Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #128
the following is a conversation with michael malus an anarchist political thinker author and a proud part-time andy kaufman-like troll in the best sense of that word on both twitter and in real life he's a host of a great podcast called you're welcome spelled y-o-u-r i think that gives a sense of his sense of humor he is the author of dear reader the unauthorized autobiography of kim jong-il and the new right a journey to the fringe of american politics this latter book when i read it or rather listened to it last year helped me start learning about the various disparate movements that i was undereducated about from the internet trolls to alex jones to white nationalists and to techno anarchists the book is funny and brilliant and so is michael unfortunately because of a self-imposed deadline i actually pulled an all-nighter before this conversation so i was not exactly all there mentally even more so than usual which is tough because michael is really quick-witted and brilliant but he was kind patient and understanding in this conversation and i hope you will be as well today i'm trying something a little new looking to establish a regular structure for these intros of first doing the guest intro like i just did second quick one or two sentence mention of each sponsor third my side comments related to the episode and finally fourth full ad reads on the audio side of things and on youtube going straight to the conversation so not doing the full ad reads and as always no ads in the middle because to me they get in the way of the conversation so quick mention of the sponsors first scm rush the most advanced seo optimization tool i've ever come across i don't like looking at numbers but someone probably should it helps you make good decisions second sponsor is doordash food delivery service that i've used for many years to fuel long uninterrupted sessions of deep work at google mit and i still use it a lot today third sponsor is masterclass online courses from the best people in the world on each of the topics covered from rockets to game design to poker to writing and to guitar with carlos santana please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i hope to have some conversations with political thinkers including liberals and conservatives anarchists libertarians objectivists and everything in between i'm as allergic to trump bashing and trump worship as you probably are i have none of that in me i really work hard to be open-minded and let my curiosity drive the conversation i do plead with you to be patient on two counts first i have an intense busy life outside of these podcasts like it's 4 00 am right now as i'm recording this so sometimes life affects these conversations like in this case i pull on all nighter beforehand so please be patient with me if i say something ineloquent confusing dumb or just plain wrong i'll try to correct myself on social media or in future conversations as much as i can i really am always learning and working hard to improve second if i or the guest says something about for example our current president donald trump that's over the top negative or over the top positive please don't let your brain go into the partisan mode try to hear our words in an open-minded nuanced way and if we say stuff from a place of emotion please give us a pass nuanced conversation can only happen if we're patient with each other if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review five stars and a podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with michael malus there was a simpsons episode where he starts mixing like um sleeping pills with like pet pills and he's driving his truck and i like i want to see what happens with this red bull and nitro there's a lineup of drugs this is gonna be so fun yeah let's start with love yes yeah so one one thing we'll eventually somehow talk about it'll be a theme throughout is that you're also russian yes a little bit less than me but how loud why because i'm from ukraine oh you're from ukraine okay wow no because you came here a little bit when you were younger yeah i i i came here when i was 13 so i saturated a little bit of the russian soul i i marinated in there so a little deeper i haven't told anyone this but i'll be glad to tell you davidish um i haven't been back since i was two and next summer it looks like me my buddy chris williamson who's also a podcaster he's british modern wisdom he looks like apollo we're we looks like we got a videographer which apollo the god so we're going to go for the first time to see where i came from which is ukraine we're going to go to level and either st petersburg or moscow probably st petersburg or both it's going to be intense it's going to be a lot of panic attacks i feel and your russian is okay no you can't talk russian ukraine or it's like they get offended yeah but then you also want to go to russia yeah i don't know for me there's several people in russia i want an interview on a podcast okay so one one of them is uh guerrilla promon which is a mathematician and the other person is putin you know my favorite food and story is do you know this no when he had merkel with him do you know this story no merkel's scared of dogs like petrified of dogs so he brings in his like like like uh black lab it's a labrador it's like the sweetest animal and it's all over her and there's pictures and she's sitting like this and she's terrified and he's like what's wrong angela it's just completely trolling her yeah he's aware of the sort of uh the narrative around him yeah and then he plays with it yes he enjoys it it's a very russian thing my friend wanted to film about me he goes i realize you guys aren't like us at all you just like like look at us and then i started telling him stories about the upbringing and he's like oh my god and as i'm telling them like wow this stuff is really crazy like what how we are wired who's the we your friend is the russian the friends american i'm saying the way russians are brought up and the way maybe i don't think it was just my family i bet you had similar things like here's an example i i was i had a buddy staying with me he had a problem with his roommate so he crashed in my place fine i went to the gym and i come back and he goes oh there was and my apartment buildings has four four apartments so it's not like a huge thing he goes oh there was someone knocking at your door so you know i i told him blah blah and and for me and i wonder if you're the same way if i'm at someone's house that's not my own and someone knocks on the door i wouldn't even think to answer it like if i had an apple here might be i'd eat it i'd cut it whatever i'm not gonna it just doesn't enter my head to smash into my face the the thought of answering the door if it's not my house it would never enter my head would it enter your head no but why but he's an american so someone's at the door he goes and opens it even though it's not his house i would never do that i would never think to do that that is so strange you pick some very obscure thing to delineate americans i don't think that's obscure because i think it speaks to how we perceive strangers with americans everyone's friendly and with us it's like no no like you have that moat and i think that's a that percolates into many different aspects of how we relate to people and i had to undo a lot of that that's true you're right there's uh the relationship i formed there were in russia or very deep yeah close and then there's the strangers the other that you don't trust by default it takes a long time to go over the moat of trust for a long time until recently whenever i said anything to anyone my brain ran a scan that said if this person turns on you would this can they use this against you and i would do everything i said with strangers and after a while it's like you know what maybe they will but i'm strong enough to take it but this is not how americans think well here's another one let me ask you this sorry i'm taking over the interview people asked about like advice for work right like i had this there was this party i went to and basically everyone had their own problems and everyone else gave their advice right and someone was having a problem with the co-worker and the advice these dupoy americans gave them is oh sit down and have a talk with them and to me this is like the last case last resort like first you have to see what you can without showing your hand sharing your vulnerability only when everything hasn't worked out or you're like all right let me sit down with you and try to have it out with you probably but for them the first thing is like sit down and be like oh you're causing me problems and blah blah so i perceive that right away as a threat that this person sees an antagonism between us and also as a weakness that i'm getting to them so my reaction isn't um how do i make it better my reaction is to reinforce my position and see what i can to marginalize them usually i haven't worked in a corporate setting in a long time but it's not i don't approach it the way an american would like i'm glad you came and talked to me now i probably would because it's gonna be a friend so you attribute that to the russian upbringing as opposed to you have deep uh psychological issues i think those are synonymous wait am i would you think differently maybe a few years ago um i don't know i i i think you lost me at the because you kind of said that you're kind of implying you have a deep distrust of the world like the world does i think the default setting would be distrust yeah but i would put it differently is i almost ignore the rest of the i don't even acknowledge it i just uh savor i save my love and trust for the small circle of people i agree but when that person is being confrontational or as they perceive it as being open now there's a situation how do you how would you handle that like like a cold wind blows he's just kind of like yeah but it's not like this is an opportunity for us to work out our differences it's a cold wind it's not a hug that's my point you're so suspicious what it really is is a cold wind i'm so inhumane to be scared of it's a cold wind person but it's not this is great but it's not a source of like i'm not suspicious of like i'm not uh anxious i would say or like living in fear of the rest of the world anymore oh i agree but you're not receptive to that person right that's all i'm saying and they are got it so speaking of which let's talk about love yes which requires to be receptive of the world yes of strangers i agreed how do we put more love out there in the world especially on the internet one mechanism i have found to um increase love and that's a word that has many meanings and is you know used in a very intense sense and it's used in a very loose sense can you try to define love sure love is a strong sense of attraction toward a another person entity or place that causes one to tend to react in a disproportionately positive manner that's off the top of my head disproportionately yes so for example if why not proportionally because like if you're someone's about to who you love is about to get harmed you're moving heaven and earth to make sure uh or like a book you love you know like i love this book like you're going through the fire to try to save it whereas if it's a book you really like it's like huh i'll get another one i don't you know and a book's a kind of a loose example but so you're going with the love that's like you're saving for just a few people almost like romantically like love for a close family but it's also just love to even the broader like the kind of love you can put out to people on the internet which is like just kindness sure i would say in that case it's important to make them feel seen and validated and i try to do this when people who i have come to know on the internet and there's a lot i try to do that as much as possible because i don't think it's valid how on social media and i do this a lot myself but not towards everyone it's just there to be aggressive and antagonistic you should be antagonistic towards bad people and that's fine but at the same time there's lots of great people and especially with my audience and i would bet disproportionately with yours there's a lot of people who are because of their psychology and intelligence are going to be much more isolated socially than they should and if i and i've heard from many of them and if i'm the person who makes them feel oh i'm not crazy it's everyone else around me who is just basic uh the fact that i can be that person which i didn't have at their age to me is incredibly reaffirming you mean a source of love but i mean love in the sense of like you know you care about this person and you want good things for them not in a kind of romantic way but i mean you're using in a broad sense now yeah but you're also a person who kind of i mean uh attacks this power structures in the world by mocking them yes effectively yes and uh love i would say requires you to be non-witty and simple and fragile which i see it as like the opposite of what trolls do trolls are if i if there is someone coming after what i love there's two mechanisms right at least two i go up and i'm fighting them and in which case you bring in if you are getting hurt and i fight even if you win the knife fight or if you disarm them and you preclude the possibility of a fight and you drive them off or render them powerless you can you keep your person intact as yourself and you also protect your values so how do you render them powerless as you just said by mocking them one of the most effective mechanisms for those in power we're much closer to brave new world than 1984. the people who are dominant and in power aren't there because of the threat of you know the gulag or prison they're there because of social pressures look at the masks i was on the subway not that long ago in new york city um no one cared who i was until i put out the mask i was in the subway that long in new york city there was and i put this on my instagram i've told this story before there was an asian dude in his early 30s he was like in western clothes it's not like he had a rickshaw or something an older man in his 50s stood up over him on the subway screamed at him said go back where you came from you're disgusting i'm going to get sick if you think this guy is a vector of disease which is your prerogative why are you coming close to him why are you getting in his face and what that was sorry so it was because he was asian it was both it was the not having a mask gave him the permission to act like a despicable aggressive person toward him right and the point being a lot of these mechanisms for social control are outsourced to low-quality people because this is their one chance to assert dominance and status over somebody else so the best way to defuse that isn't with weaponry or fighting it's through mockery because all of a sudden their claims to authority are effectively destroyed so let me push back on that what about fighting that with with love with um patience and like kindness towards them i i don't think kindness is i think that would be uh a mismatch and inappropriate there's superman is batman okay and superman's job is to help the good people and batman's job is to hurt the bad people and i will always be on the batman side than the superman side both work the silly tight costumes one has pointy ears both are ridiculous so it's uh it was a billionaire who gets you know he's swimming in trim which one is the best batman okay i'm uh i'm undereducated on um okay on the superhero movies i apologize okay but but you're just saying you your predisposition is to be on the batman side is to uh fighting the bad guys yeah and that's what i'm good at that's what you're good at but just to play devil's advocate or actually in this case i am the devil because that's what i usually do watch the devil here the other angels advocate exactly to be the to be the angel advocate yeah it's like i feel like mockery is um is a as a path towards escalation of conflict yes in many ways yes so you're not i mean it's kind of like guerrilla warfare it means you're not going to win i am winning we're all winning we're winning on a daily this is my next book we're winning we've won before i'm not joking the net the topic of the next book yes is the white pill the white pill is that we're gonna we are winning the most horrible people are being rendered into laughing stocks on a daily basis social media this is glorious i so disagree with you i disagree with you because there's side effects that are very destructive it feels like you're winning but we're completely destroying the possibility of having um like a cohesive society that's called oncology what's that mean curing cancer no your concept of a cohesive society is in fact a society based on oppression and not allowing individuals to live their personal freedom oh so your your utopian view of this you're the utopian you're saying cohesive society i'm saying i don't need that i'm saying there's going to be conflict right there's going to be conflict you and i are disagreeing right now that's not cohesive doesn't mean we like each other less doesn't mean we respect each other less cohesive doesn't it it's just a euphemism for like everyone's submitting to what i want no i mean cohesive could could uh could be that it could be um it could be like enforced with violence all that kind of stuff sort of the uh the libertarian view of the world but it could just be being respectful and kind of each other and kind towards each other and loving towards each other i mean that's what i mean by cohesive so when people say free it's it's funny like freedom is a funny thing because freedom can be painful to a lot of people it's it's all matters how you define it how you implement it how it actually looks like sure and i'm just saying it feels like the mockery of the powerful leads to further and further the divisions it's like it's turning life into a game to where it's always you're playing you you're creating these different little tribes and groups and you're constantly uh fighting the groups that become a little bit more powerful by undercutting them through guerrilla warfare kind of thing and that's what the internet becomes is everyone's just mocking each other and then certain groups become more and more powerful and then they start fighting each other and into basic they they form groups of ideologies and they start fighting each other in the internet where the result is it doesn't feel like the common humanity is highlighted it doesn't feel like that's a path of progress now like when i say cohesive i don't mean like everybody has to be you know enforcing equality all those kinds of ideas i just mean like not being so divisive that's like so it's going back to the original question of like how do we put more love out in the world than the internet i i want divisiveness oh you see you think that this is that's that goal it's very interesting it's the goal so you we started this conversation with you talking about you have love for that small group uh i think we both would agree to have a bigger group be better especially if that love comes from a sincere place um i think our country specific i wrote an article about this four years ago that it's time to disunite the states and to secede this country has been held together with at least two separate cultures with thumbtacks and string for over 20 years uh there's an enormous amount of contempt from one group toward another this contempt comes from sincere place they do not share each other's values there's absolutely no reason just like any unhealthy relationship where you can't say you know what it's not working out i want to go my own way and live my happiness and i genuinely want you to go your way live your happiness if i'm wrong prove me wrong i'll learn from you and and take lessons and vice versa but the fact that we all have to be in the same house together is not coherent and that's not love that is the path towards friction and tension especially do you think there's concrete groups like is it as simple as the two groups of blue and red no it's it's it's it's also very fluid because you and i are allied as jewish people as russians as males as podcasters uh you're an academic i'm not there so there's there we're different but we each are a venn diagram even within ourselves and i can talk to you about politics and then we can talk about russia stuff and then you could talk about your your work which i don't know anything about so that would be where you're way up here in our way down here so there's lots every relationship with just between individuals there's it's very dynamic so how do we succeed like how do we form individual states sure there's a little bit more cohesion sure the and voluntary cohesion so the first step is to uh um eliminate and the concept of political authority as legitimate and to uh denigrate and humiliate those who would put themselves in a position in which they are there to tell you how to live your life from any semblance of validity and that's starting to happen um if you look at what they had with the lockdowns cuomo and de blasio new york uh we have i was uh tired a couple weeks ago and i said to my friend oh just click maybe i've covered and he goes it's not possible like what do you mean and he goes we haven't had any deaths in like two months and there's only 100 cases a day for like two months and i go you're exaggerating because everything was still closed and i looked at the numbers and he wasn't exaggerating and there's no greater american dream to me than an immigrant family comes to the states forms their own little business maybe mom's a good cook it's a restaurant dry cleaner fruit stand and those people aren't going to have a lot of money those are the first ones who lost their companies because of these lockdowns they cuomo who's the governor of new york opened up the gyms he said you're clear to open up de blasio said and we don't have enough inspectors you're gonna have to wait another couple of weeks uh to regard that as anything other than literally criminal is something that i am having a hard and harder time wrapping my head around you said i mean that's something i'm deeply worried about as well which is like thousands it's actually millions of dreams being crushed that amer american dream of starting a business of running a business what about all the young people who you and i have in our audiences who are socially isolated at best and now they can't leave their homes uh isolation and ostracism are things that are very well studied in psychology these have extreme consequences i read a book called ostracism and this wasn't scientific but basically the author was a psychiatrist at college whatever and he had one of his colleagues they did an experiment let's for a week you ostracized me completely we know it's an and he goes even knowing it's the experiment the fact that he wouldn't make eye contact with me and the fact that he ignored me had an extreme emotional impact on me knowing full well this is purely for experimental purposes now you multiply that by all these p the suicide the number of kids were thinking about suicide was through the roof during all this uh and my point is until these people it's gonna i would predict like 2024 that's where we're going to have to start having conversations about what personal consequences have to be done for these people because until then