works.

00:06:06.960 | And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar.

00:06:10.160 | You know, people are under house arrest.

00:06:11.800 | You're not allowed to have, you know,

00:06:13.280 | newspapers are being shut down

00:06:14.560 | if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.

00:06:16.720 | And, you know, she was just even more of a pariah

00:06:19.280 | than she had been previously.

00:06:20.480 | So she is, you know, deserves huge accolades in that regard.

00:06:24.640 | I brought her up and we were talking about

00:06:26.040 | with our conversation with Yaron Orwell.

00:06:28.680 | I think you don't need me to explain what he has done

00:06:31.960 | and continues to do to use fiction

00:06:34.400 | to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state

00:06:39.400 | and Camus, who might be my all time, you know,

00:06:42.000 | great lighthouse, so to speak,

00:06:44.280 | in terms of being a man of conscience.

00:06:46.000 | You know, he joined the communist party

00:06:47.560 | and for a lot of people in the States, you hear,

00:06:49.720 | oh, you joined the communist party, so I need to hear.

00:06:51.360 | It's all you need to, he was a communist,

00:06:52.520 | all you need to know.

00:06:53.360 | He joined the communist party

00:06:54.480 | because they were the main ones fighting the fascists

00:06:56.840 | in France and other locations.

00:06:58.700 | And he took Nazism as did many others, of course,

00:07:01.920 | very, very, very seriously.

00:07:03.240 | He wasn't some committed communist,

00:07:04.680 | but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know,

00:07:08.760 | be part of the underground in Vichy France

00:07:10.440 | and so on and so forth.

00:07:11.580 | So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him,

00:07:15.720 | which is kind of a misquote.

00:07:16.920 | Howard Zinn is the one who actually said it,

00:07:18.440 | that it is a job of thinking people

00:07:20.520 | not to be on the side of the executioners.

00:07:22.960 | And he very much felt, if you read his speech

00:07:26.220 | when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, it's in the 50s,

00:07:28.680 | where he goes, it's basically the job of writers

00:07:31.520 | to keep civilization from destroying himself.

00:07:34.520 | I don't think I'm ever going to be a man

00:07:36.680 | on the level of Camus and what he's accomplished,

00:07:39.080 | but I think that vision of it is the job of writers

00:07:44.080 | to be the conscience and to point out, you know,

00:07:47.800 | this is the leftism at its best,

00:07:49.640 | when you're giving voice to the voiceless.

00:07:51.840 | When you have the machine of the state

00:07:54.080 | crushing and marginalizing people,

00:07:55.960 | and they might not be educated, literate,

00:07:58.000 | or have any power at all, he's the guy who's like,

00:08:02.000 | you are ruining humans, these humans matter,

00:08:05.040 | and I'm not going to let you look the other way

00:08:08.080 | and act like you don't know what you're doing.

00:08:10.000 | - So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism

00:08:13.600 | or we look at the fictional animal farm,

00:08:15.720 | what's the heroic action then?

00:08:17.840 | So Camus joined the Communist Party.

00:08:21.240 | There's a bunch of different heroic actions,

00:08:23.320 | some more heroic than others, not just for the,

00:08:27.720 | you know, hero's the wrong word,

00:08:28.960 | in terms of like effectiveness.

00:08:30.720 | What's the effective action, I guess, is what I want to ask.

00:08:33.480 | As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind,

00:08:36.520 | what's the heroic action?

00:08:38.280 | - That's a tricky question,

00:08:39.280 | because a lot of times in the West,

00:08:40.960 | heroism is regarded as intertwined with martyrdom, right?

00:08:44.240 | So it's kind of this idea of like, you have to speak,

00:08:46.640 | you know, Camus always talked about,

00:08:48.480 | let justice be done till the heavens fall.

00:08:50.480 | This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience

00:08:54.400 | and that you have to do the right thing,

00:08:55.560 | even the consequences might not be what you like,

00:08:58.000 | and I think that is a good, loose definition of heroism.

00:09:01.400 | So if you meet, I'll give you one example of heroism.

00:09:03.920 | This was on Twitter, and I really feel bad

00:09:06.620 | that I don't remember the guy's name.

00:09:09.680 | This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was,

00:09:12.400 | and you know, there's the Nazi guards keeping everyone along

00:09:15.600 | and if you were, I think if you were under 12,

00:09:18.900 | they killed you or something.

00:09:19.760 | There was some age limit where some kids were killed

00:09:21.920 | or some were not, there was some circumstances.

00:09:24.120 | And he asked the mom how old this kid was,

00:09:26.960 | and she's like, "He's 14."

00:09:28.120 | And she's like, "No, he's 12."

00:09:29.280 | And she's like, "No, he's not, he's 14."

00:09:30.240 | She goes, "He's 12."

00:09:31.920 | And she realized what this Nazi was telling her,

00:09:34.260 | even in that circumstance,

00:09:36.040 | and it ended up saving the kid's life.

00:09:37.780 | So I think heroism in this context is defiance

00:09:42.780 | and standing true to values of liberalism, humanism,

00:09:48.360 | and venerating the sanctity of human life.

00:09:51.640 | I think that, and I think it's also important

00:09:55.200 | to pick your battles.

00:09:56.960 | I don't think if, you know, he got,

00:09:59.480 | that Nazi over there got in a bullhorn and said,

00:10:02.160 | "Hey, this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

00:10:04.600 | That's not gonna help anyone do anything.

00:10:06.200 | So I do think, you know, people a lot of times attack me

00:10:09.080 | for my anarchist views.

00:10:10.120 | It's like, oh, you know, would you call the police?

00:10:12.280 | Would you use the roads?

00:10:13.260 | Would you pay your income taxes?

00:10:14.860 | You know, I got in an argument with Tim Pool

00:10:18.280 | because there was that couple, I think,

00:10:19.640 | in, what was that, Missouri or Illinois,

00:10:21.040 | when they had their guns, and they were being arrested,

00:10:24.840 | and they basically took a plea deal,

00:10:26.640 | and he said, "You should have fought."

00:10:27.800 | I go, "It's a lot easier to say you should fight,

00:10:30.640 | "but we don't know what circumstance someone is under."

00:10:33.200 | And what these totalitarian regimes did very, very well

00:10:36.180 | as you know, is if you were a target

00:10:40.200 | and they can't get through to you, that's fine.

00:10:42.320 | You have a family.

00:10:43.440 | So you can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw,

00:10:47.000 | and you can stand up to all the torture.

00:10:48.560 | Cool, what are we gonna do about your wife?

00:10:50.640 | What about your mom?

00:10:51.480 | One thing Stalin did, he made it a law

00:10:54.820 | that kids up to 14 and up could get the death penalty

00:10:57.880 | for certain crimes.

00:10:59.120 | So after that, the rule was from the NKVD,

00:11:02.480 | if you were interrogating someone,

00:11:04.760 | they would have death warrants for the kid's child

00:11:07.920 | on the desk visible.

00:11:09.320 | So I'm interrogating you, asking you to commit to,

00:11:13.160 | I'm sorry, to admit to some crime that you're not committed,

00:11:15.960 | and those piece of paper, it's Svetlana,

00:11:18.640 | she's got a death warrant.

00:11:19.860 | You're gonna admit to any crime you want.

00:11:21.960 | So this is something Americans,

00:11:24.040 | this is even the case right now in North Korea,

00:11:26.520 | which I know you had Yeonmi Park on,

00:11:28.000 | it's something I talk about a lot.

00:11:29.240 | Let's talk about it instead of the hypothetical,

00:11:30.980 | but this is happening right now on Earth.

00:11:33.700 | You can look at the map on Google.

00:11:35.940 | The great leader Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea,

00:11:38.280 | said class enemies must be exterminated three generations.

00:11:41.640 | So when people talk about individualism versus collectivism,

00:11:45.320 | Rick Santorum from Ascender says,

00:11:46.800 | "The family is the basic unit of society."

00:11:49.840 | Unit, North Korea takes that seriously.

00:11:52.040 | The family is punished as a unit.

00:11:54.280 | So if someone does something wrong,

00:11:56.080 | three generations have to pay the price,

00:11:58.360 | and you often don't know who it is

00:12:00.520 | that got you all in trouble.

00:12:01.820 | There's not a trial.

00:12:03.000 | This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible.

00:12:06.920 | - It's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin.

00:12:10.520 | There's something when it's, yeah,

00:12:12.560 | when it's your child, your loved ones,

00:12:16.260 | every man becomes a coward.

00:12:17.840 | - But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay

00:12:20.640 | for "The Guardian" to say I don't vote?

00:12:22.360 | There's no consequences to me.

00:12:23.760 | There's no possibility of consequences to me.

00:12:25.560 | This is the wonderful thing about living,

00:12:27.040 | excuse me, in a free country.

00:12:29.040 | It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union

00:12:32.880 | and say, "I'm not going to vote."

00:12:34.840 | And what would that courage accomplish?

00:12:37.320 | Very little.

00:12:38.160 | So I think heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff

00:12:40.840 | and taking a stance with no consequence is a bit overrated.

00:12:45.400 | - There is some aspect, like the way I think about heroism

00:12:49.200 | is something like you said about the Nazi soldier,

00:12:52.960 | which is quietly, privately in your own life,

00:12:56.760 | live the virtues that you want

00:12:59.280 | the rest of the world to live by.

00:13:01.080 | - Yes.

00:13:02.000 | - So like without, like writing about it

00:13:04.720 | is not as heroic as living it quietly.

00:13:08.080 | - I'll give you a great example of this.

00:13:10.920 | I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids,

00:13:15.360 | if you know someone's in town and it's their birthday

00:13:18.040 | with nothing to do, take them out.

00:13:19.520 | And I say, I do this for selfish reasons.

00:13:21.560 | And everyone laughs and I go, think about it this way.

00:13:25.000 | The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.

00:13:29.040 | That could be you.

00:13:30.180 | Like you have that capacity to be that person

00:13:33.120 | and you're making that day feel special.

00:13:34.760 | They're gonna remember for a long time.

00:13:36.340 | What's the cost, dinner, 30 bucks, 25 bucks?

00:13:39.200 | So it's very disturbing to me

00:13:42.960 | how often people have opportunities

00:13:46.280 | to slightly move the needle

00:13:48.360 | and make things a bit better at almost no cost.

00:13:51.800 | And they just literally don't think in those terms.

00:13:54.440 | And one of the things Camus talked about,

00:13:56.840 | he's often described as a existentialist,

00:14:00.040 | which he did not like that term.

00:14:01.280 | He regarded himself as an absurdist,

00:14:03.020 | is the idea that we're basically blank canvases.

00:14:05.880 | And this isn't something that is dangerous.

00:14:07.760 | This is enormous opportunity.

00:14:09.520 | And you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman

00:14:13.560 | that you admire and want to be.

00:14:15.360 | You don't have to be, I don't know, George Washington

00:14:18.000 | or one of these great heroes of all time,

00:14:19.880 | but everyone out there has the capacity,

00:14:23.160 | capacity, excuse me, to be a hero to their kids

00:14:26.000 | or to be a hero to maybe some,

00:14:27.880 | there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely.

00:14:30.960 | I think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs.

00:14:34.200 | These are little things.

00:14:37.200 | Terry Shepard does that a lot.

00:14:38.480 | I regard him as a hero.

00:14:39.620 | These are, not Terry Shepard, I'm blanking on his name.

00:14:42.920 | These are things that people do

00:14:44.800 | that aren't heroic in the sense of Superman,

00:14:48.040 | but that I find admirable extremely

00:14:50.920 | and I think are very underrated

00:14:52.560 | 'cause these people aren't championed.

00:14:54.680 | - Is this some kind of weird,

00:14:56.760 | passive-aggressive indirect way for you to tell me

00:15:00.520 | that I should take you out for your birthday on Monday?

00:15:03.120 | Is that why you gave that whole speech?

00:15:05.280 | - That wasn't it at all.

00:15:06.720 | - That was a joke, Michael.

00:15:07.800 | - No, it was a failed joke.

00:15:10.080 | - Nevertheless.

00:15:11.040 | - There was no punchline.

00:15:12.560 | - Without failure, we would not have triumph.

00:15:14.840 | Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism?

00:15:19.960 | - Sure.

00:15:20.800 | - What do you think is the difference

00:15:24.280 | in your ideas about anarchism too?

00:15:28.440 | It seems like those are somehow intricately connected

00:15:33.200 | because existentialism is connected to freedom

00:15:37.080 | and freedom is connected to anarchism.

00:15:40.640 | - Sure, but I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.

00:15:45.640 | He said explicitly about things like gulags,

00:15:48.720 | like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk about it.

00:15:51.800 | So what people don't appreciate is how human beings

00:15:56.640 | can have contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time.

00:15:59.200 | So one would think, okay, someone's a Democrat,

00:16:01.760 | they think ABC, therefore they can think DEF.

00:16:04.080 | People that have all sorts of contradictions

00:16:06.600 | and it's not at all clear

00:16:07.640 | and they'll have a clean conscience

00:16:08.880 | 'cause the human mind is very sophisticated

00:16:11.160 | and is capable of doing this.

00:16:12.320 | So Sartre, you would think he's this radical individualist,

00:16:17.320 | this sense of ultimate freedom,

00:16:18.960 | but he's defending the Soviet Union.

00:16:21.160 | Camus on the other hand would probably be,

00:16:23.400 | was very much like a social Democrat.

00:16:25.360 | He didn't really talk about what politics should be

00:16:28.760 | so much as it shouldn't be.

00:16:29.840 | His essay, "Reflections on the Guillotine"

00:16:32.280 | is one of the great masterpieces of all time,

00:16:34.960 | an attack on the death penalty,

00:16:36.920 | not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong

00:16:40.480 | to kill murderers, but in terms of

00:16:42.560 | what does it do for a society?

00:16:44.560 | If you have someone who takes a person

00:16:47.400 | and locks them in a room and says,

00:16:50.280 | in two years, I'm going to murder you

00:16:52.200 | and you lock them for that.

00:16:53.260 | This is not someone we regard as moral,

00:16:55.240 | we regard this as someone who's a complete monster,

00:16:57.880 | but that's what the state does with the death penalty.

00:17:01.240 | And he challenges us to think,

00:17:04.040 | is this the kind of people we wanna be?

00:17:07.320 | And again, he's saying,

00:17:08.520 | I'm not saying killing a murderer is wrong.

00:17:11.120 | I'm not saying evil is wrong.

00:17:12.560 | His entire career was dedicated

00:17:14.840 | to fighting the concept of evil.

00:17:16.960 | But are we the kind of people

00:17:19.560 | who want to be doing these things

00:17:21.440 | that in any other context we regard as torture or depraved?

00:17:24.920 | So I'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.

00:17:28.800 | - He was probably against war in that same way.

00:17:30.960 | So I don't, I have to admit,

00:17:33.480 | I don't know much about the political side of Camus.

00:17:36.240 | - Well, and I don't think his political side

00:17:37.640 | is that interesting or relevant.

00:17:38.720 | What I find, sorry to interrupt you,

00:17:40.520 | what I find fascinating about Camus

00:17:42.280 | and what I think about on a daily base from him

00:17:44.520 | is his insistence that you have to live a life

00:17:48.520 | based on conscience,

00:17:50.000 | that you have to be accountable to yourself

00:17:51.880 | when you put your head on the pillow at the end of the day

00:17:54.440 | and ask yourself,

00:17:55.600 | did I live a righteous life with integrity,

00:17:59.120 | true to my values?

00:18:00.600 | Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?

00:18:05.600 | You know, that kind of mindset.

00:18:07.280 | Did I, if someone is weak,

00:18:09.480 | am I using that as an opportunity

00:18:11.120 | to exploit them or to harm them?

00:18:12.960 | Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person

00:18:17.080 | because maybe they didn't have circumstances

00:18:18.720 | that were as beneficial as other people had?

00:18:23.120 | - Well, how does that fit absurdism

00:18:24.840 | where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning?

00:18:28.020 | You know, it really borders on nihilism.

00:18:31.240 | - Yeah, so he regards,

00:18:34.000 | his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism

00:18:38.240 | and a attack on nihilism.

00:18:40.640 | He regards cynicism as the worst value people can have

00:18:46.040 | and I agree with him 100%.

00:18:48.160 | A lot of times people call me cynical online

00:18:50.680 | and I push back very, very hard

00:18:52.520 | because to be a, you know,

00:18:54.680 | I had this quote in the New Right where I said,

00:18:56.360 | "I'd rather be naive than a cynic

00:18:58.040 | "because a cynic is a hopeless man

00:19:00.140 | "who projects his hopelessness to the world at large."

00:19:03.360 | Camus, this is the metaphor I use

00:19:05.880 | and I find it very inspirational.

00:19:07.600 | I thought it was in his work,

00:19:08.920 | but I guess I thought if it described it to him.

00:19:11.080 | There's two types of people.

00:19:12.400 | You imagine you go to a mountainside

00:19:14.440 | and you see a blank canvas on an easel

00:19:19.000 | standing in front of this mountainside.

00:19:20.960 | One people would be like, "Why is this blank canvas here?

00:19:24.120 | "You know, what is this?

00:19:25.460 | "What's going on here?"

00:19:26.760 | And just be confused.

00:19:28.080 | Whereas the other type of person will be like,

00:19:30.880 | "There's a blank canvas here in this beautiful countryside.

00:19:33.920 | "What a great opportunity.

00:19:35.580 | "I can paint this river, I could paint that bird,

00:19:38.440 | "I could paint my friends or myself in the background."

00:19:41.640 | Infinite choices and this is a gift

00:19:43.700 | that I have been given.

00:19:45.080 | And I think that also ties very heavily

00:19:47.040 | into what I went to yeshiva as a kid,

00:19:49.080 | which is Jewish school.

00:19:50.240 | What we were taught incessantly how to look at life

00:19:54.640 | is this beautiful gift that God has given you

00:19:57.880 | and that God wants you to be happy.

00:19:59.840 | He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way.

00:20:03.440 | I remember the first time I went into a church

00:20:06.480 | and they were asking questions about the Jewish concept,

00:20:08.680 | the afterlife, they weren't familiar with Jewish thought.

00:20:10.880 | And it took me a second 'cause I didn't really have answers

00:20:13.160 | and then I remembered what we were taught,

00:20:15.060 | which is let's suppose you're at this banquet

00:20:18.100 | with the best chef on earth and the table's so heavy

00:20:20.980 | 'cause you've got steaks and you've got chicken

00:20:23.080 | and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing

00:20:25.640 | and you've got your Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb

00:20:29.860 | and the store brand, everything you want.

00:20:31.700 | And you're looking around at this amazing bounty, right?

00:20:34.740 | And then you turn to this best chef on earth

00:20:36.840 | and you're like, "Oh, so what's for dessert?"

00:20:39.140 | I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane.

00:20:44.140 | You have this, eat the meal.

00:20:45.820 | I promise you, if I could deliver this meal,

00:20:48.460 | the dessert's gonna be okay.

00:20:50.020 | So this focus on the afterlife

00:20:52.000 | when we've been given this amazing gift on this earth

00:20:56.740 | is a very kind of different mindset

00:20:58.860 | from both the Jewish tradition as I'd been taught

00:21:01.420 | and the Camus mindset.

00:21:02.500 | Obviously Camus was an atheist,

00:21:03.780 | didn't believe in an afterlife.

00:21:05.300 | But this concept that life is meaningless,

00:21:09.340 | but that means you have that opportunity to find value,

00:21:14.340 | to seek for truth, to seek for happiness.

00:21:17.420 | And Camus has this quote, it's ascribed to him,

00:21:19.580 | it's like a meme, I've never found the source

00:21:21.140 | so maybe he doesn't really say it, but he says,

00:21:23.380 | "Maybe it's not about happy endings,

00:21:25.020 | maybe it's about the journey."

00:21:26.660 | And I think when you have that mindset,

00:21:28.420 | and as you and I, I think you and I both found this

00:21:30.920 | because neither of us when we were kids

00:21:32.660 | thought we'd be doing this, right?

00:21:34.540 | But now that we are really fortunate.

00:21:36.980 | - Definitely this.

00:21:37.900 | - Yeah.

00:21:38.740 | - And definitely that.

00:21:39.560 | - Yeah, but now that we're fortunate enough to do this

00:21:41.660 | and that we're blessed enough

00:21:42.940 | that there's people who find this of value and interest

00:21:45.300 | and we could pay the rent doing this,

00:21:47.100 | there's not a day that goes by

00:21:49.020 | where I don't think you and I think this is pretty absurd,

00:21:53.180 | but it's also pretty wonderful.

00:21:54.700 | And as a consequence of us thriving,

00:21:56.740 | it also shows other people

00:21:59.180 | that happiness is possible on this earth.

00:22:01.820 | And I think cynicism is the lie.

00:22:04.940 | It's not just the world view,

00:22:06.140 | it's a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth

00:22:09.940 | or it's only possible if you sell your soul

00:22:13.980 | and you're like a bad person, you screw other people over.

00:22:17.300 | I reject that in every aspect.

00:22:19.860 | You know, as you said, my birthday is coming up.

00:22:21.940 | I've been feeling just a lot of really great things

00:22:25.420 | have been happening very, very recently.

00:22:27.180 | So it affects me very heavily emotionally,

00:22:29.780 | especially when I see the response it gives to,

00:22:34.580 | like the kids, right?

00:22:36.020 | So it's one thing to say, this is what I'm for,

00:22:38.740 | but when you can provide proof of concept

00:22:41.260 | that what you've been advocating

00:22:42.780 | does result in positive responses.

00:22:45.220 | I got a message from this kid

00:22:47.060 | who had tried to kill himself a year ago, okay?

00:22:49.940 | And then he was like, look, I found your work,

00:22:52.580 | I found some other stuff.

00:22:53.900 | And now I realize I'm gonna make something of myself.

00:22:56.620 | I was born in a meth house,

00:22:58.860 | whatever 19, 20 years old, I should be in the garbage,

00:23:02.140 | but I'm gonna try to be a standup

00:23:03.940 | because I have opportunity on this earth.

00:23:06.420 | Even if he fails as a standup,

00:23:08.420 | he's still such, whatever he does, washing dishes,

00:23:11.980 | there's no shame in that.

00:23:13.420 | Is it so bad to have a crappy job

00:23:16.260 | and a girlfriend who you don't really like,

00:23:18.300 | but as compared to the alternative of like,

00:23:19.980 | I'm gonna kill myself, this is heaven.

00:23:22.500 | - Well, I think there's beauty to be discovered

00:23:25.100 | in all of it and all of those experiences.

00:23:27.420 | - Yes.

00:23:28.260 | - So, but at the same time,

00:23:30.500 | so I often think about,

00:23:33.140 | I just recently reread "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky.

00:23:36.260 | I often feel like the idiot.

00:23:38.020 | That's why when I say I'm an idiot,

00:23:39.580 | I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot,

00:23:43.220 | which the world sees you as naive.

00:23:45.220 | I don't think he's naive, I don't think I'm naive,

00:23:47.740 | but I tend to see the good in people

00:23:51.220 | and the good in every moment.

00:23:53.460 | And the world often is cynical.

00:23:57.380 | And in fact, especially in what we do,

00:24:00.060 | often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical.

00:24:03.340 | - This is very much an urban elite educated mindset

00:24:09.060 | where if you write a book about someone who's,

00:24:11.300 | let's suppose a drug addict or a prostitute,

00:24:13.460 | that has heft and that's valid.

00:24:15.580 | But if you're writing a book about like a love story,

00:24:18.240 | you know, two people fall in love

00:24:19.260 | and they're in roller coasters or carousels,

00:24:22.020 | that's less legitimate.

00:24:23.060 | I hate that.

00:24:23.980 | I hate that, I hate that so much

00:24:25.700 | because the message it gives to people

00:24:27.980 | is you have to choose between thriving and happiness

00:24:31.220 | and silliness and seriousness and depravity.

00:24:34.380 | And I'm not saying that drug addicts or prostitutes

00:24:36.020 | to pray, but they're basically their worldviews.

00:24:37.780 | If it's, unless it's dark and twisted,

00:24:39.440 | it doesn't really count as art.

00:24:40.960 | And I despise that mindset, that subtext.

00:24:43.940 | - So the internet and people around me

00:24:45.900 | often will call me naive because I don't know.

00:24:47.860 | - I think the word they want is innocent, don't you think?

00:24:49.980 | It's a better word. - But it's not that innocent.

00:24:51.780 | - No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart,

00:24:55.560 | I know you fairly well at this point,

00:24:57.180 | believe that goodness is possible

00:25:00.220 | and that people can, if not be good,

00:25:02.300 | at least be better than they were yesterday.

00:25:04.140 | - See, even the word naive or the word innocent

00:25:06.820 | presumes that there's not wisdom in that,

00:25:09.500 | presumes that somehow that's,

00:25:12.700 | oh, isn't that beautiful to live that life

00:25:14.980 | of a child who sees the world with these bright eyes

00:25:18.260 | and is hopeful about the future,

00:25:20.260 | but just wait until they grow up and realize

00:25:23.100 | that reality is much harsher than they think.

00:25:25.960 | But that child might be wiser

00:25:29.120 | than all of the adults in the room.

