The following is a conversation with Michael Malis, an anarchist, political thinker, author,
and a proud, part-time, Andy Kaufman-like troll, in the best sense of that word, on both Twitter
and in real life. He's a host of a great podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y-O-U-R.
I think that gives a sense of his sense of humor. He is the author of Dear Reader,
the unauthorized autobiography of King Jong Il, and The New Right, a journey to the fringe of
American politics. This latter book, when I read it or rather listened to it last year,
helped me start learning about the various disparate movements that I was undereducated about
from the internet trolls, to Alex Jones, to white nationalists, and to techno-anarchists.
The book is funny and brilliant, and so is Michael. Unfortunately, because of a self-imposed
deadline, I actually pulled an all-nighter before this conversation. So, I was not exactly all
there mentally, even more so than usual, which is tough because Michael is really quick-witted
and brilliant. But he was kind, patient, and understanding in this conversation,
and I hope you will be as well. Today, I'm trying something a little new,
looking to establish a regular structure for these intros. First, doing the guest intro,
like I just did. Second, quick one or two sentence mention of each sponsor. Third,
myside comments related to the episode. And finally, fourth, full ad reads on the audio
side of things, and on YouTube, going straight to the conversation, so not doing the full ad reads.
And as always, no ads in the middle, because to me, they get in the way of the conversation.
So, quick mention of the sponsors. First, SEM Rush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool
I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers, but someone probably should. It helps
you make good decisions. Second sponsor is DoorDash, food delivery service that I've used for many
years to fuel long, uninterrupted sessions of deep work at Google MIT, and I still use it a lot today.
Third sponsor is Masterclass, online courses from the best people in the world on each of the topics
covered from rockets to game design to poker to writing and to guitar with Carlos Santana.
Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that I hope to have some conversations with political thinkers,
including liberals and conservatives, anarchists, libertarians, objectivists,
and everything in between. I'm as allergic to Trump bashing and Trump worship as you probably are.
I have none of that in me. I really work hard to be open-minded and let my curiosity drive
the conversation. I do plead with you to be patient on two counts. First, I have an intense,
busy life outside of these podcasts. Like it's 4 a.m. right now as I'm recording this. So sometimes
life affects these conversations. Like in this case, I pull an all nighter beforehand. So please
be patient with me if I say something ineliquent, confusing, dumb, or just plain wrong. I'll try
to correct myself on social media or in future conversations as much as I can. I really am always
learning and working hard to improve. Second, if I or the guest says something about, for example,
our current president Donald Trump that's over the top negative or over the top positive,
please don't let your brain go into the partisan mode. Try to hear our words in an open-minded,
nuanced way. And if we say stuff from a place of emotion, please give us a pass.
Nuance conversation can only happen if we're patient with each other.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on
Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. And now here's my
conversation with Michael Malis. There was a Simpsons episode where he starts mixing sleeping pills
with pet pills, and he's driving his truck. And I'm like, I want to see what happens if he makes
Red Bull a nitro cold brew. There's a lineup of drugs. This is gonna be so fun. This is, yeah.
Let's start with love. Yes. Yeah, so one thing we'll eventually somehow talk about,
it'll be a theme throughout, is that you're also Russian. Yes. A little bit less than me.
But how am I, because I'm from Ukraine? Oh, you're from Ukraine? Okay. Well,
not because you came here a little bit when you were younger. Yeah. I came here when I was 13,
so I saturated a little bit of the Russian soul. I marinated in the Russian soul a little deeper.
I haven't told anyone this, but I'll be glad to tell you, Davidish. I haven't been back since I was
two. And next summer, it looks like me, my buddy Chris Williamson, who's also a podcaster. He's
British, modern wisdom. He looks like Apollo. We look like we got a videographer. Which Apollo,
Apollo 3? The God. He looks like the God of Apollo. Yeah, he's like a model. I think you're talking about
Rocky. So we're gonna go for the first time to see where I came from. Which is in Ukraine. We're
gonna go to Levov and either St. Petersburg or Moscow, probably St. Petersburg or both.
It's gonna be intense. It's gonna be a lot of panic attacks, I feel. And you're Russian is okay?
You can't talk Russian and Ukraine or it's like they get offended. Yeah, but then you also want to
go to Russia. Yeah. I don't know. For me, there's several people in Russia I want to interview on a
podcast. Okay. So one of them is a good girl, a proman, which is a mathematician. And the other
person is Putin. You know, my favorite food and story is, do you know this? No. When he had Merkel
with him, do you know this story? No. Merkel's scared of dogs, like petrified of dogs. So he
brings in his like black lab. It's a Labrador. It's like the sweetest animal and it's all over
her and there's pictures and she's sitting like this and she's terrified and he's like, what's
wrong, Angela? It's just completely trolling her. Yeah, he's aware of the sort of the narrative
around him. Yeah. And then he plays with it. Yes. He enjoys it. It's a very Russian thing. My friend
wanted to do a film about me. He goes, I realized you guys aren't like us at all. You just like,
look at us. And then I started telling him stories about the upbringing and he's like,
oh my God. And as I'm telling them, I'm like, wow, this stuff is really crazy. Like what,
how we are wired. Who's the, your friend is? The Russian, the friend's American. I'm saying the
way Russians are brought up and the way maybe, I don't think it was just my family. I bet you
had similar things. Here's an example. I was, I had a buddy staying with me. He had a problem with
his roommate. So he crashed into my place. Fine. I went to the gym and I come back and he goes,
oh, there was, and my apartment building is for four apartments. So it's not like a huge thing.
He goes, oh, there was someone knocking at your door. So, you know, I told him blah,
and, and for me, and I want to know if you're the same way. If I'm at someone's house that's
not my own and someone knocks on the door, I wouldn't even think to answer it. Like if I had an
apple here, maybe I'd eat it, I'd cut it, whatever. I'm not going to, it just doesn't enter my head
to smash into my face. But the thought of answering the door, if it's not my house, it would never
enter my head. Would it enter your head? No, but why? But he's an American. So someone's at the door,
he goes and opens it, even though it's not his house. I would never do that. I would never think
to do that. That is so strange that you picked some very obscure thing to delineate Americans.
I don't think that's obscure because I think it speaks to how we perceive strangers.
With Americans, everyone's friendly. And with us, it's like, no, no, no, like you have that moat.
And I think that's a, that percolates into many different aspects of how we relate to people.
And I had to undo a lot of that. That's true. You're right. There's the relationship I formed
there were in Russia or very deep, close. And then there's the strangers, the other that you don't
trust by default. It takes a long time to go over the moat of trust. For a long time,
until recently, whenever I said anything to anyone, my brain ran a scan that said,
if this person turns on you, can they use this against you? And I would do everything I said
with strangers. And after a while, it's like, you know what, maybe they will, but I'm strong enough
to take it. But this is not how Americans think. Or here's another one. Let me ask you this. Sorry,
I'm taking over the interview. People asked about advice for work. There was this party I went to
and basically everyone had their own problems and everyone else gave their advice. And someone's
having a problem with the coworker. And the advice these are to boy Americans gave them is, oh,
sit down and have a talk with them. And to me, this is like the last case, last resort. Like,
first, you have to see what you can without showing your hand, showing your vulnerability,
only when everything hasn't worked out. You're like, all right, let me sit down with you and try
to have it out with you, probably. But for them, the first thing is like, sit down and be like,
oh, you're causing me problems and blah, blah, blah. So I perceive that right away is a threat
that this person sees an antagonism between us and also as a weakness that I'm getting to them.
So my reaction isn't, how do I make it better? My reaction is to reinforce my position and see
what I can to marginalize them, usually. I haven't worked in a corporate setting in a long time.
But it's not, I don't approach it the way an American would. Like, I'm glad you came and
talked to me. Now I probably would because it's going to be a friend. So you attribute that to
the Russian upbringing as opposed to you have deep psychological issues. I think there's a synonymous
on it. Wait, am I, would you think differently maybe a few years ago? I don't know. I think
you lost me at the, because you kind of said that you're kind of implying you have a deep
distrust of the world, like the world does. I think the default setting would be distrust, yeah.
But I would put it differently is I almost ignore the rest of the, I don't even acknowledge it. I
just savor, I save my love and trust for the small circle of people. I agree. But when that
person is being confrontational or as they perceive it as being open, now there's a situation.
How do you, how would you handle that? Like, like a cold wind blows. You just kind of like,
yeah, but it's not like this is an opportunity for us to work out our differences. It's a cold wind.
It's not a hug. That's my point. I don't think it's a hug. You're so suspicious. What it really is
is a cold wind. I'm so inhumane. It's not, it's not something to be scared of. It's a cold wind,
it's not in person. But it's not, it's great. But it's not a source of like, I'm not suspicious of,
like I'm not anxious, I would say, or like living in fear of the rest of the world. I'm more. Oh,
I agree. But you're not receptive to that person. Right. That's all I'm saying. And they are. Got it.
So speaking of which, let's talk about love. Yes. Which requires to be receptive of the world. Yes.
Of strangers. I agree. How do we put more love out there in the world, especially on the internet?
One mechanism I have found to prove increased love, and that's a word that has many meanings and is,
you know, used in a very intense sense and is used in a very loose sense.
Can you try to define love? Sure. Love is a strong sense of attraction toward another person,
entity or place that causes one to tend to react in a disproportionately positive manner. That's
off the top of my head. Disproportionately. Yes. So for example, if you... Why not proportionately?
Because like, if you're, someone's about to, who you love is about to get harmed, you're moving
heaven and earth to make sure, or like a book you love, you know, like, I love this book,
like you're going through the fire to try to save it. Whereas if it's a book you really like,
it's like, oh, I've got another one. I don't, you know, and a book's kind of a loose example, but...
So you're going with the love that's like, you're saving for just a few people, almost like
romantically, like love for a close family. But it's also like...
But what about just love to even the broader, like the kind of love you can put out to people
on the internet, which is like, just kindness. Sure. I would say in that case, it's important to
make them feel seen and validated. And I try to do this when people who I have come to know on the
internet, and there's a lot, I try to do that as much as possible, because I don't think it's valid
how on social media, and I do this a lot myself, but not towards everyone, it's just there to be
aggressive and antagonistic. You should be antagonistic towards bad people, and that's fine.
But at the same time, there's lots of great people, and especially with my audience, and I would bet
disproportionately with yours, there's a lots of people who are, because of their psychology and
intelligence, are going to be more and more isolated socially than they should. And if I, and I've
heard from many of them, and if I'm the person who makes them feel, oh, I'm not crazy, it's everyone
else around me who is just basic, the fact that I can be that person, which I didn't have at their
age, to me is incredibly reaffirming. You mean that source of love? But I mean, love in the sense of
like, you know, you care about this person, and you want good things for them, not in a kind of
romantic way. But I mean, you're using a broad sense now. Yeah. But you're also a person who kind of,
I mean, attacks the power structures in the world by mocking them effectively. Yes. And love, I
would say, requires you to be non witty, and simple, and fragile, which I see it as like the
opposite of what trolls do. Trolls are, if I, if there is someone coming after what I love,
there's two mechanisms, right, at least two, I go up and I'm fighting them. And in which case,
you bring in, if you are getting hurt in a knife fight, even if you win the knife fight, or if
you disarm them, and you preclude the possibility of a fight, and you drive them off or render them
powerless, you can, you keep your person intact as yourself, and you also protect your values.
So how do you render them powerless? As you just said, by mocking them, one of the most effective
mechanism for those in power, we're much closer to brave new world than 1984. The people who are
dominant and in power aren't there because of the threat of, you know, the Gulag or prison.
They're there because of social pressures. Look at the masks. I was on the subway not that long
ago in New York City. No one cared who I was until I put out the mask. I was in the subway that long
in New York City. They would, and I put this on my Instagram, I've told this story before,
there was an Asian dude in his early 30s. He was like in Western clothes. It's not like he had a
rickshaw or something. An older man in his 50s stood up over him on the subway, screamed at him,
said, go back where you came from. You're disgusting. I'm going to get sick. If you think
this guy is a vector of disease, which is your prerogative, why are you coming close to him?
Why are you getting in his face? And what- That was the rate, sorry. So it was because he was Asian?
It was both. It was, the not having a mask gave him the permission to act like a despicable,
aggressive person toward him, right? And the point being, a lot of these mechanisms for social
control are outsourced to low quality people because this is their one chance to assert dominance
and status over somebody else. So the best way to diffuse that isn't with weaponry or fighting,
it's through mockery because all of a sudden their claims to authority are effectively destroyed.
So let me push back on that. What about fighting that with love, with patience and kindness towards
them? I don't think kindness is, I think that would be a mismatch and inappropriate. There's
Superman is Batman, okay? And Superman's job is to help the good people and Batman's job is to hurt
the bad people. And I will always be on the Batman side than the Superman side. Both work,
silly tight costumes, one has pointy ears, both are ridiculous. So it's- He wants a billionaire
who gets, you know, he's swimming in trim. Which one is the billionaire? Batman. Okay. I'm under-educated
on the superhero movies, I apologize. Okay, but you're just saying your predisposition is to be
on the Batman side is to fighting the bad guys. Yeah, that's what I'm good at. That's what you're
good at. But just to play devil's advocate or actually, in this case, I am the devil because
that's what I usually do. Watch the devil. You're the angel's advocate. Exactly. To be the angel
advocate. Yeah. It's like, I feel like mockery is a path towards escalation of conflict. Yes,
in many ways, yes. So you're not, I mean, it's kind of like guerrilla warfare. I mean, you're not
going to win. I am winning. We're all winning. We're winning on a daily. This is my next book.
We're winning. We've won before. I'm not joking. The topic of the next book. Yes, is the white pill.
The white pill. Is that we're gonna, we are winning. The most horrible people are being
rendered into laughing stocks on a daily base in social media. This is a glorious thing. I so
disagree with you. I disagree with you because there's side effects that are very destructive.
It feels like you're winning, but we're completely destroying the possibility of
having like a cohesive society. That's called oncology. What's that mean? Curing cancer.
No. Your concept of a cohesive society is in fact a society based on oppression and not
allowing individuals to live their personal freedom. Oh, so you're your utopian view of the
world. You're the utopian. You're saying cohesive society. I'm saying, I don't need that. I'm saying
there's going to be conflict. Right. There's going to be conflict. You and I are disagreeing right
now. That's not cohesive. Doesn't mean we like each other less. Doesn't mean we respect each
other less. Cohesive doesn't, it's just a euphemism for like everyone submitting to what I want.
No. I mean, cohesive could be that. It could be like enforced with violence,
all that kind of stuff, sort of the libertarian view of the world, but it could just be being
respectful and kind of each other and kind towards each other and loving towards each other.
I mean, that's what I mean by cohesive. So when people say free, it's funny. Like freedom is
a funny thing because freedom could be painful to a lot of people. It's all matters how you
define it, how you implement it, how it actually looks like. Sure. And I'm just saying it feels like
the mockery of the powerful leads to further and further the divisions. It's turning life into a
game to where it's always you're creating these different little tribes and groups and you're
constantly fighting the groups that become a little bit more powerful by undercutting them
through guerrilla warfare kind of thing. And that's what the internet becomes is everyone's just
mocking each other and then certain groups become more and more powerful. And then they start fighting
each other into basically they form groups of ideologies and they start fighting each other
in the internet where the result is it doesn't feel like the common humanities highlighted.
It doesn't feel like that's a path of progress. Now, when I say cohesive, I don't mean
everybody has to be enforcing equality, all those kinds of ideas. I just mean not being so divisive.
So it's going back to the original question of how do we put more love out in the world on the
internet? I want divisiveness. Oh, you see, you think divisive is very interesting. It's the goal.
So you started this conversation by you talking about you have love for that small group.
I think we both would agree to have a bigger group would be better, especially if that love comes
from a sincere place. I wrote an article about this four years ago that it's time to disunite
the states and to secede. This country has been held together with at least two separate cultures
with dumb tax and string for over 20 years. There's an enormous amount of contempt from
one group toward another. This contempt comes from a sincere place. They do not share
each other's values. There's absolutely no reason just like any unhealthy relationship
where you can't say, you know what, it's not working out. I want to go my own way and live my
happiness and I genuinely want you to go your way, live your happiness. If I'm wrong, prove you wrong.
I'll learn from you and take lessons and vice versa. But the fact that we all have to be in
the same house together is not coherent and that's not love. That is the path towards friction and
tension and conflict. Do you think there is concrete groups? Is it as simple as the two
groups of blue and red? No, it's also very fluid because you and I are allied as Jewish people,
as Russians, as males, as podcasters. You're an academic, I'm not. So we're different,
but we each are a Venn diagram even within ourselves. I can talk to you about politics and
then we can talk about Russia stuff and then you could talk about your work which I don't know
anything about. So that would be where you're way up here and I'm way down here. So there's
lots, every relationship with just between individuals, it's very dynamic. So how do we
secede? Like how do we form individual states where there's a little bit more cohesion? Sure.
And voluntary cohesion. So the first step is to eliminate the concept of political authority
as legitimate and to denigrate and humiliate those who would put themselves in a position in which
they are there to tell you how to live your life from any semblance of validity. And that's starting
to happen. If you look at what they had with the lockdowns, Cuomo and de Blasio New York,
we have, I was tired a couple of weeks ago and I said to my friend, oh, just click maybe have COVID
and he goes, it's not possible. Like what do you mean? And he goes, we haven't had any deaths
in like two months. And there's only like 100 cases a day for like two months. And I go, you're
exaggerating because everything was still closed. And I looked at the numbers and he wasn't exaggerating.
And there's no greater American dream to me than an immigrant family comes to the states, forms
their own little business, maybe mom's a good cook as a restaurant, dry cleaner, fruit stand.
And those people aren't going to have a lot of money. Those are the first ones who lost their
companies because of these lockdowns. Cuomo, who's the governor of New York, opened up the
gyms. He said, you're clear to open up. De Blasio said, and we don't have enough inspectors,
you're going to have to wait another couple of weeks. To regard that as anything other than
literally criminal is something that I am having a hard and hard of time wrapping my head around.
You said, I mean, that's something I'm deeply worried about as well, which is like
thousands, it's actually millions of dreams being crushed, that American dream of starting a business,
of running a business. What about all the young people who you and I have in our audiences who
are socially isolated at best and now they can't leave their homes? Isolation and ostracism are
things that are very well studied in psychology. These have extreme consequences. I read a book
called ostracism. And this wasn't scientific, but basically the author was a psychiatrist,
like college, whatever. And he had one of his colleagues, they didn't experiment.
Let's for a week, you ostracize me completely. We know it's an, and he goes, even knowing it's
the experiment, the fact that he wouldn't make eye contact with me and the fact that he ignored me,
had an extreme emotional impact on me, knowing full well, this is purely for experimental purposes.
Now you multiply that by all these, the suicide, the number of kids who think that suicide was
through the roof during all this. And my point is until these people, it's going to, I would predict
like 2024, that's where we're going to have to start having conversations about what personal
consequences have to be done for these people, because until then they're going to do the same
thing. So you think there's going to be society-wide consequences of this that we're going to see,
like ripple effects because of the social isolation? I know, I mean, we also need to talk
about consequences of Cuomo and de Blasio, because if politicians respond to incentives and the
incentives are there for them to be extremely conservative, because if you have to choose,
as Cuomo said in a press conference, between a thousand people dying and a thousand people
losing their business, it's not a hard choice and he's right. But at a certain point, it's like,
all right, you're losing both, you're losing, not losing, you're making these decisions
and not having consequences for it, and you're going to do it again the next time.