they're going to do the same thing so you think there's going to be society-wide consequences of this that we're going to see like ripple effects because of the social isolation i i know i mean we also need to talk about consequences or cuomo de blasio because if politicians respond to incentives and the incentives are there for them to be extremely conservative because if you have to choose as cuomo said a press conference between a thousand people dying and a thousand people losing their business it's not a hard choice and he's right but at a certain point it's like all right you're losing both you're losing not losing the you're making these decisions um and not having consequences for it and you're going to do it again the next time so we need to make sure you're you're a little scared okay and i don't know what that would mean but you're laying this problem this this incompetence i don't think it's incompetence i think it's very competent i think they're just they're jobs yes but what but you're laying it not at the the hands of the individuals but the structure of the of government it's both yes how would we deal with it better without centralized control well we didn't really have centralized control because every country and every state you know handled it in a different mechanism but a city has centralized control just yeah right i mean no that's not true so cuomo de blasio they had a lot of disagreements over this over the months and this was actually a source of great interest and tension um de blasio wanted at one point was talking about like quarantining people in their homes home was like you're crazy uh something same thing with the schools same thing with the gyms um and there are other such uh examples but the point being this was an emergency this is world war one i talked about some timpool show um was very dangerous because it gave a lot of evil people some very useful information about what the country put up with and what they can get away with under wartime and this set the model for things like the new deal and the other things of that nature it is undeniable you're a scientist so you understand this perfectly well um that this lockdown gave some very nefarious people some very valid data about how much people will put up with uh under uh pressures from the state so fundamentally what is the problem with the state that's existence okay well but but uh uh to play angel's advocate again you know government is the people so come on you don't you you you're do you do you really think this at as best i think it's possible to have represent representation can you imagine if you have an attorney you're like oh you can't have the attorney you want you're gonna have this guy who you absolutely hate who you share no values with why because he drives i mean leaders political leaders and political representation drive the discourse like we you know uh the majority of people voted for him or whatever however however he defined that and now we get to have a discussion well was this the right choice and then we get to make that choice again in four years and so on first of all the fact that i have to be under the thumb of somebody four years makes no sense there's no other relationship that's like this including a marriage you can leave any other relationship at any time number one number two is it always impeach but they did that part of it i'm in just saying yeah that there's yeah the mechanisms are uh flawed in many ways yeah yeah right and and so that's number one number two is it doesn't make sense that if i don't want someone to represent me that because that person is popular that they are now in a position to so having uh um representation and and having citizenship based on geography is a pre line technology in a post-cell phone world there's no reason why i have to just because we're physically in between two oceans we all have to be represented by the same people whereas i can very easily have my security be under someone and switch it as easily as cell phone providers so okay but it doesn't have to be geographical it can be ideas sure i mean this country represents a certain set of ideas yes it does it started out geographically it still it was just it started off as ideas as well but like there's a it's it was intricately i mean that's the way humans are there's i mean there was no internet so it was you were geographically in the same location and you signed a bunch of documents and then you kind of debated and you wrote a bunch of stuff and then you agreed on it okay so you understand that no one signed these documents and no one agreed to it as lysandra spooner pointed out over 150 years ago the constitution or the social contract if anything is only binding to the signatories and even then they're all long dead uh so it's it's this fallacy that somehow because i'm in a physical place i have agreed even though i'm screaming to you a face that i don't agree to be um subordinate to uh some imaginary invisible monster that was created 250 years ago and this idea of like if you don't like it you have to move that's not what freedom means freedom means i do what i want not what you want so if you don't like it you move okay just to put some i don't like words and terms one one one zero one one one zero yeah exactly is that what your language is it is i'm translating it all in real time but uh would you call the kind of ideas that uh you're advocating for and we're talking about anarchy yes anarchism yes okay so let's get into it can you can you try to paint the utopia that an anarchist worldview dreams about the only people who describe anarchism as utopia are its critics if i told you right now and i wish i could say this factually that i have a cure for cancer that would not make us a utopia that would still probably be expensive we would still have many other diseases however we would be fundamentally healthier happier and better off all of us than democracy so that democracy sorry i jump back from the cancer no that democracy or government so it's only curing one major major life-threatening problem but in no sense is it a utopia so what can we try to uh answer this question same question many times which is what exactly is the problem with democracy the problem with democracy is that those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them so that's the central problem of democracy not all of us need leaders right what does it mean to need a leader are you saying like people who are actually like free thinkers don't need leaders kind of thing sure that's but like take a wave but like you don't okay so do you acknowledge that there's some value in authority in different subjects so what what that means is i don't mean an authority somebody who's in control of you but you're doing the definition switch because i am i am you're right you're right it's unfair okay those those bad but that's what they do that's their trick yeah and it's this is one of the useful things by the way less is total sidebar if people ask me for advice i always tell them if you're going to raise your kids raise them bilingual because i was trilingual by the time i was six and that teaches you to think in concepts whereas if you only know one language you fall for things like this because using authority in the sense of a policeman and someone is an authority in physics it's the same word conceptually they're extremely different but if you're only thinking in one language your brain is going to equate the two and that's a trap that people who only speak one language have for sure but even if you know multiple languages you can still use the trick of using your c or convenience yeah absolutely to manipulate the conversation you weren't trying to do that but you you fell in i accidentally did it yeah right we all tend to do that if you only speak one language and think of one language but if i guess let me rephrase it i are you against do you acknowledge the value of like offloading your own effort about a particular thing to somebody else absolutely like an accountant a lawyer a doctor absolute a chef infinite isn't that ultimately what a democracy is broadly defined like you're basically electing a bunch of authorities using the word you in two senses using the word you meaning me as an individual now using you as a mass yes as a math not use an individual so i have i would absolutely want someone to provide for my security i would absolutely want someone to negotiate with me for foreign power or something like that that does not mean it has to be predicated and what lots of other people who i do not know and if i do know them probably would not respect think about it's of no moral relevance to me nor eye to them so do you think this kind of there could be a bunch of humans that behave kind of like ants in a distributed way there could be an emergent behavior in them that results in a stable society like isn't that the hope with anarchy is like without an overarching uh but answer i i mean answer the worst example here because ants have a very firm authority the queen yeah and they're all they're all drones they're all clones of each other yeah but so if you forget the queen their behavior they're all well from your perspective from your human intelligence perspective but from their perspective they'll probably see each other as a bunch of individuals no they don't ants are very big on altruism in the sense of self-sacrifice they do not think the individual matters they routinely kill themselves for the sake of the hive in the community but they see that's from the outside perspective from the individual perspective of the individual they probably they they don't see it as altruism right but they they view and they're right because the aunt's life is very ephemeral and cheap that it's more important to continue this mass population that that one individual ant live like bees are another even better example the honey bee when they sting they only sting once and they die and they do it gladly because it's like okay this community is much more important than me and they're right yeah okay so fine let's forget i'm being pedantic but it's important i think i'm not just being for the sake of being fed but there's something beautiful that i won't argue about because i do there's an interesting point there about individualism of ants i do think they're more individual but like let's let's give your view of ants that they're it's their communists okay let's go with the communist view of ants okay yeah uh but there's still a beautiful emergent thing which is like they can function as a as a society and without i would say centralized control so is that the hope for anarchy it's like you just throw a bunch of people that voluntarily want to be in the same place under the same set of ideas and they kind of like the doctors emerge the police officers emerge the uh the different necessary structures of a functional society emerge do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is that is just beyond beautiful when you stop to think about it i'm not being tongue-in-cheek language there's infinite languages language the things that language can be used for are bring tears to people's eyes quite literally it's also used for basic things no one is forcing us we speak two languages each at least no one's forcing us to use english no one's forcing us to use this dialect of english uh it's a way and and despite there being so many different languages uh lingua franca emerge you know people the language that everyone is in latin even in north korea they refer to the fish and the different animals by the latin scientific uh no one decided this sure there's an organization that sets a binomial nomenclature but there's no gun to anyone's head referring to uh seamoth as a pegasus species and when you think about how amazing language is and someone other context would say like well you you need to have a world government and they're deciding which is the verbs and you have to have an official definition and an official dictionary and none of that happened and i think anyone even if they don't agree with my politics or my worldview cannot deny that the creation of language is one of humanity's most miraculous beautiful achievements absolutely so there there you go there's one system where a kind of anarchy can result in in beauty stability like sufficient stability and yet dynamic flexibility to adjust it and so on and the internet helps it you get some something like urban dictionary which which starts creating absurd both humor and wit but also language and syntax and jargon immediately you size people up if you use if you say vertebral i know you're a doctor because that's how they pronounce it the the spinal column uh i'm sure in your field there's certain jargon right away you can know if this person's one of us or not i mean it's infinite i mean i don't need to tell you and it's emojis too yes there's so much there to study with language it's fascinating but do you think this applies to human life the the meat space the physical space yes so these there's that kind of beauty can emerge without uh without writing stuff on paper without laws you could have rules you don't need you don't have to be laws so enforced by violence like that's what what's a law a law is something that is unchosen a rule is something if i go to my pool and i i sign up to remember a pool on the wall lists certain things it's like you know certain number of people in the pool no peeing in here good luck enforcing that one um and so on and so forth well that's the problem aren't you afraid that people are gonna pee in the pool that's not as my biggest concern is mass incarceration as the fact that the police can steal more money than burglars can the fact that innocent people can be killed with no consequences the fact that war can be waged and with no uh consequences for those who waged it the fact that so many men and women are being murdered overseas and here and the people who are guiding these are regarded as heroic so you think there might that in an anarchist system there's a possibility of have of having less wars and less what would you say corruption and uh less abuse of power let's talk yes and let's talk about corruption because and i made this point on rogan you and i again this the russian background we realize that when it comes to corruption american is very naive corruption they think is oh i got my brother a job and he's getting money on the table that's not when we're talking about like state corruption things that are done in totalitarian states and even to some extent in america like jeffrey epstein julian maxwell things that stalin did things that hitler did you know when the cia was torturing people at gitmo they had to borrow kgb manuals because they didn't know how to torture correctly because they never thought of these things we it's very hard for us to get into the mindset of someone who's like a child predator someone who uh let me give you an example from my forthcoming book there was a guy who was the head of ukraine in the 30s i forget his name now these old soviets they were tough i mean they pride stalin means steel you know they pride themselves in their cruelty and how strong they were and this was the purge you know stalin is trying to you know killing lots of people left and right and his henchman beria had the quote uh find me the man i'll find you the crime you know they would accuse someone and they would torture him until he talked and confessed and then he had to turn people in and they took this guy in like beginning the year i think it's 36 38 he was had ukraine by may he's arrested and they take him to the le blanca the basement in the red square where they're torturing people and they put they did the works on him and he was a good soviet he stood up and he who knows what they did to him he didn't talk so they said okay one moment they brought his teenage daughter in raped her in front of him he talked so when we talk about corruption we would never in a million years think of this that's not how our minds work um so when you're talking about states and people where you don't have ease of exit where you are forced to be under the auspices of an organization creating a monopoly that leads to in extreme cases but in not as extreme cases really uh nefarious outcomes whereas if you have the option to leave as a client or customer that would have a strongly limiting effect on uh how a business and what it can get away with so but don't you think maybe i don't know who the right example is whether it's stalin i think hitler might be the better example of don't you think or jeffrey epstein perhaps don't you think people who are evil will will find ways to manipulate human nature to attain power no matter the system yes and like the the corollary question is do you think those people can get more power in um in the democracy in a you know in when there's a government already in place they can it's easily they get more power more dangerous they have a government place first of all sociopaths are known for their charm and for their warmth here's the two situations in in a free society i'm a sociopath i'm an evil person i'm the head of macy's in a state society i'm an evil person i'm a sociopath i'm the head of the us government which of these are you more concerned with it's like night and day so you would have far more decentralized military you would have far more decentralized security forces and they would be much more subject to feedback from the market if you have an issue with macy's or any store with a sweater look at that transaction if you have an issue with the state to you hiring a lawyer costs more than a surgeon to even access the mechanism for dispute is going to be exorbitant and price poor people out of the market for um conflict resolution immediately so right away you have something that's extremely regressive and even though this is touted as some great equalizer it's quite the opposite so in current society there's a deep suspicion of governments and states they're not that's not really like just your example of macy's i mean don't you think a hitler could rise to be at the top of a social network like twitter and facebook okay let's suppose hitler ran twitter okay let's take this thought experiment seriously literally what could he do so all the only tweets are gonna be about how much the jews suck right okay fine okay all the cool people are leaving there could be some compelling like you said um evil people are charming there could be some compelling narratives that could be with conspiracy theories uh untruths that could be spread like propaganda every criticism of anarchism is in fact a description well the strongest criticisms of anarchism are in fact description of the status quo your concern is under anarchism propaganda would spread and people would be taught the wrong ideas unlike the status quo that's not even a criticism of anarchism i'm not actually criticizing it's an open question of it's an open question of in which system will human nature thrive be be able to thrive more and in in which system would the evils that arise in human nature would be more easily suppressable there that's that's the question it's a scientific experiment and i'm asking only from our perspective of the fact that we've tried democracy quite a bit recently and we i don't maybe you can correct me we haven't yet seriously tried anarchy in a large scale well we don't need to try to so anarchy isn't like a country right it's like it's you can't i'm not it's like saying well if anarchy works how can we've never had an anarchist government right so anarchism is a relationship and language is an example of this it's a worldwide and our system you and i have an anarchist relationship there's almost no circumstances we'd be calling the police on each other i mean it's i'm asking the same question in a bunch of different directions out of born out of my curiosity is why is anarchy going to be better at preventing the darker sides of human nature which presumably your criticism of government because it's this because of decentralization so the darker side of human nature is an extreme concern anyone who says it's going to go away is absurd and fallacious i think that's a non-starter when people say that everyone's going to be good human beings are basically animals we're capable of great beauty and kindness we're capable of just complete cruel and what we would call inhumanity but we see it on a daily basis even today uh and what's interesting is the corporate press won't even tell you the darkest aspects because that's too upsetting to people so they'll tell you about atrocities and horrors but only to a point um and then when you actually do the homework you're like oh it's so much worse than like that thing about stalin right so we know in a broad sense that stalin was a dictator we know that he killed a lot of people but it takes work to learn about the hall of demore it takes work to learn about what those literal tortures were and that this is the person who later fdr and harry truman were shaking hands with and taking photos with and was being sold to us as uncle joe you know he's just like you and me um so when you have a decentralized information network as opposed to having three media networks it is a lot easier for information that doesn't fit what would be the corporate america narrative to reach uh the populations and it would be more effective for democracy because they're in a much better position to be informed now you're right it also means well if everyone has a mic that means every crazy person and with their wacky views and at a certain point yeah it has to become then there's another level which is then the people have to be self-enforcing and and you see that on social media all the time when someone says this the other person jumps in you think but isn't social media a good example of this like so you think ultimately without centralized control you can have stability like what about the mob outrage and the mob rule the the power of the mobs that that emerge power of the mob is is a very uh serious concern uh gustav labon wrote a book in the 1890s called the crowd and this was one of the most important books i've written because it influenced both mussolini and hitler and stalin and they all talked about it and he made the point that under crowd psychology human lynching is another example this none of those individuals or very few would ever dream of doing these acts but when they're all together and you lose that sense of self you become the ant and you lose that sense of individually you're capable of doing things that like in another context you'd be like i should kill myself i'm a monster so you're worried about that but like is in the mob doesn't the mob have more power under anarchy no the mob has much less power on anarchy because under anarchism every individual is fully empowered you wouldn't have uh um uh gun restrictions you would have people creating communities based on shared values they would be much more collegial they'd be much more kind as opposed to when you're forcing people to be together in a polity when they don't have things in common that is again like having a bad roommate if you're forced to look at jails if you're forced to be in locked in a room with someone even if you at first like them after a while you're going to start to hate them and that leads to very nefarious consequences so as an anarchist what do you do in a society like this thrive i think i'm doing okay [Laughter] i mean i mean there's an election coming up there's uh as as you talk uh you're welcome is one of the 15 shows that you host it's you talk about libertarianism a little bit yeah i mean is there some practical political direction like in terms of we as a society should should go i don't mean we as a nation i mean we as a collective of people should go to uh to make a better world from an anarchist point of view sure uh i think politics is the enemy uh and anything i need to find politics so anything that lessens its sway on people anything that delegitimizes it is good i wrote an article a few years ago about how wonderful it is that trump is regarded as such a buffoon because it's very very useful to have a commander-in-chief who's regarded as a clown because it's going to take a lot to get him to convince your kids to go overseas and start killing people and making widows and orphans as well as those kids coming home in caskets whereas if someone is regarded with prestige and they're like oh we need to send your kid overseas oh absolutely i mean this guy's great so that is a very healthy thing where people are skeptical of the state but there's a lot of people that uh regard him as as one of the greatest leaders we've ever had yeah dinesh d'souza he's another lincoln i when you talk shit about trump or talk shit about biden i think i'm trying to find a line to walk where you they don't immediately put you into the this person has trump derangement syndrome or they have the other the alternative to that i i'm more than happy when people are preemptively dismissing me because then i don't have to waste time engaging with them because those people will be of no use to me when i was on tim pool recently tim poole's show uh tim poole's known for his little like hat i got a propeller beanie motorized and it was just spinning the whole two hours like the 1950s thing the point being i wore it because there's lots of people who would say i can't take seriously someone who wears a hat like that and my point being if you are the kind of person who takes your cues based on someone's wardrobe as opposed to the content of your ideas you're of no use to me as an ally so i'd be more than happy you preemptively abort rather than waste our breath this is the deep this is a very very deep thing that you and i disagree on which is this is goes to the trolling versus the love is i believe that person instinctually dismisses you on the very basic surface level yes but deep down there actually there's a wealth of a human being that seeks the connection to seeks to understand deeply to connect with other humans that we should speak to i think you and i completely disagree see you're saying i'm saying there's no mind there literally okay so let's i naturally i think that majority so i naturally think the majority of people are have the capacity to be thoughtful intelligent and um you know learn about ideas ideas that they instinctually based on their own likes current inner circle disagree with and learn to understand to empathize with the other like i and in the current climate there's a divisiveness that discourages that and that's where i see the value of love of of encouraging people to to uh to strip away that surface instinctual response based on the thing they've been taught based on the things they listen to to actually think deeply have you ever had uh gone to cvs or dwayne reed and your bill how much you owe them is six dollars and you give them a ten dollar bill in a single and watch the look on their face you watch them void their bowels and panic because you give them eleven dollars on a six dollar bill this is not a mind capable or interested in thoughts and ideas learning no you're talking about the first moment of uh a for a first moment where there's an opportunity to think they are desperate to avoid it no they're just it's and incapable of it i i just it's uh they're they have these same exact experiences i have every single day when i know it's time for me to go on on a run of five miles or six miles or ten miles i'm desperate to avoid it and at the same time i know i have the capacity to do it and i'm deeply fulfilled when i do do it when i do overcome that challenge you are one of the great minds of our generation you are telling me that any of these people can do anything close to the work you do not in artificial intelligence but in in inability to be compassionate towards other people's ideas like understand them enough to be able passion requires a certain baseline of intelligence because you have to perceive other people as being different but of value yeah exactly that's a sophisticated mindset i think i think most people are are capable of it you don't think so no and nor are they interested in it but in that kind of if you don't believe they're capable of it how can anarchy be stable uh if you have a farm there's one farmer and 50 cows it's very stable you're just not you're not asking the cows where to force or where to farm things yeah but the cows aren't intelligent enough to do damage cows cows certainly bulls because they could do a lot of damage they could trample things they could attack you the cows are like how much they weigh like four thousand pounds can you connect the analogy then because like sure you can't expect yeah saying a cow is a cow isn't a slur it's not saying you hate cows cows or even let's say the example i always use with good reason is dogs okay uh i always say to study how human beings operate watch caesar milan because human beings and dogs have co-evolved our minds have both evolved in parallel tracks to communicate with each other dogs are can be vicious dogs for the most part are great wonderful but you can't expect the dog to understand certain concepts it's not an ins and out most people are offended are you saying like a dog if you're a dog person like i am this is actually a huge compliment most dogs are better than most people um but to get the idea that this is something that is basically your peer is nonsensical now of course this sounds arrogant and elitist and so on and so forth and i'm perfectly happy with that but it is very hard to persuade me or anyone that if you walk george carlin has that joke think how smart the average person is then realize 50 of people are dumber than that if you walk around and see who's out there these people are very kind they are of value they they deserve to be treated with respect they deserve to be secure in their person they deserve to feel safe and to have love but the expectation that they should have any sort of semblance of power over me in my life is as nonsensical as asking lassie to be my accountant so but that goes to power that not to uh the ability the capacity to be empathetic compassionate intelligent what if i were to try to prove you wrong that's a good question okay what would what would what would you be impressed by about society well how would i show it to you that's a good question how would you show it to me because i think something has to be falsifiable if you're going to make a claim right so what would it what would it because we both made claims that are a kind of our own like interpretation based on our interaction like when i open twitter everyone seems to say why do you only follow one person who do you follow who's the one person you follow uh stoic emperor i i follow a lot of people i have a script i have a script this is real love it's not ironic love i love watching it and i'm sure you do too i love watching a quality mind at work because when someone has a quality of mind they're often not self-aware i catch this on myself of how it operates and then when other people see it they're like oh my god this is so beautiful because there's such an innocence to it yeah but like when i open twitter i'm energized there's a lot of love on twitter people say like i love to i agree i have you don't think i have a lot of love on twitter my fans pay my rent i mean i don't know your experience of twitter but when i look at your which is a fundamentally different thing i'm saying my experience from the so maybe you can tell me what your experience is like as a human so when i observe your twitter i think i i wouldn't call it love i would call it fun yes and because of that that's a different kind of like love emerges from that because people kind of learn that we're having this is like game night like yes uh you know we're we can talk shit a little bit we can uh and you can you can even like pull in you can make fun of people you can have the crazy uncle come over that is a huge trump supporter somebody who hates trump and you can have a little fun yes i get it's a different kind of thing i i wouldn't be able to um uh be the you're the host of game night yes yes so i wouldn't be able to host that kind of game you night your robots and you're asking what is fun and it just starts sparkling exactly what is fun [Laughter] so the robots in my life that survive are the ones that that don't that like survive that whole programming uh process so they're kind of like they're kind of like the idiot from dostoevsky they're very like simple-minded robots it's just one is moving a can from one table to another yeah that's game night for uh for our kin you know what my quotes is and i i i think about this every day and i mean it with every fiber of my being uh we are born knowing that life is a magical adventure and it takes them years to train us to think otherwise and i think that willy wonka approach it's a very camu approach it's something i believe with every fiber of my being i try to spread that as much as possible i think it is very sad i'm not being sarcastic i this it comes off as condescending i mean it at face value it's very sad how many people are not receptive to that and i think a lot of those functions how they were raised and i i could have very easily with my upbringing have not maintained that perspective and there's a lot of i have a lot of friends in recovery like aa and they have an expression um not my circus not my monkeys right that you can't really take on other people's problems on your own at a certain point they have to do the work themselves because you can only do so much externally and there are a lot of very damaged people out there and there are damaged people who revel in being damaged and they are damaged people who desperately desperately desperately want to be well who desperately want to be happy who desperately want to find joy so if i can be the one and as arrogant as it sounds i'll own it who does give them that fun and to tell them it doesn't have to be like you you thought like it could be it's going to hurt it's gonna suck but it's still a magical adventure and you're gonna be okay because you've been through worse like that if that could be my message i would own it all day long and so what does adventure look like for you because i mean it actually boils down to i still disagree with you i think trolling can can be and very often as destructive for society you yes i want to destroy society that is the goal i want i want to help many people ironically okay ironically yes what do i do with that okay so whatever you want do what that will is the hall of the law um like i just wanna so you're hosting game night and i just wanna play monopoly i wanna play uh what's the risk okay i want to play these games and you're saying lots of games yeah i was trying to think like of a friendlier game but they're all kind of aggressive uh battleship access and allies you know fun stuff but like uh so that's an adventure but you're saying that we want to destroy everything even like the rules of those games are are not like you voluntarily agree to those rules the point is if someone comes in who's not who no one invited to game night and are telling you no when you play monopoly you have to get money when you land in free parking or you don't yeah it's like who are you yeah we're having our own fun and you smell i don't know but there's there's a an aggressive there's an aggression let me let me speak to that which i think you're picking up on uh i had a friend named martha marcia excuse me she ran something called cuddle parties which people laughed at about a lot back in the day and the premise of the cuddle parties everyone got together and cuddled right and it's like ah then you stop to think about and you realize uh physical contact is extremely important and a lot of people don't have it and if this is a mechanism of people getting that it actually is going to have profound positive psychological consequences so after she explained it i'm like okay we laughed at this because it's weird and now that i think about this is wonderful and and i asked her about like like the tough question i go what if guys get turned on and on their website it even has a rule like do not fear the erection right because it's going to be a natural consequence of physical proximity and the point she goes she said this i think about us all the time people will take as much space as you let them it is incumbent on each of us to set our own boundaries we all have to learn when to say no you're making me uncomfortable if someone doesn't respect your right to have your boundary to be uncomfortable this person is not your friend now they can say i don't understand like why is this okay why is that not i let me know you better so i'm respectful of you but if they roll their eyes and they're like get over i'm gonna do what i want this person is not interested in knowing you as a human being okay that is the aggression it is you have to draw those lines i mean but that's a very positive way of phrasing that aggression i'm a very positive person but the trolling there's a destructive thing to it yes that hurts others yes but it's not bad people oh i only troll as a reaction or towards those in power okay so maybe let's talk about trolling a little bit because trolling when it can maybe you can correct me but i've seen it become a game for people that's enjoyable in itself i i'm not i'm not i i disagree with that but that's not a good thing if you are there just to hurt innocent people you are a horrible human being but doesn't trolling too easily become that uh i don't know about easily let me give you an example of the the where trolling came from the original troll was andy kaufman he was on the show taxi he was a stan he was a performance artist not a standard comedian and this is a quintessential example of trolling he had a character um where he was basically like a lounge singer he had these glasses on and just a terrible terrible singer and so on and so forth and he denied it was him and he came out and i'm blanking on the guy's name i can't believe it tony clifton yeah he came out in the audience and he goes you know my wife died a few years ago every time i look at my daughter sarah's eyes i could see my wife sarah come out here let's do a duet and sarah's like 11. sits on his lap they start singing duet her voice cracks he smacks her across the face what the hell are you doing you're making ass in front of these people they're they're she starts crying the audience is booing and goes don't bore you're just going to make her cry more now it ends this wasn't his daughter it wasn't even a child was an actress this was all set up he's exploiting their love of children in order to force them to be performers that is trolling no one is actually getting hurt it's a humorous the twisted exchange if you go online looking for weak people and you are there to denigrate them just for them being weak or in some way inferior to you that is the wrong approach i am best on the counter punch a lot of times people come to me and they'll be like i hope you die you're ugly you're disgusting and there's this great quote from billy idol which i'm going to mangle where he sums in the effect of i love it when people are rude to me then i can stop pretending to be nice then you start fights now it's a chance for me to finish it and make an example of this person but that's very very different from i'm gonna go around and humiliate people for the sake of doing it in my view and i can see how one would lead to the other yeah but that's my fundamental concern with it so i my dream is to put use technology create platforms that uh increase the amount of love in the world and to me trolling is doing the opposite so like andy kaufman is brilliant so i love obviously it sounds like i'm a robot saying i love humor okay humor is good one one zero one one one one but but like it's i just see like 4chan i see that you can often see that humor quickly turn yeah because what happens is a lot of low status people this is their one mechanism through sadism uh to feel empowered and then they can hide behind well i'm just joking as this that people do which is like they'll say like the shittiest thing right and then they feel lol after like as if i don't i don't even know like what is happening in the dark mind of yours because they are feeling powerless in their lives right and they see someone who they perceive as higher status or more powerful than them or even not appear and they through their words cause a reaction in this person so they feel like they are in a very literal sense making a difference on earth and they matter in a very dark way uh it's it's disturbing this is not i mean it's unfortunate that that term trolling is used for that as opposed to what andy kaufman does as opposed to what i do um it's it really is uh a sinister thing and it's something i'm not at all a fan of or how do we how do we fight that so like a neighboring concept of that is conspiracy theories which is i don't think they're neighboring at all well let me let me give myself a naive perspective maybe you can educate me on this from my perspective conspiracy theories are these constructs of ideas that go deeper and deeper and deeper into creating worlds where there's powerful pedophiles controlling things like these uh very sophisticated models of the world that you know in part might be true but in large part i would say are are figments of imagination that become really useful constructs and self-reinforcing self-reinforcing for then feeding like empowering the trolls to attack the powerful the conventionally powerful i i don't think that that's a function conspiracy theories now let's talk about conspiracy theories because one of my quotes is you take one red pill not the whole bottle this concept that everything in life is at the function of a small cadre of individuals would be for many people reassuring because as bad as it looks you know they whoever they are it's usually the jews aren't going to let it get that bad that they will pull back or the the black pill is that they are intentionally trying to destroy everything and there's nothing we can do and we're doomed and there's an amazing book by arthur herman called the idea of decline western history i it's one of my top 10 books where he goes through every 20 years how there's a different population that say it's the end of the world here's the proof and very often the proof is something that is kind of self-fulfilling where there's no it's not falsifiable and we both have to think of ways to falsify our claims from earlier yeah so it is a big danger it's a big danger online because very quickly if someone who you thought was good but now is bad on one aspect well they're controlled opposition or they've been uh taken over or they've been kind of uh appropriated by the bad people whoever those bad people would be um i don't know that i have a good answer for this i don't think it's as pervasive as people think the number of people who believe conspiracy theory right the i mean and also conspiracy theory is a term used to dismiss ideas that have some currency the constitutional convention was a conspiracy uh the founding fathers got together secretly under water secrecy in philadelphia said we're throwing out the articles of confederation we're making new government right yeah yeah and luther martin left and he told everyone this is a conspiracy and they're like yeah whatever luther morgan so and jeffrey epstein was a conspiracy harvey weinstein was a conspiracy bill cosby conspiracy they all knew they didn't care uh communist infiltration in america there's a great book by eugene lyons called the red decade they all knew they every atrocity that uh was done under stalinism was excused in the west and if you didn't believe it oh you've got this crazy anti-russian conspiracy so it's a term that is weaponized uh in a negative sense but that does not all imply that it does not have very negative real life consequences because it's kind of a cult of one right like i'm at home on my computer i bang to this ideology anyone who doesn't agree with me they're blind they're oblivious mom and dad my friends you don't get it we were warned about people like you and i think there's a very heavy correlation and i'm not a psychiatrist of course between that and certain types of mild melt illness like uh you know some kind of paranoid schizophrenia things like that because after a certain point if everything is a function this conspiracy it's it's there's no randomness or beauty in life yeah i mean i don't know if you can say anything interesting about it in the way of advice of how to take a step into conspiracy theory world without completely going like diving deep because it seems like that's what happens people can't look at jeffrey epstein i can tell you what the device i'd have seriously and rigorously without going because you can look at jeffrey epstein and say there's a deeper thing you can always go deeper right it's like jeffrey epstein was just the tool of uh the lizard people and the lizard people are well they say satanists in this case and somehow recently very popular pedophiles somehow always involved i'm not understanding any of that i legitimately i say this both humorously and seriously i need to look into it and i guess the bigger question i'm asking how does a serious human being uh somebody with a position at a respectable university like look at a conspiracy theory and look into it when i look at somebody like jeffrey epstein who had a role at mit yeah oh yeah and i and i think i'm not happy personally i didn't i wasn't there when jeffrey epstein was there i'm not happy with the behavior of people now about jeffrey epstein about the bureaucracy and the everybody's trying to keep quiet hoping it blows over without really looking into any like looking in a deep philosophical way of like how do we let this human being be among us can i give you a better example sure that that is kind of conspiratorial the speaker of the house the longest serving republican speaker of the house dennis hastert was a pedophile he went to jail the democrats don't throw this in the republicans faces every five minutes not even democratic activists i find that very very odd and not what i would predict now i'm not saying there's some kind of conspiracy but when it comes to things like sexual predation which is something that i'm very very concerned about i'm an uncle now my sister just had her second kid recently he's adorable um it's something that i don't understand if it feels as if there's a lot of people who want this to all go away now i think it's also because we don't have the vocabulary and framework to discuss it because when you start talking about things like children these kind of issues we want to believe it's all crap because it's for those of us who aren't in this kind of mindset the idea that this happens to kids