Michael Malice: Freedom, Hope, and Happiness Amidst Chaos | Lex Fridman Podcast #150
the following is a conversation with michael malus his second time on the podcast he's an anarchist political thinker podcaster and author he wrote dear reader which is a book on north korea and the new right a book on the various ideological movements at the fringe of american politics he hosts the podcast called you're welcome spelled y-o-u-r and in general there's a lot of live shows on youtube that are at times profoundly absurd and at other times absurdly profound and always full of humor and wisdom he is the joker to my batman and the caviar to my vodka his masterful dance between dark humor and difficult even dangerous ideas challenges me to think deeply about this world and when that fails at least smile and have a good laugh at the absurdity of it all this episode has much of that his outfit for example the exact inverse of mine with a white suit and a black shirt is just one example of that of the humor trolling and brilliance that is michael malus quick mention of our sponsors netsuite business management software athletic greens all-in-one nutrition drink sun basket meal delivery service and cash app so the choice is success health food or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that michael is in many ways a man of radical ideas but also a man with kindness in his heart those two things are great ingredients for a fascinating conversation i hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year who also have radical ideas about politics science technology and life at times often perhaps i might fail at asking the challenging questions that should be asked but i will try my best to do so and hope to keep improving every time mostly i come to these conversations with an open mind and with love unfortunately that kind of approach can be taken advantage of in many ways it can be used by reporters or just people online later to highlight how or why i'm ignorant or worse i'm generally not a good human being in the context of this i have two options i could either be cautious and afraid or second be kind thoughtful and fearless i choose the latter hopefully while still being open fragile and empathetic again i strive to be like the main character of the idiot by dostoyevsky that's my new year's resolution be kind and do difficult things difficult conversations difficult research projects and difficult entrepreneurial adventures if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on apple podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with michael malus knock knock you're stealing my bed i'll kill your family that's not how knock knock joke works knock knock michael you don't do knock knock jokes with the russians because we have to knock at the door turn down the tv you got to sit quiet never hope they go away this is you don't throw that back to the netherlands you know this it's triggered who's there i can't even do it now knock knock who's there leon leon who leon me when you're not strong michael well that will never happen i stole elegantly eloquently that joke from you the lie detector that was a lie elegantly and eloquently yeah you crossed it on a sheet of paper that means it's real the reason i bring it up is because you had the guts the brilliance to to uh do a knock knock joke not once but three times with alex jones i think it was like six i had a runner okay maybe i just they started to sort of uh melt together in this beautiful art form that you've created which is like these kind loving knock knock jokes with alex jones so you got a chance to meet him and talk with him twice with uh tim poole yeah in a long form conversation what was it like talking to alex jones both on the deep philosophical intellectual level and staring the man in his eyes and doing a knock-knock joke about olive knock-knock who's there olive i love you alex i love you well there's a lot to to explain where do you start i've been on his show in for worse a few times when i was researching my book then you write so i had had conversations with him before one of the things that i appreciate about alex is he is a lot more self-aware than people think and has a good sense of humor and i also like a good twist ending so if you set people up and all these jokes are these kind of vapid you know all of you jokes and the last ones about building seven uh they're not going to see that one coming nor will he see that one coming i even had another one about sandy hook which i didn't do on the air because he was being like a good sport so i didn't but that was the dagger that was kind of behind my back if necessary but it was a good mechanism toward i like it when things work on several levels it was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation guarded and this every so often this is kind of hitting the control delete and bringing it down uh um to a certain point of calmness what about the love thing i mean you're saying that that was a buildup to the dagger but it was also somehow really refreshing to get that little jolt like that pause you don't get that in conversations often like i'm a huge fan of rogan and he'll have a three-hour conversation but at some point just pause and be like i love you man like like it's in the cheesiest way possible because that seems to be it somehow hits the hardest then i don't know i don't know you didn't intend it that way but with alex jones to sit there and to say i love you that was like that i just haven't never heard that before and so it struck me as like not just funny for what you're doing but just like whoa we just took because uh conversations are all about like this ranting especially with alex jones yeah just like ranting about this or that this this part of the world like can you believe this that kind of thing but like to pause and be like this is awesome i don't know if you felt that way but oh oh i definitely felt that way so it was actually very fun i'll give you the backstory of how that happened um it was it was all it was silly because tim calls me up and there's this expression in marketing don't go past the sale right so if you're trying to sell someone a car and like it's got this feature this feature and that feature and they're like you know what i'm gonna buy the car if you keep talking you can only make them lose the sale you just get them to sign and get get out of dodge so tim calls me up and he goes okay uh here's what we're thinking this is top secret alex is going to be on the show we want you on as well and i've never said yes to anything as quickly in my life um and then he keeps talking and i'm like tim this you don't have to sell it i i interrupted him i go you don't have to sell it why are you by the way i think because um i am kind of an agent of chaos and alex is in his own way an agent of chaos and what is provides an opportunity in this kind of news media space that you and i travel in it's the kind of things where none of us three you know as we said on the show knew what it would be like if you you know to certain within certain parameters what you know megyn kelly or wolf blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be like in a conversation to some extent none of us had any idea and i knew they didn't know i was bringing knock-knock jokes yeah um so that was kind of what was so ex so i said at one point i'm kind of envious of the audience because this is there's so many exciting things that are happening and that the internet and podcasting provides people an opportunity to do that it was great yeah that that was the greatest pairing with alex jones that i've ever seen by far so like okay so i immediately knew now this isn't a knock on tim but i don't even know if tim was prepared tim was not prepared for this call how could he be prepared well so i i mean i don't know if tim is used to that i think joe rogan is more equipped prepared for the chaos just the years he's been in it like i immediately thought this is the right pairing for joe rogan because alex jones has been on joe rogan a few times yeah three times my favorite so far was with tim dillon right for jen yeah but tim was clearly uh tim dillon was also kind of uh a genius in his own right but he was kind of a fan and he was back and he was stepping away he was almost like in awe of alex jones where uh you were both you were in awe of the experience that's being created and at the same time fearlessly just trolling the situation i mean to do a knock-knock joke to stop me that just shows that you're in control of the experience no you're like riding the experience that immediately was like this needs to be on rogan so i hope that happens as well you you're on your own of course on rogan but just you that's an experience that's the whatever there's gotta be a good name for it like jimi hendrix experience there's the michael and alex because that was a band it's taken well i don't know how many years you can you can restart the the experience because i feel sorry interrupt you i feel a very big responsibility especially in 2020 to provide fun and something cool and something unique that hasn't been done before for the audience i think this has been a very rough year on our audiences psychologically and in other aspects of their lives so i feel if i'm gonna be there i'm going to put on a show and it's also going to be great because it also alienates the people you don't want right so there's a lot of people who sit there and be like oh he's telling not people who are too cool for school uh where they're like oh he's telling knock knock jokes this is stupid i'm like good if you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle with a kid or without it you know by yourself that's on you and it's something very i something i think is the enemy of cynicism and this idea that like oh this is too silly and meets me it's like we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives i think it's something we could use more of it's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of have be condemnatory about that or to do it in a certain very corporate fake way so it is something i encourage a lot something i enjoy doing um and again i like with the first time i was on tim i had a propeller beanie on you know with the motorized and a lot of people were like i can't take anyone seriously who dresses like this i go good if you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of the ideas themselves you're not someone i want on my team are we going to address the outfit you're wearing we can dress it sure you know for those who are color blind [Laughter] michael's wearing the orange or just listening to this michael's wearing the exact opposite the inverse from uh from another dimension outfit which is a white suit and black shirt it's so genius okay so uh you should see the next two looks i've planned oh no yeah they're great well obviously this relationship is going to end today okay is there some deep philosophy to the humor is uh this goes to our trolling discussion is there some is there like chapters to this genius or is this just uh what makes you smile in the morning well i mean i think you're honestly in this case using the word genius a little loosely i think this is particularly genius but i do think it is fun it is exuberant it is joyous um i think the the bigger my audience has gotten and the more i actually communicate with you know fans i do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal maternal instincts it's which is very very odd i did not expect to have that what do you mean who's the dad i'm the dad and the mom i remember and it may have been similar for you i'm curious to hear it for young smart like um ambitious men like 24 to 27 for me was a very rough period because that's the window where a lot of people get married and they kind of check out and if you're very much kind of finding your own road you don't know what's happening no one's in a position to really guide you or help you and it's it's it's tough it's a very tough window and what i'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position but now instead of them stumbling along for some of them i'm the one who could be like no no no it's not you it's everybody else and to be able to give them that semblance of feeling seen to use a cliched expression to feel normal and that no no you're the you're the you're the heroes here they're the background noise um it's just really very uh flattering and humbling to be in that position you have many minds right there's the thoughtful kind michael there's like i'm gonna burn down the powerful yeah mike i think like yeah and then there's like i'm going to have this just light-hearted trolling of the world yeah which and which of those are most important to the 24 to the 27 demographic i i think it's it is the combination you know it's like if you're making a meal you know chicken kiev you need the chicken you need the ham you need the butter sauce um because i think people when you're young you need to see someone who's fought the fight for you and who's won so it's very easy to be defeatist so this is what winning looks like no this is not this is most assuredly what winning does not look like but in my normal clothes yeah a little bit more uh this is a good time to mention that clothes wise you're wearing sheath underwear and people should uh buy sheath underwear use code malice20 if you go to sheets underwear.com use promo code malice20 what i love about why i'm glad to promote the product and wear it it's the most comfortable underwear i've ever worn and you have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals that's that's what you i thought there was like a punch line coming no it's a very nice aspect of the product yeah but i think what here's something else just goes back we're just talking about there are so many and this is going to segue into this there are so many small companies who have been devastated this year we have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops uh like we've seen in 2020 who are innovators and making something happen and when you're just like one dude who's producing a product they're a sponsor of mine i'm happy to first of all it's funny that i'm pitching underwear but haha pitching but it's also something i enjoy she says small business yeah yeah it's microscopic like a thimble so this isn't a sponsor of mine but this is a good segue so this is the russians we celebrate new year's november we have diet moroz he comes down puts a present under your pillow so this is a company called jl lawson he's a fan of yours he's a metal worker and he said can i give you something to give to lex i have one of his worry coins i'll tell you what it is he's not a sponsor this is not i'm not getting paid for this so what a worry coin is i carry around in my butt if you have raw denim it's great because it brings you fades so you carry it around with you all the time it says worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe right and i carry this around and for now it's been like a year next time you're worrying this is good advice if you don't have a word coin go think about 10 years ago yes and what you were worried about then and then think about did any of those things pan out and some of them did but you were able to handle it and that's a good way to maintain perspective so jl lawson's the company he sent me this present i said let me give it to lex on air so enjoy should i also open it yeah j l lawson and co two lex from anthony yeah and i said make something mathematical for lex i don't even know what's in there you don't know what's in there no and it got through us tsa could be a bomb it could be just like this episode make sure you unwrap it close to mike because it drives you crazy that's really the best part me or is this what unboxing video looks like i think so this conversation's going to be a big hit on the internet the unboxing community i need to have an excited look on my face to make sure the reaction video it should be an unboxing and a reaction video lex freeman reacts it's another box it's just a series of boxes lex big fan since hearing you on rogan months ago most of your guests are over my head but still enjoyable ah like this episode michael was kind enough to want to share my work with you keep doing what you do anthony lawson thanks anthony there's a lot in there what is in there give me some i'll open some okay all right by the way show it to the camera and then make sure you look excited or not or disappointed no this is cool this is a worry coin like i was showing you oh so you hold it in your hand and when you can do this with your thumb if people are have anxiety or whatever oh there's a lot of cool stuff in here fibonacci coin oh see yeah that's the math stuff that's really awesome this is really cool wait you got a big one laying there too that's what she said i'm telling you last time you offended me saying i don't have humor uh the spin tray micro brass and copper bronze by the way the packaging is epic i think that's his top he makes tops cool yeah you spin it in there and it's the two different uh bronze and copper i think he's the only one who makes these machined tops and then he's sitting here i guess yeah but you could spin him in that stack that section got it cool where's the where's the worry thing here's the word coin anyway i wasn't listening what were you worried about 10 years ago 10 years ago 2010 what would i have been worried about then the government no i'm not that's not a worry i i i i it was a north korea book i published that came out in 2014. i went there in 2012. came out in january 2014. it still pays my rent um with the royalties so the north korea book yeah see this is this is why it's so much better too i gotta talk to you about self-publishing because that you brought that up i'm doing the next book's also going to be self-published can we talk about self-publishing what uh what's that what's the whole idea of publishing like having a publisher and an agent because there's a bunch of people been reaching out to me trying to get me to write a book which is ridiculous why there there's people who are brilliant folks like you like jordan peterson that i think have a lot of knowledge to share with the world okay i think what i feel i can contribute to the world in terms of impact is to build something okay meaning like engineering stuff okay like a book it has to be engineered and i'm not using it loosely you have to engineer a book no for sure i what i mean is like literally a product with programming and artificial intelligence involved that's i want to build the company i want to because there's i have a few ideas that i feel i'm equipped and it has to do with your like intuition about the way you can build a better world you individually like what can you add to the world that's a positive thing and for me i feel like the maximal thing i can add to the world is at least to attempt to build products that would add more love in the world and like so i want to focus on that the danger of the book for me or any kind of writing and even this podcast is a little bit dangerous for me it's like it's fun for sure it's it's fun it's like it takes you into this place where you start thinking about the world you start enjoying and playing with ideas you start and like just your book on um a dear reader uh but also the new right like clearly you and i probably think similarly in the sense that you did a lot of work yes this next book is killing me yeah as you mentioned often it's clear like uh on your youtube channel which i'm a fan of you often it just comes out like you mentioned all of these books that you're reading it just comes through you that you're suffering through this and you've it changes you and it's clear that you're thinking deeply about the world because of this book and i feel like if you do that that's like uh when i was when i first came to this country i read the book the giver i need to read it again it's like it uh the red pill thing is it changes you in where you can never be the same person again and i feel i feel about a book in that same way the moment you write a book of course it depends on the book i could also just write uh like in my field a very technical book no that's a terrible idea yes but that that's okay that doesn't really change you that's just like sharing information but like something where you're like how do i