Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200
the following is a conversation between me and michael malus michael is an author anarchist and simpleton and i'm proud to call him my friend he makes me smile he makes me think and he makes me wonder why i sound so sleepy all the time and now enjoy this conversation with michael malus in the dupagolova language that i'm increasingly certain i'll never quite able to get the hang of hello comrade let's miss it so animal farm by george orwell is one of my favorite books it's an allegory about at least i think about the soviet union and the russian revolution of 1917 so for people who haven't read it it's uh animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become as bad or worse than the humans so comrade if we lived on this farm in the book animal farm which animal would you most rather be would it be the pigs the horses the donkey benjamin the raven moses the humans mr mrs jones the dogs or the sheep um i'm gonna go with the milton answer which is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven right it's better to rule in health and serve in heaven yeah so i would have to go with the pigs so i guess i'd be a cop um at the very top so the leader the main pig napoleon versus like the wallet or the other yeah i i would say it's not it's sure it's an allegory of the russian revolution but i think um orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships i mean it could very easily be read as an indictment of mussolini or hitler or many of these others uh i'm a huge um george orwell fan one of the things that i think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of many of these in undisputably left-wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarianism totalitarian communism and the three i think off top my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time are emma goldman albert camus and orwell being the third you know something that uh leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly invoke orwell is that orwell said and i don't have the exact quote on top of my head but some to the effect of every word i have written is in should be taken as a defense of democratic socialism against totalitarianism so uh people like truman you know was obviously very hardcore in many ways anti-communist we like to parse things out you're going to laugh into binary fashions that you know left good right bad or right good left bad but historically speaking it does not fall away into these camps as easily as people would like and i think it is important for those of us it takes a lot more courage to fight the right from the right or to fight the left from the left because in a sense a lot of your countrymen or your fellow travelers are going to regard you as a traitor to the cause so i every chance i get i will sing the praises of these three figures among others who not only even if they hadn't done what they had done just lived just amazing lives that all of us can uh learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model so what was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism is it basically freedom well the value of freedom let's go to the three of them so emma goldman she was an early anarchist figure you know we'll talk about her later i'm sure she got deported from the united states with her partner in crime alexander berkman literal crime he tried to assassinate uh frick who was andrew carnegie's main man in the pittsburgh steel mill strike um she got deported to the soviet union and they're like they're like oh you want socialism because at the time the anarchists were regarded as socialist you know go choke on it and she's there and she was watching in great horror uh what was going on and she actually went to lenin's office and she goes this isn't what we're about the revolution is about the individual and free speech and everyone working together to further a society and he told her that you know you know free speech is a bourgeois contrivance and regardless you can't have these circumstances in the midst of a revolution and when she left the soviet union and you know she went to britain and at the time before the 1917 there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles about what would the revolution look like right would there be the bakunin anarchist model would there be the marxist model obviously the bolsheviks ended up winning but even then it wasn't obvious because there was the bolsheviks and the mensheviks and what people you know you and i know what those words mean but bolsheviks were kind of funny because borscha means bigger and mancha means smaller the mensheviks had the numbers it was sarcastic that they were called mensheviks and the bolsheviks were called bolshah and lenin you know destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way obviously beforehand you know there was the idea like okay with all these cockamamie ideas we have to work together you know we don't know what's going to look like for the cause then as soon as he sees power he's like yeah yeah we're not doing that kind of pluralism anymore this is going to be the right approach so she left the soviet union as did berkman she wrote a book that they titled my disillusionment with russia and i remember this is one anecdote which i'm going to discuss in the forthcoming book where she goes to britain and the british were very red at the time they really uh had something called the fabian society which was the predecessor to the british labour party which were like all right we're going to get rid of liberalism and have a socialist uh kind of nation and she gave talks and there was this one's time where she gave a talk and she started and there was a standing ovation by the time she was done you could hear a pin drop because she dared to look at these people in the face something they'd be fighting for all their lives and saying you know we've been to the future and it works and she's like guys this is worse than the czar uh you know people are under house arrest you're not allowed to have you know newspapers are being shut down if they have heretical views so on and so forth and you know she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously so she is you know deserves huge accolades in that regard i brought her up and we were talking about with our conversation with iran or well i think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction to demonstrate uh the horrors of a totalitarian state and camus who might be my all-time you know great lighthouse so to speak in terms of being a man of conscience you know he joined the communist party and for a lot of people in the states you hear oh you joined the communist party so i need to hear so all you need he was a communist all you need to know he joined the communist party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in france and other locations and he took nazism as did many others of course very very very seriously he wasn't some committed communist but this was just his mechanism to take on uh you know be part of the underground in vichy france and so on and so forth so he had the quote which is ascribed to him which is kind of a misquote howard zinn is the one who actually said it that it is a job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners and he very much felt if you read his uh speech when he won the nobel prize i forget in the 50s where he goes it's basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying himself i don't think i'm ever going to be a man on the level of camus and what he's accomplished but i think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point out uh you know this is the leftism at its best when you're giving voice to the voiceless when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people and they might not be educated literate or have any power at all some he's the guy who's like you are ruining humans these humans matter and i'm not going to let you look the other way and act like you don't know what you're doing so in this time whether we look at the time of fascism or we look at the fictional animal farm what's the heroic action then so uh camus joined the communist party there's a bunch of different heroic actions some more heroic than others not just for the you know heroes the wrong word in terms of like effectiveness what's the effective action i guess is what i want to ask as a writer as a thinker somebody with a mind what's the heroic action that's a tricky question because a lot of times in the west heroism is regardless intertwined with martyrdom right so it's kind of this idea of like you have to speak to you know kemu always talked about just let justice be done though the heavens fall this is a common um kind of motto among people with conscience and that you have to do the right thing even the consequences might not be what you like and i think that is a good loose definition of heroism so if you me i'll give you one example of heroism this was on twitter and i really feel bad that i don't remember the guy's name uh this was the line to auschwitz i believe it was and you know there's the nazi guards keeping everyone along and uh if you were a certain i think if you were under 12 they killed you or some there was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not there were some circumstances and he asked the mom how old this kid was and she's like he's 14 and she's like no he's 12. and she's like no he's nice 14 she goes he's 12. and she realized what this nazi was telling her even in that circumstance and it ended up saving the kids life so i think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism humanism and venerating the sanctity of human life i think that uh and i think it's also important to pick your battles uh i don't think if you know he got that nazi over there gotten a bullhorn and said hey this is the rules blah blah blah blah that's not going to help anyone do anything so i do think you know people a lot of times attack me from my anarchist views it's like oh you know would you call the police would you use the roads would you pay your income taxes uh you know i i got an argument with tim poole because there was that couple i think it was at missouri or illinois when they were had their guns and they were being arrested and they basically took a plea deal and he said you should have fought i go it's a lot easier to say you should fight but we don't know what circumstance someone is under and what these totalitarian regimes did very very well as as you know is if you were a target and they can't get through to you that's fine you have a family so you can sit there lex and gird your jaw and you can stand up to all the torture cool what are we gonna do about your wife what about your mom one thing stalin did he made it a law that kids up to uh 14 and up could get the death penalty for certain crimes so after that the rule was from the nkvd if you were interrogating someone they would have death warrants for the kid's child on the desk visible so i'm interrogating you asking you to commit to i'm sorry to admit to some crime that you're not committed and those piece of paper it's you know svetlana she's got a death warrant you're gonna admit to any crime you want so this is something americans this is even the case right now in north korea um which i know you had yami park on it's something i talk about a lot let's talk about instead of the hypothetical but this is happening right now on earth you can look at the map on google uh the great leader kim il-sung the founder of north korea said class enemies must be exterminated three generations so north when people talk about individualism versus collectivism uh rick santorum former senator says the family is the basic unit of society unit north korea takes that seriously the family is punished as a unit so if someone does something wrong three generations have to pay the price and you often don't know who it is that got you all in trouble there's not a trial this to western minds is something almost incomprehensible it's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin there's something when it's when it's yeah when it's your child your your loved ones your every man becomes a coward but also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for the guardian to say i don't vote there's no consequences to me there's no possibility of consequences to me this is the wonderful thing about living excuse me in a free country uh it would take a lot of courage to be in the soviet union and say i'm not going to vote and what would that courage accomplish very little so i think heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with no consequences is a bit overrated there is some aspect like the way i think about heroism is something like you said about the soldier which is quietly privately in your own life live the virtues that you want the rest of the world to live by yes so like without like writing about it is um it's not as heroic as living it quietly i'll give you a great example of this i sometimes give talks on networking and i tell the kids if you know someone's in town and it's their birthday with nothing to do take them out and i say i do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs and i go think about it this way the guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome that could be you like you have that capacity to be that person and you're making that day feel special they're going to remember for a long time what's the cost dinner 30 bucks 25 bucks so they're it's it's very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle and make things a bit better at almost no cost and they just literally don't think in those terms and one of the things camus talked about you know he's often described as a existentialist which he did not like that term he regard himself as an absurdist is the idea that we're basically blank canvases and this isn't something that is dangerous this is enormous opportunity and you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want to be you don't have to be you know i don't know george washington or one of these great heroes of all time but everyone out there has the capacity capacity excuse me to be a hero to their kids or to be a hero to maybe some there's there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely i think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs uh these are little things terry shepard does that a lot out of garden was a hero um these are not terry sheppard on blanken's name these are things that people do um that aren't heroic in the sense of superman but that i find admirable extremely and i think are very underrated because these people aren't championed is this some kind of weird passive-aggressive and direct way for you to tell me that i should take you off for your birthday on monday is that why you gave that whole speech that's that wasn't it at all that was a joke michael no it was a failed joke nevertheless there was no punch line without failure we would not have triumph can we stick on the camus absurdism versus existentialism sure what do you think is the difference in your ideas about uh anarchism too it seems like those are somehow intricately connected because uh existentialism is connected to freedom and freedom is connected to anarchism sure but i mean sartre was a defender of the soviet union uh he said explicitly about things like gulags like even if it's true we shouldn't talk about it um so he it's what people don't appreciate is how uh human beings can have contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time so one would think okay someone's a democrat they think abc therefore they think def people that have all sorts of contradictions and it's not at all clear and they'll have a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated um and is capable of doing this so sartre you know was you would think he's this radical individualist you know this sense of ultimate freedom but he's defending the soviet union camus on the other hand would probably be was very much like a social democrat he didn't really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn't be his essay reflections on the guillotine is one of the great masterpieces of all time an attack on the death penalty not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong to kill murderers but in terms of what does it do for a society if you have someone who set takes a person and locks them in a room and says you know in two years i'm going to murder you and you lock them for that this is not someone we regard as moral regardless as someone who's a complete monster but that's what the state does you know on with the death penalty and he challenges us to think is this the kind of people we want to be do and again he's saying i'm not saying killing a murderer is wrong i'm not saying evil is wrong his entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil but are we the kind of people who want to be doing these things that in any other context we regard as torture or depraved so i i'm much more of a camus person than a star person he was probably against war in that same way so i don't i have to uh admit i don't know much about the political side of kamu well i don't think his political side is that interesting or relevant what i find so interrupted what i find fascinating about camus and what i think about on a daily basis from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based on conscience that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your pill your head on the pill at the end of the day and ask yourself did i live a righteous life with integrity true to my values did i uh not needlessly cause harm to innocent people um you know that kind of mindset did i if someone is weak am i using that as an opportunity to exploit them or to harm them or do i feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person because maybe they didn't have circumstances that were you know as beneficial as other people had well how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd nothing has meaning uh you know it really borders on nihilism so he his he regards not his his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on nihilism he you know he regards cynicism as like the worst value people can have and i agree with him one hundred percent a lot of times people call me cynical online and i push back very very hard because to be a si you know i had this quote and then you write where i said i'd rather be naive than a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world at large uh camus this is the metaphor i use and i find it very inspirational i thought it was in his work but i guess i thought if it described it to him there's two types of people you imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas on an easel standing in front of this mountainside one people be like why is this blank canvas here you know what what was this what's going on here uh and just be confused whereas the other type of person will be like this a blank canvas here in this beautiful countryside what a great