and happens frequently is something so horrible yeah that we it's just like i don't even want to hear it and that does these children and adult survivors an enormous disservice so i don't know that i have any particular insight on this but see like how do you i mean the catholic church again there's all these topics that public school teachers are far more proportionally uh better as the children of the catholic church i mean i don't know what i you're right you're right um perhaps some uh i've been you know reading a lot about stalin and hitler yeah somehow it's more comforting yeah like to be here and then and then and then the atrocities that are happening now it's a little bit more difficult because there was a new york times article interrupted where they were had a people tracking down child pornography and i think the article said they didn't have enough people just to cover the videotapes of infants being raped and we can even wrap our heads around like reading lolita like okay she's 14 12. okay it's still a female an infant it's it's something that again like with the stalin example we sat down here for a hundred years we would never think of something like this think of in a sexual context it makes no sense yeah um so and the fact that this is international okay we eliminated completely in america well then they're gonna go find this there's infants all over the world there's video cameras over the world so then it has to become a conspiracy because i someone has to film it i'm filming it you're buying it your kid it is literally a conspiratorial not in the sense of like a mafia conspiracy or some government illuminati but there is our networks designed to produce this product see but like what i'm i'm trying to do now i mean part of the one of the nice things with like a podcast and other things i'm involved with is i'm removing myself from having any kind of boss so i can do whatever yes oh it's so it's so wonderful that just happened to me it's it's the most wonderful thing ever so i could do i can actually in moderation consider like look into stuff careful though i was going to write a book about this and people pointed out you sure want to do this research because if you start googling around for this kind of stuff it's on your computer oh in that sense yeah i'm more concerned about you know it's the nietzsche thing looking into the abyss like you want to be very yeah i believe i can do this kind of thing in moderation without slipping oh yes into the depths of course i think that's that's intelligence that's uh like i recently quote unquote looked into like the ufo community the um extraterrestrial whatever community i think it always frustrated me that the scientific community like rolled their eyes at all the ufo sightings all that kind of stuff even though there could be fascinating beautiful physical fun like first of all there could be like lightning or the ball lightning right that's at the very basic level is a fascinating thing and also it could be something like i mean i i don't know but this could be something interesting like worth looking into my grandfather was an air traffic controller back in the soviet union and he said we saw this stuff all the time these are planes that were not moving or whatever things that were not moving according to anything we knew about so it's absolutely real he's not some jerk with an iphone in his backyard this is a a military professional who understood technology who knew where the secret bases were so if he's telling me it's something doesn't mean it's martians but he's telling me there's something there and there are many examples of of these like military people these aren't some laymen who sees a story they're legit people yeah and and so it's you you can dismiss when you're talking about professionals who are around aircraft all the time who are familiar with aircraft at the highest levels and they're seeing things that they can't explain it's they're clearly not stupid and they're clearly not under form so might there's different ways to dismiss ideas for example i i'm uh you were saying that trolling is a good mechanism i'm against that but i'm not dismissing it by like rolling my eyes i'm considering legitimately that you're way smarter than me and you understand the world better than me like i'm allow myself to consider that possibility and thinking about it like maybe that's true like seriously considering it that's what that's i feel the way people should approach intelligent people serious quote-unquote people scientists should approach conspiracy theories like look at it carefully you know is first of all is it possible that the earth is flat it's not trivial to show that the earth is not flat it's a very good exercise you should go through it yes but once you go through it you realize that uh based on a lot of data and a lot of evidence and there's a lot of different experiments you could do yourself actually to show that the earth is not flat okay the same kind of process can be taken for a lot of different conspiracy theories and it's helpful and without slipping into the depths of of lizard people running everything that's where i i've now listened to two episodes of um of alex jones's show because he goes crazy deep into um into different kind of world views that i was not familiar with right and i don't know what to make of it i mean the reason i've been listening to it is because um there's been a lot of discussions about platforming of different people and i've been thinking about what is censorship mean i've been thinking about it whether because joe rogan uh said he's gonna have alex on again and then i enjoyed it as a fan just the entertainment of it but then i actually listened to alex and i was thinking is this human being dangerous for the world like is the ideas he's saying dangerous for the world i'm more concerned with the russian conspiracy that we had for three years and the claim that our election was not legitimate and that everyone in the trump white house is a stooge of putin uh and the people who said this had no consequences for this alex jones doesn't have the respect that they do uh these are both areas of concern for me but he he might if there's if he's given more platforms so like the the the the people who've and i'd be curious if i'm also a little bit i don't know what to think about the idea that russians hacked the election the it seems too easily accepted in the mainstream media hillary clinton said that how they did it was they had ads on the dark web now you and i both know what the dark web is so the possibility of ads in the dark web having an influence from a proportional influence on the election is literally zero perhaps i should look into it more carefully but i've found very little good data on exactly what did the russians do to hack elections like like technically speaking what are we talking about here like as opposed to these kind of weird like the best thing there's a couple books and like reporting on like farms control farms troll farms but let's see the data like how many exactly what are we talking about like what were they doing relative not just like some anecdotal discussions of but like relative to the bigger the size of facebook like if there's a few people several hundred say the posting different political things on facebook relative to the full size of facebook let's look at the full size like right you're thinking like a scientist the actual impact like the because it's fascinating the social dynamics of viral information of videos when when uh donald trump retweets something i think that's understudied the effect of that uh like he retweeted a clip with joe rogan on uh with and mike tyson where mike tyson says that he finds fighting orgasmic i don't understand that but it'd be fascinating to think like what is the ripple effect on the social uh dynamic of our society from retweeting a clip about mike ty what's your favorite um um trump tweet i i tuned the model a long time ago unfortunately i have um it's the this goes to the you and i have a different relationship with donald trump you appreciate the art form of trolling non-sexual non-sexual yeah so i i tend to prefer uh bill clinton he's more my type no i'm just kidding uh i don't know you don't like that consent stuff no because no uh no you appreciate the art form of trolling and and uh donald trump is is uh a a master he's the da vinci of trolling so i tend to think that trolling is ultimately destructive for society and then donald trump takes nothing seriously he's playing a game he's making a game out of everything takes a lot of things seriously i think he's very committed to international peace i say i i shouldn't speak so strongly i think i think it takes actually yes a lot of things seriously i meant on twitter and the game of politics yeah he is um [Music] he only takes irreverently yeah yeah and um i appreciate it i just would like to focus on like genuine real expressions of humanity especially positive well this is my love this is my favorite tweet my fans got it laser etched and put in a block of lucite for me and he said every time i speak of the losers and haters i do so with great affection they cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up that's an actual trump tweet it's my favorite one and that's kind of nice that's love that's love that's kind of nice that i mean exclamation point even um i broke legs what is love yeah the sparks are flying but uh i have to kind of analyze that from like a literary perspective but it seems like there's love in there like a little bit like it's a little bit light-hearted because he's saying even when i'm going after them don't take it so seriously yeah that's that's nice it is nice acknowledging the game of it yes that's nice uh he's not always something he's very very vicious yeah very vicious he's done things that i i can tell you about that i'm like this is a bad person what do you think about one of the okay listen i'm not i for people listening i do not have trump derangement syndrome i'm i don't i see i try to look for the good and the bad in everybody one thing perhaps it's irrational but perhaps because i've been reading history i the one triggering thing for me is the delaying of elections i believe in elections and [Music] this is this is the part that you probably disagree with but i you know i believe in the value of people voting and i just seen too many dictators the the place where they finally the big switch happens when you question the legitimacy of elections who's been questioning the legitimacy of elections for the last three years i've only heard donald trump do it last like year but the last three years you're saying somebody else you don't think not my president illegitimate we're not going to normalize him as president russia hacked this election impeached you're not a real president you don't think that's questioning legitimacy of 2016. no it's a good uh i haven't been paying attention enough but i would i would imagine that argument has been that i haven't actually heard too many people but i imagine that's been a popular oh very much yeah okay i but nevertheless that's a part that didn't uh that's not a statement that gained power enough to say that um barack obama will keep being president or hillary clinton should be president newsweek had that article how hillary clinton could still be president newsweek no but she's not that's what i'm saying my worry isn't my worry isn't uh saying that the election was illegitimate and people whining and mass scale and then the fox news or cnn reporting for years or books being written for years my worry is legitimately martial law a person's ma stays president so here's the issue like there's a there's a shift that i have not i i i did a book on north korea i'm not someone who thinks dictatorship should be taken lightly i'm not someone who thinks it can't happen here uh i i think a lot of times people are desperate for dictatorship so i am with you and i think this is something if you're going to hand wave it away everyone else hand waved it away hitler's never going to be chancellor he's a lunatic he's a joke he's a joke that he they couldn't find a publisher from mineconf in english because this is a guy from some random minor party in germany spouting nonsense who's going to read this crap you know so i i completely agree with you uh you don't think we're there my point is donald trump this year had every uh pathway open to him to declare martial law the cities were being burnt down he could have very easily sent in the tanks uh and people would have been applauding him from his side he feels so good right now but am i wrong though no i what he did he tweeted out to mayor wheeler of portland he said call me we will we will solve this in minutes but you have to call and he sat in his hands and they said oh it's his fault the city is burning down he's not doing anything and he goes i'm not doing anything until you ask me to do it so i think that is even if you think he's an aspiring dictator that is at least a sign that there is some restraint on his aspirations can i just take that in as a beautiful um like moment of hope so i'm i'm gonna remember this ted cruz beautiful ted i'm gonna i'm gonna remember that i mean uh i i should say that perhaps i'm irrationally this is the one moment where i feel myself being a little i i don't like it i think there's an asymmetry because it's kind of like okay either i if i leave the house it's like russian roulette yeah maybe it's like a one and six shot i'm pulling the trigger i'm killing myself but that's one in six that's not and and the consequences are so dire that a little paranoia would go a long way there's something that you can't go back yeah you it's an asymmetry yeah and the the thing is the thing that makes donald trump new to me and again i'm a little naive in these things but he surprised me in how many ways he just didn't play by the rules yeah and he's made me a little ant in this ant colony think like well do you have to play by the rules at all right like why are we having elections why just say like it's coronavirus time like it's it's uh not healthy to have elections like we shouldn't be like i could if i put my dictator hat on nancy pelosi said that joe biden shouldn't debate yeah uh did she yes she says she shouldn't dignify trump with the debate he's the president he could be the worst president on earth evil despicable monster i'll take that as an argument so she's playing politics but she's i don't think that's playing politics i think when there's a certain point where things get and when things get uh when you start attacking institutions for the the emergencies at the moment and acting arbitrarily that is when things are the slippery slope yeah so you're saying debates is one of the institutions like that's one of the traditions to have the debates i think the debates are extremely important uh and now i don't think that someone's a good debater is going to make a good president i mean that's that's a big problem but you're just saying this is attacking just yet another tradition yet another you know like how if you're dating if you're married to someone and someone throws out the word divorce you can't unring that bell you threw it out there yeah i'm saying you don't throw things out like that unless you really are ready to go down this road and i think that is there's nothing in the constitution about debates we've only had them since 1980 but still i think they are extremely important it's also a great chance for joe biden to tell him to his face you're full of crap here's what you did here's what you did here's what you did it's so fascinating that you're both you acknowledge that and you you also see the value of tearing down the entire thing so you're both worried about no debates or at least in your voice in your tone there's a great quote by chesterton i'm not a fan of him at all but he says before you tear down a fence make sure you know why they put it up first so i am for tearing it all down but there's something called a controlled demolition like building seven um or there's allegedly we knew we were in tel aviv um and hashtag building seven we knew we were intelligent wow you're faster than me you're you're operating in a different level i need to upgrade my operating system i told you when it was 95. yeah um building seven if you're gonna uh it's like indiana jones right if you're gonna tear pull something away make sure you have something in place first as opposed to just breaking it and then just especially in politics it because it escalates and when things escalate without any kind of response it it can go in a very bad that's when napoleon comes in so what's your prediction about the the biden trump debates again i just have this weird maybe we'll return to maybe not in this how do we put more love into the world and like one of the things that worries me about the debates is it'll be um it'll be the the world's greatest troll against the the grandpa and the porch who grabbed his pants yeah yeah and it'll it will not put more love into the world it it will it will create more mockery like uh joe biden did a great job against paul ryan in 2012. paul ryan was no lightweight no one thought he was a lightweight joe biden handed sarah pale in her ass in 2008 which isn't as easy to do as you think because she's a female so you're going to come off as bullying that's something you have to worry about so the guy isn't um i think he is in the stages of like cognitive decline um so i think it's going to be interesting uh i want it to be um like mike tyson beating up a child because it'll be a source of amusement to me um but i don't know how it's gonna go because it's possible that joe biden will be the mike tyson yes because in his last debate with bernie he was perfectly fine and again the guy was a center for decades and i don't think anyone if you looked at joe biden in 2010 would have thought this guy is going to be have his ass handed him a debate you wouldn't think that at all so i don't know who we're going to see plus he's got a lot of room to attack trump so i'm sure he's gonna come strapped and ready and he's gonna have his talking points and watch trump dance try to tap dance around him and if he's in a position i know the rules of the debate are to actually nail him to the wall it might actually i'm sure he's gonna have a lot of lines too the problem is trump is the master counter puncher so he like when hillary's you know had her line she's like well it's a good thing that donald trump isn't in charge of our legal system he's like yeah he'd be in jail it's like it's like oh like you lady you set him up that's painful to watch yeah those those debates i mean there's something uh i think it's actually analogous um i've come to think of it uh your conversation with me right now some sleepy joe i'm playing the role of sleepy joe i actually connect to uh joe because they're also incontinent there's like these weird pauses i do the same i do the same thing it annoys the shit out of me that like uh in mid-sentence i'll start saying a different thing and take a tangent i'm not as slow and drunk as i sound always i swear i'm more intelligent underneath lower but less drunk exactly but the result one of those is true but not both yeah and and and trump just like you are a master counter puncher so it's going to be messy here's the other thing in all seriousness chris wallace is the moderator chris wallace has interviewed trump several times and he was a tough tough questioner so i don't think he's going to come in there with softball questions i think he's really going to try to nail trump down which is tough to do i like him a lot yeah he's rea and he's like mr president sir that's not accurate blah blah he's done it and trump gets very frustrated because he doesn't just let him say whatever he wants and he he hits him with the follow-up he's he's uh i guess he's on fox news and he i listen to his sunday program uh every once in a while uh he gives me hope that i don't know there's something in the voice like that he's not bought he's i i there's no question he's going to take this seriously which i think is the best you could hope for in a moderator like it feels like there's people that might actually take the mainstream media into a place that's going to be better in the future and like we need people like him you mean like rob spear what do you mean like taking the mainstream media to a better future like bring out the guillotines okay see you you put your anarchist hat back on i don't think robster is much of an anarchist but yeah i get what you're saying yeah you don't think there should be a centralized place for news there isn't now well that's what mainstream media is supposed to represent broken well it's not whatever uh what would he call that a place where people traditionally said was the like the legitimate source of truth no that's what the media was supposed to represent no i said i that's their that's their big branding uh accomplishment it's okay that was never true yeah because if we here's what happens we remember the spanish-american war remember the maine we have to take cuba yellow journalism willie randolph first right then record scratch and then we're all objective like when did this transition happen according to people when you were saying that the kaiser is uh the worst human being on earth when you were downplaying uh stalin and down playing hitler's atrocities when you were saying we had to be in vietnam at what point wmds when did it change it never changed you just are better con artists at a certain point and now the mask is dropping yeah but don't you think there's uh at its best like investigative journalism can uncover truth in a way that um that like reddit uh subreddits can't you know read it sure i agree at its best absolutely that's not even dispute but like don't you think uh like fake it until you make it is the right way to do it meaning like the take the news no no no i meant the new saying like we dream of doing of arriving at the truth and reporting the truth they don't say that cnn had an advertisement that said this is an apple we only report facts that's a lie no that's now and now it's clear things have changed and they haven't changed you're just more you're more aware of chicanery but okay so the how many people died in iraq because saddam hussein was about to launch wmds who had consequences for this no one this isn't a minor thing this is lots of dead people yeah and also i mean dead people it's horrible but also the money which has like we said economic effects marian williamson i think it was it was had trump both of them had the great point that goes that's like a trillion dollars how many schools would that build how many roads did that build even here why are we building hospitals in iraq that we destroyed when we could building hospitals here it makes no sense it's horrifying so who's responsible for that like who um alex jones now meant for well uh so who's responsible for arriving at the truth of that of speaking to the money spent i think this is wars in iraq this is one of the great things about social media twitter you have faith in twitter not not specifically twitter but yeah social media as a whole what anyone could be here's a great another great example before if you were talking about police brutality or these riots you would have to perceive it in the way it was framed and presented to nicholas sandman is another example uh brianna taylor all these