The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malis.
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 Malis in the Dupagalovic language
that I'm increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of.
Hello, comrade.
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 animals overthrow the humans and they 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. and Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep? I'm going to go with the Milton answer, which is
better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, right? It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Yeah. So, I would have to go with the pigs. So, I guess I'd be a cop.
At the very top. So, the leader, the main pig, Napoleon, versus like the-
It's no wallet of the others. I would say it's not, it's sure it's an allegory about the Russian
Revolution, but I think Orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.
I mean, it could very easily be reticent indictment of Mussolini or Hitler or many of these others.
I'm a huge George Orwell fan. One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate
is the courage of many of these indisputably left-wing voices who were the strongest ones to
take on totalitarianism, totalitarian communism. And the three I could think off the top of my head
who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the
third. Something that 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 off the top of my head,
but something to the effect of every word I have written should be taken as a defense
of democratic socialism against totalitarianism. So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore,
in many ways, anti-communist. We like to parse things out. You're going to laugh
into binary fashions that 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 every chance I get, I will sing the praises of
these three figures, among others, who even if they hadn't done what they had done,
have just lived just amazing lives that all of us can learn from and admire and regard as
somewhat a role model. What was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism? Is that
basically freedom, the value of freedom? Let's go through the three of them. So Emma Goldman,
she was an early anarchist figure. 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 Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's main man in the Pittsburgh Steel Mill Strike.
She got deported to the Soviet Union, and they're like, oh, you want socialism because at the time
the anarchists were regarded as socialists, go choke on it. And she's there, and she was watching
in great horror 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 society. And he told her that 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, 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 and I know what those words mean. But Bolsheviks were
kind of funny because Bolsheviks means bigger, and Mensheviks means smaller. The Mensheviks had
the numbers. It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks.
And Lenin destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously. Beforehand, there was
the idea that with all these kakamimi ideas, we have to work together. 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 Disillusion with Russia. And I remember this
one anecdote, which I'm going to discuss in a forthcoming book, where she goes to Britain,
and the British were very red at the time. They really 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 kind of nation. And she gave talks, and there was this
one 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've been fighting for all their lives, and saying, we've been to the future and it
works. And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar. People are under house arrest. You're
not allowed to have newspapers being shut down if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.
And she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously. So she deserves huge
accolades in that regard. I brought her up, and we were talking about with our conversation with
Yaron Orwell. I think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do,
to use fiction to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state. And Camus, who might be my
all-time great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being a man of conscience, 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. 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, 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 speech when he
won the Nobel Prize, I forget it's 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, you know, this is the leftism at its best when, you know,
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, 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 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,
as somebody with a mind, what's the heroic action? That's a tricky question because a lot of times
in the West, heroism is regarded as intertwined with martyrdom, right? So it's kind of this idea
of like, you have to speak to, you know, Camus always talked about justice, let justice be done,
though the heavens fall. This is a common 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 meet, 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.
This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was, and you know, there's the Nazi guards keeping
everyone along. And 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 was 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 kid's 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, and I think it's also important to pick your
battles. I don't think if, you know, he got on that Nazi over there, gotten a bullhorn and said,
hey, this is the rules, blah, 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 for 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?
You know, I got an argument with Tim Pool because there was that couple, I think,
and it was at Missouri or Illinois when they 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 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 going to do about your wife? What about your mom? One
thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids up to 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
pieces of paper, it's, you know, Svetlana, she's got a death warrant, you're going to
admit to any crime you want. So this is something Americans, this is even the case right now in
North Korea, which I know you had Yanmi Park on, 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. The great leader Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, said class enemies must be exterminated
three generations. So when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum
from Sanders 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, yeah,
when it's your child, your loved ones, 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. 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 consequence is a bit overrated.
There is some aspect. Like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about the
Nazi 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 writing about it is 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 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 regarded 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 to be, capacity, excuse me, to be a hero to their
kids or to be a hero to maybe some, 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. These are little things.
Terry Shepard does that a lot out of regard. I was a hero. These are not Terry Shepard,
I'm blanking his name. These are things that people do 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.
Oh, that was a joke, Michael. No, it was a failed joke.
Nevertheless, there was no punchline. 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 anarchism too? It seems like those are
somehow intricately connected because existentialism is connected to freedom
and freedom is connected to anarchism. Sure. But I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.
He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk about it.
It's what people don't appreciate is how 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 can think DEF. People would have all sorts of contradictions,
and it's not at all clear, and they'll have a clean conscience because a human mind is very
sophisticated and is capable of doing this. So Sartre was, you would think he's this radical
individualist, 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 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, we regard this as someone who's a complete monster,
but that's what the state does, you know, with the death penalty. And he challenges us to think,
is this the kind of people we want to be? 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'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.
So he was probably against war in that same way. So I don't have to admit, I don't know much about
the political side of Camus. Well, and I don't think his political side is that interesting or
relevant. What I find, sorry to interrupt you, 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 head on the
pelt at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity,
true to my values? Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?
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 as beneficial as other people had.
Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning,
it really borders on nihilism?
His philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on nihilism. He regards
cynicism as the worst value people can have and I agree with him 100%. A lot of times people
call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to be a, I had this quote in the
New Right 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. 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 would be like, why is this blank
canvas here? What was this? What's going on here? And just be confused. Whereas the other type of
person will be like, there's 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 went to Yeshiva as a kid, which is Jewish school. What we were taught in incessantly,
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 me 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 is 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. Pib and the store brand, everything you want. And you're looking around at this amazing
bounty. 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 insane. You have this eat the meal. I promise you
if I could deliver this meal, the dessert's going to be okay. So this focus on the afterlife when
we've been given this amazing gift on this earth is a very kind of different mindset from both
the Jewish tradition as I'd been taught and the Camus mindset. Obviously Camus was an atheist,
didn't believe in an afterlife, but this concept that life is meaningless. But that means you have
that opportunity to find value, to seek for truth, to seek for happiness. And Camus 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 have 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 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 a world view. 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
birth is coming up, I've been feeling 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 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 going to 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. 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 re-read
the idiot by Dostoyevsky. 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. This is very much an urban 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 fall in love and it's there on 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 or prostitute is depraved, but they're basically
the worldviews. Unless it's dark and twisted, it doesn't really count as art. And I despise
that mindset, that subtext. So the internet and people around me often will call me naive
because I don't know. I think the word they want is innocent, don't you think? It's a better word.