00:25:31.080 | - And don't you wanna be, if the world is like that,

00:25:34.480 | don't you wanna be the guy who takes it on

00:25:37.120 | and changes it for the better?

00:25:39.040 | So it's like saying, well, cancer's everywhere,

00:25:42.360 | it's inevitable, well, don't you wanna be the one

00:25:44.400 | who says, not anymore, I'm here

00:25:46.720 | and I'm gonna make that change

00:25:48.080 | and I can see it being better than it is now.

00:25:51.160 | So I think you and I have the same analysis

00:25:55.940 | of your worldview and I don't think

00:25:57.980 | that there is a good word for it.

00:25:59.860 | So I guess it's this idea of inherent benevolence,

00:26:02.740 | might be maybe wordy, but I think that's more accurate

00:26:05.620 | because you and I did not have such easy lives

00:26:09.300 | growing up, to put it mildly.

00:26:11.140 | You constantly talk about just horrific aspects of life.

00:26:15.900 | So to claim that you kinda don't know that they exist

00:26:18.500 | or you sleep on the rug is completely not accurate

00:26:20.940 | to your work and your mindset.

00:26:23.260 | - Can we talk about World War II and the Soviet Union?

00:26:28.440 | - Sure.

00:26:29.280 | - So on Sunday, June 22nd, 1941,

00:26:36.640 | Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa,

00:26:40.320 | which was the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union.

00:26:42.920 | If I could read to you a few lyrics from a song

00:26:48.200 | that for some reason has stuck throughout my childhood.

00:26:51.820 | It was a famous song during that time.

00:26:53.720 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:27:14.020 | The song talks about Kiev, like that moment

00:27:19.020 | as part of that operation that Kiev was first bombed

00:27:21.780 | and it was announced on June 22nd.

00:27:24.460 | The song says at exactly four o'clock

00:27:26.940 | that the war has begun.

00:27:28.780 | For some reason, this song haunts me

00:27:32.580 | because the exactness of that time

00:27:37.740 | and this realization that at any moment

00:27:41.380 | you could have this thing happen to you

00:27:44.600 | in your own personal life.

00:27:46.180 | Maybe you had something like 9/11 happen

00:27:48.860 | where everything changes.

00:27:50.300 | And it's just like haunting

00:27:52.860 | because it makes me think that at any moment

00:27:56.020 | something like that could happen that changes everything.

00:27:59.700 | And I just think about like normal life going on in Kiev

00:28:04.220 | at the time and then all of a sudden the bombs are dropping

00:28:08.740 | and they announced that the war has begun

00:28:10.620 | and you thought you were going to stay out of the war.

00:28:13.500 | - This is something that is very intensely emotional for me

00:28:26.300 | because you and I are both Russian Jewish.

00:28:29.580 | So to know that my grandparents

00:28:32.900 | and my great-grandma were told that the Nazis are coming

00:28:39.740 | and this was an address rehearsal

00:28:42.060 | and that if they get here, which they do, they did.

00:28:45.580 | Lvov is very Western Ukraine,

00:28:47.740 | that 100% you and all your relatives are going to be murdered

00:28:52.100 | and there's a monument now in Lvov

00:28:57.980 | where I'm from about this,

00:28:59.720 | but I don't think either of us can imagine what it's like

00:29:06.860 | to know, to think that we're about minutes or whatever hours

00:29:11.860 | or there's just the Russian army standing between us

00:29:16.980 | and everyone we are related to

00:29:20.220 | are going to be murdered for no reason.

00:29:23.740 | And you know, like what's the closure here, right?

00:29:28.740 | Like they evacuated a lot of people

00:29:31.940 | but they didn't evacuate enough.

00:29:33.820 | And to know that there is this force

00:29:37.900 | coming to 100% murder you,

00:29:40.620 | this isn't some kind of, you know,

00:29:43.820 | the TV news being hyperbolic, they're coming to kill you.

00:29:47.260 | And if they get you, they will kill you.

00:29:49.740 | And you have to, you know, we all think about war like,

00:29:53.340 | oh, you know, we hope America wins in Iraq, right, right.

00:29:56.460 | But if America got their ass kicked kind of in Vietnam,

00:29:59.820 | it's not really gonna affect America

00:30:02.820 | in the sense that you're gonna have the body bags

00:30:04.660 | and all the kids being killed.

00:30:05.800 | And that's something that's, I'm not sweeping in the rug,

00:30:07.940 | but no one in America thought the Vietnamese

00:30:10.820 | are gonna come here and kill them, right?

00:30:12.160 | They were secure in their person.

00:30:13.780 | So to have that sense of, we really need to win

00:30:18.780 | because if we don't win, we are 100%,

00:30:23.700 | if we, they, the Russian army doesn't win,

00:30:26.020 | we are 100% all going to be slaughtered

00:30:29.620 | and often in not just a bullet to the head

00:30:31.660 | and in sadistic ways is something that to know

00:30:35.900 | that people who share my blood saw and went through

00:30:39.780 | is very hard for me to kind of wrap my head around.

00:30:44.780 | - And there's no possibility to delude yourself.

00:30:48.820 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:49.660 | - Because I mean, they would, as the song also talks about,

00:30:53.740 | but they would burn the factories.

00:30:56.540 | So it's basically saying we're in the war now.

00:31:00.020 | This is like--

00:31:01.740 | - This is your life, yeah.

00:31:02.580 | - This is our life now.

00:31:03.700 | - You know how you, yesterday you were worried about like,

00:31:05.860 | oh, I misplaced my pen.

00:31:07.380 | Where is it like, it's like, yeah, this was paradise.

00:31:11.500 | - Most of us are gonna, our life now is that most of us

00:31:15.380 | are going to die.

00:31:17.300 | And if we want to prevent all of us from dying,

00:31:21.580 | we have to fight.

00:31:23.620 | And we also can't sit down in some kind of weird

00:31:26.740 | like desert island or plane crash situation

00:31:31.060 | and be like, let's decide between us

00:31:33.060 | who's gonna be the first to die.

00:31:34.220 | Maybe the Titanic, right?

00:31:36.820 | They sat down and they were like women and children

00:31:38.820 | in the lifeboats.

00:31:39.980 | You know, they had this rational agreement.

00:31:41.700 | You don't have those choices in a war.

00:31:44.380 | So it's something that I, it's just very chilling

00:31:51.380 | and it's something I don't really have the emotional space

00:31:56.180 | to understand or grapple with.

00:31:58.300 | Even, you know, obviously I've been to North Korea,

00:32:01.220 | you can see it and so on and so forth.

00:32:03.100 | You and I can't, or anyone listening to this,

00:32:07.060 | except for maybe on me and people like that,

00:32:09.980 | you can't imagine what that's like to live it.

00:32:13.020 | We can't, we can't imagine what it's like to live

00:32:16.460 | in those situations where it's not like before Hitler came,

00:32:19.780 | everyone's dancing around and having a great time.

00:32:23.420 | I mean, imagine how, what that life is like

00:32:25.420 | where your preference to Hitler is starving

00:32:29.580 | and waiting on line for hours for bread

00:32:31.780 | and to have the secret police and your friend's attorney

00:32:34.140 | when and your phones are all tapped and you're a prisoner.

00:32:36.520 | But to you, this is infinitely better than the alternative.

00:32:40.500 | Like these are the choices that, you know,

00:32:42.540 | our family had to deal with.

00:32:45.060 | It's something that no matter how much you,

00:32:48.260 | it's like, let me put it in terms people can understand.

00:32:50.900 | You know what I mean?

00:32:51.740 | It's like your first bad breakup, right?

00:32:53.580 | Like that's a much simpler thing to wrap your head around

00:32:56.380 | because it's like, if you've never had it,

00:32:58.460 | you can't really, but when you feel it,

00:33:00.300 | it's just so intense, but you can't tell someone

00:33:02.540 | what it's like.

00:33:03.660 | We could sit down for days and hours

00:33:05.700 | and have people tell us, but until it's the totality

00:33:10.020 | of your environment and your life and your mindset.

00:33:13.140 | I remember my grandma,

00:33:14.340 | she would talk about, it's like,

00:33:19.340 | when you're that hungry,

00:33:26.040 | all you're thinking about is bread.

00:33:32.220 | - Yeah.

00:33:33.060 | - Because your brain won't like, you know,

00:33:34.660 | human beings, you know, we evolved,

00:33:36.460 | we have instincts, whatever.

00:33:37.580 | And the mind is telling you food, food, food, food, food,

00:33:41.420 | food, and that there's kids thinking this

00:33:45.300 | and that they're not gonna get the food.

00:33:47.820 | - Yeah.

00:33:48.660 | - And you imagine being a parent and your kids--

00:33:50.940 | - Watching your kids without food

00:33:52.780 | and knowing they're not gonna get the food.

00:33:56.340 | - And the fact that this happened in North Korea

00:33:58.940 | in the '90s, I met a refugee

00:34:02.020 | and he had to watch his dad starve to death.

00:34:07.320 | And thank you.

00:34:10.980 | And we have no concept of what it's like.

00:34:15.980 | I mean, we kind of, you know, it's just like,

00:34:23.140 | last night here in Austin, all the places were closed

00:34:26.260 | and I couldn't get my protein powder.

00:34:28.340 | - Yeah.

00:34:29.180 | - And this is the extent of my suffering

00:34:31.760 | when it comes to food, you know, or if I couldn't,

00:34:34.540 | there was a restaurant that I went to in Brooklyn

00:34:36.980 | where for some fakakta reason,

00:34:39.860 | they weren't serving sashimi, they only had sushi.

00:34:42.260 | So I had to have the rice and the carbs.

00:34:44.700 | To live a life where that is the extent

00:34:47.220 | of your food problems, as opposed to the choice

00:34:51.320 | is either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24/7.

00:34:55.140 | You know, my grandma told this story

00:34:56.620 | of how they had a close call.

00:34:59.660 | It was her and her brother and her mom,

00:35:01.660 | my great-grandma, who passed.

00:35:04.020 | And I think there was like either a helicopter overhead

00:35:05.980 | or something and my great-grandma jumped on top

00:35:09.260 | of my grandma's brother and not my grandma.

00:35:12.700 | So she basically did a Sophie's Choice,

00:35:15.060 | my grandma's name is Sophia, and chose the brother.

00:35:18.640 | And this is something that she felt, you know,

00:35:20.980 | all her life that her mom had chosen her brother over her.

00:35:24.360 | But these little things that happen,

00:35:26.500 | these little kind of decisions we have to make in war,

00:35:29.840 | there's a book I read called "Five Chimneys," I think,

00:35:34.340 | this woman who was an Auschwitz survivor.

00:35:36.940 | And what she talked about, what people don't appreciate,

00:35:39.620 | it's not necessarily the slaughter and the torture,

00:35:43.300 | it's that there's no rhyme or reason to it.

00:35:46.060 | Like she talked about how they had a camp

00:35:47.900 | just for people from Czechoslovakia,

00:35:51.340 | and they were treated better than the Jews,

00:35:53.460 | and then one day they just killed them all, right?

00:35:55.600 | And she's like, I still don't understand

00:35:58.260 | why they're giving them food and treating them well,

00:36:00.740 | and then the next day they're all killed,

00:36:02.500 | and we will never get answers, you know?

00:36:04.540 | And things like, she talks about

00:36:08.540 | how they decided to kill all the kids,

00:36:11.380 | and they didn't really, either for some reason

00:36:13.380 | they didn't have the courage to,

00:36:14.980 | or they wanted to be cruel, so instead of shooting them,

00:36:17.380 | they just kept walking in the snow until they all died.

00:36:20.020 | So it's things like this,

00:36:22.020 | that the fact that you and I dodged these bullets,

00:36:25.840 | and that we can be here and be doing this,

00:36:29.380 | and, you know, running our mouths for a living,

00:36:31.680 | I think about it all the time,

00:36:34.080 | and it's just very disturbing to know,

00:36:38.520 | and I know you know this as well,

00:36:43.260 | that there's lots of places on earth

00:36:44.760 | where if people had a choice, they would kill us on sight

00:36:47.580 | and be proud of themselves for it.

00:36:49.520 | - Yeah, I don't know what to make of the contrast.

00:36:52.720 | You were talking about the fact that

00:36:55.680 | you've been truly happy the last few weeks and months.

00:36:59.240 | - Yes.

00:37:00.080 | - There's been a lot of moments of happiness

00:37:01.560 | and joy, and that joy is built

00:37:05.560 | on a history of human suffering.

00:37:07.880 | Like in your roots, in your blood,

00:37:10.380 | is a lot of people that were tortured, that suffered,

00:37:13.100 | so that you could have this joy.

00:37:14.840 | And you have both the, you have the responsibility

00:37:17.680 | to truly be grateful for that joy.

00:37:19.880 | - But it also shows that there's the happy ending,

00:37:22.120 | that it does end in a good note,

00:37:23.920 | that it does get infinitely, infinitely better,

00:37:27.720 | and that I think there's a,

00:37:29.440 | I don't like using the word responsibility,

00:37:31.280 | but there is an opportunity for those of us

00:37:35.320 | who did dodge that bullet to give testimony to these people,

00:37:40.320 | and more importantly, to give testimony to the people

00:37:43.600 | who are going through this now.

00:37:46.120 | So, one of the reasons I talk about North Korea so much,

00:37:49.840 | why I wrote Dear Reader, is because it's very easy,

00:37:53.520 | and this is human nature, I'm not condemning people.

00:37:56.120 | I don't, I think that's just how people are wired.

00:37:58.480 | When you see an Asian country with Asian people,

00:38:01.160 | and things are bad over there,

00:38:03.160 | I think in the West, it's like, oh, Asia,

00:38:05.760 | they're all crazy, they're wacky,

00:38:07.120 | they eat dogs, or so on and so forth,

00:38:09.240 | some weird stereotype,

00:38:10.200 | and they think of them as kind of Martians.

00:38:12.720 | So, it's important for people who aren't

00:38:15.120 | of that kind of ancestry to speak on behalf of these people,

00:38:19.800 | because it's very different how just people

00:38:21.640 | just naturally react when you have a Westerner

00:38:23.720 | talking about this.

00:38:25.000 | Instead of it becoming them over there,

00:38:27.840 | it becomes, this could have been us very easily.

00:38:31.760 | I have a friend, Peter Veyhansky, great dude,

00:38:34.760 | and I was showing him photos when I was in Pyongyang,

00:38:37.200 | and he goes, this looks like a Russian city

00:38:39.520 | with Asian people.

00:38:40.360 | It completely disturbed him.

00:38:42.440 | So, that was one of the reasons I did go to North Korea,

00:38:45.400 | 'cause that was as close as I would get

00:38:47.320 | to see what your family went through,

00:38:48.800 | to see what my family went through,

00:38:50.560 | and they're still living under this regime.

00:38:54.520 | And one of the things I fought very hard to do

00:38:56.920 | with Dear Reader, which I was successful in amazingly,

00:38:59.480 | and it just, I said, I could die now.

00:39:02.960 | I feel like if you just move the needle a little bit,

00:39:05.120 | then you've kind of paid your due

00:39:08.560 | for your time here on this earth.

00:39:11.080 | To have it change from being a laughing stock,

00:39:14.480 | and I think Team America did a good job.

00:39:17.160 | They made Kim Jong-il into a clown,

00:39:19.240 | and they made a joke of it,

00:39:20.600 | but you're going from nothing to jokes.

00:39:22.920 | At least now people are aware of it, that it exists, right?

00:39:25.960 | And then I, and many others, took it from a joke to like,

00:39:29.920 | guys, this is really, really, really bad,

00:39:32.880 | and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is,

00:39:35.440 | and I think now there is an understanding,

00:39:37.520 | other than a few people who are just looking at it

00:39:39.080 | through a Trump lens and wanting Trump to fail,

00:39:40.880 | 'cause Trump's an asshole and that's fine,

00:39:42.520 | to be like these poor people.

00:39:45.040 | And it's really unfortunate,

00:39:46.200 | because there's a segment of Western culture

00:39:49.400 | who thinks that, correctly,

00:39:51.840 | often when you're complaining about,

00:39:54.480 | or discussing the plight of another country,

00:39:57.880 | that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade.

00:40:01.040 | Like the Kurds in Syria, we're talking about,

00:40:03.120 | if we don't end Syria tomorrow,

00:40:04.320 | it's gonna be another genocide, blah, blah, blah.

00:40:06.400 | I'm not saying let's invade North Korea,

00:40:08.560 | or anything like that.

00:40:09.400 | All I'm saying is, thank God that this isn't your life.

00:40:14.400 | I bring this up all the time.

00:40:15.920 | The woman who was my guide when I was there,

00:40:18.720 | I'm aware of what she's up to now.

00:40:22.000 | She's extremely rich by North Korean standards,

00:40:26.360 | but she'll never be in a position to buy medicine.

00:40:28.520 | She'll never be in a position to go on a vacation.

00:40:31.320 | Things that you and I just, whatever,

00:40:34.400 | she can't go on the internet.

00:40:36.360 | She can't get an encyclopedia.

00:40:39.160 | She can't better herself as a person,

00:40:41.400 | other than through what the state allows,

00:40:43.600 | and meaning better yourself as a person

00:40:45.480 | in service to the state.

00:40:47.080 | So, I mean, it's also frustrating,

00:40:50.960 | 'cause there's only so much that I can do as an individual.

00:40:54.280 | - What's your takeaway about human nature,

00:40:56.600 | from looking at North Korea,

00:40:58.080 | and looking at how the rest of the world

00:41:00.240 | is looking at North Korea?

00:41:01.560 | - This is a great question.

00:41:03.760 | I think about it fairly often.

00:41:05.440 | I always say human beings are animals, right?

00:41:07.960 | When you say someone's an animal,

00:41:09.360 | it's like a slur, like he's a beast.

00:41:12.000 | Animals are capable of enormous kindness,

00:41:15.000 | empathy, sympathy.

00:41:17.120 | They look out for one another, groom one another.

00:41:19.800 | There's a thing with apes,

00:41:21.200 | where they groom each other for parasites,

00:41:23.680 | and even if there are no parasites,

00:41:25.400 | they pretend there's parasites,

00:41:26.640 | just to have that kind of bonding.

00:41:28.520 | You see infinite photos online of cats raising puppies,

00:41:33.440 | 'cause the puppy's mom died, things like this.

00:41:35.720 | That's part of being an animal.

00:41:37.200 | Part of being an animal is also

00:41:39.040 | just the most monstrous cruelty, killer whales.

00:41:43.360 | There's this big PC move to not call them killer whales,

00:41:46.280 | and just call them orcas.

00:41:47.680 | They will murder blue whale pups, calves, excuse me,

00:41:52.680 | and play with them and not even eat them.

00:41:54.400 | So they just murder for the sake of fun.

00:41:56.400 | And cats kill birds all the time, things like this.

00:42:00.720 | So it runs the whole gamut.

00:42:02.440 | When Yaron and I run your show,

00:42:07.160 | I don't think "Lord of the Flies" is accurate.

00:42:08.760 | I don't think Hobbes is how reality works

00:42:10.920 | when you're in that kind of state.

00:42:14.040 | But I think we've seen countless examples of human beings,

00:42:19.040 | especially when human beings have power

00:42:22.640 | over someone who's powerless,

00:42:24.720 | of allowing themselves to engage in not just harm,

00:42:29.440 | but cruelty.

00:42:31.160 | And that is something as Soviets,

00:42:32.960 | you and I are very painfully aware of.

00:42:35.520 | It's not just about the oppression,

00:42:37.740 | which as bad enough as it is,

00:42:39.540 | it's that mediocre person with that little bit of power,

00:42:43.720 | and now they're standing between you

00:42:46.120 | and your daughter having medicine,

00:42:48.160 | and they love it to make you dance,

00:42:51.600 | to be like, "Oh, you need me to get this medicine?"

00:42:54.160 | Make you go through hoops,

00:42:56.080 | 'cause now they feel like for the first time in their life,

00:42:58.320 | they're in a position of strength and power.

00:43:00.240 | I think that is in many ways the more common nature of evil,

00:43:04.440 | that what Hannah Arendt talks about, the banality of evil,

00:43:06.960 | than someone who's like an SS guard

00:43:08.800 | just shooting someone in the head.

00:43:10.240 | Like that, I think we could all wrap our heads around

00:43:12.120 | to some extent, like, "Okay, I'm a military.

00:43:14.640 | "It's not easy.

00:43:15.480 | "I have to execute people."

00:43:16.840 | Pulling a trigger, you could kind of have

00:43:18.080 | this mental disconnect between the finger and the victim.

00:43:20.800 | But like that little day-to-day stuff,

00:43:22.660 | like are you doing the right thing on a day-to-day basis?

00:43:24.780 | That I think is far more common

00:43:26.800 | and far more disturbing aspect in certain senses

00:43:29.620 | of the human psyche.

00:43:30.660 | - Yeah, there's something especially disturbing

00:43:35.620 | about a weak man given power,

00:43:41.800 | and just abusing that power.

00:43:44.320 | There's something about not just weak,

00:43:45.960 | but like mediocre at everything he does,

00:43:49.160 | or less than mediocre.

00:43:50.640 | - A great example of this,

00:43:52.000 | which I'm also talking about in the next book,

00:43:53.480 | is Ceausescu, who was the dictator of Romania.

00:43:56.360 | So the Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood

00:44:00.480 | in popular culture, but the different countries

00:44:03.880 | in the Second World, the Soviet bloc,

00:44:05.980 | some are more liberal than others.

00:44:07.560 | Some are more sane than others.

00:44:08.800 | And Ceausescu, at first, was one of the more

00:44:12.080 | Western-friendly, more the free ones.

00:44:13.900 | Then he met the great leader, Kim Il-sung, from North Korea,

00:44:16.660 | and he had the idea to impose a personality cult on Romania.

00:44:20.240 | And it's the kind of things like forcing people to breed,

00:44:22.480 | 'cause he wanted to make people taller.

00:44:24.480 | I think he made like the biggest building in all of Europe,

00:44:27.120 | the People's Palace, but it was just for him,

00:44:29.400 | while there's no electricity elsewhere.

00:44:31.840 | But you look at this guy, Stalin's a badass, right?

00:44:34.660 | He was a bank robber.

00:44:35.640 | If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk.

00:44:37.800 | Lenin was clearly intellectual.

00:44:39.640 | These were powerful, Trotsky, these were powerful men

00:44:43.360 | with huge egos, huge force of personality.

00:44:46.040 | But you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could,

00:44:49.000 | like for example, on my driver's license,

00:44:52.000 | instead of my address, I'm like in my real address,

00:44:53.700 | being like one, two, three, four, Fifth Avenue,

00:44:56.560 | by mistake it says one, two, three, four, Fifth Street.

00:44:59.720 | So you can imagine him being in the post office

00:45:02.200 | and me giving him my ID to get my package

00:45:04.120 | and him being baffled because this says street,

00:45:06.320 | this says Avenue instead of understand.

00:45:08.080 | And the look on his face, this dullard,

00:45:10.880 | that you can see how, you know how sometimes,

00:45:12.720 | I'm gonna, can I curse?

00:45:13.880 | - Fuck yes.

00:45:15.800 | - Yeah, so if you know like how if you're in the airport

00:45:17.280 | and you see someone and you look at them an adult

00:45:19.200 | and you think, okay, this person was born fucked up,

00:45:21.160 | just like on sight, like something's wrong with them,

00:45:22.800 | how are they traveling alone?

00:45:24.000 | You look at Ceausescu, you look at him,

00:45:26.400 | you're like, something's not right with this guy.

00:45:27.920 | Not in the sense of like evil,

00:45:29.160 | but in the sense of he's a simpleton, right?

00:45:31.200 | And now he's in charge of this whole country

00:45:33.120 | and everyone's taught to regard him

00:45:34.880 | as one of the great geniuses of all time.

00:45:37.280 | And it's this, the idea of this mediocre nobody,

00:45:41.240 | this guy would have in any other culture

00:45:43.280 | been accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job

00:45:48.200 | where he's like, okay, he works at the mail service

00:45:50.560 | and he's bad at it, okay, fine, he's not hurting anyone.

00:45:52.760 | And now as a result of this, he's responsible

00:45:54.640 | for mass death, secret police and incarceration.

00:45:58.200 | And you know, one of the greatest things I've ever seen,

00:46:01.360 | which I'm sure many people have seen as well,

00:46:03.840 | if you go on YouTube, it's his speech

00:46:06.880 | and it's the first time the crowd turns

00:46:08.520 | and his head kind of, 'cause they start booing him,

00:46:10.520 | which was unheard of.

00:46:11.760 | And he was shot with his dog-faced wife not that long after.

00:46:15.600 | It was just a great moment, but it's things like this.

00:46:18.400 | I agree with you that that mediocre weak person

00:46:21.320 | is now in a position of power over somebody else.

00:46:24.040 | And that sense of vindictiveness,

00:46:27.080 | like I'm gonna feel strong for once in my life,

00:46:29.160 | but it's gonna be at your expense.

00:46:30.840 | That I think is human nature, it's most primal.

00:46:34.480 | - And every time I meet a person in this world--

00:46:37.160 | - You're the first person to get me to cry

00:46:38.960 | on a fucking podcast.