opportunity i can paint this river i could paint that bird i could paint my friends or myself in the background infinite choices and this is a gift that i have been given and i think that also ties very heavily into what i was i went to yeshiva as a kid which is jewish school what we were taught in incessantly uh how to look at life is this beautiful gift that god has given you and that god wants you to be happy he wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way i remember the first time i went into a church and they were asking questions about the jewish concept the afterlife they weren't familiar with jewish thought and it took me a second because i didn't really have answers and then i remembered what we were taught which is let's suppose you're at this banquet with the best chef on earth and the table's so heavy because you've got steaks and you've got chicken and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing and you've got your dr pepper and mr and mr pibb and the store brand everything you want and you're looking around at this amazing bounty right and then you turn to this best chef on earth and you're like oh so what's for dessert i mean the offensiveness of that is just so you know insane like you have this eat the meal like i promise you if i could deliver this meal the dessert's gonna be okay so this focus on the afterlife when we've been given this amazing gift uh you know on this earth is is a very kind of different mindset from both the jewish tradition as i'd been taught and the kamu mindset obviously kamu is an atheist didn't believe in an afterlife but this concept that life is is meaningless but that means you have that opportunity to find value to seek for truth to seek for happiness and kamu has this quote it's ascribed to him it's like a meme i've never found the source so maybe he doesn't really say it but he says maybe it's not about happy endings maybe it's about the journey and i think when you have that mindset and as you and i i think you and i both found this because neither of us when we were kids thought we'd be doing this right but now that we are really fortunate definitely this yeah and definitely that yeah but now that we're fortunate enough to do this and that we're blessed enough that there's people who find this of value and interest and we could pay the rent doing this there's not a day that goes by where i don't think you and i or think this is pretty absurd yeah but it's also pretty wonderful and as a consequence of us thriving it also shows other people that happiness is possible on this earth and i think cynicism is the lie it's not just the worldview it's a lie that happiness is not possible in this earth or it's only happy possible if you sell your soul and you're like a bad person you screw other people over i reject that in every aspect you know as you said my birthday's coming up i've been feeling um just a lot of really great things have been happening very very recently so it affects me very heavily emotionally especially when i see the response it gives to uh like the kids right so it's one thing to say this is what i'm for but when you can provide proof of concept that what you've been advocating does result in positive responses i got a message from this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago okay and then he was like look i found your work i found some other stuff and now i realize i'm going to make something of myself i was born in a meth house you know whatever 19 20 years old i should be in the garbage but i'm gonna try to be a stand-up because i have opportunity on this earth even if he fails as a stand-up you know he's still such whatever he does washing dishes there's no shame in that he is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don't really like but as compared to the alternative of like i'm going to kill myself this is heaven well i think there's beauty to be discovered in all of it and all of those experiences yes so but at the same time so i often think about i just recently reread the idiot by destiusky i often feel like the idiot that's why when i say i'm an idiot i often think about prince mishkin that kind of idiot which the world sees you as naive i don't think he's naive i don't think i'm naive but i tend to see the good in people and the good in every moment and the world often is cynical and in fact especially in what we do often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical it's i this is very much an urban uh elite educated mindset where if you write a book about someone who's let's suppose a drug addict or a prostitute that has heft and that's valid but if you're writing a book about like a love story you know two people love and it's they're in roller coasters or carousels that's less legitimate i hate that i hate that i hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity and i'm not saying a drug addict approaches to pray but they're basically their worldviews if it's unless it's dark and twisted it doesn't really count as art and i i despise that mindset that subtext so the internet and people around me often will call me naive because i don't think the word they want is innocent don't you think it's about it's not that innocent no but innocent in that you you genuinely in your heart i know you fairly well at this point believe that goodness is possible and that people can if not be good at least be better than they were yesterday see even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there's not wisdom in that presumes that somehow that's uh oh isn't that beautiful to live that life of a child who sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future but just wait until they grow up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think right but that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room and don't you don't you want to be if the world is like that don't you want to be the guy who takes it on and changes it for the better right so it's like saying well you know cancer is everywhere it's inevitable well don't you want to be the one who says not anymore i'm here and i'm going to make that change and i can see it being better than it is now so i i i think you and i have the same analysis of your world view and i don't think that there is a good word for it so i guess it's this idea of you know inherent benevolence might be you know maybe wordy but i think that's more accurate because you know you and i did not have such easy lives growing up to put it mildly you constantly talk about um just horrific aspects of life so to claim that you kind of don't know that they exist or you sleep on the rug is completely not accurate to your work and your mindset can we talk about world war ii in the soviet union sure so on sunday june 22nd 1941 hitler launched operation barbarossa which was the surprise invasion of the soviet union that's right if i could read to you a few lyrics from a song that for some reason has stuck throughout my childhood it was a famous song during that time the song talks about um kiev like that moment as part of that operation that kiev was first bombed and it was announced on june 22nd the song says at exactly four o'clock that the war has begun for some reason this song haunts me because the exactness of that time and this realization that at any moment you could have this thing happen to you in your own personal life maybe you had something like 9 11 happen where everything changes and it's just like haunting because it makes me think that at any moment something like that could happen that changes everything and i just think about like normal life going on in kiev at the time and then all of a sudden the bombs are dropping and they announced that the war has begun and you thought you were going to stay out of the war um um this is something that is very intensely emotional for me because you and i are both russian jewish so to know that my grandparents and my great-grandma were told that the nazis were coming and this wasn't a dress rehearsal and that if they get here which they do they did lev is very western ukraine that 100 you and all your relatives are going to be uh murdered yeah and uh there's a monument now in in level where i'm from about this but i i don't think either of us can imagine what it's like to know to think that we're about you know minutes or whatever hours or there's just there's just the russian army standing between us and everyone everyone we are related to are going to be murdered for no reason and um you know like what's the closure here right like they evacuated a lot of people and but they didn't evacuate enough and to know that there is this force coming to 100 murder you this isn't some kind of you know uh the tv news being hyperbolic they are coming to kill you and they if they get you they will kill you and you have to you know we all think about war let go you know we hope america wins in iraq right but if america got their ass kicked kind of in vietnam it's not really going to affect america in the sense that you're going to have the body bags and all the kids being killed and that's something that's i'm not sweeping on the rug but no one in america thought the vietnamese are going to come here and kill them right they were secure in their person so to have that sense of we really need to win because if we don't win we are 100 if we they the russian army doesn't win we are 100 percent all going to be slaughtered and often in not just a bullet to the head in sadistic ways is something that um to know that people who share my blood uh saw and went through is very hard for me to kind of um uh wrap my head around and there's no possibility to delude yourself yeah yeah yeah because i mean they they would uh as the song also talks about but they would burn the factories so it's basically saying we're in the war now this is like this is your life yeah like this is our life you know how you yesterday you're worried about like oh i misplaced my pen where is it like it's like yeah this was paradise most of us are gonna this our life now is that most of us are going to die and if we want to prevent all of us from dying we uh we have to fight and we also can't sit down in some kind of weird like um desert island or you know plane crash situation and be like let's decide between us who's going to be the first to die maybe the like titan the titanic right they sat down and they were like women and children in the lifeboats you know they had this rational agreement you don't have those choices in in a war so um it's it's something that i uh uh it's it's just very chilling and it's something i don't really have um the emotional space to understand or grapple with uh even you know obviously i've been to north korea you can see it and so on and so forth you and i can't or anyone listening to this except for maybe on me and people like that you can't imagine what that's like to live it we can't i we can't imagine what it's like to live in those situations where it's not like before hitler came everyone's you know dancing around and having a great time i mean imagine how what that life is like where your preference to hitler is starving and waiting online for hours for bread and to have the secret police and your friends are turning you in and your phones are all tapped and you're a prisoner but to you this is infinitely better than the alternative like these are the choices that you know our family had to deal with it's something that no matter how much you it's like a let me put in terms people understand you know what i mean it's like your first bad breakup right like that's a much simpler thing to wrap your head around because it's like if you've never had it you can't really but when you feel it it's just so intense but you can't tell someone what's like we could sit down for days and hours and have people tell us but until it's the totality totality of your environment and your life and your mindset i remember my grandma um she would talk about that's like when you're when you're that hungry oh all you're thinking about is bread yeah because your brain won't let you know human beings you're revolved we have instincts whatever and the mind is telling you food food food food food food and that there's kids thinking this and that there's there they're not going to get the food yeah and imagine being a parent and you're watching your kids without food and knowing they're not gonna get the food and uh the fact that this happened in north korea in the 90s yeah i i met a refugee and uh he had to watch his dad starve to death and uh thank you um and we have no concept of uh what it's like i mean we kind of you know it's just like last night here in austin all the places were closed and i couldn't get my protein powder yeah and this is the extent of my suffering when it comes to food you know or if i couldn't there was a restaurant that i went to in brooklyn where for some vacation reason they weren't serving sashimi they only had sushi so i had to have the rice and the carbs to live a life where that is the extent of your food problems as opposed to the choice is either hitler killing you or being hungry 24 7. you know my grandma told this story of how they had a close call it was her and her brother and her mom my great-grandma who passed and i think there was like either helicopter overhead or something and my great-grandma jumped on top of my uh grandma's brother and not my grandma so she basically did a sophie's choice my grandma's name is sophia and chose the brother and this is something that she felt you know all her life that her mom had chosen her brother over her but these little things that happen these little kind of a decisions we have to make in war there's a book i read called uh uh five chimneys i think this woman who was an auschwitz survivor and what she talked about what people don't appreciate it's not necessarily the slaughter and the torture it's that there's no rhyme or reason to it like she talked about how they had a camp just for people from uh czechoslovakia and they were treated better than the jews and then one day they just killed them all right and she's like i still don't understand why they're giving them food and treating them well and then the next day they're all killed and we will never get answers you know and she's and and things like she talks about how they decided to kill all the kids and they didn't really either for some reason they didn't have the courage to or they wanted to be cruel so instead of shooting them they just kept walking in the snow until they all died so it's things like this that uh the fact that you and i dodged these bullets and that we can be here and uh be doing this and you know running our mouths for a living uh i i think about it all the time and um uh it's it's just very um uh disturbing to know and i know you know this as well that there's lots of places on earth where if people had a choice they would kill us on site and be proud of themselves for it yeah they're i don't know what to make of the contrast that you you were talking about the fact that you've been truly happy the last few weeks and months yes there's been a lot of moments of happiness and joy and that joy is built on a history of human suffering like in your roots in your blood is a lot of people that were tortured that suffered so that you could have this joy you have both the you have the responsibility to truly be grateful for that joy but it also shows that there's the happy ending that it does end in a good note that it does get infinitely infinitely better um and that i think there's a i don't like you saying the word responsibility but there is um an opportunity for those of us who did dodge that bullet to uh give testimony to these people and more importantly to give testimony to the people who are going through this now so you know one of the reasons i you know talk about north korea so much why i wrote dear reader is because it's very easy and this is human nature i'm not condemning people i don't i think this is how people are wired when you see an asian country with asian people and things are you know bad over there you you know i think in the west it's like oh you know asia they're all crazy there they're wacky they eat you know they eat dogs or someone and so forth some weird stereotype and they think of them as kind of martians so it's important for people who aren't of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on behalf of these people because it's very different how just people just naturally react when you have a westerner talking about this instead of becoming there you know them over there it becomes you know this could have been uh us very easily i have a friend peter they hansky great dude and i was showing him photos when i was in pyongyang and he goes this looks like a russian city with asian people it was it completely disturbed him so you know that was one of the reasons i did go to north korea because that was as close as i would get to see what your family went through to see what my family went through and they're still living under this uh a regime and one of the things i fought very hard to do with dear reader which i was successful in amazingly and it just i said like i could die now like i feel like if you make if just move the needle a little bit then you've kind of uh paid your due for your time here on this earth to have it change from being a laughing stock you know and i i think team america did a good job they made kim jong il into a clown and they made a joke of it but you're going from nothing to joke so at least now people are aware of it that it exists right and then i st and many others took it from a joke to like guys this is really really really bad and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is and i think now there is an understanding other than a few people who are just looking through a trump lens and wanting trump to fail because trump's an asshole and that's fine to be like these poor people and it's really unfortunate because there's a segment of western culture who thinks that correctly often when you're complaining about uh or discussing the plight of another country that's just your preludes to war and an excuse to invade like the kurds in syria you know we're talked about if we're not in syria tomorrow it's going to be another genocide blah blah i'm not saying let's invade north korea or anything like that all i'm saying is you know thank god that this isn't your life i bring this up all the time the woman who was my guide when i was there i'm aware of what she's up to now she's still she's extremely rich by north korean standards but she'll never be in a position to buy medicine she'll never be in a position to go on a vacation uh things that you and i just you know whatever she she can't go on the internet she can't get encyclopedia uh she can't better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning better yourself as a person in service to the state so i i i mean there's it's also frustrating because there's only so much that i can do as an individual what's your takeaway about human nature