think about this world can you just leave that behind you i get it dude it's it's being pregnant there's it never escapes your brain i'm telling you you're absolutely right yeah i don't know it uh it does seem to change it but the reason i bring that up is because there's this whole industry of people that uh seem to not really contribute much to the publication process but they they make themselves seem necessary for like if you want to be in the new york times bestseller list kind of thing but also just being like reputable yeah which is i'm allergic to that whole concept but it does do you think it's possible to be on the new york times bestseller list and be a reputable author and still be self-published not what you would want to do like people like marxist and i think is his name he wrote like the primal blueprints so like if i'm getting the names correct he's the first paleo guy right so he self-published it it sold gangbusters uh but that would be on their health chart i believe and uh it's a little bit of a different situation you would be reaching much more for the mainstream um you'd be giving up a lot if you go through a publisher especially financially but yeah you are not going to have the cred because there the publishing is a cartel the new york times is part of this cartel and if you don't publish within this cartel they will do what they can as any cartel has to by necessity of being cartel to pretend you don't exist so they will i was i think the first one to have an hour on book tv for dear reader because that was a kickstarter book um but this is something that people do it was a kickstarter book yeah this is something people would have to be aware of so you would be giving up a lot but you'd also be giving a lot to work with the publisher because you're losing like a year and a half of your life because they're glacial and they don't care well this that's my only problem it's not the money i mean the money is whatever percent they take 10 20 30 percent they're taking a huge chunk so if i sell a book through st martin's it's a dollar if i sell a book through amazon which is dear reader that's six dollars so that's what 87 it's something crazy but for me what bothers me isn't the money that that for me personally for me what bothers me is incompetence like whenever i go to the dmv or something like that can i can i interrupt you yeah let's talk in confidence yep new ride comes out last year yes i get on rogan get on reuben i call them and i said i got in these shows is there money in the budget for travel and they say we don't have that budget fine by the way you got on those shows no with no help from them correct oh yeah that's not even a question uh the reason they would want you to do a book is because they know you could get the only reason people get book deals nowadays literally it's because they know that person can market their own book that's the only way and i i got a reuben i got in rogan and they they go down the money for the bunch for travel which is fair they can do skype they told me this in writing and i'm like okay and they can financially cover skype no but it's like hey joe yeah we don't have the budget but you're gonna do skype hello hello so there is another friend of mine was on a show on cnbc with nasim taleb and they said naseem wants a copy of the book and they're like oh yeah it's like four o'clock on friday so we're closed so and he's like he went there picked it up and walked it the two blocks so there is it's almost cartoonish and it's not incompetence it's um it's past that it's something almost you can't really believe that i've had two friends who have been literally rendered suicidal um because this was such a huge opportunity for them and it was like watching their kid get beaten in front of them and i had to talk them off the ledge so it's people do not appreciate how bad here's another example the apathy of bureaucracy something like that i did this book concierge confidential there's a typo in the first chapter it ends with i'm about to t-o-o they didn't fix it for the paperback i don't care it's just like wow okay yeah great book by the way got it got npr gave it one the books of the year so that was good so why participate in this because otherwise new york times is going to pretend you don't exist uh getting book on some booked on some shows might be more difficult although i think that's collapsing in real time um you're not going to get reviewed necessarily in places like pw um or some others so the new book you're working on you have a title yeah the white pill the white pill are you self-publishing that oh yeah for sure and what's the thinking behind that just because you already have a huge following and a big platform and uh it's six times the cash if i finish the book in december i could have it out in february if i finish the book in december with the publisher it's going to be out in december at the earliest 2021. why am i giving up 10 months of my life well this is the big one do you have any leverage like do do authors have leverage to say f you like can you just say what even just look meaning like i want to release this book in two months oh no no i mean you'll have a contract and then your agent can fight it but they don't have the bureau they don't have the capacity to rush things through yeah i guess if the cause i've heard like big authors i don't know sam harris all those folks talk about like they've accepted it actually they've accepted they're like yeah it takes a long time to i'm not accepting it but you but you're kind of implying that a human being like me should like i'm saying these are your options right so i just i just hate it i hate the waiting because it's incompetence it's not that it's not necessarily the way if i knew it wasn't you know if it was the kind of people that are up at 2 am at night on a friday and they love what you're doing and they're helping create something special that's the sense i get with some of the netflix folks for example uh that work with people i just i don't know anything about this world but you get like netflix folks who who help with shows you could tell that they're obsessed with those shows yeah well yeah you're not gonna get that publishing if you hand like i handed the book in i think it was july i didn't hear anything from my uh editor until december well can we actually talk about the suffering sure the darkest parts of writing a book so the let's let's go to the full michael mal stephen king mode of uh what are the darkest moments of writing this book and what is it maybe start the white pill what's the idea what's the hope and what are your darkest moments around writing this book so people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill the the red the they're from the matrix the red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact by the corporate press entertainment industry is in fact a carefully constructed narrative designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and everyone else under control and one of my expressions is you take one red pill not the whole bottle yes because at a certain point you think everything's a lie and then you're you're kind of no capacity for distinguishing truths you're full of good one-liners well thank you yeah i'm full of something that's for sure and what i saw in this space is a lot of these red-pilled people got very um disheartened and cynical and one of my big heroes is albert camus and he said the worst thing is cynicism and that led something called the black pill which is the idea that you know it's it's all it's it's it's just we're waiting for the end it's hopeless and i i don't see it that way at all and i'm like all right i have to address this and not just with some kind of cheerleading everything's gonna be great guys here is why i am positive and not that i'm positive the good guys are gonna win but i'm positive the good guys can win and that's all you need because if your god forbid kid is kidnapped and there's a 10 chance that you can save them you're not going to be like well i don't like those odds this is your country this is your values this is your family uh and i think it's much more than 10 and even if you lose you will take pride in that you did everything in your power to win so is there a good definition of good guys in the sense the ones who wear white there's layers to this you're like modern-day shakespeare is there a danger in thinking um adolf hitler was probably pretty confident that he led a group of good guys listen if hitler did anything wrong why isn't he in jail uh i checked friend thought of that joke he actually he says in his accent he goes if hitler's so bad why isn't he in that jail [Laughter] that's a good point he's probably still alive right and look yeah hopefully [Laughter] oh boy two of the three people listening to this are very upset right now uh what were you even talking about oh how do you how do you know the what is good there's lots of standards of good but if you're for me to be a good guy is if you want to leave the world a little bit better than you found it that to me is the definition of a good guy and i think there are many people that that that's not their motivation and also it's about your motivation well it's also about if your motivation is at all um correlated to reality i you no one thinks we're the bad guys that's correct but are you taking steps to check your motivations and and also take a certain amount of humility because if you're going to start interfering with other people's lives you really uh better be sure you know what you're talking about the control of others if you do have centralized control or any kind of you become a leader of a group you better know you better do so humbly and cautiously and i also have uh steam valves right so if in case things go wrong let's have i'm sure this is a lot happening with ai whatever works with computers like okay if something goes wrong here how do we have a workaround to make sure it doesn't cause everything to collapse yeah the the going wrong thing i mean the the whole the feedback mechanism yeah like uh i wonder if people in congress think that things are really wrong it's working for them i use are you sure because i'm not sure because i i'd like to believe uh that the people that at least when they got into politics actually wanted some of it as ego but some of it is like wanting to be the kind of person that builds a better world sure i'd also think it's a it's diverse some who are going to have different motivations than others but like when once you're in the system and trying to build a better world how do you know that it's not working like how do you take the basic feedback mechanisms and like and actually productively change i mean that's what it means to be a good guys like something is wrong here and this that's why i like the elon musk like think from first principles like wait wait okay let's ask the big question like can this be one is this working at all like the way we're solving this particular problem of government is this working at all and then like stepping away and saying like as opposed to modifying this bill or that bill or like this little strategy like increase the tax by this much or decrease the tax by this much like why do we have a democracy at all or why do we have any kind of representative democracy shouldn't it be a pure democracy or why do we have states uh like representation of states and federal government and so on why do we have us this kind of separation of powers is this different why don't we have term limits or not like big things like how do you actually make that happen and is that what it means to be a good guy it's like taking big revolutionary steps as opposed to incremental steps well i don't know that you could be a politician to be a good guy to be honest and let me give you a counter example someone who you could tell is not being a good guy uh joe biden said he was he regards the iraq war as a mistake okay you and i have made mistakes in our lives i'm sure none of our mistakes have caused tens of thousands of people to die um if let's suppose something for yourself i that's fair okay i'll take that i don't build the killbots um if i were a chef let's take it out of politics and in my restaurant somehow accidentally someone ate something and they died a i would feel horrible but more importantly i would be like we need to look through the system and figure out how it got to the point where someone lost their life because that can never happen again and we need to figure out step by step it's there's i'm not a gun person but there's like this checklist of like if you're holding a gun there's five things to do and even if you get too wrong you're gonna be sick it's like assume every gun is loaded only pointed at something that you want to kill and there's like three other things and it's like to make sure that nothing goes wrong so if i made a if i'm not chef and i would have to not only feel guilt but take preventative action to make sure this has no possibility of happening again if you look at the staff he's putting in it's the same warmongers that would have advised him to get into the iraq war on the first time that is to me is not a good guy that to me is someone who does not feel remorse for their responsibility in killing not only many americans but some of us think that you know dead iraqis isn't necessarily ideal either okay let's talk a bit about war i maybe you can also correct me on something the first time i found myself into barack obama was uh i don't know how many years ago this was but when i maybe heard a speech of his about him speaking out against the war yeah and him i i think it's on record saying he was against the war before it was happening now he wasn't in senate at the time so it was very easy for him to say this because i see like people say that people say that people say like it was easy and it was some people say it's like strategically sure the wise thing to do given some kind of calculus whatever but i to this day give him that's the reason i've always given him props in my mind like okay this is a man of character like he makes i also personally really value great speeches i think speeches are really important for leaders because they inspire the world it's like one of the most best things you can contribute to the world is great uh like through intellect mold ideas in a way that's communicable to like a huge number of people yeah better to persuade than to force in every instance that's why i disagree with chomsky he said like if you're it chops chopsticks whole idea was that like if you're really eloquent speaker that means your ideas aren't that good that's nonsense yeah so i think that's a way for him to describe like i speak in a very boring way maybe that's the pitch for this podcast i speak boring so that the ideas are the things you uh value and it's also useful to go to sleep but the i that's that's why i really liked obama throughout his life and still do but when i first like saw this is for some reason you can disagree i thought he's a man of character is to when most politicians most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power i think were for the war or too afraid to be against the war yeah that's why i liked uh uh bernie sanders and that's what i liked like in the early days of obama for speaking out against the war and not like in this weird activist way not weird but not not saying i'm an activist this is but like just saying the common sense thing and being brave enough to say the common sense thing without like having a big sign and saying i'm going to be the anti-war candidate or something like that but just saying this is not a good idea yeah and and i think it's it's for those of us who are old enough to remember it's pretty uh despicable what happened with tulsi in 2020 she was the biggest anti-war candidate and she was marginalized within her own party which i guess you can make sense she's just a congresswoman from hawaii but the corporate press did everything in their power to diminish her and pretend she didn't existed and for those of us who remember where 12 years prior uh you know when george w bush had the republican national convention in new york and it was the biggest protest in history and the iraq war led to democratic um landslides in 2006 and 2008 to have that completely not part of the democratic party in 2020 is both shocking and reprehensible hey michael hey is it that you don't have to say hey michael you just say knock knock no it's not knock knock okay what did the volcano say to his true love what i love you [Laughter] i uh these jokes look better when you know how to speak english i it was actually in russian i i did google translate okay back to your book in the suffering you uh you somehow turned it positive and as as one who's wearing who's the representative of the black pill in this conversation what are some of the darker moments what are the some of the hardest challenges of putting together this book the white pill uh content content content so if i'm having a page in about reagan taking on gerald ford in the 1976 presidential primaries i'm gonna have to read like 20. so and it's the thing like if there'll be sometimes i'll remember some quotes somewhere and then i have to spend an hour trying to find it because i want it to be as dense with information as uh possible like how do you structure the the main philosophical ideas you want to convey is that already planned out no the book changed entirely from its conception so uh my buddy ryan holiday had a series of books still does where he takes the ideas of the stoics and he applies them to contemporary uh terms he has this whole cottage industry that he's doing very well with and i'd asked him years ago if i could do that with camus and he's like sure go for it and i was going to rework camus the myth of sisyphus and i read it recently i re-read it and this wasn't the book i remembered at all and i'm like okay i'm going to write the book that i remembered but the more i was writing it i one of the things i always yell at conservatives about and there's a long list is they don't talk about um the great victory of conservatism which was the winning of the cold war without firing a shot and i said you can't expect the new york times to tell this story because the blood is on their hands and i'm like well michael instead of complaining about it why don't you do it why don't you talk that is a great example of the good guys winning over the bad guys and that's become a it's the victory is beautiful but also pointing out to p when people are like oh things are worse than they've ever been they don't appreciate how bad things were in the 30s uh what stalin was doing overseas and how people in the west were advocating to bring that here so that's kind of pointing out how bad things were and how good they became and uh you don't have to be a republican or conservative to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism and the peaceful liberation of half the world so that's a picture of the good guys winning oh yeah well how does that connect to sisyphus and uh maybe to speak deeper to [Music] life and the whatever the hell this thing is which is what i remember the myth of sisyphus being about so where does the threat of camus sort of uh lie in the work that you're doing so the myth of sisyphus which i had remembered incorrectly is actually just a five like seven five to seven page uh like coda to the whole book at the very end like you only need to read that little essay called the myth of sisyphus the broader work is about camus concept of the absurd and the absurd man within literature and he goes and it's just like i don't really care about this character in dostoevsky and all this other stuff that you're talking about it's of no relevance but what he the myth of sisyphus the myth itself not the book or the or the essay of his is this greek character and sisyphus is forced in hell to uh roll a rock up a hill uh for attorney at the very last moment the rock falls away and camus take away from the story is that we have to met we must imagine sisyphus happy and there's several interpretations of this but one is once you accept that you are living an absurdist existence once you own your reality it loses its um bite and you can start with that as your kind of baseline and bite is suffering and hopelessness so i i think when