But it's not that innocent. No, but innocent in that 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, 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. But that child might be wiser than all of the adults in the room. And 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 think you and I have the same
analysis of your worldview 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 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.
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. On June 22nd, at exactly four o'clock,
Kiev was bombed. Nam announced that the war had begun. The war began at dawn to kill more
people. Their parents were asleep, their children were asleep, when the old Kiev was bombed.
The song talks about Kiev, like that moment as part of that operation that Kiev was first
bombed. 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 can have this thing happen to you in your own personal life.
Maybe we 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.
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 are coming and this
was an address rehearsal and that if they get here, which they do, they did, Lviv is very Western
Ukraine, that 100% you and all your relatives are going to be murdered. And there's a monument now
in Lviv where I'm from about this. But I don't think either of us can imagine what it's like
to know, to think that we're about minutes or whatever hours or there's just the Russian army
standing between us and everyone we are related to are going to be murdered for no reason.
And what's the closure here? They evacuated a lot of people 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
the TV news being hyperbolic. They're coming to kill you and if they get you, they will kill you.
And you have to, we all think about war like, oh, 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 I'm not sweeping in 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% all going to be slaughtered and often not just a bullet to the head in insidistic ways
is something that to know that people who share my blood saw and went through is very hard for me
to kind of wrap my head around. And there's no possibility to delude yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because, I mean, they would, 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.
This is our life now. You know how yesterday you worried about like, oh, I misplaced my pen?
Yeah. 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, we have to fight. And we also can't sit down in some kind of weird, like, desert island
or, you know, plain crash situation and be like, let's decide between us who's going to be the
first to die. Maybe the Titanic, the Titanic, right? They sat down and they're like women
and children in the lifeboats. You know, they had this rational agreement. You don't have those
choices in a war. So, it's something that I, it's just very chilling. And it's something I don't
really have the emotional space to understand or grapple with. 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 friend's attorney you went and your phones are
all tapped and your 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 it in terms so people can 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 that 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 of your environment and your life and your mindset,
I remember my grandma, she would talk about it like, when you're that hungry,
all you're thinking about is bread. Because your brain won't like, you know, human beings,
you know, we're evolved, 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 they're not going
to get the food. Yeah. And imagine being a parent and your kids. Watching your kids without food
and knowing they're not going to get the food. And the fact that this happened in North Korea in
the 90s, I met a refugee and he had to watch his dad start to death. And thank you. And we have no
concept of 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. 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, for cocktail 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 choices either Hitler killing you or being hungry 24 seven, 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 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 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 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 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 them the snow until they all died.
So it's things like this, that the fact that you and I dodge these bullets, and that we can be here
and be doing this and, you know, running our mouths for a living. I think about it all the time.
And it's just very 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, I don't know what to make of the contrast. 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. And 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. And that I think there's a, I don't like using
the word responsibility, but there is an opportunity for those of us who did dodge that bullet
to give testimony to these people. And more importantly, to give testimony to the people
who are going through this now. So one of the reasons I 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 that's just how people are wired. When you see an Asian country with
Asian people and things are bad over there, I think in the West, it's like, oh, Asia,
they're all crazy. They're wacky. They eat dogs or so on 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 act. 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 us very easily.
I have a friend, Peter, they handski 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 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 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 paid your due for your time
here on this earth to have it change from being a laughing stock, you know, and 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 jokes. At least now people are aware of it that it exists, right? And then I, 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 at it 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 or discussing
the plight of another country, that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade. Like,
the Kurds in Syria, you know, we're talked about, if we don't in Syria tomorrow, it's going to be
another genocide, blah, blah. I'm not saying let's invade North Korea and things 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. Things that you and I just,
you know, whatever, she can't go on the internet. She can't get an encyclopedia.
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 mean, 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?
I always, this is a great question. I think about it fairly often. 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 apes where they groom each other for parasites and
you're, even if there are no parasites, they pretend that there's parasites just to have
that kind of bonding. You see infinite 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 monstrous cruelty. Killer whales, you know, there's this big PC move to not call
them killer whales and just call them workers. They will murder blue whale pups, cats, 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. And I think
it's, you know, when you're on 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. But I think 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
Soviet, 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 through hoops. Because now they feel
like for the first time in their life, they're in a position of strength and power. I think that is,
in many ways, the more common nature of evil that what Hannah Arendt 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 especially disturbing about a weak man
given power and just abusing that power. There's something about not just weak, but like
mediocre at everything it does, or less than mediocre. A great example of this, which I'm
also talking about in the next book, is Ceausescu, who was the dictator of Romania. So, you know,
the Cold War is still somewhat poorly understood in popular culture, but the different countries in
the second world, the Soviet bloc, some are more liberal than others, some are more sane than others.
And Ceausescu, at first, was one of the more Western friendly, more of the free ones. Then he
met the great leader Kim Il-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. I think he made the biggest building in all of Europe, the People's Palace,
but it was just for him, bothers no electricity elsewhere. But you look at this guy, Stalin's
a badass, right? He was a bank robber. If you look at photos of him as a kid, he was a hunk.
Lenin was clearly intellectual. These were powerful men with huge egos, huge forces of
personality. But you look at this Ceausescu guy, and you could, for example, on my driver's license,
instead of my address, I'm like in my real address, 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, this says avenue instead of understand. And the look on his face,
this dullard, that you can see how, you know how sometimes I'm going to connect hers?
Fuck yes. Yeah. 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 Ceausescu,
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 of this mediocre, nobody, this guy would have in any other culture
been accomplished nothing or would have had an honest job where he's like, okay,
he works at the mail service and he's bad at 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, you know, one of the greatest things 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 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 rebel
against mediocrity, like in the most simplest of ways, like 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, like conformity, where he just
spoke out, he's like, hey lady, yeah. But that's a big one. Oh, that's a big, sure. I mean, like
literally at the line at Starbucks or something like that, 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. There's all this conformity all around us that's
at a different time, could have been Nazi Germany, could have been Stalinist Soviet Union.
Sure. We're in this together, we're going to rebel against that conformity, but I just
taking the risk, that little bit of risk against mediocrity. I don't know. And then once again,
I see this in companies too. When I see the mediocrity, I see this, 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.
My hope is that all of us have the possibility for that glimmer, that risk taking, 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 think most, a lot of people are not capable of that.
They're accustomed to it. I don't know if they're not capable.
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 think thinking is involved, or is it just taking that leap? There's something about that
basic human spirit. Forget the thinking part. It's just saying, I'll take that risk.