from looking at north korea and looking at how the rest of the world is looking at north korea uh i i always this is a great question i think about it fairly often and i always say human beings are animals right when you say someone's an animal it's like a slur like he's like a beast animals are capable of enormous kindness empathy sympathy you know they look out for one another groom one another there's a thing with with apes where they groom each other for parasites and you're suppose even if there are no parasites they pretend this parasites just to have that kind of bonding uh you see infinite uh photos online of like cats raising puppies because the puppies mom died things like this that's part of being an animal part of being an animal is also just the most uh monstrous cruelty killer whales you know there's this big pc move did not call them killer whales and just call them orcas they will murder blue whale pups uh cavs excuse me and play with them and not even eat them so they just murder for the sake of fun so there's and cats you know kill birds all the time things like this so it runs the whole gamut um and i think it's i i'm you know when yaron and i were on your show i don't think lord of the flies is accurate i don't think hobbes is how reality works when you're in that kind of state um but i think uh we've seen countless examples of human beings especially when human beings have power over someone who's powerless of allowing themselves to engage in not just harm but cruelty and that is something as soviets you and i are very painfully aware of it it's not just about the oppression which as bad enough as it is it's that mediocre person with that little bit of power and now they're standing between you and your daughter having medicine and they love it to make you dance to be like oh you need me to get this medicine make you go go through hoops because now they feel like for the first time their life they're in a position of strength and power i think that is in many ways the more common nature of evil what hannah aaron talks about the banality of evil than someone who's like an ss guard you're shooting someone in the head like that i think we could all wrap our heads around to some extent like okay i'm a military it's not easy i have to execute people pulling a trigger you could kind of have this mental disconnect between the finger and the victim but like that little day-to-day stuff like are you doing the right thing on a day-to-day basis that i think is far more common and far more disturbing aspect in certain senses of the human psyche yeah there's something um especially disturbing about a weak man given power yeah and just abusing that power there's something about not just weak but like mediocre and everything it does or less than mediocre if you a great example of this which i'm also talking about the next book is ceausescu who was the dictator of romania so you know the cold war is still somewhat poorly understood in you know popular culture but the different countries in the second world the soviet bloc some are more liberal than others some were more sane than others and chauchesko at first was one of the you know more western friendly more the free ones then he met the great leader kim sung from north korea and he had the idea to impose a personality cult on romania and it's the kind of things like forcing people to breed because he wanted to make people taller he i think he made like the biggest building in all of europe the people's palace but it was just for him while there's no electricity you know elsewhere but you look at this guy you know stalin's a badass right he was a bank robber if you look at photos of him as a kid he was a hunk lennon was clearly intellectual these were not these are powerful trotsky these were powerful men with huge egos huge force of personality but you look at this chaucesko guy and you could like for example on my driver's license instead of my address i'm like in my real dress being like one two three four fifth avenue by mistake it says one two three four fifth street right so you can imagine him being in the post office and me giving him my id to get my package and him being baffled because this says street that says avenue instead of understand and this the look on his face this dullard that you can see how you know how sometimes i'm gonna can i curse fuck yes yes so if you know like if you're in the airport and you see someone and you look at them an adult and you think okay this person was born fucked up just like on site like something's wrong with them how are they traveling alone you look at chauchesku you look at him you're like something's not right with this guy not in the sense of like evil but in the sense that he's a simpleton right and now he's in charge of this whole country and everyone's taught to regard him as one of the great geniuses of all time and it's this the idea this mediocre nobody this guy would have in any other culture been accomplished nothing or or at war would have had an honest job where he's like okay he works at the mail mail service and he's batted it okay fine he's not hurting anyone and now as a result of this he's responsible for mass death secret police and incarceration and uh you know the one the greatest things that i've ever seen which i'm sure many people have seen as well if you go on youtube it's his speech and it's the first time the crowd turns and his head kind of like because they start booing him which was unheard of and you know he was shot with his uh um dog-faced wife not that long after it was just a great moment but it's things like this i agree with you that that mediocre weak person is now in a position of power over somebody else and that sense of vindictiveness like i'm going to feel strong for once in my life but it's going to be at your expense that i think is you know human nature it's most primal and every time i meet a person in this world you're the first person to get me to cry on a fucking podcast fucking the robot gets me to cry what the fuck is going on every time i meet a weird person somebody to me heroism is also taking a risk to uh rebel against mediocrity yeah like in in the most simplest of ways like the the license address like taking a risk to break the little bit of rule that nobody will know about to take that little bit of a leap of like that little protest against the bureaucracy well like that nazi remedy where he just spoke out he's like hey lady that's a big one oh that's a restructuring i mean like literally at the line at starbucks or something like okay like even in the tiniest of ways when i see people just like it's almost like that little like glimmer in their eye a wink like we're in this together this there's there's all this conformity all around us that's at a different time could have been nazi germany could have been uh stalin and soviet union sure we're in this together we're going to rebel against that conformity by just just taking the risk that little bit of risk against mediocrity i don't know and that and then once again i see this in companies too when i see the mediocrity i see this you know i used to work at google i see it in google and when the companies grow that mediocrity is overwhelming the peter principle right the peter principle yeah yeah my hope is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer that um that risk taking the the leap of faith or whatever the heck that is the leap out of the ordinary out of the conformity out of the mediocrity so this is where you and i disagree i i think most a lot of people do are not capable of that they're accustomed to it i don't know if they're not capable i i i understand your position i'm disagreeing with it i'm saying i do not think they're capable i think a lot of people effectively don't have souls they do not have a conscience in this sense where they're going to look at an issue bring their critical thinking and say all right i am going to do the right thing although i'm taking a risk i don't think thinking is involved or is it just taking that leap there there's something about that basic human spirit forget the thinking part it's it's just saying like i'll take that risk they're taking that adventure the same thing that got people to explore the seas you know that that uh throughout human civilization explore land explore the oceans like that explore exploration like we've done stuff this way all this time i'm going to take a leap and that comes out of nowhere seemingly but those people are the heroes but i don't think that's universal remember there's i'm going to use a very gauche example there was a show called scare tactics which was basically a candid camera but they would scare people like they'd have vampires whatever hidden camera and people's reactions and so a lot of but sometimes it the prank didn't work out like they expected so there was one where they were hiring some of the the people who were the marks you know the contestants so to speak was it was hard to be a security guard okay and you have to watch this this factory overnight and you get paid and what the setup was some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle of the night like in rags and they were saying they were keeping us prisoner here like blah blah and just watch the person reaction to this and there was one security guard where there he basically forced them back into the building and they're like they're working us 24 7 we're getting beaten he's like i'm here to do a job get back in there and you watch this and it never even enters his head to be like something's wrong here he was given his orders he's following his orders and to me that is not uncommon and that person although they look like you and i uh there's something essentially human missing with them now very quickly the reaction is well it's one step from there to nazism i don't think it's something that i'm not saying this person should be killed but i'm just saying to expect that every human being has the capacity to have that defiance especially to cost their own life that i think is not realistic uh and i but at the same time i feel like an octopus on the eighth hand it is those few of us or if you want to include me in this who do make these tiny little protests who look the other way when someone is hungry who's stealing food from the supermarket right it's like all right like i i'm gonna pretend i didn't see anything that those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate the validity of the human experience whereas everyone else is kind of like scenery i think almost everybody in the world can derive deep meaning and pleasure from having done those courageous acts and i also think they have the capacity to do them to discover that meaning and happiness so you're the cynic then why aren't they doing it they haven't gotten a chance to like i've never tried lsd or dmt you haven't gotten the chance to try this amazing journey which is taking the risk that's something yes because as you just said two minutes ago everyone has that chance every day to do the right thing and we have the chance to do a lot of things and we don't realize there's a lot of stuff right in front of our nose that we don't realize right because you have to kind of wake up to it and sometimes uh you need the catalyst there needs to be some kind of thing that happens that wakes you up that the fact that most people don't take the small acts of rebellion doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to both do so and to derive a lot of meaning from it then it's a discussion about how to create societies that get more and more people to be free actors and free thinkers that's that's the question and that that probably leads us into a discussion of anarchism and so on but yeah i just think we are very young as a species we're trying to figure out how to get ourselves to first be collaborative but at the same time be free spirits and i think both of those are within human nature i think another big concern is that there's enormous disincentives and this is michael malus speaking yeah uh for human beings to be kind and for tenderness and i think especially when you're young you know what i mean when you're immature a lot of times someone will reach out to you with kindness or vulnerability and you think it's funny to kind of dunk the head underwater in a pool or something like that yeah and when you get older you look there you know there's this one uh example of this this was a this was in the 90s and there was a woman she became a like uh like stripper or something like that or whatever it was but she had this amazing body she was just gorgeous and the show was she was talking about how when she was in high school she was bullied a lot and that there was this football player he messed with her every single day and like at one day she even threw pickles in her hair and her hair smelled like pickles and it was laughing at her and this really screwed her up i mean up to that show and they took her backstage and they brought out the football player now he's a dad and a regular dude and he's like do you know like do you know why you're here and he's like no and they're like oh what were you like in high schools like i was kind of a jock you know bully whatever and they brought her out and he didn't even remember her really and she just starts crying about the pickles and whatever and this something that affected her for like 20 years and i've never seen a clear example of someone who wants to kill themselves in this guy like the guilt on his face and he's looking at her and he's desperate to be like what can i do to take your pain away to make it better uh like i i he was just crippled by it because he knew there's nothing he could do he knew he 100 did the wrong thing he knew he did the wrong thing unthinkingly like you can imagine you know i got to screw over this lady to feed my family you know that that's fine but for it was at the time it meant nothing to him so of course he didn't remember and he was just paralyzed by this sense of crippling guilt one of the reasons i always try to do the right thing isn't because i'm an inherently good person which i do not think i am i don't think anyone is inherently good but because i will feel guilty about it for a very very long time because if you do the wrong thing this is a very common idea if you do the wrong thing to a good person that's really really bad because what kind of person are you in the same way that everyone can be that guy who takes someone out for their birthday everyone has that ability for someone who did the wrong thing to someone who's a normal person and do you want to be that guy as well my friend uh um bitstein he's a um uh big gold uh excuse me bitcoin person my biography ego and hubris is like 500 now on ebay it's like hard to find came out in 2006 and he had told me that you know you can get it on on torrent it's it's downloadable and i'm like oh i thought if you were my friend you know you'd want to buy it at the time it was not 500 i assure you and he goes i did buy it i'm just telling you that you could also get it for free this information that you might want to use and i felt i'm like i snapped at this kid who was doing right by me and i felt it just stuck in my head i'm like you're an ass yeah and then years later i apologize he didn't have no memory of this at all and i'm glad to be able to reiterate the apology again but you know this is you know a lot of times i'm extremely aggressive on twitter and in other venues i always try to and maybe i fail and that's my moral failing always do it as a counter-attack if you're gonna start going personal if you're gonna start being aggressive against an individual i'm not going to necessarily hold back when i reciprocate and it's something that is very common on social media but i don't think it is normal i just because a lot of this you're talking about the the quiet little rebellion just because everyone else around you thinks it's okay to just go up to people and attack them in the most personal ways imprompted because of their views really just take a step back and realize what you're engaging with now if that's the fight they want then you know my soviet cruelty can come out and that's kind of why i don't drink because i do enjoy it yeah but at the same time be aware of what you're doing and and and again this goes back to camus um sense that conscience really is what makes us human beings yeah that's the thing was saying i don't think most people think in terms of conscience they don't think it they we are taught this is that this is that that creeping cynicism that oh grow up when you're an adult you have to make sacrifices blah blah blah and even if i buy that for a second which i don't but if i have to make sacrifices sometimes that doesn't mean it's okay for me to make a sacrifice of my values in this moment if i have to maybe be at work and my boss is a jerk to me and calls me names i have to be humiliated but i got to put food in the plate that doesn't mean it's okay later if i'm at a party and i'm just you know extremely offensive to someone for no reason you know my own flavor of a little bit of rebellion sometimes i use the number two is uh you know you're very witty on twitter and thank you my and twitter likes mockery and wit and uh counterattack is uh twitter loves that somebody who's skilled at it my own flavor of a bit of a rebellion is to say things very simply bordering and cliche with with uh with a authenticity and like genuinely meaning the words i say but knowing that those words would be are easy to attack sure and that sometimes those attacks can hurt because people would just mock me sure people don't like earnestness because they've been taught to be too cool for school yeah so there's this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated yeah use bigger words sometimes throw in um a criticism of institutions or something like that like uh like almost as if i have a deep wisdom about the way the world is broken but when you speak very simply about beautiful things in life it's very easy to sound like you don't know what the hell you're talking about sure and i kind of i stick by that i don't know where that's going to end up but it's like the idiot from this day it feels like that's the right uh that's the right thing even if it hurts when i'm attacked for it i i do something similar sometimes which is i'll have some innocuous comment about like bubble gum i mean just it's not even political and a lot of times people it's a few people will respond to this paragraph of just invective yeah about like blah blah and then this and you say this and you're an ass and just really trying to get at me and what i in those situations there are very specific circumstances i will respond and i mean it every single time i will say i i wish your parents had been kinder to you or your mom or your dad because if someone is some even if i'm some idiot on twitter right if we just talk about bubble gum and this is your res i'm not talking about politics where i can see how people get emotional coven my grandma died