00:46:40.160 | Fucking the robot gets me to cry.

00:46:41.800 | What the fuck is going on?

00:46:43.280 | - Every time I meet a weird person,

00:46:45.520 | somebody, to me, heroism is also taking a risk

00:46:50.520 | to rebel against mediocrity.

00:46:54.680 | - Yeah.

00:46:55.560 | - Like in the most simplest of ways,

00:46:58.400 | like the license address.

00:47:00.760 | Like taking a risk to break the little bit of rule

00:47:03.400 | that nobody will know about,

00:47:04.640 | to take that little bit of a leap

00:47:07.440 | of like that little protest against the bureaucracy.

00:47:11.040 | - Well, like that Nazi guard where he just spoke out,

00:47:13.080 | he's like, "Hey, lady."

00:47:14.200 | - But that's a big one.

00:47:15.200 | - Oh, that's a big one, sure.

00:47:16.040 | - I mean, like literally at the line at Starbucks

00:47:18.720 | or something like that.

00:47:19.560 | Like even in the tiniest of ways,

00:47:21.920 | when I see people just like,

00:47:25.000 | it's almost like that little like glimmer in their eye,

00:47:27.600 | a wink like we're in this together.

00:47:29.640 | There's all this conformity all around us

00:47:33.360 | that's at a different time could have been Nazi Germany,

00:47:37.400 | could have been Stalinist Soviet Union.

00:47:40.320 | We're in this together,

00:47:41.520 | we're going to rebel against that conformity

00:47:43.840 | by just taking the risk,

00:47:46.600 | that little bit of risk against mediocrity.

00:47:48.960 | I don't know.

00:47:49.800 | And then once again, I see this in companies too.

00:47:54.800 | When I see the mediocrity, I see this,

00:47:58.240 | I used to work at Google,

00:47:59.280 | I see it in Google.

00:48:00.760 | And when the companies grow,

00:48:02.640 | that mediocrity is overwhelming.

00:48:04.560 | - The Peter principle, right?

00:48:05.720 | - The Peter principle.

00:48:06.560 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:48:07.400 | My hope is that all of us have the possibility

00:48:10.520 | for that glimmer, that risk-taking,

00:48:14.320 | the leap of faith or whatever the heck that is,

00:48:17.920 | the leap out of the ordinary,

00:48:19.680 | out of the conformity, out of the mediocrity.

00:48:22.200 | - So this is where you and I disagree.

00:48:24.880 | I think most, a lot of people are not capable of that.

00:48:28.840 | They're accustomed to it.

00:48:30.800 | I don't know if they're not capable.

00:48:32.320 | - No, I understand your position,

00:48:34.440 | I'm disagreeing with it.

00:48:35.280 | I'm saying I do not think they're capable.

00:48:36.880 | I think a lot of people effectively don't have souls.

00:48:40.680 | They do not have a conscience in this sense

00:48:42.960 | where they're going to look at an issue,

00:48:45.520 | bring their critical thinking and say,

00:48:47.680 | "All right, I am going to do the right thing,

00:48:51.360 | "although I'm taking a risk."

00:48:52.840 | - Do you think thinking is involved

00:48:54.200 | or is it just taking that leap?

00:48:56.040 | There's something about that basic human spirit.

00:48:58.720 | Forget the thinking part.

00:49:00.120 | It's just saying, "I'll take that risk."

00:49:04.200 | They're taking that adventure.

00:49:05.400 | The same thing that got people to explore the seas,

00:49:09.360 | throughout human civilization,

00:49:13.120 | explore land, explore the oceans,

00:49:16.280 | that exploration.

00:49:18.240 | We've done stuff this way all this time.

00:49:21.080 | I'm going to take a leap.

00:49:23.440 | And that comes out of nowhere, seemingly.

00:49:25.000 | - But those people are the heroes,

00:49:26.600 | but I don't think that's universal.

00:49:28.640 | I'm going to use a very gauche example.

00:49:33.320 | There was a show called "Scare Tactics,"

00:49:35.360 | which was basically a candid camera,

00:49:36.880 | but they would scare people.

00:49:37.920 | Like they'd have vampires, whatever,

00:49:39.520 | and hidden camera and people's reactions.

00:49:41.720 | But sometimes the prank didn't work out like they expected.

00:49:48.640 | So there was one where they were hiring

00:49:50.800 | the people who were the marks,

00:49:52.320 | the contestants, so to speak,

00:49:53.960 | who were hired to be a security guard.

00:49:56.360 | And you have to watch this factory overnight

00:49:59.200 | and you get paid.

00:50:00.400 | And what the setup was,

00:50:02.280 | some people were breaking out of the factory

00:50:04.960 | in the middle of the night, like in rags.

00:50:07.200 | And they were saying,

00:50:08.020 | "They were keeping us prisoner here," like blah, blah, blah,

00:50:10.280 | and just watch the person's reaction to this.

00:50:12.360 | And there was one security guard where they're,

00:50:15.480 | he basically forced them back into the building.

00:50:18.240 | And they're like, they're working us 24/7.

00:50:20.240 | We're getting beaten.

00:50:21.080 | He's like, "I'm here to do a job.

00:50:22.800 | "Get back in there."

00:50:24.240 | And you watch this and it never even enters his head

00:50:27.760 | to be like, "Something's wrong here.

00:50:29.920 | "He was given his orders.

00:50:31.640 | "He's following his orders."

00:50:33.640 | And to me, that is not uncommon.

00:50:37.480 | And that person, although they look like you and I,

00:50:40.040 | there's something essentially human missing with them.

00:50:43.600 | Now, very quickly, the reaction is,

00:50:46.560 | "Well, it's one step from there to Nazism."

00:50:50.080 | I don't think it's something that,

00:50:52.560 | I'm not saying this person should be killed,

00:50:54.360 | but I'm just saying to expect that every human being

00:50:58.880 | has the capacity to have that defiance,

00:51:02.160 | especially at a cost to their own life,

00:51:04.040 | that I think is not realistic.

00:51:06.400 | But at the same time,

00:51:08.880 | I feel like an octopus on the eighth hand,

00:51:11.200 | it is those few of us,

00:51:13.640 | or if you want to include me in this,

00:51:15.880 | who do make these tiny little protests,

00:51:20.160 | who look the other way when someone is hungry,

00:51:23.120 | who's stealing food from the supermarket, right?

00:51:25.280 | It's like, all right, I'm going to pretend

00:51:27.400 | I didn't see anything.

00:51:28.520 | Those little elements of heroism

00:51:32.040 | are what move humanity forward

00:51:35.040 | and demonstrate the validity of the human experience,

00:51:39.680 | whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery.

00:51:42.280 | - I think almost everybody in the world

00:51:45.000 | can derive deep meaning and pleasure

00:51:48.000 | from having done those courageous acts.

00:51:50.360 | And I also think they have the capacity to do them,

00:51:53.680 | to discover that meaning and happiness.

00:51:55.440 | - So you're the cynic, then why aren't they doing it?

00:51:57.480 | - They haven't gotten a chance to,

00:51:59.520 | like I've never tried LSD or DMT.

00:52:04.520 | You haven't gotten the chance to try this amazing journey,

00:52:08.320 | which is taking the risk.

00:52:09.560 | - That's nonsense, because as you just said two minutes ago,

00:52:13.600 | everyone has that chance every day

00:52:16.600 | to do the right thing.

00:52:18.040 | - We have the chance to do a lot of things

00:52:19.640 | and we don't realize.

00:52:20.600 | There's a lot of stuff right in front of our nose

00:52:22.960 | that we don't realize.

00:52:24.200 | - Right.

00:52:25.040 | - You have to kind of wake up to it.

00:52:26.200 | Sometimes you need the catalyst.

00:52:30.000 | There needs to be some kind of thing that happens

00:52:33.000 | that wakes you up.

00:52:34.060 | The fact that most people

00:52:38.560 | don't take the small acts of rebellion

00:52:41.520 | doesn't mean they don't have the capacity

00:52:43.720 | to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it.

00:52:48.720 | Then it's a discussion about how to create societies

00:52:52.840 | that get more and more people to be free actors

00:52:57.400 | and free thinkers.

00:52:58.800 | That's the question.

00:53:00.640 | That probably leads us into a discussion

00:53:02.320 | of anarchism and so on.

00:53:03.320 | But I just think we are very young as a species.

00:53:07.340 | We're trying to figure out how to get ourselves

00:53:10.680 | to first be collaborative,

00:53:13.960 | but at the same time be free spirits.

00:53:16.520 | I think both of those are within human nature

00:53:18.560 | for most of us.

00:53:19.520 | - I think another big concern

00:53:22.120 | is that there's enormous disincentives,

00:53:25.240 | and this is Michael Malice speaking,

00:53:27.760 | for human beings to be kind and for tenderness.

00:53:32.040 | I think, especially when you're young,

00:53:34.160 | you know what I mean, when you're immature,

00:53:36.320 | a lot of times someone will reach out to you

00:53:38.200 | with kindness or vulnerability

00:53:40.360 | and you think it's funny to kind of dunk the head

00:53:42.520 | in the water in a pool or something like that.

00:53:44.680 | And when you get older, you look,

00:53:46.600 | you know, there's this one example of this.

00:53:50.320 | This was in the '90s,

00:53:52.640 | and there was a woman, she became a stripper

00:53:56.480 | or something like that or whatever it was.

00:53:58.000 | But she had this amazing body.

00:53:59.160 | She was just gorgeous.

00:54:00.680 | And the show was, she was talking about

00:54:03.120 | how when she was in high school, she was bullied a lot.

00:54:05.800 | And that there was this football player,

00:54:07.160 | he messed with her every single day.

00:54:09.400 | And like at one day, she even threw pickles in her hair

00:54:11.800 | and her hair smelled like pickles

00:54:12.880 | and it was laughing at her.

00:54:14.320 | And this really screwed her up.

00:54:15.920 | I mean, up to that show.

00:54:17.320 | And they took her backstage

00:54:18.600 | and they brought out the football player.

00:54:19.960 | Now he's a dad and a regular dude.

00:54:22.920 | And he's like, "Do you know why you're here?"

00:54:25.280 | And he's like, "No."

00:54:26.200 | And they're like, "Oh, what were you like in high school?"

00:54:27.560 | He's like, "I was kind of a jock, you know, bully, whatever."

00:54:30.000 | And they brought her out

00:54:31.360 | and he didn't even remember her really.

00:54:33.200 | And she was just starts crying about the pickles

00:54:35.280 | and whatever, and this is something that affected her

00:54:36.800 | for like 20 years.

00:54:38.000 | And I've never seen a clear example

00:54:40.920 | of someone who wanted to kill themselves in this guy.

00:54:43.240 | Like the guilt on his face, and he's looking at her

00:54:46.480 | and he's desperate to be like,

00:54:47.960 | "What can I do to take your pain away, to make it better?"

00:54:52.960 | Like he was just crippled by it

00:54:55.240 | 'cause he knew there's nothing he could do.

00:54:56.920 | He knew he 100% did the wrong thing.

00:54:59.440 | He knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly.

00:55:01.880 | Like you can imagine, you know,

00:55:03.240 | I got to screw over this lady to feed my family.

00:55:05.400 | You know, that's fine.

00:55:06.800 | But at the time it meant nothing to him.

00:55:09.840 | So of course he didn't remember.

00:55:11.400 | And he was just paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt.

00:55:14.440 | One of the reasons I always tried to do the right thing

00:55:17.640 | isn't because I'm an inherently good person,

00:55:20.320 | which I do not think I am.

00:55:21.440 | I don't think anyone is inherently good,

00:55:23.160 | but because I will feel guilty about it

00:55:26.000 | for a very, very long time.

00:55:28.040 | Because if you do the wrong thing,

00:55:29.920 | this is a very Camus idea.

00:55:31.640 | If you do the wrong thing to a good person,

00:55:35.560 | that's really, really bad

00:55:37.760 | 'cause what kind of person are you?

00:55:39.040 | In the same way that everyone can be that guy

00:55:41.680 | who takes someone out for their birthday,

00:55:43.840 | everyone has that ability

00:55:45.600 | for someone who did the wrong thing

00:55:47.320 | to someone who's a normal person.

00:55:49.560 | And do you want to be that guy as well?

00:55:51.960 | My friend, Bittstein, he's a big gold,

00:55:56.640 | excuse me, Bitcoin person.

00:55:58.320 | My biography, "Ego and Hubris" is like $500 now on eBay.

00:56:01.440 | It's like hard to find, came out in 2006.

00:56:03.840 | And he had told me that you can get it on Torrent.

00:56:08.840 | It's downloadable.

00:56:10.280 | And I'm like, "Oh, I thought if you're my friend,

00:56:12.200 | "you'd want to buy it."

00:56:13.240 | At the time it was not $500, I assure you.

00:56:15.800 | And he goes, "I did buy it.

00:56:17.200 | "I'm just telling you that you could also get it for free,

00:56:19.960 | "this information that you might want to use."

00:56:22.480 | And I felt, I'm like, I snapped at this kid

00:56:26.000 | who was doing right by me.

00:56:28.600 | And I felt, it just stuck in my head.

00:56:30.880 | I'm like, "You're an ass."

00:56:32.640 | And then years later, I apologized.

00:56:34.320 | He had no memory of this at all.

00:56:35.760 | And I'm glad to be able to reiterate the apology again.

00:56:38.120 | But a lot of times I'm extremely aggressive on Twitter

00:56:43.120 | and in other venues.

00:56:45.040 | I always try to, and maybe I fail,

00:56:47.120 | and that's my moral failing,

00:56:49.200 | always do it as a counterattack.

00:56:51.480 | If you're going to start going personal,

00:56:53.560 | if you're going to start being aggressive

00:56:55.120 | against an individual,

00:56:56.440 | I'm not going to necessarily hold back when I reciprocate.

00:57:00.200 | And it's something that is very common on social media,

00:57:03.560 | but I don't think it is normal.

00:57:05.480 | Just because a lot of,

00:57:06.640 | this is, you're talking about the quiet little rebellion,

00:57:09.200 | just because everyone else around you thinks it's okay

00:57:12.240 | to just go up to people and attack them

00:57:14.040 | in the most personal ways,

00:57:15.200 | imprompted 'cause of their views,

00:57:17.720 | really just take a step back

00:57:19.480 | and realize what you're engaging with.

00:57:20.760 | Now, if that's the fight they want,

00:57:23.240 | then my Soviet cruelty could come out,

00:57:26.080 | and that's kind of why I don't drink,

00:57:27.920 | 'cause I do enjoy it.

00:57:29.440 | But at the same time, be aware of what you're doing.

00:57:32.720 | And again, this goes back to Camus' sense

00:57:36.640 | that conscience really is what makes us human beings.

00:57:40.760 | That's the thing I was saying,

00:57:41.800 | I don't think most people think in terms of conscience.

00:57:44.440 | They don't think it, we are taught,

00:57:46.360 | this is that creeping cynicism that,

00:57:50.080 | oh, grow up, when you're an adult,

00:57:52.240 | you have to make sacrifices, blah, blah, blah.

00:57:55.400 | And even if I buy that for a second, which I don't,

00:57:57.960 | but if I have to make sacrifices sometimes,

00:58:01.320 | that doesn't mean it's okay for me

00:58:02.680 | to make a sacrifice of my values in this moment.

00:58:06.360 | If I have to maybe be at work,

00:58:08.480 | and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names,

00:58:10.720 | I have to be humiliated,

00:58:11.880 | but I got to put food on the plate,

00:58:13.680 | that doesn't mean it's okay later if I'm at a party

00:58:16.680 | and I'm just extremely offensive to someone for no reason.

00:58:19.820 | - My own flavor of a little bit of rebellion.

00:58:24.920 | - Sometimes I use the number two.

00:58:27.400 | (laughing)

00:58:29.640 | - Is, you're very witty on Twitter.

00:58:34.920 | - Thank you.

00:58:36.760 | - And Twitter likes mockery and wit,

00:58:43.000 | and on Counter-Attack is,

00:58:47.840 | Twitter loves that, somebody who's skilled at it.

00:58:51.040 | My own flavor of a bit of rebellion

00:58:54.120 | is to say things very simply,

00:58:57.400 | bordering on cliche,

00:58:58.900 | with authenticity and like genuinely meaning

00:59:05.760 | the words I say,

00:59:08.160 | but knowing that those words would be,

00:59:10.700 | are easy to attack.

00:59:12.920 | - Sure.

00:59:13.760 | - And that, sometimes those attacks can hurt

00:59:17.280 | because people would just mock me.

00:59:19.400 | - Sure, people don't like earnestness

00:59:21.560 | 'cause they've been taught to be too cool for school.

00:59:24.180 | - Yeah, so there's this pressure for me

00:59:26.280 | to be sound way more sophisticated.

00:59:28.920 | - Yeah.

00:59:29.740 | - Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism

00:59:34.740 | of institutions or something like that.

00:59:37.040 | Like almost as if I have a deep wisdom

00:59:40.460 | about the way the world is broken.

00:59:42.640 | But when you speak very simply

00:59:45.140 | about beautiful things in life,

00:59:47.360 | it's very easy to sound like you don't know

00:59:50.440 | what the hell you're talking about.

00:59:51.640 | - Sure.

00:59:52.480 | - And I kind of, I stick by that.

00:59:56.000 | I don't know where that's gonna end up,

00:59:57.800 | but it's like the idiot from Dostoevsky.

00:59:59.400 | It feels like that's the right thing,

01:00:03.080 | even if it hurts when I'm attacked for it.

01:00:05.360 | - I do something similar sometimes,

01:00:07.320 | which is I'll have some innocuous comment

01:00:09.480 | about like bubblegum.

01:00:10.560 | I mean, just it's not to be in political.

01:00:12.840 | And a lot of times people,

01:00:14.440 | will respond to this paragraph of just invective

01:00:18.560 | about like blah, blah, blah, and then this,

01:00:20.160 | and you say this, and you're an ass,

01:00:21.480 | and just really trying to get at me.

01:00:23.880 | And what I, in those situations,

01:00:26.000 | there are very specific circumstances,

01:00:28.200 | I will respond and I mean it every single time.

01:00:31.080 | I will say, I wish your parents had been kinder to you

01:00:34.480 | or your mom or your dad.

01:00:35.880 | Because if someone is some,

01:00:37.600 | even if I'm some idiot on Twitter, right?

01:00:39.440 | Who just talk about bubblegum, and this is your response.

01:00:41.520 | I'm not talking about politics

01:00:42.480 | where I can see how people get emotional.

01:00:43.840 | COVID, my grandma died, now you're talking about her.

01:00:46.280 | And I realize this isn't about me.

01:00:50.120 | Like I'm someone you've never met,

01:00:52.360 | making some inane point about nothing.

01:00:54.960 | And you're getting agitated about this.

01:00:57.000 | It's clearly something else that's going on here.

01:00:59.560 | And someone taught you, someone had to teach you,

01:01:02.480 | that this is how to respond

01:01:04.480 | in this kind of very kind of harsh way.

01:01:06.920 | And a lot of times they'll,

01:01:08.960 | they won't say anything or get deleted.

01:01:11.080 | And I hope every single time,

01:01:14.920 | there's no asterisk here, that they take a second,

01:01:18.320 | and they realize that the way that they were talked to

01:01:21.760 | growing up was not acceptable,

01:01:24.760 | that they don't have to carry this forward,

01:01:27.400 | and that they don't have to be kind to me.

01:01:29.640 | I'm nobody to them.

01:01:30.880 | But take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset

01:01:33.920 | you want to be your norm,

01:01:35.640 | as opposed to a weapon you pull out of your pocket

01:01:37.600 | sometimes where it's warranted,

01:01:38.720 | or even when it's not warranted.

01:01:40.400 | I think there's a lot of those people out there,

01:01:42.440 | and we forget how,

01:01:45.640 | you know, how hard it is for a lot of people to grow up,

01:01:50.640 | how they're trained from their parents or the single parent,

01:01:55.200 | that the only way they're going to get attention

01:01:57.040 | is by acting out,

01:01:58.200 | that when they do good things, it doesn't get comment.

01:02:01.000 | But if they do bad things,

01:02:02.240 | they got to smack upside their head.

01:02:04.000 | That I think is far more common than we realize.

01:02:07.160 | And that's such a, it's not even,

01:02:08.840 | it's not hitting the kid that's going to last.

01:02:10.680 | The pain is going to give five seconds.

01:02:12.800 | But when you're training this child, helpless child,

01:02:16.280 | is something that's really, really bad.

01:02:18.200 | - I don't know if it always can be mapped to that.

01:02:20.640 | I always wonder about them, like what their motivations are.

01:02:24.800 | And I just kind of, like, whenever I think about them,

01:02:27.380 | I think only positively.

01:02:28.800 | And I don't even think about the childhood thing.

01:02:31.240 | I think, I don't know.

01:02:33.800 | I kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage

01:02:39.320 | where we enjoy the derision of others.

01:02:43.060 | We go through stages of being-

01:02:44.360 | - I enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be,

01:02:47.000 | you know, Billy, I'd have that quote,

01:02:48.200 | like I like it when people are mean to me,

01:02:49.640 | I got to stop pretending to be nice.

01:02:51.480 | But like, what's the worst thing

01:02:52.720 | someone can say about you?

01:02:53.680 | You're not, what harm are you doing?

01:02:55.520 | Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are,

01:02:58.360 | the conversations suck and the people are losers, okay.

01:03:01.000 | - No, the main thing I would say is I'm way more popular

01:03:04.280 | than I deserve to be.

01:03:05.520 | - What does deserve mean?

01:03:06.960 | - The reality is there's people out there

01:03:10.480 | that just enjoy hating on others.

01:03:12.960 | And I don't fault them for it.

01:03:17.960 | Like, I don't even think of them as haters.

01:03:21.280 | I think of them as just people

01:03:22.600 | that in this particular part of their life

01:03:24.520 | are enjoying this activity

01:03:26.080 | of deriding others on the internet.

01:03:30.660 | I'm not sure what to do with that.

01:03:34.280 | I just don't want to,

01:03:35.680 | I don't want to allow myself to think badly of them,

01:03:38.060 | I guess is the thing.

01:03:39.460 | - I'm the one saying, don't think badly of them.

01:03:41.180 | I'm saying that I don't think they're inherently bad people.

01:03:43.660 | I think that their thinking is screwed

01:03:45.340 | and that I'm steel manning them.

01:03:48.020 | I'm saying, let's assume everything

01:03:49.460 | you're saying about Lex is true.

01:03:51.240 | This is an opportunity for you to outdo Lex.

01:03:53.460 | Like it's--

01:03:54.460 | - No, but are you saying they should stop hating?

01:03:57.780 | 'Cause I'm saying like, maybe they shouldn't just keep--

01:04:00.260 | - I don't believe in should, right?

01:04:01.780 | I'm an anarchist, but I'm saying is like,

01:04:03.220 | if this is your belief about Lex,

01:04:05.280 | you know what it is?

01:04:07.520 | I made this comment in my book, "The New Right"

01:04:09.720 | when people make fun of Andy Warhol

01:04:11.700 | and they're like, oh my God, he painted a soup can

01:04:14.000 | and now he became a millionaire.

01:04:15.400 | I could do this.

01:04:16.440 | Well, why don't you?

01:04:17.880 | So basically, if I go up to you with a check

01:04:21.080 | and I say, I will give you a million dollars,

01:04:22.900 | you could see the check, you got to paint a soup can,

01:04:25.800 | what am I waiting for?

01:04:27.160 | So clearly there's a disconnect in their thinking

01:04:29.720 | between what they're perceiving and the reality

01:04:32.520 | because if it was as simple or as, maybe not simple,

01:04:34.900 | but as possible for them as they perceive it to be,

01:04:38.900 | why are they leaving comments instead of outdoing you?

01:04:42.260 | How great would it be for them

01:04:44.060 | to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground?

01:04:46.360 | I don't know how that would work 'cause it's not the NBA,

01:04:48.100 | but--

01:04:48.940 | - No, but you wanna point out, you do this too on Twitter.

01:04:50.580 | You wanna point out the hypocrisy,

01:04:55.580 | the fraudulence of others, right?

01:04:57.860 | - Sure, but what are you, you're not claiming anything

01:05:00.340 | other than this is, the following is a conversation

01:05:02.960 | between me and Machiki, whatever his name is, right?

01:05:06.880 | I got the voice down, dude, I got it down.

01:05:08.680 | I've been walking around my house doing my Lex impression.

01:05:11.160 | I've been leaking motor oil everywhere.

01:05:13.800 | - Yeah, but yeah, I don't know.

01:05:16.320 | I don't know what to make of it

01:05:18.360 | 'cause I think there's a more general statement to be made.

01:05:21.600 | Like I see Twitter this way too.

01:05:23.520 | When I read a tweet, I try to read it

01:05:27.440 | with like the best possible interpretation,

01:05:29.840 | meaning like what is the wisdom in this tweet?

01:05:32.660 | - Sure.

01:05:33.500 | - As opposed to what I think a large number of people,

01:05:36.420 | not a large number, but some fraction,

01:05:38.440 | try to see what is the worst possible interpretation

01:05:42.700 | of this tweet.