Taking that adventure, the same thing that got people to explore the seas,
throughout human civilization, explore land, explore the oceans, that exploration. We've
done stuff this way all this time. I'm going to take a leap, and that comes out of nowhere,
seemingly. Those people are the heroes, but I don't think that's universal.
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. They'd have vampires,
whatever, hidden camera, and people's reactions. Sometimes the prank didn't work out like they
expected. There was one where they were hiring the people who were the marks, the contestants,
so to speak, hired to be a security guard. You have to watch this factory overnight,
and you get paid. What the setup was, some people were breaking out of the factory in the middle
of the night in rags, and they were saying, they were keeping this prisoner here, blah, blah, blah,
and just watched the person reaction to this. There was one security guard where he basically
forced them back into the building, and they're working us 24-7. We're getting beaten. He's like,
I'm here to do a job. Get back in there. 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. To me,
that is not uncommon, and that person, although they look like you and I,
there's something essentially human missing with them. Now, very quickly, the reaction is,
well, it's one step from there to Nazism. 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 at a cost of their own life, that I think is not realistic. 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. It's like, all right, I'm going to pretend I didn't
see anything. Those little elements of heroism are what move humanity forward and demonstrate
the validity of the human experience, whereas everyone else is 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 a chance to try this amazing journey,
which is taking the risk. That's nonsense, because as you just said, two minutes ago,
everyone has that chance every day to do the right thing. 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. You have to kind of wake up to it. Sometimes you need the catalyst. There needs to
be some kind of thing that happens that wakes you up. 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 the question. That probably leads us into
a discussion of anarchism and so on, but 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 for most of us. I think another big concern
is that there's enormous disincentives, and this is Michael Malus speaking, for human beings to be
kind and for tenderness. And I think, especially when you're young, 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 on the water in a pool or something like that. And when you get older,
you look, there's this one example of this. This was in the 90s, and there was a woman,
she became a 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 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, do you know why you're here? And he's like, no. And they're like, oh,
what were you like in high school? It's 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 there's something that affected her for like 20 years.
And I've never seen a clear example of someone who wanted 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? Like, 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's fine. But 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 tried 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 Camus 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 is a normal
person. And do you want to be that guy as well? My friend, bitstein, he's a big gold, excuse me,
Bitcoin person. My biography, ego and hubris is like $500 now in eBay. It's like hard to find,
came out in 2006. And he had told me that you can get it on torrent. It's downloadable. And I'm
like, oh, I thought if you're my friend, 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. 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 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 going to start going personal, if you're going to 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. Just because a lot of,
this is what you were talking about, 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,
impromptu 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 my Soviet cruelty could come out. And that's kind
of why I don't drink because I do enjoy it. But at the same time, be aware of what you're doing.
And again, this goes back to Camus' sense that conscience really is what makes us human beings.
That's the thing we're saying. I don't think most people think in terms of conscience. They
don't think it. We are taught, this is 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 on the plate. That doesn't mean it's okay
later if I'm at a party and I'm just extremely offensive to someone for no reason.
You know, my own flavor of a little bit of rebellion.
Sometimes I use the number two.
You know, you're very witty on Twitter. And Twitter likes mockery and wit. And
on the counter attack is Twitter loves that, somebody who's skilled at it.
But my own flavor of a bit of rebellion is to say things very simply, bordering on cliche
with 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 like there's this pressure for me to be sound way more sophisticated.
Yeah. Use bigger words, sometimes throw in a criticism of institutions or something like
that. 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.
What? I don't know where that's going to end up, but it's like the idiot from Dostoevsky.
It feels like that's the right, that's the right thing, even if it hurts when I'm attacked for it.
I do something similar sometimes, which is I'll have some innocuous comment about like
bubble gum. I mean, just not to be impolitical. And a lot of times people respond with this
paragraph of just invective about like blah, blah, blah, and then this and you say this and
you're an ass and just really trying to get at me. And in those situations, there are very
specific circumstances, I will respond and I mean it every single time. I will say 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, who's just talking about bubble gum and this is your,
I'm not talking about politics where I can see how people get emotional. COVID, my grandma died,
now you're talking about her. 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 how,
you know, how 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 going to get attention is by acting out that when
they do good things, it doesn't get comment. But if they do bad things, they got to 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 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 enjoy the derision of others, but it has to be, you know, Billy, I'd have that quote, like,
I like it when people are mean to me because it's not pretending to be nice. But like,
what's the worst thing something to say to about you? You're not, what harm are you doing?
Maybe your podcast is garbage and the people are the conversations suck and the people are
losers. Okay. No, 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, 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 deriding others on the internet. I'm not sure what to do with that. I just don't want
to, 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 still madding them. I'm
saying let's assume everything you're saying about Lex is true. This is an opportunity for you to
outdo Lex. Like it's- No, but are you saying they should stop hating? Cause I'm saying like,
maybe they shouldn't just keep- I don't believe in should, right? I'm an anarchist,
but I'm saying is like, if this is your belief about Lex, you know what it is? I made this comment
in my book, The New Right, 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, as possible for them as they perceive it
to be, why are they leaving comments instead of 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? Sure. But what are you,
you're not claiming anything other than this is the following is the conversation between me
and, and Michiki, whatever his name is, right? I got the voice down, dude. I got it down. I've
been walking out 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 I think
there's, 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 number, but some fraction tried 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,
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.
They want me to be some dark, like a Bill Cosby type character.
They would be pain. Yeah. They want you to be in pain because they don't, 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, if 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 going to, 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. Because that's why I 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 worldview. This is 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. Joy. Joy over love.
So what's the difference between joy and love, Michael Malus?
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.
I love having a bad meal at a restaurant. And 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. They 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 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 got to wait an hour for
this meal that's going to 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, everything's going the wrong way.
Doesn't every moment have the capacity to fill you with joy then?
Yes, yes.
So it's both the shitty moments and the good moments.
Yes.
But see, that's the way I usually talk about love is like, I love life.
Yes.
And because life can generate 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 a kind
of, I guess, joy, but joy has a connotation that it's supposed to be somehow positive,
like you're supposed to be smiling. To me, man search for meaning with Victor Franco,
you know, just 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,
or even just thinking about food.
Or what about there's a kid there, you tell him a funny story and you crack him up?
Yeah.
Like you take away this child's pain for like five minutes, that is the height of joy.
Yeah. So to me, all of life is 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 conspiring, notice the absurdity of how
shitty this meal is. And like that, again, that little glimmer of realization, that's
what makes life beautiful.
You mentioned your grandmother in Levov. 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?