now you're talking and you i realize this isn't about me like i'm someone you've never met making some inane point about nothing and you're getting agitated about this it's clearly something else that's going on here and someone taught you someone had to teach you that this is how to respond in this kind of very kind of harsh way and a lot of times they'll you know they won't say anything or get deleted and i hope every single time there's no asterisk here that they take a second and they realize that the way that they were talked to growing up was not acceptable that they don't have to carry this forward and that they don't have to be kind to me i'm nobody of them but take a second and ask if this is the kind of mindset you want to be your norm as opposed to a weapon you pull out of your pocket sometimes where it's warranted or even when it's not warranted i think there's a lot of those people out there you know and we forget uh how you know how um hard it is for a lot of people to grow up how they're trained from their parents or the single parent that the only way they're gonna get attention is by acting out that when they do good things it doesn't get comment but if they do bad things they gotta smack upside their head that i think is far more common than we realize and that's such a it's not even it's not hitting the kid that's going to last it's the pain is going to give five seconds but when you're training this child helpless child is something that's really really bad i don't know if it always can be mapped to that i always wonder about them like what their motivations are and i just kind of like whenever i think about them i think only positively and i don't even think about the childhood thing i think i don't know i i i kind of imagine that all of us can go through that stage where we enjoy the derision of others we go through stages of being i i enjoy the derision of others but it has to be you know billy i'd have that quota like i like it when people are mean to me i stopped pretending to be nice but like what's the worst thing someone can say about you you're not what harm are you doing uh maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are the conversations suck and the people are losing well okay no the main the main thing i would say is i'm way more popular than i deserve to be what does deserve mean the reality is there's people out there that just enjoy hating on others and i don't um i don't fault them for it like i don't even think of them as haters i think of them as just people that in this particular part of their life are enjoying this activity of uh of deriding others on the internet i'm i'm not sure what to do with that i i just don't want to i i don't want to allow myself to think badly of them i guess is the thing i'm the one saying don't think badly of them i'm saying that i don't think they're inherently bad people i think that their thinking is screwed and that i'm i'm i'm steel mining them i'm saying let's assume everything you're saying about lex is true this is an opportunity for you to out dulex like it's no but are you saying they should stop hating because i'm saying like maybe they shouldn't just keep i i don't believe in should right i'm an anarchist what i'm saying is like if this is your belief about lex you know what it is i made this comment in my book than you write when people make fun of andy warhol and they're like oh my god he painted a soup can and now he became a millionaire i could do this well why don't you yeah so basically if i go up to you with a check and i say i will give you a million dollars you could see the check you got to paint a soup can what am i waiting for so clearly there's a disconnect in their thinking between what they're perceiving and the reality because if it was as simple or as maybe not simple but as as possible for them as they perceive it to be why are they leaving comments instead of uh outdoing you how great would it be for them to have your bigger audience and drive you into the ground i don't know how that would work because it's not the nba but no but you want to point out you do this too on twitter you want to point out the hypocrisy the fraudulence of others right yeah what are you you're not claiming anything other than this is the following is the conversation between me and and yeah michiki whatever his name is right i got the voice down dude i got it down i've been walking around my house doing my lex impression i've been leaking motor oil everywhere yeah but yeah i don't know i i don't know i don't know what to make of it because uh i think there's a more general statement to be made like i see twitter this way too when i read a tweet i try to read it with like the best possible interpretation meaning like what is the wisdom in this tweet right as opposed to what i think a large number of people not a large but some fraction try to see what is the worst possible interpretation of this tweet and they want to they they want to destroy you for that worst interpretation like they want to um there's people i'm already aware of this with me and certainly with a lot of people they're waiting for me to fail they want me to be like this guy talks about love all the time you want me to be some dark like uh abilities pain yeah they want you to be in pain because they die i'll tell you exactly why because this is why i'm so for being white-pilled and being for hope because if you are black-pilled meaning if you think it's pointless we're all done you're just wasting your breath if you have any counter examples to this thesis if there's even a little bit of hope your entire hypothesis falls through right so if it's it's kind of how like you have all these stories of people who are like painting swastikas who aren't nazis but just to show that oh there's all this nazism so i'm gonna you know kind of force the conclusion so for them when they see you thriving you are as a mediocre person with a crappy show but you're demonstrating that people can succeed this bothers them so you are anyone can succeed that bothers them yeah so because then why haven't they so now you're a counter to their worldview and that is going to cause anxiety when you have data that contradicts other data in your in your world view this is the in your mindset this is a big issue for them yeah so anyone listening to this they're annoyed by the look of my face remember that you could probably do way better than me and you should but also what would you failing look like like let's suppose this podcast went from whatever views you had to 100 views in episode that's still success you are talking to people you like having conversations about important issues you're having a good time they're giving a good time how is that a failure if i have dinner with a friend of mine there's zero viewers and we enjoy that time that is the height of human success when you are sharing happiness happiness joy joy over love so what's the difference between joy and love michael malus uh i think joy is easier to attain it's more common you could share it with everyone give me an example of joy like what was the moment of joy for you recently i could give you a great example of joy and this is part in the absurdist mindset okay i love having a bad meal at a restaurant and i'll give you you can see why you go with your friend it takes you 45 minutes to get seated okay i'm starving waiters not at paying attention to you they bring your water it's got a hair in it they get the food wrong yeah it comes out again it's ripe but it's cold at a certain point you're like okay i'm hungry i'm living an anecdote this is something that you if you were at dinner we could talk about this for years because how great is it that the worst thing that's happening to me is i gotta wait an hour for this meal that's gonna be cooked wrong right that to me is joy is holding on to that idea that happiness and thriving are possible even when in the moment it's uh everything's going the wrong way doesn't every moment have the capacity to uh fill you with joy then yes so yes the shitty moments and the good moments yes but that see that's the way i usually talk about love is like i love life yes and in because life can generate every everything the pain the loss but also just like simple or complicated bliss all of that i just love all of that and that because it fills me with it with a kind of i guess joy but joy has a connotation that's supposed to be somehow positive like you're supposed to be smiling uh to me you know man search for meaning with victor frankl you know just it's you're you're in the holocaust you're in a concentration camp just having a little bit of food that you didn't expect you will have uh or even just thinking about food or what about there's a kid there you tell them a funny story you crack them up yeah like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes that is the height of joy yeah so to me like all of like life is like infinitely full of possibility for joy yes and that's what i mean by love because oftentimes like romantic love is what people think about when they think love but to me it's all like part of the same thing and it's almost like love romantic love or love with a friend friendship is like you both notice each other it's like dogs they look at each other and then they look at the thing they're interested in you both notice each other and that moment of joy you share that moment of joy together yeah like the restaurant yeah the restaurant yeah if you're both almost without uh conspiring notice the absurdity of how shitty this meal is and like that again that little glimmer of realization that's that's what makes life beautiful you mentioned uh your grandmother and lev you were thinking of returning there the plans got a little bit delayed but what are you hoping from that trip of going back to russia going back to ukraine what do you hope to get out of it but what do you think you will feel uh a lot of things first of all i'm going with my buddy chris williamson he hosts the modern wisdom podcast he is one of my closest friends we've never met oh really we've never met he's br he's in britain he's tried he's trying to get his ass over here to austin uh he's filling out his form he's too good-looking a crime we call him i call him apollo and i'm loki so right away you have a buddy comedy because we're going to film it right you have these two guys who on paper you're very dissimilar but we're very very close in which way are you similar i think we're both very intense people uh very strong emotionally um uh we're both very ambitious in the sense that uh not in terms of career but like we want to grab life by the short hairs kind of thing um we're just both like good experiences uh he uh bench more than you or oh yeah he's he's of course yeah i mean the guy's jacked he's just because you know he he's so good-looking he could be one of those guys who's mostly biceps and oh no no no he's not if you look at go to his instagram chris will x is his handle it's like heads head it's head to toe it's just sculpted he's perfect in every way that's great he he what flaws does he have because i need that taste of friends and his accent is all crazy yeah uh he pronounces it uh he's an under a muddle now i spell it mudl so just us two british and american and just two different dudes it's going to be a lot of fun although to be fair as you know i'm an underwear model now as well so yeah yeah we're going to talk that in a second maybe but um yeah thunderbird.com yeah uh this episode is brought to you by sheath underwear are we going to get some pictures eventually i think we might yeah uh yes i have them on my phone we're gonna we'll have them we could we could shouldn't write uh you could slice it in right here so to be able to go with someone who is a very close i mean we meet him talk like every day right so to someone who generally cares about you who uh who's he's very very grounded right so like a lot of times i'll have like some concern and he's really good and if you listen to show at slicing through the noise and being like hold on a second i can't do the accent yet have you considered a b and c because you know whenever i had the situation this is what i did so he's really good with that um so to have a first of all just like two buddies on a trip is a really a lot of fun second of all i know that if it's gonna get be very intense so for you you left russia much later than i did how old were you 13 13 right so you remember it i'm sure very very well i left when i was one and a half two i don't remember at all to go to the streets where you know my family had to go through this stuff to see the you know they they came to live up they slaughtered all the jews i mean to have that little memorial there that's there now and to just look around and know yesterday best basically they came here they rounded everyone up and also from the other side you had the stalinists coming in and starving all the people it's it's just to know that so much horror and death there's this quote i saw once about a woman who went to auschwitz and she just made the comment like grass grows here because we think you know that when it comes to the nature of evil that you're going to go there this is going to be this pits of hell or whatever there's birds you know there's you know robin's hopping around looking for the worms or whatever they think it's perfectly nice and you you you stand there to understand that so much suffering happened here or there is going to be very jarring i know that it's going to be an issue because i speak russian and not ukrainian and to speak russian to ukrainians is like a big deal so that's going to be a concern i'm also worried about going to russia because every russian has this idea that even though they've just met you they feel it they feel that they're in a position to tell you what you're doing wrong with your life what you should be doing if they're a cab driver i have no tolerance for unsolicited advice on a basis at all that's gonna be horrible they're gonna be telling me i need to speak russian better because think about i'm not hearing it i'm not interested in hearing it so that i think and also you know given my upcoming book the white pill and covering what happened back in the day under stalinism and later to see this was the leblanc this was the basement where they would you know you know once this is something that people might not realize there's a superb film uh the death of stalin which is kind of that's what i do with north korea you know he puts a humorous spin on and then when you take a step back and you realize what they're actually saying it's just like it's very very disturbing how when stalin was dying he had a stroke he's laying there in a pile of his own past he's unconscious he'd be right before he died he thought the doctors were all plotting against him so they were being tortured to confess that they were trying to murder him they had to get the doctors out of the torture chambers to attend to him and they did it so this kind of thing to like go there like red square and see this is where it happened to see lennon's body like this is the guy who emma goldman yelled at it's gonna be really um because i've worked so much in this space jarring and intense and emotional and that's as intense as for me sitting here talking to you about it to see it and to see the faces and to see cyrillic everywhere you know other than brighton beach and brooklyn um it's gonna i'm sure it's gonna do a huge number on me because uh as we as western and as the tupoi mirikanets as the russians will say i am this is still where i came from yeah so no matter to see it face to face i don't know how i'm gonna react but i don't think it's gonna be like meh you've assembled uh a number of essays from anarchist thinkers in a new book called the anarchist handbook you mentioned emma goldman what interesting things do these thinkers agree on and what do they disagree on the anarchist handbook.com is the website it covers from the 1790s to i think my essay is the last one from 2014 which uh a friend of mine who's uh kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audiobook um also podcasts and vodka i never but it's not a podcast anyone would have heard of it's like tom wood's been even worse so what they all agreed on was the illegitimacy of government and also the malevolence of state actors and the consequences of governments so they range in terms that most people would easily regard as either left or right wing but it tackles the nature of government and also creates positive non-state alternatives from really many different angles the slogan i have is the black flag which is the traditional flag of anarchism the black flag comes in many colors so they were really all over the map in terms of what they're for but their disagreement is about the nature of state and the nature of power um and it's very edifying because this is an ideology that's been in many ways swept on the rug no one takes this seriously grow up um that i can allow people to sit down and read these essays and see for themselves just how beautiful this tapestry over the decades and centuries uh has been woven about people who genuinely believed in freedom as the most important and how to maximize that uh uh for society so maybe it's useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there so one is uh leo tolstoy oh yeah who um i think not many people know is uh an anarchist yes uh a christian and a christian anarchist yeah so he uh came to despise government for his deceit and his violence but to him the the christian principles of non-violence i think are important oh yeah this kind of pacifist kind of mindset of uh you know it's better to someone to punch you than to punch them back so he's in that way at least i read he influenced mlk and gandhi what do you think about this flavor color of the anarchist flag of non-violence ah nonviolent opposition i i i will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring up mlk because he's become so corporate yeah and everyone just brings him up without knowing about him one of the things that martin luther king did so very well was that he forced people to face the consequences of what they were putting forward you want to be racist you want to be for jim crow you wanted for segregation okay it's easy for you to do that from your living room now turn on your news and you see men and women in suits being attacked by dogs being attacked by fire hoses and beaten by cops just so they could sit on the front of the bus and now for a lot of people who were still racist who were still had animus toward black people are watching this and it's gonna be a lot harder to be like i'm okay with this i'm okay with human beings even ones i regard as somehow bad or inferior to be beaten and attacked by trained dogs and they're not doing anything in response that strikes to i think a very basic nature of especially american like okay whatever you're for i'm not for people getting beaten and attacked when they're not really doing anything so i think pacifism is something