01:05:43.540 | And they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation.

01:05:48.540 | Like they wanna, there's people, I'm already aware of this

01:05:53.260 | with me and certainly with a lot of people,

01:05:55.140 | they're waiting for me to fail.

01:05:56.940 | They want me to be like this guy talks about love

01:06:00.660 | all the time.

01:06:01.500 | They want me to be some dark, like a-

01:06:03.860 | - They want you to be in pain.

01:06:05.260 | Yeah, they want you to be in pain because they don't-

01:06:07.460 | - Why?

01:06:08.300 | - I'll tell you exactly why.

01:06:09.260 | Because this is why I'm so for being white pilled

01:06:11.660 | and being for hope.

01:06:12.800 | Because if you are black pilled,

01:06:14.700 | meaning if you think it's pointless, we're all done,

01:06:17.840 | if you're just wasting your breath,

01:06:19.620 | if you have any counter examples to this thesis,

01:06:22.560 | if there's even a little bit of hope,

01:06:24.940 | your entire hypothesis falls through, right?

01:06:27.060 | So it's kind of how like you have all these stories

01:06:30.060 | of people who are like painting swastikas who aren't Nazis,

01:06:33.220 | but just to show that, oh, there's all this Nazism.

01:06:35.700 | So I'm gonna kind of force the conclusion.

01:06:38.680 | So for them, when they see you thriving,

01:06:41.220 | you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show,

01:06:44.860 | but you're demonstrating that people can succeed,

01:06:47.220 | this bothers them.

01:06:48.300 | So you are-

01:06:49.900 | - Anyone can succeed that bothers them.

01:06:51.860 | - Yeah, so because that why haven't they?

01:06:53.500 | So now you're a counter to their worldview,

01:06:55.940 | and that is going to cause anxiety

01:06:57.860 | when you have data that contradicts other data

01:07:00.260 | in your worldview, in your mindset,

01:07:03.060 | this is a big issue for them.

01:07:04.260 | - Yeah, so anyone listening to this,

01:07:06.700 | they're annoyed by the look of my face.

01:07:09.300 | Remember that you could probably do way better than me

01:07:11.940 | and you should.

01:07:12.900 | - But also what would you failing look like?

01:07:15.620 | Like, let's suppose this podcast went

01:07:17.380 | from whatever views you had to 100 views an episode,

01:07:21.040 | that's still success.

01:07:22.540 | You are talking to people you like,

01:07:24.660 | having conversations about important issues,

01:07:26.860 | you're having a good time, they're giving a time,

01:07:29.120 | how is that a failure?

01:07:30.240 | If I have dinner with a friend of mine,

01:07:32.060 | there's zero viewers and we enjoy that time,

01:07:35.500 | that is the height of human success

01:07:38.860 | when you are sharing-

01:07:40.380 | - Happiness.

01:07:41.220 | - Happiness, joy, joy over love.

01:07:43.740 | - So what's the difference between joy and love,

01:07:45.940 | Michael Malice?

01:07:46.780 | - I think joy is easier to attain,

01:07:49.820 | it's more common, you could share it with

01:07:52.500 | everyone.

01:07:53.340 | - Give me an example of joy,

01:07:55.260 | like what was a moment of joy for you recently?

01:07:58.180 | - I could give you a great example of joy

01:08:00.140 | and this is part in the absurdist mindset, okay?

01:08:03.340 | I love having a bad meal at a restaurant

01:08:07.340 | and you could see why.

01:08:09.280 | You go with your friend,

01:08:10.940 | it takes you 45 minutes to get seated.

01:08:13.540 | Okay, I'm starving.

01:08:15.540 | Waiter's not paying attention to you.

01:08:17.380 | They bring your water, it's got a hair in it.

01:08:19.340 | They get the food wrong.

01:08:20.780 | It comes out again, it's ripe but it's cold.

01:08:23.060 | At a certain point, you're like, okay, I'm hungry.

01:08:26.320 | I'm living an anecdote.

01:08:28.300 | This is something that if you were at dinner,

01:08:30.460 | we could talk about this for years

01:08:31.940 | because how great is it that the worst thing

01:08:35.760 | that's happening to me is I gotta wait an hour

01:08:38.120 | for this meal that's gonna be cooked wrong, right?

01:08:40.500 | That to me is joy, is holding on to that idea

01:08:45.460 | that happiness and thriving are possible

01:08:48.540 | even when in the moment everything's going the wrong way.

01:08:52.740 | - Doesn't every moment have the capacity

01:08:54.820 | to fill you with joy then?

01:08:57.500 | - Yes, yes.

01:08:58.340 | - So it's both the shitty moments and the good moments.

01:09:00.220 | - Yes.

01:09:01.060 | - But see, that's the way I usually talk about love

01:09:03.000 | is like I love life.

01:09:07.100 | - Yes.

01:09:07.940 | - And because life can generate everything,

01:09:11.220 | the pain, the loss, but also just like simple

01:09:16.820 | or complicated bliss, all of that, I just love all of that.

01:09:20.820 | And that because it fills me with a kind of, I guess, joy,

01:09:24.940 | but joy has a connotation that it's supposed

01:09:27.300 | to be somehow positive, like you're supposed to be smiling.

01:09:30.500 | To me, "Man's Search for Meaning" with Viktor Frankl,

01:09:34.140 | you're in the Holocaust, you're in a concentration camp,

01:09:41.160 | just having a little bit of food

01:09:42.700 | that you didn't expect you will have,

01:09:44.780 | or even just thinking about food.

01:09:47.660 | - Or what about there's a kid there,

01:09:48.900 | you tell him a funny story and you crack him up.

01:09:50.780 | - Yeah.

01:09:51.620 | - Like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes.

01:09:54.220 | That is the height of joy.

01:09:55.780 | - Yeah, so to me, all of life is infinitely full

01:09:59.860 | of possibility for joy.

01:10:01.220 | - Yes.

01:10:02.060 | - And that's what I mean by love,

01:10:03.060 | 'cause oftentimes romantic love is what people think about

01:10:07.540 | when they think love, but to me,

01:10:08.700 | it's all part of the same thing.

01:10:11.020 | And it's almost like love, romantic love,

01:10:14.260 | or love with a friend, friendship,

01:10:16.660 | is like you both notice each other.

01:10:19.900 | It's like dogs, they look at each other

01:10:21.660 | and then they look at the thing they're interested in.

01:10:23.980 | You both notice each other and that moment of joy.

01:10:27.280 | You share that moment of joy together.

01:10:28.860 | - Yeah, like the restaurant.

01:10:29.700 | - The restaurant.

01:10:30.900 | Yeah, if you're both almost without conspiring,

01:10:35.900 | notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal is.

01:10:40.220 | And like that, again, that little glimmer of realization,

01:10:43.780 | that's what makes life beautiful.

01:10:46.540 | You mentioned your grandmother in Lvov.

01:10:49.740 | You were thinking of returning there.

01:10:51.900 | The plans got a little bit delayed,

01:10:53.880 | but what are you hoping from that trip

01:10:57.940 | of going back to Russia, going back to Ukraine?

01:11:01.140 | What do you hope to get out of it,

01:11:04.780 | but what do you think you will feel?

01:11:06.580 | - A lot of things.

01:11:08.440 | First of all, I'm going with my buddy, Chris Williamson.

01:11:11.460 | He hosts the Modern Wisdom Podcast.

01:11:13.340 | He is one of my closest friends.

01:11:15.660 | We've never met.

01:11:17.060 | - Oh, really?

01:11:17.900 | - We've never met.

01:11:18.720 | He's in Britain.

01:11:19.560 | He's trying to get his ass over here to Austin.

01:11:22.920 | He's filling out his form right now.

01:11:24.500 | - He's too good looking.

01:11:25.860 | It's a crime.

01:11:26.700 | - I call him Apollo and I'm Loki.

01:11:29.460 | So right away you have a buddy comedy

01:11:31.100 | 'cause we're gonna film it, right?

01:11:32.220 | You have these two guys who on paper,

01:11:34.220 | you're very dissimilar, but we're very, very close.

01:11:37.140 | - In which way are you similar?

01:11:40.460 | - I think we're both very intense people,

01:11:43.540 | very strong emotionally.

01:11:45.660 | We're both very ambitious in the sense that,

01:11:50.740 | not in terms of career,

01:11:51.700 | but we wanna grab life by the short hairs kind of thing.

01:11:55.260 | We're just both good experiences.

01:11:57.660 | - Did he bench more than you or?

01:12:00.940 | - Oh yeah, he's, of course.

01:12:03.060 | I mean, the guy's jacked.

01:12:04.220 | He's just-

01:12:05.060 | - 'Cause he's so good looking.

01:12:06.300 | He could be one of those guys who's mostly biceps.

01:12:09.500 | - Oh no, no, no.

01:12:10.620 | If you look at, go to his Instagram,

01:12:12.220 | Chris Willex is his handle.

01:12:14.140 | It's like head to toe, it's just sculpted.

01:12:17.340 | - So he's perfect in every way.

01:12:18.580 | That's great.

01:12:19.420 | - He-

01:12:20.660 | - What flaws does he have?

01:12:21.860 | 'Cause I need-

01:12:22.700 | - He has bad taste in friends.

01:12:24.180 | (laughing)

01:12:25.660 | And his accent is all crazy.

01:12:27.620 | He pronounces it, he's an underwear muddle.

01:12:31.820 | (laughing)

01:12:33.420 | Now I spell it M-U-D-L.

01:12:35.380 | So just us two, British and American

01:12:37.860 | and just two different dudes,

01:12:38.900 | it's gonna be a lot of fun.

01:12:39.820 | Although to be fair, as you know,

01:12:41.580 | I'm an underwear model now as well.

01:12:43.180 | So we're gonna talk that in a second, maybe.

01:12:46.540 | But yeah, sheathunderwear.com.

01:12:48.900 | - Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear.

01:12:52.260 | Are we gonna get some pictures eventually?

01:12:53.940 | - I think we might, yeah.

01:12:55.700 | Yes, I have them on my phone.

01:12:57.460 | We'll have them, we can share them right.

01:12:59.220 | You could slice it in right here.

01:13:00.860 | So to be able to go with someone who is a very close,

01:13:05.820 | I mean, we meet him, talk like every day, right?

01:13:07.860 | So to someone who generally cares about you,

01:13:10.740 | he's very, very grounded, right?

01:13:15.260 | So like a lot of times I'll have like some concern

01:13:18.060 | and he's really good.

01:13:19.500 | And if you listen to his show

01:13:20.820 | at slicing through the noise and being like,

01:13:22.780 | hold on a second, I can't do the accent yet.

01:13:24.860 | Have you considered A, B and C?

01:13:26.580 | Because you know, whenever I had the situation,

01:13:28.660 | this is what I did.

01:13:29.500 | So he's really good with that.

01:13:31.460 | So to have a, first of all,

01:13:34.260 | just like two buddies on a trip is a really a lot of fun.

01:13:37.380 | Second of all, I know that it's gonna be very intense.

01:13:41.460 | So for you, you left Russia much later than I did.

01:13:44.620 | How old were you? - 13.

01:13:45.500 | - 13, right.

01:13:46.340 | So you remember it, I'm sure very, very well.

01:13:47.980 | I left when I was one and a half, two.

01:13:49.540 | I don't remember it all.

01:13:50.580 | To go to the streets where, you know,

01:13:54.220 | my family had to go through this stuff to see the,

01:13:56.780 | you know, they came to Lvov, they slaughtered all the Jews.

01:13:59.860 | I mean, to have that little memorial there that's there now

01:14:02.860 | and to just look around and know yesterday, basically,

01:14:06.780 | they came here, they rounded everyone up.

01:14:08.580 | And also from the other side,

01:14:10.260 | you had the Stalinists coming in

01:14:11.620 | and starving all the people.

01:14:13.020 | It's just to know that so much horror and death.

01:14:16.340 | There's this quote I saw once

01:14:18.820 | about a woman who went to Auschwitz

01:14:20.820 | and she just made the comment like, "Grass grows here."

01:14:23.460 | 'Cause we think, you know,

01:14:24.780 | that when it comes to the nature of evil,

01:14:26.700 | that you're gonna go there,

01:14:27.540 | there's gonna be this pits of hell or whatever.

01:14:29.700 | There's birds, you know, there's, you know,

01:14:32.100 | robins hopping around looking for the worms or whatever.

01:14:34.700 | They think it's perfectly nice.

01:14:35.980 | And you stand there to understand

01:14:38.420 | that so much suffering happened here

01:14:40.020 | or there is gonna be very jarring.

01:14:43.060 | I know that it's going to be an issue

01:14:44.900 | because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian.

01:14:47.380 | And to speak Russian to Ukrainians is like a big deal.

01:14:50.180 | So that's gonna be a concern.

01:14:51.820 | I'm also worried about going to Russia

01:14:53.260 | because every Russian has this idea

01:14:56.080 | that even though they've just met you,

01:14:57.740 | they feel that they're in a position

01:14:59.860 | to tell you what you're doing wrong with your life,

01:15:01.420 | what you should be doing if they're a cab driver.

01:15:03.500 | I have no tolerance for unsolicited advice.

01:15:05.900 | And at base at all, that's gonna be horrible.

01:15:08.140 | They're gonna be telling me I need to speak Russian better

01:15:09.980 | because (speaking in foreign language)

01:15:12.340 | I'm not hearing it.

01:15:13.500 | I'm not interested in hearing it.

01:15:15.220 | So that I think, and also, you know,

01:15:17.940 | given my upcoming book, "The White Pill"

01:15:20.380 | and covering what happened back in the day

01:15:22.500 | under Stalinism and later,

01:15:24.300 | to see this was the Lubyanka,

01:15:26.420 | this was the basement where they would, you know,

01:15:28.380 | you know, this is something that people might not realize.

01:15:31.100 | There's a superb film, "The Death of Stalin,"

01:15:33.660 | which is kind of, does what I do with North Korea.

01:15:35.820 | You know, puts a humorous spin on it.

01:15:37.460 | Then when you take a step back

01:15:38.660 | and you realize what they're actually saying,

01:15:39.860 | it's just like, it's very, very disturbing.

01:15:41.540 | How when Stalin was dying, he had a stroke.

01:15:44.900 | He's laying there in a pile of his own piss.

01:15:46.540 | He's unconscious.

01:15:48.060 | He, right before he died,

01:15:49.740 | he thought the doctors were all plotting against him.

01:15:52.260 | So they were being tortured to confess

01:15:54.740 | that they were trying to murder him.

01:15:56.300 | They had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers

01:15:59.500 | to attend to him and they did it.

01:16:01.700 | So this kind of thing to like go there,

01:16:04.700 | like Red Square and see,

01:16:05.900 | this is where it happened to see Lenin's body.

01:16:08.780 | Like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at.

01:16:11.580 | It's gonna be really,

01:16:13.240 | 'cause I've worked so much in this space,

01:16:16.220 | jarring and intense and emotional.

01:16:19.020 | And as intense as it is for me sitting here

01:16:20.820 | talking to you about it,

01:16:21.940 | to see it and to see the faces

01:16:23.900 | and to see Cyrillic everywhere,

01:16:25.380 | you know, other than Brighton Beach and Brooklyn,

01:16:27.740 | it's gonna, I'm sure it's gonna do a huge number on me

01:16:30.740 | because as Western and as the (speaking in foreign language)

01:16:35.740 | as the Russians will say I am,

01:16:37.220 | this is still where I came from.

01:16:39.300 | So no matter to see it face to face,

01:16:41.780 | I don't know how I'm gonna react,

01:16:42.900 | but I don't think it's gonna be like, meh.

01:16:45.740 | - You've assembled a number of essays

01:16:48.020 | from anarchist thinkers in a new book

01:16:50.300 | called "The Anarchist Handbook."

01:16:52.660 | You mentioned Emma Goldman.

01:16:54.400 | What interesting things do these thinkers agree on

01:16:58.460 | and what do they disagree on?

01:17:00.660 | - The anarchist handbook.com is the website.

01:17:03.140 | It covers from the 1790s to,

01:17:05.340 | I think my essay is the last one from 2014,

01:17:07.780 | which a friend of mine who's kind of a mediocre scientist

01:17:11.420 | is gonna be reading for the audio book.

01:17:13.860 | - Also podcast.

01:17:14.780 | - Also podcast, I never,

01:17:16.020 | but it's not a podcast anyone would have heard of.

01:17:19.100 | It's like Tom Woods, but even worse.

01:17:20.820 | So what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government

01:17:25.820 | and also the malevolence of state actors

01:17:30.540 | and the consequences of governments.

01:17:34.020 | So they range in terms that most people would easily regard

01:17:39.020 | as either left or right wing,

01:17:40.680 | but it tackles the nature of government

01:17:44.180 | and also creates positive non-state alternatives

01:17:48.540 | from really many different angles.

01:17:50.580 | The slogan I have is the black flag,

01:17:52.540 | which is the traditional flag of anarchism.

01:17:54.220 | The black flag comes in many colors.

01:17:56.380 | So they were really all over the map

01:17:58.260 | in terms of what they're for,

01:17:59.860 | but their disagreement is about the nature of state

01:18:02.500 | and the nature of power.

01:18:04.540 | And it's very edifying 'cause this is an ideology

01:18:07.120 | that's been in many ways swept under the rug.

01:18:09.580 | No one takes this seriously, grow up,

01:18:12.660 | that I can allow people to sit down and read these essays

01:18:16.620 | and see for themselves just how beautiful this tapestry

01:18:19.820 | over the decades and centuries has been woven

01:18:22.900 | about people who genuinely believed in freedom

01:18:25.820 | as the most important and how to maximize that for society.

01:18:30.820 | - So maybe it's useful to talk about

01:18:34.460 | a few contrasting thinkers in there.

01:18:36.180 | So one is Leo Tolstoy.

01:18:39.180 | - Oh yeah.

01:18:40.180 | - Who I think not many people know is an anarchist.

01:18:45.180 | - Yes.

01:18:46.860 | - A Christian anarchist.

01:18:48.380 | - Christian anarchist, yeah.

01:18:49.540 | - So he came to despise government

01:18:52.700 | for his deceit and his violence.

01:18:55.500 | But to him, the Christian principles of nonviolence,

01:18:59.180 | I think, are important.

01:19:00.660 | - Oh yeah, and it's kind of pacifist kind of mindset of,

01:19:04.460 | you know, it's better to someone to punch you

01:19:06.580 | than to punch them back.

01:19:07.740 | - So he's in that way, at least I read,

01:19:09.780 | he influenced MLK and Gandhi.

01:19:12.180 | What do you think about this flavor,

01:19:15.220 | color of the anarchist flag of nonviolence,

01:19:18.700 | nonviolent opposition?

01:19:20.140 | - I will put the caveat that it bothers me

01:19:24.220 | when people bring up MLK 'cause he's become so corporate

01:19:27.180 | and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him.

01:19:29.340 | One of the things that Martin Luther King did so very well

01:19:33.380 | was that he forced people to face the consequences

01:19:37.980 | of what they were putting forward.

01:19:40.220 | You wanna be racist, you wanna be for Jim Crow,

01:19:42.460 | you wanna be for segregation, okay,

01:19:44.460 | it's easy for you to do that from your living room.

01:19:46.540 | Now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits

01:19:50.620 | being attacked by dogs, being attacked by fire hoses

01:19:54.420 | and beaten by cops just so they could sit

01:19:57.100 | on the front of the bus.

01:19:58.500 | And now for a lot of people who were still racist,

01:20:01.540 | who were still had animus toward black people

01:20:03.580 | are watching this and it's gonna be a lot harder

01:20:07.520 | to be like, I'm okay with this, I'm okay with human beings,

01:20:11.260 | even ones I regard as somehow bad or inferior

01:20:13.900 | to be beaten and attacked by trained dogs

01:20:18.260 | and they're not doing anything in response.

01:20:20.180 | That strikes to I think a very basic nature

01:20:23.260 | of especially American like, okay, whatever you're for,

01:20:26.740 | I'm not for people getting beaten and attacked

01:20:29.580 | when they're not really doing anything.

01:20:31.460 | So I think pacifism is something that's very easy

01:20:34.460 | to make fun of, but people don't underestimate

01:20:38.460 | how powerful it is for someone to say,

01:20:41.940 | you can do what you want to me,

01:20:43.900 | I'm not gonna fight you back, I just want to live peacefully

01:20:47.260 | and have the same rights as you and to say,

01:20:50.060 | screw you, you should get beaten.

01:20:52.460 | That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.

01:20:55.100 | So I think he was really and Gandhi of course as well,

01:20:58.780 | were excellent in that regard.

01:21:00.260 | There's a little bit of Machiavellianism to it.

01:21:02.180 | They've both been beatified in regard to saints,

01:21:04.560 | but their strategy worked very, very well

01:21:08.300 | for their purposes.

01:21:09.340 | So I think just all of us, when you see someone

01:21:14.220 | in this kind of Christian, I know you're Ron,

01:21:16.060 | obviously it's nothing very highly Christianity,

01:21:18.100 | but if he's someone who's willing to take a punch

01:21:22.820 | and to say, you could do whatever you want to me,

01:21:25.300 | I'm not going to hurt somebody else,

01:21:27.980 | instinctively, and maybe this is kind of a hack,

01:21:31.820 | most people wanna side with that guy,

01:21:34.140 | step in between and be like, oh, okay,

01:21:35.740 | let's take a step back because whatever led to this

01:21:38.420 | is not tenable, we need to go back to the drawing board

01:21:40.860 | if the consequence is people are having these

01:21:43.660 | as a result of my decisions and actions.

01:21:45.960 | So I think that aspect of anarchism is very, very,

01:21:50.960 | in certain contexts, healthy and much smarter

01:21:54.700 | and more sophisticated than people give it credit for.

01:21:57.620 | And let's also point out that Tolstoy wrote "War and Peace"

01:22:01.740 | and he wrote "Anna Karenina."

01:22:03.300 | So this was not some naive or innocent,

01:22:05.760 | whatever word you wanna use.

01:22:07.020 | He knew the nature of evil.

01:22:08.860 | He knew how bad things get.

01:22:10.760 | So he wasn't saying at all that human beings

01:22:13.620 | are inherently nice and kind.

01:22:15.060 | He was saying it's much more effective to not fight back

01:22:18.780 | and to force them to face that.

01:22:20.660 | I'll give you another example.

01:22:22.540 | I was talking to, I was on the show "Trigonometry"

01:22:24.980 | and I was talking to the hosts and one of them

01:22:28.020 | talked about how someone he knew had been the Gulag

01:22:32.660 | or his mom was born the Gulag grandma.

01:22:34.900 | And after Stalin died and the Soviet Union liberalized

01:22:38.140 | and lots of the people in the Gulags were freed

01:22:39.860 | by Khrushchev and so on and so forth,

01:22:42.560 | I didn't know this, many of the, or some, let's say some,

01:22:46.120 | of the guards of the Gulags killed themselves

01:22:48.560 | because they had genuinely believed

01:22:51.360 | that everyone in these camps was there for a reason.

01:22:54.320 | And when they found out that these people

01:22:56.760 | were completely innocent, didn't even have trials,

01:22:59.560 | and that they were the ones forcing them

01:23:01.120 | to work themselves to death and starve,

01:23:02.920 | they couldn't deal with that guilt.

01:23:05.120 | So when you are a pacifist or non-retaliatory

01:23:10.320 | and you're forcing someone who's using force,

01:23:12.920 | like look what you're doing, look what you've become.

01:23:15.820 | For some people, some people don't care.

01:23:18.000 | You know, like the guy in "Scare Tactics"

01:23:19.400 | like I mentioned earlier, where for a lot of others,

01:23:21.760 | they're gonna be like, okay,

01:23:23.400 | is this who I wanted to grow up to be?

01:23:24.880 | They will have that little flame of conscious

01:23:26.440 | that you and I talked about earlier.

01:23:27.760 | They will be like, how did I get to the point

01:23:30.640 | where there's this lady who wants to ride the bus

01:23:33.500 | and she's, you know, lovely dressed, put together,

01:23:37.000 | and I have a, sending a dog on her?

01:23:39.120 | What kind of person am I?

01:23:40.400 | For some of those people, they're gonna be like,

01:23:43.080 | okay, I can't be a part of this.

01:23:45.080 | I don't even understand the politics.

01:23:46.760 | I still am racist, but I'm not going to take part

01:23:50.520 | in this atrocity.

01:23:52.200 | - Well, that was for him from the individual perspective,

01:23:56.160 | perhaps he calls that Christian,

01:23:58.520 | but listening to that voice of conscience,

01:24:01.160 | like whatever that is in you.

01:24:04.320 | So for Tolstoy, it seems like anarchism

01:24:09.320 | from the individual perspective

01:24:12.300 | is silencing the rest of the world

01:24:14.640 | and listening to the, for him probably,

01:24:17.720 | God-given voice of conscience.

01:24:20.120 | And so that's what it means to live, embody anarchism.

01:24:25.120 | - And to embody Christianity, I would think he would say.

01:24:27.360 | - But he would see those as basically.

01:24:29.200 | - Yes, correct.

01:24:30.480 | - Yeah, so in terms of forms of government,

01:24:33.900 | the Christian government is one that's no government.