So we need to make sure you're a little scared. Okay. And I don't know what that would mean.
But you're laying this problem, this incompetence-
I don't think it's incompetence. I think it's very competent. I think their jobs-
Malevolence. Yes.
But you're laying it not at the hands of the individuals, but the structure of government.
It's both, yes.
How would we deal with it better without centralized control?
Well, we didn't really have centralized control, because every country and every state handled
it in a different mechanism. But a city has centralized control.
No, that's not true. So Cuomo and De Blasio, they had a lot of disagreements over this
over the months, and this was actually a source of great interest and tension.
De Blasio wanted, at one point, was talking about quarantining people in their homes.
Cuomo was like, you're crazy. Same thing with the schools, same thing with the gyms,
and there were other such examples. But the point being, this was an emergency.
This is World War I, I talked about this on Tim Pool's show, was very dangerous,
because it gave a lot of evil people some very useful information about what the country put up
with and what they can get away with under wartime. And this set the model for things
like the New Deal and the other things of that nature. It is undeniable, you're a scientist,
so you understand this perfectly well, that this lockdown gave some very nefarious people
some very valid data about how much people will put up with under pressures from the state.
So fundamentally, what is the problem with the state that...
It's existence.
Okay, well, but to play Angel's advocate again, you know, government is the people.
Come on, you don't, you're saying, do you really think this?
As best I think it's possible to have representation.
Can you imagine if like you have an attorney, you're like, oh, you can't have the attorney you
want. You're going to have this guy who you absolutely hate, who you share no values with.
Why?
Because he drives, I mean, leaders, political leaders and political representation drive the
discourse. Like we, you know, the majority of people voted for him or whatever, however,
however you define that. And now we get to have a discussion, well, was this the right choice?
And then we get to make that choice again in four years and so on.
First of all, the fact that I have to be under the thumb of somebody for years makes no sense.
There's no other relationship that's like this, including a marriage.
You can leave any other relationship at any time, number one. Number two is...
It always impeach.
But they did that.
Part of it I'm just saying that the mechanisms are flawed in many ways.
Yeah, right. And so that's number one. Number two is it doesn't make sense that if I don't want
someone to represent me, that because that person is popular, that they are now in a position to...
So having representation and having citizenship based on geography is a pre-landline technology
in a post-cell phone world. There's no reason why I have to just because we're physically
in between two oceans, we all have to be represented by the same people. Whereas I can very easily have
my security be under someone and switch it as easily as cell phone providers.
So okay, but it doesn't have to be geographical. It can be ideas.
Sure.
I mean, this country represents a certain set of ideas.
Yes, it does.
It started out geographically. It still is geographic.
It started off as ideas as well.
But it was intricately... I mean, that's the way humans are. I mean, there was no internet.
So it was geographically in the same location and you sign a bunch of documents and then you kind
of debated and you wrote a bunch of stuff and then you agreed on it.
Okay, so...
You understand that no one signed these documents and no one agreed to it,
as Lysander Spooner pointed out over 150 years ago.
The constitution or the social contract, if anything, is only binding to the signatories
and even then, they're all long dead. So it's this fallacy that somehow,
because I'm in a physical place, I have agreed, even though I'm screaming to you a face that I
don't agree, to be subordinate to some imaginary invisible monster that was created 250 years ago.
And this idea of like, if you don't like it, you have to move, that's not what freedom means.
Freedom means I do what I want, not what you want. So if you don't like it, you move.
Okay, just to put some... I don't like words and terms.
1110, 1110.
Yeah, exactly.
Because I'm like your language.
It is. I'm translating it all in real time. But would you call
the kind of ideas that you're advocating for and we're talking about anarchy?
Yes, anarchism, yes.
Okay, so let's get into it. Can you try to paint the utopia that an anarchist worldview
dreams about?
The only people who describe anarchism as utopia are its critics. If I told you right now,
and I wish I could say this factually, that I have a cure for cancer that would not make us
utopia, that would still probably be expensive. We would still have many other diseases. However,
we would be fundamentally healthier, happier, and better off all of us.
Then democracy. So I jump back from the cancer analogy.
No, then democracy or government. So it's only curing one major, major life-threatening problem.
But in no sense is it a utopia.
So what... Can we try to answer this question many... Same question many times, which is
what exactly is the problem with democracy?
The problem with democracy is that those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them.
Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them.
That's the central problem with democracy.
Not all of us need leaders.
What does it mean to need a leader? Are you saying like people who are actually
free thinkers, don't need leaders kind of thing?
Sure. That's a good way of working here.
Okay, so do you acknowledge that there's some value in authority in different subjects?
So what that means is... I don't mean authority.
Somebody who's in control of you, but...
But you're doing the definition switch.
Yeah, I am. You're right. It's unfair. Okay, that was bad.
But that's what they do. That's their trick.
Yeah.
And this is one of the useful things, by the way, Lesley's total sidebar.
If people ask me for advice, I always tell them,
if you're going to raise your kids, raise them bilingual.
Because I was trilingual by the time I was six and that teaches you to think in concepts.
Whereas if you only know one language, you fall for things like this.
Because using authority in the sense of a policeman and someone's authority in physics,
it's the same word. Conceptually, they're extremely different.
But if you're only thinking in one language, your brain is going to equate the two.
And that's a trap that people who only speak one language have.
For sure. But even if you know multiple languages,
you can still use the trick of using the worst-seeker convenience to manipulate the conversation.
But you weren't trying to do that, but you fell...
I accidentally did it.
People, we all tend to do that if you only speak one language and think in one language.
But if... I guess let me rephrase it.
Are you against... Do you acknowledge the value of offloading your own effort
about a particular thing to somebody else?
Absolutely. Like an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a chef, infinite.
Isn't that ultimately what a democracy is?
No.
Broadly defined, like you're basically electing a bunch of authorities...
Using the word you in two senses.
Using the word you meaning me as an individual, not using you as a mass.
Yeah, as a mass, not you as an individual.
Right. So I would absolutely want someone to provide for my security.
I would absolutely want someone to negotiate with me for foreign power or something like that.
That does not mean it has to be predicated.
And what lots of other people who I do not know,
and if I do know them, probably would not respect, think about.
It's of no moral relevance to me, nor I to them.
Do you think this kind of...
There could be a bunch of humans that behave kind of like ants in a distributed way.
There could be an emergent behavior in them that results in a stable society.
Like, is not the hope with anarchy is like without an overarching...
But ants... I mean, ants are the worst example here because ants have a very firm authority.
The queen.
Yeah. And they're all drones. They're all clones of each other.
Yeah, but so if you forget the queen, their behavior, they're all...
Well, from your perspective, from your human intelligence perspective,
but from their perspective, I probably see each other as a bunch of individuals.
No, they don't. Ants are very big on altruism in the sense of self-sacrifice.
They do not think the individual matters.
They routinely kill themselves for the sake of the hives in the community.
But see, that's from the outside perspective.
From the individual perspective of the individual, they probably...
They don't see it as altruism.
Right. But they view, and they're right because the ants' life is very ephemeral and cheap,
that it's more important to continue this mass population that one individual ant live.
Like bees are another even better example.
The honey bee, when they sting, they only sting once and they die.
And they do it gladly because it's like, okay, this community is much more important than me,
and they're right.
Yeah, okay, so fine.
I'm being pedantic, but it's important, I think.
I'm not just being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.
But there's something beautiful that I won't argue about because I do...
There's an interesting point there about individualism of ants.
I do think they're more individual than that.
But let's give your view of ants that they're communists.
Okay, let's go with the communist view of ants.
Okay, yeah.
But there's still a beautiful emergent thing, which is like they can function as a society
and without, I would say, centralized control.
Yeah, I agree.
It's another argument.
So is that the hope for anarchy?
It's like you just throw a bunch of people that voluntarily want to be in the same place
under the same set of ideas and the doctors emerge, the police officers emerge, the different,
let's say, structures of a functional society emerge.
Do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is
that it's just beyond beautiful when you stop to think about it?
I'll say it later.
I'm not being tongue-in-cheek.
Okay.
Language.
There's infinite languages.
Language, the things that language can be used for are bring tears to people's eyes quite literally.
It's also used for basic things.
No one is forcing us.
We speak two languages each, at least.
No one's forcing us to use English.
No one's forcing us to use this dialect of English.
It's a way and despite there being so many different languages,
lingua franca emerge, the languages of Latin.
Even in North Korea, they refer to the fish.
And the different animals by the Latin scientific note.
No one decided this.
Sure, there's an organization that sets a binomial nomenclature,
but there's no gun to anyone's head referring to Seamoth as a Pegasus species.
And when you think about how amazing language is,
and some in other contexts would say, well, you need to have a world government,
and they're deciding which is the verbs, and you have to have an official definition
and an official dictionary, and none of that's happened.
And I think anyone, even if they don't agree with my politics or my worldview,
cannot deny that the creation of language is one of humanity's most miraculous,
beautiful achievements.
Absolutely.
So there you go.
There's one system where a kind of anarchy can result in beauty, stability,
like sufficient stability and yet dynamic flexibility to adjust to them and so on.
And the internet helps it.
You get something like Urban Dictionary, which starts creating absurd, both humor and wit.
But also language and syntax and jargon immediately you size people up.
If you use, if you say vertebral, I know you're a doctor,
because that's how they pronounce it, the spinal column.
I'm sure in your field, there's certain jargon right away.
You can know if this person's one of us or not.
I mean, it's infinite.
I mean, I don't need to tell you.
It's emojis, too.
Yes, there's so much there to study with language.
It's fascinating.
But do you think this applies to human life, the meat space, the physical space?
Yes.
So that kind of beauty can emerge without writing stuff on paper, without laws.
You could have rules.
You don't need, you don't have to be laws.
So.
Enforced by violence.
Like that's what, what's a law?
A law is something that is unchosen.
A rule is something.
If I go to my pool and I sign up to remember a pool on the wall, there's certain things.
It's like, you know, certain number of people in the pool, no peeing in here.
Good luck enforcing that one.
And so on and so forth.
Well, that's the problem.
Aren't you afraid that people are going to pee in the pool?
That's not as my biggest concern is mass incarceration,
as the fact that the police can steal more money than burglars can.
The fact that innocent people can be killed with no consequences.
The fact that war can be waged and with no consequences for those who waged it.
The fact that so many men and women are being murdered overseas and here,
and the people who are guiding these are regarded as heroic.
So you think that in an anarchist system, there's a possibility of having less wars
and less, what would you say, corruption and less abuse of power?
Power, let's talk, yes, and let's talk about corruption because, and I made this point on
Rogan, you and I, again, this is the Russian background.
We realize that when it comes to corruption, American is very naive.
Corruption, they think is, oh, I got my brother a job and he's getting money on the table.
That's not when we're talking about like state corruption, things that are done
in totalitarian states.
And even to some extent, America, like Jeffrey Epstein, Jillian Maxwell,
things that Stalin did, things that Hitler did.
You know, when the CIA was torturing people at Gitmo, they had to borrow KGB manuals
because they didn't know how to torture correctly because they never thought of these things.
We, it's very hard for us to get into the mindset of someone who's like a child predator,
someone who, let me give you an example from my forthcoming book.
There was a guy who was the head of Ukraine in the 30s, I forget his name.
Now these old Soviets, they were tough.
I mean, they pride, Stalin means steel, you know, they pride themselves and their cruelty
and how strong they were.
And this was the purge.
You know, Stalin is trying to, you know, killing lots of people left and right.
And his henchmen, Beria, had the quote, find me the man and I'll find you the crime.
You know, they would accuse someone and they would torture him until he talked
and confessed and then he had to turn people in.
And they took this guy in like beginning of the year, I think it's 36, 38.
He was head of Ukraine.
By May, he's arrested.
And they take him to the Lublanca, the basement in the Red Square where they're
torturing people and they put, they did the works on him.
And he was a good Soviet and he stood up and who knows what they did to him.
He didn't talk.
So they said, okay, one moment.
They brought his teenage daughter in, raped her in front of him.
He talked.
So when we talk about corruption, we would never in a million years think of this.
That's not how our minds work.
So when you're talking about states and people where you don't have ease of exit,
where you are forced to be under the auspices of an organization creating a monopoly,
that leads to in extreme cases, but in not as extreme cases, really nefarious outcomes.
Whereas if you have the option to leave as a client or customer,
that would have a strongly limiting effect on how a business and what it can get away with.
So, but don't you think maybe, I don't know who the right example is,
whether it's Stalin, I think Hitler might be the better example of,
don't you think, or Jeffrey Epstein perhaps, don't you think people who are evil will,
will find ways to manipulate human nature to attain power, no matter the system?
Yes.
And like the corollary question is, do you think those people can get more power
in the democracy, when there's a government already in place?
They can, it's easily, they get more power, more dangerous to have a government in place.
First of all, sociopaths don't know for their charm and for their warmth.
Here's the two situations.
In a free society, I'm a sociopath, I'm an evil person, I'm the head of Macy's.
In a state society, I'm an evil person, I'm a sociopath, I'm the head of the US government.
Which of these are you more concerned with? It's like night and day.
So, you would have far more decentralized military, you would have far more decentralized
security forces, and they would be much more subject to feedback from the market.
If you have an issue with Macy's or any store with a sweater, look at that transaction.
If you have an issue with the state, to hire a lawyer cost more than a surgeon,
to even access the mechanism for dispute is going to be exorbitant and price poor people
out of the market for conflict resolution immediately.
So, right away, you have something that's extremely regressive,
and even though this is touted as some great equalizer, it's quite the opposite.
So, in current society, there's deep suspicion of governments and states.
That's not really.
Well, just your example of Macy's, I mean, don't you think a Hitler could rise to be at the top
of social network like Twitter and Facebook?
Okay, let's suppose Hitler ran Twitter, okay?
Let's take this thought experiment seriously.
Literally, what could he do?
So, the only tweets are going to be about how much the juice suck, right?
Okay, fine.
Okay, all the cool people are leaving.
There could be some compelling, like you said,
evil people are charming.
There could be some compelling narratives that could be with conspiracy theories,
untruths, that could be spread like propaganda.
Every criticism of anarchism is in fact a description.
Well, the strongest criticism of anarchism are in fact description of the status quo.
Your concern is, under anarchism, propaganda would spread and people would be taught the wrong
ideas, unlike the status quo.
Well, that's not even a criticism of anarchism.
I'm not actually criticizing.
It's an open question of, it's an open question of in which system will human nature thrive,
be able to thrive more, and in which system would the evils that arise in human nature
would be more easily suppressible?
That's the open question.
It's a scientific experiment, and I'm asking only from my perspective of the fact that we've
tried democracy quite a bit recently, and maybe you can correct me, we haven't yet
seriously tried anarchy on a large scale.
So anarchy isn't like a country, right?
It's like saying, well, if anarchy works, how come we've never had an anarchist government,
right?
So anarchism is a relationship.
And language is an example of this.
It's a worldwide anarchic system.
You and I have an anarchist relationship.
There's almost no circumstances we'd be calling the police on each other.
I mean, I'm asking the same question in a bunch of different directions,
out of, born out of my curiosity, is why is anarchy going to be better at preventing
the darker sides of human nature, which presumably a criticism of government.
Oh, because of decentralization.
So the darker side of human nature is an extreme concern.
Anyone who says it's going to go away is absurd and fallacious.
I think that's a non-starter when people say that everyone's going to be good.
Human beings are basically animals.
We're capable of great beauty and kindness.
We're capable of just complete, cruel, and what we would call inhumanity.
But we see it on a daily basis even today.
And what's interesting is the corporate press won't even tell you the darkest aspects,
because that's too upsetting to people.
So they'll tell you about atrocities and horrors, but only to a point.
And then when you actually do the homework, you're like, oh, it's so much worse than,
like that thing about Stalin, right?
So we know in a broad sense that Stalin was a dictator.
We know that he killed a lot of people, but it takes work to learn about the Holodomor.
It takes work to learn about what those literal tortures were and that this is the person who later,
FDR and Harry Truman were shaking hands with and taking photos with and was being sold to us as Uncle Joe.
You know, he's just like you and me.
So when you have a decentralized information network, as opposed to having three media networks,
it is a lot easier for information that doesn't fit what would be the corporate American narrative
to reach the populations.
And it would be more effective for democracy because they're in a much better position to be informed.
Now, you're right.
It also means, well, if everyone has a mic, that means every crazy person and with their wacky views
and at a certain point, yeah, it has to become, then if there's another level,
which is then the people have to be self-enforcing and you see that in social media all the time
where someone says this, the other person jumps in.
You think, but isn't social media a good example of this?
Like, so you think ultimately without centralized control, you can have stability?
Like, what about the mob outrage and the mob rule?
The power of the mobs that emerge.
Power of the mob is a very serious concern.
Gustav Le Bon wrote a book in the 1890s called The Crowd, and this was one of the most important books
I've written because it influenced both Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin, and they all talked about it.
And he made the point that under crowd psychology, human lynching is another example of this.
None of those individuals or very few would ever dream of doing these acts.
But when they're all together and you lose that sense of self, you become the ant,
and you lose that sense of individually, you're capable of doing things that like in another context,
you'd be like, I should kill myself, I'm a monster.
So you're worried about that, but like, isn't the mob, doesn't the mob have more power under anarchy?
No, the mob has much less power on anarchy because under anarchism, every individual is fully empowered.
You wouldn't have gun restrictions. You would have people creating communities based on shared values.
They'd be much more collegial, they'd be much more kind, as opposed to when you're forcing people
to be together in a polity, when they don't have things in common, that is like having a bad roommate.
If you're forced to liquid jails, if you're forced to be in locked in a room with someone,
even if you at first like them, after a while, you're going to start to hate them and that leads to very nefarious consequences.
So as an anarchist, what are you doing in a society like this?
Right. I think I'm doing okay.
I mean, there's an election coming up.
As you talk, You're Welcome is one of the 15 shows that you host.
It's down to one.
Okay, it's down to one.
But I'm a big fan. You talk about libertarianism a little bit.
I mean, is there some practical political direction like in terms of we as a society should go?
I don't mean we as a nation. I mean, we as a collective of people should go to make a better world from an anarchist point of view.
Sure. I think politics is the enemy.
I need to find politics.
So anything that lessens its sway on people, anything that delegitimizes it is good.
I read an article a few years ago about how wonderful it is that Trump is regarded as such a buffoon,
because it's very, very useful to have a commander in chief who's regarded as a clown,
because it's going to take a lot to get him to convince your kids to go overseas and start killing people and making widows and orphans,
as well as those kids coming home in caskets, whereas if someone is regarded with prestige and they're like,
oh, we need to send your kid overseas.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this guy's great.
So that is a very healthy thing where people are skeptical of the state.
But there's a lot of people that regard him as one of the greatest leaders we've ever had.
Dinesh D'Souza, he's another Lincoln.
When you talk shit about Trump or talk shit about Biden,
I'm trying to find a line to walk where they don't immediately put you into this person's Trump derangement syndrome
or they have the alternative to that.
I'm more than happy when people are preemptively dismissing me,
because they don't have to waste time engaging with them, because those people we have no use to me.
When I was on Tim Pool recently, Tim Pool's show, Tim Pool's known for his little hat,
I got a propeller beanie motorized and it was just spinning the whole two hours, 1950s thing.