people look at how much ridiculousness is happening in america and it's escalating you could either think oh all is lost or you can and i think you and i have lived our lives like this you can live life more like a surfer whereas you're never going to control the ocean but you can sure enjoy that ride and stop tr if you're trying to control the waves yeah you're done but if you're like all right i've got my board i'm going to see where this takes me surfing from what i understand is a pretty fun activity and also sometimes dangerous but you'd have to ask chelsea about that so we were offline talking about stalin and the evils of the soviet regime yeah one of the things i mentioned i watched the movie uh mr jones but it's about the 1930s called the more the what would you say the torture of the ukrainian people yeah by stalin one interesting thing to me that i'd love to hear your opinion about is the role of journalism and all of this and also about 1930s germany so what's the role of journalists and intellectuals in a time when trouble is brewing but it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking to understand that trouble is brewing like if you were a journalist or if you were just like an intellectual a thinker sure but also a voice of uh in the space of public discourse what would you do in 1930s about stalin about hundred more and what would you do about nazi germany in 1937 1938 so that's really funny that you asked that because currently how the book is structured it's like you know books often follow a three-act structure right so act three is the eighties act one is the thirties and act two is gonna be like all right let's suppose you were in the thirties are you just going to give up like are you just going to be like well we're screwed and you'd be right to say things are going to be very bad for a long time or are you going to be one of those few who are like we're going to do something about this and you know we're going to go down swinging there are two books i can recommend which are just masterpieces that that are written by women um that just are historians that are superb there's a book called beyond belief by deborah lipstadt she talks about the rise of nazi germany as seen through the press and what was amazing and she does a great job empathizing with the press and understand their perspective is we remember and chamberlain gets a bad rap neville chamberlain for kind of appeasing hitler because not that long ago they had the great war they had world war one and they had the carnage that the earth had never seen before and when you had people made out of meat meeting industrial machines and plastic surgery was invented as a consequence of this they're coming back mangled and disfigured and for what and this was a world where the kaiser was the most evil person who ever lived and we all had the western propaganda about the hun and all the rapes and all this barbarism and blah blah so not that long later when you're hearing all this propaganda which was factual about hitler it's like we heard this we heard this 20 years ago this was all lies give us give us a break and she has all the quotes from the different agencies and how they addressed it plus they had very limited information it's not like nazi germany was an open society where reporters can walk around and they were under a lot of pressure as well you know in those areas and hitler himself was pretty good at uh he let some stuff slip but usually he made it seem like he wants peace he wants world peace this was amazing they were making the argument that because all these jews were being beaten up on the street this proved this was the hot take of the day that hitler was weak because since hitler's a statesman and he can't control these hooligans that shows his control and power is tenuous and this is all going to go away by the way i mean hitler thought that too he was kind of afraid of the the brown shirts or whatever like he was afraid of these hooligans a little bit like they were useful to him but like at a certain point like yeah they can get in the way yeah that's why he wanted to get control of the military the army like their regiment like if you want to take over the world you can't do it with hooligans right you have to do it with an actual army and then you had kristallnacht which was a nationwide pogrom and then all the news agencies universally were like oh crap we were we we got this wrong and the condemnation was universal so that book traces uh the west's reaction to what's going on there and including the reaction to the uh in sip and holocaust as people being you know what they knew when did they know there was not ambiguity about people i think there's this myth that she dispels that p that they didn't know the holocaust was happening or they didn't care they were aware but they were already at war with nazi germany like what literally what else could they do at that point um you know to rescue um all these jews so so that's the superb book and anne applebaum i think the book is called red famine came out fairly recently and she brings the receipts and she's a you know this is something i really hate with the binary thinkers where the people think oh you know if you're a democrat you're basically a communist they call joe biden marxist it's just like you know she's a hard lefty she's you know has tds but this book just systemically lays out what stalin did by the way i'm triggered by the binary thinkers and for those who don't know tds is trump derangement syndrome yes so they you know forced the starvation in its entire population and they it's not only that it's like they knew if you weren't starving by looking at you that you were hiding food so they'd come back to your house at night and break your fingers in the door or take burn down your house so now you're on the street without food because you lied because this is the people's food you're a kulak you're a land owned and very quickly a kulak which meant like peasant landowner became anyone who had a piece of bread and it was systemic and ongoing and many people in the press did not believe it there was a um a british journalist i believe who got out of the train uh ukraine like one town earlier and walked and he described all this and he was mocked and derided and this is just anti-russian propaganda because at the time in the 30s this was socialism had come to fruition this was a noble experiment i'd seen the future and it works as i think uh sydney webb was the guy who said that and the premise was let's see what happens we've never tried something like that and they were perfectly happy to have this experiment happen overseas at the price of the russian people because it's like you know what maybe this will be paradise on earth and there's a i address this in my book as well there's superb essay i think by eugene genovese and uh he talks about the question the question being what did you know and when did you know it what did you know about the concentration camps what did you know about the starvation what did you know about children being taught at school to turn in their parents for you know having some extra bread and his conclusion is we all knew and we all knew from the beginning every bit of it and we didn't care because we were more interested in promoting this ideology so when people are kind of thinking the worst thing on earth is like robert e lee statue being taken down in washington dc we were being told on a an especially a much more limited news information world where now you have literally anyone given twitter but how many outlets were there that this is uh we're backwards they're the future they're scientific we have the vagaries of the market which led to the great depression and when you see what was being put over on the american public at the time anyone who thinks things are as bad now as they've ever been is simply delusional or ignorant yeah i i would say just as a small aside that's why reading as i'm almost done with uh the rise and fall of the third reich oh yeah is uh it it's uh refreshes the resets the palette of your understanding of what is good and evil in the world that i think is really useful now like you know what helps me be really positive and almost naive on twitter and in the world is by just studying history yeah and and uh comparing it to how amazing things are uh today but in that time what would you do what does the brave mind do and not just acts of bravery but how do you be effective in that that's something i often think about sometimes easy to be an activist in terms of just saying stuff it's hard to be effective at your activism one of the big questions historians have uh constantly is how did this happen a is to make sure it doesn't happen again but this is germany this is not some kind of weirdo cult nation they're very advanced very in the land of poets and philosophers how did it get to that point that they're just shooting children and everyone's cheering for this and and specifically on the anti-semitism and the holocaust but just the whole no the whole time terrorism the cult of hitler and you're just this whole kind of thing and there's this sorry to starting to draw but there's two sides i don't know if you want to separate them one is the totalitarianism and the the entire the entirety of the nazi regime and then there's the holocaust which is like you know going i would say like very specifically as i think you're about to describe it's like you know targeting jews very much so i don't know if you see those as two separate things i think they're very interconnected but i think if you look at it everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up anne frank but if you look at the numbers they'd be the ones calling the the stasi on her or whoever the people were at the time and not the stasi obviously uh and patting themselves in the back for it so sorry to pause on that it's a really important thing if you're listening to this that and you were not you were in germany at the time you would have likely been willing to commit or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against jews like you have to really sit with that idea that you would have been somebody who just sees this and is not bothered by it and also very likely kind of understand this as a necessary evil or even unnecessary good yeah and i think people think they would be the abolitionists or marching on selma the numbers don't add that add up to that at all and i think the question would be like what social i my friend was on tinder my friend matt he's a great dude and the question was what's the most controversial opinion you have this is new york and the girl wrote i hate trump and what people perceive themselves as being courageous in saying and doing and what is the actual social costs of you saying or doing this are two very disconnected things and we're also trained by corporate media to have completely vapid uninteresting banal ideas and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries you know their people who still in new york will take pride because they have a gay friend and it's like first of all who cares but second of all you are not a hero and that person is not your prop by the way that's another big problem which is why i'd like to give richard wolff a shout out for being an intellectual who talks about communism i think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now to speak about like communism seriously there's difficult waters to tread set the expression there's difficult paths to walk i love watching a robot try to use idiom in a language zero zero one one i'm i'm quite deeply hurt by the binary comment are you your feeling has gone from one to zero yeah what is my buffers have overflown uh though but there's difficult i i feel like communism is uh like universally seen as a bad thing currently in intellectual circles yes or actually maybe some people disagree with that people say like far far left people are trying to you know there's some people who argue the the blm movement is some kind of marxist i mean i don't i don't really follow the deep logic in that whatever but uh you know it's just well they said they were formed by marxism the founder co-founder yeah but stating that is different than um there's there's marx the the totalitarian there's also marx the revolutionary and i think they're talking more like we're revolutionaries who are going to overthrow the status quo yeah right but like we we can have that further discussion but i i just don't think they speak deeply about uh political systems of and saying communism is uh is going to be the righteous system that you know that there's not a deep intellectual discourse what i mean but if you were to try to be on stage with the jordan peterson like to me the brave thing now like it would be to argue for communism it'd be interesting to see not many people do it uh i certainly wouldn't be willing to do it i don't have enough i don't first of all don't believe it but second of all it's a very difficult argument to make because you'll get so much fire which is why i like richard wolf he's one of the people who is quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system of communism uh specifically saying that uh attacking more the the negative sides of capitalism so saying that there is uh that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism i mean it's i i disagree with that but i think it's a i love how something is like we've got a body count of 60 million but this everything is put to and potentially you know like water can drown everyone on earth so this is incoherent well i think nuclear weapons are bad but nuclear energy is good sure that's what nuclear weapons are also can be good you can easily make the argument which i don't know that i subscribe to that nuclear weapons prevented uh boots on the ground war and it caused them to be much more contained and they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about to hit earth as i've learned from armageddon and they're actually useful as elon musk has claimed for uh uh for application for prior to colonizing mars making it uh more habitable oh okay so it should change something [Laughter] uh but what else but yes but well i guess what i'm saying is there's there's place for nuance and there's some topics so hot like communism where nuance is very difficult to to have and that i feel like with nazi germany it was a similar thing at the time oh let me talk you want to talk about janet rankin who's one of my favorite people so jeanette rankin was the first woman elected to congress she was elected before uh women's suffrage was massive constitutional amendment from montana she was elected in 1916. she was one of a handful of people to vote against the us going into the great war which was the right call at the time she was a pacifist republican as well coincidentally she lost her seat ran again in was it 1940 got the seat again uh and was the only person to vote against getting into world war ii it was not a unanimous choice jeannette rankin was the one person and she said you could no more win a war than you can win a hurricane so she's one of these interesting free and talk about bravery you're the one vote after pearl harbor to say we're not doing this and i mean the pressure she must have been under at the time is uh and of course many people are not interested in hearing her perspective she's crazy she's evil blah blah it's also funny someone on my twitter when i talked about her goes maybe she had hitler's sympathies like yeah ms rankin was a big fan of hitler that's what you figured it out guys do you think there's an argument to be made that united states should not have gotten involved in world war ii oh easy an easy argument the argument there's a i talk about this in the new right so on internet circles there's something called godwin's law which means the longer an internet conversation goes on the probability someone gets compared to hitler becomes one in certain new write circles the longer the conversation goes on the more likelihood that the argument would come we should have been in world war ii also becomes one and the argument is at the very least stay back let hitler fight stalin kill each other off and then go in and knock off the weaker one and you're going to be saving destroying two nightmare systems and i think that's an easy argument to make now it's hard to pull off after pearl harbor but in terms of strategy i don't think that's a that's a tough uh sell what about after pearl harbor i mean i started saying after pearl harbor how are you gonna sell that to the people the argument is blah blah the holocaust the holocaust is there's no scenario where that doesn't happen really if you're unless you're going in way earlier but even so hitler had said if the jews launched another war you know we're going to wipe them from the face of the earth so the jews are being held hostage by hitler as an argument for this another thing he did which was you know diabolical is in order to make it that people could not accept jews as refugees if they were going to leave germany they had to be penniless so now you have it's not like they're coming over with money and they can take care of themselves no no they're going to be completely destitute it makes it harder to accept them yeah millions of destitute people who don't speak the language it's it's it's a tough sell so speaking of goodwin's law what do you make of this condition uh trump derangement syndrome yeah and the idea of comparing trump to hitler i think it's despicable and i'll give you an exam something parallel that i think more people should be regarded regardless despicable earlier in 2020 we were all told that unless we were in syria immediately the kurds were going to be exterminated they invoke the holocaust this is going to be another genocide and if you're not for this you should you're basically you know forcing another holocaust none of the people who use this argument we didn't go to syria their kurds were exterminated they just vanished from the news had any consequences for using this kind of a comparison so i think it's it's really kind of fatuous and i think it's amazing that people think hitler's the only tyrant who ever lived like everyone who's bad is specifically hitler um you know how you know he's not hitler because you can tweet at him and no one comes to your house to kill your family like that's kind of a big difference also there between trump and many of his critics is that his grandchildren will be raised as jews so that's also kind of a and and and um deborah lipchat talks about this a lot the new york times at the time there's another book called um buried by the times which talks about new york times in world war ii because the idea that jews weren't white was the hitler idea the new york times at the time salzburger wanted to be against this idea so they specifically downplayed the anti-semitism as opposed to the nazis are being oppressive so the argument that you can separate nazism from anti-semitism is a historical debate people have and my perspective is i think it's i do not find it convincing that you can separate those two i think anti-semitism was essential to nazism i think nazism and mussolini's fascism have very big differences um and do you think uh do you think anti-semitism was fundamental to who hitler was or was it just that so this is the interesting thing is like it was it a tool that he saw as being effective no he believed it so why do you see those as intricately connected could uh hitler have accomplished the same amount or more without the holocaust yeah because think about how many resources you have divert at a time where you have operation barbarossa with stalin so why are they connected why are they so connected uh is it because hitler was insane or was he a bad strategist was obviously a bad strategist he took he had no need to open a second front his generals my understanding told him this is crazy it didn't work out for him at all uh i i i mean to draw russia and her resources into that war it makes absolutely no sense in retrospect there's a book about i forget what it's called where talked about him at that point was just high all the time on amphetamines and that could have affected his thinking yeah there's a really good book on drugs yeah and uh uh i forget what it's called but yeah it's a really good one but it was i mean scapegoating