01:24:37.360 | - Yeah, correct.

01:24:38.280 | - What do you think about that as advice

01:24:44.200 | for an individual, turn the other cheek?

01:24:46.560 | Do you think, I tend to believe

01:24:48.080 | that that's a really good way to live.

01:24:50.400 | - I think it's very underrated, and this is me talking.

01:24:53.800 | I think a lot of times when someone,

01:24:56.520 | let's suppose you're having an argument,

01:24:58.440 | and, but you have to pick your battles, right?

01:25:01.120 | Let's suppose you're having a heat argument

01:25:02.360 | and someone says something very cruel to you,

01:25:04.460 | where you have attempted to double down

01:25:06.300 | and hit back twice as hard.

01:25:07.820 | But if it's someone who at all cares about you,

01:25:09.620 | but they're just in the moment and you just stop,

01:25:12.020 | and you just say, did you hear what you just said to me?

01:25:14.880 | For some cases, that person will take a step back

01:25:17.700 | and be like, just like when I snapped at Michael

01:25:20.340 | at Bitstein years ago, I'd be like, wow, okay, this is bad.

01:25:24.380 | This is bad, I'm sorry.

01:25:25.460 | And they kind of, it's kind of like,

01:25:27.680 | they have to get to 10 before they control

01:25:30.500 | or delete to use your language.

01:25:32.220 | - Thank you.

01:25:33.060 | - Yeah, thank you.

01:25:33.880 | - But for overflow, I appreciate that.

01:25:35.640 | - But, and for some, they're gonna just twist the knife,

01:25:39.040 | but I think this is a very useful technique.

01:25:41.760 | And also, you can also sleep well at night,

01:25:45.040 | 'cause you could be like,

01:25:46.000 | as much as this person tried to hurt me,

01:25:48.920 | I still didn't reciprocate.

01:25:51.000 | And yeah, I took that punch and it sucks,

01:25:53.920 | but at least I never said anything

01:25:56.280 | that I could feel guilty about.

01:25:57.840 | - Exactly.

01:25:59.600 | Do you think that's ultimately a good way

01:26:01.540 | to implement anarchy in your personal life?

01:26:04.320 | - Anarchy, implementing anarchy in your personal life

01:26:08.260 | just means respecting people's boundaries.

01:26:12.380 | It means not forcing people to do things

01:26:16.900 | that they otherwise wouldn't want to do.

01:26:18.480 | - I think you then have to take case by case.

01:26:23.180 | Like, there's so many human interactions

01:26:25.100 | that are required for life.

01:26:27.460 | And there's tension and all those kinds of things.

01:26:29.580 | It's not always--

01:26:30.420 | - Am I being naive or innocent?

01:26:31.840 | - You're being so naive.

01:26:33.960 | No, it's--

01:26:34.800 | - Should I put the hat on?

01:26:35.640 | (laughing)

01:26:37.120 | The hat's on the other head now.

01:26:38.560 | - Well, I had to take off the hat,

01:26:39.720 | 'cause it's like Frodo with the ring.

01:26:41.160 | I was starting to feel powerful.

01:26:43.740 | I wanted to give you orders.

01:26:46.040 | No, I just, I think there's ways of dealing

01:26:50.040 | with the tensions that are natural to human interactions

01:26:53.680 | that can't be simply,

01:26:58.680 | it's not as simple as saying you want to respect

01:27:01.940 | the freedom of others and the boundaries of others.

01:27:06.300 | It's like, you both have to agree on stuff

01:27:09.400 | and work something out.

01:27:10.740 | And the mechanisms of that agreement,

01:27:12.540 | the game theory of that agreement

01:27:14.460 | requires different hacks and strategies.

01:27:16.660 | And the question is, for an anarchist collective

01:27:21.660 | that's well-functioning, what kind of hacks,

01:27:27.620 | what kind of ways of behavior

01:27:29.800 | are more likely to be productive and not?

01:27:32.500 | That's almost like the question.

01:27:35.180 | Do you want to turn the other cheek

01:27:36.480 | or do you want to stand your ground really firmly?

01:27:39.060 | When somebody is an asshole to you, you walk away.

01:27:41.720 | Or when somebody is an asshole to you,

01:27:44.280 | you turn the other cheek and give them a chance

01:27:46.600 | to rise to the best version of themselves

01:27:48.920 | and then find a common ground kind of thing.

01:27:51.600 | It's an open question of how to form those collectives

01:27:54.800 | when there's people with difficult childhoods

01:27:57.700 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:27:59.940 | - Well, this also comes down to

01:28:01.100 | what is your relationship with this person?

01:28:03.220 | Is this out of character?

01:28:04.120 | If you and I got into a disagreement,

01:28:06.140 | all of a sudden you started getting very personal.

01:28:07.900 | First, I'd be very hurt,

01:28:09.340 | but then I'd be like, this is out of character for Lex.

01:28:11.260 | I'm sure I could be like, whoa, let's take a pause here.

01:28:13.540 | Like you're getting heated, I'm trying to work this out.

01:28:16.060 | Look, what's going on here?

01:28:17.140 | And you get a kind of a meta conversation.

01:28:19.120 | But again, you and I have a relationship of mutual respect.

01:28:21.800 | So as opposed to if it was a stranger,

01:28:24.260 | you know, who just wants a piece of you,

01:28:27.060 | it's just like, you are coming at me not correct.

01:28:29.800 | I don't have to reciprocate in kind.

01:28:31.780 | I'm not gonna shoot you,

01:28:33.100 | but I'm not gonna pretend that you deserve respect

01:28:36.020 | when you're treating me with such contempt.

01:28:38.460 | I do defer, especially with people I know,

01:28:42.460 | 'cause this is smart long-term game theory

01:28:44.620 | as well as the right thing to do.

01:28:46.240 | I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt at first.

01:28:48.660 | Because if you're gonna go aggro, you can't go back.

01:28:51.060 | But you could always go from like, let me hear them out

01:28:53.420 | and then I could go aggro.

01:28:54.900 | So there's a big asymmetry there.

01:28:56.540 | - Yeah, and that's, I mean,

01:28:58.700 | I don't think anyone has the answer to this question

01:29:01.740 | is that the right strategy.

01:29:03.420 | To me, game theoretically,

01:29:04.740 | it seems the right strategy is to--

01:29:06.620 | - Well, reciprocity is what game theory says

01:29:08.420 | is the right strategy.

01:29:09.380 | They did the prisoner's dilemma

01:29:10.780 | and they found tit for tat

01:29:11.820 | is the one that's the most advantageous.

01:29:13.700 | - So that's for when it's perfectly rational actors.

01:29:16.100 | But when you have, I mean, there's noise.

01:29:20.040 | There's, I think, benefit to just,

01:29:23.400 | even if they keep being shitty to you,

01:29:25.640 | still being nice to them.

01:29:27.800 | - Well, then there's the inverse

01:29:28.840 | where girls are turned off.

01:29:29.880 | Some people, like if you're in a relationship

01:29:31.880 | and not just girls, but girls,

01:29:33.280 | like some people, when you're kind to them,

01:29:35.280 | they find you less attractive, right?

01:29:37.720 | That is kind of this weird, what am I supposed to do?

01:29:40.520 | Like, you're only into me if I'm mean to you.

01:29:43.480 | I don't wanna be mean,

01:29:44.600 | but then I'm getting punished for doing the right thing.

01:29:46.680 | That's another tricky one.

01:29:48.240 | And I mean, this is nothing that necessarily

01:29:50.120 | to do with anarchism so much as like,

01:29:52.320 | human beings are infinitely complex.

01:29:54.240 | We don't often know the backstory.

01:29:55.760 | Like for example, just yesterday,

01:29:57.160 | Jay, who's here is one of my closest friends.

01:30:00.360 | I had a dinner with a bunch of people.

01:30:02.320 | I couldn't bring a plus four, so he wasn't invited.

01:30:06.160 | He didn't know the circumstances.

01:30:07.700 | He just thought we were having dinner without him.

01:30:09.200 | He was hurt.

01:30:10.160 | Once I spelled it out, he completely understood.

01:30:12.400 | And I felt horrible because for me

01:30:14.440 | to have any of my friends feel left out

01:30:16.400 | is just a very, very cruel thing.

01:30:19.280 | And I felt bad and I'm glad to apologize again publicly

01:30:21.960 | that that's ended up being the circumstances.

01:30:23.560 | But yeah, a lot of times we're also in Plato's cave.

01:30:27.360 | When you're dealing with somebody else,

01:30:28.760 | you have very, very limited information

01:30:30.640 | about their background and circumstances.

01:30:32.520 | And that's why I will always,

01:30:34.000 | if it's someone I even have a little bit of a relationship

01:30:37.320 | with, try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

01:30:39.520 | Because I found, especially this comes from being a co-author

01:30:42.760 | when you co-author books

01:30:43.640 | and you're walking in other people's shoes,

01:30:45.240 | you don't know a lot of the information.

01:30:47.480 | So a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding.

01:30:51.120 | - But isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question

01:30:53.280 | of how we figure out this puzzle of human complexities

01:30:57.760 | in order to form voluntary collectives?

01:30:59.600 | Like we have to figure that out,

01:31:01.040 | how to make people feel good, how to make people--

01:31:04.240 | - I agree, that's fair.

01:31:05.320 | - And that--

01:31:06.160 | - I think not only anarchists have to think about this

01:31:08.760 | is my point, of course.

01:31:10.680 | - Well--

01:31:11.800 | - But we have to think about it more than others do.

01:31:13.880 | - Right, I feel like I should try to argue against anarchism

01:31:17.760 | at some point, out of love, out of love.

01:31:20.560 | And so because people--

01:31:21.880 | - Out of joy.

01:31:22.880 | - People enjoy seeing me, what is it,

01:31:26.880 | when like Ben Shapiro argues against

01:31:28.920 | like a 20-year-old feminist--

01:31:29.760 | - Ben Shapiro destroys high school students

01:31:31.680 | with Maximum Logic.

01:31:32.520 | - This is this video of Michael Malice destroys

01:31:35.360 | a Marxist Russian communist pig.

01:31:40.360 | So anarchism as opposed to hierarchies.

01:31:43.520 | - Well, that's left anarchism, anarcho-communism, yeah.

01:31:46.000 | - The state.

01:31:46.840 | - But there are many hierarchies that are not the state.

01:31:48.760 | We have a hierarchy here, this is your show,

01:31:50.320 | I'm differential to you.

01:31:51.200 | - Right, but they're, okay, rigid hierarchies.

01:31:53.200 | - Forced hierarchies is the--

01:31:54.480 | - Forced hierarchies, forced hierarchies, okay.

01:31:56.520 | So do you think it's possible that humans,

01:32:00.120 | when left on their own accord,

01:32:03.120 | they form hierarchies naturally?

01:32:05.000 | - Yes, inevitably in my opinion.

01:32:06.200 | - Inevitably.

01:32:07.040 | - Which is why I disagree with the left anarchists.

01:32:08.640 | I think it's not a coherent thing to argue

01:32:11.240 | for non-hierarchical relationships, even in theory.

01:32:14.880 | It doesn't make sense to me.

01:32:16.080 | And I know the old school anarchists

01:32:19.320 | will call me stupid or uninformed,

01:32:21.000 | but I've never been able to even wrap my head

01:32:23.720 | around this claim that you could have relationships

01:32:25.440 | without hierarchy.

01:32:26.680 | - Right, so I guess there's a certain sense

01:32:28.880 | in which we're living in anarchism now.

01:32:30.920 | And I don't mean just like because the nations,

01:32:33.360 | as you've said, are in anarchism relative to each other.

01:32:37.800 | But isn't the United States just a collective

01:32:40.440 | that was formed in anarchy?

01:32:42.600 | And this is just the collective that we're operating under,

01:32:45.440 | this hierarchy that was naturally formed.

01:32:47.680 | - Well, the United States was not naturally formed.

01:32:49.640 | It was formed by force and by fiat.

01:32:51.720 | But to your point, I stress this throughout the book.

01:32:56.720 | I always say this anarchism is not a location,

01:32:59.040 | it's a relationship.

01:33:00.360 | So yeah, you and I do have a hierarchy

01:33:02.280 | in that this is your show, but neither of us

01:33:04.840 | really has an authority over the other.

01:33:06.560 | Like I'm here voluntarily, you can kick me out if you want.

01:33:09.460 | I can leave it anywhere.

01:33:10.560 | Neither of us has the power to force the other

01:33:12.280 | to be in this relationship we've chosen.

01:33:13.840 | My lawyer, I defer to his judgment.

01:33:17.340 | He's not forcing me to do it.

01:33:18.560 | He gives me his advice and I can take it or leave it.

01:33:20.760 | Same with the doctor.

01:33:21.840 | So there is a clearly like who's in charge

01:33:23.760 | and who's not in charge, but they're not in a position

01:33:25.800 | to impose their will on everybody else.

01:33:27.520 | And you could very easily see John is Stephanie's lawyer

01:33:31.960 | and Stephanie is John's doctor.

01:33:33.840 | And in each of those contexts, one has this position

01:33:36.680 | of ostensible authority over the other.

01:33:38.360 | So anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing.

01:33:42.380 | It is the norm of human relationships

01:33:45.180 | where you meet people, you're not necessarily equal.

01:33:47.840 | Someone's gonna be taller, someone's gonna be stronger,

01:33:49.660 | someone's smarter, wealthier with others,

01:33:51.820 | but you're not at all thinking I am here

01:33:55.120 | and I could tell you what to do

01:33:56.860 | and you are legally or morally obligated

01:33:59.880 | to follow my wishes.

01:34:01.060 | That is the basis of anarchism.

01:34:03.180 | - So in what way is the United States imposing

01:34:06.500 | by force something on you, do you think?

01:34:09.360 | - If you leave your house, you will go to jail.

01:34:11.700 | My money being taken from you via taxation.

01:34:15.560 | - But don't you have the freedom to not operate under that?

01:34:19.360 | - No, but that's like, yeah, like technically

01:34:21.080 | if someone comes up to you and mugs you

01:34:22.800 | and says your money or your life, you are making a choice.

01:34:26.040 | But what the anarchist argument is,

01:34:27.640 | they're not in a position to force you to make that choice.

01:34:30.880 | That is not morally binding,

01:34:32.760 | even though they have practically the power

01:34:35.100 | to force you into that dilemma.

01:34:37.160 | - But you have the freedom to live

01:34:39.240 | under the United States or not.

01:34:40.880 | So even--

01:34:43.320 | - I see, yeah, the argument is if you don't like it, leave.

01:34:46.200 | Right?

01:34:47.040 | - Not necessarily leave like geographically,

01:34:48.800 | but there's ways to live outside

01:34:53.480 | the force of the United States.

01:34:55.200 | There's ways, it's just very difficult to operate that way.

01:34:57.360 | - But that's like saying you could outrun the mugger,

01:34:59.200 | which is true, but the issue is does that mugger

01:35:02.480 | have the right to tell you at gunpoint,

01:35:06.860 | you're either giving me your money or I'm gonna shoot you

01:35:09.200 | or secret plan C, you get to run away.

01:35:12.260 | Is that person a moral actor?

01:35:14.500 | And the anarchist answer is never.

01:35:16.420 | And the difference, just one more thing,

01:35:18.420 | the anarchist view is the difference between that mugger

01:35:21.140 | and the government is only an air of legitimacy.

01:35:25.220 | Literally, they're morally identical.

01:35:27.140 | - So is it possible that every hierarchy

01:35:30.500 | that gets big enough and successful enough

01:35:33.040 | such that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides,

01:35:37.740 | isn't it always going to be amoral in your sense

01:35:42.240 | the way the United States government is amoral?

01:35:44.460 | - Well, I don't wanna say just like

01:35:45.980 | the United States government is amoral

01:35:47.160 | 'cause that implies the United States government

01:35:48.780 | is uniquely or especially amoral.

01:35:50.460 | - Right, governments have--

01:35:51.300 | - I just wanna clarify that 'cause I know

01:35:52.700 | you didn't mean that and I don't want that

01:35:53.820 | to be the implication.

01:35:54.920 | Can you repeat the question, I'm sorry.

01:35:57.420 | - So like won't every--

01:36:00.460 | - Okay, so that's right.

01:36:01.300 | So that's progressive economics.

01:36:03.260 | So the argument is in any market at a certain point

01:36:05.900 | things tend to centralize and then that organization

01:36:09.460 | de facto can dictate price, can dictate so on and so forth.

01:36:12.420 | That is completely historical.

01:36:14.660 | If you look at any market,

01:36:16.020 | the trend is always towards decentralization,

01:36:19.140 | the music industry, right?

01:36:20.280 | When we were kids, there were four or five record labels.

01:36:23.420 | They were the ones who made all the songs

01:36:24.940 | that you're gonna see in the Billboard Top 100

01:36:26.380 | with a few exceptions.

01:36:27.500 | Now anyone can go to direct to market.

01:36:30.060 | If you look at TV stations, right?

01:36:31.520 | It went from CBS, NBC, ABC, then you got Fox,

01:36:34.980 | then you had cable which is 100.

01:36:36.580 | Now you have satellite which have sounds around the world

01:36:38.680 | and you have YouTube which is literally infinite.

01:36:40.620 | So as technology improves and as wealth increases

01:36:43.780 | which is a function of free enterprise,

01:36:45.700 | you are going to always have more and more choice

01:36:48.780 | even within a monopoly, Coca-Cola, right?

01:36:51.600 | This is an example I used I think in the new right.

01:36:55.100 | When we were kids, every terrible comedian would be like,

01:36:57.900 | oh, now they've got diet caffeine free Coke, what's next?

01:37:02.100 | It's like, yeah, that's good.

01:37:03.840 | You want to have, what was his name?

01:37:05.900 | Kamin, the guy who invented the Segway.

01:37:08.860 | If you go, Dean Kamin,

01:37:10.260 | if you go into some restaurants right now,

01:37:13.760 | you will have those machines.

01:37:15.860 | We have like 80 kinds of Cokes

01:37:17.900 | and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add

01:37:19.700 | to a grape, cherry, lemon, lime, so on and so forth.

01:37:22.600 | So in any field, you're going to have

01:37:25.460 | more and more competition.

01:37:27.100 | You're going to have less competition and less choices

01:37:30.360 | when the state gets involved

01:37:31.800 | because the state wants control.

01:37:33.640 | The state wants one big neck with one leash around it

01:37:36.980 | and that way it could just pull that dog

01:37:38.580 | in one direction or another.

01:37:39.880 | And you saw this last year with the lockdowns.

01:37:42.500 | Carol Roth wrote this amazing book

01:37:44.300 | called "The War on Small Business"

01:37:45.900 | and she talked about we have seen

01:37:47.820 | for the first time in history,

01:37:49.680 | a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business

01:37:53.940 | towards organizations like Target and Amazon

01:37:56.260 | who made trillions of dollars last year.

01:37:59.060 | Whereas mom and pop, which to me at least

01:38:01.260 | is like the Acme of American achievement.

01:38:03.540 | You come to America, you have a fruit stand, a laundromat,

01:38:07.000 | you make socks, whatever it is,

01:38:09.180 | you're that unique artisan creating something special.

01:38:11.740 | They're the ones who didn't last,

01:38:13.300 | whereas Target and Amazon did.

01:38:14.740 | So when you have the state involvement,

01:38:16.500 | it will always be in favor of Jeff Bezos.

01:38:18.420 | And for the simple reason that

01:38:19.920 | it's gonna be a lot easier for Jeff Bezos

01:38:22.040 | to get Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell on the phone

01:38:24.760 | than it is for me making socks on Etsy.

01:38:27.640 | - But your sense is that there'll be less and less

01:38:30.920 | over time Jeff Bezos is,

01:38:33.240 | like whatever the industry will look at,

01:38:35.680 | there's be less, there's a trend towards decentralization

01:38:39.560 | across all industries.

01:38:41.920 | - And when I say decentralization, I just mean choice.

01:38:45.600 | So if you look at, again, networks,

01:38:47.840 | you're gonna, if you were in the 80s

01:38:49.840 | and you had a network just for LGBT issues,

01:38:53.040 | first of all, it's gonna be complete heretical,

01:38:55.180 | that's not gonna happen.

01:38:56.340 | And there's not gonna be enough necessarily

01:38:57.820 | people identifies that to have an audience.

01:38:59.560 | Then there was something called Logo, they had that.

01:39:01.560 | And there's lots of other shows like that in this way.

01:39:03.560 | So more specific, look at websites.

01:39:06.680 | I'm positive that you and I,

01:39:08.640 | if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs,

01:39:12.220 | would find thousands of websites about different breeds

01:39:15.260 | and all this other stuff.

01:39:16.560 | 20 years ago, 30 years ago,

01:39:18.160 | like you're gonna have two books.

01:39:20.200 | And they're not gonna be dynamic

01:39:21.480 | as these new breeds are developed.

01:39:24.480 | - So at the same time, it does,

01:39:27.160 | following on your argument,

01:39:29.440 | it does seem easier to move and immigrate

01:39:32.880 | from state to state within the United States

01:39:35.440 | and to other countries.

01:39:37.000 | Do you think that's a form of freedom

01:39:39.700 | that embodies anarchism,

01:39:42.160 | where you can resist the force of state

01:39:46.020 | by choosing where you live?

01:39:47.520 | - To some extent, but the line people,

01:39:50.240 | some of these boomers will go at me on Twitter,

01:39:51.920 | if I'm going after the police or something,

01:39:53.400 | and be like, if you don't like America, get out of here.

01:39:55.700 | And I tell them, freedom means I do what I want,

01:39:58.840 | not what you want.

01:39:59.680 | Freedom means I don't have to move, you don't have to move.

01:40:02.800 | Free speech is a good example.

01:40:04.080 | It doesn't mean I have to be on Twitter, right?

01:40:05.760 | Twitter has the right to ban me.

01:40:07.080 | But what I'm saying is,

01:40:07.900 | if I'm saying something and you don't like it, too bad.

01:40:11.320 | You're the one who has to accommodate me

01:40:13.440 | because I have a right to do what I want

01:40:15.240 | with my person as long as I'm being peaceful.

01:40:18.040 | - So I guess I'm trying to get to the difference

01:40:20.420 | between the state and what you would naturally want

01:40:25.420 | in anarchy, which is like a security company.

01:40:28.900 | - Sure.

01:40:29.740 | - All those things, they will, as they become successful,

01:40:34.300 | start looking more and more like the state.

01:40:36.440 | Because you get to elect, you give them money.

01:40:39.440 | - I got you.

01:40:41.540 | - They have leaders.

01:40:42.360 | What's the difference between a government

01:40:45.640 | and a very successful service provider in anarchism?

01:40:50.640 | - This gets a little confused in America

01:40:52.400 | as big companies necessarily are hand in hand

01:40:55.560 | with the government, ended up in bed with them.

01:40:57.520 | The answer to this question is a long, complicated one,

01:41:00.000 | and thankfully it's all in the Anarchist Handbook.

01:41:02.280 | There was an essay by Murray Rothbard, who Dave Smith,

01:41:05.080 | this is the essay that converted Dave Smith,

01:41:06.840 | so maybe it's not as good as it could have been otherwise,

01:41:09.360 | called Anatomy of the State.

01:41:11.000 | And Murray Rothbard points out that state

01:41:12.920 | is the only agency in a country

01:41:15.800 | which gets its goods through force.

01:41:18.520 | The state is the only agency that is not a producer,

01:41:22.080 | but inherently a parasite,

01:41:23.760 | because it does not get its money voluntarily,

01:41:26.280 | but through taxation and by imposing its values

01:41:28.900 | on a country.

01:41:29.860 | That is what makes a state uniquely different

01:41:32.520 | from let's suppose an Amazon or a Barnes & Noble

01:41:35.400 | or a Target.

01:41:36.280 | Jeff Bezos does not have the authority

01:41:39.820 | or the moral legitimacy to get an army

01:41:42.760 | and go into somebody's house,

01:41:44.120 | whereas Andrew Cuomo or Ron DeSantis,

01:41:47.640 | Donald Trump and Barack Obama certainly do.

01:41:50.040 | - But is it possible that to reframe,

01:41:54.360 | so Jeff Bezos does if he hires a security force.

01:41:58.640 | - Right.

01:41:59.600 | - Also, is it possible to reframe taxation

01:42:03.080 | as a form of payment?

01:42:04.280 | If it was done much better,

01:42:07.620 | if you could pay this collective that we call government

01:42:11.560 | in ways where you could pay for things that you care for.

01:42:15.020 | So much, your money would be much more directly contributing

01:42:19.400 | to the things you care for.

01:42:20.720 | Whether if you care for a service like healthcare,

01:42:23.400 | you'll be able to buy essentially insurance

01:42:25.840 | from the government.

01:42:27.040 | - Why am I buying insurance from the government

01:42:28.640 | as opposed to insurance from an insurance company?

01:42:30.520 | What do you perceive as the difference

01:42:31.760 | between a tax and a price?

01:42:33.080 | Do you see the difference?

01:42:34.600 | - Yes, I know on the surface level,

01:42:36.440 | I'm trying to get deeply to say

01:42:39.060 | there's a lot of similarities.