The point being, I wore it because there's lots of people who would say,
I can't take seriously someone who wears a hat like that.
And my point being, if you are the kind of person who takes your cues based on someone's wardrobe,
as opposed to the content of your ideas, you're of no use to me as an ally.
More than happy, you preemptively abort rather than waste our breath trying to engage.
This is the deep, this is a very, very deep thing that you and I disagree on,
which is, this goes through the trolling versus the love,
is I believe that person instinctually dismisses you on the very basic surface level.
Yes.
But deep down, there's a wealth of a human being
that seeks the connection, to seeks to understand deeply,
to connect with other humans that we should speak to.
Yeah, you and I completely disagree.
So you're saying...
I'm saying there's no mind there, literally.
Okay, so I naturally think the majority of people
have the capacity to be thoughtful, intelligent,
and learn about ideas,
ideas that they instinctually based on their own current inner circle disagree with
and learn to understand, to empathize with the other.
And in the current climate, there's a divisiveness that discourages that.
And that's where I see the value of love, of encouraging people to strip away
that surface instinctual response based on the thing they've been taught,
based on the things they listen to, to actually think deeply.
Have you ever had, gone to CVS or doing read,
and your bill, how much you owe them is $6,
and you give them a $10 bill in a single and watch the look on their face?
You watch them void their bowels and panic
because you've given them $11 on a $6 bill?
This is not a mind capable or interested in thoughts and ideas and learning.
No, you're talking about the first moment where there's an opportunity, you think.
They are desperate to avoid it.
No, they're just...
And incapable of it.
They have the same exact experience as I have every single day
when I know it's time for me to go on a run of 5 miles or 6 miles or 10 miles.
I'm desperate to avoid it, and at the same time,
I know I have the capacity to do it,
and I'm deeply fulfilled when I do overcome that challenge.
You are one of the great minds of our generation.
You are telling me that any of these people can do anything close to the work you do?
Not in artificial intelligence,
but in the ability to be compassionate towards other people's ideas.
Understand them enough to be able...
Passion requires a certain baseline of intelligence
because you have to perceive other people as being different but of value.
That's a sophisticated mindset.
I think most people are capable of it. You don't think so.
No, and nor are they interested in it.
But in that kind of...
If you don't believe they're capable of it,
how can anarchy be stable?
If you have a farm, there's one farmer and 50 cows.
It's very stable.
You're not asking the cows where to farm things.
Yeah, but the cows aren't intelligent enough to do damage.
Cows certainly could do a lot of damage.
They could trample things. They could attack you.
How much do they weigh? 4,000 pounds?
Can you connect the analogy then?
Sure, you can't expect...
Saying a cow is a cow isn't a slur.
It's not saying you hate cows.
The example I always use with good reason is dogs.
I always say to study how human beings operate.
Watch Caesar Milan because human beings and dogs have co-evolved.
Our minds have both evolved and parallel tracks to communicate with each other.
Dogs can be vicious.
Dogs, for the most part, are great.
Wonderful.
But you can't expect the dog to understand certain concepts.
Most people are saying,
if you're a dog person like I am,
this is actually a huge compliment.
Most dogs are better than most people.
But to get the idea that this is something that is basically your peer
is nonsensical.
Now, of course, this sounds arrogant and elitist and so on and so forth.
I'm perfectly happy with that.
But it is very hard to persuade me or anyone
that if you walk, George Carlin has that joke,
think how smart the average person is,
then realize 50% of people are dumber than that.
If you walk around and see who's out there,
these people are very kind.
They are of value.
They deserve to be treated with respect.
They deserve to be secure in their person.
They deserve to feel safe and to have love.
But the expectation that they should have any sort of semblance of power
over me or my life is as nonsensical
as asking Lassie to be my accountant.
But that goes to power, not to the ability,
the capacity to be empathetic, compassionate, intelligent.
If I were to try to prove you wrong.
That's a good question.
What would you be impressed by about society?
How would I show it to you?
That's a good question.
How would you show it to me?
Because I think something has to be falsifiable
to make a claim, right?
So what would it...
Because we both made claims that are a kind of
our own interpretation based on our interaction.
When I open Twitter, everyone seems to say...
Why do you only follow one person?
Who do you follow?
Who's the one person you follow?
Stoic Emperor.
I follow a lot of people.
I have a script that...
I have a robot.
I have an entire interface.
I think Twitter is really...
This is real love.
It's not ironic love.
I love watching it.
And I'm sure you do too.
I love watching a quality of mind at work.
Because when someone has a quality of mind,
they're often not self-aware.
I catch this on myself of how it operates.
And then when other people see it,
they're like, oh my God, this is so beautiful.
Because there's such an innocence to it.
Yeah.
But like when I open Twitter, I'm energized.
There's a lot of love on Twitter.
People say like...
I love Twitter.
I agree.
You don't think I have a lot of love on Twitter?
My fans pay my rent.
I mean, I don't know your experience of Twitter.
But when I look at your...
Which is a fundamentally different thing.
I'm saying my experience from the...
So maybe you can tell me what your experience is like as a human.
So when I observe your Twitter, I think...
I wouldn't call it love.
I would call it fun.
Yes.
And because of that, that's a different kind of...
Love emerges from that.
Because people kind of learn that we're having...
This is like game night.
Yes.
We can talk shit a little bit.
Yes.
And you can even like pull in...
You can make fun of people.
You can have the crazy uncle come over
that is a huge Trump supporter or somebody who hates Trump.
And you can have a little fun.
Again, it's a different kind of thing.
I wouldn't be able to be the...
You're the host of game night?
Yes, yes.
So I wouldn't be able to host that kind of game night?
I imagine you program with your robots.
And you're asking what is fun and it just starts sparking.
Exactly.
What is fun.
So the robots in my life that survive are the ones that don't...
That like survive that whole programming process.
So they're kind of like...
They're kind of like the idiot from just to ask you.
They're very like simple minded robots.
Fun is moving a can from one table to another.
That's game night for our kin.
You know what one of my quotes is and I think about this every day
and I mean it with every fiber of my being.
We're born knowing that life is a magical adventure
and it takes them years to train us to think otherwise.
And I think that Willy Wonka approach, it's a very Camu approach.
It's something I believe with every fiber of my being.
I try to spread that as much as possible.
I think it is very sad.
I'm not being sarcastic.
It comes off as condescending.
I mean it at face value.
It's very sad how many people are not receptive to that.
And I think a lot of those function how they were raised.
And I could have very easily with my upbringing
have not maintained that perspective.
And there's a lot of...
I have a lot of friends in recovery like AA.
And they have an expression, not my circus, not my monkeys, right?
That you can't really take on other people's problems on your own.
At a certain point they have to do the work themselves
because you can only do so much externally.
And there are a lot of very damaged people out there.
And they're damaged people who revel in being damaged.
And they are damaged people who desperately,
desperately, desperately want to be well,
who desperately want to be happy, who desperately want to find joy.
So if I can be the one, and as arrogant as this sounds,
I'll own it, who does give them that fun.
And to tell them it doesn't have to be like you thought.
Like it could be, it's going to hurt.
It's going to suck.
But it's still a magical adventure and you're going to be okay
because you've been through worse.
Like that, if that could be my message,
I would own it all day long.
And so what does adventure look like for you?
Because I mean it actually boils down to, I still disagree with you.
I think trolling can be and very often is destructive for society.
Yes, I want to destroy society.
That is the goal.
I want to help many people.
Unironically, okay.
Unironically, yes.
What do I do with that?
Okay, so.
Whatever you want.
Do with that will, is the Hall of the Law.
Like I just want, so you're hosting Game Night
and I just want to play Monopoly.
I want to play, what's the risk?
Okay, I want to play these games and you're saying.
Those are aggressive games.
Yeah, I was trying to think of a funnier game,
but they're all kind of aggressive.
Battleship.
Axis and allies.
You know, fun stuff.
But like, so that's an adventure,
but you're saying that we want to destroy everything,
even like the rules of those games are not like.
You voluntarily agree to those rules.
The point is if someone comes in who's not,
who no one invited to Game Night and are telling you,
no, when you play Monopoly,
you have to get money when you land in free parking
or you don't.
It's like, who are you?
Yeah.
We're having our own fun and you smell.
I don't know, but there's an aggressive.
There's an aggression.
Let me, let me speak to that,
which I think you're picking up on.
I had a friend named Martha, Marcia, excuse me.
She ran something called cuddle parties,
which people laughed at about a lot back in the day.
And the premise of the cuddle parties,
everyone got together and cuddled, right?
And it's like, ah, ha, ha.
Then you stop to think about and you realize
physical context is extremely important
and a lot of people don't have it.
And if this is a mechanism of people getting that,
it actually is going to have profound
positive psychological consequences.
So after she explained it,
I'm like, okay, we laughed at this
because it's weird and now that I think about it,
this is wonderful.
And I asked her about like,
like the tough question,
I go, what if guys get turned on
and on their website,
it's even has a rule like do not fear the erection, right?
Because it's going to be a natural consequence
of physical proximity.
And the point she goes, she said this,
I think about this all the time.
People will take as much space as you let them.
It is incumbent on each of us to set our own boundaries.
We all have to learn when to say no,
you're making me uncomfortable.
If someone doesn't respect your right
to have your boundary to be uncomfortable,
this person is not your friend.
Now they can say, I don't understand.
Like, why is this okay?
Why is that not?
Let me know you better.
So I'm respectful of you.
But if they roll their eyes and they're like,
get over, I'm going to do what I want,
I'm going to do what I want.
This person is not interested in knowing
using human being.
That is the aggression.
You have to draw those lines.
I mean, but that's a very positive way
of phrasing that aggression.
I'm a very positive person.
But the trolling, there's a destructive thing to it.
Yes.
That hurts others.
Bad people.
Yes.
But it's not bad people.
I only troll as a reaction or towards those in power.
Okay.
Maybe let's talk about trolling a little bit,
because trolling when it can, maybe you can correct me,
but I've seen it become a game for people
that's enjoyable in itself.
I disagree with that.
That's not a good thing.
If you are there just to hurt innocent people,
you are a horrible human being.
But doesn't trolling too easily become that?
I don't know about easily.
Let me give you an example of where trolling came from.
The original troll was Andy Kaufman.
He was on the show Taxi.
He was a performance artist, not a standard comedian.
And this is a quintessential example of trolling.
He had a character where he was basically like a lounge singer.
He had these glasses on and just a terrible singer and so on and so forth.
And he denied it was him.
And he came out and I'm blanking on the guy's name.
I can't believe it.
Tony Clifton.
He came out in his audience and he goes,
you know, my wife died a few years ago.
Every time I look at my daughter Sarah's eyes,
I can see my wife Sarah come out here.
Let's do a duet.
And Sarah was like 11 sits on his lap.
They start singing duet.
Her voice cracks.
He smacks her across the face.
What the hell are you doing?
You're making ass on me in front of these people.
She starts crying.
The audience is booing.
And he goes, don't boo her.
You're just going to make her cry more.
Now it ends.
This wasn't his daughter.
It wasn't even child.
It was an actress.
This was all set up.
He's exploiting their love of children
in order to force them to be performers.
That is trolling.
No one is actually getting hurt.
It's a humorous though twisted exchange.
If you go online looking for weak people
and you are there to denigrate them
just for them being weak or in some way inferior to you.
That is the wrong approach.
I am best on the counter punch.
A lot of times people come to me
and they'll be like, I hope you die.
You're ugly.
You're disgusting.
And there's this great quote from Billy Idol,
which I'm going to mangle.
He's something effective.
I love it when people are rude to me.
Then I can stop pretending to be nice.
Then you start fights.
Now it's a chance for me to finish it
and make an example of this person.
But that's very, very different from
I'm going to go around and humiliate people
for the sake of doing it in my view.
And I can see how one would lead to the other.
Yeah.
And that's my fundamental concern with it.
So my dream is to put, use technology,
create platforms that increase the amount of love in the world.
And to me trolling is doing the opposite.
So like Andy Kaufman is brilliant.
So I love, obviously, it sounds like I'm a robot saying,
I love humor.
Okay.
Humor is good.
1-1-1-0-1-1-1-1.
But like it's, I just see like 4chan.
I see that you can often see that humor quickly turned.
Yeah.
Because what happens is a lot of low status people,
this is their one mechanism through sadism to feel empowered.
And then they can hide behind, well, I'm just joking.
Yeah.
Like there's this dark thing.
Yeah.
That's not acceptable.
There's a dark LOL that people do,
like they'll say like the shittiest thing.
Right.
And then do LOL after.
Like as if, I don't even know like what is happening in the dark mind of yours.
Because they are feeling powerless in their lives.
Right.
And they see someone who they perceive as higher status or more powerful than them
or even not appear.
And they, through their words, cause a reaction in this person.
So they feel like they are in a very literal sense making a difference on Earth
and they matter in a very dark way.
It's disturbing.
This is not, I mean, it's unfortunate that that term trolling is used for that
as opposed to what Andy Kaufman does as opposed to what I do.
It really is a sinister thing.
And it's something I'm not at all a fan of.
How do we fight that?
So like a neighboring concept of that is conspiracy theories, which is...
I don't think they're neighboring at all.
Let me give a naive perspective.
Maybe you can educate me on this.
From my perspective, conspiracy theories are these constructs of ideas that go deeper
and deeper and deeper into creating worlds where there's powerful pedophiles controlling
things like these very sophisticated models of the world that in part might be true,
but in large part I would say are figments of imagination that become really useful constructs
and self-enforcing for then feeding, like empowering the trolls to attack the powerful,
the conventionally powerful.
I don't think that that's a function of conspiracy theories.
Now, let's talk about conspiracy theories because one of my quotes is you take one red pill,
not the whole bottle.
This concept that everything in life is at the function of a small cadre of individuals
would be, for many people, reassuring.
Because as bad as it looks, you know they, whoever they are, it's usually the Jews,
aren't going to let it get that bad that they will pull back.
Or the black pill is that they aren't intentionally trying to destroy everything,
and there's nothing we can do when we're doomed.
And there's an amazing book by Arthur Herman called The Idea of Declined Western History.
It's one of my top 10 books where he goes through every 20 years how there's a different population
that say, it's the end of the world, here's the proof.
And very often the proof is something that is kind of self-fulfilling where it's not falsifiable.
And we both have to think of ways to falsify our claims from earlier.
So it is a big danger.
It's a big danger online, because very quickly if someone who you thought was good,
but now is bad on one aspect, well they're controlled opposition.
Or they've been taken over, or they've been kind of appropriated by the bad people,
whoever those bad people would be.
I don't know that I have a good answer for this.
I don't think it's as pervasive as people think.
The number of people who believe conspiracy there?
Right. And also conspiracy theory is a term used to dismiss ideas that have some currency.
The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy.
The founding fathers got together secretly under the word of secrecy in Philadelphia,
said we're throwing out the Arctic Confederation, we're making a new government, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Luther Martin left, and he told everyone this is a conspiracy,
and they're like, yeah, whatever, Luther Martin.
And Jeffrey Epstein was a conspiracy, Harvey Weinstein was a conspiracy,
Bill Cosby was a conspiracy, they all knew, they didn't care.
Communist infiltration in America, there's a great book by Eugene Lyons called The Red Decade.
They all knew, every atrocity that was done under Stalinism was excused in the West.
And if you didn't believe it, oh, you've got this crazy anti-Russia conspiracy.
So it's a term that is weaponized in a negative sense,
but that does not at all imply that it does not have very negative real life consequences,
because it's kind of a cult of one, right?
I'm at home on my computer, I bay into this ideology.
Anyone who doesn't agree with me, they are blind, they're oblivious, mom and dad, my friends,
you don't get it.
We were warned about people like you, and I think there's a very heavy correlation,
and I'm not a psychiatrist, of course, between that and certain types of mild mental illness,
like, you know, some kind of paranoid schizophrenia and things like that,
because after a certain point, if everything is a function of this conspiracy,
there's no randomness or beauty in life.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can say anything interesting about it
in the way of advice of how to take a step into conspiracy theory world
without completely going, like diving deep, because it seems like that's what happens.
People can't look at Jeffrey Epstein.
I can tell you what the device that has started.
It's very interesting, rigorously, without going, because you can look at Jeffrey Epstein
and say there's a deeper thing.
You can always go deeper.
Right.
It's like Jeffrey Epstein was just a tool of the lizard people, and the lizard people are the tool.
Well, they say Satanists.
Satanists.
In this case.
And somehow recently, very popular spedophiles somehow always involved.
I'm not understanding any of that.
Legitimately, I say this both humorously and seriously, I need to look into it.
And I guess the bigger question I'm asking, how does a serious human being,
somebody with a position at a respectable university,
look at a conspiracy theory and look into it?
When I look at somebody like Jeffrey Epstein who had a role at MIT.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And I think I'm not happy personally.
I wasn't there when Jeffrey Epstein was there.
I'm not happy with the behavior of people now about Jeffrey Epstein, about the bureaucracy
and the everybody's trying to keep quiet, hoping it blows over without really looking into any,
like looking in a deep philosophical way of like, how do we let this human being be among us?
Can I give you a better example?
Sure.
That is kind of conspiratorial.
The Speaker of the House, the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House,
Dennis Hasturt was a pedophile.
He went to jail.
The Democrats don't throw this in the Republicans' faces every five minutes.
Not even Democratic activists.
I find that very, very odd and not what I would predict.
Now, I'm not saying there's some kind of conspiracy,
but when it comes to things like sexual predation,
which is something that I'm very, very concerned about.
I'm an uncle now.
My sister just had her second kid recently.
He's adorable.
It's something that I don't understand.
It feels as if there's a lot of people who want this to all go away.
Now, I think it's also because we don't have the vocabulary and framework to discuss it,
because when you start talking about things like children and these kind of issues,
we want to believe it's all crap because it's for those of us who aren't in this kind of mindset,
that the idea that this happens to kids and happens frequently is something so horrible
that it's just like, I don't even want to hear it,
and that does these children and adult survivors an enormous disservice.
So I don't know that I have any particular insight on this.
But see, like, how do you...
I mean, the Catholic Church, again, there's all these topics that...
Public school teachers are far more proportionately
predators of children than the Catholic Church.
I mean, I don't know what...
You're right, you're right.
I've been, you know, reading a lot about Stalin and Hitler.
Somehow it's more comforting to be able to...
Yeah, because it's there and then.
And then the atrocities that are happening now, it's a little bit more difficult because...
There was a New York Times article that started to interrupt you
where they were had people tracking down child pornography.
And I think the article said they didn't have enough people
just to cover the videotapes of infants being raped.
And we can even wrap our heads around, like, reading Lolita.
Like, okay, she's 14, 12, okay, it's still a female.
An infant, it's something that...
Again, like with the Stalin example,
we sat down here for 100 years, we would never think it's something like this.
Think of it in a sexual context, it makes no sense.
Yeah.
So, and the fact that this is international.
Okay, we eliminated completely in America.
Well, then they're gonna go find...
There's infants all over the world.
There's video cameras all over the world.
So then it has to become a conspiracy
because someone has to film it.
I'm filming it.
You're buying it.
You're kid.
It is literally a conspiratorial,
not in the sense of like a mafia conspiracy
or some government Illuminati,
but there is our networks designed to produce this product.