things well you're not footage of her you would have to perceive in the way that it's edited and presented to you by the corporate press now everyone is a video who has video camera everyone has their perspective and it's very useful when these incidents happen where you could see the same incident from several angles and you don't need don lemon or chris wallace to tell me what this means i can see with my own eyes yeah i've been very pleasantly surprised about the power see like people the mob again gets in the way they get emotional and they destroy like the the ability for people to reason but you're right that truth is unobstructed on social media like if you're if you're careful and patient you can see the truth yeah like for example data on coven some of the best sources are doctors like if you want to know the truth about the coronavirus of what's happening is uh there's follow people on twitter yeah there's certain people there yes like sourcing for me versus the cdc and the wa show it's that's that's fast i mean it's well it's kind of anarchy right it's yes it is it's anarchy yes i mean well there's some censorship and all that kind of stuff you have censorship under anarchy in the sense that you're talking about like people be kicked off on twitter that's a drawing somebody okay so i mean it's a private company private company most people wouldn't say twitter's working but they that's probably because they take for granted how well it's working and they're just complaining about the small part of it that's broken right okay another question about don't you feel better no by the way i mean i had a personal gripe with the situation about the um not a personal gripe but i felt overly emotional about um the possibility that there will be some of donald trump messing with the election process but you made me feel better like saying like he if he had a bunch of opportunities to um to do what like to do what i would have done if i was a dictator i would um the first time those rides over george floyd i would instituted um martial law do you know what i remember very vividly is after 9 11 and everyone was waiting for george bush to give his speech and he had 98 approval rating and i remember very vividly because if he had said we're suspending the constitution everyone had cheered for him like he couldn't get enough support at that time and he didn't do it and i can't say anything really good about george w bush i'm not a fan of his to say the least so i think you and i and you know other people who are familiar with you know uh totalitarian regimes to some extent from our ancestry or whatever from research should always be the ones freaking out and warning but we should also be aware of we got a ways to go before it's hitler and thankfully uh there are a lot of dominoes that have to fall into place before hitler it's like the game secret hitler it's a board game before hitler becomes hitler like it's not e especially in america there's lots of things that have to happen before you really get to that point i mean fdr was for all intensive purposes of dictator but even then the worst you could say and this is not something that you take lightly was internment of japanese citizens but they weren't murdered uh they weren't you know uh you know under lock and key in the sense of like in cells so things could have gotten a lot worse for him we have to i mean hitler is such a horrible person to bring up because mussolini you know yeah mussolini is better because hitler is so closely connected to the atrocities of the holocaust right there's all the stuff that led up to the war and the war itself say that there was no uh holocaust hitler will probably be viewed differently i should yes i should think so well i mean but you think that's a very controversial stance you think hitler viewed differently if it wasn't for the holocaust well i mean but it's a funny thing that the the the i would say the death of how many 40 50 million i mean i don't know how you calculate it as is not seen as as bad as the 6 million oh yeah because of mountain and stalin yeah yeah and it but it's interesting uh working on it you're working on yeah the next book i'm talking reminding what's good i'm i'm glad a good writer is because i'm not reminded my last book the new right you know i had to deal with some like the nazis and one of the points they make is how come everyone knows about the holocaust but no one knows about the holodomor and they're right we should know about this because it is a great example of both how the western media were depraved but also what human beings are capable of and those scars are still you know many americans think russia and ukraine are the same thing you know that like oh trump's in bed with ukrainians trump's about the russians they think it's the same thing is for us it's complete lunacy but this is the kind of thing where pol pot is another example uh where people have no clue of what has been done to their fellow man on the face of this earth and they should know how much of that do you lay at the hands of communism how much are you with like a jordan pearson who has as intricately connecting the atrocities like like you're saying 1930s ukraine where people were starved um i recently said my grandmother recently passed away and she she looked she survived that as like as a kid which is it's fat those people i mean just they're tough they're tough like that whole region is tough because they survived that and then right after the occupation of nazis yeah of germans um how much do you lay that at communism as an ideology versus um stalin the man uh i think you know lenin was building concentration camps you know while he was around in slave labor um i i don't i think it's clearly both there are certain variants of communism that were far like khrushchev you know and gorbachev uh the reason the soviet union fell apart and this is kind of i'm going to spoil the end of the book there's an amazing book called revolution 1989 it's like the most beautiful book i've ever read by victor sebastian he's a hungarian author and basically what happens in 1989 poland has their elections and then then in 1990 they kind of let in the labor people into the government and people start crossing borders you know in the eastern bloc and you had hanukkah from eastern germany and uh chances from romania colin gorbachev because those are the two toughest ones by communist standards they go they're they're just escaping we're gonna we're gonna lose everything you gotta send in the tanks like you did in hungary like you did in czech republic surviving 68 and gorbachev goes i'm not sending the tanks and they go dude if you don't sing in the tanks it's all done and he goes nope i'm not that kind of guy and they were right i mean they uh coaches was personally shot with his wife up against the wall hanukkah i forget what happened to him but it they all self-liberated my friend who was born in czech czechoslovakia his mom was pregnant you know under communism and she never even imagined he'd be free and he was born under free uh and they were all looking around all these countries that self-liberated because they're like this is a trick right they're just they're trying to figure out who's like not good so that they can arrest us on mass and they didn't so although even within communism there are bad guys and better guys but we talked about anarchy we talk about democracy do you see like there's democratic socialism conversations going on in the popular culture socialism is seen as like evil or for some people great sure what like what are your thoughts about is in a political ideology evil so you're on the evil side yes fundamentally yes what what what is it you know what yeah what makes it evil what's like structurally if you were to try to analyze like sure this i say three ways morally no person has the right to tell another person how to live their life um economically it's not possible to make calculations under socialism it's only the price the prices that are information that tells me oh this is we need to produce more of this we need to produce less of this without prices being able to adjust and give information to producers and and consumers you have no way of being able to produce uh effectively efficiently and also it is uh it turns people against each other when you force people to interact when you force them into relationships when you force them into jobs and you don't give them any choice when there's a monopoly uh the consequence of monopoly everyone's familiar with ostensibly under capitalism but somehow when it's a government monopoly all those economic principles don't work doesn't make any sense but there's force in democracy too it's just you're saying there's a there's a bit more force in uh in socialism yeah but that's interesting that you say that there's not enough information i mean that's ultimately you need to have really good data yes to achieve the goals of the system even even if there's no corruption right you just need to have the information right which you can't and capitalism provides you um like really strong real-time real-time information that um and if like capitalism at its best and cleanest which is like perfect information is available there's no manipulation of information that's what you know that's one of the problems okay can we talk about some candidates the ones we got and possible alternatives so one question i have is why do we have within this system why do we have the candidates we have is it seems um maybe you can correct me highly unsatisfactory like the like is anyone actually excited about our current candidates i'm kind of excited because no matter who wins the elections can be hilarious so that is something that i'm excited about from uh from a human perspective yeah is that what the whole system is uh so that's the one theory of the case is the entire thing is optimized for viewership yeah and uh excitement by definitions of like the reality show kind of excitement i think it is if you look at what happened with brett kavanaugh this is not a career that would draw people who are you might say quality because no matter who they are there would be a huge incentive from the other team to denigrate them and humiliate them in the worst possible ways because as the two teams lose their legitimacy among gen pop it's going to get harder and harder for them to maintain any kind of claims to authority which is something i like but which does kind of play out in you know certain nefarious ways so people the best of the best are not going to want to be politicians yeah because like i could have a job or have a job interview and i'm running yahoo or whatever or i could for 18 months have to eat you know corn dogs looking like i'm going down on someone and shake hands and have all this my family and on social media daily called the worst things for what and then i'm still not guaranteed the position but the flip side of that like from my perspective is the competition is weak meaning like you need a certain a minimum amount of eloquence clearly that i don't uh the bar which i did not pass i don't think either of them would be considered particularly eloquent biden or trump no i know but that's what i'm saying the competition like if if you were um wanted to be become a politician if you wanted to run for president the opportunity is there like if you were at all competent like if you had so like andrew yang is an example of somebody who has a bunch of ideas is somewhat uh eloquent like young energetic it feels like there should be thousands of andrew yangs like that would enter the domain and he went nowhere well he j well i i wouldn't say he went nowhere he generated quite a bit of excitement he just didn't go very far that's okay you don't have to run for president to generate excitement with your ideas you could be a podcast host i'm not even joking that's right that's right that's right and he's both andrew yang oh he's a podcast yeah he has a podcast called yang speaks no okay cool [Laughter] oh wow the music of the way you said yeah cool is the way my mom talks to me when i tell her with something exciting going on in my life oh that's nice honey oh you made a robot that's cool that makes coffee oh you're still single though aren't you ah i wonder why i wonder why make yourself a robot wife give me some robot grandchildren um okay but first of all okay let me ask you about andrew yanks he represents fresh energy you don't find him fresh or energetic you know like is there any candidate you wish was um in the mix that was in the mix you wish was one of the last two remaining yeah people like marion williamson i thought was great uh tulsi i thought was great amy klobuchar got a bad rap i think she held her own um smart she wasn't particularly funny and that's okay i think she was not threatening to a lot of people what did you like about them i guess it's named all women that's interesting it wasn't even intentional um tulsi i like that she was aggressive has a good resume and is not um staying the course for the establishment marion williamson i like because she comes from a place from what it seems of genuine compassion maybe she's a sociopath i don't know i read her book and it actually affected me profoundly because it's very rare when you read a book and there's even that one idea that blows your mind and that you kind of think about all the time and there was one of that such idea in her book about um she was teaching something called the course in miracles in hollywood i think she still teaches it and this was during the 80s the high the aids crisis and all these young men in the prime of their life were dropping like flies and she's trying to give him hope well good luck they're dying no one cares and they're like you can't tell us that they're going to cure this like you're that's a lie and she goes what if i told you they're not going to cure it what if i told you it's going to be to like diabetes they cut off your foot and you're going to go blind would that be something that you can hope for and when you put it like that it's like yeah like if you're talking to him like a homeless junkie and you're like you could be a doctor you're a lawyer or a lawyer like cool story like you could have a studio apartment with a terrible roommate and a shitty job but when you're on the street you know cooking need breakfast in a teaspoon and you hear that you're like wait would that really be so bad is that really so much worse than this no and it becomes something so when she put it in those terms i'm like wow this woman that really did a number on me in terms of teaching people how to be hopeful small steps but it's but it's also then it becomes less of i need a miracle to be like oh this is really magical yeah it's and it's absurd to think it's impossible what about what's your take on unity 2020 that brett weinstein uh pushed forward it i i it was doa uh he couldn't even stand up to twitter dead on the rival in rival he couldn't even stand up to twitter let alone or to facebook they got blocked let alone hugely problematic by the way that twitter would block that not at all um i don't know why they blocked it but i believe i don't know problematic means that's a word that does a lot of work uh that people wanted to do conceptually um the idea that like unity is like taking the rejects from each party and we're gonna like have something that no one likes and therefore it's gonna be a compromise is absurd the last time we had this kind of unity ticket was the civil war when you had andrew johnson from the democrats and lincoln from the republicans this was not something that ended well uh particularly nicely for both halves of the country so that that's the way you see it as like the way i saw i i guess i haven't looked carefully at it i haven't either to be fair yeah the way i saw it is emphasizing centrists which is uh how's celsius centrist tulsa was involved yes he's trying to push tulsi and like jesse ventura or something oh so oh okay i don't know i don't know the specific as a scientist you also know centrism is not a coherent term in politics but see now you're like uh uh what is it pleading to authority no i'm treating my ego no no i'm pleading to how you approach data if someone is saying the mean is accurate that only mean i mean the mean could be anywhere it's a function of what's around it doesn't mean it's true i don't even know what uh census is supposed to mean but what it means to me there's no idea essentia centrist there's more of a center right or center left to me what that means is somebody who is a liberal or conservative but is um open-minded and uh empathetic to the other side joe biden had the crime bill joe biden voted for republican supreme court justices joe biden voted for a balanced budget joe biden voted for bush's war he and i'm sure probably haven't looked this up the patriot act yeah if you want a centrist you have joe biden yeah okay he's worked very well with the republicans that argument could be made of course they'll everybody will always uh resist that argument you it's undeniable in fact during the campaign some uh um uh activists started yelling at him at a town hall not yelling just saying hey we need open borders joe biden says i'm not for open borders go vote for trump and literally turned his back on the man and this is during the primaries where it would behoove you to try to appeal to the base and of course you can probably also make the argument that donald trump is center right if not center left well i mean he's he's very uh unique as a personality right but if you look at his record and his first name is rhetoric you can say is not centrist at all but in terms of how he governs the budgeting i mean has been very moderate it certainly hasn't been like draconian budget cuts uh the supreme court you could say okay he's hard right immigration you could say in certain capacities he's hard right but in terms of pro-life what has he done there in terms of you know so it's in many other aspects he's been very much this kind of me too uh republican but certainly the rhetoric it's very hard to make in the case that he's a centrist so you don't like uh is there any other idea you find compelling like you what i like about unity 2020 is just an idea for uh a different way for like a different party a different path forward so ideas just like anarchy is an interesting idea that's that leads to discourse at least i don't think it's interesting at all and here's why i think it's interesting uh sweden has eight parties in its parliament iceland population's like 150 000 they've got nine i think it was czech republic has nine britain has five um so the claim that two uh parties is the sensorious of speech but three oh now all of a sudden it makes no sense doesn't import to the data number one number two is donald trump demonstrated that you can be basically a third-party candidate seize the machinery of a existing party and appropriate to your own hands as bernie sanders almost did bernie sanders has never been a democrat uh major credit to him for that's not easy to be elected as senator as an independent he's done it repeatedly so these are two examples of ossified elites uh right for the picking so to have a third party makes uh no real sense speaking of which party you talk about quite a bit uh and uh let's look this is a personal challenge to you let me bring up the libertarian party yeah and the personal challenge is to go five minutes without mocking them okay in discussing uh and discussing this idea so first of all what i'm being troubled there was an episode where chandler had to not make fun of people like can you go one day chandler and phoebe starts telling him about like this ufo she saw and it's like that's very interesting nice for you this is exactly that okay so a true master would be able to play within the game within the constraints so um no i i'm pretty sure you'll still mock them but no no i'll stick to the rules five minutes easy so first of all speaking broadly about libertarianism can you speak to that how you feel about it and then also to the libertarian party which is the implementation of it in our current system so i think libertarianism is a great idea and i think there's many libertarian ideas that have become much more mainstream which i'm very very happy about i remember there was an article in either new york or new yorker magazine in the early 90s where they talked about the cato institute which is a libertarian think tank and they referred to the fact that keda was against war and against like regulation with a wacky consistency because they didn't know how to reconcile these two things i remember what the two things were but i remember that expression wacky consistency and it wasn't eve we were all taught and this is very much before the internet that there's two tribes and if you're pro-life you have to hate gays and if you're for socialized medicine that also means you have to be for uh um you know free speech it was just this very and like there's a whole menu and you got to sign into all of them and that menu is terrible they hate america they want to destroy it oh my god those are horrible evil this is the menu you want and the libertarian party to some extent and just libertarian as a whole said you know you can do the chinese buffet and take a little from columbia live from column b and have an ideology that is coherent and consistent analogy ideology of peace and non-aggression and things like that the libertarian party takes its model from like the early progressive and populist parties from the early 20th century which were not very effective in terms of getting people elected but were extremely effective in terms of getting the two major parties to appropriate and adopt their ideas and implement them and in britain as well the liberal party got destroyed and became taken over by labor as the uh alternative party to the tories um and have those ideas basically become mainstreamed so i think that and deliberate my friend who passed away eric i miss him dearly was their webmaster and his whole point is if you don't think about it in terms of a party in terms of getting people elected but if you think of it as a party in terms of getting people educated about alternatives then there's enormous use for that that was his perspective and i don't think that's an absurd perspective but here's some libertarian ideas that have become extremely mainstream war should be a last resort uh this is something we're taught as kids and we all say but for many years it's been like they don't think of it as the last resort it's like something's bad well it's like the first instinct now it's like let's really give it a week just a week like what's going on in syria is there really gonna be a genocide the kurds you know things like that so that's one another thing is drug legalization uh this was you know when you and i were kids oh it's crazy it's only hippies want to smoke pot now it's like with it i was on a grand jury and the point out people make is are you sure that this 16 year old who's selling wheat let's say selling should his life be ruined should he be imprisoned with rapists and murderers like if you say yes say yes but you but are you sure you have to acknowledge that that's what you're meaning and then a lot of people are like wait a minute there's got to be a third option then he has no consequences or he's imprisoned with the rapist like i'm not comfortable with either of these uh and i think the other one is an