01:42:40.860 | - But what I'm saying is there's one essential difference,

01:42:44.140 | which is taxes are imposed on you and you have no choice.

01:42:48.740 | Here's an example, my book "Ego and Hubris", my biography,

01:42:52.300 | it goes for $500 on eBay, someone paid for it,

01:42:54.260 | some crazy person.

01:42:55.580 | People were showing me that it's on Amazon for $3,000,

01:42:58.780 | something like that.

01:42:59.860 | You could put a million for it.

01:43:01.300 | You could charge whatever price you want.

01:43:03.100 | The question is, is someone paying that 3,000 for it?

01:43:05.460 | Is someone paying that million for it?

01:43:07.280 | It's actually the buyer who establishes the price

01:43:10.340 | because the seller can put any price tag he wants,

01:43:12.780 | $80 trillion, but unless someone's paying that amount

01:43:15.660 | and clearing the market,

01:43:17.120 | that price has literally no real meaning.

01:43:19.500 | It's not an indicator of value or worth or market price.

01:43:22.020 | Taxation on the other hand is by fiat.

01:43:25.260 | I can decide it's fair that you Lex have to pay 40%

01:43:29.460 | and Joe has to pay 45%.

01:43:31.940 | Joe and Lex are in no position to be like,

01:43:34.060 | this price is too high.

01:43:35.940 | Not only is that money set

01:43:38.300 | just completely out of their hands,

01:43:40.160 | for people who are employees,

01:43:43.220 | it's taken out of their paychecks before they even see it.

01:43:46.100 | They don't even have the choice to be like, you know what?

01:43:48.220 | I agree that the government has the right to pay taxation.

01:43:50.700 | Here's my check for 40%, it's going on.

01:43:52.860 | It's a completely different paradigm

01:43:55.260 | than you are when you're paying for price.

01:43:56.100 | - But the government provides a lot of services

01:43:58.740 | in the current system.

01:44:00.060 | - Right, but there's no service the government provides

01:44:02.260 | that would not be provided better, more efficiently

01:44:05.140 | and with more choices in a market.

01:44:06.620 | - Well, that's a hypothesis.

01:44:08.060 | - No, that's-- - Very likely.

01:44:09.060 | No, that's not--

01:44:10.100 | - I can demonstrate it to you very easily.

01:44:12.160 | I love it when you get flustered.

01:44:15.380 | This is what people like.

01:44:17.860 | It's so cute.

01:44:18.920 | The robot--

01:44:20.980 | - Don't make me put on the hat again.

01:44:22.660 | - The robot has the fire,

01:44:24.100 | the smoke coming out of his ears.

01:44:26.180 | What is price?

01:44:27.400 | - Okay, so-- - I will tax love.

01:44:31.420 | - You know, people like,

01:44:33.580 | I think of the government as a kind of subscription service.

01:44:36.980 | - No, no, that's the anarchist view.

01:44:38.740 | The anarchist view of private security

01:44:41.420 | would be a subscription service.

01:44:42.660 | So that's exactly correct.

01:44:44.060 | - But everyone hates when you sign up to a gym

01:44:48.100 | and then you realize in the contract,

01:44:50.080 | it's very difficult to cancel that membership

01:44:52.940 | and then they up the price.

01:44:54.260 | I mean, there's a lot of unpleasant things

01:44:56.780 | with a subscription service

01:44:59.260 | that then you can elect to go to another subscription service

01:45:02.500 | - Or you could go on Yelp and complain

01:45:05.580 | and if there's enough people to do that,

01:45:06.740 | the gym will be receptive.

01:45:08.020 | Look at the power of Yelp versus the power of the vote.

01:45:10.900 | - Well, we could talk about that too.

01:45:13.300 | So you're saying Yelp is more effective than voting.

01:45:18.300 | - Yes.

01:45:19.260 | - The thing is, I agree with you,

01:45:22.380 | but you take a further step.

01:45:25.260 | You say that Yelp is ethical and moral

01:45:29.340 | and voting is amoral or like not voting,

01:45:32.140 | but government is amoral.

01:45:34.480 | So like, it's not only is one more efficient than the other,

01:45:37.500 | you're saying like, 'cause I would say government sucks

01:45:41.100 | at doing what it does and has gotten a lot better at it.

01:45:44.300 | And I believe it can keep getting better

01:45:47.340 | as it gets smaller and leverages companies more and more.

01:45:52.060 | But you're saying, no, no, no,

01:45:53.580 | government is fundamentally as an idea,

01:45:57.820 | gets in the way of companies

01:46:00.420 | that should be doing those things anyway.

01:46:03.140 | I just think that companies,

01:46:04.820 | when you take away government,

01:46:05.860 | will start looking like government.

01:46:08.140 | - Just 'cause something looks like something

01:46:09.660 | does not mean it's the same.

01:46:11.460 | If someone puts out a yarmulke to fill in

01:46:13.860 | and they go to shul, they're not Jewish.

01:46:15.860 | - Right.

01:46:17.940 | The basic objection you have with government,

01:46:20.260 | 'cause you can leave,

01:46:21.620 | I apologize that this is that stupid Twitter cliche

01:46:25.780 | statement, but your opposition to this idea

01:46:30.460 | of leaving the United States is that it's just,

01:46:34.260 | it's a lot of effort.

01:46:35.380 | It's too much friction.

01:46:37.460 | - That's not the option.

01:46:38.660 | The opposition is, in the introduction to the book,

01:46:42.020 | I say anarchism can be summed up in one sentence.

01:46:44.740 | You do not speak for me.

01:46:46.180 | Everything else is application.

01:46:47.740 | So the claim that somebody I've never met

01:46:50.700 | or who I voted against, let's say,

01:46:52.540 | I hate Donald Trump, I despise him.

01:46:55.380 | I want Hillary Clinton to be president.

01:46:56.940 | Too bad, Trump's your president.

01:46:58.620 | That's not what I want.

01:46:59.860 | The idea that this person can come on me

01:47:02.180 | and make any claims onto one second of my time,

01:47:05.100 | as opposed to trying to persuade me,

01:47:07.020 | that is something that I, an anarchist,

01:47:09.300 | regard as inherently evil and nonsensical.

01:47:12.740 | - But to operate large organizations,

01:47:15.260 | like you see this with cryptocurrency, there's governance,

01:47:18.140 | you have to make difficult decisions.

01:47:20.020 | There's a block size wars for Bitcoin.

01:47:22.580 | So you will, there is a voting mechanism often

01:47:25.180 | with membership when you're a subscription service.

01:47:27.340 | - But see, the thing is you're using these words

01:47:29.980 | and you're switching definitions.

01:47:31.460 | Because if I go to a store, I can technically say

01:47:34.460 | I'm voting for Tropicana orange juice

01:47:36.180 | as opposed to another one.

01:47:37.620 | But to kind of say, oh, well, you're making a choice,

01:47:40.340 | therefore every choice is a vote.

01:47:41.860 | I think that that's something that the Venn diagram is not.

01:47:44.740 | - No, I literally mean vote in this case, not money.

01:47:47.420 | There's some decisions,

01:47:49.100 | like should Bitcoin have increases block size?

01:47:52.860 | There's a bunch of different,

01:47:54.940 | they're called soft forks or hard forks.

01:47:56.900 | - Oh, I'm not saying you should never vote.

01:47:59.100 | Like stockholders have to vote, right?

01:48:00.940 | - Exactly. - But there's no pretense.

01:48:02.940 | Here's, let's look at this.

01:48:04.300 | If you wanna build robots, right?

01:48:06.180 | You would sit down with the company,

01:48:07.540 | you guys would be like, we should do this kind of robot,

01:48:09.660 | we should do this kind of robot.

01:48:10.740 | The stockholders would have a vote or the board

01:48:13.260 | in proportion to their investment in the firm.

01:48:15.580 | Me, who knows nothing about robots,

01:48:18.140 | the idea that I'm in a position to walk in

01:48:21.820 | and be like, this is what you should do

01:48:23.820 | is crazy and bizarre and wrong

01:48:26.180 | 'cause I'm not in an informed position.

01:48:27.900 | So what democracy does is it forces people

01:48:30.660 | who run businesses well to run businesses poorly

01:48:34.380 | by people who don't know how to run businesses at all.

01:48:36.820 | That's one of the many concerns.

01:48:39.060 | - But you're saying that's the fundamental property

01:48:41.340 | of the state.

01:48:43.340 | I have a sense that the state could become

01:48:45.660 | as effective as what we think of as companies.

01:48:47.820 | I mean, as-- - This is why they can't

01:48:50.060 | because the state does not have access to data

01:48:53.220 | the way that firms do.

01:48:54.820 | And this is one of Ludwig von Mises' great points,

01:48:57.420 | what he called the calculation problem.

01:48:59.540 | If I'm looking at comic books, right?

01:49:01.900 | And I have detective comics.

01:49:03.780 | If detective comics 26 is 1,000

01:49:06.620 | and detective comics 28 is 1,000

01:49:09.100 | and detective comics 27 is 50,000,

01:49:12.300 | that is telling me that even if I don't know anything

01:49:14.860 | about comics, that detective comics 27

01:49:17.900 | is either very, very scarce for some reason

01:49:20.140 | or very, very desirable.

01:49:21.500 | It's the first appearance of Batman, whatever,

01:49:23.140 | but you don't need to know that to just look at this data

01:49:25.500 | and be like, okay, this is the market, tell me something.

01:49:28.460 | If prices are set by the government,

01:49:30.500 | which the government is a monopoly,

01:49:32.300 | I have no way of picking those winners or losers.

01:49:35.260 | I don't have that data of supply and demand

01:49:37.660 | of an entire nation or a world

01:49:39.860 | of people making individual decisions

01:49:42.100 | and having price be dynamic

01:49:44.140 | and informing me as the organization

01:49:47.220 | where I should allocate my resources.

01:49:49.260 | - So the price is a really strong signal

01:49:52.860 | that allows you to operate a voluntary collective

01:49:57.860 | where people get what they want

01:49:59.700 | and don't get what they don't want.

01:50:01.460 | - And it tells me what to produce, what not to produce.

01:50:04.340 | And it also is great because if I see this podcasting

01:50:07.820 | industry which didn't exist five years ago

01:50:09.700 | and now these people are making bank,

01:50:11.340 | that tells me as someone who's an investor,

01:50:14.660 | okay, they're making 50%, whatever,

01:50:17.180 | 10% profit on their capital.

01:50:19.140 | In the plant industry, it's 2%.

01:50:22.140 | If I'm going to further my capital into this 10%

01:50:25.620 | and that's gonna lower the profit rate as that builds up

01:50:28.900 | and that is how markets are regulated voluntarily.

01:50:32.380 | - But the word government,

01:50:34.100 | I just think it's possible to have collectives

01:50:37.020 | that of human beings that represent others

01:50:40.540 | based on their voluntary--

01:50:43.420 | - Yes, of course, you have private governance.

01:50:45.220 | - Right, private governance.

01:50:46.420 | - Any company, you can have a CEO,

01:50:48.420 | you can have a board of directors.

01:50:49.940 | - But then you, I just, it starts to look very similar to me

01:50:54.940 | a successful private governance mechanism

01:50:59.020 | at a scale of the United States

01:51:00.860 | starts looking a whole lot like

01:51:03.880 | the current government of the United States.

01:51:06.080 | - What's, even Amazon I don't think is anything close

01:51:10.020 | to the federal budget. - Size-wise.

01:51:11.340 | - Size-wise or budget-wise or power-wise.

01:51:13.340 | - No, so you're saying you just, it's not even state,

01:51:17.700 | it's almost like anything at that size,

01:51:19.580 | you want to keep things smaller.

01:51:21.420 | - And I don't, markets are not going to combine

01:51:26.420 | to that level of the state because no,

01:51:28.540 | Jeff Bezos will never be in a position

01:51:30.920 | to tell everyone in America,

01:51:32.620 | I'm gonna take 40% of your money before you even see it.

01:51:35.500 | - That to me is actually unclear.

01:51:37.340 | We don't know that to be true,

01:51:38.700 | where that Google or Amazon can't grow to the size,

01:51:41.820 | if you take away the US government,

01:51:43.540 | I'm not so sure that Amazon can't grow to the size--

01:51:46.300 | - Okay, so worst case scenario

01:51:48.060 | is we're back where we started, right?

01:51:49.960 | - That's not worst case scenario.

01:51:54.780 | - But the concern is that Google

01:51:56.820 | is gonna be the federal government?

01:51:58.500 | - That's not the concern, I'm saying like,

01:51:59.860 | this is what it looks like

01:52:01.220 | when Google is the federal government.

01:52:02.540 | It's not, it's like, to me,

01:52:05.820 | the US government is our best attempt so far

01:52:09.300 | to have large scale representation of people's interest.

01:52:12.340 | It really sucks, but it's our best attempt so far.

01:52:15.540 | And the question is how to improve it.

01:52:17.300 | Like, if you take away all,

01:52:19.220 | if you take away the US government,

01:52:20.900 | I'm trying to see how do we improve

01:52:23.500 | on that level, that scale of representation

01:52:27.180 | of people's interest.

01:52:28.000 | - Let me give you one example

01:52:28.840 | that people could wrap their heads around very easily.

01:52:30.780 | I'm against government police monopoly,

01:52:32.540 | I'm for private security, right?

01:52:34.700 | You don't have to be an anarchist to understand this.

01:52:37.020 | Can everyone agree, or at least as a hypothesis,

01:52:40.440 | everyone can wrap their heads around,

01:52:42.580 | here's a big concern, 911, right?

01:52:45.020 | I've heard this 911 call, it's very chilling.

01:52:47.240 | There's a kid in a closet,

01:52:48.300 | his family's being murdered outside, right?

01:52:50.060 | He has to call 911, he's whispering.

01:52:51.600 | It's horrifying to hear.

01:52:53.700 | There's no reason why the number I call

01:52:56.860 | for my family's being murdered

01:52:58.900 | is the same number I call for the fire department,

01:53:00.940 | is the same number I call for an ambulance.

01:53:02.500 | What if instead it operated like Uber?

01:53:04.560 | You had buttons on your phone.

01:53:05.940 | If there's a real emergency, like someone's gun flyers,

01:53:09.380 | someone's being killed, you press this,

01:53:11.100 | and it sends instead of the one police district,

01:53:14.540 | whatever company is nearby, you have a bunch of them,

01:53:17.420 | and they're the ones who are gonna come

01:53:18.660 | to your house to save you.

01:53:19.900 | People can wrap their heads around that very easily.

01:53:22.100 | That is one very clear way to go

01:53:24.580 | from having a government security monopoly

01:53:26.940 | towards having a more free enterprise system.

01:53:29.540 | So when you apply that to pretty much anything,

01:53:31.800 | it doesn't become that complicated of alternative.

01:53:34.260 | - So what I would, you're gonna criticize this,

01:53:38.820 | but I believe the government,

01:53:41.980 | it's like the parenting thing we've talked about earlier.

01:53:44.100 | I think it creates a safe space for--

01:53:49.100 | - I'm for safe spaces,

01:53:51.100 | so I'm not gonna laugh at you about that.

01:53:52.860 | I want people to be safe.

01:53:53.900 | - But for a safe space for entrepreneurship.

01:53:57.220 | So I believe that good government,

01:54:00.660 | hold on a sec, give me a sec.

01:54:02.300 | - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're right, I'm sorry.

01:54:04.220 | I think government gives opportunity

01:54:09.020 | for companies to out-compete it.

01:54:11.100 | - Yes, UPS, FedEx, 100%, not a question.

01:54:16.100 | - So I believe you need to have government

01:54:19.620 | to give a chance for UPS, FedEx, for SpaceX,

01:54:24.900 | oh, there's an X in there, to pop up,

01:54:28.480 | and then government will naturally back off from that place.

01:54:32.140 | So like, but you need the innovators

01:54:34.660 | to step in and build the thing.

01:54:36.140 | - Okay.

01:54:36.980 | - Like you can't just--

01:54:37.820 | - When has government ever backed off though?

01:54:39.760 | That never happens.

01:54:41.220 | - Back, well, from what, from FedEx and UPS,

01:54:45.580 | from SpaceX, from Amazon.

01:54:48.740 | - Hold on, the US Postal Service

01:54:50.540 | still competes with FedEx and UPS,

01:54:52.660 | so here's the other thing.

01:54:53.620 | - Not nearly--

01:54:54.940 | - Not well, but they still exist.

01:54:56.220 | And the point is UPS-- - They're dying.

01:54:57.740 | - But UPS and FedEx are taxed,

01:55:00.740 | so not only are they paying for their own company,

01:55:02.980 | they're paying for this competitor.

01:55:04.220 | This is the essential difference.

01:55:05.780 | Imagine if you didn't have UPS,

01:55:08.100 | excuse me, the federal government, no post office.

01:55:10.260 | So you had FedEx, you have DHL,

01:55:11.740 | you have US Postal Service and many others.

01:55:13.820 | How about in this scenario, UPS has the capacity

01:55:18.300 | to take 20% of FedEx's DHL and Courier's money

01:55:22.580 | and put it in their own pocket

01:55:23.620 | and they never have to do anything in return.

01:55:25.140 | This is gonna be an enormous advantage of UPS,

01:55:28.060 | and then when you add the addition

01:55:29.440 | that UPS is not necessarily gonna be more efficient

01:55:32.180 | than the others, this is gonna be a huge distortion

01:55:34.140 | in the market.

01:55:35.220 | Can you imagine if your podcast,

01:55:36.620 | you just automatically got 20% of the views

01:55:38.620 | of everybody else?

01:55:39.580 | I mean, would there be any incentive for you to be great?

01:55:42.540 | Or you could just sit in your laurels

01:55:43.680 | and do whatever you want, even more than now?

01:55:45.820 | (laughing)

01:55:47.060 | - It's hard to imagine more than now.

01:55:48.820 | - That's 'cause you're a robot and lack imagination.

01:55:51.380 | - I think there just has to be,

01:55:54.060 | of course you can do it completely without government,

01:55:56.180 | but government-- - That's all I need to hear.

01:55:57.420 | Okay, that's all I need to hear.

01:55:58.540 | - Show's over. - Show's over.

01:55:59.980 | - Of course you can do it without government.

01:56:01.180 | - The question-- - Let us try.

01:56:02.780 | - The question is, that safety net

01:56:05.540 | that's needed for entrepreneurship,

01:56:07.180 | that's needed for, I'm sorry to say,

01:56:10.420 | but I have a sense that there needs to be

01:56:12.620 | a bit of a safety net for freedom.

01:56:14.580 | - I'm much more comfortable with saying

01:56:17.020 | you need a safety net for freedom

01:56:18.420 | than you need one for entrepreneurs.

01:56:20.180 | The beauty of markets is, with your startup,

01:56:22.980 | if you have a startup and it completely fails,

01:56:25.740 | the only person who's screwed is you and your investors.

01:56:28.380 | If I'm a government and I make a startup,

01:56:30.420 | the entire society fails, like the Iraq War.

01:56:32.660 | If I have this cockamamie plan,

01:56:35.260 | everyone else doesn't have a choice.

01:56:36.460 | They are both funding it and sometimes

01:56:38.100 | you get drafted or forced into it.

01:56:40.340 | The safety net, the antlers,

01:56:42.400 | getting back to the early anarchists,

01:56:43.740 | one of the things that I admire about them,

01:56:46.100 | the anarcho-communists, the old school left anarchists,

01:56:48.780 | is people don't remember what context they were in.

01:56:51.580 | They were in context without a welfare state.

01:56:53.660 | They're immigrating in huge numbers from Eastern Europe.

01:56:56.220 | People are, you go to the Tenement Museum in New York,

01:56:58.420 | people are like 12 to a room.

01:56:59.900 | Kids are working in factories.

01:57:01.380 | If they're either working in factories

01:57:02.620 | or they have to starve,

01:57:03.460 | it's not that their parents didn't love them,

01:57:04.940 | it's that the parents didn't have birth control,

01:57:06.540 | which was a felony, and they also were in a position

01:57:09.100 | to put food on the table for their kids

01:57:10.420 | 'cause they're uneducated and the jobs are paying nothing.

01:57:13.100 | So you could understand why Emma Goldman,

01:57:14.820 | Alexander Berkman, Proudhon, and all these other figures

01:57:18.140 | were like, this is untenable.

01:57:19.720 | We see Carnegie with 80,000 mansions,

01:57:22.720 | whereas this lady whose husband died at age 30,

01:57:26.520 | who's never been to high school or even junior high school,

01:57:29.680 | has 10 kids, how's she gonna put food on the table?

01:57:32.320 | It's not gonna happen.

01:57:33.280 | You can understand why they would be like,

01:57:35.000 | all right, we need to seize this money

01:57:36.740 | and distribute it around the people.

01:57:37.860 | That makes a lot of sense.

01:57:39.080 | In a contemporary context where food is much cheaper,

01:57:42.740 | where shelter to some extent is more available,

01:57:45.760 | when medical care, people, we're so oblivious

01:57:51.160 | to how bad things were that we see things are bad now,

01:57:53.880 | so we assume that they were better than in some context,

01:57:56.100 | they were much, much worse there in many contexts.

01:57:58.600 | So if you're gonna make an argument for government,

01:58:01.400 | for me, the strongest argument is like food stamps

01:58:04.760 | or like free lunches for children

01:58:07.080 | because I agree that would be very inefficient

01:58:10.080 | and it's gonna probably make them obese

01:58:11.960 | because you're gonna have Nabisco lobbying

01:58:14.560 | to make sure that if you're gonna have this protein,

01:58:17.960 | you're not gonna give the kids an Oreo, aren't you?

01:58:19.700 | These kids are poor.

01:58:21.200 | You want them to have some pleasure

01:58:22.800 | and that's gonna have deleterious effects,

01:58:24.680 | but if the choice is an inefficient government program

01:58:27.360 | and mass starvation, that is one where as an anarchist,

01:58:30.720 | I could easily see making the argument for that one.

01:58:33.680 | Even though I think very clearly private charity

01:58:38.000 | would be more efficient and distributed more effectively,

01:58:40.180 | but at that point, I don't really care about efficiency.

01:58:42.680 | If you're throwing out food

01:58:44.080 | to make sure these kids get fed, I don't care.

01:58:46.520 | - So would engagement in military conflict

01:58:50.040 | be one of the biggest negative things

01:58:53.020 | about the state to you?

01:58:55.980 | - Yeah, of course.

01:58:56.820 | War is the state at its worst.

01:59:00.020 | - So if we take away war-

01:59:01.940 | - Or make it defensive instead of aggressive.

01:59:04.740 | Yeah, I mean, wouldn't that be a huge step forward?

01:59:07.060 | If war instead of regarded,

01:59:08.740 | we're always, this is what drives me crazy.

01:59:10.940 | We're taught as kids in school that war is a last resort

01:59:14.840 | and I agree with that.

01:59:16.380 | And yet when you look at the corporate press,

01:59:18.800 | war is always the first response.

01:59:21.440 | And these people do not talk about what war means.

01:59:26.440 | They'll show examples during the Bush years

01:59:29.180 | of soldiers coming home in caskets,

01:59:31.260 | which already is an unacceptable price in many cases for me,

01:59:34.520 | but they don't even pretend to care about the people

01:59:37.600 | overseas whose countries we've ransacked

01:59:40.020 | and lives we've ruined.

01:59:41.540 | And it's just like, well, what are you gonna do?

01:59:42.860 | Not ransack those countries?

01:59:44.460 | So that war to me is the state at its worst.

01:59:49.180 | - See, I think that there's value from small government

01:59:53.500 | that doesn't engage in wars.

01:59:55.180 | I do think that the kind of collectives

01:59:58.340 | that you imagine functioning well

02:00:00.140 | would look like the best version of government

02:00:03.140 | that I imagine.

02:00:04.140 | So- - Okay, great.

02:00:04.980 | What a great endorsement.

02:00:06.540 | - Well, I see them as the same.

02:00:07.980 | - Okay, fine.

02:00:08.820 | - I think a lot of it is just terminology.

02:00:10.980 | - I have no problem saying that I'm using the word anarchism

02:00:14.040 | incorrectly and to go for what you want.

02:00:16.380 | - I have no problem with that or anything really,

02:00:19.420 | 'cause like I said, life is beautiful,

02:00:21.220 | but nevertheless, you wrote the essay,

02:00:25.580 | "Why I'm Not Going to Vote This Time or Ever."

02:00:29.540 | - Yeah, "Why I Won't Vote This Year or Any Other Year."

02:00:31.980 | - Or Any Year.

02:00:32.820 | And the basic idea- - I hope you do a better job

02:00:35.700 | reading it than you just read that title.

02:00:37.580 | I guess you'll take as many takes as necessary.

02:00:42.300 | - I'll read it in Russian

02:00:43.320 | and then pay somebody to translate it.

02:00:45.480 | - This isn't even Russian at all, he's just making up words.

02:00:49.960 | Where'd you find this guy?

02:00:51.260 | - You get what you pay for. - He has this podcast.

02:00:55.080 | Yeah, exactly.

02:00:56.160 | - This is anarchy.

02:00:58.340 | - This is what you wanted.

02:01:01.460 | - Like your basic summary is, let me see.