See, but like what I'm trying to do now,
I mean, part of the...
One of the nice things with like a podcast
and other things I'm involved with is
removing myself from having any kind of boss
so I can do whatever that helps.
Yes, it's...
Oh, it's so, it's so wonderful.
That had just happened to me.
It's the most wonderful thing ever.
So I could do...
I can actually in moderation
consider like look into stuff.
Careful though.
I was gonna write a book about this
and people pointed out,
you sure want to do this research?
Because if you start Googling around
for this kind of stuff,
it's on your computer.
Oh, in that sense.
Yeah.
I'm more concerned about, you know,
it's the Nietzsche thing looking into the abyss.
Like you want to be very...
Yeah.
I believe I can do this kind of thing
in moderation without slipping into the depths.
Oh, yes.
Of course.
I think that's intelligence.
That's like I recently quote unquote looked
into like the UFO community,
the extraterrestrial, whatever community.
I think it always frustrated me
that the scientific community like rolled their eyes
at all the UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff.
Even though there could be fascinating,
beautiful, physical fun,
like first of all, there could legit...
Like ball lightning.
The ball lightning, right?
That's at the very basic level is a fascinating thing.
And also it could be something like,
I mean, I don't know,
but it could be something interesting,
like worth looking into.
My grandfather was an air traffic controller
back in the Soviet Union.
And he said,
we saw this stuff all the time.
These are planes that were not moving
or whatever things that were not moving
according to anything we knew about.
So it's absolutely real.
He's not some jerk with an iPhone in his backyard.
This is a military professional
who understood technology,
who knew where the secret bases were.
So if he's telling me,
it doesn't mean it's Martians,
but he's telling me there's something there.
And there are many examples of these like military people.
These aren't some laymen who sees a storm.
These are legit people.
Yeah.
And so you can dismiss,
when you're talking about professionals
who are around aircraft all the time,
who are familiar with aircraft at the highest levels,
and they're seeing things that they can't explain,
they're clearly not stupid
and they're clearly not uninformed.
So there's different ways to dismiss ideas.
For example,
you were saying that trolling is a good mechanism
against that,
but I'm not dismissing it by like rolling my eyes.
I'm considering legitimately
that you're way smarter than me
and you understand the world better than me.
I allow myself to consider that possibility
and thinking about it.
Maybe that's true.
I'm seriously considering it.
That's what I feel the way people should approach
intelligent people, serious quote-unquote people,
scientists should approach conspiracy theories,
like look at it carefully.
First of all,
is it possible that the earth is flat?
It's not trivial to show that the earth is not flat.
It's a very good exercise.
You should go through it.
Yes.
But once you go through it,
you realize that based on a lot of data
and a lot of evidence,
and there's a lot of different experiments,
you can do yourself, actually,
to show that the earth is not flat.
Okay.
The same kind of process can be taken
for a lot of different conspiracy theories,
and it's helpful.
And without slipping into the depths of lizard people
running everything,
that's where I've now listened to two episodes
of Alex Jones' show,
because he goes crazy deep
into different kind of worldviews
that I was not familiar with.
Right.
And I don't know what to make of it.
I mean, the reason I've been listening to it
is because there's been a lot of discussions
about platforming of different people.
Yeah.
And I've been thinking about what censorship mean.
I've been thinking about whether,
because Joe Rogan said he's going to have Alex on again.
And then I enjoyed it as a fan,
just the entertainment of it.
But then I actually listened to Alex,
and I was thinking,
is this human being dangerous for the world?
Like, is the ideas he's saying dangerous for the world?
I'm more concerned with the Russian conspiracy
that we had for three years.
The claim that our election was not legitimate
and that everyone in the Trump White House is a stooge of Putin.
And the people who said this had no consequences for this.
Alex Jones doesn't have the respect that they do.
These are both areas of concern for me.
But he might, if there's,
if he's given more platforms.
So like the people who've,
and I'd be curious to,
I'm also a little bit,
I don't know what to think about the idea
that Russians hack the election.
It seems too easily accepted in the mainstream media
Hillary Clinton said that how they did it
was they had ads on the dark web.
Now you and I both know what the dark web is.
So the possibility of ads in the dark web
having an influence,
a proportional influence on the election is literally zero.
Perhaps I should look into it more carefully,
but I've found very little good data
on exactly what did the Russians do to hack elections.
Like technically speaking,
what are we talking about here?
Like as opposed to these kind of weird,
like the best thing there's a couple of books
and like reporting on like farms,
like a troll farms, but let's see the data.
Like how many exactly,
what are we talking about?
Like what were they doing?
Relate, not just like some anecdotal discussions of,
but like relative to the bigger,
the size of Facebook.
Like if there's a few people, several hundreds say,
posting different political things on Facebook,
relative to the full size of Facebook,
let's look at the full size.
Right, you're thinking like a scientist.
The actual impact.
Because it's fascinating the social dynamics
of viral information, of videos,
when Donald Trump retweets something,
I think that's understudied the effect of that.
Like he retweeted a clip with Joe Rogan and Mike Tyson,
where Mike Tyson says that he finds fighting orgasmic.
I don't understand that,
but they'd be fascinating to think like,
what is the ripple effect on the social dynamic
of our society from retweeting a clip about Mike Tyson?
What's your favorite Trump tweet?
I tuned them out a long time ago, unfortunately.
I have, this goes to the,
you and I have a different relation with Donald Trump.
You appreciate the art form of trolling.
It's non-sexual.
Non-sexual, yeah.
So I tend to prefer Bill Clinton,
he's more my type, no I'm just kidding.
You don't like that consent stuff?
No, you appreciate the art form of trolling
and Donald Trump is a master,
he's the Da Vinci of trolling.
So I tend to think that trolling
is ultimately destructive for society
and then Donald Trump takes nothing seriously.
He's playing a game, he's making a game out of everything.
He takes a lot of things seriously.
I think he's very committed to international peace.
Sorry, I shouldn't speak so strongly.
I think he takes actually, yes, a lot of things seriously.
I meant on Twitter and the game of politics,
he only takes irreverently.
Yeah, and I appreciate it.
I just would like to focus on genuine real expressions
of humanity, especially positive and love.
This is my favorite tweet, my fans got it laser etched
and put in a block of loose light for me
and he said, every time I speak of the losers and haters,
I do so with great affection.
They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up.
That's an actual Trump tweet, it's my favorite one.
That's kind of nice.
That's love.
That's love.
That's kind of nice.
Great affection.
I mean, exclamation point, even.
I broke legs.
What is love?
Yeah, the sparks are flying.
I have to kind of analyze that from a literary perspective,
but it seems like there's love in there.
It's a little bit lighthearted.
Because he's saying even when I'm going after them,
don't take it so seriously.
That's nice.
It is nice.
Acknowledging the game of it, that's nice.
He's not always nice.
At least he's very, very vicious.
Very vicious.
He's done things that I can tell you about
that I'm like, this is a bad person.
What do you think about one of the...
Okay, listen, I'm not, for people listening,
I do not have Trump derangement syndrome.
I see, I try to look for the good and the bad in everybody.
One thing, perhaps it's irrational,
but perhaps because I've been reading history,
the one triggering thing for me is the delaying of elections.
I believe in elections,
and this is the part that you probably disagree with.
But I believe in the value of people voting,
and I just see too many dictators.
The place where they finally, the big switch happens.
When you question the legitimacy of elections...
Who's been questioning the legitimacy of elections
for the last three years?
I've only heard Donald Trump do it last year,
but the last three years, you're saying somebody else?
You don't think not my president illegitimate.
We're not going to normalize him as president.
Russia hacked this election.
impeached you, not a real president.
You don't think that's questioning legitimacy of 2016?
No, it's a good...
I haven't been paying attention enough,
but I would imagine that argument has been...
I haven't actually heard too many people,
but I imagine that's been a popular thing to say.
Oh, very much so, yeah.
Okay, but nevertheless, that's not a statement
that gained power enough to say
that Barack Obama will keep being president,
or Hillary Clinton should be president.
Newsweek had that article,
how Hillary Clinton could still be president.
Newsweek.
No, but she's not.
That's what I'm saying.
My worry isn't saying that the election was illegitimate
and people whining and mass scale,
and then Fox News or CNN reporting for years
or books being written for years.
My worry is legitimately martial law.
So, I think that's the reason why
Hillary Clinton stays president.
So, here's the issue.
There's a big shift that happens in a dictatorship.
I did a book on North Korea.
I'm not someone who thinks
dictatorship should be taken lightly.
I'm not someone who thinks it can't happen here.
I think a lot of times people are desperate for dictatorship.
So, I'm with you, and I think this is something...
If you're going to hand wave it away,
everyone else hand-waved it away.
Hitler's never going to be chancellor.
He's a lunatic.
He's a joke.
He's a joke.
He's a liar from Mein Kampf in English
because this is some guy from some random
minor party in Germany spouting nonsense.
Who's going to read this crap?
So, I completely agree with you in that regard.
But you don't think we're there.
My point is, Donald Trump this year
had every pathway open to him to declare martial law.
The cities were being burned down.
He could have very easily sent in the tanks.
And people would have been applauding him from his side.
You think he feels so good right now.
But am I wrong, though?
No, I...
What he did, he tweeted out to Mayor Wheeler of Portland.
He said,
Call me.
We will solve this in minutes.
But you have to call.
And he sat in his hands.
And they said,
Oh, it's his fault.
The city is burning down.
He's not doing anything.
And he goes,
I'm not doing anything until you ask me to do it.
So, I think that is...
Even if you think he's an aspiring dictator,
that is at least a sign that there is some restraint
on his aspirations.
Can I just take that in as a beautiful,
like, moment of hope?
So, I'm going to remember this moment.
That's beautiful as Ted Cruz.
Beautiful Ted.
I'm going to remember this.
I mean, I should say that perhaps I'm irrationally...
This is the one moment where I feel myself
being a little unhealthy.
I don't think you're being irrational.
I think there's a symmetry.
Because it's kind of like,
okay, either if I leave the house,
it's like Russian roulette.
Yeah, maybe it's like a one in six shot.
I'm pulling the trigger.
I'm killing myself.
But that's one in six.
That's not...
And the consequences are so dire
that a little paranoia would go a long way.
There's something that...
If you can't go back.
Yeah.
It's an asymmetry, yeah.
The thing is,
the thing that makes Donald Trump new to me,
and again, I'm a little naive in these things,
but he surprised me in how many ways
he just didn't play by the rules.
Yeah.
And he's made me a little aunt in this aunt colony
think like, well, do you have to play by the rules at all?
Right.
Like, why are we having elections?
Why did you say, like, it's coronavirus time.
Like, it's not healthy to have elections.
Like, we shouldn't be...
Like, I could...
If I put my dictator hat on...
Nancy Pelosi said that Joe Biden shouldn't debate.
Yeah.
Did she?
Yes.
She says she shouldn't dignify Trump with a debate.
He's the president.
He could be the worst president on earth,
evil, despicable monster.
I'll take that as an argument.
So she's playing politics, but she's...
I don't think that's playing politics.
I think when...
There's a certain point when things get...
When you start attacking institutions
for the emergencies at the moment
and acting arbitrarily,
that is when things are the slippery slope.
Yeah.
So you're saying debates is one of the institutions.
Like, that's one of the traditions to have the debates.
I think the debates are extremely important.
Now, I don't think that someone's a good debater
is going to make a good president.
I mean, that's a big problem.
But you're just saying this is attacking
just yet another tradition, yet another...
You know, like, how if you're dating,
if you're married to someone
and someone throws out the word divorce,
you can't unring that bell, you threw it out there.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't throw things out like that
unless you really are ready to go down this road.
And I think that is...
There's nothing in the Constitution about debates.
We've only had them since 1980.
But still, I think they are extremely important.
It's also a great chance for Joe Biden
to tell him to his face,
you're full of crap.
Here's what you did, here's what you did,
here's what you did.
So fascinating that you're both...
You acknowledge that
and you also see the value
of tearing down the entire thing.
You're both worried about no debates
or at least in your voice, in your tone.
There's a great quote by Chesterton.
I'm not a fan of him at all.
But he says,
before you tear down a fence,
make sure you know why they put it up first.
So I am for tearing it all down,
but there's something called a controlled demolition,
like building seven.
Or there's...
Allegedly.
We knew we were in Tel Aviv.
And...
Hashtag building seven.
We knew we were in Tel Aviv.
Wow, you're faster than me.
You're operating at a different level.
I need to upgrade my operating system.
I told you Windows 95.
Yeah.
Building seven.
If you're gonna...
It's like Indiana Jones, right?
If you're gonna tear,
pull something away,
make sure you have something in place first,
as opposed to just breaking it
and then just,
especially in politics,
because it escalates.
And when things escalate
without any kind of response,
it could go in a very bad...
That's when the polling comes in.
So, what's your prediction about
the Biden-Trump debates?
Again, I just have this weird...
Maybe we'll return to it,
maybe not in this,
how do we put more love into the world?
And like one of the things
that worries me about the debates
is it'll be the world's greatest troll
against the gramp on the porch.
Who crap his pants.
Yeah.
And it will not put more love
into the world.
It will create more mockery.
Joe Biden did a great job
against Paul Ryan in 2012.
Paul Ryan was no lightweight.
No one thought he was a lightweight.
Joe Biden handed Sarah Payle
and her ass in 2008,
which isn't as easy to do as you think
because she's a female,
so you're gonna come off as bullying.
That's something you have to worry about.
So, the guy isn't...
I think he is in the stages
of like cognitive decline.
So, I think it's going to be interesting.
I want it to be like Mike Tyson
beating up a child
because it'll be a source of amusement to me.
But I don't know how it's gonna go.
Is it possible that Joe Biden
will be the Mike Tyson?
Yes, because in his last debate with Bernie,
he was perfectly fine.
And again, the guy was a senator for decades.
And I don't think anyone,
if you looked at Joe Biden in 2010,
would have thought this guy is gonna be,
have his ass handed him a debate.
You wouldn't think that at all.
So, I don't know who we're going to see.
Plus, he's got a lot of room to attack Trump.
So, I'm sure he's gonna come strapped and ready
and he's gonna have his talking points
and watch Trump dance,
try to tap dance around him.
And if he's in a position,
I don't know what the rules of the debate are,
to actually nail him to the wall,
it might actually, I'm sure he's gonna have a lot of lines too.
The problem is Trump is the master counterpuncher.
So, when Hillary had her line,
she's like, well, it's a good thing
that Donald Trump isn't in charge of our legal system.
He's like, yeah, you'd be in jail.
It's like, oh, lady, you set him up.
It's painful to watch those debates.
I mean, there's something,
I think it's actually analogous.
Come to think of it,
your conversation with me right now,
that's a sleepy Joe.
I'm playing the role of sleepy Joe.
I actually connect to Joe because there's-
I'm also incontinent.
There's like these weird pauses that he does.
Yes, he does.
I do the same thing.
And I know there's a shit out of me
that like, in mid-sentence,
I'll start saying a different thing
and take a tangent.
I'm not as slow and drunk as I sound.
Always.
I swear I'm more intelligent underneath that-
I'm slower but less drunk.
Exactly.
But the result, one of those is true,
but not both, yeah.
And Trump, just like you are a master counterpuncher,
so it's gonna be messy.
Here's the other thing in all seriousness.
Chris Wallace is the moderator.
Chris Wallace has interviewed Trump several times
and he was a tough, tough questioner.
So I don't think he's gonna come in there
with softball questions.
I think he's really going to try to nail Trump down,
which is tough to do.
I like him a lot.
Yeah.
And he's like, Mr. President, sir, that's not accurate,
blah, blah, blah.
He's done it.
And Trump gets very frustrated
because he doesn't just let him say whatever he wants
and he hits him with the follow-up.
I guess he's on Fox News
and I listened to his Sunday program
every once in a while.
He gives me hope that there's something in the voice
that he's not bought.
There's no question he's gonna take this seriously,
which I think is the best you could hope for in a moderator.
It feels like there's people that might actually
take the mainstream media into a place
that's going to be better in the future
and we need people like him.
You mean like Robespierre?
What do you mean?
Like taking the mainstream media to a better future,
like bring out the guillotines.
Okay, so you put your anarchist hat back on.
I don't think Robespierre is much of an anarchist,
but yeah, I get what you're saying.
You don't think there should be a centralized place for news?
There isn't now.
Well, that's what mainstream media is supposed to represent
and it's broken.
Well, it's not whatever, what would you call that?
A place where people traditionally said
was the legitimate source of truth.
That's what the media was supposed to represent, no?
That's their big branding accomplishment.
That was never true?
Yeah, because here's what happens.
We remember the Spanish-American war,
remember the main, we have to take Cuba,
yellow journalism, we're only Randolph Hearst, right?
Then record scratch and then we were all objective.
Like when did this transition happen according to people?
When you were saying that the Kaiser is the worst human being on Earth,
when you were downplaying Stalin
and downplaying Hitler's atrocities,
when you were saying we had to be in Vietnam,
at what point, WMDs, when did it change?
It never changed.
You just are better con artists at a certain point
and now the mask is dropping.
Yeah, but don't you think there's, at its best,
investigative journalism can uncover truth
in a way that like Reddit, subreddits can't.
You know Reddit, sure, I agree, at its best, absolutely.
That's not even dispute.
But like, don't you think like fake it until you make it
is the right way to do it, meaning like the...
Make the news?
No, no.
I meant the news saying like we dream of doing,
of arriving at the truth and reporting the truth.
They don't say that.
CNN had an advertisement that said this is an apple.
We only report facts, that's a lie.
No, that's now.
And now it's clear things have changed.
They haven't changed.
You're more aware of the chicanery.
But okay, so the...
How many people died in Iraq?
Because Saddam Hussein was about to launch WMDs.
Who had consequences for this?
No one.
This isn't a minor thing.
This is lots of dead people.
Yeah.
And also, I mean, dead people is horrible,
but also the money, which has, like we said,
economic effects.
Marion Williamson, I think it was, had the...
Trump, both of them, had the great point that goes,
that's like a trillion dollars.
How many schools would that build?
How many roads would that build?
Even here, why are we building hospitals in Iraq
that we destroyed when we could build hospitals here?
It makes no sense.
It's horrifying.
So who's responsible for that?
Like who...
Alex Jones.
No, I meant for...
Well, so who's responsible for arriving at the truth of that,
of speaking to the money spent on wars in Iraq?
This is one of the great things about social media.
Twitter.
You have faith in Twitter.
Not specifically Twitter, but yeah,
social media is the whole...
Here's a great, another great example.
Before, if you were talking about police brutality
or these riots, you would have to perceive it
in the way it was framed and presented to...
Nicholas Sandman is another example.
Breonna Taylor, all these things.
Well, we don't have footage of her.
You would have to perceive in the way that it's edited
and presented to you by the corporate press.
Now, everyone has a video camera.
Everyone has their perspective.
And it's very useful when these incidents happen
where you could see the same incident from several angles
and you don't need Don Lemon or Chris Wallace
to tell me what this means.
I can see with my own eyes.
Yeah.
I've been very pleasantly surprised about the power.
See, like people, the mob again gets in the way.
They get emotional and they destroy the ability
for people to reason, but you're right,
that truth is unobstructed on social media.
Like if you're careful and patient, you can see the truth.
Like for example, data on COVID,
some of the best sources are doctors.
Like if you want to know the truth about the coronavirus
and what's happening is there's follow-up people on Twitter.