is a big part and parcel of uh the nazi mythology and this kind of one universal figure explain you know this kind of you know skeleton key but it could have been the communists i mean that that could have been the source of the hatred so like the communists didn't get germany into world war one like he said the jews did it seems to me that the atrocity of the holocaust is the reason we see hitler's evil no the reason we see hitler is evil is because of world war ii propaganda still because we don't see stalin as evil right that's what we don't see mao is evil to that extent uh i think that why like why would you say that you know what because nature that propaganda because i think a lot of the problem for this certain type of mentality is hitler didn't mass murder equally so as long as you're killing just one group it's a problem but if you're murdering everyone equally all of a sudden it's like yeah what are you gonna do so the fact like you were saying the hall of more is not common knowledge the fact that mao's 50 million dead are not common knowledge and richard nixon can be raising a glass to him in china these are things that i think the west has not done a good job reconciling knock knock who's there frank frank who thank you for being my friend michael and the heart attacks will say thank you for being my friend this is you gotta do it like this okay all right yeah okay now back to hitler do you think hitler could have been uh stopped we kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of how to what is the brave thing to do in the time of nazi germany but do you think i mean i'm not even going to ask about stalin in terms of could stalin have been stopped because probably the answer there is no but on the hitler side could hitler have been stopped i think a lot of these things a lot of luck has to play with it he was almost assassinated um if you mean by like the west it's very hard uh i mean yeah by the german people too i mean could like if for politically speaking there was a rise to power through the 30s through the 20s really i mean like can whoever it's not about hitler it's about that kind of way of thinking that totalitarian control that always leads to trouble and sometimes on mass scale could that have been stopped in germany or maybe in the soviet union well i think this is one of the best arguments against radicalization in the states which is how do you engage when you have like 30 percent of population who are members of a party which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy stalin gave orders that the communists who had a pretty sizable population the rex dog that their target shouldn't be the nazis but the the liberals and the social democrats and they invented the term social fascist for them so instead of they're just like like jihadis instead of taking their sights on nazism they set their sights on the moderates because they wanted they figured the choice between hitler and us were going to win and this was a huge gamble and it they were all killed in or had to flee and the ones who fled were killed also by stalin said that to my understanding so this is an easy way where he could have been uh certainly heavily mitigated what about uh france and england that it was obvious that hitler was lying and they wanted peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it even after czechoslovakia like like this is the anti-pacifist argument which is like they should have threatened military force more but then the other anti the anti-anti-pacifist argument is if you're gonna remember barack obama had that the red line if you cross this red line in syria we're gonna go in and assad whatever was like yeah cool and he's like oh okay well sorry so if you're threatening force there's the great song lyric uh uh don't show your guns unless you intend to fight right so if it's very clear with with free countries through what's in the press whether the institutional will is there to follow through on these threats so i think we have been very hard for chamberlain to rally the british people to take on hitler just after the great i mean the suffering that britons took on the great war they still you know obviously it means so much more of them than us does to us in the west what about what do you make of churchill then like why was churchill able to rally the british people why was he uh like do you give much credit to churchill for being one of the great forces in stopping hitler in world war ii i don't think that's really in dispute um i think he was very much regarded as this kind of the right man at the right time and i think chamberlain took a gamble he the expression piece in our time was neville chamberlain when he signed the the appeasement with hitler and he goes uh we now have peace in our time now go home and get a good night's sleep that's what he said because he's like all right you know he's gonna stop here and it's not impossible that if you just gave him like if he gave saddam hussein kuwait it's not impossible that he's not gonna you know invade saudi arabia next something like that let's see okay but everything i've read it's like of course there's there's uh it's not impossible but when you're in the room with hitler you should be able to see like man-to-man like like to me a great leader should be able to see past the facade and see like like yes everything in life is a risk but it seems like the right risk to take with hitler like it's surprising to me i know there's charisma but surprising to me people did not see through this facade i i really hate the idea of hindsight and everything being 2020 and i think it's a very good idea generally i'm seeking generally not in this specific instance to give our ancestors more credit than they than than we tend to give them because people often here's a great example from another context which is uh lightning rods people always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious and they weren't they often were very well reasoned an example of this is lightning rods which is every year whatever town the church was the tallest building and that's the one that always got hit by lightning and got caught on fire now what it's a coincidence that it's always the church like that makes logical sense now there didn't realize well it's because it's the tallest and therefore that attracts the electricity and in fact when they invented lighting rods this is a controversy because it's like well how is god going to show his displeasure if now it's striking this lightning rod not burning down the church so a lot of times things are a lot more coherent than we give them credit for and again chamberlain didn't he's the head of a parliamentary party um so he does not have the freedom in a sense that hitler would to be like all right we're doing this again boys we don't know what it's like in the room with hitler come on that that's that's we really have no idea but i think you have to think about that right i can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming and then you think okay the guy with the speeches is the act and he's putting on a show for his people and this is the real one okay so let's let's take somebody as an example let's take uh our mutual friend vladimir putin yes okay i don't know why saying his name makes my voice crack because you're scared he can hear you it's like beetlejuice [Laughter] so there's a lot of people st the one who built you no that was uh that was a collaboration um what's it's a double-blind engineering effort where i was not told of who my maker was there's a backstory but um there's a talking cricket pinocchio i talk about him quite a bit because i find him fascinating now there's a there's a really important line that people say like why does lex admire putin i do not admire putin i find the man fascinating i find hitler fascinating i find a lot of figures in history fascinating both good and bad and the figures just as you said that are with us today like vladimir putin like donald trump like barack obama it's difficult to place them on the spectrum of good and evil because that's only really applies to like when you see the consequences of their actions in a historical context so there's some people who say that vladimir putin is evil and based on our discussion about hitler that's something i think about a lot which is in the room with putin and there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's like to be in the room with hitler in the 1930s there there is a lot of charisma in the same way i find putin to be uh very charismatic in his own way the humor the wit the brilliance the there's um there's a simplicity of the way he thinks that really if taking a face value looks like a very intelligent honest man thinking practically about how to build a better russia constantly almost like um like an executive like he loves he looks like a man who loves his job in a way that trump for example doesn't right meaning like he loves laws and rules and how to uh there's no adversarial press so that's going to help yes and he's popular with his people that's also going to help northwesterly i'm talking about strictly the man directly the words coming out of his mouth like all the videos and interviews i've watched i'm based on that not the press not the reporting you can just see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not like i can see that's why i love joe rogan is like you could tell the guy is genuine and there's a good person and like you could tell immediately that like once you meet joe that he's going to be offline also a good person you could tell there's like signals that we send that are like difficult to kind of describe in the same way you can tell putin is like he genuinely loves his job and wants to build a better russia there's the argument that he is actually an evil man behind that charisma or is able to you know assassinate people of you know limit free press all those kinds of things like that's what do we do with that so what do human beings like journalists or what do other leaders when they're in the room with putin do with those kinds of notions in deciding how to act in this world and deciding what policy to enact all those kinds of things just like with hitler when uh chairman is in the room with hitler how does he decide how to act well let's go back to like my wheelhouse which is north korea right so uh when your entire world is based on uh being against trump and everything trump does as buffoonery or counterproductive the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much given i was very hopeful that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes rather of trump's meeting with kim jong-un it looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better i talked about it a lot at the time and trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with um people pretend that oh he was kind of naive he had one of the refugees that had stayed the union you know lifting up his crutch uh the first thing he sat down and talked to xi jinping about in mar-a-lago right after he became inaugurated was north korea barack obama said that when he sat down trump in the white house during the transfer of power he said north korea is the biggest issue so i think a good leader whether or not you consider trump a good leader has to be aware of all right i'm going to have to have relationships of some kind even if it's adversarial with some really evil evil horrible people which kim jong-un clearly is well i i don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that nor north korean kim jong-un or ill are not evil right correct but with in 1930s germany isn't it a little bit more nuanced yeah because hitler hasn't done anything yet and he's just to blow hard and he's an anti-semite sure but he's what about like before the war breaks out like what about the basic uh actionable anti-semitism when you're like just attacking hurting which type of crystal knock or talk about the knight of long knives uh crystal knocks so this is the night of the broken glass yeah yeah the long knives is when he assassinated a bunch of his people that was something different yeah so like when you're actually attacking your own citizenry yeah that was universally condemned crystal knocked and that was very shocking uh its level of barbarism um to the west because i think i think we still want to believe understandably that things aren't as bad as they seem we would rather this is why i you know i the north korea book i did dear reader is used in a humorous framework because if you have to look it's like looking to the sun if you stare at it straight on it's very hard to do so you have to kind of look at it obliquely and and then you're kind of realizing the enormity of the depravity um and again pogroms in russia had been a thing for a very long time and there's a difference between okay you know we're going to sack these villages and persecute people and we're going to systematically exterminate them that's th there's there's still levels of evil and depravity so you did write the book dear reader on kim jong-il yeah dear reader the unauthorized autobiography of kim jong-il yeah so that's the previous leader of north korea correct current one is the un no no creativity on the naming well no this is intentional because it's a throwback to um the dad so there's been only three leaders in north korea so we've talked about the history of hitler and stalin men like these i think it's important to understand that the history of those kinds of humans there's the history of north korea is not well written about or understood which is why your book is exceptionally powerful and important so maybe in a big broad way can you say who was who is kim jong-il as a as a man as a leader as a historical figure that we should understand and why should we understand them so i wrote dear reader by going to north korea and getting all their propaganda which is translated into several languages because the conceit is everyone on earth is interested in them and wants to mirror their ideology and he died in 2011 2011 and you wrote the book in 2012. uh i went there in 2012 i wrote the book came out 2014. so kim jong-il is um though not an intellect north korea's version of forrest gump in that when they write their history whenever something appears happens he's there uh and by telling his life story it's in the first person he's telling the history of north korea so i wanted to write the kind of book where in one book and it's the kind of reading you could do in the beach or the bathroom you're going to get the entire history and know everything you need to know about north korea in one accessible outlet and it's it's what people don't appreciate about north korea there's several things how bad it is and this didn't happen overnight this was very systemic that what this family did to that country where piece by piece they did everything in their power to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world ramp up the oppression uh keep any information from coming in and you know they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and control so there is a farcical element let me give you an example so people in the west kind of get it wrong they talk about oh they talk about when kim jong-il played golf for the first time he gets 17 holes in one there's this one story about kim jong-il shrinking time and this is a story it sounds supernatural but it's not so kim jong-il is at a conference the dear leader and someone is giving a talk and while that person is giving me a talk kim jong-il is taking notes and working on his work and he has an aide who keeps interrupting him with questions and the speaker keeps stopping and kim jong-il says while you're stopping goes i see you're doing other things and it goes no no he can i can do all these things at once everyone's shocked and they said this is why kim jong-il looks at time not like a plane but like a cube and he can shrink time and my friend goes do they mean multitasking and yes kim jong-il is the only person in north korea who's capable of multitasking so in order to elevate him they basically make everyone else in north korea completely you know incompetent um and that has a purpose because should the leader go away this country is going to collapse overnight so this they laugh in the west about all these newspapers show him you know at the factory and he's at the fish hatchery at the paper plant they say the difference in north korea is that the leader goes among the people and does what he called field guidance so he will go in that farm and be like this is what you need to do and he'll go here and he's so smart he's good at everything and thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us and he's not removed from the people like in every other country why does that seem to go wrong with humans do you think that this kind of the structure where there's this one figure this authoritarian is the totalitarian structure where there's one figure that's a source of comfort and knowledge kim jong-il is not good at farming kim jong-il is not good at the machinery it's all a complete lie or the things he'll point out will be things that are completely obvious so here's another example they use in north korea they have something called the tower of the juicy idea which is an obelisk which looks like the washington monument but it's completely different because it's got this like plastic torch at the top and they talk about in their propaganda how all the architects got together and they said oh we should make this the second tallest stone obelisk in the world and kim jong-il says no let's make it the tallest they're like oh we never thought of this before and the way it's presented as it and like he's the first person to think of this like these architects are having a brainstorming session the tower that you should idea they're like all right we gotta do something innovative to put north korea on the map what can we do how about second biggest he's gonna go for this and then he's like oh we never thought of this it's it's it it's so because i presented at face value people sometimes say the book's a satire it's not a satire i downplayed all this stuff it's a farce here's another example north korea is very big and i think russia is to some extent too on amusement parks fun fairs they call them in the british style because this is a chance for the people to all to get together and there was this amusement park it's almost like south park at cartman where there's all these rides and kim jong-il is like i'm not gonna let any elderly or children take these rides until i put myself in danger and ride them myself and they go but dear leader it's drizzling and he goes no i have to make sure these rides are going to be safe for everyone even during the light rain to go well can we go on these rides with you no no no i have to be the courageous one and he's riding all the rides and they're standing there crying at his courage yeah but that's what's and you ask all the thing in one power it's like listen i'm quite confident that those funfair engineers are in a position to ride modest mouse wherever it's called by themselves and be like yeah okay this is good for the kids uh although to be fair some of those amusement parks are not are pretty rusty and dangerous yeah but that that kind of propaganda i guess what i'm playing a devil's advocate is like it's it's comforting and it's useful but it does seem that that naturally leads to an abuse of power it's not how can it be used correctly no one person has the intellect or the mind to understand the entirety of an economy let alone every individual field of interest well for example you could have an artificial intelligence system that understands the entirety of it your affect just complete change the mask slip i guess you could have an artificial intelligence system uh but like the question is can that mean like the the the human version of that is like you can hire a lot of experts right you can be an extremely good manager and since everything's dynamic it's not gonna they're not gonna have the data to kind of manage it well it seems that there's a like what george washington allegedly did it seems like most humans are not able to fire themselves you're not able to like yeah you're right ultimately be a check on your own power but that's not if i was like uh if i was creating a human it's like it would