02:01:06.680 | "If pressed, the simplest explanation I have

02:01:09.080 | "for refusing to vote is this.

02:01:11.020 | "I don't vote for the same exact reasons

02:01:14.000 | "that I don't take communion.

02:01:16.100 | "No matter how admirable he is or how much I agree with him,

02:01:20.200 | "the Pope isn't the steward over my soul,

02:01:23.420 | "nor is any president the leader of my life.

02:01:26.060 | "This does not make me ignorant or evil

02:01:30.100 | "any more than not being a Christian

02:01:31.720 | "makes me ignorant or evil.

02:01:33.460 | "If I need representation,

02:01:35.040 | "I will hire the most qualified person to do so."

02:01:37.720 | - Yeah.

02:01:38.560 | - Isn't voting our current best developed way

02:01:42.180 | of hiring the most qualified person

02:01:43.820 | to represent you on some things?

02:01:45.660 | - No, because if I have a lawyer

02:01:48.660 | and the lawyer screws up, I can fire him.

02:01:50.860 | If I vote for someone, I don't get who I want.

02:01:53.520 | I get for who my neighbors want.

02:01:55.220 | So that makes no sense.

02:01:57.020 | Representation means I want you to speak for me,

02:02:00.660 | whereas voting is like, I kind of want you,

02:02:03.080 | but I'll take what I can get.

02:02:04.360 | And I'm gonna take what I could get regardless,

02:02:06.280 | so what's the point?

02:02:08.020 | - In governance, again, that's what Bitcoin is.

02:02:11.620 | You want to be represented in deciding what to do,

02:02:14.820 | but once--

02:02:15.660 | - Wait, Bitcoin isn't picking a person.

02:02:17.620 | They're not picking a president of Bitcoin.

02:02:19.780 | - They're picking an idea.

02:02:20.860 | - Yeah, it's more like a referendum.

02:02:22.420 | - Right.

02:02:23.260 | - And to me, a referendum is much more coherent

02:02:26.860 | and defensible than it is voting for representative

02:02:29.820 | because if I'm voting for Joe Biden,

02:02:32.380 | I'm saying this person speaks to me for abortion,

02:02:35.220 | taxation, environmental policy, immigration, war, right?

02:02:38.380 | The odds that unless you're a complete NPC

02:02:40.520 | that this one person will speak for you for everything

02:02:43.460 | and will deliver what he promised

02:02:45.740 | and has the power to deliver what he promised is not true.

02:02:48.180 | Whereas if I have Brexit, if I say I want Britain

02:02:52.320 | to remain part of the European Union,

02:02:54.100 | to say yes or no question,

02:02:55.580 | that makes a lot more sense to me.

02:02:57.740 | But even that is not pure democracy

02:02:59.940 | because going back to the idea of the circulation of elites,

02:03:02.740 | which James Burnham talked about,

02:03:04.440 | Pareto and Moscow and all them,

02:03:06.280 | you are still going to have someone telling you

02:03:08.920 | what you can and can't vote for

02:03:10.520 | and how these questions are framed.

02:03:12.200 | So, contradiction to what the left anarchist said,

02:03:15.680 | some element of hierarchy is always going to be inevitable.

02:03:19.380 | - So, listen, I agree with this aspect very much

02:03:25.600 | so that we should be voting for ideas and issues,

02:03:28.520 | not voting for leaders,

02:03:29.980 | for leaders to represent us

02:03:32.200 | across the full spectrum of issues.

02:03:34.400 | It seems to make no sense.

02:03:36.440 | - Okay, good.

02:03:37.280 | Man, this is great.

02:03:38.200 | - But I do think there should be a leader.

02:03:42.080 | I do believe in voting for representatives to debate,

02:03:46.280 | to be communicators of ideas to us.

02:03:48.400 | - But here's, let me, sorry to interrupt you,

02:03:50.480 | but you could have those two things.

02:03:52.680 | For example, wouldn't this be an improvement

02:03:54.400 | if they have that now?

02:03:55.760 | You have a referendum.

02:03:56.800 | Do you want tax rate to be 30 or 40, whatever percent?

02:03:59.440 | You have the guy leading the campaign for 50,

02:04:01.800 | fight for 50.

02:04:02.900 | Then you have the lady leading the campaign for 40,

02:04:04.840 | fight for 40.

02:04:05.760 | They'll go out there.

02:04:06.720 | They can have debates.

02:04:07.880 | They can talk about the issue,

02:04:09.200 | but you're still not voting for one of them.

02:04:10.780 | You're voting for the issue.

02:04:12.140 | That makes much more sense to me

02:04:14.040 | than I'm going to vote for him

02:04:15.360 | and hope that he puts forward 50

02:04:16.960 | and that depends on 99 other senators.

02:04:18.680 | - Exactly.

02:04:19.600 | But also, I mean, I do like the idea of voting

02:04:21.840 | for certain people to debate certain ideas.

02:04:23.640 | - Yes, I think that's a major improvement.

02:04:25.560 | - But the final vote should be based on the idea.

02:04:27.920 | So, okay, so agree.

02:04:29.200 | That would be nice to have plus no wars

02:04:31.400 | and then you'll stop tweeting so aggressively.

02:04:35.360 | - And to decriminalize things that don't hurt people.

02:04:39.400 | - Drugs. - Victimist crimes.

02:04:40.320 | Drugs, especially prostitution is a big one.

02:04:42.960 | If there's, and this is me talking,

02:04:44.760 | Mr. All Cops Are Criminals.

02:04:47.040 | There is no one or maybe other than like abused children

02:04:50.120 | who needs access to the police other than sex workers.

02:04:54.160 | They are the ones who are the most likely

02:04:56.120 | to really put themselves in danger situation.

02:04:58.480 | So they need to be able to call security

02:05:00.800 | 'cause that's why they have pimps

02:05:02.160 | because you're a woman dealing with some strange dudes

02:05:05.000 | who are a lot of the time gonna have weird kinks.

02:05:08.080 | You wanna be able to be sure,

02:05:09.880 | even if you don't approve of prostitution,

02:05:11.640 | think it's horrible,

02:05:12.600 | that she's not gonna be raped and murdered

02:05:14.400 | and have no consequences.

02:05:15.680 | And if you're gonna say,

02:05:16.520 | oh, well, she's a prostitute, she can't be raped.

02:05:19.480 | Just think for a second,

02:05:20.360 | if you're agreeing to sleep with somebody

02:05:22.560 | and then he starts choking you and beating the crap out of you

02:05:24.480 | and saying, now it's a dumb situation,

02:05:26.320 | that is clearly beyond the pale of salt.

02:05:28.960 | - And the same thing with drugs, heroin, cocaine, crack.

02:05:33.400 | The people that need help the most

02:05:38.440 | are the ones who are addicted to those drugs.

02:05:39.880 | - But even the ones who need punishment,

02:05:41.320 | let's suppose you think drug dealers

02:05:42.880 | should be in jail, right?

02:05:44.600 | It is very hard for me to say that someone who sells cocaine

02:05:49.600 | should be treated or in the same building

02:05:52.480 | as someone who rapes children or is a murderer.

02:05:55.240 | These are not similar types of evil,

02:05:57.080 | even if you believe that that drug dealer is an evil person.

02:06:00.280 | - Yeah, I have-

02:06:01.120 | - There's an essay in there by Alexander Berkman,

02:06:04.920 | who is Emma Goldman's partner on prisons and crime.

02:06:08.880 | And this is leftism at its best,

02:06:11.000 | forgetting the person who's forgotten.

02:06:13.040 | And the fact that we have

02:06:14.040 | the world's largest prison population,

02:06:16.080 | the fact that so many people are just like,

02:06:17.800 | oh, you commit a crime, just put them in jail,

02:06:19.200 | throw away the key, at the very least,

02:06:21.600 | if you wanna be totally immoral about it, it's expensive.

02:06:24.160 | And second of all, the concept that all criminals

02:06:26.840 | should be locked in a room together

02:06:28.120 | in these kind of largely inhuman conditions,

02:06:30.440 | and that's gonna help people,

02:06:31.880 | I don't think that that's the ideal mechanism.

02:06:34.680 | - Yeah, I tend to believe,

02:06:36.320 | I usually don't speak so negatively about politicians,

02:06:39.440 | but I do think that politicians have done more evil

02:06:44.400 | in the war on drugs than did the people

02:06:46.440 | that are supposed to be the criminals in this picture.

02:06:49.040 | - And I'll give you another example

02:06:50.440 | of how this is the anarchist critique of power.

02:06:52.800 | Hunter Biden, and I'm not making fun of him,

02:06:55.280 | not taking shots at him,

02:06:56.200 | he had an article in "The New Yorker"

02:06:59.040 | where he talks about when he was in LA,

02:07:00.840 | he was buying crack and there was a misunderstanding,

02:07:03.520 | or he left the crack pipe in the Hertz car,

02:07:05.800 | and then blah, blah, there's an issue.

02:07:07.520 | He's admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter,

02:07:11.000 | and I'm sure this was within the statute of limitations.

02:07:13.880 | There was no possibility he was gonna have consequences.

02:07:17.200 | Kamala Harris, who was a cop,

02:07:19.080 | talked about when she was in college, she was smoking weed,

02:07:22.200 | and it's like, I don't begrudge you guys

02:07:24.560 | smoking your crack or smoking your weed,

02:07:26.640 | but for other people who are poor

02:07:29.360 | or maybe just had the short end of the stick,

02:07:31.840 | this is years of their life being destroyed.

02:07:35.120 | At the very least, even arrest is a traumatic situation.

02:07:37.840 | If you have a weed or cocaine or crack, you're arrested.

02:07:41.160 | That's really gonna screw up,

02:07:42.440 | it's gonna do a number on you being locked up.

02:07:44.680 | So to have that double standard, to me,

02:07:46.680 | is completely unacceptable,

02:07:48.640 | and that has nothing to do with a Republican or Democrat.

02:07:51.520 | George W. Bush was a cokehead back in the day.

02:07:55.200 | He talks about overcoming his addiction,

02:07:57.000 | and I'm glad that he did, more power to him.

02:07:59.360 | But just to have this kind of,

02:08:01.440 | it's just really kind of disturbing to me,

02:08:03.960 | and this is my anarchist brain,

02:08:05.720 | like how prevalent drug use is in college.

02:08:08.040 | I think it was a joke on South Park,

02:08:09.520 | there's a time and a place to try drugs,

02:08:10.960 | and that's called college, where people experiment.

02:08:12.920 | But all those college kids,

02:08:14.280 | which are gonna become next generation's elite,

02:08:16.720 | don't really have that worry that if they get caught,

02:08:19.880 | then anything's gonna happen to them.

02:08:21.480 | But that kid in the street,

02:08:23.400 | who did not have that good upbringing,

02:08:24.960 | even if he's a piece of crap,

02:08:26.760 | like he's not gonna have a different punishment.

02:08:28.760 | I think that's just really at his base on American.

02:08:32.220 | - So in contrast to Tolstoy,

02:08:35.640 | let me ask you about Emma Goldman.

02:08:37.040 | You wrote that if anarchism believed in rulers,

02:08:41.500 | then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed queen.

02:08:44.960 | - Yes.

02:08:46.280 | - What ideas define her flavor of anarchism, would you say?

02:08:51.760 | - Emma was really an old school radical.

02:08:56.320 | She was a radical among radicals.

02:08:58.840 | I don't know what ideas,

02:08:59.880 | I mean, what would ideas define her was anarchism, obviously.

02:09:03.840 | - There's the violence.

02:09:04.920 | I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition

02:09:09.320 | versus somebody like Tolstoy.

02:09:11.520 | - Oh, sure, for sure.

02:09:12.520 | So basically Emma and Alexander Berkman,

02:09:14.960 | their mentor was someone named Johann Most.

02:09:17.200 | And Johann Most was a very early free speech,

02:09:20.600 | not very early, but he was a free speech concern

02:09:22.640 | 'cause he published a pamphlet in Europe

02:09:24.720 | that was translated in the States

02:09:26.440 | about how to build dynamite.

02:09:28.320 | Because his idea was, all right,

02:09:30.080 | you have this oppressive government,

02:09:31.600 | this oppressive police force

02:09:33.260 | that use batons and bolts against us.

02:09:36.280 | The only way for us as the working class

02:09:38.360 | to level the playing field is through dynamite,

02:09:40.880 | and here's how you build it.

02:09:42.280 | So the question is, all right,

02:09:43.640 | is this something that could be allowed to be legal

02:09:46.120 | now that you're allowing the layman

02:09:47.800 | to in his own house build bombs?

02:09:50.200 | So Johann Most, basically they had a big parting of ways

02:09:55.200 | because when Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate Frick,

02:09:58.960 | Johann said, no, no, no, this is not something I'm for.

02:10:02.760 | And in fact, they thought with this assassination,

02:10:05.680 | this failed assassination,

02:10:06.720 | this would be the thing that's fired off the revolution

02:10:09.440 | 'cause you had the strike, the Pinkertons undervile,

02:10:11.480 | Pinkertons getting killed, strikers are getting killed.

02:10:14.400 | This was what Marx predicted.

02:10:15.840 | They're gonna light the spark

02:10:17.360 | and everything's gonna come falling down.

02:10:18.840 | He ends up going to jail for 13 years instead,

02:10:20.760 | Alexander Berkman does.

02:10:21.920 | And then Goldman and Berkman had a big issue

02:10:26.520 | because when Leon Salgaz killed McKinley in 1901,

02:10:30.240 | it was really, it's kind of humorous in retrospect.

02:10:32.640 | He gets arrested and they're like,

02:10:33.800 | why'd you kill the president?

02:10:34.760 | He goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman.

02:10:37.040 | And she's like, oh, damn it.

02:10:38.400 | So she's on the run.

02:10:39.600 | She's like, I don't even know this guy.

02:10:42.200 | And she made the point about like,

02:10:45.200 | why is it worse than the president being killed

02:10:47.120 | and somebody else, we're all equal.

02:10:49.080 | And you would think if you're against capitalism,

02:10:51.480 | against the ruling class, this would be your first target.

02:10:53.960 | But Berkman who went to jail,

02:10:55.960 | who tried to assassinate someone,

02:10:59.040 | he had said, McKinley, this is your villain.

02:11:02.160 | He's just a party hack.

02:11:03.480 | He's like a symptom of the times.

02:11:05.480 | This is foolish.

02:11:06.640 | And Goldman disagreed with him.

02:11:08.160 | She thought it wasn't necessarily justified,

02:11:11.400 | but it may have done something that was defensible.

02:11:14.680 | So the three of them, you know,

02:11:16.800 | had their differences on the use of violence.

02:11:19.200 | And in fact, when she came back from Russia

02:11:21.640 | and was denouncing it in her book,

02:11:23.160 | "My Disillusionment in Russia,"

02:11:24.240 | and "My Third Disillusionment in Russia,"

02:11:25.600 | the last chapter, she goes,

02:11:26.840 | look, I'm not saying I'm against violence.

02:11:29.760 | When there's the revolution comes,

02:11:31.080 | we're gonna have to use force.

02:11:32.200 | She goes, but it's not the force of the state

02:11:35.160 | against the working class, against the masses.

02:11:37.080 | This is exactly what we're opposed to.

02:11:38.560 | This is a complete obscenity to our principles.

02:11:41.800 | So that was interesting.

02:11:43.320 | The fact that she was,

02:11:44.880 | her periodical "Mother Earth" was a clearing house

02:11:48.200 | for many prominent, you know, ideas of the day

02:11:51.160 | that weren't anarchist, but were certainly radical.

02:11:52.880 | So she was a bit, and also she was like tiny.

02:11:54.680 | She was like 5'1".

02:11:55.840 | So to have this little woman who was so feisty and-

02:11:59.800 | - Talk back to Lennon.

02:12:00.880 | - Talk back to Lennon.

02:12:02.840 | She took on Lennon, Woodrow Wilson.

02:12:04.440 | J. Edgar Hoover was the one who deported her.

02:12:07.080 | Someone who just, and the thing is you have to be careful

02:12:10.520 | because I think just like war,

02:12:12.640 | it's very easy to glamorize violence

02:12:15.840 | and to regard it as something admirable or heroic,

02:12:18.880 | like you're fighting for the cause.

02:12:20.480 | But if you take it out of the romanticism,

02:12:22.520 | you're like, you're killing someone who had kids.

02:12:24.960 | You are, you know, killing someone with a family.

02:12:27.200 | You're making your, if you're gonna shoot someone,

02:12:29.880 | they're probably gonna retaliate twice as hard.

02:12:31.920 | Violence sings its own song

02:12:33.560 | and this is a very dangerous road you're going down.

02:12:35.600 | So you really need to be careful

02:12:38.880 | about what you're preaching here.

02:12:41.200 | And, you know, she kind of had this mixed feelings about it,

02:12:44.080 | but that is certainly not Emma Goldman at her best.

02:12:47.520 | Emma Goldman at her best was about the ultimate freedom

02:12:51.280 | of the individual, of caring about people

02:12:54.520 | who are desperately poor, who despised the corporate idea

02:12:58.240 | that we all have to be made cookie cutters

02:13:00.880 | and be interchangeable

02:13:02.080 | and all have to start work at the same time.

02:13:04.000 | And basically our entire lives slave for corporation

02:13:06.760 | that have nothing to show for it

02:13:08.040 | while they get wealthy and you have no opportunity

02:13:10.400 | for either productive work or creative work.

02:13:13.320 | So that I think the valorization of kind of the lowest

02:13:17.680 | of the low is something I find very admirable.

02:13:20.240 | There's a quote of hers, which I think even for those of us

02:13:23.200 | who are, you know, for property rights,

02:13:25.600 | is left anarchism at its best,

02:13:27.800 | but she goes, "Go and ask for work.

02:13:30.680 | If they don't give you work, ask for bread.

02:13:33.320 | If they don't give you bread, take bread."

02:13:35.200 | So the idea that like, if you're that poor

02:13:37.000 | and you're honestly trying to work and work isn't available

02:13:39.920 | and you steal food to keep alive,

02:13:42.160 | that you shouldn't feel guilt about it.

02:13:44.120 | I don't know that I would disagree with that.

02:13:46.120 | I think that there's something to be said at that point

02:13:48.880 | where it's just like, you know,

02:13:50.520 | if property rights come between that and mass starvation,

02:13:53.360 | it's gonna be very hard for anyone

02:13:54.960 | to make the case for property rights.

02:13:56.400 | Now, my argument is when you have free enterprise,

02:13:58.960 | food becomes so plentiful that now obesity is an issue.

02:14:01.800 | But at the time she did not have, of course,

02:14:03.520 | have that data to, you know, access.

02:14:06.320 | - Is there somebody you left out from the book

02:14:09.400 | that you thought about leaving in?

02:14:11.640 | Like some interesting figures.

02:14:14.640 | - Yeah, there's a couple.

02:14:15.840 | So Chomsky would have been one, of course,

02:14:19.320 | 'cause he's probably the biggest anarchist,

02:14:21.920 | he's one of the biggest anarchist thinkers

02:14:23.160 | in contemporary times.

02:14:24.480 | I was on the fence about Herbert Spencer

02:14:28.400 | because he's not an anarchist.

02:14:29.960 | Chris Williamson's reading the chapter for the book.

02:14:32.040 | He coined the term "Survival of the Fittest"

02:14:33.680 | and the chapter is called "The Right to Ignore the State"

02:14:36.320 | from his book, "Social Statics."

02:14:37.680 | It was deleted from later editions,

02:14:39.000 | but Bill found it and reprinted it.

02:14:40.760 | And Randolph Bourne, he was an early progressive.

02:14:46.800 | He was the only one or one of the very few

02:14:49.240 | fighting against entering the Great War.

02:14:51.640 | And he had an essay called "War is the Health of the State,"

02:14:54.480 | which is basically about how states love war

02:14:57.040 | because it gives them an excuse to increase their power.

02:14:59.520 | And it's very hard to argue against increasing state power

02:15:02.120 | in a time of war.

02:15:03.200 | But since he was not himself an anarchist

02:15:05.200 | and there was plenty anti-war in there already,

02:15:07.440 | I didn't include him, but those would be the ones.

02:15:09.280 | - Is there some people that you think

02:15:11.600 | the public would be surprised to learn

02:15:15.680 | that they are at least in part anarchist?

02:15:17.720 | Like I saw that Howard Zinn is supposed to be an anarchist.

02:15:21.400 | I mean, is there, just like Tolstoy is an anarchist.

02:15:25.480 | Is there some people like that,

02:15:26.560 | that you think in our modern life

02:15:28.800 | that would be surprised to learn they're anarchist?

02:15:31.200 | - I can't think of any off the top of my head.

02:15:34.280 | I mean, you could say Carl Hess,

02:15:35.920 | who was like Barry Goldwater's speechwriter

02:15:37.760 | from the 1964 campaign, but he's hardly a household name.

02:15:40.600 | I mean, I think a lot of people

02:15:44.360 | would not ascribe to that term,

02:15:46.760 | but are certainly informed

02:15:48.280 | with this complete distrust of all authority.

02:15:51.440 | Murray Rothbard had an essay,

02:15:52.840 | if I didn't include anatomy of the state,

02:15:54.440 | I was gonna include this one.

02:15:55.560 | It's much, much shorter.

02:15:57.040 | And his question was, who are our allies

02:15:59.400 | and who are our enemies?

02:16:00.640 | And the point he made is there's lots of people

02:16:03.200 | who would call themselves anarchists who are of little use,

02:16:06.280 | whereas someone who is still like a minarchist

02:16:08.720 | or for government, but genuinely hates,

02:16:10.680 | the question Rothbard had is if there's a button

02:16:13.800 | and you could press it, you would end the state.

02:16:15.640 | Would you press it so fast, your finger would get a blister.

02:16:18.120 | Those are allies, even if they're somewhat of a minarchist.

02:16:22.000 | So I think that is kind of a better lens of looking at it.

02:16:26.000 | And I don't think anyone needs to really ascribe

02:16:28.440 | to anarchism as a whole ideology,

02:16:31.000 | insofar as you're seeing right now,

02:16:32.920 | many people in certain fringe elements are just essentially

02:16:36.880 | or are decreasingly fringe and increasing mainstream elements

02:16:40.280 | are realizing that this idea that whatever the state does

02:16:44.780 | is somehow morally binding or legitimate

02:16:46.960 | is something that at least bears strong questioning.

02:16:49.980 | - Sure, and I mean, I guess there's a lot of groups

02:16:54.560 | like the libertarians, for example.

02:16:56.800 | - Sure.

02:16:57.640 | - That have some element of that.

02:16:58.640 | - Oh, sure, for sure.

02:16:59.760 | - Of harsh questioning of the ways of government.

02:17:02.720 | - And also I think what I love, I mean,

02:17:05.640 | if there's one issue where I would want people

02:17:07.960 | to have this kind of analysis, it is war.

02:17:10.480 | And it is like, okay, are you really sure?

02:17:13.760 | 'Cause this is 100% gonna result

02:17:15.920 | in a lot of people being killed,

02:17:17.680 | a lot of people being traumatized,

02:17:19.600 | a lot of people who are never gonna recover,

02:17:22.200 | children, innocent people,

02:17:23.840 | are you really sure this is the right thing to do?

02:17:26.700 | And I think a lot of times the answer is,

02:17:28.920 | well, it's the profitable thing to do.

02:17:30.760 | And that is, I think, again,

02:17:32.880 | government at its absolute most venal and worst.

02:17:35.760 | - You, Michael Malice, in many ways are a New Yorker.

02:17:41.220 | - Oh, yes.

02:17:42.440 | I'll give you one example.

02:17:43.560 | I don't know where Austin is on the map.

02:17:45.180 | No idea, not even kidding.

02:17:46.520 | - But does it even matter?

02:17:47.640 | - It doesn't matter.

02:17:48.480 | (laughing)

02:17:49.960 | - But nevertheless, you've decided to move to Austin.

02:17:52.920 | - Yes.

02:17:54.420 | - Why do you think you're moving to Austin?

02:17:56.280 | Or why do you moving both to Austin and away from New York?

02:18:00.600 | - This was one of the,

02:18:02.400 | both, I hate it when people talk like this,

02:18:04.400 | but I'm gonna do it anyway.

02:18:05.520 | This was one of the hardest

02:18:06.680 | and easiest decisions of my life.

02:18:08.840 | It was hard because I've lived in New York since I was two,

02:18:12.200 | other than college, it's the only home I've known.

02:18:14.720 | I know it intimately.

02:18:16.160 | I know all the cool spots.

02:18:17.540 | I love it with every fiber of my being, or I did.

02:18:20.720 | It was very much ingrained in my personality,

02:18:23.800 | my outlook about what cities can be and can't be

02:18:26.520 | and should be and shouldn't be.

02:18:28.080 | Deciding to move was not done,

02:18:31.400 | but when you see your crew, your chosen family,

02:18:35.400 | one by one whittling away, it's not easy.

02:18:39.280 | They all left.

02:18:40.560 | There's just a couple of us left in New York.

02:18:42.960 | And I don't see any mechanism

02:18:45.680 | by which New York is gonna improve.

02:18:47.240 | Things are getting much worse all the time.