There's certain people that are just like sourcing them for me
versus the CDC and the WHO.
That's fast.
I mean, it's kind of anarchy, right?
Yes, it is.
It's not kind of.
It is anarchy.
Yes.
Well, there's some censorship and all that kind of stuff.
You have censorship under anarchy
in the sense that you're talking about.
Like people be kicked off of Twitter.
That's a drawing country.
How do you kick somebody?
Okay.
I mean, it's a...
Private company.
Private company.
Most people wouldn't say Twitter is working,
but that's probably because they take for granted how well it's working
and they're just complaining about the small part of it that's broken.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Another question about...
You feel better?
No.
By the way, I mean, I had a personal gripe with the situation about the...
Not a personal gripe, but I felt overly emotional about the possibility
that there will be some of Donald Trump messing with the election process,
but you made me feel better.
Good.
Like saying, like, if he had a bunch of opportunities to do what I would have done
if I was a dictator, I would...
The first time those rides over George Floyd,
I would instituted martial law.
Do you know what I remember very vividly is after 9-11,
and everyone was waiting for George Bush to give his speech,
and he had 98% approved rating.
And I remember very vividly because if he had said,
we're suspending the Constitution, everyone would have cheered for him.
Like, he couldn't get enough support at that time, and he didn't do it.
And I can't say anything really good about George W. Bush.
I'm not a fan of his to say the least.
So I think you and I and other people who are familiar with totalitarian regimes
to some extent from our ancestry or whatever, from research,
should always be the ones freaking out and warning.
But we should also be aware of we got a ways to go before it's Hitler.
And thankfully, there are a lot of dominoes that have to fall into place before Hitler.
It's like the game secret, Hitler.
It's a board game before Hitler becomes Hitler.
Like, it's not...
Especially in America, there's lots of things that have to happen
before you really get to that point.
I mean, FDR was for all intents and purposes a dictator.
But even then, the worst you could say, and this is not something that you should take lightly,
was interment of Japanese citizens, but they weren't murdered.
They weren't, you know, under lock and key in the sense of like in cells.
So things could have gotten a lot worse for him.
We have to... I mean, Hitler is such a horrible person to bring up because...
He's Mussolini.
Yeah, Mussolini is better because Hitler is so closely connected to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
There's all the stuff that led up to the war in the war itself.
Say that there was no Holocaust.
Hitler would probably be viewed differently.
I should. Yes, I should think so.
Well, I mean...
You think... That's a very controversial stance.
You think Hitler would be viewed differently if it wasn't for the Holocaust?
Well...
I mean...
But it's a funny thing that the...
I would say the death of...
How many?
40, 50 million. I mean, I don't know how you calculate it.
It's not seen as bad as the 6 million.
Oh, yeah, because of Mao and Stalin?
Yeah.
But it's interesting.
I'm working on it.
You're working on it?
Yeah, the next book I'm talking about.
Reminding... Well, it's good.
I'm glad a good writer is...
Because I'm almost not reminded of that.
My last book, The New Right, you know, I had to deal with some like the Nazis.
And one of the points they make is how come everyone knows about the Holocaust,
but no one knows about the Hall of the Moor.
And they're right.
We should know about this because it is a great example of both
how the Western media were depraved,
but also what human beings are capable of.
And those scars are still...
You know, many Americans think Russian and Ukraine are the same thing.
You know, they're like...
Oh, Trump's in bed with the Ukrainians.
Trump's about the Russians.
They think it's the same thing.
For us, it's complete lunacy.
But this is the kind of thing where Pol Pot is another example
where people have no clue of what has been done to their fellow man on the face of this earth.
And they should know.
How much of that do you lay at the hands of communism?
How much are you with like a Jordan Pearson
who is intricately connecting the atrocities,
like you're saying 1930s Ukraine where people were starved.
My grandmother recently passed away and she survived that as a kid, which is...
Those people, I mean, just...
They're tough.
They're tough.
Like that whole region is tough because they survived that.
And then right after...
The Nazis.
Occupation of Nazis.
Yeah.
Of Germans.
How much do you lay that at communism as an ideology versus Stalin the man?
I think, you know, Lenin was building concentration camps
while he was around in slave labor.
I don't...
I think it's clearly both.
There are certain variants of communism that were far like Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
The reason the Soviet Union fell apart.
And this is kind of...
I'm going to spoil the end of the book.
There's an amazing book called Revolution 1989.
It's like most people have a book of her read by Viktor Sebastian.
He's a Hungarian author.
And basically what happens in 1989, Poland has their elections.
And then in 1990, they kind of led in the labor people to the government.
And people start crossing borders, you know, in the Eastern Bloc.
And you had Hanukkah from Eastern Germany and Chachesko from Romania calling Gorbachev.
Because those are the two toughest ones by communist standards.
They go, they're just escaping.
We're going to lose everything.
You got to send in the tanks like you did in Hungary, like you did in Czech Republic, Czechoslovakian 68.
And Gorbachev goes, I'm not sending the tanks.
And they go, dude, if you don't send in the tanks, it's all done.
And he goes, nope, I'm not that kind of guy.
And they were right.
I mean, Chachesko was personally shot with his wife up against the wall.
Hanukkah, I forgot what happened to him, but they all self-liberated.
My friend who was born in Czechoslovakia, his mom was pregnant, you know, under communism.
And she never even imagined he'd be free and he was born under free.
And they were all looking around all these countries that self-liberated because they're like, this is a trick, right?
They're just, they're trying to figure out who's like not good so that they can arrest us en masse and they didn't.
So even within communism, there are bad guys and better guys.
But we talked about anarchy, we talked about democracy.
Do you see like there's democratic socialism conversations going on in the popular culture socialism is seen as like evil or for some people, great?
Sure.
What, like, what are your thoughts about as in a political ideology?
Evil.
So you're on the evil side.
Yes.
Fundamentally.
Yes.
What, what, what is it?
You know, what, yeah, what, what makes it evil?
What's like structurally, if you were to try to analyze?
Sure.
I say three ways.
Morally, no person has the right to tell another person how to live their life.
Economically, it's not possible to make calculations under socialism.
It's only the price, the prices that are information that tells me, oh, this is, we need to produce more of this.
We need to produce less of this without prices being able to adjust and give information to producers and consumers.
You have no way of being able to produce effectively or efficiently.
And also it is, it turns people against each other when you force people to interact, when you force them into relationships, when you force them into jobs, and you don't give them any choice when there's a monopoly.
The consequence of monopoly, everyone's familiar with ostensibly under capitalism, but somehow when it's a government monopoly, all those economic principles don't work, that doesn't make any sense.
But there's force in democracy too.
It's just you're saying there's a bit more force in socialism.
Yeah.
But that's interesting that you say that there's not enough information.
I mean, that's ultimately, you need to have really good data to achieve the goals of the system, even if there's no corruption.
Right.
You just need to have the information.
Right.
Which you can't.
And capitalism provides you like really strong.
Real time.
Real time information that, and if like capitalism at its best and cleanest, which is like perfect information is available.
There's no manipulation of information.
That's what, you know, that's one of the problems.
Okay.
Can we talk about some candidates?
The ones we got and possible alternatives.
So one question I have is why do we have within the system, why do we have the candidates we have?
Is it seems, maybe you can correct me, highly unsatisfactory.
Like the, like is anyone actually excited about our current candidates?
I'm kind of excited because no matter who wins the election is going to be hilarious.
So that is something that I'm excited about.
From a, from a human perspective.
Yeah.
Is that, is that what the whole system is?
So that's the one theory of the case is the entire thing is optimized for viewership.
Yeah.
And excitement by definitions of like the reality show kind of excitement.
I think it is, if you look at what happened with Brett Kavanaugh.
This is not a career that would draw people who are, you might say quality, because no
matter who they are, there would be a huge incentive from the other team to denigrate
them and humiliate them in the worst possible ways, because as the two teams lose their
legitimacy among gen pop, it's going to get harder and harder for them to maintain any
kind of claims to authority, which is something I like, but which does kind of play out in,
you know, certain nefarious ways.
So people, the best of the best are not going to want to be politicians.
Yeah.
Because I could have a job where I have a job interview and I'm running Yahoo or whatever,
or I could for 18 months have to eat, you know, corn dogs looking like I'm going down
on someone and shake hands and have all this, my family and on social media daily called
the worst things for what?
And then I'm still not guaranteed the position.
But the flip side of that, like from my perspective is the competition is weak, meaning like you
need a certain minimum amount of eloquence clearly that I don't, the bar which I did
not pass.
I don't think either of them would be considerably eloquent, Biden or Trump.
No, I know.
But that's what I'm saying.
The competition, like if you were wanting to become a politician, if you wanted to run
it, the opportunity is there, like if you were at all competent, like if you had.
So like Andrew Yang is an example of somebody who has a bunch of ideas is somewhat eloquent,
like young, energetic.
It feels like there should be thousands of Andrew Yang's like that would enter the domain.
He went nowhere.
Well, he, well, I wouldn't say he went nowhere.
He generated quite a bit of excitement.
He just didn't go very far.
Okay.
You don't have to run for president to generate excitement with your ideas.
You could be a podcast host.
I'm not even joking.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
And he's both Andrew Yang.
Oh, he's a podcast?
Yeah.
He has a podcast called Yang Speaks.
Oh, okay.
Cool.
Oh, wow.
The music of the way he said, yeah, cool.
It's the way my mom talks to me when I tell her with something exciting going on in my life.
Oh, that's nice, honey.
Oh, you made a robot.
Oh, that's cool.
That makes coffee?
Oh, you're still single though, aren't you?
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Make yourself a robot wife?
Give me some robot grandchildren.
Okay.
But first of all, okay, let me ask you about Andrew Yang because he represents fresh energy.
You don't find him fresh or energetic.
Like, is there any candidate you wish was in the mix that was in the mix you wish was
one of the last two remaining?
Yeah.
People like Marion Williamson, I thought was great.
Tulsi, I thought was great.
Amy Klobuchar got a bad rap.
I think she held her own.
Smart.
She wasn't particularly funny.
That's okay.
I think she was not threatening to a lot of people.
What did you like about them?
I guess it's named all women.
That's interesting.
It wasn't even intentional.
Tulsi, I like that she was aggressive, has a good resume and is not staying the course
for the establishment.
Marion Williamson, I like because she comes from a place from what it seems of genuine
compassion.
Maybe she's a sociopath.
I don't know.
She read her book and it actually affected me profoundly because it's very rare when
you read a book and there's even that one idea that blows your mind and that you kind
of think about all the time.
And there was one of that such idea in her book about, she was teaching something called
A Course in Miracles in Hollywood.
I think she still teaches it.
And this was during the 80s to hide the AIDS crisis.
And all these young men in the prime of their life would drop in like flies.
And she's trying to give them hope.
Well, good luck.
They're dying.
No one cares.
And they're like, you can't tell us that they're going to cure this.
Like you're, that's a lie.
And she goes, what if I told you they're not going to cure it?
What if I told you it's going to be to like diabetes?
They cut off your foot and you're going to go blind.
Would that be something that you can hope for?
And when you put it like that, it's like, yeah, like if you're talking to them as like
a homeless junkie and you're like, you could be a doctor, you're a lawyer or a lawyer.
Like, cool story.
Like you could have a studio apartment with a terrible roommate and a shitty job.
But when you're on the street, you know, cooking breakfast in a teaspoon and you hear that,
you're like, wait, would that really be so bad?
Is that really so much worse than this?
No, and it becomes something.
So when she put it in those terms, I'm like, wow, this woman that really did a number on
me in terms of teaching people how to be hopeful.
Small steps.
But it's also then it becomes less of I need a miracle to be like, oh, this is really manageable.
It's doable.
Yeah.
And it's absurd to think it's impossible.
What about what's your take on you the 2020 that Brett Weinstein pushed forward?
It was DOA.
He couldn't even sign up to Twitter.
Dead on arrival.
Dead on arrival.
He couldn't even sign up to Twitter, let alone or to Facebook, they got blocked, let alone
to Facebook.
It was not hugely problematic, by the way, that Twitter would block that.
Not at all.
I don't know why they blocked it, but I believe, I don't know, problematic means.
That's a word that does a lot of work that people wanted to do conceptually.
The idea that unity is taking the rejects from each party and we're going to have something
that no one likes and therefore it's going to be a compromise is absurd.
The last time we had this kind of unity ticket was the Civil War, where you had Andrew Johnson
from the Democrats and Lincoln from the Republicans.
This was not something that ended well, particularly nicely for both halves of the country.
So that's the way you see it is, like the way I saw it, I guess I haven't looked carefully
at it.
I haven't either, to be fair.
Yeah.
The way I saw it is emphasizing centrists, which is-
How is Tulsi a centrist?
Tulsi was involved?
Yes.
He's trying to push Tulsi and Jesse Ventura or something.
So okay, I don't know.
I don't know the specifics.
As a scientist, you also know centrism is not a coherent term in politics.
But see, now you're like, what is it, pleading to authority and to my ego?
No, no, I'm pleading to how you approach data.
If someone is saying the mean is accurate, that only mean, I mean, the mean could be
anywhere.
It's a function of what's around it.
That mean is true.
I don't even know what centrists are supposed to mean, but what it means to me, there's
no idea, a centrist, there's more of a center right or center left.
To me, what that means is somebody who is a liberal or conservative, but is open-minded
and empathetic to the other side.
Joe Biden had the crime bill, Joe Biden voted for Republican Supreme Court justices, Joe
Biden voted for a balanced budget, Joe Biden voted for Bush's war.
And I'm sure probably I haven't looked this up the Patriot Act.
If you want a centrist, you have Joe Biden.
Yeah, okay.
He's worked very well with the Republicans.
That argument could be made.
Of course, everybody will always resist that argument.
It's indeniable.
In fact, during the campaign, some activists started yelling at him at a town hall, not
yelling, just saying, hey, we need open borders.
Joe Biden says, I'm not for open borders, go vote for Trump and literally turn his back
on the man.
And this is during the primaries where it would be who of you to try to appeal to the
base.
And of course, you can probably also make the argument that Donald Trump is center right,
if not center left.
Well, I mean, he's very unique as a personality.
But if you look at his record and his first name is rhetoric, you can say is not centrist
at all.
But in terms of how he governs, the budgeting, I mean, has been very moderate.
It certainly hasn't been like draconian budget cuts.
The Supreme Court, you could say, okay, he's hard right, immigration, you could say in
certain capacities, he's hard right.
But in terms of pro-life, what has he done there?
In terms of, you know, so it's in many other aspects, he's been very much this kind of
me too Republican, but certainly the rhetoric, it's very hard to make in the case that he's
a centrist.
So you don't like, is there any other idea you find compelling?
Like what I like about UND 2020, is it's an idea for a different way, for like a different
party, a different path forward.
So ideas just like anarchy is an interesting idea that leads to discourse that leads to-
I don't think it's interesting at all, and here's why I don't think it's interesting.
Sweden has eight parties in its parliament, Iceland, population is like 150,000, they've
got nine, I think it was, Czech Republic has nine, Britain has five.
So the claim that two parties is the sensorious of speech, but three, oh, now all of a sudden,
it makes no sense, doesn't port to the data, number one.
Number two is Donald Trump demonstrated that you can be basically a third party candidate,
it sees the machinery of an existing party and appropriate to your own ends, as Bernie
Sanders almost did.
Bernie Sanders has never been a Democrat, major credit to him, that's not easy to be
elected as Senator as an Independent, he's done it repeatedly.
So these are two examples of ossified elites right for the picking.
So to have a third party makes no real sense.
Second which party you talk about quite a bit, and this is a personal challenge to you,
let me bring up the Libertarian Party, and the personal challenge is to go five minutes
without mocking them in discussing this idea.
So first of all-
I'm being trolled.
I'm being trolled.
I'm being trolled.
I'm being trolled.
I'm being trolled.
Okay, that's good.
You remember the Fun Friends, there was an episode where Chandler had to not make fun
of people, like can you go one day Chandler, and Phoebe starts telling him about like
this UFO she saw, and he's like, that's very interesting, nice for you.
This is exactly that.
So a true master would be able to play the game within the constraints, so no, I'm pretty
sure you'll still mock them.
No, no, I'll stick to the rules, five minutes easy.
So first of all, speaking broadly about Libertarianism, can you speak to that, how you feel about
it, and then also to the Libertarian Party, which is the implementation of it in our
current system?
So I think Libertarianism is a great idea, and I think there's many Libertarian ideas
that have become much more mainstream, which I'm very, very happy about.
I remember there was an article in either New York or New Yorker magazine in the early
90s, where they talked about the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank, and they
referred to the fact that Cato was against war and against like regulation with a wacky
consistency, because they didn't know how to reconcile these two things.
I don't remember what the two things were, but I remember that expression, wacky consistency.
And it wasn't even, we were all taught, and this is very much before the internet, that
there's two tribes, and if you're pro-life, you have to hate gays, and if you're for
socialized medicine, that also means you have to be for free speech.
It was just this very, and there's a whole menu, and you got to sign into all of them,
and that menu's terrible.
They hate America.
They want to destroy it.
Oh my God, those are horrible.
Evil.
This is the menu you want.
And the Libertarian Party, to some extent, and just Libertarians as a whole, said, you
know, you can do the Chinese buffet and take a little from Colombe, a little from Colombe,
and have an ideology that is coherent and consistent, an ideology of peace and non-aggression
and things like that.
The Libertarian Party takes its model from the early progressive and populist parties
from the early 20th century, which were not very effective in terms of getting people
elected, but were extremely effective in terms of getting the two major parties to
appropriate and adopt their ideas and implement them, and in Britain as well, the liberal
party got destroyed and became taken over by labor as the alternative party to the Tories,
and have those ideas basically become mainstreamed.
So I think that, and my friend who passed away, Eric, I miss him dearly, was their webmaster,
and his whole point is, if you don't think of it in terms of party, in terms of getting
people elected, but if you think of it as a party in terms of getting people educated
about alternatives, then there's enormous use for that.
That was his perspective, and I don't think that's an absurd perspective.
But here's some libertarian ideas that have become extremely mainstream.
War should be a last resort.
This is something we've taught as kids, and we all say, but for many years, it's been
like, they don't think of it as a last resort.
It's like something's bad.
Well, it's like the first instinct.
Now it's like, let's really give it a week, just a week, like what's going on in Syria.
Is there really going to be a genocide, the Kurds, you know, things like that?
So that's one.
The other thing is drug legalization.
This was, you know, when you and I were kids, oh, it's crazy, it's only hippies want to
smoke pot.
Now it's like, I was on a grand jury, and the point people make is, are you sure that
this 16-year-old who's selling weed, let's say selling, should his life be ruined?
Should he be imprisoned with rapists and murderers?
Like, if you say yes, say yes, but you have to acknowledge that that's what you're meaning.
And then a lot of people are like, wait a minute, there's got to be a third option, then he
has no consequences or he's imprisoned with a rapist.
Like, I'm not comfortable with either of these.
And I think the other one is an increasing skepticism.
This libertarians run top of this first and the hard left of the police.
As of now, acid forfeiture steals more from people than burglaries, what people don't
know about what acid forfeiture is.
If the cops come to your house and they suspect you, you haven't been convicted of using your
car or your house or whatever in terms of selling drugs, they can take whatever they
want and then you have to sue to prove your innocence and get your property back.