that's very easy to make fun of but people don't underestimate how powerful it is for someone to say you can do what you want to me i'm not going to fight you back i just want to live peacefully and have the same rights as you and to say screw you you should get beaten that's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow so i think he was really and gandhi of course as well were excellent in that regard there's a little bit of machiavellianism to it you know they've both been beatified regardless saints but their strategy worked very very well for their purposes so i think uh just all of us when you see someone you know in this kind of christian i know iran obviously it's nothing very highly christianity but if he's someone who's willing to you know take a punch and just say you could do whatever you want to me i'm not going to hurt somebody else instinctively that maybe this is kind of a hack most people want to side with that guy step in between and be like oh okay let's take a step back because whatever led to this is not tenable we need to go back to the drawing board if the consequence is people are having these as a result of my decisions and actions so i think that aspect of anarchism uh is very very in certain context healthy and much smarter and more sophisticated than people give it credit for and let's also point out that tolstoy wrote warned peace and he wrote anna karenina so this was not some naive or innocent whatever word you want to use he knew the nature of evil he knew how bad things get so he wasn't saying at all that human beings are inherently nice and kind he was saying it's much more effective to not fight back and to force them to face that i i i'll give you another example i was talking to i was on the show of trigonometry and i was talking to the hosts and one of them talked about how someone he knew had been uh in the gulag or his mom was born the gulag grandma and after stalin died and the soviet union liberalized and lots of the people in the gulags were freed by khrushchev and and so on and so forth he i didn't know this many of the or some let's say some of the guards of the gulags killed themselves because they had genuinely believed that everyone in these camps was there for a reason and when they found out that these people were completely innocent didn't even have trials and that they were the ones forced them to work themselves death and starve they couldn't deal with that guilt so when you are a pacifist or non uh non-retaliatory and you're forcing someone who's using force like look what you're doing look what you've become for some people some people don't care you know like the guy in scare tactics like i mentioned earlier where for a lot of others they're gonna be like okay is this who i wanted to grow up to be they will have that little flame of conscience that you and i talked about earlier there will be like how did i get to the point where there's this lady who wants to ride the bus and she's you know lovely dressed put together and i have a sending a dog on her what kind of person am i for some of those people they're gonna be like okay i can't be a part of this i don't even understand the politics i still am racist but i'm not going to take part in this atrocity well that was uh for him from the individual perspective perhaps he he calls that christian but listening to that voice of conscience like whatever that is in you so for tolstoy it seems like anarchism from the individual perspective is uh silencing the rest of the world and listening to the the for him probably god-given voice of conscience yes and so that that's what it means to live embody anarchism and to embody christianity i would think he would say but he would see those as basically yes correct uh yeah so in terms of forms of government the christian government is one that's no government yeah correct uh what do you think about that as a device for an individual turn the other cheek do you think uh i tend to believe that that's a really good way to live i think it's very underrated and this is me talking i think a lot of times when someone let's suppose you're having an argument and but you have to you have to pick your battles right let's suppose you're having a heat argument if someone says something very cruel to you we have attempted to double down and hit back twice as hard but if it's someone who at all cares about you when they're just in the moment and you just stop and you just say did you hear what you just said to me for some cases that person will take a step back and be like just like me when i snapped at michael uh at bitstein years ago i'd be like wow okay this is bad this is bad i'm sorry and they kind of you know it's kind of like they have to get to 10 before they re control or delete to use your language thank you yeah but for overflow i appreciate that but and for some they're gonna they're gonna just twist the knife but i think this is a very useful technique and also you can also sleep well at night because you could be like as much as this person tried to hurt me i still didn't reciprocate and yeah i took that punch and it sucks but at least i never said anything that i could feel guilty about exactly do you think that's ultimately a good way to implement anarchy in your personal life anarchy implementing anarchy in your personal life just means uh respecting people's boundaries it means uh um uh not forcing people to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do i think you then have to take uh case by case like there's so many human interactions that are required for life and there's tension and all those kinds of things it's not always being so naive no should i put the hat on the hat's on the other head now well i had to take off the hat because it's like frodo with the ring i was starting to feel like powerful i wanted to give you orders and i want no i i just i think there's uh ways of dealing with the tensions that are natural to human interactions that can't be simply um you know it's not as simple as saying you want to respect the freedom of others and uh the boundaries of others it's like you both have to agree on stuff and work something out and the mechanisms of that agreement the game theory of that agreement requires different hacks and strategies and the the the question is for an anarchist collective that's well functioning what kind of hacks uh what kind of ways of behavior are more likely to be productive and not you know that that's almost like the question do you want to turn the other cheek or do you want to stand your ground really firmly when somebody is an asshole to you you walk away or when somebody is an asshole to you you turn the other cheek and give them a chance to rise to the best version of themselves and then find a common ground kind of thing it's it's an open question of how to form those collectives when there's people with with difficult childhoods and all that kind of stuff but it also comes down to what is your relationship with this person right is this out of character if you and i got into a disagreement all of a sudden you started getting very personal first i'd be very hurt yeah but then i'd be like this is out of character for lex i'm sure i could be like let's take a pause here like you're getting heated i'm trying to work this out what's going on here and you get a kind of a meta conversation but again you and i have a relationship with mutual respect so as opposed to if it was a stranger you know who just wants a piece of you it's just like i don't you are coming at me not correct i don't have to reciprocate in kind i'm not going to shoot you but i'm not going to pretend that you deserve respect when you're treating me with such contempt i i do defer especially with people i know because it's just this is smart long-term game theory as well as the right thing to do i do try to give them the benefit of the data first right yeah because if you're gonna go aggro you can't go back but you could always go from like let me hear them out and then then i could go aggro so there's a big asymmetry there yeah and that's i mean i don't think anyone has the answer to this question is is that the right strategy to me game theoretically it seems the right strategy is to uh with reciprocity is what game theory says is the right strategy they did the prisoner's dilemma and they found tit for tat is the one that's the most advantageous so that's for when it's perfectly rational actors but when you have i mean there's noise the the there's uh i think benefit to just even if they keep being shitty to you still being nice to them well then there's the universe where girls are turned off some people are like if you're in a relationship and not just girls but girl like some people when you're kind to them they find you less attractive right that is kind of this weird what am i supposed to do like you're only into me if i'm mean to you i don't want to be mean but then i'm getting punished for doing the right thing that's another tricky one and i mean this is nothing that necessarily do with anarchism so much as like you know human beings are infinitely complex we don't often know the back story like for example just yesterday jay who's here is one of my closest friends i had a dinner with a bunch of people i couldn't bring a plus four so i didn't he wasn't invited he didn't know the circumstances he just thought we were having dinner without him he was hurt once i spelled it out he completely understood it i felt horrible because for me to have any of my friends feel left out is just a very very cruel thing um and i was i felt bad and i'm glad to apologize again publicly that that's end up being the circumstances but yeah it's it's it's a lot of times we're also in plato's cave when you're dealing with somebody else you have very very limited information about their background and circumstances and that's why i will always if it's someone i even have a little bit of a relationship with try to give them benefit of doubt because i've found especially this comes from being a co-author when you co-author books and you're walking other people's shoes you don't know what's a lot of the information so if it's a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding but isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question of uh how we figure out this puzzle of human complexities in order to form voluntary collectives like we have to figure that out how to make people feel good how to make people i agree that's fair and that i think i think not only anarchists have to think about this as my point of course well but we have to think about it more than others do right i feel like i should try to argue against anarchism at some point out of love out of love and so because people out of joy do people enjoy seeing me um what is it when like ben shapiro argues against like a 20 year old feminist destroys high school students so this is this is this video of uh michael males destroys uh a a marxist russian communist pig so anarchism as opposed to hierarchies well that's left anarchism yeah anarcho-communism yeah the state but there are many hierarchies that are not the state you we have a hierarchy here this is your show on differential to you right but they're okay rigid hierarchies forced hierarchies is the first time yes forced hierarchies okay so do you think it's possible that humans when left on their own chord they they form hierarchies naturally yes inevitably it might be inevitably which is why i disagree with the left anarchist i i think it's not a coherent thing to argue for uh non-hierarchical relationships even in theory it doesn't make sense to me and i i know the the the old school anarchist will call me stupid or uninformed but i i've never been able to even wrap my head around this claim that you could have relationships with that hierarchy right so i guess there's a certain sense in which we're living in anarchism now and i don't mean just like because the the nations as you've said are uh in anarchism relative to each other but isn't the united states just a collective that was formed in anarchy and this is just the collective that we're operating under this hierarchy that was naturally formed it wasn't well the united states was not naturally formed it was formed by force and and by fiat but to your point um i i stress this throughout the book uh i always say this anarchism is not a location it's a relationship so yeah you and i do have a hierarchy in that this is your show but not but neither of us really has an authority over the other like i'm here voluntarily you can kick me out if you want i can leave it anyone neither of us has the power to force the other to be in this relationship we've chosen my lawyer uh you know i defer to his judgment he's not forcing me to do it he gives me his advice and i can take it or leave it same with the doctor so there is a clearly like who's in charge and who's not in charge but they're not in a position to impose their will and everybody else and you could very easily see uh john is stephanie's lawyer and stephanie is john's doctor and in each of those contexts one has this position of ostensible authority over the other so anarchism is in fact not some utopian crazy thing it is the norm of human relationships where you meet people you're not necessarily equal someone's gonna be taller someone's gonna be stronger someone start smarter wealthier with others but you're not at all thinking i am here and i could tell you what to do and you are legally or morally obligated to follow my wishes that that is the basis of anarchism so in what way is the united states imposing by force something on you do you think uh if you leave your house you will go to jail uh 40 of my money being taken from you by taxation right but don't you have the freedom to not operate under that no but that's like yeah like technically if someone comes up to you and mugs you and says your money or your life you are making a choice but what the anarchist argument is they're not a position to force you to make that choice that is not morally binding even though they have practically the power to force you into that dilemma but you have the freedom to live on the united states or not so so even i see yeah the argument is if you don't like it leave right not necessarily leave like geographically but there's there's ways to live outside the force of the united states there's ways it's just very difficult to operate that way but that's like saying you could outrun the mugger which is true but the issue is does that mugger have the right to tell you at gunpoint you're either giving me your money or i'm gonna shoot you or secret plan c you get to run away is that person a moral actor and the anarchist answer is never and the difference one more thing the anarchist view is the difference between that mugger and the government is only an air of legitimacy literally they're morally identical so is it possible that every hierarchy that gets big enough and successful enough such that it can monopolize a bunch of services it provides isn't it always going to be a moral in your sense the way the united states government is immoral well i i don't want to say just like the united states government is immoral because that implies the united states government is uniquely or especially immoral very governmental i just want to clarify that because i know you didn't mean that i don't want that to be an implication um can you repeat the question so like won't every okay so that's right this is so that's progressive economics yeah so the argument is in any market at a certain point things tend to centralize and then that organization de facto can dictate price can dictate so on and so forth that is completely historical if you look at any market the trend is always towards decentralization the music industry right when we were kids there were four or five record labels they were the ones who made all the songs that you're going to see in the billboard top 100 with a few exceptions now anyone can go to direct to market if you look at tv stations right it went from cbs nbc abc then you got fox then you had cable which is 100. now you have satellite which have sounds around the world and you have youtube which is literally infinite so as technology improves and as wealth increases which is a function of free enterprise you are going to always have more and more choice even within a monopoly coca-cola right uh uh this is an example i used i think and then you write when we were kids every terrible comedian would be like oh now that i've got diet uh caffeine-free coke what's next and it's like yeah that's good you want to have uh what was his name uh caiman the guy who invented the segway if you go it dean came in if you go into some restaurants right now you will have those machines where you have like 80 kinds of cokes and then you could have whatever flavor you want to add to it grape cherry lemon lime so on and so forth so in any field you're going to have more and more competition you're going to have less competition and less choices when the state gets involved because the state wants control the state wants one big neck with one leash around it and that way it could just pull that dog in one direction another and you saw this last year with the lockdowns carol roth wrote this amazing book called the war in small business and she talked about we have seen for the first time in history a massive wealth transfer from small and medium business towards organizations like target and amazon who made trillions of dollars last year whereas mom and pop which to me at least is like the acme of american achievement you come to america you have a fruit stand a laundromat uh you make you socks whatever it is you're that unique artisan creating something special they're the ones who didn't last whereas target amazon did so when you have the state involvement it will always be in favor of jeff bezos and for the simple reason that it's going to be a lot easier for jeff bezos to get nancy pelosi and mitch mcconnell on the phone than it is for me making socks on etsy but your sense is that there'll be less and less over time jeff bezos says like whatever the industry will look at there's be less there's a trend towards decentralization across all industries and when i say decentralization i just mean choice right so if you look at again networks you're gonna if you were in the 80s and you had a network just for uh lgbt issues first of all it's going to be completely heretical that's not going to happen and there's not going to be enough necessarily people identify as that to have an audience then there was something called logo they have that there's lots of other shows like that in this the way so more specific look at websites yeah i'm positive that you and i if we wanted to look up uh breeding guinea pigs would find thousands of websites about different breeds and all this other stuff 20 years ago 30 years ago like you're going to have two books yeah and they're not going to be dynamic as these new uh um uh breeds are developed so at the same time it does