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 in Britain. He's trying to get his ass over here to Austin. He's filling
out his form right now.
He's too good looking. It's 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, very strong emotionally. We're both very ambitious
in the sense that not in terms of career, but like we want to grab life by the short hairs kind
of thing. We're just both like good experiences.
Will he bench more than you or?
Oh, yeah. Of course. I mean, the guy's jacked, he's just...
Because, you know, he's so good looking. He could be one of those guys who's mostly biceps and...
Oh, no, no, no. If you look at, go to his Instagram, Chris Will-X is the handle. It's like head to toe.
Oh, he's perfect in every way. That's great.
What flaws does he have? Because I need...
He's bad taster friends.
And his accent is all crazy. He's an underwear model.
So now I spell it M-U-D-L. 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 we're going to talk that in a second, maybe. But yeah, sheathunderwear.com.
Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Sheath Underwear.
We're going to get some pictures eventually.
I think we might... Yeah, yes, I have them on my phone. We're going to have them.
We can share them right... You can slice it in right here.
So to be able to go with someone who is a very close... I mean, we meet and talk like every day, right?
So to someone who generally cares about you, who... 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 his 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.
So to have a... First of all, just like two buddies on a trip is really a lot of fun.
Second of all, I know that it's going to 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, too. I don't remember at all.
To go to the streets where my family had to go through this stuff.
To see the... 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, basically, they came here.
They rounded everyone up. And also, from the other side,
you had the Stalinists coming in and starting all the people.
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 that when you come to the nature of evil,
that you're going to go, there's going to be this pits of hell or whatever.
There's birds. Robbins hopping around looking for the worms or whatever.
They think it's perfectly nice. And 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 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 unsold-side advice and it based at all.
That's going to be horrible. They're going to be telling me I need to speak Russian better
because I'm not hearing it. I'm not interested in hearing it.
So that I think, and also given my upcoming book, The White Pillen,
covering what happened back in the day under Stalinism and later,
to see this was the Ljublanka, this was the basement where they would...
You know, this is something that people might not realize.
There's a superb film, The Death of Stalin, which does what I do with North Korea.
He puts a humorous spin on it. 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 piss.
He's unconscious. 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 go there, like Red Square and see this is where it happened,
to see Lenin's body, like this is the guy who Emma Goldman yelled at.
It's going to be really, because I've worked so much in this space,
jarring and intense and emotional. And as intense as it is 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 in Brooklyn, it's going to... I'm sure it's going to do a huge number on me because
as Western and as the Tupoy Midekanyets, as the Russians will say I am, this is still where I
came from. So no matter to see it face to face, I don't know how I'm going to react, but I don't
think it's going to be like meh. You've assembled 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 anarchisthandbook.com is the website.
It covers from the 1790s to, I think, my essays, the last one from 2014, which a friend of mine who's
kind of a mediocre scientist is going to be reading for the audiobook. Also podcasts.
Also podcasts. 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. And it's very edifying because this is an
ideology that's been in many ways swept under the rug. No one takes this seriously, grow up,
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 has been woven about people who genuinely
believed in freedom as the most important and how to maximize that for society.
So maybe it's useful to talk about a few contrasting thinkers in there. So one is Leo
Tolstoy, who I think not many people know is an anarchist, a Christian anarchist.
So he came to despise government for his deceit and his violence,
but to him, the Christian principles of non-violence, I think, are important.
Oh yeah, and it's kind of pacifist kind of mindset of, 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, non-violent opposition? I will put the caveat that it bothers me when people bring
up MLK because he's become so corporate 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 want to be 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 going to 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. They've both been
beatified in regard to saints, but their strategy worked very, very well for their purposes. So
I think just all of us, when you see someone in this kind of Christian, I know you're Ron,
obviously it's something very highly Christianity, but if he's someone who's willing to take a punch
and just say, you could do whatever you want to me, I'm not going to hurt somebody else.
Instinctively, and 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 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 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 war and 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'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 in the gulag or his mom was born
the gulag grandma. And after Stalin died and the Soviet liberalized and lots of the people in the
gulags were freed by Khrushchev and so on and so forth. 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, they didn't even have trials and that they were the ones forced them
to work themselves to starve, they couldn't deal with that guilt. So when you are a pacifist or
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 going to be like,
okay, is this who I wanted to grow up to be? They will have that little flame of conscious
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 going to 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 for him from the individual
perspective. Perhaps 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 silencing the rest of the world and listening to the, for him, probably God-given
voice of conscience. And so that's what it means to live in body anarchism for him.
And to embody Christianity, I would think you would say.
But he would see those as basically-
Yes, correct.
Yeah. So in terms of forms of government, the Christian government is one that's no government.
Yeah, correct. What do you think about that as advice for an individual? Turn the other cheek?
Do you think, 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 heated argument and 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, what 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 when I snapped at Michael, at Bidstein 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 control or delete to use your language. Thank you for overflow. I appreciate that.
But for some, they're going to, they're going to 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?
Implementing anarchy in your personal life just means respecting people's boundaries.
It means not forcing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't want to do.
I think you then have to take 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
You're being naive. Should I put the hat on? The hat's on the other hand now.
Well, I had to take off the hat because it's like photo with the ring. I was starting to feel
like powerful. I wanted to give you orders. I think there's ways of dealing with the
tensions that are natural to human interactions that can't be simply... It's not as simple as saying
you want to respect the freedom of others and 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, that agreement requires different hacks and strategies. And the question is for an anarchist
collective that's well functioning, what kind of hacks, what kind of ways of behavior are more
likely to be productive and not? 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 an open
question of how to form those collectives when there's people with difficult childhoods and
all that kind of stuff. This also comes down to what is your relationship for 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 of all, I'd be very hurt. But then I'd be like, this is out
of character for Lex. I'm sure I could be like, whoa, let's take a pause here. 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 of mutual respect. So as opposed to if it was a
stranger who just wants a piece of you, it's just like, 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 do defer, especially with people
I know, because this is smart, long-term game theory as well as the right thing to do. I do try
to give them the benefit of data first, right? Because if you're going to go agro, you can't
go back. But you could always go from like, let me hear them out and then I could go agro. So
there is a big asymmetry there. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I don't think anyone has the answer to
this question. Is that the right strategy? To me, game theoretically, it seems the right strategy
is to- Well, 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 that there's, I think,
benefit to just, even if they keep being shitty to you, still being nice to them.
Well, then there's the inverse where girls are turned off. Some people are like, if you're in
a relationship and not just girls, but girls, 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 backstory. Like for example, just yesterday, Jay, who's here as 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.