It's a complete violation of due process.
People don't realize this is going on.
It's a great way for the cops to increase their budgets and it's legal.
And libertarians were the first big ones saying, guys, this is not American and this is crazy.
And now increasingly, people on conservatives and left are just like, wait a minute, even
if you are selling drugs, they take your house, what are you talking about?
So I think those are some mechanisms that libertarianism, but not by name, has become
far more popular.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
So the idea, yeah, a coherence set of ideas that eventually get integrated into a two-party
system.
Yeah.
The war, that's an interesting one.
You're right.
I wonder what the thread there is.
I wonder how it connects to 9-11 and so on.
I think the Patriot Act, for people who are politically savvy, we're like, oh, okay,
this is not a joke.
This is really a crazy infringement on our freedoms and both parties are falling over
each other to sign into law and the Orwellian name.
How can you be against patriotism?
What kind of person?
You know what I mean?
So I think for a lot of people, especially both civil libertarians on the left and a lot
of conservatives who are constitutionalists are like, wait a minute, I'm not comfortable
with this and I'm also not comfortable with how comfortable everyone in Washington is
with it.
You're right.
Probably libertarians and libertarianism is a place of ideas, which is why I have a
connection to it.
I like the, every time I listen to those folks, I like them.
I feel connected to them.
I would even sometimes, depending on the day, call myself a libertarian.
We're all in the spectrum.
So that's why.
Yeah.
But like when I look at the people that actually rise to the top in terms of like the people
who represent the party, this is where like five minutes right now, right?
You can.
I could go.
I'm allowed.
You can go.
Why are they so weird?
Why aren't strong candidates emerging that represent as political like representatives
or as like famous speakers like that represent the ideology?
I think libertarians tend to be, I think John Hite in his book and his research, he's a
political scientist and he does a lot of things about how people come to their political
conclusions and what factors force people to reach conclusions.
And he found that libertarians are the least empathetic and most rationalistic of all the
groups.
And by that he means like they think in terms of logic as opposed to like people's feelings
and that has positives and has negatives.
We have the A.B. testing with Ron Paul.
Ron Paul ran for president as a libertarian nominee.
He was the nominee.
He got pretty much nowhere in 1988.
Then he ran as a return to Republican party as a congressman for many years from Texas.
He ran for the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
And in 2008 he stood on stage with Rudy Giuliani and told him that they were here in 9-11
because we're over there, which would have been a shocking, horrifying taboo a few years
earlier.
Many people were like, holy crap, this is amazing.
Giuliani was all offended and Ron Paul's like, I took some guts by the way.
I did.
And I heard that it was so refreshing that not what he said, but the fact that he said
something that took guts.
It made me realize how rare it is for politicians, but even people to say something that takes
guts.
It's also the idea that you can't, even if you think America has a right to invade any
country on earth as much as it wants and kill people as a consequence of war and blow up
their buildings and destroy their country, you can't with a straight face not expect
us to have consequences, even if they're consequence from evil people.
Even if we're 100% the good guys and they're 100% the bad guys, those bad guys, some of
them are still going to try to do something.
What happens next?
You know what I mean?
That kind of concept that there's any American culpability was where America, we're the
good guys by definition.
We're not culpable to have people start thinking about, what if there's another way?
What if we're not there and then they're not here and we're kind of doing a back door.
We're talking so different scenarios.
So the fact that he got so much more traction as a Republican, the fact that Donald Trump,
who came out of nowhere, became not only the candidate, but the president tells people,
it's like getting a book deal, right?
You can either go, there's three choices.
You can either self publish, mainstream publisher or independent publisher.
The independent publisher is the worst of all choices because you're not getting a big
advance, they're not going to be able to promote you a lot and they don't get the distribution.
Mainstream, I've done mainstream itself, right?
With self, I don't have the cred, the respectability of a mainstream for the cachet.
It can be a New York Times bestseller.
Right, it takes a lot of work, but I get a lot more of the profit.
If it looks good on the shelf and Amazon looks identical, so on and so forth.
With the mainstream, the benefits and costs are pretty much obvious to most people.
So the same thing, it's like you can either be an independent like Ross Perot or you could
be just C's when the party apparatus, which the benefits are norms there, but in terms
of going third party, I don't know the libertarian party apparatus other than maybe some ballot
access is really that efficacious and then you're going to have a lot of baggage because
if you hear independent, Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot, you think of the person.
Now you have to define yourself and you have to defend the party.
That's two bridges for most people.
Brilliantly put.
Okay.
Thank you.
Let me speak to you because I'm speaking to Yaron Brooks.
I like him.
Yeah.
But that, another example, I was- Ask him to tell you a joke about Ayn Rand if he can
do it.
So there, that's one criticism I've heard you say, which is they're unable to speak
to any weaknesses in either Ayn Rand's or Objectivist's worldview.
Yes.
That's really, you put it, I know you're half joking, but that's actually a legitimate
discussion to have.
I'm not joking at all.
Because that's, to me, one of the criticisms and one of the explanations why the world
seems to disrespect Ayn Rand, the people that do, is she kind of implies that her ideas
are flawless.
No, she says they correspond to reality.
Yeah.
Right.
That's the term she uses.
That, I mean, Objectivist, it's in the name, it's just facts.
It's impossible to basically argue against because it's pretty simple.
It's just all facts.
Well, that's, it's possible to argue against, but she would say she's never met a good critic
who can argue the facts at misrepresentation.
And she's not entirely wrong.
She's often caricatured because she has a very extreme personality and extreme worldview.
But that to me, I mean, some people, there's a guy named in the physics, mathematics community
called Stephen Wolfram.
I don't know if you've- Wolfram Alphal?
Yeah.
Okay.
There's another style of speaking sometimes, which is like, I've created a science, but
that turns a lot of people off like this kind of weird confidence.
But he's one of my favorite people.
I think one of the most brilliant people.
If you just ignore that little bit of ego or whatever you call that, that there's some
beautiful ideas in there.
She's an amazing person.
And that, for me, Objectivism, I'm undereducated about it.
I hope to be more educated.
But there's some interesting ideas that, again, just like with UFOs, not that there's a connection
between you two.
Don't bring that up for your own.
He won't like it.
He won't like it.
I'm friends like UFOs.
Oh, no, no, no.
This interview is over.
That's a good yarn, okay.
But you have to be a little bit open-minded.
But what's your sense of Objectivism?
Are there interesting ideas that are useful to you to think about?
I own her copy of the first printing of the fountain head.
So that should tell you a little bit about how my affection for Ms. Rand, how heavy that
goes.
Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions.
So if you study Rand, you are going to be forced to think through some very basic things
and you're going to have your eyes open very, very heavily.
She was not perfect.
She never claimed to be perfect.
She was asked on Donahue, is it true that according to your philosophy, you are a perfect
being?
I never think of myself that way, and she said, but if you ask me, do I practice what
I preach?
The answer is yes, resoundingly.
She's a fascinating woman.
What is really interesting about her and something you'd appreciate personally is when you read
her essays, she'll have these weird asides, like she would talk about art and she'd be
like, and this is why the US should be the only country with nuclear weapons.
And when you follow a brilliant mind making these seemingly disparate connections, it's
something I find to be just absolutely inspiring and awesome and entertaining.
I think there's lots of things about her that people like Yaron would make uncomfortable.
Well like she, so objectivism, like any other philosophy has all these techniques to kind
of hand wave away things you don't want to talk about and like pretend it.
So they talk about things like having no metaphysical significance, right?
So what that means is like, well, what about this?
I don't want to talk about it.
It doesn't matter.
Like it literally means it fancy a philosophical term, it doesn't matter.
Or they will say correctly that it's very twisted in our culture that when we have heroes,
we look for their flaws instead of looking for their virtues.
That's a hundred percent valid perspective.
However, if I'm sitting here telling you that I think this woman is a badass and she's amazing
and she should be studied, but there's also these idiosyncrasies.
They don't want to hear it because they, and I think it's very convenient for them because
there's a lot of things she did that were, here's an example.
Rand was very, very pro, a happiness and poor pleasure.
She was very pro sex, which is kind of surprising looking at her and how she talked and how
strident she was.
As a result of this, she never got her cats fixed to deny them the pleasure of orgasm.
So her male cats are spraying up her entire house.
Like that is, I mean, that's her putting her philosophy into practice, but it's still gross.
So that's the kind of thing where I don't think he, another thing is Rand had an article
on a woman president and she said a woman should never be president, right?
Now when Rand says things that are too goofy for them, they say, oh, that's not objectivism.
That's her personal preference.
It's like she did not have these lines.
Objectivism was always defined as Ayn Rand's writings plus the additional essays in her
books.
So if this was in part of those books, this counts as official objectivism, but they pretend
otherwise.
So that's another example.
And I bet you she was on the spectrum to some extent.
I'm not joking.
I'm not using it derisively.
She was of the belief and not inaccurately because that humor is used to denigrate and
humiliate.
And she was thinking about the John Stuart type before there was a John Stuart.
And a lot of times, like how I use mocking, but she was resentful correctly that a lot
of times people who are great and accomplished, little nobodies will make a punchline just
to bring them down and just bother.
Here's an example I just thought of.
I remember in, I don't remember when it was, it must have been the 90s.
They had a segment of MTV of all these musicians who were making their own perfumes, right?
And this girl grabbed Prince's perfume and before she even smelled it, she had the joke
ready.
She just, oh, this smells almost as bad as his music lately.
It's like, first of all, I'm sure the perfume's fine.
And second of all, this is Prince.
He's one of the all time greats and you can't wait to, you know, denigrate him.
And apart, I want to be like, like, how dare you?
Like as if, as if this perfume in any way, in any way mitigates his amazing accomplishments
and achievements.
You horrible person.
But I do have some great Iron Man jokes and he would not be happy about them.
The perfume thing, the problem with this is just not funny.
Not that.
Oh, he sucks.
Okay.
Great.
Not that they dared to try to be humorous.
Right.
Cause I don't know why you mentioned John, cause John Stuart is pretty, can be funny.
Right.
Like he taught a generation, you still see this on Twitter where things have to be inherently
sarcastic and snide, but isn't that, I mean, aren't you practicing that?
No, I use irony and not sarcasm.
Here's an example when people, like you say something and someone replied to be like,
um, last I checked, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'll say them.
I go, what do you think saying last I checked added to your point?
You're giving me valuable information and data, but you are trained to believe that it has
to be couched in this sneering.
It doesn't just give me the information.
This is useful information.
Yeah.
That's, that's true.
It's an e-jerk.
But see John Stuart did it masterfully.
Correct.
And they don't.
And they, they don't.
It's, it's like people who copy communities, certain comedians, you try to copy them and
use everything in the process of copy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Uh, but in terms of the, uh, the philosophy of, you know, selfishness, this kind of individual
focused idea, and I imagine that connects with you.
Yes.
And I think it would connect with more people if they understood what she meant by it.
Nathaniel Brandon, who was her heir until she kind of broke with him and, and he was
a code dedicated of Atlas shrugged, said, no one will say Einran's views with a straight
face.
They won't say, I believe that my happiness matters and is important and is worth fighting
for.
And that Einran says this, then she's dangerous.
Now, it's very easy to say this could have dangerous consequences if you're a sociopath,
but to put it in those terms, uh, I think it's extremely healthy.
I think more people should want to be happy and, and have, I think a lot of us are raised
to be apologetic, especially in this cynical media culture, that if you say, I want to
be happy, I want to love my life, that it's just like, okay, sweetheart.
And the eye rolling, and I think that's so pernicious and so horrifying.
And this is why I'm a Camus person because Camus thought the arch enemy was cynicism
and I could not agree more.
Like if you were the kind of person, if someone likes a band and you're like, oh, you're
like a them, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's like, this gives them happiness.
Yeah.
Now, there's certain exceptions, but if it gives you happiness, it's not for you.
That's cool.
Okay.
This is beautiful.
I, I, I so agree with you on the eye rolling, but you see the best of trolling is not the
eye roll.
Correct.
Of course not.
The best of trolling is taking down the eye rollers.
I'm going to have to think about that.
Okay.
Cause I kind of.
Have another red bull.
Yeah.
My blood type is red bull.
I kind of put them all in the same bin and they're not, they're not, they're not.
Okay.
All right.
Here's another example of trolling.
I was making jokes about Ron Paul.
He just had a stroke, right?
And someone came at me and they're like, oh, blah, blah, blah, you know, you're ugly.
I hope you have a stroke.
I hope you're in the hospital.
And I just go, I just did have a stroke on your mom's face.
So they came at me and now they got put in their place with a sub par.
Um, I mean, that wasn't clever.
You weren't, you weren't clever.
Not particularly.
No.
Well, one of your things you do, which is interesting, I mean, I give you props in a sense is you're
willing to go farther than people expect you to.
Yes.
That's fun.
Yeah.
In fact, I'll probably edit out like half of this podcast because the, the thing you
did, which she kept in, I should mention, um, Michaela Peterson now has a podcast, which
is nice.
I guess was it on her podcast?
She was on mine.
She was on yours.
We did both, but this is when you're referring to when she was on mine.
Yeah.
She was on, yeah, right.
And you went right for the, for the, so I'll tell you what it was, you don't have to paraphrase.
So I opened up, I say, you know, she's Jordan Peterson's dad and as many people know, Jordan,
sorry, he's her dad, yeah.
He's had a long issue with a substance addiction and I said to her, you're, you know, you're
most famous for being, you know, Jordan Peterson's daughter, you know, many people, he's changed
so many lives around the world.
And he's been such an enormous influence to me personally that I've started taking
Benzo D'Azepine's recreationally and she's like, Oh my God, Michael is so horrible.
Yeah.
You, because you pulled me in with this because you're taught, I mean, you know, because he's
going through a rough time now, she's going through just everything was just, you pulled
me in emotionally.
I was like, this is going to be the sweet, Mike is going to be just this wonderful.
And then just bam.
So that's, that's, that's, that was a props to you on that.
It wasn't, whatever that is, that is an art form when done well, it can be taken too far.
My criticism is that that feels too good for some people.
What do you, what do you mean?
Oh, they're too happy being a reference because to show that they don't care.
But I think that's another form of cynicism though.
Right.
So I, because you think it's possible to be a troll and still be the live life to its
highest ideal in the Camus sense.
I try.
That's kind of my ideal.
I, I believe it's not, it becomes a drug.
I feel like that takes you like, I think love ultimately is the way to experience like every
moment of every day.
You don't think that was an expression of, I honestly think, let's, let's, let's split
hairs here.
Cause I think this is something of use here.
I do think that me, me being able to make her laugh about this year of hell she was
in does create an element of love and connection between me and her.
Yeah.
But I know she would say that.
Yes.
It wasn't that.
It was what you said in combination with the sweetness everywhere else, the kindness.
It's a very subtle thing, but like it's like some of the deepest connections we have with
others is when we like mock them lovingly or yes, correct.
But like there is stuff.
There's kindness around that.
Yes.
Not in words, but in like subtle things cause it creates an era of familial being familial.
Like we're through this together.
Yeah.
It's, yeah.
Yeah.
That's missing.
That's very difficult to do on the internet.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
That's why my, like my general approach on the internet is to be more like simple, less
witty and more like, dumbly loving, but that's not your core competency being witty.
Me?
Yeah.
I could be witty.
You can be.
That's not your core competence.
I'm not saying you're a bad at it, but I'm saying that's not where you go like organically,
especially with strangers.
I just feel like nobody's core competence on the internet is, uh, I guess if you want
to bring love to the world, nobody's core competence is given the current platforms.
Nobody's core competence is wit.
It's very difficult to be witty on the internet without, while still communicating kindness.
Like.
I'll give you another example.
In the same way that you can in physical space.
I'll give you another example.
Someone, um, came at me and they were like, they give me a donation.
People do this all the time.
And they go, Oh, um, like I started reading your books because of my wife and, you know,
now watch your shows together, uh, keep up the good work.
And I go, what does her boyfriend think?
So that is an example of wit and love because that person feels seen.
I'm acknowledging them.
Yeah.
I'm also making a joke at their expense.
We know it's a joke.
Yeah.
True.
So I think you and I,
Good point.
Good point.
Language is often used in non-literal ways to cue emotional and connectivity.
It's difficult, but it's very difficult.
What you've done is as difficult to accomplish, but you've done it well.
I mean, you do like you did, you've been doing these live streams, which are nice that people
give you a bunch of money and donations and stuff.
And then you, you'll often like make fun of certain aspects of their questions and so
on.
Yeah.
But it's always lovely.
That's not from love.
That is genuine annoyance.
Yeah.
But it's often like there's a kind person under that that's being communicated.
That's interesting.
But I don't know if I get that from your Twitter.
I know I get that from the video, the, something about the face, something about like the physical
presentation.
Yeah.
The more data, the more easy it is to convey emotion and subtlety.
Absolutely.
If you only have literally black and white letters, it's going to be, or whatever, white
and black, if you have night mode, it's going to be a very different, it's much more limited
information.
Yeah.
I think this is the fundamental thing is like,
Here's another example.
Like if they had access to my face, like a lot of times some people don't know who I
am and they come at me, call me a Nazi anti-Semite, right?
And I start talking about the Jews and just how terrible the Jews are.
Now all my audience knows I'm Jewish that I went to the Shiva.
So they're sitting there laughing because this person's making ass to themselves.
That person has no idea.
But if there was video, then they would be like, okay, wait a minute, something's up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Something's up.
I don't know.
I think it's entertaining.
I think it's fun, but I just, I don't think it's scalable and ultimately I'm trying to
figure out this whole trolling thing because I think it's really destructive.
I've been the outrage mob, the outrage mobs, just the dynamics of Twitter has been really
bothering me.
Okay.
And I've been trying to figure out if we can try to build an alternative to Twitter
perhaps or try to encourage Twitter to be better, how to have nuanced, healthy conversations.
Like the reason I talk about love isn't just for the love's sake.
It's just a good base from which to have difficult conversations.
Like that's a good starting point because if you start, like I would argue that the
kind of conversation you have on Twitter is fun, but it might not be a good starting
point for difficult nuanced conversation.
Well, I'm not interested in having those conversations with most people.
No, I know.
So I agree with you.
Your point is valid.
Yes.
But like I'm saying, so if we were trying to have a difficult nuanced conversation about
say race in America or policing, is there racism, institutional racism or policing?
Okay.
There's the only conversations that have been nuanced about it that I've heard is in
the podcasting medium.
I agree.
There's the magic of podcasting, which is great, but that's the downside of podcasting
is it's a very small number of people.
Even if it's in the thousands, it's still small.
And then there's millions of people on social media and they're not having nuanced conversation
at all.
They're not capable of it.
That's the difference in you.
They have no minds.
I believe they are.
There's no data that serves us.
And then both of us aren't being not scientific.
You don't have data to support your world either.
You're making the claim.
Well, you are too.
No, I'm not.
If I'm looking at an object, the claim that has a mind, well, no, your claim is that people
are fundamentally stupid.
We can do this.
Aren't you a martial artist?
Yes.
How does it feel?
I just judo on you.
Yeah.
But you really don't think people are deep down like capable of being intelligent.
No.
Not at all.
Not deep down that surface.
I'm not joking.
I'm not being tongue-in-cheek.
I'm not being cynical.
I do not at all think they have this capacity.
I'm going to think because you're being so clear about it.
You're not even...
I'm going to have to think about that.