following on your argument it does seem easier to move and immigrate from from state to state within the united states and to other countries do you think that's a form of freedom that embodies anarchism where you can resist the uh the force of state by choosing where you live to some extent but the line people some of these boomers will got me on twitter if i'm going after the police or something and be like if you don't like america get out of here and i tell them freedom means i do what i want not what you want freedom means i don't have to move you don't have to move free speech is a good example it doesn't mean i have to be on twitter right twitter has the right to ban me but what i'm saying is i'm saying something and you don't like it too bad you're the one who has to accommodate me because i have a right to do what i want with my person as long as i'm being peaceful so i guess i'm trying to get to the difference between the state and what you would naturally want in anarchy which is like a security company sure all those things they will as they become successful start looking more and more like the state because you get to elect you give them money they uh i got you they have leaders what's the difference between a government and a very successful service provider in in anarchism this gets a little confused in america's big companies necessarily are in hand in hand with the government ended up in bed with them the answer to this question is a long complicated one and thankfully it's all in the anarchist handbook there was an essay by murray rothbard who dave smith is this is the essay that converted dave smith so maybe it's not as good as it could have been otherwise called anatomy of the state and mary rothbard points out that state is the only agency in a country which gets its goods through force the state is the only agency that is not a producer but inherently a parasite because it does not get its money voluntarily but through taxation and by imposing its values on a country that is what makes a state uniquely different from let's suppose an amazon or a barnes noble or a target jeff bezos does not have the authority or the moral legitimacy to get an army and go into somebody's house whereas andrew cuomo or ron desantis donald trump and barack obama certainly do but is it possible that to refrain so jeff pesos does if he if he hires a security force right also is it possible to reframe taxation as a form of payment like it uh if it was done much better if you could pay this collective that we call government in ways where you could pay for things that you care for so much your money would be much more directly contributing to the things you care for whether if you care for a service like healthcare you'll be able to buy essentially insurance from the government uh why am i buying insurance from the government as opposed to insurance from insurance company what do you perceive as a difference between a tax and a price do you see the difference yes i know on the surface level i'm trying to get deeply to say there's a lot of similarities but what i'm saying is there's one essential difference which is taxes are imposed on you and you have no choice as here's an example my my book ego and hubris my biography uh it goes for 500 on ebay someone paid for it some crazy person people are showing me that it's on amazon for three thousand dollars something like that you could put a million for it it's you could charge whatever price you want the question is is someone paying that three thousand ford is someone paying that million for it and if it's actually the buyer who establishes the price because the seller can put any price tag he wants 80 trillion dollars but unless someone's paying that amount and clearing the market uh that price has literally no real meaning right it's not an indicator of value or worth or market price taxation on the other hand is by fiat i can decide it's fair that you lex have to pay 40 and joe has to pay 45 joe and lex are in no position to be like this price is too high that not only is that money uh set just completely out of their hands it's taki for people who are employees it's taken out of their paychecks before they even see it so they don't have the choice to be like you know what i agree that the government has the right to pay taxation here's my check for 40 it's going on it's a completely different uh paradigm than you are when you're playing the government provides a lot of services in the current system right but there's no service the government provides that cannot be that would not be provided better more efficiently and with more choices in a market well that's a hypothesis no that's very likely no well that's not this i can demonstrate this to you very easily i love it when you get flustered this is this is what this is what people like it's so cute the robot don't make me put on the head uh robot has the fire the smoke coming out of his ears what is price there okay so it will tax love you know like you know people like i i think of uh the government as a kind of subscription service no no that's the anarchist view the anarchist view of gov of a private security would be a subscription service so that's exactly correct but everyone hates when uh you sign up to a gym and then you realize in the contract it's very difficult to cancel that uh membership and then they up the price i mean that's there's a lot of unpleasant things with with uh with a subscription service that then you can elect to go to another subscription service sure you're or you could go and yelp and complain and if there's enough people do that the gym will be receptive look at the power of yelp versus the power of the vote well this we could talk about that too so you're saying yelp is more effective than voting yes the thing is i agree with you but you go take a further step you say that yelp is ethical and moral and voting is amoral or like not voting but government is immoral so like it's not only is one more efficient than the other you're saying like because i would say government sucks at doing what it does and it's gotten a lot better at it and i believe it can get keep getting better uh as it gets smaller and leverages companies more and more but you're saying no no government is fundamentally as an idea gets in the way of companies that should be doing those things anyway right i i just think that companies when you take away government will start looking like government they just because something looks like something does not mean it's the same if someone puts out a yamaka into fill-in and they go to shul they're not jewish right the the basic objection you have with government because you can leave like i i i apologize that this is that stupid twitter cliche statement but your opposition to the this idea of leaving the united states is that it's just it's a lot of effort it's it's it's too much friction not the opposite the option the opposition is i in the introduction to the book yeah i say anarchism can be summed up in one sentence you do not speak for me everything else is application so the claim that somebody i've never met or who i voted against let's say i hate donald trump i despise him you know i want hillary clinton to be president too bad trump's your president that's not what i want yeah the idea that this person can come on me and make any claims onto one second of my time as opposed to trying to persuade me that is something that i at anarchists regard as inherently uh evil and nonsensical but to operate large organizations like you you see this with cryptocurrency there's governance you have to make difficult decisions there's a block size wars for bitcoin sure so you will there is a voting mechanism often with membership when your subscription service but see the thing is you're using these words and you're switching definitions because like if i go to a store i can technically say i'm voting for tropicana orange juice as opposed to another one but to kind of say oh well you're making a choice therefore every choice is a vote i i don't i think that that's something that the venn diagram is not no i literally mean vote in this case not money okay there's some decisions like should bitcoin have increases block size okay there's a bunch of different uh they're called soft forks they're hard forks oh i'm not saying you should never vote like stockholders have to vote right exactly but there's no pretense here's let's look at this if you want to build robots right you would sit down with the company you would you guys would be like we should do this kind of rubble i should do this kind of robot the stockholders would have a vote or the board in proportion to their investment in the firm me who knows nothing about robots uh i am the idea that i'm in a position to walk in and be like this is what you should do is crazy and bizarre and wrong because i'm not in an informed position so what democracy does is it forces people who run businesses well to run businesses poorly by people who don't know how to run businesses at all that's the that's one of the many concerns but you're saying that's the fundamental property of the state i have a sense that the state could become as effective as what we think of as companies i mean as this is why they can't because the state does not have access to data the way that firms do and this is one of ludwig von mises great points what he called the calculation problem if i'm looking at comic books right and i have detective comics if detective comics 26 is a thousand and detective comics 28 is a thousand and detective comics 27 is 50 000 that is telling me that even if i don't know anything about comics that detective comics 27 is either very very scarce for some reason or very very desirable it's the first appearance of batman whatever but you don't need to know that to just look at this data and be like okay this is the market tell me something if prices are set by the government which the government is a monopoly i have no way of picking those winners or losers i don't have that data of supply and demand of an entire nation or a world of people making individual decisions and having price be dynamic and informing me as the the organization where i should allocate my resources so the price is a really strong signal yes that allows you to uh to operate a voluntary collective where people get what they want and don't get what they don't want and it tells me what to produce what not to produce and it also is great because if i see this podcasting industry which didn't exist five years ago and now these people are making bank that tells me as someone who is an investor okay they're making 50 pro whatever 10 profit on their capital in in the plant industry it's 2 percent if i i'm going to further my capital into this 10 percent and that's going to lower the profit rate as that builds up and that is how uh markets are regulated voluntarily but the word government i just think it's possible to have collectives that of human beings that represent others based on their voluntary yes of course you have private governance absolutely private governance any company you can have a ceo you're gonna have a board directors yeah but then you i just it starts to look very similar to me a successful private governance mechanism at a scale of the united states starts looking a whole lot like the current government of the united states what's what's how even amazon i don't think is anything close to the center size-wise or budget-wise or power-wise no so you're saying you just it's not even state it's almost like anything at that size you want to keep things smaller and i don't i their markets are not going to combine to that level of the state because no jeff bezos will never even position to tell everyone in america i'm going to take 40 of your money before you even see it that to me is actually unclear we don't know that to be true or that google or amazon can't grow to the size if you take away the us government i'm not sure that amazon can't grow to the size okay so worst case scenario is we're back where we started right uh that's not worst case scenario but the concern is that google is going to be the federal government that's not the concern i'm saying like this is what it looks like when google is the federal government it's not a it's like to me the the us government is our best attempt so far to have large-scale representation of people's interests it really sucks but it's our best attempt so far and the question is how to improve it like if you take away all the if you take away the us government i'm trying to see how do we improve on that level that scale of representation of people's let me give you one example that's that people could wrap their heads up very easily i'm against government police monopoly i'm for private security right you don't have to be an anarchist to understand this can everyone agree or at least as a hypothesis everyone can wrap the heads around and here's a big concern 9-1-1 right there i've heard this 9-1-1 call it's very chilling there's a kid in a closet his family's being murdered outside right he has to call 9-1-1 he's whispering it's it's horrifying to hear there's no reason why the number i call for my families being murdered is the same number i call for the fire department is the same number i call for an ambulance what if instead it operated like uber you had buttons on your phone if there's a real emergency like someone's gun flyers someone's being killed you press this and it sends instead of the one police district whatever company is nearby you have a bunch of them and they're the ones who are going to come to your house to save you people can wrap their heads around that very easily that is one very clear way to go from having a government security monopoly towards having a more free enterprise system so when you apply that to pretty much anything it doesn't become that complicated of alternative so what i would criticize this but i believe the government it's like the parenting thing we've talked about earlier i think it creates a safe space for govern for uh i'm for safe spaces so i'm not going to laugh you about that no i want people to be safe but for uh a safe space for entrepreneurship so i believe that good government hold on give me a second give me a second sure i'm sorry i'm sorry you're right you're right i'm sorry uh i think government gives opportunity for companies to out-compete it yes so yes fedex 100 not a question so i believe you need to have private school government to give a chance for ups fedex for spacex always an x in there uh to uh to to pop up and then government will naturally back off from that place so like you but you need the innovator to step in and build the thing okay like you can't just when has government ever backed off though that never happens back well from from from what from fedex and ups from uh spacex from amazon hold on the u.s postal service still competes with fedex and ups so here's the other thing not nearly not well but they still exist and the point is they're dying but ups and fedex are taxed so not only are they paying for their own company they're paying for this competitor this is the essential difference imagine if you didn't have ups excuse me the federal government no post office so you had fedex you have dhl you have u.s post service and many others how about in this scenario ups has the capacity to take 20 of fedex's dhl and couriers money and put in their own pocket and they never have to do anything in return this is going to be an enormous advantage of ups and then when you add the addition that ups is not necessarily going to be more efficient the others this is going to be a huge distortion in the market can you imagine if your podcast you just automatically got 20 percent of the views of everybody else i mean would there be any incentive for you to be great or you could just sit in your laurels and do whatever you want even more than now it's hard to imagine more than now i didn't say your robot and lack imagination i i think there just has to be uh it's of course you can do it completely without government but government's all i need to hear okay that's all i need to hear show's over is uh like that safety net that's needed for entrepreneurship that's needed for uh i'm sorry to say but i have a sense that there needs to be a bit of a safety net for freedom i i'm much more comfortable with saying you need a safety net for freedom then you need one for entrepreneurs the beauty of markets is with your startup if you have a startup and it completely fails the only person who's screwed is you and your investors if i'm a government and i make a startup the entire society fails like the iraq war right if i have this cockamamie plan i don't everyone else doesn't have a choice they are both funding it and sometimes even drafted or forced into it right the safety net the antlers getting back to the early anarchists one of the things that i admire about them the inaugural communists the old school left anarchists is people don't remember what context they were in they were in context without a welfare state they're immigrating in huge numbers from eastern europe people are you go to the tenement museum in new york people like 12 to room kids are working factories or they either work in factories or they have to starve it's not their parents didn't love them it's that the parents didn't have birth control which was a felony and they also were in a position to put food in the table for their kids because they're uneducated and the jobs are paying nothing so you could understand why emma goldman alexander berkman prudone uh and and all these other figures were like this is untenable we see carnegie with 80 000 mansions whereas this lady whose husband died at age 30 who's never been to uh high school or even junior high school has 10 kids how is she going to put food in the table it's not going to happen you could understand why they would be like all right we need to seize this money and distribute around the people that makes a lot of sense in a contemporary context where food is much cheaper where shelter to some extent is uh more available when medical care people we're so oblivious to how bad things were that we see things are bad now so we assume that they were better than in some context they were much much worse there in many contexts so if you're going to make an argument for government for me the strongest argument is like food stamps or like uh free lunches for children because i agree that would be very inefficient and it's gonna probably make them obese because you're gonna have uh nabisco lobbying to make sure that if you're gonna have this uh protein you wanna you're not gonna give the kids an oreo aren't you these kids are poor you want them to have some pleasure and that's gonna have deleterious effects but if the choice is an inefficient government program and mass starvation that is one where as an anarchist i i could easily see making the argument for that one even though i think very clearly private charity would be more efficient and distributed