And I was, I felt bad and I'm glad to apologize again publicly that that's ended up being the
circumstances. But yeah, 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 the benefit of the doubt because I 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 it's, a lot of times it's just a misunderstanding.
But isn't that a fundamentally anarchist question of how we figure out this puzzle
of human complexities in order to form voluntary collectives? Like, when you have to figure that
out, how to make people feel good, how to make people. I agree. That's fair. And I think not
only anarchists have to think about this as my point, of course, 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, people enjoy seeing me,
what is it when like Ben Shapiro argues against like a 20-year-old feminist. Ben Shapiro
destroys high school students with Mexican legends. This is this video of Michael Malz
destroys a Marxist Russian communist pig. So anarchism is opposed to hierarchies.
Well, that's left anarchism here, anarcho-communism, yeah.
The state. But there are many hierarchies that are not the state. We have a hierarchy here.
This is your show, I'm differential to you. Right. But they're, okay, rigid hierarchies.
Forced hierarchies is the... Forced hierarchies. Forced hierarchies. Okay. So do you think it's
possible that humans, when left on their own accord, they form hierarchies naturally?
Yes. Inevitably, in my opinion. Inevitably.
Which is why I disagree with the left anarchists. I think it's not a coherent thing to argue for
non-hierarchical relationships, even in theory. It doesn't make sense to me. And I know the
old school anarchists will call me stupid or uninformed, but 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 nations, as you've said, are 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 by
fiat. But to your point, I stress this throughout the book. 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 nine, 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 if you want. Neither of us has the power to
force the other to be in this relationship we've chosen. My lawyer, 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 a 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 on everybody else. And you could very easily see John is Stephanie's lawyer
and Stephanie is John's doctor. And in each of those contexts, one has this position of
a sensible 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 going to
be taller, someone's going to be stronger, someone's stronger, 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 is the basis of anarchism.
So in what way is the United States imposing by force something on you, do you think?
If you leave your house, you will go to jail. My money being taken from you via 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 in 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 under the United States or not. The argument is,
if you don't like it, leave. Not necessarily leave geographically, but 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 going to shoot you, or secret plan C, you get to run away? Is that person a moral actor?
And the anarchist answer is never. And just 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 amoral in your sense, the way the United States government is amoral?
Well, I don't want to say just like the United States government is amoral, because that implies
the United States government is uniquely or especially amoral, which I just want to clarify
that because I know you didn't mean that. And I want that to be the implication. Can you repeat
the question? So like, won't every... Okay, so that's right. So that's progressive economics.
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. 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,
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?
This is an example I used, I think in the new right. When we were kids, every terrible comedian
would be like, oh, now that I've got diet caffeine free Coke, what's next? And it's like, yeah,
that's good. You want to have, what was his name? Cayman, the guy who invented the Segway.
If you go, Dean Cayman, if you go into some restaurants right now, you will have those
machines. You have like 80 kinds of Cokes, and then you could have whatever flavor you want to
add to a 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 or another. And you saw this last year
with the lockdowns. Carol Roth wrote this amazing book called The War and 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, you make socks, whatever it is, you're that unique artisan creating something
special. They're the ones who didn't last, whereas Target and 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 and Etsy. But your sense is that there'll be less and less
over time. Jeff Bezos is like whatever the industry will look at. 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 going to, if you were in the 80s and you had a
network just for 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 way. So more specifically, look at websites. I am positive that you and I,
if we wanted to look up breeding guinea pigs, would find thousands of websites about different
breeds and all this other stuff. 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you're going to have two books.
And they're not going to be dynamic as these new breeds are developed.
So at the same time, it does, following on your argument, it does seem easier to move
and immigrate 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 force of
state by choosing where you live? To some extent, but the line of people, some of these boomers will
go on me on Twitter, if I'm going up to 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 of 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 have leaders. What's the difference between a government and a very successful
service provider in anarchism? This gets a little confused in America as big companies
necessarily are 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, 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 Murray 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 reframe, so Jeff Bezos does,
if he hires a security force, also, is it possible to reframe taxation as a form of payment?
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 your money would be much more directly
contributing to the things you care for. If you care for a service like healthcare,
you'll be able to buy essentially insurance from the government.
Why am I buying insurance from the government? It's supposed to be an insurance company.
What do you perceive as the 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. Here's an example. My book Ego and Hubris, my biography, it goes for
$500 in eBay. Someone paid for it, some crazy person. People were showing me that it's on Amazon
for $3,000 or something like that. You could put a million for it. You could charge whatever price
you want. The question is, is someone paying that $3,000 for it? Is someone paying that $1,000,000
for it? It's actually the buyer who establishes the price because the seller can put any price
that he wants, $80 trillion, but unless someone's paying that amount and clearing the market,
that price has literally no real meaning. 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.
Not only is that money set just completely out of their hands, for people who are employees,
it's taken out of their paychecks before they even see it. They don't even 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 paradigm than you are when you're paying for
price. But the government provides a lot of services in the current system. Right. But
there's no service the government provides that would not be provided better more efficiently
and with more choices in the market. That's a hypothesis. Very likely. Well, that's not a...
I can demonstrate to you very easily. I love it when you get flustered. This is what people like.
It's so cute. The robots. Don't make me put on the hat again. The robot has a fire.
There was a smoke coming out of his ears. What is price?
Okay. Will tax love? I think of the government as a subscription service.
No, no. That's the anarchist view. The anarchist view of private security would be a subscription
service. That's exactly correct. But everyone hates when you sign up to a gym and then you
realize in the contract it's very difficult to cancel that membership and then they up the price.
There's a lot of unpleasant things with a subscription service that then you can elect
to go to another subscription service. Sure. 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. We could talk about that too. You're saying yelp is more effective than a voting.
The thing is, I agree with you, but you take a further step. You say that yelp is ethical
and moral and voting is amoral. Or not voting, but government is amoral. It's not only 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 keep getting better
as it gets smaller and you leverage as companies more and more. But you're saying no, no, no.
Government is fundamentally as an idea gets in the way of companies that should be doing those
things anyway. I just think that companies, when you take away government, will start looking like
government. Just because something looks like something does not mean it's the same. If someone
puts out a yarmulke and to fill in and they go to shul, they're not Jewish. Right. The basic
objection you have with government, because you can leave. I apologize that this is that
stupid Twitter cliche statement, but your opposition to this idea of leaving the United States
is that it's just a lot of effort. It's too much friction. That's not the option. The
opposition is, in the introduction to the book, I say anarchism can be summed up in one sentence.