increasing skepticism this libertarians were on top of this first and the hard left of the police uh as of now asset forfeiture steals more from people than burglaries what people don't know about what that's their forfeiture is if the cops come to your house and they suspect you you haven't been convicted of using your car or your house or whatever in terms of selling drugs they can take whatever they want and then you have to sue to prove your innocence and get your property back it's a complete violation of due process people don't realize what's going on it's a great way for the cops to increase their budgets and it's legal and libertarians were like the first big ones saying guys this is not american and this is crazy and now increasingly people on conservatives and left is like wait a minute this this is even if you are selling drugs like they take your house what are you talking about so i think those are some uh mechanisms that libertarianism though but not by name has become far more popular yeah it's interesting so the idea yeah coherent set of ideas uh that that eventually get integrated into a two-party system yeah the war that's an interesting one you're right i would want i wonder what the thread there is i wonder how it connects to 911 and so on but i i think that i i think the patriot act patriot act for people who are politically savvy were like oh okay this is not a joke this is really a crazy infringement our freedoms and both parties are falling over each other to sign into law and the orwellian name you don't want to how can you be against patriotism what kind of person you know what i mean so that i think for a lot of people especially both civil libertarians on the left and a lot of conservatives who are constitutionalists are like wait a minute this isn't i'm not comfortable with this and i'm also not comfortable with how comfortable everyone in washington is with it you're right probably libertarian libertarians and libertarianism is a place of ideas which is why i have a connection to it like i like i i like the every time i listen to those folks i like them i feel connected to them i would even sometimes depending on the day call myself a libertarian well we're on the spectrum so that's why we're on the spectrum yeah but like when i look at the people that actually rise to the top in terms of like the people who represent the party this is where like five minutes ran out right you can i could go i'm allowed you can go why are they so weird why aren't strong candidates emerging that represent as political like representatives or as like uh famous speakers yeah like that represent the ideology i think libertarians tend to i think jonathan height in his book uh in his research he's a political scientist and he does a lot of things about how people come to their political conclusions and what factors uh um force people to reach conclusions and he found that libertarians are the least empathetic and most rationalistic of all the groups and by that he means like they think in terms of logic as opposed to like people's feelings and and that has positives and has negatives uh it would and we have the a b testing with ron paul ron paul ran for president as a libertarian nominee he was the nominee he got pretty much nowhere in 1998. then he ran as a return to republican party as a congressman for many years from texas he ran for the presidency in 2008 and 2012. and in 2008 he stood on stage with rudy giuliani and told him that they were here in 911 because we're over there which would have been a shocking horrifying taboo a few years earlier many people were like holy crap this is amazing julian was all offended and ron paul's like i took some guts by the way yeah it did i heard that it was so refreshing that not what he said but the fact that he said something that took guts it made me realize how rare it is yes for peop for politicians but even people to say something that takes guts well it's also the idea that like you can't even if you think america has a right to invade any country on earth as much as it wants and kill people as a consequence of war and blow up their buildings and destroy their country you can't with a straight face not expect us to have consequences even if they're consequences from evil people even if we're 100 of the good guys and their 100 the bad guys those bad guys some of them are still going to try to do something what happens next you know what i mean so that kind of concept that there's any american culpability was where america where you know we're the good guys by definition we're not culpable to have people start thinking about what if there's another way you know what if we're not there and then they're not here and we're kind of doing a back door we're talking so different scenarios so the fact that he got so much more traction as a republican the fact that donald trump who came out of nowhere became the not only the candidate but the president tells people it's like getting a book deal right you can either go there's three choices you can either self-publish mainstream publisher or independent publisher the independent publisher is the worst of all choices because you're not getting a big advance they're not going to be able to promote you a lot and they don't get the distribution mainstream i've done mainstream myself right with self i don't have the the cred the respectability of a mainstream for the cachet it can't be uh new york times bestseller right let's take six a lot of work but i get a lot more of the profit uh if it looks good on the shelf on amazon looks identical so on and so forth with the mainstream the benefits and costs are pretty much obvious to most people so the same thing it's like you can either be an independent like ross perot or you could be just cs won the party apparatus which the benefits are enormous there but in terms of going third party i don't know the libertarian party apparatus other than maybe some ballot access is really that efficacious and then you're gonna have a lot of baggage because if you hear independent jesse ventura ross perot you think of the person now you have to define yourself and you have to defend the party that's two bridges for most people brilliantly put okay thank you uh let me speak to you because i'm i'm speaking to jaron brooke soon yeah uh i like him yeah so but that another example i was ask him to tell you a joke about iran if he can do it so there that's one criticism i've heard you say which is they're unable to speak to any weaknesses in either iran's or objectivist worldview yes that's really uh you you put it i know you're half joking but that's actually a legitimate discussion to have i'm not i'm not joking at all because that's to me one of the criticisms and one of the explanations why the world seems to disrespect ayn rand the the people that do is she kind of implies that her ideas are like flawless she says they correspond to reality yeah right that's the term she uses that i mean objective is it's in the name it's you know it's just facts like it's impossible to basically argue against because it's pretty simple it's just all facts and that's it's possible to argue against but she would say she's never met a good critic who could argue the facts about misrepresentation and she's not entirely wrong she's often caricatured because she has a very extreme personality and extreme worldview but that to me i mean some people there's a guy named in the physics mathematics community called stephen wolf from i don't know if you're well from alpha yeah okay he has a similar style of speaking sometimes which is like i've created a science but that turns a lot of people off like this kind of weird confidence but he's one of my favorite people i think one of the most brilliant people if you just ignore that little bit of ego or whatever you call that yeah yeah that there are some beautiful ideas in there and this amazing person and that for me objectivism i'm undereducated about it about it uh i hope to be more educated but there's some interesting ideas that again just like with ufos uh not that there's a connection with you don't bring that up for your own he won't like it i'm runs like ufos oh no no no this interview is over that's that's a good yarn okay uh but you know you have to be a little bit open-minded but what's your sense of of objectivism what's uh are there interesting ideas that are useful to you to think about i own her copy of the first printing of the fountainhead so that should tell you a little bit about how my affection for miss rand how heavy that goes um i ein rand does not have all the answers but she has all the questions so if you study rand you are going to be forced to think through some very basic things and you're going to have your eyes open very very heavily she was not perfect she never claimed to be perfect she was asked on donahue is it true that according to your philosophy you're a perfect being she said i never think of myself that way and she said but if you ask me do i practice what i preach the answer is yes resoundingly um she's a fascinating woman uh what is really interesting about her and this something you'd appreciate personally is when you read her essays she'll have these weird asides and it looked like she would talk about art and she'd be like and this is why the u.s should be the only country with nuclear weapons and when you follow a brilliant mind making these seemingly disparate connections it's something i find to be just absolutely inspiring and awesome and entertaining um i think there's lots of things about her that people like yaran would make uncomfortable um well like she they so objectivism like any other philosophy has all these techniques to kind of hand wave away things you don't want to talk about and like pretend that so they talk about things like having no meta metaphysical significance right so what that means is like well what about this i don't talk about it like it doesn't matter like it literally means fancy philosophical terms doesn't matter or they will say correctly that it's very twisted in our culture that when we have heroes we look for their flaws instead of looking for their virtues that's a 100 valid perspective however if i'm sitting here telling you that i think this woman is a badass and she's amazing and she should be studied but there's also these idiosyncrasies they don't want to hear it because they and i think it's very convenient for them because there's a lot of things she did that work here's an example rand was very very pro a happiness and pleasure she was very pro-sex which is kind of surprising looking at her and how she talked and how strident she was as a result of this she never got her cats fixed to deny them the pleasure of orgasm so her male cats are spraying up her entire house yeah like that is i mean that's her putting her philosophy into practice but it's still gross yeah so that's the kind of thing where i don't think he'd another thing is rand had an art an article on a woman president and she said a woman should never be president right now when ran says things that are too goofy for them they say oh that's not objectivism that's her personal preference it's like she did not have these lines objectivism was always defined as ein rand's writings plus the additional essays in her books so if this was in part of those books this counts as official objectivism but they pretend otherwise so that's another example plus they are they she was and i bet you she was on the spectrum to some extent i'm not joking i'm not using that derisively she was of the belief and not inaccurately because that humor is used to denigrate and humiliate and she was thinking about the jon stewart type before there was a john stewart and a lot of times like how i use mocking but she was resentful correctly that a lot of times people who are great and accomplished little nobodies will make a punch line uh just to bring them down and just bother here's an example i just thought of i remember in i remember when it was must be in the 90s they had a segment on mtv of all these musicians who were making their own perfumes right and this girl grabbed princess perfume and before she even smelled it she had the joke ready she just ugh this smells almost as bad as his music lately it's like first of all i'm sure the perfume's fine yeah and second of all this is prince he's one of the all-time greats and you can't wait to you know you know denigrate him like and part i want to be like brown like how dare you like as if as if this perfume in any way in any way mitigates his amazing accomplishments and achievements you horrible person but i do have some great iran jokes and he would not be happy about them the perfume thing the problem with is just not funny not that no he sucks okay great not that they dared to try to be humorous right because i don't know why you mentioned jonathan because john stewart's pretty can be funny right but hey he taught a generation you still see this on twitter where things have to be inherently sarcastic and snide but isn't that i mean aren't you practicing that no i use irony not sarcasm here's an example when people like you say something and someone reply to be like um last i checked blah blah blah blah and i'll that i see i go what do you think saying last i checked added to your point you're giving me valuable information and data but you are trained to believe that it has to be couched in this sneering it doesn't just give me the information this is useful information that's that's true it's a jerk but see john stewart did it masterfully exactly and they don't and they they don't it's it's like people who copy commit certain comedians you try to copy them and you lose everything in the process of copying yeah yeah yep okay uh but in terms of the the philosophy of you know selfishness this kind of individual focused idea and i'm i imagine that connects with you yes and i think it would connect with more people they understood what she meant by nathaniel brandon who was her heir until she kind of broke with him and and he was a co-dedicatee of atlas shrugged said no one will say on rand's views with a straight face they won't say i believe that my happiness matters and is important and it's worth fighting for and that ayn rand says this then she's dangerous now it's very easy to say this could have dangerous consequences if you're a sociopath but to put it in those terms uh i think is extremely healthy i think more people should want to be happy and and have i think a lot of us are raised to be apologetic especially in this cynical media culture that if you say i want to be happy i want to love my life that it's just like okay sweetheart and you the eye rolling and i think that's so pernicious is so horrifying and this is why i'm a kamu person because camus thought the archenemy was cynicism and i could not agree more like if you're the kind of person if someone likes a band and you're like oh you like them blah blah it's like this gives them happiness yeah now there's certain exceptions but if it gives you happiness it's not for you that's cool okay this is beautiful i i so agree with you on the eye rolling but you see the best of trolling is not the eye roll correct of course not the best of trolling is taking down the eye rollers i'm gonna have to think about that okay because i haven't red bull yeah uh because i put them all type is red bull um i kind of put them all in the same bin okay and they're not they're not they're not okay all right here's another example of trolling i was making jokes about ron paul he just had a stroke right and someone came at me and they're like oh blah blah blah you know you're ugly i hope you have a stroke i hope you're in the hospital and i just go i just did have a stroke on your mom's face so they came at me yeah and now they got put in their place with a subpar um i mean i wasn't clever you weren't you weren't clever not particularly no well one of your things you do which is interesting i mean i give you props in a sense is you're willing to go farther than people expect you to yes that's fun yeah in fact i'll probably edit out like half of this podcast because the the thing you did which she kept in i should mention is michaela peterson now has a podcast which is nice i guess was it on her podcast she was at mine she was on yours we did both but this is when you're referring to when she was on mine she was on yeah right and you went right for the for the so i'll tell you what it was you don't have to paraphrase so i opened up i say you know she's jordan peterson's dad and as many people know jordan he's her dad yeah she's had a long issue with uh substance addiction and i said to her you're you know you're most famous for being you know jordan peterson's daughter you know many people he's changed so many lives around the world he's and he's been such an enormous influence to me personally that i've started taking benzodiazepines recreationally and she's like oh my god michael is so horrible yeah you because you pulled me in with this because you're talking i mean you know because he's going through a rough time now she's going through just everything was just you pulled me in emotionally i was like this is going to be the sweet mic is going to be just this wonderful and then just bam so that's that's that's that was uh props to you on that it wasn't whatever that is that is an art form uh when done well it can be taken too far my criticism is it that feels too good for some people what do you mean uh for oh they're too happy being irreverent because to show that they don't care about anything that's another form of cynicism though right so i if you because you think it's possible to be a troll and still be the live life to its highest ideal in the camus sense i try that's kind of my ideal i i believe it's not i it becomes a drug i feel like that takes you like i think love ultimately is the way to experience like every moment of every day you don't think that was an expression of i honestly think let's let's let's split hairs here because i think there's something of use here i do think that me i'm me being able to make her laugh about this year of hell she was in yeah does create an element of love and connection between me and her yeah but i know she would say that yes it wasn't that it was what you said in combination with the sweetness everywhere else the kindness it's a very subtle thing but like it's like some of the deepest connections we have with others is when we like mock them lovingly or yes that's correct but like there is stuff there's kindness around that yeah it's not in words but in life of course subtle things because it creates an error familiarity being familial like we're through this together like yeah yeah yeah that's missing that's very difficult to do on the internet i agree with you i agree with you that's why my like my general approach on the internet is to be uh some more like simple less witty and more like dumbly loving but that's not your core competency being witty uh me yeah but i i could be woody you can be but i'm saying that's not your core company so i'm just saying you're bad at it but i'm saying that's not where you go like organically especially with strangers i just feel like nobody's core competence on the internet is uh i guess if you want to bring love to the world nobody's core competence is given the current platforms nobody's core competence is whit it's very difficult to be witty on the internet without while still communicating kindness like i'll give you another example in the same way that you can in physical space i'll give you another example someone um came at me and they were like they gave me a donation people do this all the time and they go oh um like i started reading your books because of my wife and you know now watch your shows together i keep up the good work and i go what does her boyfriend think so that is an example of wit and love because that person feels seen i'm acknowledging them yeah i'm also making a joke at their expense we know it's a joke so i think language is often used in non-literal ways to cue emotional and connectivity it's difficult but you it's very difficult what you've done is is difficult to accomplish but you've done it well i mean you do like you did you do been doing these live streams which are nice that people give you a bunch of money and donations and stuff and then you you'll often like make fun of certain aspects of their questions and so yeah but it's so it's always wrong that's not from love that is genuine annoyance because they ask me some really dumb questions but they're still underlying it's not even like there's a kind person under this that's being communicated that's interesting but i don't know if i get that from your twitter i know i get that from the video the something about the face something about like yeah of course it's much harder the more the more data yeah the more easy it is to convey emotion and subtlety absolutely if you only have literally black and white letters it's gonna be or whatever white and black if you have night mode it's gonna be a very different it's much more limited information yeah but this is the fundamental thing is like let's here's another example like if they had access to my face like a lot of times some people don't know who i am and they come at me call me a nazi anti-semite right and i start talking about the jews and just how terrible the jews are now all my audience knows i'm jewish that i went to shiva so they're sitting there laughing because this person is making ass to themselves that person has no idea but if there was video then they would be like okay wait a minute something yeah yeah something's up i don't know uh i think it's entertaining i think it's fun but i just i don't think it's scalable and ultimately i'm trying to figure out this whole trolling thing because i think it's really destructive i've been the outrage mob the outrage mobs the just the the dynamics of twitter has been really bothering me okay and i've been trying to figure out if we can try to build an alternative to twitter perhaps or try to encourage twitter to be better how to have nuanced healthy conversations like the reason i talk about love isn't just for love's sake it's just a good base from which to have difficult conversations like that's a good starting point because if you start like i would argue that the kind of conversation you have on twitter is fun but it might not be a good starting point for a difficult nuanced conversation well i'm not interested in having those conversations with most people no i know but so i agree with you your point is valid yes but like i'm saying so if we were trying to have a difficult nuanced conversation about say race in america or policing is there racism institutional racism of policing okay there's uh the only conversations that have been nuanced about it that i've heard is in the podcasting medium which is the magic of podcasting which is great but that that's the downside of podcasting is it's a very small number of people even if it's in the thousands it's still small and then there's millions of people on social media and they're not having nuanced conversation at all they're not capable of it that's the difference in you that's saved their minds i believe they are so that's there's no data that's happening and then both of us aren't being not scientific you don't have data to support your worldview either you're making the claim well you are too no i'm not if i'm looking at an object