more effectively but i at that point i don't really care about efficiency i if you're throwing out food to make sure these kids get fed i don't care so would uh engagement in military conflict be one of the biggest negative things about the state to you yeah of course war is wars war is the state at its worst so if we take away yeah i mean wouldn't that be a huge step forward yeah instead of regarded we're always this is what drives me crazy we're taught as kids in school that war is a last resort and i agree with that and yet when you look at the corporate press war is always the first response and these people do not talk about what war means they'll show examples during the bush years of soldiers coming home in caskets which already is an unacceptable price in many cases for me but they don't even pretend to care about the people overseas whose countries we've ransacked and uh lives we've ruined and it's just like well what are you gonna do not ransack those countries so that war is it to me is the state at its worst see i think that there is value from small government that doesn't engage in wars i do think that the kind of collectives that you imagine functioning well would look like the best version of government that i imagine so okay what a great endorsement why i see them as the same i think a lot of this is just terminology i have no problem saying that i'm using the word anarchism incorrectly and to go for what you want i have no problem with that or anything really because like i said life is beautiful but nevertheless you wrote the essay why i'm not not going to vote this time or ever yeah i think i won't vote this year or any other year or any year uh and the basic i hope you do a better job reading it than you just read that title i guess you'll take as many takes as necessary [Laughter] i'll read it in russian and then pay somebody to just translate it this isn't even russian at all you just make up words where'd you find this guy um you get what you pay for exactly uh this is anarchy this is what you wanted uh like your basic summary is uh let me see if pressed the simplest explanation i have for refusing to vote is this i don't vote for the same exact reasons that i don't take communion no matter how admirable he is or how much i agree with him the pope isn't the steward over my soul nor is any president the leader of my life this does not make me ignorant or evil any more than not being a christian makes me ignorant to evil if i need representation i will hire the most qualified person to do so yeah isn't voting our current best developed way of hiring the most qualified person to represent you on some things no because because if i have a lawyer and the lawyer screws up i can fire him if i vote for someone i don't get who i want i get for who my neighbors want so what that makes no sense but representation means i want you to speak for me whereas voting is like i kind of want you but i'll take what i can get and i'm going to take what i could get regardless of what's the point what in governance again that's what with bitcoin is you want to be represented in deciding what to do but once wait bitcoin isn't picking a person they're not picking a president of bitcoin they're picking an idea yeah it's more like a referendum right and to me a referendum is much more represent is much more coherent and defensible than it is voting for representative because if i'm voting for joe biden i'm saying this person speaks for me for abortion taxation environmental policy immigration war right the odds that unless you're a complete npc that this one person will speak for you for everything and will and will deliver what he promised as and has the power to deliver what he promised is not true whereas if i have brexit if i say i want britain to be remain part of the european union to say yes or no question that makes a lot more sense to me but even that is not pure democracy because going back to the idea of the circulation of the elites which uh james burnham talked about pareto and moscow and all them you're still going to have someone telling you what you can and can't vote for and how these questions are framed so the contradiction to what the left anarchist said some element of hierarchy is always going to be inevitable so listen i agree with this aspect very much so that we should be voting for ideas and issues not voting for leaders for for leaders to represent us across the full spectrum of issues right it seems to make no sense okay good man this is great but i do think there should be a leader i i do believe in voting for representatives to debate to be communicators of ideas to us but that you here's here let me interrupt you but you can you could you could have those two things for example wouldn't this be an improvement if they have that now you have a referendum do you want tax rates to be 30 or 40 whatever percent yeah you have the guy leading the campaign for 50. fight for 50. then you have the lady leading the campaign for 45 for 40. they'll go out there they can have debates they can talk about the issue but you're still not voting for one of them you're voting for the issue that makes much more sense to me then i'm going to vote for him and hope that he puts forward 50 and that depends on 99 other senators exactly and but but also i mean i do like the idea of voting for certain people to debate certain ideas yes i think that's a major improvement but the final vote should be based on the idea so okay so we agree that would be nice to have plus no wars and then then uh you'll stop tweeting so uh aggressively and to decriminalize things that don't hurt people drugs crimes drugs especially prostitution is a big one if there's and this is me talking mr mr all cops are criminals there is no one or maybe other than like abused children who needs access to the police other than sex workers they're the ones who are the most likely to really put themselves in dangerous situation so they need to be able to call security because that's why they have pimps because you're a woman dealing with some strange dudes who are a lot of the time gonna have weird kinks you want to be able to be sure even if you don't approve of prostitution think it's horrible that she's not going to be raped and murdered and have no consequences and if you're going to say oh well she's a prostitute she can't be raped i uh just think for a second if you're agreeing to sleep with somebody and then he starts choking you and beating the crap out of you and saying it's now it's a dumb situation that is clearly a beyond the pale assault and the same thing with drugs uh heroin cocaine you crack do you um the people that need help the most are the ones who are addicted to those drugs even the ones who need punishment let's suppose you think drug dealers should be in jail right it is very hard for me to say that someone who sells uh cocaine should be treated or in the same building as someone who rapes children or is a murderer these are not similar types of evil even if you believe that that drug dealer is an evil person yeah i have um i mean there's an essay in there called by alexander burkman who is emma goldman's partner crime on crime on prisons and crime and this is leftism at its best for getting the person who's forgotten and the fact that we have the world's largest prison population the fact that so many people are just like oh you commit a crime just put them in jail throw away the key at the very least if you want to be totally immoral about it's expensive and second of all the the concept that all criminals should be locked in a room together in these kind of largely inhuman conditions and that's going to help people i don't think that that's the ideal mechanism yeah i tend to believe i usually don't speak so negatively about politicians but i do think that politicians have done more evil in the war on drugs than did the people that are supposed to be the criminals in this picture and i'll give you one another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power hunter biden and i'm not gonna i'm not making fun of him not taking shots at him he had an article in uh the new yorker where he talks about when he was in la he was buying crack and there was a misunderstanding or like he left the crack pipe in the hertz car and then blah blah there's an issue he's admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter and i'm sure this was within the statute of limitations there was no possibility he was going to have consequences kamala harris who was a cop talked about when she was in college through smoking weed and it's like i don't begrudge you guys smoking your crack or smoking your weed but for other people who are poor or maybe just had their short end the stick this is years of their life being uh destroyed at the very least even a rest is a traumatic situation yeah if you have a weed or cocaine or crack you're arrested that's really going to screw up it's going to do a number on you being locked up so to have that double standard to me is completely unacceptable and that has nothing to do with republican or democrat that george w bush was i i coke head back in the day he talks about overcoming his addiction and i'm glad that he did more power to him but just to have this kind of you know it's just really kind of um disturbing to me and this is my anarchist brain like how prevalent drug use is in college there's that i think this joke on south park like there's a time and a place to try drugs and that's called college where people experiment but all those college kids which are going to become next generation's elite don't really have that worry that if they get caught then anything's going to happen to them but that kid in the street uh who did not have that good upbringing even if he's a piece of crap like he's not gonna have a different punishment i i think that's just really that is based on american so in contrast to tolstoy let me ask you about emma goldman you wrote that uh if anarchism believed in rulers then emma goldman would be the undisputed queen yes what uh ideas define her flavor of anarchism would you say emma was really an old-school radical she was a radical among radicals i don't know what ideas i mean what would diabetes find her was anarchism obviously there's the violence i mean she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus somebody like tolstoy oh sure for sure so basically emma and alexander berkman their mentor was someone named johan most and johan most was a very early free speech not very early but he was a free speech concern because he published a pamphlet in europe that was translated in the states about how to build dynamite because his idea was all right you have this oppressive government this oppressive police force that use batons and bolts against us the only way for us as the working class to level the playing field is through dynamite and here's how you build it so the question is all right is this something that could be allowed to be legal now that you're allowing the layman to in his own house build bombs so uh johann most turn basically they had a big parting of ways because when alexander berkman tried to assassinate uh frick johann said no no this is not uh something i'm for and in fact they thought uh with this assassination this failed assassination this would be the thing that's fired off the revolution because you have this strike the pinkerton's interval pinker's getting killed strikers are getting killed you know this is what marx predicted you know they're gonna light the spark and everything's come falling down he ends up going to jail for 13 years instead alexander berkman does uh and then goldman and berkman had a big issue because when leon salgaz killed mckinley in 1901 it was really it's kind of humorous in retrospect he gets arrested and they're like why'd you kill the president he goes i was radicalized by emma goldman and she's like god damn it so she's on the run she's like i don't even know this guy and she made the point about like why is it worse than the president being killed and somebody else we're all equal and you would think if you're against capitalism against the ruling class this would be your first target but berkman who went to jail who was tried to assassinate someone he had said mckinley this is your villain he's just a party hack he's like a symptom of the times he's this is this is foolish and goldman disagreed with him she thought it wasn't necessarily um justified but it may have done something that was defensible so the three of them uh you know had their differences on the use of violence and in fact when she came back from russia and was denouncing it in her book my disillusionment russia and my further solution rostra the last chapter she goes look i'm not saying i'm against violence when there's the revolution comes we're going to have to use force she goes but it's not the force of the state against the working class against the masses this is exactly what we're opposed to this is a complete obscenity to our principle so that was interesting the fact that she was a uh her periodical mother earth was a clearing house for many prominent uh you know ideas of the day that weren't anarchists but were certainly radical so she was a bit and also she was like tiny she was like 5-1 so to have this little woman who was so feisty um and talk back to lennon talk back to lennon uh would she took on lennon woodrow wilson jander hoover was the one who deported her uh someone who just and the thing is you have to be careful because i think just like war it's very easy to glamorize violence and to regard it as something admirable or heroic like you're fighting for the cause but if you take it out of the romanticism you're like you're killing someone who had kids you are you know killing someone with the family you're making your if you're gonna shoot someone they're probably gonna retaliate twice as hard violence sings its own song and this is a very dangerous word you're going down so you you really need to be uh careful about what you're what you're preaching here um and you know she kind of had this mixed feelings about it but that is certainly not uh emma goldman her best emma goldman her best was about the ultimate freedom of the individual of caring about people who were desperately poor who despised the corporate idea that we all had to be made into cookie cutters and be interchangeable and all have to start work at the same time and basically our entire lives slave for corporation that have nothing to show for it while they get wealthy and you you have no opportunity for either uh productive work or creative work so uh that i think the valorization of kind of the lowest of the low is something i find very admirable there's a quote of hers which i think even for those of us who are you know for property rights is anarchy left anarchism at its best but she goes go and ask for work if they don't give you work ask for bread if they don't give you bread take bread so the idea that like if you're that poor and you're honestly trying to work and work isn't available and you steal food to keep alive that you shouldn't feel guilt about it i don't know that i would disagree with that i i think that there's something to be said at that point where it's just like you know if property rights come between that and mass starvation it's gonna be very hard for anyone to make the case for property rights now my argument is when you have free enterprise food becomes so plentiful that now obesity is an issue but at the time she did not of course have that data to you know access is there somebody you left out from the book that you thought about leaving in like uh some interesting figures yeah there there's a couple so um chomsky would have been one of course because he's a you know one he's probably the biggest standard because one of the biggest anarchist thinkers in contemporary times um i was on the fence about herbert spencer because he's not an anarchist chris williamson's reading the chapter for the book he coined the term survival of the fittest and the chapters called the right to ignore the state from his book social statics it was deleted from later editions people found it and reprinted it um and uh randolph-born he was an early progressive he was the only one or one the very few fighting against entering the great war and he had an essay called war is the health of the state which is basically about how states love war because it gives them an excuse to increase their power and it's very hard to argue against increasing state power in a time of war but since he was not himself an anarchist and there was plenty anti-war in there already i didn't include him but those would be the ones is there some people that you think uh the public would be surprised to learn that they are at least in part anarchists like i saw that howard zinn is supposed to be an anarchist i mean is there um like just like tolstoy isn't it anarchist is there some people like that that you think in our modern life that would be surprised to learn their anarchists i can't think of any off the top of my head i mean you could say carl hess who was like barry goldwater speechwriter from the 964 campaign but he's hardly a household name yeah um i mean i think a lot of people would not ascribe to that term but are certainly informed with this complete distrust of all authority murray rothbard had an essay if i didn't include anatomy of the state i was going to include this one it's much much shorter and his question was who are our allies and who are enemies and the point he makes is there's lots of people who would call themselves anarchists who are of little use whereas someone who is still like a minor kisser for government but genuinely hates the question rothbard had is if there's a button and if you compress that you would end the state would you press it so fast your finger would get a blister those are allies even if they're uh you know somewhat of a minericus so i think that is a kind of a better lens of looking at it and i don't think anyone needs to really ascribe to anarchism as a whole ideology insofar as you're seeing right now many people in certain fringe elements are just essentially or are decreasingly fringe and increasing mainstream elements are realizing that this idea that whatever the state does is somehow morally binding or legitimate is something that a b at least bears strong questioning sure and i mean i i guess there's a lot of groups like the libertarians for example sure have some element of that oh sure for sure of harsh questioning of the ways of government and also i think what's what i love i mean if there's one issue where i would want people to have this kind of analysis it is war and it is like okay are you really sure uh because this is a hundred percent gonna result in a lot of people being killed a lot of people being traumatized a lot of people who are never gonna recover children innocent people are you really sure this is the right thing to do and i think a lot of times if the answer is well it's the profitable thing to do and