that's not an obvious bug of the system that we would not be able to fire ourselves to uh to know when we have i mean it seems like that's something you have to know always like that's something i often wonder is like am i wrong about this well this is what we talked about earlier what are the safety valves yeah to make sure that okay if i am incorrect or my knowledge is finite plato's cave kind of thing what mechanisms are in place that my mistake or limited information isn't going to have deleterious consequences and north korea does not really have that and as a result they had polio in the 90s so there is a you you write about it straight but there's a humor to it because it's an absurdly evil place i suppose yeah a bunch of people i asked i asked uh i said that i'm talking to you and a bunch of people asked questions oh we gotta hear from the plebs you asked me before we start recording i specifically said no it was in my contract uh yeah and you gave i gave you all the pink skittles or whatever uh but they so thanks you know pink i'm trolling michael let me explain to you how that works uh people should go malice.locals.com which and sign up and uh pay i think the membership fee several thousand dollars it's very it's it's it's not it's not for the layman yeah but uh the service is excellent you get a coat with it uh but yeah i i went there posted a lot of really brilliant people there people should join that community if you find uh uh michael interesting or if you just want to go and say why he's wrong it's a great place to have that discussion for that i assure you uh yeah a lot of really kind people so anyway the there's a bunch of people ask that we should talk about humor okay so i'll pretend hypothetically speaking that i'm a robot asking you to explain humor to me what so dear reader i mean there's a humor there's there's you're so a wonderfully dance between serious dark topics and then seriously dark humor can you try to uh if you were to write like a i don't know wikipedia article maybe a book about your philosophy of humor what do you think is the role of humor in all of this a joke is like a baby you can't dissect it and then put it back together and expect it to work trust me on this one despite no matter how you carve that thing up it's not going to be working the next day and you needed to sew those little sneakers with those hands oh um i don't know that humor is something that is very explainable people there's something called clapter where this is like the worst kind of humor where people applaud because they agree with what you're saying as opposed to laughter oh that's though that's that's the kind of approach you're reading yeah and the drag queens do that too um i think because they're the nails this you laugh it's a visceral reaction when someone on twitter is insisting you know that's not funny you're not in a position to make that claim and let's let's go let's go back to north korea i had a refugee i knew and he went to high school here and he was talking his buddies and they said um hey remember when we were kids we had pokemon and he goes oh yeah except instead of pokemon i watched my dad starve to death which is the truth now who are who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke i don't know what it's like watching anyone including my dad uh starve to death and my dad's fatty so he's not going hungry anytime soon um so it's very bizarre to me when people feel comfortable precluding others from making jokes especially and i think this is a very jewish thing like this kind of gallows humor especially when it's some laughing about a personal uh loss or experience that they've had humor is a great way to mitigate um pain and suffering but it's also i think this com why it's a jewish thing it's a black thing when you are a marginalized community or poorer it's free telling stories telling jokes or songs you don't have to have money but you can have joy and happiness and i think that's why you find it so much more in kind of lower status communities than you're finding like wasps who are notoriously uh humorless which is strange because people pay you a lot of money for the jokes you do so it's not really free yeah well no they don't have to pay me i it's appreciated but not expected i find my voice cracking every time i try to make a joke like i fail ever miserably at this uh so some people uh you're still in beta that's right alpha alpha was like being sure lady if you have to help people you are you aren't no i meant alpha version oh okay i don't i don't know if you're a robot gobbly cook i'm not going there okay uh who are you talking to in my own head i'm talking to myself in my own head okay speaking of north korea some people say that uh you know i've read that comedy is about timing first of all do you agree and second of all no i'm serious it's not just that you're saying yes it's funny okay isn't it comedy's tragedy plus timing is not the this is not the full reference what is it the interrupting call knock knock joke i'm not gonna do it but uh that's not a timing thing that's more of a repetition and then the twist ending no the move oh the move yeah yeah yeah yeah interrupting cow you think of the banana the banana one anyway uh i'm not i'm not going there yet you're talking to me are you small wonder do you stand sleeping in a wardrobe yeah uh uh that's so british but yet you're very i want to stay in a closet because that is connotations let's let's both come out of the closet for a second i love it let's talk about you relax i wasn't saying i love you alex i was saying i love you lex oh you were talking to me yes that's through the screen so when you so you think about me when you're with a with another man i watch it when you're sleeping okay so you're a dangle song you're really active on twitter yeah uh and somebody else asked on your uh overly expensive membership site uh what like [Laughter] how do you find uh humor different in writing on twitter versus spoken humor so if that's a great question if humor is about timing how do you capture the timing and the brilliance of the whatever is underlying humor in the context of twitter like another way to say it is uh how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on twitter so with twitter you have to be the first one to the punch line so when ron paul had a stroke i was immediately being like he's still the most articulate libertarian he's doing a great job by an impression right now all the libertarians got ass mad that's and people like too soon or like when someone dies you're making the jokes about them it's like when do you want to make the jokes about someone just died a week later it doesn't make any sense now you might too soon it's perfect timing or you could say it's not appropriate ever but too soon does not make sense in this context um so that is something that i uh enjoy doing it's also fun ruffling people's feathers if it's something i enjoy doing i think uh spoken versus writing is very different because when you are having good banter with someone uh for me as the audience knowing that it is on the spot really adds an element of humor because then it's like wow this is fun it's like a ping pong match or something whereas in writing it's you're losing the tone you're losing the relationship of a dynamic conversation um and a lot of times the joke is just giving a different type of joke well it's funny but twitter there's a sense especially your twitter that you're you just thought of that and you just wrote it yes like there's a there's a feeling like it's literally you talking as opposed to what i imagine is there's some editing or it doesn't look like it whoever your editor is should be fired [Laughter] there's an interesting effect actually if i want to say something i don't know about uh about the something that's bothering me about the presidential election or something like that like what are what is the actual central idea that i'm trying to convey to myself like if say i was having hypothetical conversation with myself okay why am i putting my pants back on i'm more comfortable this way promo called malice20 sheath underwear dot com okay um that's she's uh what is it what's the website sheath underwear.com sheath underwear.com promo code malice20 and i forgot why is that underwear really nice because it has a dual pouch technology to keep your man parts separate they've also got women's stuff but i don't know how that works yeah there's a thing worth going somewhere and the material is really refreshing i mean it's really again and it makes your ass look good that's promo code mouse 20. and it's made by it's made by a former vet because he was in iraq so that's why i like promoting it yeah but what i'm writing the the the tweet i i like to it forces me to think deeply about the core of the message okay but what i found this really interesting effect like i don't really do much editing on the tweet like i'll just like think and then i'll write it and then when i post it like submit like i immediately see the tweet very differently than it was in my mind huh i often delete like i delete i don't know some percentage of tweets about like two five seconds after wow i don't know it's something well once you send it it's why the gmail send features undo send features really nice it's like it just changes the way i see the thing so it's very interesting it's uh but i really love it that you can delete it because when i say stuff out in the wild like to other humans like spoken [Laughter] spoken word is like you can't delete what you just said and i often regret the things i say like in in on the spot like i shouldn't have said that really yeah i don't have that well again whoever your editor is what is it uh edith piatt uh generic han wow you're french is this bad is your english um i don't have any tweets i regret because if i sent a tweet that i regretted i would make amends i would make it a point if i was a needlessly offensive to somebody or hurtful or accidentally i would make sure to fix it and and go out of my way to make sure that person feels vindicated and validated by accepting my apology that has never happened had to happen thankfully i'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait uh us you know some recently some people have come after me pretty hard and my perspective is that it's not really about me it's either i represent something to them i'm just some jackass with a twitter so if you're getting this riled up over me it's not really about me maybe i'm delusional that's how i look at it so if they are trying to provoke me into this kind of heated exchange i will never do it uh because that's not i'm not interested in it and it's i don't think there's going to be any it's like jeannette rankin you you can't win it's just going to be like trying to win a hurricane there's no hero here well let me ask you about this because somebody also asked that on your overly expensive membership site that like they were saying that they're an academic they wonder because i'm an echo quantum court i'm not an academic but i do still have an affiliation with mit i the word academic is just dirty it's like which is a problem that needs to change just like the word nerd is dirty now academic needs is going to be the next front to open and they're going to be very vilified we're coming for them and it's going to be very very ugly and i cannot wait no but there needs to be a place a different term for people who love research and knowledge and like you have you're right 100 yeah right so like they're you have to you have to clarify what you mean by academic and right now the word academic means a very in the intellectual public discourse it means the enemy and there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve that targeted uh vilification but like a lot that don't they're just curious people they're just absolutely right building building robots that will one day destroy you voice cracks every time i make a joke you're not consistent i can't do this you're telling me i'm editing i'm gonna i can't delete that joke okay it's not even a joke robots building robots that'll one day kill us you god willing humans are the joke that's why i'm cracking my voice is cracking what were even uh what was i even  saying academics uh but why uh local someone had a question they're an academic right they're at academic they're saying like are you worried that uh you know in academia associating yourself with a sort of uh somebody who has who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas like the two examples they gave is michael mouse and joe rogan uh is uh joe have any radical i wouldn't consider him radical at all well we'll get we can talk about it i think a bad example he's quite centrist to me well he could have for example like what has the job been attacked on is for example on the on the topic of like transgender like uh athletes in sports based in sports uh there's what else i mean he's been pro bernie sanders and that's pro trump or like giving trump a pastor not anti-trump not anti-trump uh what else just but none of these are radical meat meat stuff being pro-meat versus anti-vegan yeah of you know all those kinds of things but you can be misconstrued and and saying there's i think a highlight and my mom actually wrote to me about this which is joshua thank you i think i like hey dom that's when it's important well i said your mom wrote to you that's that's the sign my voice cracks the sign when when michael malice makes the funny jokes when you jot something down and he writes it and then the next time he crosses it out just get put yeah it's like joe biden at the debates okay uh i did also just grab my pants so uh slide down here there's a i mean he's a comedian you have a comedian side to you right i mean you're you've talked about humorous side yeah humorist is so you can misconstrue like joe as being somehow a radical thinker and the same one could be done with you and his question was how are you worried about associating yourself with folks like that am i or you me me yeah and is that something do you see yourself as somebody uh who's dangerous that i shouldn't be talking to and in the same way do you uh do you ever think about guests on your podcast or people you talk to publicly associate yourself with publicly uh and think that there is somebody that crosses that line that you shouldn't so i interviewed in the new ride i interviewed like up to full-blown nazis last chapters about chris cantwell but that was in the context of that book right so there's lots of people who people want me to have on my show and the way i look at it is like you have a table and a tablecloth right and let's suppose the table is a three feet wide the tablecloth is two feet wide so if i move the tablecloth to the right i'm gonna lose people on the left i can only cover so much space and the further you go on the fringe in one direction the more mainstream you're going to lose in the other direction so i'm very much making a conscious choice not to talk to being people will say i'm cowardly and that's absolutely true i'm being fearful here i would prefer not to talk to some of those who would alienate some of the more mainstream people and here's a perfect example of why on my birthday last year i woke up seven o'clock in the morning to go pee and i checked twitter so whatever and jeb bush had followed me jeb and i i it's 7 00 am you're not really awake you're like wait what and then i thought maybe it's a fake account but it's in the verified tab oh you don't have this because you're not verified on twitter that's a shame uh so people who are matter on twitter twitter does not respect robots they danbots you're lucky zero one zero zero it's zero zero those are my pronouns [Laughter] so i it was jeb governor bush and i corresponded with him and i asked him on the show and he decided not to for various reasons very politely he's like just politics is so bad right now i don't want to talk about it and i respect that for him if i am in a spit if i'm creating my show where he's going to get heat for who and get cancelled oh you can't be on the show he has these other guests i don't want to lose that opportunity because as we were talking about earlier me and alex jones and tim poole i think a lot of people would be very excited to see me sit down with jeb bush and i told him in writing and i meant this i wouldn't be clowning him i wouldn't be disrespectful it would be a lot of fun i there's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes and i would do my best to bring that out and talk about what it's like being a blue blood to be born into his grandfather prescott uh bush was a senator from connecticut uh marrying a woman didn't speak english how does that work when your family's royalty and things like that so i had a lot of fun questions for him and that's kind of you're gonna have to choose one or the other well you do a really good job with that like ben shapiro does a good job with that too which is you can have multiple you can have a trolley side a humorous side where you tear down the power structures and so on but you can also have a serious side and it's a safe space for people from all walks of life to walk in and yes not you're not adversarial never i'm there i i take the word guest seriously if they're going to be on my show i'm not going to have them have negative consequences as a result of being on my show that said i mean maybe in my case i'll be honest and say that i find alex jones outside the conspiracy stuff for some reason maybe you can explain maybe you can psychoanalyze me but i find him hilarious yeah he's a performer he's very performative but there's a lot of people that don't see the humor of it and they see the serious like consequences of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds and uh yeah they see the danger of it you know and i personally i'm often tempted to to talk to alex in a podcast format but i think i'm trying to convince myself that i never will for me i feel unsafe talking to alex because i can't truly be myself which is like yeah you'd have to be on naive and honest yeah and like and uh actually i generally when i talk to humans i want to see the best in them and i think that's like i often think about if i talk to hitler in 1935 you got a list of names to give him well yeah i mean that's how you get the interview come on let's be honest who who are we getting um i would uh you have to give away one of your i'll probably get one with my brother so how many brothers do you have well just one okay too many what i want to be an only child he's the older brother he used to pick on me payback you know it's only he had a good life you should think of it more stalin i saw interrupt you because hitler you're jewish so you're already gonna have very adversarial it's not gonna be a normal he's not gonna perceive you as a as a human in a sense right right so it's all in you right yeah that would be much easier or kim jong un or something like that okay you think like how okay this is a good question is is and that and that's wait why don't you jot something down uh if you hitler all right we'll cross it on in a second uh [Laughter] i think this is a really good example of a difficult figure that's controversial that people bring up to me a lot and you interviewed twice which is curtis yarvin yeah manchester united manchester small aka mention small bug which is his pseudonym that he goes by is his blog can you tell me about who he is sure why is he interesting what if his ideas are interesting well he briefly he invented the concept the red pill so curtis mentions mulbuck had a blog called unqualified reservations you can still find it online it's very verbose he writes at length very very bright um his perspective is very heretical so a lot of things that we take for granted in our liberal democracy uh he regards as not only incorrect which is downright absurd and does not he does not take what many people view as the basis of american discourse as the basis for his thought so when you're starting with someone who is basically repudiating uh kind of the western world view or not the western world view like the american milieu a lot of people are gonna of course regard him as dangerous or uh someone who is verboten um he's a very bright person um why is he such a toxic figure because if you are blue-pilled if you are the guardians of what is