the free the claim that opens my mind well no what no your claim is that people are fundamentally stupid aren't you a martial artist yes how does it feel i know you yeah but you really don't think people are deep down like capable of being intelligent no not at all not not deep down not surface i'm not joking i'm not being tongue-in-cheek and not being cynical i do not at all at all think they have this capacity i'm gonna because you're just being so clear about it you're not even i'm gonna be here you know why i here's here's a here's evidence for my position not proof and this is of course data that is of little use but it's of interest a lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine and people come at you not only will people say the same thing the same concept they'll say the same concept in the same way that is not a mind yeah that's surface evidence you're saying this iceberg looks like this from the surface yeah i'm saying there's an iceberg there that if challenged can can rise to the occasion of deep thinking and you're saying nope nope it's just frozen water isn't that the russian expression that's ice cream no not doesn't it mean like no one's there actually i don't know yeah it means like yeah yeah it's like thought it means okay well uh so you're challenging me to be a little bit more rigorous i think i'll try i'll not challenge you anything i'm just saying no not challenging me but like i'm challenging myself based on what you're saying because i'd like to prove you wrong and find actual yeah data to show you're wrong and i think i can but i would need to uh get that data that's funny you said i think i can when when they were working on my biography ego and hubris the title i had suggested was the little engine that could but shouldn't and they didn't like it i think that's a great title it's pretty good yeah speaking of biographies i mean one i read your book or listen to your book listen to there's an audiobook for you right yeah i did the audio yeah yeah you you read it my goal is yes okay so this is this is uh i didn't do yaron brook's voice in the book i did all the different voices because he has lisp and i didn't want to sound like i was making fun of him yeah i i don't remember you reading it but it was i was really enjoyed this yeah no okay it was good it was like a year a year and a half ago i can't prove uh well let me at a high level see if you can pull this off if i ask you uh what's the book new write about it's about uh a group of people who are united solely by their opposition to progressivism who have little else in common but who are all frequently caricatured and dismissed um by the larger establishment media but you give this kind of story of how it came to be sure and to me like we're talking about trolls but the internet side of things is quite interesting so first of all how does alt-right connect so the alt-right is the subset of the new right which feels that race not racism is the most or one of the most important socio-political issues are any of those folks like part of the mainstream or worth paying attention to not only by the mainstream the alt-right yeah by definition they would be part of the mainstream they would not be part of that no they would not i don't know that any of them well worth is not a position i'm not able to say worth i'm i would say that it is of use to be familiar with their arguments because to dismiss any school of thought especially one that has historically gained leverage especially one that has historically gained leverage in very dark ways especially in america in europe and other places just to say oh they're racist i don't need to think about them it's it's it doesn't behoove you so what uh what lessons do we draw from the the 4chan side of things like the internet side of the movement tits or get the fuck out um can you define every single word hits our breasts or get the fuck out that's from 4chan okay that's what's uh what's it mean oh sometimes like a woman will appear in 4chan and they'll just reply tits or get the fuck out i'm trying to understand what oh oh that's a way i just um very slow uh so that's okay so that's very disrespectful towards female members of the community i don't understand there's rules to this community and one of them is uh we're not very good with women is that that's one of those sort of principles it's a principle we're not going to ever get laid that's the fundamental principle is there we are going to get pics pics sometimes sometimes on the sometimes gtfo gt okay so is there other actual principles of so like it's it's i from my maybe naive perspective is they have like the darkest aspects of trolling which is like take nothing serious make a game out of everything that's not 4chan per se one of the things that you will learn 4chan which i think is very healthy is if you have an idiosocratic or unique worldview or focus on an aspect of history or culture you'll be able to find like-minded people who you will engage with you and discuss it without being promptly dismissive that's an ideal that they well it's not ideal it's something that happens a lot now 4chan is not really like paul as their board with politics but they will you know get into some like the people there are much more erudite than you think so they do take my my perception was they take nothing seriously so there's things that they take seriously like discussing ideas i'll give you one example there was a video someone posted of a girl who put kittens in a bag and threw in a river and they found out where she was within a day and got her like arrested so yeah they do they take some things very seriously okay but that's like an extreme that i mean that's good first of all that's heartwarming that they wouldn't somehow turn that into a thing that feels like more of uh what is it what's the other one 8chan 8 chance twice as good as 4chan yeah that's their slogan but it feels like they're the kind of community that would take that kitten situation and make a mockery yeah they're they're a darker than fortune yeah yeah i don't even i'm not allowed to talk about 16 chan i'm already overwhelmed clearly uh by 4chan lingo i'm i have actu i literally wrote down on my notes um like in doing research for this conversation i learned the word pleb and i wanted to ask you would this pleb mean you know what flood means no i don't what i i saw i mean actually no i don't you know what a pleb is i just i don't know what a flub is like a plebiscite or plebeian okay but does it mean something more sophisticated um no it's a very unsophisticated mechanism of being dismissive of like the regular people yeah or someone who comes at me on twitter okay all right so back to the 4chan alt-right it wasn't uh those are very different concepts don't conflate them but which internet culture was the alt-right born out of uh alright was more born of blogs and people had different blogs where they were posting what they called like racial realism scientific which is scientific racism so-called um and you know breaking down issues from a racialist perspective so that wasn't 4chan is much more uh dynamic it's a message board it's very fluid um so it doesn't lend itself to these kind of in-depth analysis of ideas or history but it spreads them like it it spreads them as memes yeah and it you know but it's not it's not an essential mechanism of uh of the alt-right historical no no no no no no so it was both mostly about blogs okay so what uh what do you make of the psychology of this kind of world view when you have this goes to your conspiracy theory subject earlier when you have a little bit of knowledge about something about history that no one's talking about and there's only one group that is talking about it and they and you have no alternative answers you're going to be drawn to that group so because issues about race anti-semitism homophobia are so taboo in our culture understandably there's good reasons if you start putting things like how old should you be you have sex with kids just have regular conversations eventually some people are going to start taking some positions you don't like so some things have to be sanctified to some extent they're the only ones talking about it you're going to be drawn to that subculture and where does the alt-right stand now i mean i hear that term used so the term has been weaponized by the corporate press for people that they want to read out of society so it's used both on individual levels like people like gavin mcking mckingus milo yiannopoulos some others they i mean i think they refer to trump as alt-right um and and you know it's become a slur just like in cell or bot that has become largely removed from its original meaning do you have a sense that there's still a movement that's all right or like yeah they call themselves now so okay so there's something called the dissident right and they say we're completely not like the alt-right because the alt-right's a b and c and we're bcd there's a huge overlap it's very much the same people um is there intellectuals that still represent some awesome aspect of the movement i mean sure are you tracking this not not that much anymore um i think they've they're i don't find it particularly as um now that the book's done you know my i'm looking more into history from my next book um you mentioned communism i'm going to talk a lot about the cold war um so this kind of stuff has largely fallen away from my radar to some extent and they've also been the the it's been a very effective movement to get them marginalized and silenced so they're not as as deep as of a concern in terms of concern or not just their impact on size much less yeah so as a troll on twitter yeah in the best sense of the word what do you make uh of canceled culture i think it's maoism it's i mean the corporate america has done a far better job of implementing that wasn't that a communist party ever could you had this meeting not that long ago from i think it was northwestern university law school where everyone on the call got up and said that they were racist i mean this is something that legally you should be very averse to saying even if it were true and it's this kind of concept of getting up and confessing your sins before the collective is something completely um are they sorry they admitted this of themselves yeah they were like because they're saying because they're white they're inherently racist so my name's john i'm a racist my name is this i'm a racist it was it was uh you hear it and you're like okay this is looney tunes so you're saying that wow that's that that's so much you took a step further so you're saying there's like a a deep underlying force but it says cancer culture it's not just some kind of mob but it's not some at all it's a it's a systemic organized movement uh being used for very nefarious purposes and to dominate you know an entire nation how do we fight it because i sense it inside you know i used to defend academia um more because um i i still do to some extent it's a nuanced discussion because you know like folks like jordan peterson and a lot of people that kind of attack academia they refer they really are talking about gender studies at certain departments and me from mit you know it's the university of science and engineering and the the faculty there really don't think about these issues or haven't traditionally thought about it's beginning to even infiltrate there it's the you know it's starting to infiltrate engineering and sciences outside of biology yeah like let's put biology with the gender studies like i'm talking about sciences that really don't have anything to do with gender uh it's starting to infiltrate um and it worries me i don't know exactly why like i don't know exactly what the negative effect there would be except it feels like it's anti-intellectual oh yes of course and i'm not sure what to uh because on the surface it feels like a path towards progress at first when you when i'm like zoomed out you know just like like squinting my eyes the you know not even in detail looking at things but when i actually joined the conversation to like listen in the conversation on quote-unquote diversity it quickly makes me realize that there's no interest in um in making a better world no no it's about domination it's it's about getting yeah it's a way for if you are a lowest status white person using anti-racism is the only mechanism you will have to feel superior to another human being so it's very useful for them um in terms of fighting it one of my suggestions has been to seize all university endowments which are the crystallization of privilege and distribute that money as reparations so be very effective by turning two populations against each other and strongly diminishing the university's intellectual hegemony uh the universities are absolutely the real villains in the picture thankfully they're also the least prepared to be aggressed upon and after the government and the corporate press they are the last leg of the stool and they don't know what's coming and it's gonna get ugly and i cannot wait so this is where you and i disagree part one yeah we disagree in a sense that you want to dismantle broken institutions i don't think they're broke they're working like by design i think for over 100 years they have been talking about bringing the next generation of american leaders which is code for promulgating an ideology based on egalitarian principles and world domination let me try to express my lived experience okay sure okay my experience at mit is that there's a bunch of administrators that are the bureaucracy sure that i can i can say this is the nice thing about having a podcast i don't give a damn is they're pretty useless in fact they get in the way but there's faculty there's professors that aren't incredible they're incredible human beings that all they do all day they're too busy but for the most part what they do all day is just like continually pursue different little trajectories of curiosities in the in the various avenues of science that they work on and as a side effect of that they mentor a group of students sometimes a large group of students and also teach courses and they're constantly sharing their passion with others and my experience is it's just a bunch of people who are curious about engineering and math and science chemistry artificial intelligence computer science what i'm most familiar with and there's never this feeling of mit being broken somehow like this kind of feeling like if i talk to you just now or like eric weinstein there's a feeling like stuff is on fire right there's something broken uh but when i'm in in the system uh especially before the kovid before this kind of tension everything was great there was no discussion of even diversity all that kind of stuff the the toxic stuff that we might be talking about right now none of that was happening it was a bunch of people just in love with uh cool ideas exploring ideas being curious and learning and all that kind of stuff so i don't my my sense of academia was this is the place where kids in their 20s 30s and 40s can continue the playground of science and having fun it's if you destroy academia if you destroy universities like you're suggesting kind of lessening their power you take away the playground from these kids to to to play it's going to be hard for you to tell me that i'm anti-playground yeah well i guess i'm saying you're on top certain kinds of playgrounds which is yeah the ones that have the broken glass on the floor yeah i am against those kinds of playgrounds no no you're you're you're yes no you see that you listen no you no you wait yeah i i i would say you're being the watchful mother who the one kid who hurt themselves in the glass one kid it's an intelligent it's generation after generation i'm not a watchful mother i'm the guy with the flamethrower no i i i understand that but you're using the one kid who was always kind of like weird um gender studies department uh that that hurt themselves on the glass as opposed to the people who are like obviously having fun in the playground and not uh playing by the glass the broken glass and they're just i mean to me some of the best innovations in science happen in universities okay you can't forget that universities don't have this liberal like politics literally in every conversation until this year until this this year there's something happening but uh every conversation i've ever had nothing to do with politics would never trump never came up none of that ever come up nothing like all this kind of idea that there's liberal all that that that's in the humanities yeah but do you think mit massachusetts into technology might be a little bit of an outlier yeah there probably is yeah but i i don't i honestly don't think when people criticize academia they're looking at uh they're in fact also picking the outliers which is they're picking some of the quote unquote's strongest gender studies department this is nonsensical when i was a bucknell i was a college student we had to take you know we had a bunch of electives and i want to take a class on individual american individualism one of the texts of the five that we had to read was birth of a nation the movie about the clan so there's no department where these people are not thorough going hardcore ideologues uh this is not a gender cities that's the humanity fine all the humanity it's not just gender studies okay fine i can give you history english yes all of them every university as you know has it mandatory in the curriculum they have to take a bunch of these propaganda classes i look forward to youtube comments because you're being more eloquent and you're speaking to the thing that a lot of people agree with and i'm being my usual slow self and people are going to say not very nice things about me don't say anything that nice about lex okay please let me try to just just shoot up a school that would be preferable there he goes again only the teachers go to the darkest possible place the sunshine baby schools that's where everyone goes to be happy playgrounds there he goes dark ear just dives right in like it just go dark and then just comes back off to the surface not to feel [Laughter] um you're probably a figment of my generation i'm not even having this podcast well after 18 red bulls i'm surprised you could see anything this is like fight club red bull gives you delirious yeah uh i got into it at norton yesterday on twitter oh really yeah as he uh like the rest of the celebrities yeah he's like oh this is an existential threat to america trump's a fascist he's delegitimizing the oval office i said what an odd endorsement of trump well you should have went with bad pit he might have a different opinion that's spike reference okay this conversation is over it's interesting i'd like to draw a line between science and engineering and science not including like the biological aspect the the parts of biology that touch and humanities and biology like i feel because uh humanities if you just look at the percentage of universities it's still a minority percentage and i would actually draw different i think they serve very different purposes sure and that's actually a broken part about universities about like why why is some of the best research in the world done at universities that doesn't like there might be a different like mit it feels weird that a faculty yeah these are conceptually different things like we do research and we teach why is this the same yeah it feels weird but that's just but but i'm also i'm coming to like the defense of the engineers that never talk about i'm not like like my mind isn't i'm not like deluded or something where i'm i'm not seeing the the house on fire i'm just saying i am seeing the house because i also lived in harvard square i'm seeing harvard but when you see the tanks coming they're coming next they're gonna be so beautiful i'm gonna it'll be like the american beauty the plastic bag i just won't be able to stop crying because it'll be so beautiful yeah thanks i could i can already i can already see it but the but the engineering departments were like i believe that the elon musks of the world that the the like the innovation that will make a better world is happening and like let's not burn that down because it has nothing to do with any like they're all like sitting quietly in while like well the the humanities and all these kind of diversity programs they're not having any of these discussions listen my soviet brother you both know we both know that ice water runs in our veins so if you're calling for mercy that is not how i'm wired but i'm not closing the door yeah i'm actually realizing now so for people listening to this i'll probably prepend this and saying that i'm even slower than usual i didn't sleep last night but i feel i'm actually realizing just how slow i am and how much preparation i need to do in if i would like to defend aspects of academia i better come prepared i don't think you need to defend them i think i'm granting you your premise freely no you might be okay i don't think the the world is that like actually you just defeat your own argument because you because it is not at all have to be the way that a phenomenal research institution like mit which no one disputes has to also be an educational establishment these two things are not at all necessarily interconnected but then you have to offer a way to separate correct but like i'm not a big fan everybody's different but i'm not a fan of criticizing institutions without offering sure a way to change and especially when i'm like have ability to change i'd like to yeah i'd like to offer a path like what if they were in students they were all mentor like uh like men like um what's the opposite of a mentor mentee protege what's the term when you're like just when you work at a place like interns not an intern something i'm thinking of but anyway like basically they're working there instead of going to college there it's possible but it's going against tradition and so you have to build new institutions and uh and then have these engineers building new things that's crazy yeah these research engineers where they're going to be building things well one of the things because you're kind of you know apprentice that's the way i was looking at apprentice which is ironic we're talking about trump and we couldn't think of the word apprentice ah very yeah well done we should both be fired yeah there you go these russian jews so quick with their wit okay uh but the the thing is you're a fan of freedom i am and there's there is uh intellectual freedom people this is what i was trying to articulate i'm failing to articulate but there truly is complete intellectual freedom within universities on topics of science and engineering i believe you yeah i agree with you i don't think it's going to take much persuasion but i'll give you an example when that i i'm sure you know more details about this than i do when that uh scientist engineered that probe to land on that comet and the articles written because this hawaiian shirt he was wearing had like pinup girls on it which i think is female student episode frame or something where's his ex-girlfriend and he had to apologize this is what rand was talking about yeah that the great accomplishments of men have to say i'm sorry to the lowest most despicable disgusting people yeah i don't know you know let me bring this case up because i think about this uh this might not mean much to you but it means a lot to a certain aspect