that is i think again government at its absolute most venal and worst you michael mouse in many ways are a new yorker oh yes i'll give you one example i don't know where austin is on the map no idea not even kidding but does it even matter it doesn't matter but nevertheless you've decided to move to austin yes why do you think you're moving to austin or why do you moving both to austin and away from new york this was one of the both i hate it when people talk like this but i'm gonna do it anyway this was one of the hardest and easiest decisions of my life it was hard because i've lived in new york since i was two other than college it's the only home i've known i know it intimately i know all the cool spots i love it with every fiber of my being or i did uh it was very much you know ingrained in my personality my outlook about what cities can be and can't be and should be and shouldn't be um deciding to move was not done but when you see your crew your your you know chosen family one by one whittling away it's not easy um they all left uh there's just a couple of us left in new york and i don't see any mechanism by which new york is going to improve things are getting much worse all the time it's just completely outrageous here i would have a i have a huge crew i didn't realize how much cheaper real estate is than in new york this is another way many so new yorkers are the most provincial people on earth who are completely oblivious to the rest of the country so for a long time the argument was new york versus l.a right for certain types of people and they would say la's cheaper in terms of rent so new york let's suppose the rent is a thousand la was 700 but you'd have to get a car i'm like this is kind of a wash so i assumed austin would be like 80 of new york prices and i'm looking at these houses and for like 700 000 you could get a house here that would cost like 3.5 million in new york yeah so and you could have a gun and it's just like i could have a yard and i could have a dog and i have a three bedroom and i could have you know aquariums and my weird plants so to have all that and it's just to have i am very very lucky that i have such a supportive crew and they're also very smart because they sat me down and they said whatever excuse you have not to move here we are going to make sure that doesn't count so my buddy matt said because i have a huge library he goes i will go to your house and i will pack every single book you own myself so you can get that as an excuse out of the way i don't know how to drive near this uku um she's like we're gonna take driving lessons together there goes that excuse uh how do i find an apartment they're like we'll go to with the realtor we'll take pictures for you we'll report back you could trust our judgment and i'm like that's very i would do that that sounds like fun shopping for house i'd have to buy them yeah then matt just yesterday had the idea goes come here rent a furnished apartment for a few months you don't have the pressure of buying and it's just it's going to be an easy transition the rent's not going to be anything compared to new york i'm like these are all very valid things you're here lots of other people by the way that's what this is is uh i made sure that it's renting month to month oh this is rental this is rental well you didn't realize this i thought you bought this no no no it was a rent to hawk why i thought you bought it no it's rental well i really value freedom so who are you talking to i've heard this thing freedom it's really great [Laughter] but not everybody the implementation of freedom is different for everybody of course for me i i don't want to uh make a statement about others i'll just speak for myself i think when you buy a house that is not just a wise financial decision or all those kinds of reasons that people have investment all those kinds of things i think it's also a hit on your freedom because the positive way to frame that is you make it a home you have a deep connection to it but the negative way to frame it is you're now a little bit stuck there yeah and you may stay there way longer than you should when much better opportunities for life come up there are stages in life when you're not sure exactly what the future will hold i would argue that's very often the case uh basically at every stage in life and i just want to make sure i maximize the freedom to uh to embrace the most ambitious the uh the craziest the wildest the most beautiful opportunities that come by you've actually brought this up to because i i said i really enjoyed the conversation with you and euron yeah like you talking to you and somebody else yeah i think you make a really significant effort you've said this before but it really is true and it stands in contrast to other folks who are also good conversation you really make an effort for that person like to unders like to meet the person oh for sure and that's uh you made me you made me realize it's kind of a uh it's an art form uh but it's also just it's a thing worth doing of putting in that effort and that leap of humanity to like reach the whether you're talking to dave rubin or alex jones or joe or me just yeah those are different human beings and they're taking that leap it's it's fascinating i mean do you have um how do you think about that i i'm a huge introvert as as you are i think um i i feel very very very lucky that i get to get on a mic and run my mouth and for some people some reason people like this so i know what it's like to have a good convo and i know what it's like to have a bad convo so before i'll do a show i will have like some things i would want to talk about and then i'll think about how to say them in an engaging way so i do my homework in that regard i'm also very good at or i pride myself at taking people who are cerebral or intellectual and making them a little bit silly but also making them feel safe to be silly because i'm not going to be making a buffoon of them that we're having fun as opposed to disrespecting the person i think we all saw that with yaran who's very cerebral very serious but we were all cracking jokes um and he was having a good time and he knew even if i'm making fun of him to his face it is coming from a place of kindness and he's in on the joke and we're all having fun that is something i try to do as uh much as possible i had an episode of my show a couple of weeks ago and someone who's been a friend of mine for a long time and someone i admire a lot elizabeth spyers she was the founding member of um gog founding editor of gawker you know she's she's worked for the observer for jared kushner she's her resume's second to none and she was on my show and she was talking you know her our politics are pretty straightforward like corporate journalists blue pill politics and my audience was very upset that i wasn't pushing back or like whatever i'm like my job if someone is coming to a place where like the audience is at least going to be somewhat hostile is not to make her have negative consequences for doing something that she didn't need to do my job is to make sure that the experience is a positive one for her as the host so when i'm the guest i always feel that my job is to make the host look good and make the host not feel like it's work and the audience really likes that because instead of it being an interview or intense it is a conversation nine of us know what's going to happen and so this is something i think about a fair amount and i try to apply and insofar as it successfully i'm delighted and there's times when it's not successful and that's a shame but all we could do is uh do our best yeah i really enjoyed that conversation with her i was surprised by uh the dislikes and all that kind of stuff well one of the things i always talk about is i don't i don't care what my friends politics are i care about if someone's if i'm having a bad day can i call them up and ask for advice and elizabeth has been there for me in the past and then when i do it on a camera in front of mike's people freaking out i'm like i'm practicing what i preach uh my the relationships are more important than someone's political views and it's not hypocrisy at all to demonstrate that and not not to push back and there was great humor there you're both a bit of trolls and yeah in very different ways but nevertheless that connection the humor and the mutual respect and love that was all there yeah yeah it's just fascinating um you've talked to alex jones a couple days ago sure yeah you've talked to him many times before but you've had him on your podcast um this week yeah this week i was kind of surprised that um he mentioned that human animal hybrids was like the number the main conspiracy that people should look into to open their eyes to the you know to the globalists all the conspiracies that are out there was that surprising to you um no because i came in there with questions and i was very focused on corralling him and having it be like a kind of a coherent intellectual conversation that was a really really good it was only an hour but it was a very good conversation yeah thank you the response was overwhelmingly positive and i'm like all right i'm in a unique position because alex i i met alex well that's not true but i was on alex with alex on tim pool a couple of times it was mayhem it was anarchy and i'm like all right let me get but the thing is what people enjoyed is i was the one who was basically able to translate alex ease he's obviously very performative and a lot of times alex will say things that are not really uh particularly controversial but he'll say them in such a way that it sounds crazier than it is you know i think joe's made this observation as well so what i wanted to have him on when on my show is all right let's go through all these conspiracies which have validity which don't and i knew if i asked because he's got a lot of historical knowledge even if you want to think of a lot of it's nonsensical let's sort out the wheat from the chaff you know because everyone has someone crazy in them i have this expression you take one red pill not the whole bottle you take the whole bottle of red pills you assume literally everything in the media is a lie that that's just not a coherent position to have is the weather alive when they tell you that the temperature's gonna be wrong tomorrow so that was fun to watch him go through that and he felt bad because he felt incorrectly in my opinion that he was needlessly aggressive and disrespectful toward me on tim i didn't feel disrespected at all it got heated but i didn't take it personally people have heated debates all the time so i think he he promised me he wouldn't interrupt and would be deferential but that because he promised to be on his best behavior that gave me an opportunity to address him seriously and not to bring the clown aspect out of him which is easy to caricature him uh my friend ethan supply who i'm sure people know played a basically character based on him in the hunt because eric alex is kind of this cartoon archetype so it was really fun to get another side of him um and and also it's just fun being on his show just him being bombastic and just trying to be the calm voice of reason and for once the trickster was apollo well i like this this thing he said before and that's what makes me the most interested in alex is the uh the nietzsche quote about the uh you know gazing into the abyss i think he said on your show that he has become the abyss or something like that i think that makes him fascinating that when you really take conspiracy theory seriously the kind of effect it has on your mind that to me is fascinating well can i say one thing the term conspiracy theory if you ask any layman like it's like this you say do you like puppies i hate them do you like baby dogs oh they're the best right people the human mind is capable of doing this yes so if you ask people do you think extremely powerful people often get together and manipulate data or rules in order to further their power and control and maintain it i think 90 plus percent of people be like of course then you say oh so you believe in conspiracy theories oh no that's for crazy people those concepts are identical now that term is used for people who are like all right uh um you know there's conspiracies in government to experiment on people like tuskegee this is not in dispute the cia has you know unsealed things operation mockingbird so on and so forth and at the same time conspiracy theory applies to people who say 9 11 never happened and those are holograms now it's the same word for both but these are not at all equal truth claims and they do not at all have equal evidence to them but it's very useful for powerful people to have that term in the zeitgeist because then i don't have to explain or defend it's like only lunatics are going to look further on this do you really want to be a lunatic kid and that takes care of the issue i i unfortunately the same problem applies with language applies to a lot of other 100 that's the nature of language yeah it's used not just to communicate but to obfuscate obviously that could be fixed by coming up with different words to uh to label conspiracy theories that are much more likely to be true yeah power elite analysis is another it's basically conspiracy theory this is the black pill versus white pill question sure with the abyss do you think thinking about these things can can destroy the mind can uh make you deeply cynical about the world yeah because if you are thinking that you are not aware of or no one is aware of who's controlling things and that the level of their control it gives you the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness yeah and my counter is the people in charge one of the reasons i'm an anarchist are nowhere near as smart and crafty as you think they are and certainly maybe the the ones completing the shadow maybe are but the ones who are in the public face most certainly are not as social media has demonstrated when you look at how senators and harvard professors tweet these are not you know intellects that you're in awe of to put it mildly so i think that kind of takes the bloom off the rose to a great extent you mentioned that you've been doing a lot of amazing things been truly joyful recently yeah what uh i don't know if you have a bucket list is there items on the bucket list you haven't done yet are you are you pretty much satisfied and happy and if you die today i if i murder you you'll be happy i could die today is there an item on the buccal list you want to get done um i don't yeah uh deep sea submersible that would be number one in a bucket list why because that's where all the most interesting zoology is and to be um in a place where like virtually no human being has been and to see these god's mistakes in their natural environment my friend coined that term god's mistakes if you look at deep sea creatures you can imagine god making some animal being like oh god this is hideous i'll just throw the bomb the ocean no one's gonna see this um so that would be my number one bucket list thing i would say go to the white house as a guest would be a bucket list thing russia go to russia would be a bucket list thing um i want to go these are secondary like go to eritrea it would be a buckless thing i've got a long list of books i need to write that's that's i don't know that's really a bucket list per se um uh there's not that much what i'm at a point in my life is once you cross off certain things you basically instead of driving the car start surfing and just amazing i talked to you about this medical thing you know before we started yeah at a certain point and i'm sure this happens to you because your platform's a lot bigger than mine all sorts of things start coming your way that you never would have thought of and you're like this is pretty darn cool so to be and that's happening at an escalating rate like i'm at a point now where i get stopped every day um by people so that's gonna be a weird thing for me to get adjusted to i ever like without exception everyone who has ever stopped me on the street has been cool and it's been a pleasant experience there was one exception in an event where someone was genuinely on the spectrum and they didn't understand like distance and you don't touch people and that but that's as bad as it got so that is something that's going to be weird for me to have to deal with um over the next couple of years but you know it's the price you pay and it's it's hardly a small price when people come up to you and say you've made my life better but it's just weird when you go and like like i was at the gym and then someone tweets like did i see you at the gym just now it's kind of weird and i'm sure it's the same for you when you're walking around and you don't think about it but people know who you are and you don't know who they are that you're being watched even though it's not malevolent it's still just you don't get prepared for that michael there were there will be two really big names that uh wanted to do this podcast we'll do this podcast that i considered to do episode 200 with but then i realized why the hell talked to somebody um famous when i could talk to somebody i love that nobody knows or cares you just hit a random number generator yeah just i listed all the russians i know and who's the easiest to get you're the yeah who's the most desperate right he's got a shitty book out we can talk about that for five minutes this garbage cut and pace that he did yeah uh it turned out okay i think slightly above average michael i i love you you're an incredible human being it's an honor that you would talk to me and you'll be my friend thanks so much for doing this uh the respect that i got uh when you asked me to be the guest for the anniversary episode was similar to the respect when my two friends josh and zoe they were going to get married at city hall and they said we want someone to witness it they ask you so it's one thing when people tell you they like you and respect you which i had growing up it's nothing when they show it and this is something that i do not take lightly and i hope no one takes slightly and if someone does right by you and shows you respect going back to kind of taking out for dinner thank them buy them a candy bar buy them a soda do something to show that you don't take it for granted because i think what you and i both want to do is increase human kindness as much as possible and i'm gonna look at the camera be kind to yourself because a lot of you deserve it thanks for listening to this conversation with michael malus and thank you to gala games indeed betterhelp and masterclass check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from jack kerouac that perhaps begins to explain the nature of and the reasons for my friendship with mr michael malus the only people for me are the mad ones the ones who are mad to live not to talk matt to be saved desirous of everything at the same time the ones who never yawn or say commonplace thing but burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you