You do not speak for me. Everything else is application. The claim that somebody I've never
met or who I voted against, let's say, I hate Donald Trump. I despise him. I want Hillary
Clinton to be president. Too bad, Trump's your president. That's not what I want. 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, an anarchist, regard as inherently evil and nonsensical.
But to operate large organizations, like you see this with cryptocurrency, there's governance.
You have to make difficult decisions. There's a block size of wars for Bitcoin.
Sure.
So you will, there is a voting mechanism often with membership when you're subscription service.
See, the thing is you're using these words and you're switching definitions, because 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 there for every choice is a vote. I don't,
I think that that's something that the Venn diagram is not there.
No, I literally mean vote in this case, not money. There's some decisions like,
should Bitcoin have increases block size? There's a bunch of different, they're called soft forks
or 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 robot, we 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,
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 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, that 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's 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 organization where I should allocate my resources.
So the price is a really strong signal that allows you 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%, whatever,
10% profit on their capital in the plant industry, it's 2%. If I'm going to further my capital into
this 10%, and that's going to lower the profit rate as that builds up. And that is how markets
are regulated voluntarily. But the word government, I just think it's possible to have
collectives of human beings that represent others based on their voluntary...
Yes, of course, you have private governance. Right, private governance.
Any company, you're going to have a CEO, you're going to have a board directors.
Yeah. But then 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. Even Amazon, I don't think is anything close
to the federal budget, 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... Markets are not going to
combine to that level of the state because Jeff Bezos will never be in 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 where that Google or Amazon
can't grow to the size. If you take away the US government, I'm not so sure that Amazon can't
grow to the size of the US government. Okay. So worst case scenario is we're back where we started,
right? 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 this is what it looks like when Google is the
federal government. To me, 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. If you take away all... 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
interests. Let me give you one example that people could wrap their heads on 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 their heads around. Here's a big concern, 911, right? I've heard this 911 call. It's very
chilling. There's a kid in a closet. His family's being murdered outside, right? He has the call,
911. He's whispering. It's horrifying to hear. There's no reason why the number I call for my
family's being murdered is the same number I call for the fire department, is the same number I call
for an ambulance. What if instead you're operated like Uber? You have 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, you're going to
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 government. I'm for safe spaces, so I'm not going to laugh
you about that. I want people to be safe. But for a safe space for entrepreneurship,
so I believe that good government, hold on a second, give me a second.
Sure, sure. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. I'm sorry.
I think government gives opportunity for companies to out-compete it.
Yes. UPS, FedEx, 100%, not in question.
So I believe you need to have government to give a chance for UPS FedEx, for SpaceX,
I was an X in there, to pop up and then government will naturally back off from that place.
But you need the innovator to step in and build the thing.
When has government ever backed off though? That never happens.
From FedEx and UPS, from SpaceX, from Amazon.
Hold on. The US 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, federal government, no post office. So you had FedEx, you have DHL,
you have US Postal Service and many others. How about in this scenario, UPS has the capacity
to take 20% of FedEx's DHL and courier's money and put it 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 than the others,
this is going to be a huge distortion in the market. Can you imagine if your podcast, you
just automatically got 20% of the views of everybody else? I mean, would there be any
incentive for you to be great? Or you could just send your laurels and do whatever you want,
even more than now. It's hard to imagine more than now. That's because you're a robot and lack
imagination. I think there just has to be, of course you can do it completely without government.
That's all I need to hear. Okay, that's all I need to hear. Show's over. What else you can do
with that government? The question is that safety net that's needed for entrepreneurship,
that's needed for, I'm sorry to say, but I have a sense that there needs to be a bit of a safety
net for freedom. I'm much more comfortable with saying you need a safety net for freedom than
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
kakumemi plan, everyone else doesn't have a choice. They are both funding it and sometimes
even drafted or forced into it, right? The safety net, let's get back to the early anarchists.
One of the things that I admire about them, the anarcho-communist, 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 a room, kids are working in factories, or they're either working
factories or they have to starve. It's not like their parents didn't love them. It's that the
parents didn't have birth control, which was a felony, and they also weren't in positions,
but 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, 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 high school or even junior high school, has 10 kids.
How's she going to put food in the table? It's not going to happen. You can understand why they
would be like, all right, we need to seize this money and distribute it around the people. That
makes a lot of sense. In a contemporary context where food is much cheaper, where shelter to some
extent is more available, when medical care, 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 food stamps or free lunches for children, because I agree that
would be very inefficient, and it's going to probably make them obese because you're going to
have Nabisco lobbying to make sure that if you're going to have this protein, you're not going to
give the kids an Oreo, aren't you? These kids are poor. You want them to have some pleasure,
and that's going to have deleterious effects. But if the choice is an inefficient government
program and mass starvation, that is one where as an anarchist, I could easily see making the
argument for that one. Even though I think very clearly private charity would be more efficient
and distribute it more effectively, but at that point, I don't really care about efficiency.
If you're throwing out food to make sure these kids get fed, I don't care.
So would the engagement in military conflict be one of the biggest negative things about
the state to you? Yeah, of course. War is the state at its worst.
So if we take away war, would you be mature? Or make it defensive instead of aggressive.
Yeah. I mean, wouldn't that be a huge step forward if war instead of regarded? This is
driving 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 lives were ruined. And it's just like, well, what are you going to do? Not ransack those
countries? So that war is, 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, great endorsement.
Well, I see them as the same. Okay, fine.
I think a lot of this is just terminology.
I have no problem saying that I'm using 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 going to vote this time or ever.
Yeah, why won't vote this year or any other year or any year?
And the basic idea... 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.
I'll read it in Russian and then pay somebody to translate it.
This isn't even Russian at all. He's just making up words.
Where'd you find this guy?
You get what you pay for.
Yeah, exactly.
This is anarchy.
This is what you wanted.
Like your basic summary is, 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 or
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 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 that makes no sense.
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 can get regardless.
So what's the point?
In governance, again, that's what 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 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 MPC, that this one person will speak for you for
everything and will deliver what he promised and has the power to deliver what he promised
is not true, whereas if I have Brexit, if I say, I'm voting for Joe Biden, I'm voting
for Joe Biden, I want Britain to be remained 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 James Burnham talked about, Pareto and Mosca and all that, you
are still going to have someone telling you what you can and can't vote for and how these
questions are framed.