You know why?
Here's evidence for my position, not proof.
And this is, of course, data that is of little use, but it's of interest.
A lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine and people come at you, not only
will people say the same thing, the same concept, they'll say the same concept in the same way.
That is not a mind.
Yeah.
That surface evidence, you're saying this iceberg looks like this from the surface.
I'm saying there's an iceberg there that if challenged can rise to the occasion of deep
thinking and you're saying, nope.
Nope.
It's just frozen water.
It's frozen, isn't that the Russian expression?
That's ice cream.
No, not atmarozhne.
Atmarozhne.
Doesn't it mean like no one's there?
Actually, I don't know.
Yeah.
It means like...
Atmarozhne.
Yeah.
It's like thought.
It means...
Nikova doma.
Nikova doma.
Okay.
Well, so you're challenging me to be a little bit more rigorous.
I think I'll try to prove...
I'm not challenging you anything.
I'm just saying...
No, not challenging me, but like I'm challenging myself based on what you're saying because
I'd like to prove you wrong and find actual data to show you're wrong.
And I think I can, but I would need to get that data.
That's funny.
You said I think I can.
When they were working on my biography, ego and hubris, the title I had suggested was
the little engine that could but shouldn't.
They didn't like it.
I think that's a great title.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Speaking of biographies, I mean, I read your book or listened to your book.
Listened to.
Yeah.
I did the audio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You read it?
My goal is, yes.
Okay.
So this was...
I didn't do Yaron Brooks' voice in the book.
I did all the different voices because he has a lisp and I didn't want to sound like
I was making fun of him.
Yeah.
I don't remember you reading it, but I was really enjoyed it.
I promise you.
No, okay.
It was good.
It was like a year, a year and a half ago.
This I can prove.
Well, let me at a high level see if you can pull this off.
If I ask you, what's the book you write about?
It's about a group of people who are united solely by their opposition to progressivism
who have little else in common, but who are all frequently caricatured and dismissed by
the larger establishment media.
But you give this kind of story of how it came to be.
Sure.
And to me, we're talking about trolls, but the internet side of things is quite interesting.
So first of all, how does alt-right connect to the new right?
So the alt-right is the subset of the new right, which feels that race, not racism,
is the most or one of the most important socio-political issues.
Are any of those folks part of the mainstream or worth paying attention to?
Not on part of the mainstream, the alt-right.
By definition, they would be part of the mainstream.
They would not be part of them.
No, they would not.
I don't know that any of them, well, worth is not a position.
I'm not a position to say worth.
I would say that it is of use to be familiar with their arguments because to dismiss any
school of thought, especially one that has historically gained leverage, especially one
that has historically gained leverage in very dark ways, especially in America, in Europe
and other places, just to say, oh, they're racist.
I don't need to think about them.
It doesn't behoove you.
So what lessons do we draw from the 4chan side of things, like the internet side of
the movement?
Tits or get the fuck out?
Can you define every single word in this sentence?
Tits are breasts or get the fuck out.
That's from 4chan.
Okay.
That's what's it mean?
Oh, sometimes a woman will appear in 4chan and it'll just reply, tits or get the fuck
out.
I'm trying to understand what that...
Oh, oh, that's the way...
I just...
Very slow.
Oh, so that's...
Okay, so that's very disrespectful towards female members of the community.
I don't understand.
There's rules to this community, and one of them is we're not very good with women.
Is that...
That's one of the rules.
It's one of the principles in a rule.
It's a principle?
It's a principle.
We're not going to ever get laid.
That's fundamental principle.
Is there other principles?
But we are going to get pics.
Pics.
Sometimes.
Sometimes on the internet.
Sometimes they GTFO?
Okay, so is there other actual principles of...
So from my maybe naive perspective is they have the darkest aspects of trolling, which
is take nothing serious, make a game out of everything.
That's not 4chan per se.
One of the things that you will learn in 4chan, which I think is very healthy, is if you have
an idiosacratic or unique worldview or focus on an aspect of history or culture, you'll
be able to find like-minded people who you will engage with you and discuss it without
being preptly dismissive.
That's an ideal.
That they...
Well, it's not an ideal.
It's something that happens a lot.
Now, 4chan is not really like Paul is their board with politics, but they will get into
some...
The people there are much more erudite than you think.
So they do take...
My perception was they take nothing seriously.
So there's things that they take seriously, like discussing ideas.
I'll give you one example.
There was a video someone posted of a girl who put kittens in a bag and threw it in a
river, and they found out where she was within a day and got her arrested.
So yeah, they do take some things very seriously.
Okay.
But that's like an extreme...
I mean, that's good.
First of all, that's heartwarming that they wouldn't somehow turn that into a thing.
That feels like more of, what is it?
What's the other one?
8chan?
8chan's twice as good as 4chan, yeah.
That's their slogan.
But it feels like they're the kind of community that would take that kitten situation and
make a mockery.
Yeah.
They're darker than 4chan.
I don't even...
I'm not allowed to talk about 16chan.
I'm already overwhelmed clearly by 4chan, lingo.
I literally wrote down in my notes, like in doing research for this conversation, I learned
the word pleb, and I wanted to ask you what this pleb means.
You know what pleb means?
No.
I saw...
I mean, actually, no, I don't...
You know what a pleb is?
I just...
I don't know what a pleb is.
Like a plebiscite, or plebian.
Okay.
But does it mean something more sophisticated?
No, it's a very unsophisticated mechanism of being dismissive.
Of like the regular people.
Yeah, or someone who comes at me on Twitter.
Okay.
All right.
So back to the 4chan alt-right.
It wasn't the...
Those are very different concepts.
Don't conflate them.
But which internet culture was the alt-right born out of?
Well, alt-right was more born of blogs, and people had different blogs that were posting
what they called like racial realism, which is scientific racism, so-called, and breaking
down issues from a racialist perspective.
So that wasn't...
4chan is much more dynamic.
It's a message board.
It's very fluid.
So it doesn't lend itself to these kind of in-depth analysis of ideas or history.
But it spreads them.
It spreads them as memes.
Yeah.
And it...
But it's not an essential mechanism of the alt-right historical...
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Okay.
So it's mostly about blogs.
Okay.
So what do you make of the psychology of this kind of worldview?
When you have...
This goes to your conspiracy theory subject earlier.
When you have a little bit of knowledge about something, that history that no one's talking
about, and there's only one group that is talking about it, and they... and you have
no alternative answers, you're going to be drawn to that group.
So because issues about race, anti-Semitism, homophobia are so taboo in our culture, understandably
there's good reasons.
If you start putting things like, how old should you be if you have sex with kids and
just have regular conversations, eventually some people are going to start taking some
positions you don't like.
So some things have to be sanctified to some extent.
If you're the only one talking about it, you're going to be drawn to that subculture.
And where does the alt-right stand though?
I mean, I hear that term used...
So the term has been weaponized by the corporate press for people that they want to read out
of society.
So it's used both on individual levels, like people like Evan McGingis, Milo Yiannopoulos,
some others.
I mean, I think they refer to Trump as alt-right.
And it's become a slur, just like incel or bot that has become largely removed from its
original meaning.
Do you have a sense that there's still a movement that's alt-right or like...
Yeah, they call themselves...
Okay, so there's something called the dissident right.
And they say, we're completely not like the alt-right because the alt-right's A, B, and
C, and we're B, C, D. There's a huge overlap.
It's very much the same people.
Is there intellectuals that still represent some aspect of the movement?
And I mean, sure...
Are you tracking this?
Not that much anymore.
I think they're...
I don't find it particularly as...
Now that the book's done, I'm looking more into history from my next book.
You mentioned communism.
I'm going to talk a lot about the Cold War.
So this kind of stuff has largely fallen away from my radar to some extent.
And they've also been...
It's been a very effective movement to get them marginalized and silenced.
So they're not as deep of a concern in terms of concern or not, just their impact on society.
Yes, there's much lessened, yeah.
So as a troll on Twitter, in the best sense of the word, what do you make of cancel culture?
I think it's Maoism.
I mean, corporate America has done a far better job of implementing Maoism than the Communist
Party ever could.
You had this meeting not that long ago from, I think it was Northwestern University Law
School where everyone on the call got up and said that they were racist.
I mean, this is something that legally you should be very adverse to saying, even if
it were true.
And it's this kind of concept of getting up and confessing your sins before the collective
is something completely...
Oh, sorry, they admitted this of themselves?
Yeah, they were like...
Because they're saying because they're white, they're inherently racist.
So my name's John.
I'm a racist.
My name's this.
I'm a racist.
It was...
You hear it and you're like, okay, this is looting tunes.
So you're saying that...
Wow, that's so much...
You took a step further.
Actually you're saying there's like a deep underlying force in the sense of cancer culture.
It's not just some kind of mob...
It's not mob at all.
It's a systemic, organized movement being used for very nefarious purposes and to dominate
an entire nation.
How do we fight it?
Because I sense it inside.
I used to defend academia more because I still do to some extent.
It's a nuanced discussion because folks like Jordan Peterson and a lot of people that kind
of attack academia, they refer...
They really are talking about gender studies at certain departments.
And me for MIT, it's the University of Science and Engineering and the faculty, they're
really don't think about these issues or haven't traditionally thought about it.
It's beginning to even infiltrate there.
It's starting to infiltrate engineering and sciences outside of biology.
Let's put biology with the gender studies.
I'm talking about sciences that really don't have anything to do with gender.
It's starting to infiltrate.
It worries me, I don't know exactly why, I don't know exactly what the negative effect
there would be, except it feels like it's anti-intellectual.
Oh yes, of course.
And I'm not sure what to...
Because on the surface, it feels like a path towards progress.
At first, when I'm like zoomed out, just like squinting my eyes, not even in detail looking
at things, but when I actually join the conversation to listen in the conversation on quote-unquote
diversity, it quickly makes me realize that there's no interest in making a better world.
No, no.
It's about domination.
It's about getting...
Because...
Yeah.
It's a way for...
If you are a lowest status white person, using anti-racism is the only mechanism you will
have to feel superior to another human being.
So it's very useful for them.
In terms of fighting it, one of my suggestions has been to seize all university endowments,
which are the crystallization of privilege and distribute that money as reparations.
So be very effective by turning two populations against each other and strongly diminishing
the university's intellectual hegemony.
The universities are absolutely the real villains in the picture.
Thankfully, they're also the least prepared to be aggressed upon.
And after the government and the corporate press, they are the last leg of the stool,
and they don't know what's coming, and it's going to get ugly, and I cannot wait.
So this is where you and I disagree, part one, we disagree in a sense that you want
to dismantle broken institutions.
I don't think they're broken.
Or the powerful.
They're working like by design.
Over 100 years, they have been talking about bringing the next generation of American leaders,
which is code for promulgating an ideology based on egalitarian principles and world
domination.
Let me try to express my lived experience.
My experience at MIT is that there's a bunch of administrators that are debu-rock-ously
that, I can say, this is the nice thing about having a podcast that I don't give a damn,
is they're pretty useless.
In fact, they get in the way.
But there's faculty, there's professors that are incredible.
They're incredible human beings that all they do all day, they're too busy.
But for the most part, what they do all day is just continually pursue different little
trajectories of curiosities in the various avenues of science that they work on.
And as a side effect of that, they mentor a group of students, sometimes a large group
of students, and also teach courses.
And they're constantly sharing their passion with others.
And my experience is it's just a bunch of people who are curious about engineering and
math and science, chemistry, artificial intelligence, computer science, what I'm most familiar with.
And there's never this feeling of MIT being broken somehow, this kind of feeling.
If I talk to you just now, or like Eric Weinstein, there's a feeling like stuff is on fire.
There's some people who are broken.
But when I'm in the system, especially before the COVID, before this kind of tension, everything
was great, there was no discussion of even diversity, all that kind of stuff, the toxic
stuff that we might be talking about right now, none of that was happening.
There's a bunch of people just in love with cool ideas, exploring ideas, being curious
and learning and all that kind of stuff.
My sense of academia was this is the place where kids in their 20s, 30s, and 40s can
continue the playground of science and having fun.
It's if you destroy academia, if you destroy universities, you're suggesting kind of lessening
their power.
You take away the playground from these kids to play.
It's going to be hard for you to tell me that I'm anti-playground.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I'm saying you're anti-certain kinds of playgrounds, which is...
Yeah.
The ones that have the broken glass on the floor.
Yeah.
I am against those kinds of playgrounds.
No.
You're...
Yes.
Nope.
See?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you listen.
No.
You wait.
Yeah.
I would say you're being the watchful mother who...
The one kid who hurt themselves in the glass.
One kid.
It's entire generation after generation.
I'm not a watchful mother.
I'm the guy with the flamethrower.
No.
I understand that.
But you're using the one kid who was always kind of like weird and kind of studies department
that hurt themselves in the glass as opposed to the people who are like obviously having
fun in the playground and not playing by the glass, the broken glass.
And they're just...
I mean, to me, some of the best innovations in science happen in universities.
Okay.
You can't forget that universities don't have this liberal...
Like politics like literally in every conversation until this year.
Until this year, there's something happening.
But every conversation I've ever had and nothing to do with politics, Trump never came up,
none of that ever come up, nothing.
All this kind of idea that there's liberal, all that, that's in the humanities.
Yeah.
But do you think MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology might be a little bit of an
outlier?
Yeah, there probably is.
Yeah.
But I honestly don't think when people criticize academia, they're looking at, in fact, also
picking the outliers, which is they're picking some of the, quote unquote, strongest gender
studies department.
This is nonsensical.
When I was at Bucknell, I was a college student, we had to take, we had a bunch of electives
and I want to take a class on individual, American individualism.
One of the texts of the five that we had to read was Birth of a Nation, the movie about
the Klan.
So there's no department where these people are not thoroughgoing hardcore ideologues.
This is not a gender...
That's a humanities.
That's a humanities.
Fine.
All the humanities, not just gender studies.
Okay, fine.
I can give you...
History, English.
Yes.
All of them.
Every university, as you know, has it mandatory in the curriculum, they have to take a bunch
of these propaganda classes.
I look forward to YouTube comments because you're being more eloquent and you're speaking
to the thing that a lot of people agree with and I'm being my usual slow self and people
are going to say not very nice things about me.
Don't say anything that nice about Lex.
Okay.
Please.
Let me try to just...
Just shoot up a school.
That would be preferable.
There he goes again.
Only the teachers.
Going to the darkest possible place.
That's sunshine, baby schools.
That's wherever one goes to be happy, playgrounds.
Okay, there he goes.
Dark ear.
Dives right in, like it just goes dark and then just comes back up to the surface.
I don't have to feel this way anymore because it's one day and I'll feel it.
You're probably a figment of my imagination.
I'm not even having this barcass.
Well, after 18 Red Bulls, I'm surprised you could see anything.
This is like Fight Club.
Red Bull gives you delirium.
I got into it at Norton yesterday on Twitter.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like the rest of the celebrities.
Yeah.
He's like, oh, this is an existential threat to America.
Trump's a fascist.
He's delegitimizing the Oval Office.
I said, why not endorsement of Trump?
Well, you should have went Vubat Pit.
He might have a different opinion.
That's true.
Fight Club reference.
Okay.
Yeah.
This conversation is over.
It's interesting.
I'd like to draw a line between science and engineering and science, not including like
the biological aspect, the parts of biology that touch and humanities and biology.
Like I feel because humanities, if you just look at the percentage of universities, it's
still a minority percentage.
And I would actually draw different, I think they serve very different purposes.
Sure.
And that's actually a broken part about universities about like why, why is some of the best research
in the world done at universities?
That doesn't, like there might be a different, like MIT, it feels weird that a faculty-
Yeah.
These are conceptually different things.
Like we do research and we teach.
Why is this the same?
Yeah.
It feels weird.
But that's just, but, but I'm also, I'm coming to like the defense of the engineers that
never talk about, I'm not like, like, my mind isn't, I'm not like deluded or something
where I'm not seeing the house on fire.
I'm just saying I am seeing the house because I also lived in Harvard Square.
I'm seeing Harvard.
But in-
Can you see the tanks coming?
They're coming, Lex.
They're coming.
It's going to be so beautiful.
I'm going to, I'll be like the American beauty, the plastic bag, I just won't be able to stop
crying because it'll be so beautiful for tanks.
Yeah.
I could, I can already, I can already see it.
But the, but the engineering departments where like, I believe that the Elon Musk's of the
world, that the, the, like the innovation that will make a better world is happening.
And like, let's not burn that down because that has nothing to do with any, like they're
all like sitting quietly in while like, while the, the humanities and all these kinds of
diversity programs, they're, they're not having any of these discussions.
Listen, my Soviet brother, you both know, we both know that ice water runs in our veins.
So if you're calling for mercy, that is not how I'm wired, but I'm not closing the door.
Yeah.
I'm actually realizing now, so for, for people listening to this, I'll probably prepend this
and saying that I'm even slower than usual.
I didn't sleep last night, but I feel I'm actually realizing just how slow I am and how much
preparation I need to do in, if I would like to defend aspects of academia, I'd better
come prepared.
I don't think you need to defend them.
I think I'm granting you your premise freely.
No, you might be.
Okay.
I don't think the world is.
But actually you just defeat your own argument because you make, because it is not at all
have to be the way that a phenomenal research institution like MIT, which no one disputes,
has to also be an educational establishment.
These two things are not at all necessarily interconnected.
But then you have to offer a way to separate.
Correct.
But like, I'm not a big fan, everybody's different, but I'm not a fan of criticizing
institutions without offering a way to change.
And especially when I'm like, have ability to change, I'd like to, yeah, I'd like to
offer a path.
Like, what if they weren't students, they were all mentor, like, like, what's the opposite
of mentor?
Menti.
Protégé.
What's the term when you like, when you work at a place, like interns, not an intern,
it's not the one I'm thinking of.
But anyway, like basically they're working there instead of going to college there.
It's possible, but it's going against tradition and so you have to build new institutions
and then.
Can't have these engineers building new things.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
They're going to be engineers, where they're going to be building things.
One of the things, because you're kind of, you know, apprentice, that's the word I was
looking at.
Apprentice.
Which is ironic.
We're talking about Trump and we couldn't think of the word apprentice.
All right.
Yeah.
Well done.
We should both be fired.
You're fired.
Yeah.
There you go.
These Russian Jews so quick with their wit.
Okay.
But the thing is, you're a fan of freedom.
I am.
And there's, there is intellectual freedom.
This is what I was trying to articulate, I'm failing to articulate, but there truly is
complete intellectual freedom within universities on topics of science and engineering.
I believe you.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
I don't think it's going to take much persuasion, but I'll give you an example.
When that, I'm sure you know the more details about this than I do.
When that scientist engineered that probe to land on that comet and the articles are
written because this Hawaiian shirt he was wearing had like pinup girls on it, which
I think is female student, so it frame or something was ex-girlfriend.
And he had to apologize.
This is what Rand was talking about.
Yeah.
That the great accomplishments of men have to say, I'm sorry, to the lowest, most despicable,
disgusting people.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, let me bring this case up because I think about this.
This might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to certain aspects of the computer science
community.
There's a guy named Richard Stallman, I don't know if you know who that is.
He's the founder of the Free Software Foundation.
He's like a big Linux.
He's one of the key people in the history of computer science, one of those open source
people, right?
But he is like, I believe he's the one of the hardcore ones, which is like, all software
should be free.