acceptable discourse then you have to make sure your forts are secured and that any figure outside of this acceptable discourse has to be marginalized and regarded as radioactive as possible you don't want to let in these kind of uh ideas that would be destructive to your hegemony well so let's dig into it so like he i've read a few things by him but then i hear that in a bunch of places him being called a racist a white supremacist neo-fascist so on i go to his wikipedia yeah there's a view on race section let me let me read it okay yarvin's opinions have been described as racist with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery including the belief that whites have higher iqs than blacks for genetic reasons jarvan himself maintains that he's not a racist because while he doubts that quote all races are equally smart the notion quote that people who score higher on iq tests and in some sense superior human beings is quote creepy he also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery though he has argued that some races are more suited for slavery than others quote it should be obvious that although i'm not a white suprem white nationalist i am not exactly allergic to the stuff jarvan wrote in a post that linked approvingly of i don't know these people steve saylor yeah he's from jared taylor and other racialists yeah so okay so like one of my questions is we can let me just say one sentence in the same way that you had you mentioned that guy earlier who was defending some aspects of communism and that is in some context acceptable when you think about it's like this should be radioactive right the fact that he is engaging with these ideas uh in any thing other than this has to be reputed at all costs is what renders him to a large extent racist that's really interesting so there are some topics you can be nuanced nuanced and some not and communism is still a topic that you can be nuanced about right it's difficult but you can be uh race and this like talking about slavery and iq differences based on race is a topic that i guess is radioactive to a degree where you can't even say anything even if it's like nuanced or not even like making a point it's like touching it as you make another point and understandably because you can understand that i'm going to steal man the their point because you can understand the point it's like you're just talking about hitler once this foot gets in the door that some people are inherently slaves or some people are inherently better than others it really quickly you know collapses so that would be their perspective but that's what like if i were to give criticism of his but let me just say one more thing racist is also used to describe alex jones alex doesn't talk about race racist is a shorthand for a certain percentage of the population to let you know do not bother investigating this person any further yeah they're off limits definitely racism and sexism is a thing that's not used to shut down conversation that's quite absurd uh by by a small percent of the point jarrod taylor and steve saylor jared taylor interviewed him from my book he would be regarded in any sense as a racist what's the difference between racist and racialist so racialists i mean this is splitting hairs and now i'm going to be all radioactive jared taylor runs something called amaran and this is i mean his perspective is that there are inherent differences to the races and you cannot live side by side uh um well whites and blacks should not be living uh by the way for people who don't know this is out of context that you have written a great book that includes some of these concepts called the new right which is not includes these concepts but talks about yeah well it's more about the growth of the comm the community uh around the uh that's the alt-right and all those kinds of the world right so and his point about iq it's like if you had a population the dutch right i think they're the tallest people on earth and if you said well the dutch are the best people on earth why because they're the tallest it's like you're a crazy person so if someone is scoring low an individual on an iq test that means there's somehow a lower quality person well maybe one very specific aspect but i mean if they're a good human being i've got friends who are low iq all my friends are like you frankly compared to me sound like trump they're first that's how you choose well i don't have any other choices no one's going to be at my level you're the smartest person since abraham lincoln that i've that i've ever seen unlike him i actually am honest so so he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas aristo here's another thing like if you bring up that aristotle said that some people are born to be slaves he wasn't speaking about race he just meant people's souls h.l mencken who was a great um heretic and uh early to 20th century figure uh one of his quotes that i say all the time which people have seen a lot in this past year that the average man does not want to be free he merely wants to be safe that i think is speaking i don't know what i am not familiar uh with what mullbug's saying about slavery because his writing is ponderous but that certainly is something i think that is undeniable that i think more people are realizing there's a large percent of the population that is actively disinterested in freedom and the more responsibilities it entails well i mean really just the word slavery if you want to make some kind of point or even think about the topic outside the context of this is a horrible thing that happened in the united states history and other countries history let's be clear this is i mean very important and there's slavery going on today and a lot of people argue that uh uh sex trafficking and all those kinds of things i mean there's there's atrocities going on today that you know uh talking about it in a way that's not immediately saying this is the most horrible thing that happened ever you know it's something i think about a lot is like if i want to say something controversial i should do so with skill with care and only about things i care about well here's where i would disagree i not when i say things i often say things that are controversial or i will say uncontroversial things in a controversial way because it's a useful mechanism to alienate people you don't want around you because if there are people who are going to be shocked by certain topics like we should have entered world war ii like even as a hypothesis they just clutch their pros they're like oh you want the holocaust to happen i can't discuss most things with you because you're not interested in having a conversation you're interested in your emotional response yeah i think i see things differently maybe this is a bit of a devil's advocate but what in at least the modern discourse of like twitter and social media and so on i find that if you do that you're not actually uh removing the people that are not thoughtful and kind and so on you're actually attracting loud people like a small number of them they come over and start yelling at you start yelling they're basically ruin the party by showing up and just screaming and so all the thoughtful people leave well that's why you have to be a very heavy blocker you have to block people on twitter because you have to cultivate your audience and have them like a lot of times people come at me i don't care then they'll start attacking members of my audience and then i'm like dang i gotta block them because they've won this one because i can't have that yeah i don't know i un necessarily provoking people feels um it's it's it's you this is beta testing you try to break the system and see what works you put as much pressure as possible this is very much computer stuff that you should be able to appreciate the point being when you have a program you're trying to intentionally sit there and do them as many mistakes see what go wrong right is that not common yeah exactly yeah so you're saying that that's a way to see communication with the world as you say something uncontroversial in a controversial way and that blocks people that or or does it trigger them do they roll their eyes you know what is going to be their emotional response are they going to start yelling the problem is the reason i can't think like this or i can't because i'm not sure about the points i'm trying to make always like i'm not always 100 sure that i'm right about things like so i'm in being thoughtful i'm afraid that i'll turn off with an ineloquently phrased or even incorrect statement i will do damage that can't be undone in terms of a having a good conversation about a topic so i want to be very careful about like i'm not saying afraid fear is not what i'm talking about i think fear is is uh like not saying something out of fear is at the core of the many of the problems of the world today but i'm just saying be say stuff with care if i'm going to touch race as a topic it feels like you really should be deeply first have a point to make like you really care about a point you want to make and second think deeply about how to say that point in a way that communicates it the best and and touching i would say listen i've i've uh on your show which is which is great i mean i'd like to say thank you for having me just small bugs you are welcome that's the uh that's the name of the show thank you for having me a couple of times it's it's great to sort of get him to in this loose way to talk about different kinds of stuff i don't think we talked about race at all so no no no no but i'm just bringing it back to what you were asking which is if you read the wikipedia the perspective is going to be this guy talks about slavery constantly where it's completely disproportionate to his work but even on your show you can tell even not outside of the race stuff that he's not ultra careful about he's not uh nuanced yeah he's not afraid to say something just like i would say let me just criticize him my face is not you this is me carelessly say something controversial right like i'm not saying he doesn't go like you know that makes him it's a very different thing than uh somebody who on purpose says something controversial stuff uh like milo not annopolis sorry i forgot my milo whatever his name is yeah which is really nice to see that he's a genuine person who's thoughtful he doesn't mean to but he just cares carelessly seems to say things that uh i feel like damaged the rest of his body of work i can't really speak for him but i would guess his point is once you're swimming in this kind of world view you're going to be anathema already so there's no pleasing these people so why bother trying yeah i think that's a deeply that's a that's a black pill way of seeing the world it's not blackfield at all because it's a cynical way like these people so like it's it's saying that you're it's a very kind of way of thinking like i'll say whatever i want whoever comes along with me no you just earlier said yourself that race racism has been weaponized as a way to shut down conversation so i think his perspective would be i am so outside the mainstream in my worldview that i know i'm going to be called racism racist so there's no point in trying to be nuanced because i'm already going to get the scarlet letter yeah i just disagree with that because for example i'm one i am one person that he turned off okay by his carelessness and i think i should be a good target i i should be saying i think that's fair and i'm just like he it's very convenient to think that there's ridiculous people out there which they are sure who call everybody racist and sexist currently and then you can't please them so i'm not even going to try no but there's like this gray area of people sure that i don't listen to the outrage culture whatever that i don't this wikipedia article means nothing to me like i i'm not going to right i'm more i'm just seeing this careless person and if he's going to be careless about uh like race like this i feel like if i walk along with him long enough i'm going to catch the carelessness i'm going to lose like i'll i'll defend your perspective better than you can yeah this is this is good i'm taking notes i talked to eric weinstein after you guys talked about me on your show when i was weinstein we had a good conversation he invited me on his show that would be an amazing conversation and we got on the phone and his concern fairly he goes i don't want you to come on my show for the purposes of clowning me and i would never do that yeah it would never he might not be aware of who of well that's why he wanted to feel me out he's like you know when he hears troll it can mean a lot of different things and i we had a very conversation and very much was very clear that's not where the conversation would go but i think when you are going to be on someone's show there is a responsibility that they're not going to have to pay a cost for having you as their guests so if you're perce if you were put off by how he was in that live stream or two i did like i understand where you're coming from i think he's very very bright but you have a very you have a different audience than i do and you're going for something different than i am no no like in my in just a sense of you wouldn't feel safe with him yeah i wouldn't feel safe with him but he's he's born a lot for me i think i think i would like to actually talk to him one day uh alex jones has crossed the other line for me well you could do what you could do with me tape the episode and never release it no it's it's one of those things will be uh when there's finally they'll make a history channel documentary about you and i and how it all went wrong like the cult that we started and everybody killed themselves and uh there's a we'll release it then because it'll be like unseen footage this is how it started it'll be black and white in a basement somewhere in new york yeah yeah my mother's basement uh let's explain so much okay so i spoke to yaran brook about objectivism and iron rand he uh he kind of argued he highlighted difference between capitalism and anarchism as around the topic of violence and the that having government be the sort of the the negative way to say it is like having a monopoly on violence but basically being the arbiter of or the the people that making sure that violence doesn't get out of hand that would yeah 2020 show that yep the government's great at that yep well what what's okay without this is him with a straight face making that argument good work here on all right well can you with a straight face argue for the idea that in anarchism violence would not get out of hand sure for one thing uh if your worst argument against one of my little quotes is what are presented as the strongest arguments against anarchism or inevitably description of the stratus quo so the argument is under anarchism you know you'd have warlords you know killing people and then you'd have uh you know whoever's strongest gets to just take over a neighborhood well we have that now uh we saw that the police um are perfectly comfortable disarming the population and then when they try to protect themselves are punished they were happy to stand down you can't you can only have that happen if you have a monopoly if they're like let's suppose you had uh television stations right and cbs said you know what we're not gonna broadcast cool you don't broadcast we're going to watch any of these other channels so the problem with have a monopoly is everyone has to be dependent on this issue what's amazing about minikism which objectivists are is they will argue that government is really really bad at everything it does and it touches therefore it has to be in charge of the most important stuff well that's not there for but but there is a thing that's fundamentally different than all the other things but joran brooke also said that no government has ever this is on your show has ever worked in the way he's proposing now objectivism ein rand's philosophy is based on objective reality and what she posited is you look and study the facts of nature stack that's the reality and deduce things accordingly and she very much regards herself as part of the aristotelian tradition as opposed to the plaintiff's tradition where the idea precedes reality and the idea is more real than what we see around us so what he's saying is all the data according to him contradicts his argument but still he's going to make this imaginary government that has never existed and there's no evidence that it can exist let's talk about objective law to have access to the legal system which is something we want even just in terms of selling disputes when you have a government monopoly it's going to be more expensive more difficult for poor people the cost of hiring a lawyer is more expensive than hiring a surgeon you can't say with a straight face this is the only way or the best way okay so and the other thing is the argument for objectivism they have this stupid against anarchism they have this stupid claim it's like what if you know you're a member of one security company and i'm a member of another and we have a dispute and one shows up the door what happens now as if this is some insuperable argument well we have that on earth every country is in a state of anarchism regarding every other country we don't have a world government so what happens if a canadian kills an american in mexico i have no idea i bet you don't have an idea what i'm sure of is that system has been worked out ahead of time between the three countries and it's been worked out in such a way that you and i don't have to reinvent the wheel same thing with cell phone companies if i'm on sprint you're on metropcs and i call you who pays does sprint pay you do they split the difference first of all there's no objective way that one has to work but the thing is companies who have auto accidents they have arbitrage all the time like if i run into you they work it out and it never reaches our um our desk so the only thing that cops are good at is keeping peop at any government monopoly it's forcing people to be their customers by keeping them unsafe okay there's a few things i'd like to say there that just explore some of these ideas so one in terms of canadian new mexico and so on that it does something has been worked out perhaps not perhaps don't say perhaps you know for sure that if something there's a point i'm trying to make so let's say for sure it's been worked out there is a there was a point in history where it wasn't worked out like to to to work to come to a place of stability there has to first be some instability so you when you first like for every kind of situation they're like dispute over space like who gets to own mars that kind of thing sure there's a first for it and then these different competing institutions will have to figure it out and so there's the concern with anarchism i think or with any kind of interaction what you said brilliantly that there's an anarchism relative to the there's no one world government right uh alex jones enters the chat but uh the there's an insta because the the fear is that there's going to be an instability that's that that doesn't converge towards some stable place that is not the fear that is the goal under iran's philosophy markets have something what they always talk about as being creatively destructive which means you look at something that's been happening for a very long time every generation every innovator starts chipping away at it he finds better ways marginal improvement or marginal and or doesn't work and he goes broke when government tries to implement improvement we all have to suffer the consequences when an innovator does it's a huge asymmetry if it hurts it only hurts him if it succeeds he becomes rich and we all profit as a consequence but the fear of anarchism i think is that it will be non-creative destruction it'll be just destruction right it's not like the instability let's give you there's no stability is one of these words that sounds objective but has no real meaning what field has stability if you had let's suppose you want stability relationships yeah let's talk about medicine stability means we're not going to invent new diseases or new treatments right if you mean stability in terms of a baseline of security we have that already very few relationships turn violent under an anarchist system look at it right now where