So contradiction to what the left anarchist said, some element of hierarchy is always
So, listen, I agree with this aspect very much so that we should be voting for ideas
and issues, not voting for leaders, for leaders to represent us across the full spectrum
of issues.
It seems to make no sense.
Okay, good.
Man, this is great.
But I do think there should be a leader, I do believe in voting for representatives
to debate, to be communicators of ideas to us.
But here, let me start interrupting you, but 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 rate to be 30 or 40, whatever percent?
You have the guy leading the campaign for 50, fight for 50, then you have the lady leading
the campaign for 40, fight 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 than I'm going to vote for him and hope that he puts forward
50 and that depends on 99 other senators.
Exactly.
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 you'll stop tweeting so aggressively.
And to decriminalize things that don't hurt people, drug crimes, drugs especially, prostitution
is a big one.
And this is me talking, all cops are criminals.
There is no one or maybe other than abused children who needs access to the police other
than sex workers.
They are the ones who are the most likely to really put themselves in danger 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 going to 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, just think
for a second.
If you're agreeing to sleep with somebody and then he starts choking you and being the
crap out of you and saying, it's now it's a dumb situation, that is clearly beyond the
pale salt.
And the same thing with drugs, heroin, cocaine, do you crack, do you, the people that need
help the most are the ones who are addicted to those drugs.
But even the ones who are in 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 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 mean, there's an essay in there called by Alexander Berkman, who is Emma Goldman's
partner on crime, on prisons and crime, and this is leftism at its best, forgetting the
person is 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, it's expensive.
And second of all, 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 believe the criminals in this picture.
And I'll give you another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power.
Hunter Biden, and I'm not going to, I'm not making fun of him, I'm not taking a shot
to him.
He had an article in 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, 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, she was 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 the short end of the stick, this is years of their
life being destroyed at the very least, even a rest is a traumatic situation.
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
the Republican or Democrat that George W. Bush was a cokehead 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 disturbing to me, and
this is my anarchist brain.
Like how prevalent drug use is in college, there's that, I think it was a 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 who did not have that good upbringing, even if he's
a piece of crap, like he's not going to have a different punishment, I think that's just
really at his base on American.
So in contrast to Tolstoy, let me ask you about Emma Goldman, you wrote that if anarchism
believed in rulers, then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed queen.
What ideas to find 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 the ideas to find her was anarchism, obviously.
There's the violence.
I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus something like Tolstoy.
Oh, sure, for sure.
So basically, Emma and Alexander Bergman, their mentor was someone named Johann Most.
And Johann 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 Johann Most, basically, they had a big parting of ways because when Alexander Bergman
tried to assassinate Frick, Johann said, no, no, no, this is not something I'm for.
And in fact, they thought with this assassination, this failed assassination, this would be the
thing that's fired off the revolution because you had this strike, the Pinkerton's under
vile, Pinkerton's getting killed, Strikers are getting killed.
This is what Marx predicted.
They're going to light the spark and everything's going to come falling down.
He ends up going to jail for 13 years instead, Alexander Bergman does.
And then Goldman and Bergman had a big issue because when Leon Salgaugh's 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, oh, damn it.
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 in
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 Bergman, who went to jail, who 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.
This is foolish.
And Goldman disagreed with him.
She thought it wasn't necessarily justified, but it may have done something that was defensible.
So the three of them 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 Dissolution
in Russia, My Fur Dissolution in Russia, 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 her periodical mother earth was a clearinghouse for many prominent ideas
of the day that weren't anarchist, but were certainly radical.
So she was a bit, and also she was like tiny, she was like five-one.
So to have this little woman who was so feisty and talk back to Lenin.
She took on Lenin Woodrow Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover was the one who deported her, 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 a family, you're making your, if you're going to shoot
someone, they're probably going to retaliate twice as hard.
Violence sings its own song and this is a very dangerous road you're going down.
So you really need to be careful about what you're preaching here.
And you know, she kind of had this mixed feelings about it, but that is certainly not Emma Goldman
or her best.
Emma Goldman or her best was about the ultimate freedom of the individual, of caring about
people who are desperately poor, who despised the corporate idea that we all had to be made
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 have no opportunity for either productive work or creative work.
So 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 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 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 have, 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 some
interesting figures?
Yeah, there's a couple.
So Chomsky would have been one, of course, because he's one of the biggest anarchist
thinkers in contemporary times.
I was on the fence about Herbert Spencer because he's not an anarchist.
Chris Williamson is reading the chapter for the book.
He coined the term survival of the fittest and the chapter is called The Right to Ignore
the State from his book Social Statics.
It was deleted from later editions, but Bill found it and reprinted it.
And Randolph Bourne, he was an early progressive.
He was the only one or one of 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 the public would be surprised to learn that they are,
at least in part, anarchists?
I saw that Howard Zinn is supposed to be an anarchist.
Is there just like Tolstoy is an anarchist?
Is there some people like that that you think in our modern life that would be surprised
to learn they're 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's speechwriter from the
1964 campaign, but he's hardly a household name.
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 an admiral 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 our enemies?
And the point he made is there's lots of people who would call themselves anarchists who are
of little use, whereas someone who is still like a minarchist or for government, but genuinely
hates the question Rothbard had is, if there's a button and you could press that you would
end the state, would you press it so fast, your finger would get a blister?
Those are our allies, even if they're somewhat of a minarchist.
So I think that is 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 at least bears strong questioning.
Sure.
And I mean, I guess there's a lot of groups like the libertarians, for example, have some
element of that.
Oh, sure.
For sure.
It's something of the ways of government.
And also, I think 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, because this is 100% going to result in a
lot of people being killed, a lot of people being traumatized, a lot of people who are
never going to recover, children, innocent people, are you really sure this is the right
thing to do?
And I think a lot of times the answer is, well, it's the profitable thing to do.
And that is, I think, again, government and it's absolute most venal and worst.
You Michael Malis 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 are you moving both to Austin and away
from New York?
This was one of the, I hate it when people talk like this, but I'm going to 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.
It was very much ingrained in my personality, my outlook about what cities can be and can't
be and should be and shouldn't be.
Deciding to move was not done, but when you see your crew, your chosen family, one by
one whittling away, it's not easy.
They all left.
There's just a couple of us left in New York.
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 huge crew.
I didn't realize how much cheaper real estate is than in New York.
This is another way.
New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth who are completely oblivious to the
rest of the country.
For a long time, the argument was New York versus LA for certain types of people.
They would say LA is cheaper in terms of rent.
In New York, let's suppose the rent is 1,000, LA was 700, but you'd have to get a car.