of the computer science community there's a guy named richard stallman i don't know if you know who that is no he's the founder of the free software foundation he's like a big linux he's one of the key people in the history of computer science one of those open source people right but he is like i believe he's the one of the hardcore ones which is like so all software should be free okay okay so very interesting personality very key person in the new just like linus torvald key person so but he also kind of speaks his mind okay and on a certain chain of conversations at mit that was leaked to the new york times then was published led him to be fired or pushed out of mit recently maybe a year ago and i always sat weird with me so what happened is um there's a few undergraduate students that called marvin minsky not sure if you're familiar who that is i've heard the name he's one of the seminal people in artificial intelligence they they said that they called him a rapist because uh he met with jeffrey epstein and jeff uh free epstein solicited uh two these are the best facts known to me that i'm aware of that's what was stated on the chain is he solicited a 17 but it might have been an 18 year old girl to come up to marvin minsky and ask him if he wanted to have sex with her so jeffrey epstein told the girl yeah she came up to marvin miske who was at that time is i think seven years old and his wife was there too marvin mink's wife and he said no or like you know awkwardly yeah so thank you yeah no thanks and that was stated in the email thread as marvin participating in uh sexual assault and rape of this uh unwilling sexual assault and it was called rape uh of this person right of this woman that propositioned him and then richard stallman who's he's kind of known for this he's very he's you make fun of me being a robot but he's kind of like a debugger he's like well that sentence is not what you said is not correct so he like corrected the person uh basically made it seem like the the use of the word rape is not correct because that's not the definition of rape and then he was attacked for saying oh now you're playing with definitions of rape rapist rape is the answer right and then that was leaked in him defending so the way he was leaked it was reported as him defending um rape that's the way it was reported and he was pushed out and he didn't really give a damn it's he doesn't seem to make a big deal out of it he just left he made an example of him they made an example and that and everyone was afraid to defend him so like there's a bunch of faculty one dude you're from the soviet union doesn't this hit close to home for you i don't know what to think of it it hits close to home but it was basically at least at mit now mit is such a light place with this it's not common at mit but it was like 18 19 year old kids undergraduate kids with this kind of fire in them there's just very few of them but they're the ones that raise all this kind of fuss and the entirety of the administration all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them it's so interesting to me like i don't know if i should be afraid of that you don't think you should be afraid so someone who's trying to be specific when it comes to charges of violent assault is looking for that clarity can get their life uh other search engines let me give you more context there's a little bit more context to richard stallman which is he was also a rapist no he left out that part he liked raping people but he's had a history through his life uh of you know every once in a while wearing the hawaiian shirt with like he would make he's a fat uh sorry but he's a fat unattractive he like what trump referred to the the yeah the guy in the basement in the basement that's richard okay i love you is is you know he is what he is peop you know people he like he would eat his own uh he would pick skin from his feet and lectures and just eat it okay yeah this video is him doing that i'm not joking he must really behind the spectrum then yeah okay yeah and so and you know uh he i think this uh and his office he adore he wrote something like uh uh like hacker uh plus plus lover of ladies or something like that like something kind of yeah yeah yeah so professional yeah unprofessional and a little creepy yeah no that's fair so he was also so they're looking for an excuse to get rid of him it sounds like i know he was just who's they the administration yeah probably probably a lot of times what people don't realize you know this would be my defensive cancer culture a lot of times when someone gets fired over something like this yeah this isn't why this is just giving them cover to get rid of them without getting a lawsuit yeah but it's still so i think i guess what i'm trying to communicate it feels a little weird and creepy and he may not be the the best for the community but that's not necessarily the message it's sent to the rest of the community the message is sent to the rest of the community that being clear about words or the usage of the word rape is uh like you should call everything rape that's that's that's basically the message you send or you should call that we say rape rape it's about submission i think i'm you'd be very happy to know that there's a lot of people and she's very crucified this like betsy devos the president's department of education who are aware of this they are aware that this completely contradicts due process uh they're aware of how a rape accusation is something not to be taken seriously but because it's not to be taken seriously it has to be also taken seriously another context that you know once that word is around a male this can ruin his entire life um and that's that that's the sticky thing of the word like i like i think about this a lot that um like how would i defend it if somebody like i've never i can honestly say i've never done anything close to creepy in my life like uh with like with women but you wouldn't know it if you had right that's the thing a lot of these creepy guys don't think they're creepy they think they're being cute yeah but i'm just telling you even like fine let's say right let's say i'm not aware of it but the point that i am aware of is that somebody could just completely make something up correct yeah yeah yeah yeah okay and like how what do what would i say no he denied the charges there's an article around everything you did supposedly and then goes uh mr freeman denied the charges yeah but what creeps me out that happened can i interrupt there is zora neal hurston is one of my favorite writers she's from the harlem renaissance um she wrote their eyes were watching god a couple of other books she was just an amazing amazing figure her biography is called um wrapped in rainbows it's just a masterpiece i like i think i read it one day can't recommend her enough fascinating fascinating woman during the 30s i think it was her 1940 she was out of the country she was accused of molesting a teenage boy she wasn't in america this could be proven so there's is absolutely false not even a question she was indicted and she wanted to kill herself because she's like people are going to see these things and they're going to think maybe there's some truth to it maybe it's voluntary what they're just going to and and you could understand what should be suicidal over this so yeah this is this is something that's been going on for a long time and in the fact that it's becoming i do agree it's important i know a lot of women who have been sexually assaulted more than i i'm happy that i know and if i know that many that means there's more so i i don't i think it's it's a good idea that they feel seen that they don't feel wounded they don't feel damaged or they can talk to their friends and i'm like man this sucks is happening to you and and i don't think you're a slut i don't think you're asking for it i think you feel violated i think it's gross talk to me like i i do think that that's important and i also think it's important though like when things get kind of in a frenzy that a lot of people like yeah i also had something happen and very quickly the line between he grabbed my boob and he violently raped me i don't think these two things are the same at all i think they're both sexual assault but in terms of what someone can deal with the next day the next month 10 years later i i don't think there's similar scenarios yeah i had juanita broderick on my show and hearing her talk about you know her alleged rape by bill clinton was very disturbing for me very disturbing to hear because it was like half an hour so you know we think of these things and think okay hold her down blah blah yeah and then it's done half an hour when just even someone physically holding you down for half an hour like not even a sexual assault yeah like that's traumatic yeah you think am i your brain's gonna think am i gonna die when i zoom out i think the ultimately this is gonna lead to a better world like empowering women to speak to those kinds of experiences the benefit of it outweighs the the issue is whenever people are given a weapon some are going to use it in nefarious ways and that's the lesson of history males when males females whites blacks children adults when people are given a mechanism to execute power over others some are going to use it can i ask you for a therapy thing um sure untrolling in a sense uh because i mentioned somebody making up something about me i feel because i wear my heart on my sleeve i'm not good with these attacks like i've been attacked recently just being called a fraud and all that kind of stuff just light stuff like i haven't you know it was like it hurt okay well let me help you maybe it's because i'm a new yorker no i'm serious here's why in new york a lot of times you'll be walking with your friend and a homeless person will come up to you and start yelling things at you your reaction isn't in those circumstances let me hear this out your reaction is physical safety and getting away now it's not impossible that that homeless person is actually saying the truth this happened to my a friend of mine she this guy wasn't homeless um and he's walking down the street on smith street and he's just talking out loud and he goes why they call them hipsters what are they hip to and she chuckles and he goes what are you laughing at fatso you start something i'll finish it yeah and she she just couldn't move yeah and it's like it's made a problem because that's the first thing he went to and there's i don't know that i have any advice but when you hear something like this this is i think you need to be better in terms of boundaries i think you should not perceive this as a fellow human but as a crazy homeless person because if this fellow human if i thought that you were a fraud in some context that's a very weird word to use because fraudulent podcaster these are real mics but if i was a scientist or human sure but i would ask myself is this person in a position to make this judgment or are they backing it up are they saying here your conclusions were wrong here's some mistakes in your data and you can engage with them on ideas but whenever someone uses a word to entirely dismiss your life without having the knowledge of your life you do not have to take that seriously i appreciate that kind of idea but some things aren't about data like you know i i see myself as a fraud often and it's it's more psychology of it um if i can reduce something to reason i can probably be fine my worry is the same as the worry of uh like teenage girls that get bullied online it's like when i'm being open and fragile on the internet it affects me in a way where i can't the reason doesn't help so it helps me you don't block people enough i'm very happy with the blocking no i so yeah i'm very heavy i block i it's healthy progressive banality i block immediately i also think time is going to help i don't think you're like you didn't grow up wanting to be a podcaster right that wasn't your aspiration so in some sense you are going to feel like a fraud because you're like what i don't have any training for this i have a training for a scientist i can talk about artificial intelligence for literally hours but in terms of this like i don't know what i'm doing i'm kind of so when they call you a fake it's like yeah you're kind of right because like i i did kind of stumble into this and this is not my pedigree so i think that kind of probably speaks to you on some level well but they're they're attacking not the podcasting thing but more like the same thing people call elon musk fraud too which guy that that's the way i rationalize it like well if they're calling him a fraud and they're calling me a fraud that like even if you have rockets that go into like if you successfully have rockets uh landing back on earth usable rockets you're still being called a fraud then it's okay not necessarily it could be that he's not a fraud you really are that's but it's not resonating with you because your brain knows the logic so you can right but uh yeah yeah but i don't know this whole trolling thing you seem to be much better at seeing it as a game you know why because you are under the delusion that every human being is capable of intelligent reasoned decisions still think i'm right and i perceive them as literally animals so when a dog starts barking all it's saying is that the dog is agitated and this is not going to change my life one iota other than crossing the street perhaps yeah i'm going to prove you wrong one day if you're going to kill yourself but if i don't i'll prove you wrong okay i'll bring the data and they'd be like you're right i have the receipt i have the receipts okay so we mentioned camus oh yeah i love him is there um this is this is this is a question that people like love when i ask of really smart people well it is love no uh what uh what books let's say three books if you can uh think of them technical fiction philosophical would you uh had a big impact on you or would you recommend to others sure uh the machiavellians by james burnham uh this is a book about how politics works in reality as opposed to how people imagine it working um mentis moldbug who's a figure in these circles who's respected by a lot of people i was giving a talk and there was a bunch of panelists and we were asked what book would you recommend i said the machiavellians independently of me that was the book he had recommended it's out of print it's hard to find but that would be one is that his book or no james burnham 1941 i think so uh can you pause on the mulches what's that it's just a small bug that's a code name right like that guy named that guy's dependent curtis jarvin it's his real name he's in he swims in your circles which he doesn't kind of progress he's originally programmed yeah he comes up as a person that i should talk with or i should know about but then i read a few of his things and they seem quite dangerous they're very long and verbose but i think he's an amazing thinker yeah but he's the one who had the idea of sending the tanks to harvard yard but doesn't he have like uh he has some radical view i forget what they are very radical views yeah he wants a military coup but you're saying he's a serious thinker this is worthy uh of not worthy i don't know that you would enjoy having a conversation with him i think a lot of people enjoy seeing it happen but i think it'd be a lot of talking past each other and and it would be interesting what do you do okay um what do you agree what do you disagree i agree with him that politics has to be looked at objectively and without kind of an emotional um connection to different schools i talk about him a lot in my book on the new right um disagree i don't think a military coup is a good idea uh he's he doesn't think anarchism is stable i disagree um i mean me and him i did his live stream with him we just dorked out a lot about history and like you know people who've fallen in the memory hall so i mean he's got a lot of writing so so you know the sense i got from him was that if i talk with him a lot of people would be upset with me for giving him a platform yeah i think he's on that edge where they want to read him out of what is acceptable discourse what's his most controversial i mean you can mention the tanks is that the most controversial viewpoint does he have a race thing no he's the the alt-right doesn't particularly like him in many ways because he's not a big on the race thing i don't know what would be his most controversial view uh uh to be honest i think because he is radical in terms of his analysis of culture anytime someone's a radical that is dangerous because it's dangerous okay book uh so that's one the headlines ahead which is a um i would say that shrug no if and if you read atlas shrug before reading the fountain head you're doing yourself an enormous disservice don't you dare do it on the philosophical because every novel every every level fountain head's a better novel fountainhead's superfluous if you read out the shrug first fountain heads about psychology and ethics uh it does not have to do with her politics other than its implications so it's by far the superior book um the third one oh this is a good one question let me see what i there's so many good books out there that i love i i'm going to this is not really my third choice but i'll throw it out there because i um this is such an important world view especially people on the right are you virtue signaling no this is counter signaling um thaddeus russell's book a renegade history of the united states his thesis is that it's the degenerates that give us all freedom um and things like prostitutes things like madams things like slaves things like immigrants because they were so low status they could get away with things that then people who are higher status demanded and so on and so forth so i think that thesis and it really has extreme um consequences in uh thinking and no john jonathan height the righteous mind that's those are the four is that his best i haven't read any of his stuff okay that was four but of course forget that we'll put we'll put height in there you would uh no forget that is this those are the three so we talked about love let me ask you the other question i'm obsessed with are you uh do you ponder your own mortality i do a lot especially now that i'm an uncle especially now that i have like these younger people that i mentor um i was just yesterday uh my friend john gergis who did my theme song for my podcast who did the book cover for um dear reader who's like the most talented person i know his song came on the ipod at the gym and i almost messaged him i go you know one day one of us is going to bury the other and it's going to be really sad and i thought about that and it was kind of like oh man that's really going to suck um and you know i don't know which scenario would be better like i will be very just sad if he's gone i'm sure he'll be very sad if i'm gone um i mean what are you are you afraid of it no uh you know uh um rand had this quote about how uh i won't die the world will end so i've had enough experiences that i am i i've really at this point and everything's icing on that cake so if you if i were to kill you at the end of this podcast it would feel painless that would be okay yeah you know why does anyone know you're here by the way you know why i'll ask you for a friend here's why there's that wit say that for twitter likes did they call you sasha no i'm uh no sure oh that's my sister's husband okay so here's why i strongly believe and this is a very kind of jewish perspective that you just have to leave the world a little bit better than you found it that all you could do is move the needle a little and one of the things i set out to do with dear reader my book on north korea i said i was at a point in my career where i could do something to make a difference instead of just writing like co-authoring books with celebrities which i'm very proud of but you know are neither here nor there and i thought all right i know how to tell stories i know how to inform people and 110 people if i move the needle in america who cares we got it really good here if i move the needle in north korea a little bit the cost benefits through the roof i never thought of that actually i never thought of d reader from that perspective so when i set out to write it i'm like okay what can i do i'm not gonna be able to liberate the north korean regime what i can do is the camera right now is focused on at the time kim jong-il now kim jong-un and i can do just this just this a little bit and i go behind that guy who you think is funny clown there's millions of dead people about north korea in terms of look at those silly buffoons to those poor people so the fact that that little thing i can say with a straight face i did doesn't make me a great person but it does make me someone who if i have to go tomorrow i can say i did a little bit to make the world a better place what do you think is the meaning of life i think the meaning of life is um why are we here oh well that i'm a camus person so i'll give the kamu answer so there's two types of people those who know how to use binary no thanks thanks for relating to the audience one zero zero one two two [Laughter] down vote what kind of radical freak is this lex so and i use this example of my forthcoming book you go into a countryside a mountainside and you see a blank canvas on an easel and one kind of mentality goes this is it's just a blank canvas this is stupid this is what am i looking at and the other type goes what a great opportunity i'm in this beautiful space i have this entire canvas to paint i could do anything i want with it so i am very much of that type 2 person and i i hope others start to think of life in that way you and i have both been more successful than we expected to especially growing up and in ways we did not expect and when you're young you are so intent on driving the car and after a certain point you realize it's not about driving the cars you're being a surfer that you can only control this little board and you have no idea where the waves will take you and sometimes you're gonna fall down and something's gonna suck and you're gonna swallow some salt water but at a certain point you stop trying to drive and you're like this is freaking awesome and i have no idea where it's going to go beautifully put i know i speak for a lot of people first of all everyone loves the game you play on the internet it's fun you make the world not everyone they came for me hard but it makes the world seem fun and especially in this dark time it's uh it's much appreciated and we can't wait till the next book and the menu to come and to hopefully many more joe rogan appearances you guys do some great magic together that's you uh yeah you're you're one of my favorite guests on this show so i can't wait especially if you can make it before the election thanks so much for making today happen i'm glad you came down you're awesome thank you so much what a great compliment thanks for listening to this conversation with michael malus and thank you to our sponsors scm rush which is a seo optimization tool doordash which is my go to food delivery service and masterclass which is online courses from world experts please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars not a podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from michael malus conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit thank you for listening hope to see you next time you