if you look at a bar full of drunken young males full of testosterone if you look at a hotel where everyone is not native to the area those are both far safer than the places that the government has taken upon itself to protect you the parks the alleyways the streets the subways we have right now a comparison of which is better at keeping people safe and it's very obvious that when it's something is private and under someone's control and there would be layers of there'd be more police but they wouldn't be a government monopoly the store would have someone the street would have someone and you'd have your own personal security that would attached to your phone having security as a function of geography as opposed to a function of you as an individual is a landline technology in a post-cell phone world so you think it's possible to have psychologically speaking as an individual among the masses to have a sense of security even there's even though there's not a centralized thing at the bottom of the whole thing so like there's not a set of laws that are enforced based on geography like we have nations now you can have a set of laws that are enforcing some kind of emergent agreed-upon way so like basically i want to go to a hotel and trust that i'll be able to get a room and nobody's going to break down the door and uh i don't know but you have to take all my vodka let's let's take a different way if you were worried about a hotel having bed bugs that's not something that government's involved in what mechanic and that's not an unrealistic concern are there mechanisms right now that you can undertake to make sure that's not the case yes so it would be the same thing with i want to make sure i go to hotel that has security it'll be exactly the same thing and here's another example kosher food uh people who keep kosher juice who keep kosher their food has to be prepared in a certain way it has to meet higher rabbinical standards right if you look at food it will have that certification decay and there's even competition there there's decay and there's a stricter u letter people don't notice it because they're looking for it right you would have companies certifying different locales for their level of security and it would take an hour to have an app that would just like when you have toll roads right that would tell you you're approaching an unsafe area you're not going to be covered by us or and you could have it color-coded very easily we could do this today but the thing is you're exactly correct but there's an assumption of you're already in a okay you can give me a different word than stability but you're already in a place where the forces of the market or whatever can operate right the worry is like initially you might not have enough stability to where you can choose one place over the other versus based on the security that they provide we already have different types of security here because we have federal government we have state governments and we have local governments so and and these often contradict each other so the idea of the implausibility of having different security companies and having it be unstable or impossible we already have a very rough example of it happening in real life but all of it started this is what this like the idea of especially with euron is like it all started with government monopoly of violence saying like in all kids don't let violence get out of hand so like we had a civil war where half the country was slaughtered that's the display of the government not having a monopoly on the violence right it's like it's it had such a monopoly on the violence in the north that it could draft people to fight others that they didn't even care but there's a south so it's like it's a it's a it's the government splitting okay so because this is giant iceberg like splitting it's it's the the argument is that you would have something like a civil war much more often under anarchism but that's that's that's first of all if you had a civil war much more often we don't have that with car companies right there's no car company that says i refuse to pay you or whatever uh that's not violence and trump but like uh and i'm playing this it isn't that i'll never finish it is violence because if i'm a company and i'm saying that my cars can run over yours with no consequences this is a rough analog that's why has that not happened now in terms of having security system if i am free just like switching cell phone to go from one provider to another and this one company as part of its payment doesn't want fifty dollars a month a hundred dollars a month once my son i'm not going to be a member of the security company unless in that case we're dealing with something like a pearl harbor or foreign innovation where it's like all hands on deck let's go by evidence how many places do we have evidence of that there you can have at a large scale well that's absolutely a large scale because it feels like once you don't know the person what about ebay ebay is an example of anarchism and practice i am selling something to someone whose name i don't even know in a country that is nowhere approximate to me and ebay acts as the arbiter sometimes i don't get the money after i get screwed over but that's far less than the taxation that i have to give to the federal government it's a great point but it's in the space of finance if i could if on ebay you could also commit violence theft is violence no if yeah if you give me 10 grand for a car and i don't deliver anything you've stolen 10 grand for me yes but it's there's something uniquely problematic to being stabbed or shot the reason you're stabbed or shot is because the government despite its contract is refusing to allow second amendment rights to be implemented among the citizenry and the people who are making that the case are the cops they are the ones who are the traitors of the constitution and should be regarded as such whereas private companies are far more amenable to market pressures than the state is it's a strong argument but uh well let's actually just briefly mention the scale thing why why don't you think we should talk about scale like because if you had anarchism just in vermont or just in brooklyn fine the people make the argument you need anarchism or else china is going to invade but that's like saying what like does like do these little countries don't exist does san salvador not exist some of them are violent some of them are not but the point is they're not all at a moment's notice about to be invaded kuwait's an example of this kuwait was invaded by iraq and very quickly all the big countries who are interested in having your stability safe space got involved and and kicked him out of kuwait if you had this company that was waging more in the population it seems quite likely that the other organization would get together put a stop to this because they're not a position to provide the services security to their customers okay all this is brilliant but didn't you just say that we are actually in a state of anarchism relative to other countries yes so isn't this what emerges this is this is what aren't we actually living in a state of anarchism where we all have agreed i haven't agreed to anything so like the basic criticism you have is like you're born on a land geographical land geographical area and you're forced to have signed a bunch of stuff just by being born right a good place so so really you could if you could just much easier choose right which space of ideas you uh associated with right that would be actually a state of anarchism yes and you could have like a military that you sign up with sure and you're certainly not putting people in prison to get raped because they're selling drugs yeah uh and you're certainly not allowing everyone else on the street who wants to be there can we say something nice about iran i can talk about nice things about her all day i own her copy of the foundation yeah what to you is iran's best idea one that you find impactful insightful useful for us in modern society that you think about that your life has meaning and productive work is your highest value and that you shouldn't apologize and this is something i despise you shouldn't apologize for saying i want to be happy and i'm going to work toward that and that oh there's a few others that you owe nobody else some random stranger a second of your time you see this a lot on twitter and social media people like demanding a debate or demanding you act a certain way and you engage with them you don't know them anything um so i think those are some of her uh uh best ideas and she teaches you how to think iran does not have all the answers but she has all the questions do you think uh what do you think about the whole selfishness thing i mean do you do are you triggered by the word selfishness so it's really unfortunate what she does because you were just talking earlier about mold bug being carelessly she this is indefensible in my opinion so she talks about the virtue of selfishness and she claims that when people talk about selfishness they they mean concern primarily with the self they don't when people talk about selfishness they mean in a sociopathic way concerned exclusively with oneself right they mean like oh if someone is dying on the street i'm not gonna you know even waste a second saving them because i'm selfish so she sets up this complete caricature of the term what she when she's attacking selflessness in her best sense is when there are people who have no sense of self they have no values of their own they have no goals of their own everything that's in their mind is gotten second hand from the culture at large and there's nothing unique or special from their perspective worth fighting for so when she attacks um which she advocates for the self she basically means self-development self-improvement and achievement so i think that word choice is really um false and needlessly off-putting yeah uh controversial perhaps for the purpose of being controversial i don't know but it's just it's not accurate that's not what people mean by selfishness yeah i would say it's one of the one of the reasons probably her philosophy is uh not as much adopted or thought about is like it's funny like the use of words mean something exactly as you said that's my criticism mentions mob which could be incorrect criticism by the way so i'm not exactly sure can we talk about some modern day chaos and politics yes please i hate chaos speaking of your hatred for chaos let's talk about secession oh yeah i was the first one on this trip yeah you were uh well the civil war beat you to it but sure in contemporary times in contemporary times you were you're on this can you talk about what is the idea of secession what are the odds that it might happen what does it mean for the united states in some way for different states to secede sure america has been one country with several cultures since the beginning there's absolutely no reason for someone this goes back to the anarchist idea if you despise donald trump which is your prerogative if you think joe biden is a clown which is your prerogative there's absolutely no reason for you to be governed by someone you disapprove of this is an incoherent nonsensical concept the only reason we even take it as a hypothesis is that we're trained to the contrary since kindergarten um a secession i don't know along what lines but increasingly it's becoming harder and harder for people to have conversations i think social media and this is something people despise social media for i think this is something that social media has done well which i'm advocating for is it tends to kind of run through ideas through like an evolutionary process and drive them to the logical inclusion uh so it's very hard to be a moderate online because there's gonna be people you know pushing through your ideas through several cycles and then you're gonna end up at some kind of more pure or if you wanna dislike it extreme perspective having these different pockets it's not really governable because people fundamentally have different world views so i don't know what this session would look like i think the number is really increasing an exponential rate um i do not have a number of supporters supporters uh i think the claim that this can only be accomplished through violence is false it's a lie uh just like any divorce doesn't have to involve beating your ex-husband or ex-wife so and i i i'm very much looking forward to this becoming a reality far quicker than i ever expected well do you think there's a value of um competing world views being forced to be in the same yes within a context so we can agree if group one thinks a b and c are the fundamental aspects of their world view and argue within that and world group two thinks d e and f and argue within that so you're going to have a lot of argument within those space but if there's fundamental differences in world view there's no reason to be especially when each views the other is completely incoherent and unreasonable do you think there's a line of fundamentally different world views that uh along which a secession will happen in the united states like is there something that emerges to you as a set of ideas that are like um what do you call that like you can't come to you can't come to an agreement over i yeah i think it's already happening like with the masks um i think there's just two fundamental perspective and each one thinks the other is insane and also deadly and destructive and i don't see how there's any um discourse on this topic so on the left i wouldn't say it's left versus right i think it's people who are pro risk versus people who are risk averse yeah so risk-averse and then there's like a uh a hope for the comfort of the sort of uh centralized science giving the the truth and then everybody must follow the truth right of the proper way to behave and then there's uh on the other side a distrust of any kind of centralized institutions of anybody who might uh use uh like control to try to gain greater and greater power and masks are simple of that and even if masks are or are not a case yeah effective way of uh of stopping the virus which is really unfortunate to me as a from a perspective i happen to be on a survey paper about masks like people don't seem to care about the data or the so on correct this is this has become just a nice point on which to then highlight the difference between uh the two the two sides yeah that's really i mean i it it sounds kind of on the face kind of ridiculous that the secession would occur over a mask it wouldn't but i'm saying this is an example of something where there's a clean break yes um and and risk averse versus you know uh someone who's risk seeking these are just two fundamental different perspectives do you want have an nhs or do you have one of a market-based healthcare system you can make very valid arguments for both there's no reason for everyone to be under one but you you think that's not something that's that you think that's irreconcilable if that's the word yeah uh that that's not in the space of ideas that you can have in the same room together and they fight at each other and ultimately make progress like they that secession is the more effective way to proceed forward yes well uh do you see a possible world with knows the answer meaning i know you say yes because you kind of lean on the side of freedom and anarchism yes like you make you want to make let me make an argument in terms of divorce which is in your world view or your intuition is you want to make secession as frictionless as possible like of course along all lines not just like states or whatever just like absolutely you want to choose you want to be free yeah and peaceful let me make my authoritarian uh russian okay papastathopoulos papastathon argument in terms of relationships like when  goes wrong in a relationship about your language okay there's only a place for one stall at this table okay okay i'll get to you no you get to be like merkel as our previous discussion with putin okay don't let me unleash the hounds uh it you know you want to work through some of the troubles before you get divorced like you want to do the work and relationship sometimes like it goes up and down it's been 200 plus years it's uh it's done but in the listen okay so it's not a one night stand but you know look at trump this i don't see the middle ground he's either a complete calamity buffoon or he's been the first great president we've had in like many many years so you think that there's something different now than it was 20 years ago yes social media and access to information and the division will only increase you think oh yes so trump is not an accident of history so they thought trump was the river but he was the dam trump was the dam they thought he was the river so in that analogy trump being gone makes things worse yes for that perspective because now things are really going to hit the fan so what are the odds of succession i don't know and my desperate hope is that it's peaceful but i think the number of people who are becoming very comfortable with the violence is making me very unsettled well i see words as violence and your twitter it's like hiroshima that's a million uh sometimes i curl up in the corner crying after i check your twitter feed so but you know in all seriousness you um you think it's possible to do non-violent succession it took a check of slovakia look at brexit brexit was the succession right right so you can have uh civil war did not need to be fought that would have been an unviolent secession and and if you worry about slavery you could have bought off all the slaves import them to the north it still would have been cheaper and less loss of life and probably better for race relations yeah i don't know enough history to to wonder about like how the civil war could have been avoided well that's how is uh well conversation so like no no if they want to secede say look here's what we're gonna do we're gonna let you secede but you have to end up slate you have to end slavery they succeeded because of slavery here's the other thing there's like this con some circles of conservatism have this myth that oh it wasn't about slavers about states rights well if you go back every state when they seceded released the press release and they said explicitly we're doing this because of slavery so that is an abomination that needs to be taken care of but the way the other countries have you know ended slavery peacefully one of the ways to do it is pay them by all and we end up doing this after war i think the south people got um reparations the slave owners it was just insane bring them north you want to go to canada whatever and you agree and that's our peace treaty because the people who died weren't the slave owners it was white trash and it was that's who always and i hate that that's the term i can't think of a better one but that's who always ends up fighting these wars often disproportionately it's poor people and uneducated people yeah and i don't i don't i do not regard them as cannon fodder i think it's horrible so what would it look like there would be two founding documents yeah they had they had their constitution actually i don't know the history of that yeah they had a constitution but it was much more decentralized if secession doesn't happen yeah you said that donald trump was the dam not the river yeah that that sounds like walt whitman or something it's poetry okay are you flirting with me i don't know you know us we don't we don't flirt we just go to town club and drag you to the it's just the hammer cave we hammer in stickle and you don't want to know about the sickle it's not good combat cop it's bad cop for a stop yeah what do you think 2024 looks like uh in terms of the candidates and it's going to be kamal harris as the democratic candidate uh i'm really looking forward to ted cruz versus mike pence because they're both very good at debate um that would be interesting to see how differentiate themselves but honestly i don't i mean things are going to get really ugly really soon what about donald trump coming back he's not going to do it um so things in my opinion i think things are going to be really really crazy in 2021 and talk about talking about the damn being gone like 2021 so this year coming up oh yeah it's going to be complete it's going to be complete mayhem what