I'm like, this is a wash.
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 New
York.
You could have a gun.
It's just like I could have a yard, and I could have a dog, and I could have a three-bedroom,
and I could have aquariums and my weird plants.
To have all that, I am very, very lucky that I have such a supportive crew.
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.
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 either
way.
I don't know how to drive in New York.
She's like, we're going to take driving lessons together.
There goes that excuse.
How do I find an apartment?
They're like, we'll go with the realtor and we'll take pictures for you.
We'll report back.
You could trust our judgment.
I would do that.
That sounds like fun shopping for house that up to buy them.
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 going to be an easy transition.
The rent's not going to be anything compared to New York.
These are all very valid things.
You're here.
Lots of other people.
That's what this is.
I made sure that's renting month to month.
This is rental.
This is rental.
You didn't realize this?
I thought you bought this.
No, no, no.
This is rental.
Why?
I thought you bought it.
No, it's rental.
Well, it really values freedom.
Yeah, of course.
Who are you talking to?
Have you heard of this thing, freedom?
It's really great.
But not everybody, the implementation of freedom is different for everybody.
Of course.
I don't want to 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.
Yes.
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, basically at every stage in life.
I just want to make sure I maximize the freedom to embrace the most ambitious, the craziest,
the wildest, the most beautiful opportunities that come by.
You've actually brought this up to, because I said I really enjoyed the conversation with
you and you're on, talking to you and somebody else.
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 to meet the person.
Oh, for sure.
You made me realize it's an art form, but it's also just, it's a thing worth doing
of putting in that effort and that leap of humanity to reach the, whether you're talking
to Dave Rubin or Alex Jones or Joe or me, those are different human beings.
Of course.
And then taking that leap, it's fascinating.
Do you have a, how do you think about that?
I'm a huge introvert, as you are, I think.
I feel very, very, very lucky that I get to get on a mic and run my mouth and for some
people, for 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 Yaron, who's very cerebral, very serious, but we were all
cracking jokes and he was having 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 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 Spires, she was the founding member
of Gawker, founding editor of Gawker, she's worked for The Observer for Jared Kushner,
she's her resume second to none, and she was on my show and she was talking, her politics
are pretty straightforward like corporate journalists, blue-pilled politics.
And my audience was very upset that I wasn't pushing back or whatever.
I'm like, my job, if someone is coming to a place where the audience is at least giving
me 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's successful, I'm delighted and there are times when it's not successful and that's
a shame, but all we could do is do our best.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation with her.
I was surprised by the dislikes and all that kind of stuff.
Well, one of the things I always talk about is I don't care what my friends' politics
are.
I care about 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 are freaking out.
I'm like, I'm practicing what I preach.
My, the relationships are more important than someone's political views and it's not hypocrisy
at all to demonstrate that and not to push back.
And there was great humor there.
You're both a bit of trolls 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.
You've talked to Alex Jones a couple of days ago.
Sure.
Yeah.
But you've had him on your podcast this week.
Yeah.
This week.
I was kind of surprised that 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 all the, to the globalists, to all the conspiracies that are out there.
Was that surprising to you?
No, because I came in there with questions and I was very focused on corralling him and
having it be like 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 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.
Now 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's ease.
He's obviously very performative and a lot of times Alex will say things that are not
really 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 out of reservation 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 think
of a lot of it's nonsensical, let's sort out the wheat from the chaff because everyone
has someone craze 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's just
not a coherent position to have is the weather lie when they tell you the temperature is
going to 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 promised me he wouldn't interrupt and would be differential, 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.
My friend Ethan Supley, who I'm sure people know, played a basically character based
on him and the hunt because Eric Alex is kind of this cartoon archetype.
So it was really fun to get another side of him.
And also it was 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 thing he said before.
And that's what makes me the most interested in Alex is the Nietzsche quote about the 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 that term conspiracy theory?
If you ask any layman, 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.
So if you ask people, do you think extremely powerful people often get together and manipulate
data or rules in order to further power and control and maintain it?
I think 90 plus percent of people will 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, there's conspiracies in government
to experiment on people like Tuskegee.
This is not in dispute.
The CIA has 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 were 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.
Unfortunately, the same problem applies with language applies to a lot of other areas.
A hundred percent.
That's an age 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 label conspiracy
theories that are much more likely to be true.
Yeah.
Like power elite analysis is another, is basically conspiracy theory.
This is the black pill versus white pill question with the abyss.
Do you think thinking about these things can destroy the mind, can 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.
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 ones completely 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 intellects
that you're in awe of to put it mildly.
So I think that 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.
But I don't know if you have a bucket list.
Is there items on the bucket list you haven't done yet?
Are you pretty much satisfied and happy?
And if you die today, if I murder you, you'd be happy.
I could die today.
Is there an item on the bucket list you want to get done?
I don't, yeah, deep sea submersible.
That would be number one on a bucket list.
Why?
That's where all the most interesting zoology is.
And to be in a place where 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 in the ocean.
I was going to see this.
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.
I want to go.
These are secondary, like go to Eritrea would be a bucket list 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.
There's not that much.
What I'm at a point in my life is once you cross up certain things, you basically instead
of driving the car starts surfing and just amazing thing.
I talked to you about this medical thing, you know, before we started at a certain point
and I'm sure this happens to you because your platform is 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 by people.
So that's going to 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 and 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 over the next
couple of years, but you know, it's the price you pay and 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 will be two really big names that wanting to do this podcast will do this
podcast that I consider to do episode 200 with, but then I realized why the hell talk
to somebody famous when I could talk to somebody I love that nobody knows or cares for.
You just hit a random number generator.
Yeah.
Just, I'd listed all the Russians I know and who's the easiest to get.
Yeah, who's the most desperate for every song?
He's got a shitty book out.
Yeah, we can talk about that for five minutes, this garbage cut and paste that he did.
Yeah.
It turned out okay, I think, slightly above average.
Michael, 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.
The respect that I got when you asked me to be the guest for the anniversary episode was
similar to the respect with my two friends, Josh and Zoe.
They were going to get married at City Hall and they said, we want someone to witness
that they ask you.
It's one thing when people tell you they like you and respect you, which I had growing up.
It's another thing when they show it.
This is something that I do not take lightly and I hope no one takes lightly.
If someone does right by you and shows you respect, going back to 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 going to look
at the camera.
Be kind to yourself because a lot of you deserve it.
Good bye.
The only people for me are the mad ones.
The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at
the same time.
The ones who never yawn or say a 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.