Okay.
Okay.
So it's very interesting personality, very key person in the GNU, just like Linus Torvald,
key person.
So, but he also kind of speaks his mind and on a certain chain of conversations at MIT
that was leaked to the New York Times, then was published, led him to be fired or pushed
out of MIT recently, maybe a year ago.
And it always sat weird with me.
So what happened is there's a few undergraduate students that called Marvin Minsky, not sure
if you're familiar with who that is.
I've heard the name.
He's one of the seminal people in artificial intelligence.
They said that they called him a rapist because he met with Jeffrey Epstein.
And Jeffrey Epstein solicited, these are the best facts known to me that I'm aware of.
That's what was stated on the chain is he solicited a 17, but it might've been an 18-year-old
girl to come up to Marvin Minsky and ask him if he wanted to have sex with her.
So Jeffrey Epstein told the girl, she came up to Marvin Minsky, who was at that time
is I think seven years old, and his wife was there too, Marvin Minsky's wife.
And he said no or awkwardly saying no thanks.
That was stated in the email thread as Marvin participating in sexual assault and rape of
this unwilling sexual assault, and it was called rape of this person, of this woman
that propositioned him.
And then Richard Stallman, who's, he's kind of known for this, he's very, you make fun
of me being a robot, but he's kind of like a debugger.
He's like, well, that sentence is not, what you said is not correct.
So he like corrected the person, basically made it seem like the use of the word rape
is not correct because that's not the definition of rape.
And then he was attacked for saying, oh, now you're playing with definitions of rape.
Rape is rape, isn't the answer, right?
And then that was leaked in him defending, so the way it was leaked, it was reported
as him defending rape, that's the way it was reported.
And he was pushed out and he didn't really give a damn.
He doesn't seem to make a big deal out of it.
He just left.
He made an example of him.
They made an example and that, and that everyone was afraid to defend him.
So like, there's a bunch of faculty, one- Dude, you're from the Soviet Union.
Doesn't this hit close to home for you?
I don't know what to think of it.
It hits close to home, but it was basically, at least at MIT, now MIT is such a light place
with this.
It's not common at MIT, but it was like 18, 19 year old kids, undergraduate kids with
this kind of fire in them.
There's just very few of them, but they're the ones that raise all this kind of fuss.
And the entirety of the administration, all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them.
It's so interesting to me.
Like, I don't know if I should be afraid of that.
You don't think you should be afraid that someone who's trying to be specific when it
comes to charges of violent assault is looking for that clarity, can get their life out of
search.
Let me give you more context.
There's a little bit more context to Richard Stallman, which is-
He was also a rapist.
No.
I left out that part.
He liked raping people.
But he's had a history through his life of every once in a while wearing the Hawaiian
shirt with, he would make, he's a fat, sorry, but he's a fat unattractive, like what Trump
referred to as the hacker-
Yeah, yeah.
The 75ine guy in the basement.
In the basement.
That's Richard.
Okay.
Yeah.
He is what he is.
People, he would eat his own, he would pick skin from his feet in lectures and just eat
it.
No.
Okay, yeah.
Those videos him doing that.
I'm not joking.
He must really behind the spectrum then.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I think this, and his office, door, he wrote something like, like hacker plus
plus, plus lover of ladies or something like that, like something kind of, yeah.
Unprofessional.
Yeah.
Unprofessional.
And a little creepy.
Yeah.
No, that's fair.
So he was also-
So they're looking for an excuse to get rid of him.
It sounds like.
No, he was just a, who's they?
The administration.
Yeah.
Probably.
Probably.
A lot of times what people don't realize, and this would be my defensive cancel culture,
a lot of times when someone gets fired over something like this, this isn't why.
This is just giving them cover to get rid of them without getting a lawsuit.
Yeah.
But it's still.
Right.
So I think, I guess what I'm trying to communicate is he was a little weird and creepy and he
may not be the best for the community, but that's not necessarily the message it's sent
to the rest of the community.
The message is sent to the rest of the community that being clear about words or the usage
of the word rape is like, you should call everything rape.
That's basically the message you was sent.
Or you should call that we say rape.
It's about submission.
I think you'd be very happy to know that there's a lot of people, and she's very crucified
by this, like Betsy DeVos from the Department of Education, who are aware of this.
They are aware that this completely contradicts due process.
They're aware of how a rape accusation is something not to be taken seriously, but because
it's not to be taken seriously, it has to be also taken seriously in the other context
that once that word is around a male, this can ruin his entire life.
That's the sticky thing of the word.
I think about this a lot that, how would I defend it if somebody, I can honestly say
I've never done anything close to creepy in my life with women.
You wouldn't know it if you had, right?
That's the thing.
A lot of these creepy guys don't think they're creepy.
They think they're being cute.
Yeah, but I'm just telling you, even like, fine, let's say, right, let's say I'm not
aware of it.
But the point that I am aware of is that somebody could just completely make something up, correct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And like what a, what would I,
I'm supposed to know.
He denied the charges.
There's an article around everything he did supposedly, and it goes, Mr. Friedman denied
the charges.
Yeah.
But what creeps me out?
That happened.
Can I interrupt?
Sure.
I'm just going to tell him Renaissance.
She wrote, their eyes are watching God, a couple of other books.
She was just an amazing, amazing figure.
Her biography is called wrapped in rainbows.
It's just a masterpiece.
I like, I think I read it one day.
Can't recommend her enough.
Fascinating, fascinating woman.
During the thirties, I think it was, or 1940, she was out of the country.
She was accused of molesting a teenage boy.
She wasn't in America.
This could be proven.
So there was, it's absolutely false.
Not even a question.
She was indicted and she wanted to kill herself because she's like, people are going to see
these things and they're going to think maybe there's some truth to it, maybe it's voluntary.
What they're just going to, and you could understand why she'd be suicidal over this.
So yeah, this is, this is something that's been going on for a long time and in the fact
that it's becoming, I do agree it's important.
I know a lot of women who have been sexually assaulted more than I am happy that I know.
And if I know that many, that means there's more.
So I don't, I think it's, it's a good idea that they feel seen, that they don't feel
wounded.
They don't feel damaged or they could talk to their friends.
And I'm like, man, this sucks as hell to you.
And I don't think you're a slut.
I don't think you're asking for it.
I think you feel violated.
I think it's gross.
Talk to me.
Like I do think that that's important.
And I also think it's important though, like when things get kind of in a frenzy that a
lot of people like, yeah, I also had something happen and very quickly the line between he
grabbed my boob and he violently raped me, I don't think these two things are the same
at all.
I think they're both sexual assault, but in terms of what someone can deal with the next
day, the next month, 10 years later, I don't think they're similar scenarios.
Yeah.
I had Juanita Broderick on my show and hearing her talk about, you know, her alleged rape
by Bill Clinton was very disturbing for me, very disturbing here because it was like half
an hour.
So, you know, we think of these things and think, okay, hold her down, blah, blah, blah.
And then it's done half an hour when, just even someone's physically holding you down
for half an hour.
Yeah.
Like not even a sexual assault.
Yeah.
Like that's traumatic.
Yeah.
You think, am I going, your brain's going to think, am I going to die?
When I zoom out, I think the ultimately this is going to lead to a better world.
Like empowering women to speak to the, those kinds of experiences, the benefit of it outweighs
the.
The issue is whenever people are given a weapon, some are going to use it in nefarious ways.
And that's the lesson of history, males, females, whites, blacks, children, adults.
When people are given a mechanism to execute power for others, some are going to use it.
Can I ask you for a therapy thing?
Sure.
Untrolling, in a sense, because I mentioned somebody making up something about me.
I feel because I wear my heart on my sleeve.
I'm not good with these attacks.
Like I've been attacked recently, just being called a fraud and all that kind of stuff.
Just light stuff.
Like I haven't, you know, it was like, it hurt.
Okay.
Well, let me help you.
Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker.
No, I'm serious.
Here's why.
In New York, a lot of times you'll be walking with your friend and a homeless person will
come up to you and start yelling things at you.
Your reaction isn't in those circumstances, let me hear this out.
Your reaction is physical safety and getting away.
Now it's not impossible that that homeless person is actually saying the truth.
This happened to my friend of mine.
This guy wasn't homeless and he's walking down the street on Smith Street and he's just
talking out loud and it goes, why they call them hipsters?
What are they hip to?
And she chuckles and it goes, what are you laughing at, fatso?
You start something, I'll finish it.
And she just couldn't move.
And it's like, it's my main problem because that's the first thing he went to.
And there's, I don't know that I have any advice, but when you hear something like this,
this is, I think you need to be better in terms of boundaries.
I think you should not perceive this as a fellow human, but as a crazy homeless person
because if this fellow human, if I thought that you were a fraud in some context, that's
a very weird word to use because fraudulent podcaster, these are real mics.
But if I was scientist or human, sure, but I would ask myself, is this person in a position
to make this judgment or are they backing it up?
Are they saying, here, your conclusions were wrong.
Here's some mistakes in your data and you can engage with them in ideas.
But whenever someone uses a word to entirely dismiss your life without having the knowledge
of your life, you do not have to take that seriously.
I appreciate that kind of idea, but some things aren't about data.
I see myself as a fraud often and it's more psychology of it.
If I can reduce something to reason, I can probably be fine.
My worry is the same as the worry of teenage girls that get bullied online is when I'm
being open and fragile on the internet, it affects me in a way where I can't, the reason
doesn't help.
It helps me.
You don't block people enough.
I'm very heavy with the blocking.
So yeah.
Very heavy.
I block.
It's helped a lot.
Any aggressive banality, I block immediately.
I also think time is going to help.
I don't think you need to grow up wanting to be a podcaster.
That wasn't your aspiration.
So in some sense, you are going to feel like a fraud because you're like, I don't have
any training for this.
I have training for a scientist.
I can talk to you about artificial intelligence for literally hours.
But in terms of this, I don't know what I'm doing.
So when they call you a fake, it's like, yeah, you're kind of right because I did kind of
stumble into this and this is not my pedigree.
So I think that kind of probably speaks to you on some level.
But they're attacking not the podcast thing, but more like the same, people call Elon Musk
a fraud too.
That's the way I rationalize it.
Well, if they're calling him a fraud and they're calling me a fraud, even if you have rockets
that go into, if you successfully have rockets landing back on earth, reusable rockets, you're
still being called a fraud, then it's okay.
Not necessarily.
It could be that he's not a fraud.
You really are.
It's not resonating with you because your brain knows the logic.
So you can create yourself.
But yeah, yeah, but I don't know this whole trolling thing.
You seem to be much better at seeing it as a game.
You know why?
Because you are under the delusion that every human being is capable of intelligent, reasoned
decisions.
I still think I'm right.
And I perceive them as literally animals.
So when a dog starts barking, all it's saying is that the dog is agitated and this is not
going to change my life when I order other than crossing the street, perhaps.
I'm going to prove you wrong one day.
If you're going to kill yourself because they can drive you to it, the first shoot up a school.
But if I don't, I'll prove you wrong.
I'll bring the data and they'd be like, you're right.
I have the receipts.
I have the receipts.
Okay.
So when we mentioned Camu, this is a question that people love when I ask.
A really smart paper or it is love.
No, what books, let's say three books, if you can think of them technical, fiction, philosophical,
would you had a big impact on you or would you recommend to others?
Sure.
The Machiavellians by James Burnham.
This is a book about how politics works in reality as opposed to how people imagine it
working.
You know, Menchus Muldbug, who's a figure in these circles who's respected by a lot
of people.
I was giving a talk and there was a bunch of panelists and we were asked, what book would
you recommend?
I said the Machiavellians independently of me.
That was the book he had recommended.
It's out of print.
It's hard to find, but that would be one.
Is that his book or no?
James Burnham.
It came out in 1941, I think.
So can you pause on the Muldjus?
Menchus Muldbug.
That's a code name, right?
That guy's the pen name.
Curtis Yarvin.
This is his real name.
He swims in your circles.
Which circles?
He does some kind of program.
Oh, he's originally a program.
He comes up as a person that I should talk with or I should know about, but then I read
a few of his things and they seem quite dangerous.
They're very long and verbose, but I think he's an amazing thinker.
But he's the one who had the idea of sending the tanks to Harvard Yard.
But doesn't he have like, he's some radical view, I forget what they are, I should say.
Very radical views.
Yeah.
He wants a military coup.
But you're saying he's a serious thinker that is worthy of not worthy.
I don't know that you would enjoy having a conversation with him.
I think a lot of people enjoy seeing it happen, but I think it'd be a lot of talking past
each other and it would be interesting.
What do you agree with him?
Would you disagree?
Okay.
What do you agree?
What do you disagree with him?
Would you agree with him that politics has to be looked at objectively and without kind
of an emotional connection to different schools?
I talk about him a lot in my book on the New Right.
Disagree?
I don't think a military coup is a good idea.
He doesn't think anarchism is stable, I disagree.
I mean, I did his live stream with him, we just dorked out a lot about history and like,
you know, people who've fallen in the memory hole.
So I mean, he's got a lot of writing.
So you know, the sense I got from him was that if I talk with him, a lot of people would
be upset with me for giving him a platform.
Yeah.
I think he's on that edge where they want to read him out of what is acceptable discourse.
What's his most controversial, I mean, you keep mentioning the tanks, is that the most
controversial viewpoint?
Does he have a race thing?
No, the alt-right doesn't particularly like him in many ways because he's not a big
on the race thing.
I don't know what would be his most controversial view, to be honest.
I think because he is radical in terms of his analysis of culture, anytime someone's
a radical, that is dangerous.
Yeah, it's dangerous.
Okay, book.
So that's one.
The Found Head.
The Found Head.
The Found Head.
Which is a, I would say...
Not Atlas Shrug?
No.
And if you read Atlas Shrug before reading the Found Head, you're doing yourself enormous
to service.
Don't you dare do it.
On the philosophical, because the novel...
On every level.
The Found Head's a better novel.
The Found Head's superfluous if you read Atlas Shrugged first.
The Found Head's about psychology and ethics.
It does not have to do with her politics other than its implications.
So it's by far the superior book.
The third one...
Oh, this is a good one question.
Let me see.
There's so many good books out there that I love.
I'm going to...
This is not really my third choice, but I'll throw it out there because I...
This is such an important worldview, especially for people on the right.
Are you virtue signaling?
No, this is counter signaling.
Thaddeus Russell's book, A Renegade History of the United States.
His thesis is that it's the degenerates that give us all freedom.
And things like prostitutes, things like madams, things like slaves, things like immigrants.
Because they were so low status, they could get away with things that then people who
were higher status demanded and so on and so forth.
So I think that thesis and it really has extreme consequences in thinking.
And no, on Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, those are the four.
Is that his best?
I haven't read any of his stuff.
The Righteous Mind is the only one you want.
That was four, but of course...
Forget Thaddeus Russell.
We'll put Haidt in there.
Of course he would.
Yeah.
No, forget Thaddeus.
So those are the three.
So we talked about love, and let me ask you the other question I'm obsessed with.
Are you, do you ponder your own mortality?
I do a lot, especially now that I'm an uncle, especially now that I have like these younger
people that I mentor.
I was just yesterday, my friend John Gurgus, who did my theme song for my podcast, who did
the book cover for Dear Reader, who's like the most talented person I know.
His song came on, The iPod at the Gym.
And I almost messaged him, I go, you know, one day one of us is going to bury the other
and it's going to be really sad.
And I thought about that.
And it was kind of just like, oh man, that's really going to suck.
And you know, I don't know which scenario would be better.
Like I will be very dissad if he's gone.
I'm sure he'll be very sad if I'm gone.
I mean, what do you, are you afraid of it?
No, you know, Rand had this quote about how I won't die, the world will end.
So I've had enough experiences that I am, I've really, at this point, and everything's
icing on the cake.
So if you, if I were to kill you at the end of this podcast, it would feel painless.
That would be okay.
Yeah.
You know why?
Does anyone know you're here by the way?
You know why?
I was asking for a friend.
Here's why.
Yeah.
There's that wit.
Save that for Twitter, Lex.
Did they call you Sasha?
No, I'm Lyosha.
Oh, that's my sister's husband.
Okay.
So here's why.
I strongly believe, and this is a very kind of Jewish perspective, that you just have
to leave the world a little bit better than you found it.
That all you could do is move the needle a little.
And one of the things I set out to do with Dear Reader, my book on North Korea, I said,
I was at a point in my career where I could do something to make a difference instead
of just writing like co-authoring books for celebrities, which I'm very proud of, but
you know, neither here nor there.
And I thought, all right, I know how to tell stories.
I know how to inform people and 110 people.
If I move the needle in America, cares, we got it really good here.
If I move the needle in North Korea a little bit, the cost benefits through the roof.
I never thought of that actually.
I never thought of Dear Reader from that perspective.
So when I set out to write it, I'm like, okay, what can I do?
I'm not going to be able to liberate the North Korean regime.
What I can do is the camera right now is focused on at the time Kim Jong-il, not Kim Jong-un.
And I can do just this, just this a little bit.
And I go, behind that guy who you think is funny clown, there's millions of dead people.
There's children being starved.
There's people who are performing because they have a gun to their kid's head.
And if someone put a gun to your kid's head, you'd put on those dancing shoes real quick.
And I and others have managed to change the conversation about North Korea in terms of
look at those silly buffoons to those poor people.
So the fact that that little thing I can say with a straight face, I did, doesn't make
me a great person.
But it does make me someone who if I have to go tomorrow, I can say I did a little bit
to make the world a better place.
What do you think is the meaning of life?
I think the meaning of life is...
Why are we here?
Oh, well, that I'm a Camus person.
So I'll give the Camus answer.
So there's two types of people, those who know how to use binary, no, thanks for relating
to the audience.
1-1-1-0-0-1-2-2.
Down vote.
What kind of radical freak is this, Lex?
So I use this example in my forthcoming book.
You go into a countryside, a mountainside, and you see a blank canvas on an easel.
And one kind of mentality goes, this is just a blank canvas.
This is stupid.
This is what am I looking at?
And the other type goes, what a great opportunity.
I'm in this beautiful space.
I have this entire canvas to paint.
I could do anything I want with it.
So I am very much of that type two person.
And I hope others start to think of life in that way.
You and I have both been more successful than we expected to, especially growing up.
And in ways we did not expect.
And when you're young, you are so intent on driving the car.
And after a certain point, you realize it's not about driving the car, it's you're being
a surfer.
That you can only control this little board and you have no idea where the waves will
take you.
And sometimes you're going to fall down and sometimes you're going to suck and you're
going to swallow some salt water.
But at a certain point, you stop trying to drive and you're like, this is freaking awesome
and I have no idea where it's going to go.
Beautifully put, I know I speak for a lot of people.
First of all, everyone loves the game you play on the internet.
It's fun.
Not everyone.
You make the world not everyone.
Today?
They came from the yard.
But it makes the world seem fun and especially in this dark time, it's much appreciated.
And we can't wait till the next book and the many to come and to hopefully many more Joe
Rogan appearances.
You guys do some great magic together.
It's fun.
You, yeah, you're one of my favorite guests on his show, so I can't wait, especially if
you can make it before the election.
Thanks so much for making today happen.
I'm glad you came down.
You're awesome.
Thank you so much.
What a great compliment.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malis and thank you to our sponsors.
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SEM is progressivism driving the speed limit.
Thank you for listening.
Hope to see you next time.