do you think uh like prediction-wise and this is empirical what do you think donald trump's twitter feed looks like in 2021 like if we're at the end of 2021 we'll look back and see like what was the you know obama gate exclamation points or we won he is going to be for the first time in history holding the republican party accountable to the the base we've never had that happen before i i think he's going to be holding their feet to the fire uh radicalizing them and given that they have the senate where it's going to be 50 50. the democrats have a three-seat majority in the house this is not a governing coalition for either um it's going to be a complete mayhem what does that actually look like it's like what are the key values do you think that he's he's going to try to push um i think it's just gonna be very contrarian it's he's gonna be holding them accountable in terms of budgeting even though he never did that as president uh i think in terms of some kind of nominations here's the thing this is the first time since um uh like nixon uh 50 years and things weren't as politicized then where an incoming president doesn't have control of the senate the senate has the vote over cabinet positions i do not see a possibility of them not trying to pick a fight on one or two of these nominations and that's gonna and especially as revenge for kavanaugh this is gonna get very bloody very quickly and i think mitch mcconnell there's a sadistic side to him he revels in being the brakes on the car uh and i think the base it's just gonna be throwing just they're gonna want some bone it's like oh yeah we we eliminated this one person so that's gonna get really ugly really quickly you see it being quite divisive like the division increasing not stabilizing or decreasing uh and i'll be doing my part i know you'll be doing my part but i'm trying to do my part and like trying to be like to me the division is uh shouting over uh people like elon musk uh people who are actually building stuff and like accomplishing things in this world in terms of like elon said he took the red pill no see you're talking about the play i'm talking about forget elon uh spacex and tesla and uh actually the good sides of like some of the things that google is doing um like actually building things like making the world's information searchable all that kind of stuff like all the stuff you know the making actually the world a better uh place there's a bunch of technologies that are increasing our quality of life all this all that kind of stuff i feel like they get like not much credit or in our public discourse because of the division division is just like like peop it's clouding our ability to concentrate on what's awesome about this world well you know what would eliminate the division right secession yeah see i don't i don't it's hard for me to disagree it's hard for me to disagree because but at the same time secession um i'm i'm a romantic at heart divorce breaks my heart cool but do you want to live in a country bro yeah but do you want to live in a country where joe rogan is regarded as an example of someone who's spreading white supremacy i don't well but see i feel like that's not the country we live in that's just the new york times did it the cathedral does it on a regular basis well the cathedral is okay the the cathedral i guess you can maybe define the cathedral but it's it's like the centralized institutions that have like a story that they're trying to sell and so this is moldbuck's concept but yeah they basically are set the limits of permissible discourse and create a narrative for the population to follow but to me that's a minority of people minorities always controlling everything in any country the vast majority of masses have no thought yeah but minorities can be overthrown and sure the circulation elites yeah the way the pro no no no that's the what progress looks like is ridiculous people take power yes and then uh they get annoying and new ridiculous people that are a little bit better overthrow the previous no i think people progress happens despite the people who are in power not because of them right and so why is this secession so is it always about overthrowing the powerful is that how progress happens no i think progress happens despite the powerful the powerful are going to do what's in their power to maintain their power and they're going to fight innovation because it's a threat to their control there's always going to be the new york times of the world right there's always going to be those those that let them have their own country so it's two countries one has joe rogan the other one has the new york times that's basically what's happening right now it just geographically doesn't map out very well but culturally yes but that's just cultural stuff like there's a layer of public discourse okay i don't mean like that's what we're operating under now but there's actually like progress being made like roads being built uh hospitals being run all those kinds of things like different innovations that seems like secession is counter productive to that right because one country would have all the roads and the other would have all the hospitals that's that's a great point no it's not that's not the point i'm trying to make it's just like it just feels like the division that we're experiencing in the space of ideas could be constructive and productive for for building better roads and better hospitals as opposed to like using that division to separate the countries they're all gonna have to solve the same problems it feels like sure but they can solve them differently and compete that way massively a great example yeah now we're seeing that right now different countries have different mass mandates and things like this and uh the competition within the same structure with the same founding documents and same institutions is not effective you think is as effective as separating it is effective but there is a certain point which i think we have long past where there is not a consensus a governing consensus ideologically or culturally let me ask you a fun question okay knock knock who's there mars god of war the other one the planet yeah so there is a kind of captivating notion that we might i'm i'm excited by it the human being stepping foot on mars that to me is uh it's like one of those things that feels like it's why do we want to engage in space exploration but i'm a bit with the elon musk on this which is um it's obvious that eventually if human species has to survive it's going to have to innovate in ways that includes the sp space okay like there's a lot of things we're not able to predict yet that if we push ourselves to the limits of space like new ideas will come they'll be obvious a hundred years from now and then we're not even imagining now and colonizing mars that idea that seems ridiculous exceptionally difficult impossibly expensive is something that is actually going to be seen as obvious in retrospect okay and that we should engage in okay that's just to contextualize things the fun idea idea and experiment from a philosophical and political sense is what kind of government how do you orchestrate a government when you go to mars like we don't get too many chances like this but how do you build new systems not in place of old ones but in a place where no system previously have existed i think organically i hate that word but that's the correct word um you would have to figure out i mean that's how america was built you had was a jamestown colony and they tried to do communism here and it completely failed then they went to a more free market system with the second wave of colonists is my understanding um for mars i mean it depends on the population who the population was the number of people um [Music] i i don't know these are all kind of hypotheticals that i don't really have any good insight in whatsoever i'm not a space person i hate astronomy like i hate it so a lot of people look up to the stars and they're filled with awe and wonder about the mystery of the universe and you you look up to the stars and you feel what i'm not looking up i'm looking at the earth if you if you look at what's i'd much rather given a choice between mars and the deep sea i'd much rather spend a week at the deep sea and all the life forms that are down there because they're literal aliens they're it's like things that are not literal but they're unimaginable to us uh some of the things down there yeah that's true to me it's an interesting thought experiment to see when you have 10 people when you have 100 people right how how do you build an effective you know this is actually really useful for a company right like how do you build an effective company that does things uh it's not an obvious despite everybody being really certain about everything in this in this modern world to me it's not obvious like how do you run successfully as a group of people i agree i that's why i'm saying it also organic means you have to look at who the people are and tailor the organization to them as opposed to try to impose something but you get to also select people right because it's not going to be open borders on mars oh right tomorrow i was gonna say when you have one country it's all open borders yeah yeah you're right the from from outer space right some say they're aliens already there so you're gonna have to negotiate that sure we're aliens so we're aliens to somebody we're legal aliens do you think there's alien civilizations out there yes of course what do you think is their system of government anarchism because they're advanced do you honestly think there's intelligent life forms out there of course just the math it's impossible that there isn't so what do you make of all the all the stories of ufo sightings all that kind of stuff do you think they've visited earth yes my grandfather was an air traffic controller in the soviet union and he said they would often see these things that were not um operating the way we knew vehicles operate so that's good enough for me so i mean do you think government is in possession of some like what do you think government is doing with this kind of information do you think somebody has any understanding of ufo sightings or any kind of information about extraterrestrial life forms that are not known to the public yes that's indisputably true i think the fact that so many of these sightings are from aerodynamic professionals like pilots and things of that nature there are people who've seen it all who are reputable if they are on record saying i've seen things that don't make sense and both the russians and the americans thought it was the other one uh that says something shouldn't that be a bigger problem shouldn't that be bigger news and a bigger problem if government is in fact hiding it i guess but like what are they going to do with that information it's a good question like if a ufo uh if extraterrestrial spacecraft which most likely would be like a crappy space like it would it wouldn't be the actual aliens it would be like some drone probe ship ai yeah yeah yeah so if that like what would you do with that information as somebody that's in charge of you know like you see how badly uh who fumbled the discussion of masks masks yeah masks is one of them but everything really in terms of communicating with the public honestly about what they know what they don't know and that's a trivial one right i don't i don't i don't know they're certainly feel incompetent and being able to communicate effectively with the public about something much more difficult much more full to mis full of mystery like a ufo a thing a piece of material that's out of this earth forget like organic material i don't i don't know to me i just so from a scientist perspective would be beautiful it'd be inspiring to reveal this to the world here's a mystery and make it completely public share it would try and share it with everybody i think there is a domino effect where the concern would be what else you hiding from us and at that point if you said no no this is everything people wouldn't believe you and they would you can't blame them for not believing them uh yeah and then it'll be like show us the aliens they'd be like we don't have them we just have the craft you're lying speaking of aliens offline you mentioned elves yeah and psychedelics yeah what do you think about psychedelics in terms of the kind of places that can take your mind the kind of journey can take you on like what what do you think what is what do you think the psychedelics do to the human mind and what does that say about the the capacity of the human mind and just in general like the mysteries of all that's out there i don't know that we understand what they do uh the way i heard it explained to me is that much of the human mind isn't about receiving information but blocking information right because we're so there's so much data coming in any moment that you basically have to train yourself to see and to hear only what you want to see into here and then what psychedelics do is they tear that away and suddenly you're much more aware of what's out there and also you're going to be noticing patterns that you hadn't noticed before i know you had that researcher on the show and he kind of discussed this at some length um i mean rogan is probably the person who popularized dmt more than anyone he's obviously the person who's popularized dmt more than anything uh it's i don't know anyone who has even the researchers who have anything close to a coherent explanation of why this drug which exists everywhere would have this very specific very extreme effect on so many people who are going to be experiencing such bizarre consequences as a result of it i think it's very interesting that this is talking with the government this you know the cia started experimenting with lsd they killed one of their own people drove to suicide and there was a lot of research into terrence mckenna talks about this um into this field and then very quickly once they got into the mainstream they shut it down even though it's not addictive it doesn't cause you to go crazy or anything like that and there was a lot of propaganda against its use which i think thankfully is now somewhat receding i think in colorado just legalized mushrooms something like that and i think it'll be very interesting to see what happens as a result of this yeah and the interesting thing is there doesn't seem to be for certain psychedelics like psilocybin like mushrooms there doesn't seem to be a lethal dose which is fascinating like matthew johnson the the hopkins professor you mentioned i'm definitely going to do one of his studies it's uh it's a really cool way to do uh what he calls a heroic dose oh i want to do it what do i have to do i'll let you know so he's he is uh heroic those holy crap yeah but it's safe what's the hell i mean how many grams are we talking i don't i don't know but it's just it's it's big he's he says that uh she's gonna have a kick yeah so he says that i mean he also studies cocaine he studies all kinds of drugs and he's like the psilocybin is heroic drosophila cocaine kills you well he you can't there you can't so you can't even come close so he says like the problem with studying cocaine is you have like people who are addicted to cocaine yeah or war or so on you give them the kind of doses that we can and part of the study is like uh it's it's nothing to them right yeah yeah cybin is the only one where like even like daily users or like regular users like are blown away by the dose they give them oh [Laughter] you can go to rush in your mind yeah um you could go to outer space maybe maybe you'll become an astronaut or astronomer um after all maybe i'll be bubba yaga uh i'll let people look that one up holy crap wow what is love what do you think this thing is uh like uh our attachment to other human beings and is it something that we should give to just a few people yes that's for sure when i was working with dl hughley in his book he didn't use the term but he was describing like low-key depression and he talked about how he was in the airport and he noticed a girl had a red dress and he went up and thanked her and she was like what are you thinking for and he had realized he hadn't registered color in like weeks and i think love is like that when you see someone and you just like oh like like your eyes are open like this is something i've never seen before or i want more of this that kind of thing it's really uh uh it really disorients and reorients your thinking don't you find that like the world is full of that like non-stop it's not just like a person either it's like but it yes but when it's in a person it's a whole other level because it's like i could have this is going to be great for years it's like you know every day it's something new i mean that that is and that is rare you think it's rare i mean find someone who you could talk to them for years and not run out of things to talk about that's true for years yes that's rare and know that they really if you leave the room they will do right by you that's really rare well from a russian perspective you just don't give them another choice [Laughter] for uh this is new year new year's eve uh so you talked about the session and the world burning down and you holding the match at the end yes standing with a big smile on your face yes why so serious but let me ask you if it doesn't include flame and secession and destruction and a laughing malice and makeup and a white suit at the end how do we bring more kindness and love to the world in 2021 oh easy be comfortable saying i want to be happy and if there's someone who interjects and gives you attitude arms length them surround yourself with people who also want to be happy here's a great example my buddy chris williamson who i mentioned before he's a podcaster does modern wisdom he's he's an awesome dude and we became friend very close friends this past year and he was in dubai recently and he sent me pics from dubai by the pool just loving life and it took me a week and then it clicked in my head and i'm like you know what for some other people if they saw him underwear model at the pool they would think this is him bragging or humble bragging and that never entered my head i'm like oh man i'm so glad my boy can be having a good time and is sharing his joy with me that's the kind of people you need to surround yourself with where it never enters their head to be resentful or anything other than sharing in your bounty what makes you happy i'm happy all the time and one of the points i made in my life is like i really hated i really did not like to give advice because i feel don't give advice until you know you're talking about and to me what makes me happy is being self-actualized i am in a position with my career where i could be myself 24 7 where i never have to engage in small talk where i never have to interact with someone i don't want to and i'm very blessed to have that very few people have that and to have that be not only um to have that be like rewarded and having people find that something of value to them makes me very very happy but also being an uncle you know i have two little nephews they make me very very happy sure my sister's raising them russians so they talk like immigrants but that's okay and we're gonna change that um we have to dismember her that's fine that makes me happy and like to be able to to be able to finish this book and know it's gonna give people a sense of hope that's really validating well what are you most grateful for for our conversation today you're stealing my debt what am i most grateful for i am very grateful that i can come in here not knowing what we're going to talk about and no it's not going to be something i have to be on guard about or i have to watch my words and that neither you or your audience is going to be uh responding derisively i feel safe here you're welcome thanks for talking michael it was awesome thank you for listening to this conversation with michael malus and thank you to our sponsors netsuite business management software athletic greens all-in-one nutrition drink sun basket meal delivery service and cash app so the choice success health food or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from emma goldman on anarchism people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take thank you for listening and hope to see you next time