02:18:49.280 | It's just completely outrageous.

02:18:51.480 | Here, I would have a huge crew.

02:18:54.520 | I didn't realize how much cheaper real estate is

02:18:56.640 | than in New York.

02:18:57.480 | This is another way when you,

02:18:58.520 | so New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth

02:19:00.520 | who are completely oblivious to the rest of the country.

02:19:02.560 | So for a long time,

02:19:03.400 | the argument was New York versus LA, right,

02:19:05.060 | for certain types of people.

02:19:06.560 | And they would say LA is cheaper in terms of rent.

02:19:09.120 | So New York, let's suppose the rent is 1,000,

02:19:10.920 | LA was 700, but you'd have to get a car.

02:19:12.720 | I'm like, this is kind of a wash.

02:19:14.400 | So I assumed Austin would be like 80% of New York prices.

02:19:18.340 | And I'm looking at these houses,

02:19:19.640 | and for like 700,000, you could get a house here

02:19:23.120 | that would cost like 3.5 million in New York.

02:19:25.680 | So, and you could have a gun.

02:19:27.040 | And it's just like, I could have a yard

02:19:28.920 | and I could have a dog and I could have a three bedroom

02:19:31.760 | and I could have aquariums and my weird plants.

02:19:35.480 | So to have all that, and it's just to have,

02:19:38.880 | I am very, very lucky that I have such a supportive crew.

02:19:44.680 | And they're also very smart

02:19:46.460 | 'cause they sat me down and they said,

02:19:48.360 | whatever excuse you have not to move here,

02:19:51.440 | we are going to make sure that doesn't count.

02:19:53.760 | So my buddy Matt said, 'cause I have a huge library,

02:19:56.920 | he goes, I will go to your house

02:19:59.260 | and I will pack every single book you own myself

02:20:02.700 | so you can get that as an excuse to get out of the way.

02:20:04.920 | I don't know how to drive and you do this, Ulku.

02:20:07.420 | She's like, we're gonna take driving lessons together.

02:20:10.100 | There goes that excuse.

02:20:12.200 | How do I find an apartment?

02:20:13.700 | They're like, we'll go with the realtor

02:20:16.360 | and we'll take pictures for you, we'll report back.

02:20:18.160 | You could trust our judgment.

02:20:19.520 | And I'm like, that's very, I would do that.

02:20:20.880 | That sounds like fun, shopping for houses,

02:20:22.440 | I'd have to buy them.

02:20:23.680 | Then Matt just yesterday had the idea,

02:20:25.740 | goes, come here, rent a furnished apartment for a few months

02:20:30.440 | so you don't have the pressure of buying.

02:20:32.240 | And it's gonna be an easy transition.

02:20:34.460 | The rent's not gonna be anything compared to New York.

02:20:36.640 | I'm like, these are all very valid things.

02:20:39.320 | You're here, lots of other people.

02:20:41.640 | - By the way, that's what this is.

02:20:44.000 | I made sure that's renting month to month.

02:20:47.100 | - Oh, this is rental.

02:20:48.080 | - This is rental.

02:20:49.440 | You didn't realize this.

02:20:50.360 | - I thought you bought this.

02:20:51.200 | - No, no, no, this is rental.

02:20:52.640 | - We didn't talk.

02:20:53.480 | - Why?

02:20:54.300 | - I thought you bought it.

02:20:55.140 | - No, it's rental.

02:20:55.960 | Well, I really value freedom.

02:20:58.000 | - Yeah, of course.

02:20:59.160 | Who are you talking to?

02:21:00.600 | (laughing)

02:21:01.440 | Have you heard of this thing, freedom?

02:21:02.560 | It's really great.

02:21:03.560 | (laughing)

02:21:05.160 | - But not everybody, the implementation of freedom

02:21:07.960 | is different for everybody.

02:21:08.960 | - Of course.

02:21:09.800 | - For me, I don't wanna make a statement about others.

02:21:14.320 | I'll just speak for myself.

02:21:15.680 | I think when you buy a house,

02:21:17.720 | that is not just a wise financial decision

02:21:21.760 | or all those kinds of reasons that people have,

02:21:24.320 | investment, all those kinds of things.

02:21:26.360 | I think it's also a hit on your freedom

02:21:29.540 | because the positive way to frame that

02:21:31.660 | is you make it a home.

02:21:33.040 | - Yes.

02:21:33.880 | - So you have a deep connection to it.

02:21:35.120 | But the negative way to frame it

02:21:36.840 | is you're now a little bit stuck there.

02:21:39.380 | - Yeah.

02:21:40.220 | - And you may stay there way longer than you should

02:21:43.080 | when much better opportunities for life come up.

02:21:46.480 | There's stages in life when you're not sure

02:21:48.640 | exactly what the future will hold.

02:21:50.080 | I would argue that's very often the case,

02:21:52.120 | basically at every stage in life.

02:21:54.960 | And I just wanna make sure I maximize the freedom

02:21:58.080 | to embrace the most ambitious, the craziest,

02:22:03.080 | the wildest, the most beautiful opportunities that come by.

02:22:07.280 | You've actually brought this up too,

02:22:08.360 | 'cause I said I really enjoyed the conversation

02:22:10.360 | with you and Yaron.

02:22:12.160 | - Yeah.

02:22:13.000 | - And you talking to you and somebody else,

02:22:16.840 | I think you make a really significant effort.

02:22:20.000 | You've said this before, but it really is true.

02:22:22.760 | And it stands in contrast to other folks

02:22:26.160 | who are also good conversation.

02:22:27.280 | You really make an effort for that person,

02:22:29.960 | like to meet the person.

02:22:32.040 | - Oh, for sure.

02:22:33.240 | - And that's, you made me realize it's kind of a,

02:22:36.560 | it's an art form, but it's also just,

02:22:42.680 | it's a thing worth doing of putting in that effort

02:22:47.120 | and that leap of humanity to reach,

02:22:50.400 | whether you're talking to Dave Rubin or Alex Jones

02:22:54.440 | or Joe or me, just those are different human beings.

02:22:58.640 | And they're taking that leap.

02:23:00.120 | It's fascinating.

02:23:00.960 | I mean, do you have, how do you think about that?

02:23:04.160 | - I'm a huge introvert as you are, I think.

02:23:08.960 | I feel very, very, very lucky that I get to get on a mic

02:23:13.960 | and run my mouth.

02:23:17.520 | And for some people, for some reason, people like this.

02:23:19.920 | So I know what it's like to have a good convo

02:23:24.920 | and I know what it's like to have a bad convo.

02:23:27.880 | So before I'll do a show,

02:23:29.720 | I will have like some things I would want to talk about.

02:23:33.640 | And then I'll think about how to say them

02:23:35.000 | in an engaging way.

02:23:36.340 | So I do my homework in that regard.

02:23:38.360 | I'm also very good at, or I pride myself at,

02:23:42.120 | taking people who are cerebral or intellectual

02:23:45.200 | and making them a little bit silly,

02:23:47.280 | but also making them feel safe to be silly

02:23:49.680 | 'cause I'm not going to be making a buffoon of them

02:23:52.280 | that we're having fun

02:23:53.680 | as opposed to disrespecting the person.

02:23:55.880 | I think we all saw that with Yaron,

02:23:57.720 | who's very cerebral, very serious,

02:23:59.760 | but we were all cracking jokes and he was having a good time

02:24:03.560 | and he knew even if I'm making fun of him to his face,

02:24:06.640 | it is coming from a place of kindness

02:24:08.560 | and he's in on the joke and we're all having fun.

02:24:10.960 | That is something I try to do as much as possible.

02:24:15.960 | I had an episode of my show a couple of weeks ago

02:24:19.200 | and someone who's been a friend of mine for a long time

02:24:21.560 | and someone I admire a lot, Elizabeth Spires,

02:24:23.880 | she was the founding member of Gawk,

02:24:26.480 | founding editor of Gawker.

02:24:27.840 | You know, she's worked for the Observer for Jared Kushner.

02:24:30.240 | She's her resume second to none.

02:24:32.560 | And she was on my show and she was talking,

02:24:34.480 | you know, her politics are pretty straightforward,

02:24:37.400 | like corporate journalist, blue pilled politics.

02:24:39.880 | And my audience was very upset

02:24:41.400 | that I wasn't pushing back or like whatever.

02:24:43.400 | I'm like, my job, if someone is coming to a place

02:24:47.320 | where like the audience is at least gonna be somewhat hostile

02:24:49.880 | is not to make her have negative consequences

02:24:53.560 | for doing something that she didn't need to do.

02:24:56.040 | My job is to make sure that the experience

02:24:58.800 | is a positive one for her as the host.

02:25:02.040 | So when I'm the guest, I always feel that my job

02:25:05.640 | is to make the host look good

02:25:07.320 | and make the host not feel like it's work.

02:25:09.480 | And the audience really likes that

02:25:10.800 | because instead of it being an interview or intense,

02:25:13.040 | it is a conversation.

02:25:14.360 | None of us know what's gonna happen.

02:25:16.320 | And so this is something I think about a fair amount

02:25:18.920 | and I try to apply and insofar as it's successfully,

02:25:22.760 | I'm delighted and there's times when it's not successful

02:25:25.800 | and that's a shame, but all we could do is do our best.

02:25:29.080 | - Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation with her.

02:25:30.680 | I was surprised by the dislikes and all that kind of stuff.

02:25:34.320 | - Well, one of the things I always talk about

02:25:36.040 | is I don't care what my friend's politics are.

02:25:38.880 | I care about if I'm having a bad day,

02:25:41.360 | can I call them up and ask for advice?

02:25:42.840 | And Elizabeth has been there for me in the past.

02:25:45.200 | And then when I do it on a camera in front of mics,

02:25:47.560 | people are freaking out.

02:25:48.400 | I'm like, I'm practicing what I preach.

02:25:50.600 | The relationships are more important

02:25:53.600 | than someone's political views.

02:25:55.520 | And it's not hypocrisy at all to demonstrate that

02:25:59.560 | and not to push back.

02:26:01.200 | - And there was great humor there.

02:26:02.520 | You're both a bit of trolls in very different ways,

02:26:05.520 | but nevertheless, that connection, the humor

02:26:08.000 | and the mutual respect and love that was all there.

02:26:11.920 | Yeah, she was fascinating.

02:26:13.220 | You've talked to Alex Jones a couple of days ago.

02:26:16.520 | - Sure, yeah.

02:26:17.360 | - You've talked to him many times before,

02:26:18.360 | but you've had him on your podcast.

02:26:20.160 | - This week, yeah.

02:26:22.040 | - This week.

02:26:23.280 | I was kind of surprised that he mentioned

02:26:27.880 | that human-animal hybrids was the main conspiracy

02:26:32.880 | that people should look into to open their eyes

02:26:36.720 | to the globalists, to all the conspiracies that are out there.

02:26:41.720 | Was that surprising to you?

02:26:43.840 | - No, because I came in there with questions

02:26:48.960 | and I was very focused on corralling him

02:26:51.240 | and having it be a coherent intellectual conversation.

02:26:54.440 | - That was a really, really good, it was only an hour,

02:26:56.680 | but it was a very good conversation.

02:26:58.080 | - Yeah, thank you.

02:26:58.920 | The response was overwhelmingly positive.

02:27:01.880 | And I'm like, all right, I'm in a unique position

02:27:04.400 | 'cause Alex, I met Alex, well, that's not true,

02:27:06.880 | but I was on Alex, with Alex on Tim Pool a couple of times.

02:27:10.200 | It was mayhem, it was anarchy.

02:27:12.560 | And I'm like, all right, let me get,

02:27:14.040 | but the thing is what people enjoyed

02:27:15.400 | is I was the one who was basically able

02:27:17.320 | to translate Alex's.

02:27:18.800 | He's obviously very performative.

02:27:20.960 | And a lot of times Alex will say things

02:27:22.820 | that are not really particularly controversial,

02:27:26.480 | but he'll say them in such a way

02:27:28.240 | that it sounds crazier than it is.

02:27:30.120 | I think Joe's made this observation as well.

02:27:32.280 | So what I wanted to have him on my show is,

02:27:35.800 | all right, let's go through all these conspiracies

02:27:38.720 | which have validity, which don't.

02:27:40.600 | And I knew if I asked him,

02:27:41.760 | 'cause he's got a lot of historical knowledge,

02:27:43.360 | even if you think of a lot of it's nonsensical,

02:27:45.800 | let's sort out the wheat from the chaff,

02:27:48.080 | 'cause everyone has someone crazy in them.

02:27:50.720 | I have this expression,

02:27:52.120 | you take one red pill, not the whole bottle.

02:27:54.320 | You take the whole bottle of red pills,

02:27:55.520 | you assume literally everything in the media is a lie,

02:27:57.720 | that that's just not a coherent position to have.

02:27:59.800 | Is the weather a lie when they tell you

02:28:01.160 | that the temperature is gonna be wrong tomorrow?

02:28:02.960 | So that was fun to watch him go through that.

02:28:05.320 | And he felt bad because he felt,

02:28:07.520 | incorrectly in my opinion,

02:28:09.280 | that he was needlessly aggressive

02:28:10.960 | and disrespectful toward me on Tim.

02:28:12.400 | I didn't feel disrespected at all.

02:28:13.660 | It got heated, but I didn't take it personally.

02:28:15.560 | People have heated debates all the time.

02:28:17.240 | So I think he promised me he wouldn't interrupt

02:28:19.480 | and we'd be deferential,

02:28:20.800 | but that because he promised to be on his best behavior,

02:28:23.960 | that gave me an opportunity to address him seriously

02:28:27.360 | and not to bring the clown aspect out of him,

02:28:30.060 | which is easy to caricature him.

02:28:32.140 | My friend, Ethan Supley, who I'm sure people know,

02:28:34.600 | played basically a character based on him in "The Hunt,"

02:28:36.840 | 'cause Alex is kind of this cartoon archetype.

02:28:40.240 | So it was really fun to get another side of him.

02:28:43.260 | And also it was just fun being on his show,

02:28:47.260 | just him being bombastic

02:28:48.340 | and just trying to be the calm voice of reason.

02:28:50.880 | And for once, the trickster was Apollo.

02:28:53.320 | - Well, I like this thing he said before,

02:28:56.920 | and that's what makes me the most interested in Alex,

02:28:59.800 | is the Nietzsche quote about the, you know,

02:29:03.200 | gazing into the abyss.

02:29:04.920 | I think he said on your show

02:29:06.120 | that he has become the abyss or something like that.

02:29:09.000 | I think that makes him fascinating

02:29:10.520 | that when you really take conspiracy theory seriously,

02:29:14.720 | the kind of effect it has on your mind,

02:29:17.680 | that to me is fascinating.

02:29:18.880 | - Well, can I say one thing?

02:29:20.120 | The term conspiracy theory.

02:29:22.000 | If you ask any layman, it's like this,

02:29:24.720 | you say, "Do you like puppies?

02:29:26.480 | "I hate them.

02:29:27.320 | "Do you like baby dogs?

02:29:28.260 | "Oh, they're the best, right?"

02:29:29.680 | The human mind is capable of doing this.

02:29:31.820 | So if you ask people,

02:29:33.240 | do you think extremely powerful people

02:29:36.680 | often get together and manipulate data or rules

02:29:40.220 | in order to further their power and control and maintain it?

02:29:43.240 | I think 90 plus percent of people would be like, "Of course."

02:29:46.160 | Then you say, "Oh, so you believe in conspiracy theories?

02:29:48.220 | "Oh no, that's for crazy people."

02:29:49.640 | Those concepts are identical.

02:29:51.440 | Now that term is used for people who are like,

02:29:54.920 | "All right, there's conspiracies in government

02:29:58.120 | "to experiment on people like Tuskegee.

02:29:59.900 | "This is not in dispute.

02:30:00.800 | "The CIA has unsealed things, Operation Mockingbird,

02:30:04.160 | "so on and so forth."

02:30:05.400 | And at the same time, conspiracy theory applies

02:30:07.360 | to people who say 9/11 never happened

02:30:09.640 | and those were holograms.

02:30:10.960 | Now it's the same word for both,

02:30:13.080 | but these are not at all equal truth claims

02:30:16.140 | and they do not at all have equal evidence to them,

02:30:18.320 | but it's very useful for powerful people

02:30:20.560 | to have that term in the zeitgeist

02:30:22.520 | because then I don't have to explain or defend.

02:30:24.400 | It's like only lunatics are gonna look further on this.

02:30:27.520 | Do you really wanna be a lunatic kid?

02:30:29.240 | And that takes care of the issue.

02:30:31.320 | - Unfortunately, the same problem applies,

02:30:33.680 | well, language applies to a lot of other areas.

02:30:35.560 | - 100%, that's the nature of language, yeah.

02:30:37.680 | It's used not just to communicate, but to obfuscate.

02:30:39.960 | - Obviously, that could be fixed

02:30:41.260 | by coming up with different words

02:30:44.120 | to label conspiracy theories

02:30:46.480 | that are much more likely to be true.

02:30:48.840 | - Yeah, like power lead analysis

02:30:51.040 | is basically a conspiracy theory.

02:30:53.520 | - Well, this is the black pill

02:30:54.720 | versus white pill question with the abyss.

02:30:57.540 | Do you think thinking about these things

02:31:01.240 | can destroy the mind,

02:31:04.200 | can make you deeply cynical about the world?

02:31:07.820 | - Yeah, because if you are thinking

02:31:11.240 | that you are not aware of,

02:31:13.040 | or no one is aware of who's controlling things

02:31:16.600 | and the level of their control,

02:31:19.020 | it gives you the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness.

02:31:22.040 | And my counter is the people in charge,

02:31:25.380 | one of the reasons I'm an anarchist,

02:31:27.000 | are nowhere near as smart and crafty as you think they are.

02:31:30.320 | And certainly maybe the ones

02:31:32.240 | to complete in the shadow maybe are,

02:31:33.480 | but the ones who are in the public face

02:31:35.080 | most certainly are not, as social media has demonstrated.

02:31:37.960 | When you look at how senators and Harvard professors tweet,

02:31:41.520 | these are not intellects that you're in awe of,

02:31:46.000 | to put it mildly.

02:31:47.200 | So I think that kind of takes the bloom off the rose

02:31:50.000 | to a great extent.

02:31:50.980 | - You mentioned that you've been doing

02:31:53.800 | a lot of amazing things, been truly joyful recently.

02:31:56.840 | I don't know if you have a bucket list.

02:32:02.340 | Is there items on the bucket list you haven't done yet?

02:32:05.440 | Are you pretty much satisfied and happy?

02:32:08.700 | And if you die today, if I murder you, you'd be happy?

02:32:12.340 | - I could die today.

02:32:13.340 | - Is there an item on the bucket list you want to get done?

02:32:16.240 | - I don't, yeah, deep sea submersible.

02:32:21.500 | That would be number one in a bucket list.

02:32:24.860 | - Why?

02:32:25.700 | - Because that's where all the most interesting zoology is.

02:32:28.460 | And to be in a place where

02:32:32.580 | virtually no human being has been,

02:32:34.620 | and to see these God's mistakes

02:32:36.700 | in their natural environment.

02:32:38.700 | My friend coined that term, God's mistakes.

02:32:40.580 | If you look at deep sea creatures,

02:32:41.820 | you can imagine God making some animal,

02:32:44.060 | being like, "Oh God, this is hideous.

02:32:45.300 | "I'll just throw the bottom of the oceans.

02:32:46.440 | "No one's gonna see this."

02:32:48.140 | So that would be my number one bucket list thing.

02:32:51.060 | I would say go to the White House as a guest

02:32:53.860 | would be a bucket list thing.

02:32:55.500 | Russia, go to Russia would be a bucket list thing.

02:32:58.240 | I wanna go, these are secondary,

02:33:01.380 | like go to Eritrea would be a bucket list thing.

02:33:04.020 | I've got a long list of books I need to write.

02:33:06.420 | That's, I don't know if that's really a bucket list per se.

02:33:10.100 | There's not that much.

02:33:13.620 | What I'm at a point in my life

02:33:16.260 | is once you cross off certain things,

02:33:18.460 | you basically instead of driving the car, start surfing.

02:33:21.740 | And just amazing thing.

02:33:22.820 | I talked to you about this medical thing before we started.

02:33:25.880 | At a certain point, and I'm sure this happens to you

02:33:28.100 | 'cause your platform's a lot bigger than mine,

02:33:30.320 | all sorts of things start coming your way

02:33:32.000 | that you never would have thought of.

02:33:33.180 | And you're like, "This is pretty darn cool."

02:33:35.300 | So to be, and that's happening at an escalating rate.

02:33:38.540 | Like I'm at a point now

02:33:40.140 | where I get stopped every day by people.

02:33:43.060 | So that's gonna be a weird thing for me to get adjusted to.

02:33:46.580 | Without exception, everyone who has ever stopped me

02:33:51.700 | on the street has been cool.

02:33:53.100 | And it's been a pleasant experience.

02:33:54.780 | There was one exception in an event

02:33:56.300 | where someone was genuinely on the spectrum

02:33:58.780 | and they didn't understand distance

02:34:00.820 | and you don't touch people.

02:34:02.380 | But that's as bad as it got.

02:34:04.100 | So that is something that's gonna be weird for me

02:34:06.920 | to have to deal with over the next couple of years.

02:34:10.340 | But it's the price you pay

02:34:11.700 | and it's hardly a small price when people come up to you

02:34:14.660 | and say, "You've made my life better."

02:34:16.300 | But it's just weird when you go in,

02:34:18.140 | like I was at the gym and then someone tweets,

02:34:20.620 | "Did I see you at the gym just now?"

02:34:22.500 | It's kind of weird, and I'm sure it's the same for you,

02:34:25.460 | when you're walking around and you don't think about it

02:34:27.900 | but people know who you are

02:34:28.980 | and you don't know who they are that you're being watched.

02:34:30.780 | Even though it's not malevolent,

02:34:31.840 | it's still just, you don't get prepared for that.

02:34:34.820 | - Michael, there will be two really big names

02:34:39.300 | that wanted to do this podcast, will do this podcast,

02:34:43.340 | that I considered to do episode 200 with.

02:34:46.020 | But then I realized, why the hell talk to somebody famous

02:34:50.380 | when I could talk to somebody I love,

02:34:53.480 | that nobody knows or cares for.

02:34:56.820 | (laughing)

02:34:57.820 | - You just hit a random number generator.

02:35:01.060 | - Yeah, I listed all the Russians I know

02:35:03.300 | and who's the easiest to get.

02:35:05.260 | - Yeah, who's the most desperate for camera stuff?

02:35:08.620 | He's got a shitty book out,

02:35:09.900 | we could talk about that for five minutes.

02:35:12.580 | This garbage cut and paste that he did.

02:35:14.580 | - Yeah, and it turned out okay, I think.

02:35:18.140 | Slightly above average.

02:35:20.860 | Michael, I love you, you're an incredible human being.

02:35:23.900 | It's an honor that you would talk to me

02:35:25.700 | and you'll be my friend.

02:35:26.700 | Thanks so much for doing this.

02:35:27.980 | - The respect that I got when you asked me

02:35:32.100 | to be the guest for the anniversary episode

02:35:34.660 | was similar to the respect when my two friends,

02:35:36.940 | Josh and Zoe, they were gonna get married at City Hall

02:35:39.420 | and they said, "We want someone to witness it,

02:35:40.740 | "we ask you."

02:35:41.740 | So it's one thing when people tell you

02:35:44.420 | they like you and respect you, which I had growing up.

02:35:46.980 | It's another thing when they show it.

02:35:48.460 | And this is something that I do not take lightly

02:35:50.660 | and I hope no one takes lightly.

02:35:52.020 | And if someone does right by you and shows you respect,

02:35:55.100 | going back to kind of taking out for dinner, thank them.

02:35:58.020 | Buy them a candy bar, buy them a soda,

02:36:00.380 | do something to show that you don't take it for granted

02:36:03.580 | because I think what you and I both want to do

02:36:06.600 | is increase human kindness as much as possible.

02:36:09.660 | And I'm gonna look at the camera,

02:36:12.820 | be kind to yourself because a lot of you deserve it.

02:36:16.940 | Dasvidanya.

02:36:17.780 | - Dasvidanya.

02:36:18.620 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:36:21.420 | with Michael Malice.

02:36:22.580 | And thank you to Gala Games, Indeed,

02:36:25.620 | BetterHelp and Masterclass.

02:36:27.660 | Check them out in the description

02:36:29.340 | to support this podcast.

02:36:31.420 | And now let me leave you with some words from Jack Kerouac

02:36:35.020 | that perhaps begins to explain the nature of

02:36:38.060 | and the reasons for my friendship with Mr. Michael Malice.

02:36:41.420 | The only people for me are the mad ones.

02:36:44.940 | The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,

02:36:47.740 | mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.

02:36:51.680 | The ones who never yawn or say commonplace thing,

02:36:54.660 | but burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles

02:36:59.180 | exploding like spiders across the stars.

02:37:01.940 | And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop

02:37:05.100 | and everybody goes, ah.

02:37:06.900 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:37:12.220 | (upbeat music)

02:37:14.800 | (upbeat music)

02:37:17.380 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200

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